"By what possible measure could the "war on drugs" ever be cheaper?"
Actually, there are a lot of places where the war on drugs has become self-funded -- where property confiscated during a drug arrest can be auctioned off and the money kept by the police department that performed the arrest (this includes the DEA). With a sufficient number of drug arrests, this allows the vice squads to fund themselves, shifting the cost away from the tax payers themselves.
Before you argue that this simply shifts the costs from police to prison, remember that prison costs are often offset by prison labor and privatization. This creates a rather convenient situation: the police profit from drug arrests by keeping the property of the accused, and the prisons get to use their prisoners to turn a profit on cheap labor. Yes, it is pillaging and slavery, and no, our society has not quite moved past such behavior.
So...regulate the sale of opiates? The problem in China was not opium in general, it was the fact that they were being flooded with opium and there was not sufficient regulation.
We already regulate the sale of opiates like morphine, codeine, and fentanyl. Why not simply add heroin to that list? You are so terrified of heroin, and so convinced that nobody could possibly use heroin without abusing it, that you are happy to live in a society where the police carry AR-15s and where the prisons are overflowing with inmates and we are still continuing to arrest people. You seriously need to get a grip and calm down, and stop making unwarranted assumptions about the effect of legal, regulated drugs.
"i'm only talking about cocaine, heroin, meth: the drugs with a proven track record of taking a mind that thought about art, culture, politics... and is now is reduced to a dim zombified state"
So, when I was talking about propaganda, this is basically what I was referring to.
Do you know anything about the drugs you are talking about, or are you basing your argument on rumors and Hollywood movies? Let's clear a few things up:
Cocaine has been used for centuries, in the form of tea. More recently, powdered cocaine has become popular, with Freud being among its most famous users (he later quit and use tobacco instead). Cocaine was also added to a popular soft drink, Coca Cola, although now the coca flavor comes from leaves that have already had the cocaine removed (and caffeine is the primary stimulant).
Heroin is an opiate that was first isolated in the 19th century. It was made available by Bayer as an over the counter drug in cough syrup until the Treaty of Versailles, when it became a generic drug for 5 years until its prohibition in America. Heroin was used by all classes over people until its prohibition here in America.
Methamphetamine is currently prescribed by doctors as a weight loss drug, and formerly to help ADD patients improve their focus, until it became stigmatized. Methamphetamine is a Schedule II drug, unlike cocaine and heroin, meaning that the US government recognizes medical uses for it.
What you should do is take some time to read a well researched article or book about substance abuse and dependence, and about the drugs you are so sure have the potential to destroy society. You seem to believe a lot of things that are not only untrue, but are frankly bizarre.
Actually, for most people, supporting H264 would mean that FF would have to ship the codec. Yes, I do actually deal with non-technical users on a regular basis, and the more steps they have to go through to get a video to play, the more likely they are to give up and use some other software. If it does not work out of the box, it might as well not work at all.
"that is, the most addictive+inebriating: cocaine, heroin, meth, etc (marijuana should be legal)"
What about alcohol? Withdrawal effects from alcohol are worse than from opiates -- in fact, they can be deadly without medical supervision. We sell tobacco to teenagers, yet tobacco dependency is more easily formed and more difficult to break than cocaine dependence.
"its not a war, its a maintenance function of civilization, like taking out the trash every thursday"
Well, let's see. Cocaine was first made illegal because people thought that when black men used cocaine, they would become unstoppable even with a gun. Yes, that sounds like a maintenance function of civilization to me...except for the racism part. Opiates, like heroin? Made illegal because of a belief that Asian immigrants would bring their habits with them to the USA -- even though heroin could be legally purchased over the counter, as marketed by Bayer. Yup, more maintenance, if we ignore the whole racism thing.
Unlike you, I actually know the history of the war on drugs, and it is not pretty. It is one racist act of congress after another, mixed with corporate lobbying, and recently we can add a profit motive for police departments. We are not talking about drug regulation here, nor are we talking about efforts to keep people healthy -- this is an effort to imprison people on a mass scale, particularly immigrants and black people. People are serving longer prison sentences for non-violent, drug related crimes than would be typical for a murder case.
