Or India will just produce its drugs domestically, using its intelligence service to procure samples of high-priced drugs in other countries.
More likely, though, the WTO and the USA will attack India for "stealing" and threaten India with various trade sanctions as retribution for this action. We would not want the Indian government to work for the benefit of its citizens at the expense of foreign corporations' profits, would we?
If other countries want to maintain Bayer's profits, let them. Why should the Indian government forbid Natco from exporting the drug to those countries that are willing to import it?
Did I say that the US government is killing people en masse? The truth is that we do have a lot of prisoners, and that only the Soviets and the Nazis had more. It is not possible for a country to have so many prisoners while simultaneously giving each person a jury trial before their incarceration -- court procedures are too expensive, too time consuming, and people would start to notice (and complain) that they are being called to jury duty every other week. That is basically the point of the right to trial; as with the rest of the bill of rights, the 6th amendment is intended as a protection from tyranny.
Really, the issue should not be that I am willing to make the comparison to Nazi Germany and the USSR, but whether or not the comparison is valid. You may not think the comparison is valid, but the actual number of prisoners is a hard and undeniable fact. The only question that needs to be considered is whether or not the US is justified in having so many prisoners, particularly given the fact that only a minority of those prisoners are actually found guilty by a jury. I would say that the fact that we have millions of prisoners and that many of them were not even convicted by a jury is evidence that the system is beyond simply being broken; we are not even bothering with the system at all, despite proudly declaring that we have one.
This was only true for a short period of time during the mid 20th century. These days, the Democrats are slightly right of center, and the Republicans are right wing.
For all their complaining, conservatives have the dominant ideology in this country.
Why do we want to crash the government? It's our tool to serve the public good. It's not perfect, but we're better off with it than against it.
We do not want to crash the government, we just want to reclaim our rights. America has more prisoners (not per capita, simply "more") than any other country, and historically the only countries to maintain larger prison populations were Nazi Germany and the USSR. We make more and more things criminal in this country, to the point where the government itself has lost track of how many laws are on the books. We imprison people for having feral hemp growing on their land. We even convicted someone of importing illegal comic books (which contained nothing but cartoons).
The Nazis and the Soviets were able to arrest mass numbers of people because they did not have a drawn out procedure for establishing guilt. The police would simply show up and arrest people. Now in the USA, we are coercing people to forgo their right to a trial, to just plead guilty to a "lesser" crime and spend some years in prison.
The point here is that we should not be abandoning rights that protect us from tyranny. If the entire government collapsed just because people exercised their rights, then the government needed to be abolished and rebuilt anyway.
Heck, for some of these guys you could just write a note, 'report to jail tomorrow and drop your computer off on the way there' and they would do it.
Paramilitary police is not about arresting people, it is about keeping the population terrified of the government. The point is to show people that the government can send a tactical team into any home at any time, so that people will be afraid to take a stand against the government.
In the USA, we are lucky if a simple majority of people vote at all. Internet based voting might help with that, since it takes some of the effort out of voting.
What you have failed to realize is that the "App Store Lock-In", and even the "iOS Development Licensing" are actually there to benefit USERS (by keeping Malware OUT, OUT, OUT).
As well as keeping pornography and political cartoons, software that might compete with Apple, software that might allow people to develop more software in a sandboxed environment, software that might allow people to play old SNES games, etc. OUT OUT OUT. The "this benefits users" argument is nothing more than a cover story; Apple could benefit users without forbidding jailbreaking, without bricking phones that were jailbroken, and without having a policy that forbids lampooning politicians.
Sony's Rootkit and Playstation DRM battles are there to benefit SONY.
So how is that not-locked-down gaming platform working for you? Oh yeah, malware:
Apple's iOS DRM serves exactly the same purpose as PS3's DRM: to thwart competition, prevent customers from controlling their computers (which includes phones and gaming systems) and to tap developers' revenue streams.
other people do bad and they just get a slap on the wrist. Sony does bad and it gets a death sentence
You must be new here. Take a look at the comments on any Apple or Facebook story, and you will see people attacking their policies just as much as Sony's.
As for the hackers, I suspect it was a matter of opportunity. Sony was probably easier to attack from the comfort of one's home (where most of the hackers were working) than other companies that the hackers probably wanted to target.
Those with power decide what is a legitimate form of protest; that is how they protect their power, by forcing people to play the game on their own terms. It is a classic trick, and when I did martial arts my sensei said as much: when you fight, if your opponent gets to choose how you fight, you are already disadvantaged. Thus politicians say that the proper form of protest is to get petitions signed, to stand with a sign in a free speech zone, to elect a new candidate, etc.
No, iOS has DRM that is designed to prevent its user from running software that Apple does not approve of. You can read more than the first sentence, you know...
But media playback is a traditionally DRM- and patent- infested territory
No it is not. They used to have DRM-free satellite broadcasts, and people used to just tune in with giant C-band antennas. Then some bright folks at HBO hired some bright folks at a company now owned by Motorola to develop a DRM system for satellite TV. Video cassettes used to be DRM free also, until some bright folks at Macrovision started attacking AGC circuits in VCRs.
The tradition is for media of all kinds to start out DRM-free, then for DRM to creep in. The removal of DRM from iTunes music was a rare event. In general, corporations (including Sony) have little respect for their customers.
It's not that Sony, like Google, is plotting to insert DRM into the open standard that governs the Web.
"Google does evil things too! Let's praise Sony!"
did Apple and other phone manufacturers issue any apology for installing CarrierIQ
Well, much as I disagree with Apple, yes they did, in roughly the same language of corporate-PR-speak that Sony used when talking about the rootkit. Neither company has changed its attitude about its customers.
Do Google apologise
Oh look, another "all the other kids are being naughty too" argument.
On the other hand, if you feel that 'big brother' is silently watching your every move, then you must have a huge ego.
I find this statement to be pretty interesting. Google certainly does monitor all the email you send, for advertising purposes (but will fork it over when law enforcement presents a court order). Facebook monitors even more details of most people's lives, and is not going to take a stand against government requests for information. Big brother is watching everyone; the government just has not figured out how best to use the flood of information to its advantage (and the friendly relationship between the government and corporations makes it hard to distinguish between corporate invasions of privacy and government invasions).
Even totalitarian states do not take action on every single piece of information that they are aware of. The point of governments collecting information on citizens is not to target everyone, it is to maintain government power by spotting potential dissidents before their movements grow to "dangerous" sizes. The struggle for privacy is a struggle for power; privacy rights are fundamental to individual empowerment and democracy.
So is big brother going to come after you because of your secret affair? Of course not. Is big brother going to release information about your secret affair when you start talking about changing the social order, reducing political corruption, or working for the benefit of the common people? It is not unthinkable that such a thing could happen.
More like, "The same group of rights-hating cops who fly helicopters over my house looking for marijuana now want to fly quieter, cheaper drones." Anything that makes violations of our civil rights -- a category which should include the war on drugs as a whole -- easier, cheaper, or in any way more efficient is a bad thing. Constitutional protections have done little to protect people from being charged with drug law violations over feral hemp growing on their land:
Illegal discharge of a weapon (yes, really, a slingshot is in the same category as a firearm in some jurisdictions)
...and so forth. How dare you try to protect your privacy from an invasive government? The proper thing to do is to go to court and pay a lawyer to protect your rights, until you are bankrupt.
Government agencies always want to spy on us; drug laws are simply an excuse to do so, as is terrorism, child pornography scares, and so forth. The real goal is to expand the power of the executive, a trend that we have observed for many years in this country. That is why