The goal is not to "win," at least not as President Reagan defined victory (a "drug-free generation"). The goal is to increase the profits of pharmaceutical, alcohol, tobacco, prison, and firearms companies, and to keep an ever expanding police force employed. Racism is a convenient means to this end: you can arrest scores of black people for drug offenses (in some localities, one third of the black men are incarcerated), and nobody in the middle or upper classes will oppose it, especially not after seeing one image of a dangerous black man after another.
Regulation and health are things I am all for. You can regulate drugs without throwing millions of people in jail or creating police forces that are as heavily armed as the military. You can protect the general health of the population without propaganda and racism. The war on drugs is not helping our society, and I hope you understand that.
Perhaps you have not been paying attention: in America, "conservative" means "always do whatever corporations want," and "liberal" means "sometimes do whatever corporations want."
The way I see it, America is gearing up for a new "war" that is never supposed to be won: the war on "piracy." Just like the "war on drugs," I see a scenario where millions of people are arrested for sharing books, music, and movies, and their lives are ruined. Children are already being fed propaganda, and I do not think it will be long before they are asked to turn in parents, siblings, and friends for sharing.
In the end, it is not going to be a question of whether or not the law can defeat technology -- it will be a question of whether or not the government can sustain an active effort to police sharing. It would not be terribly hard; there are police departments that are self funded in the war on drugs, as they are allowed to keep the proceeds from sales of confiscated property from drug raids, so perhaps the "piracy police" will be allowed to do something similar. With the amount of power the copyright lobby has in our government, I really do not think it is a huge stretch, and I am sure that private prison operators would love a new chance to expand their business.
No, technology cannot be defeated by the law, but the battle may make our lives and our society much darker.
"What Jefferson recognized... that in the long run, their improbable experiment -- called America -- wouldn't work if its citizens were uninformed, if its citizens were apathetic, if its citizens checked out, and left democracy to those who didn't have the best interests of all the people at heart."
Right on, and that is precisely the problem we have right now: most of the citizens do not care. People are not just unaware of the issues facing America and what their government is doing; they seem not to care about any of it at all.
End users do not care about licensing costs because it has always been hidden from them. They buy a computer, thinking that the price is for the hardware itself, never being informed that they are also paying for various copyright and patent licenses. If consumers were able to see what they are really paying for, and were presented with real choices (as opposed to the current, "Well, you can have this one low end system with Ubuntu preloaded, or any of these 20 high end systems with Windows"), I think we would see a much different picture.
It is a matter of faith in those dollars, not simply how many of them are in circulation. If auditing the fed is considered a problem, that suggests to me that there is some faith-shaking problem with our economy...
This is not a case of a photograph taken in public, it is a case of a photograph that was secretly taken inside someone's home. There are specific protections against that sort of behavior, particularly when it is a government agency engaging in it. Yes, privacy still matters, despite the fact that it has become cool to voluntarily abandon it.
Re:It's called "PERSONAL PROPERTY," Apple!
on
Flash Is Not a Right
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· Score: 4, Insightful
"Either way, you know what you're getting when you buy it."
At what point did Apple come out and say, "We do not allow cartoons that mock politicians on the iPhone/iPad?" Oh, that's right, they leave out the details about their restrictions when you ask about these devices.
Some people do not know what they are getting when they buy it.
Re:It's called "PERSONAL PROPERTY," Apple!
on
Flash Is Not a Right
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· Score: 2, Insightful
So let people install software from sources other than the apps store. You know, they way I can add any repositories to my Fedora system, or even just install software without using yum or rpm? I am not saying Apple needs to provide support for people who choose to do that, and they could even program the iPad to warn people about a loss of warranty or support if they choose to enable third party software sources, but the fact that they are actively working against the installation of third party software is a problem.
Re:It's called "PERSONAL PROPERTY," Apple!
on
Flash Is Not a Right
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Does your microwave producer actively prevent you from installing software on your microwave? No, they do not -- they may not provide you with tools or documentation, but there is nothing built into the microwave that thwarts efforts to install third party code.
Apple, on the other hand, deliberately and actively works to prevent you from running unapproved software on the iPhone/iPad.
You do not have to pay your TV maker for the right to modify your TV, although it will void your warranty. I would not have much of a problem if Apple would simply follow a similar approach, and allow people to hack their iPads and simply not provide assistance when something goes wrong (or demand payment for such assistance).
You can count me out of that crowd. I am in the crowd that said, "This horribly locked down and restricted computer will probably sell extremely well because of Apple's amazing abilities to market products and the average consumers lack of information on technical matters."
Except that people still play PS3 games, and they did so even for the years before GeoHot announced his hack. Most people are still so confused by technology that they fail to understand that DRM is artificial and unnecessary, let alone that there are software vendors that are not hell-bent on restricting their users.
What happens when your friend decides to post the information on Facebook, innocently thinking that they have selected a particular privacy level when they have not?
"If somebody is smart and talented enough to come up with some idea why shouldn't that idea/IP be a "tradable commodity", "property" like most everything else in a "free market economy" ??"
Because that makes no sense, since ideas can be replicated without any cost. Ideas cannot be "traded" the way physical objects can be traded -- if I tell you my idea, I do not lose it, even though you gain it.
Beyond that, intellectual development is fueled by access to the intellectual developments of others. If you are overly restrictive about what people are allowed to access, you wind up reducing the number of new ideas that people have. This is why the US constitution mandates limited periods of time for copyrights and patents -- to allow others to eventually build on the ideas, after granting the original inventor a chance to monopolize the use of the idea, a compromise intended to improve society. The original copyright act specified a term of merely 14 years for copyrights, and ever since various industries have pushed for extension after extension, to the point where nobody will live to see modern music, books, movies, or software enter the public domain. Thankfully, patents have not been similar abused, at least not yet.
People seem to have forgotten that copyrights and patents were created to improve the public's access to new ideas and inventions, not as a way to put chains on what we are allowed to say to each other.
Slashdot Mirror
"By what possible measure could the "war on drugs" ever be cheaper?"
Actually, there are a lot of places where the war on drugs has become self-funded -- where property confiscated during a drug arrest can be auctioned off and the money kept by the police department that performed the arrest (this includes the DEA). With a sufficient number of drug arrests, this allows the vice squads to fund themselves, shifting the cost away from the tax payers themselves.
Before you argue that this simply shifts the costs from police to prison, remember that prison costs are often offset by prison labor and privatization. This creates a rather convenient situation: the police profit from drug arrests by keeping the property of the accused, and the prisons get to use their prisoners to turn a profit on cheap labor. Yes, it is pillaging and slavery, and no, our society has not quite moved past such behavior.
So...regulate the sale of opiates? The problem in China was not opium in general, it was the fact that they were being flooded with opium and there was not sufficient regulation.
We already regulate the sale of opiates like morphine, codeine, and fentanyl. Why not simply add heroin to that list? You are so terrified of heroin, and so convinced that nobody could possibly use heroin without abusing it, that you are happy to live in a society where the police carry AR-15s and where the prisons are overflowing with inmates and we are still continuing to arrest people. You seriously need to get a grip and calm down, and stop making unwarranted assumptions about the effect of legal, regulated drugs.
So, when I was talking about propaganda, this is basically what I was referring to.
Do you know anything about the drugs you are talking about, or are you basing your argument on rumors and Hollywood movies? Let's clear a few things up:
What you should do is take some time to read a well researched article or book about substance abuse and dependence, and about the drugs you are so sure have the potential to destroy society. You seem to believe a lot of things that are not only untrue, but are frankly bizarre.
So in the end, we are still going to pay for H264 royalties, but we'll do so through our OSes instead of Firefox?
For the record, my OS does not ship with H264 support.
Actually, for most people, supporting H264 would mean that FF would have to ship the codec. Yes, I do actually deal with non-technical users on a regular basis, and the more steps they have to go through to get a video to play, the more likely they are to give up and use some other software. If it does not work out of the box, it might as well not work at all.
"that is, the most addictive+inebriating: cocaine, heroin, meth, etc (marijuana should be legal)"
What about alcohol? Withdrawal effects from alcohol are worse than from opiates -- in fact, they can be deadly without medical supervision. We sell tobacco to teenagers, yet tobacco dependency is more easily formed and more difficult to break than cocaine dependence.
"its not a war, its a maintenance function of civilization, like taking out the trash every thursday"
Well, let's see. Cocaine was first made illegal because people thought that when black men used cocaine, they would become unstoppable even with a gun. Yes, that sounds like a maintenance function of civilization to me...except for the racism part. Opiates, like heroin? Made illegal because of a belief that Asian immigrants would bring their habits with them to the USA -- even though heroin could be legally purchased over the counter, as marketed by Bayer. Yup, more maintenance, if we ignore the whole racism thing.
Unlike you, I actually know the history of the war on drugs, and it is not pretty. It is one racist act of congress after another, mixed with corporate lobbying, and recently we can add a profit motive for police departments. We are not talking about drug regulation here, nor are we talking about efforts to keep people healthy -- this is an effort to imprison people on a mass scale, particularly immigrants and black people. People are serving longer prison sentences for non-violent, drug related crimes than would be typical for a murder case.
The goal is not to "win," at least not as President Reagan defined victory (a "drug-free generation"). The goal is to increase the profits of pharmaceutical, alcohol, tobacco, prison, and firearms companies, and to keep an ever expanding police force employed. Racism is a convenient means to this end: you can arrest scores of black people for drug offenses (in some localities, one third of the black men are incarcerated), and nobody in the middle or upper classes will oppose it, especially not after seeing one image of a dangerous black man after another.
Regulation and health are things I am all for. You can regulate drugs without throwing millions of people in jail or creating police forces that are as heavily armed as the military. You can protect the general health of the population without propaganda and racism. The war on drugs is not helping our society, and I hope you understand that.
Do you want to foot the bill for H264 royalties?
Perhaps you have not been paying attention: in America, "conservative" means "always do whatever corporations want," and "liberal" means "sometimes do whatever corporations want."
The way I see it, America is gearing up for a new "war" that is never supposed to be won: the war on "piracy." Just like the "war on drugs," I see a scenario where millions of people are arrested for sharing books, music, and movies, and their lives are ruined. Children are already being fed propaganda, and I do not think it will be long before they are asked to turn in parents, siblings, and friends for sharing.
In the end, it is not going to be a question of whether or not the law can defeat technology -- it will be a question of whether or not the government can sustain an active effort to police sharing. It would not be terribly hard; there are police departments that are self funded in the war on drugs, as they are allowed to keep the proceeds from sales of confiscated property from drug raids, so perhaps the "piracy police" will be allowed to do something similar. With the amount of power the copyright lobby has in our government, I really do not think it is a huge stretch, and I am sure that private prison operators would love a new chance to expand their business.
No, technology cannot be defeated by the law, but the battle may make our lives and our society much darker.
"What Jefferson recognized... that in the long run, their improbable experiment -- called America -- wouldn't work if its citizens were uninformed, if its citizens were apathetic, if its citizens checked out, and left democracy to those who didn't have the best interests of all the people at heart."
Right on, and that is precisely the problem we have right now: most of the citizens do not care. People are not just unaware of the issues facing America and what their government is doing; they seem not to care about any of it at all.
End users do not care about licensing costs because it has always been hidden from them. They buy a computer, thinking that the price is for the hardware itself, never being informed that they are also paying for various copyright and patent licenses. If consumers were able to see what they are really paying for, and were presented with real choices (as opposed to the current, "Well, you can have this one low end system with Ubuntu preloaded, or any of these 20 high end systems with Windows"), I think we would see a much different picture.
What if it is identical to "geniune" Cisco gear? What difference does it really make, in terms of your ability to use the equipment?
"They don't criticise open source."
No, but they certainly threaten us:
http://www.freetype.org/patents.html
The quality argument is weak. What do political cartoons have to do with "quality?" What do sex themed apps have to do with "quality?" What about banning an app that fetches books from Project Gutenberg http://www.boingboing.net/2009/05/22/apple-says-no-projec.html ? Quality control in all these cases? What about this one: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/04/apple-scratch-app/ ? Was this about quality too: http://www.newser.com/off-the-grid/post/451/creepy-steve-jobs-may-not-want-you-to-read-this-or-will-break-down-your-door.html ?
Apple is not interested in quality, and the argument that they are is nothing more than an excuse from apologists.
It is a matter of faith in those dollars, not simply how many of them are in circulation. If auditing the fed is considered a problem, that suggests to me that there is some faith-shaking problem with our economy...
This is not a case of a photograph taken in public, it is a case of a photograph that was secretly taken inside someone's home. There are specific protections against that sort of behavior, particularly when it is a government agency engaging in it. Yes, privacy still matters, despite the fact that it has become cool to voluntarily abandon it.
"Either way, you know what you're getting when you buy it."
At what point did Apple come out and say, "We do not allow cartoons that mock politicians on the iPhone/iPad?" Oh, that's right, they leave out the details about their restrictions when you ask about these devices.
Some people do not know what they are getting when they buy it.
So let people install software from sources other than the apps store. You know, they way I can add any repositories to my Fedora system, or even just install software without using yum or rpm? I am not saying Apple needs to provide support for people who choose to do that, and they could even program the iPad to warn people about a loss of warranty or support if they choose to enable third party software sources, but the fact that they are actively working against the installation of third party software is a problem.
Does your microwave producer actively prevent you from installing software on your microwave? No, they do not -- they may not provide you with tools or documentation, but there is nothing built into the microwave that thwarts efforts to install third party code.
Apple, on the other hand, deliberately and actively works to prevent you from running unapproved software on the iPhone/iPad.
You do not have to pay your TV maker for the right to modify your TV, although it will void your warranty. I would not have much of a problem if Apple would simply follow a similar approach, and allow people to hack their iPads and simply not provide assistance when something goes wrong (or demand payment for such assistance).
You can count me out of that crowd. I am in the crowd that said, "This horribly locked down and restricted computer will probably sell extremely well because of Apple's amazing abilities to market products and the average consumers lack of information on technical matters."
What do you know, my prediction was spot on.
Except that people still play PS3 games, and they did so even for the years before GeoHot announced his hack. Most people are still so confused by technology that they fail to understand that DRM is artificial and unnecessary, let alone that there are software vendors that are not hell-bent on restricting their users.
And so forth. As I recall, Verne also prediction global electronic communications in another novel...
What happens when your friend decides to post the information on Facebook, innocently thinking that they have selected a particular privacy level when they have not?
"If somebody is smart and talented enough to come up with some idea why shouldn't that idea/IP be a "tradable commodity", "property" like most everything else in a "free market economy" ??"
Because that makes no sense, since ideas can be replicated without any cost. Ideas cannot be "traded" the way physical objects can be traded -- if I tell you my idea, I do not lose it, even though you gain it.
Beyond that, intellectual development is fueled by access to the intellectual developments of others. If you are overly restrictive about what people are allowed to access, you wind up reducing the number of new ideas that people have. This is why the US constitution mandates limited periods of time for copyrights and patents -- to allow others to eventually build on the ideas, after granting the original inventor a chance to monopolize the use of the idea, a compromise intended to improve society. The original copyright act specified a term of merely 14 years for copyrights, and ever since various industries have pushed for extension after extension, to the point where nobody will live to see modern music, books, movies, or software enter the public domain. Thankfully, patents have not been similar abused, at least not yet.
People seem to have forgotten that copyrights and patents were created to improve the public's access to new ideas and inventions, not as a way to put chains on what we are allowed to say to each other.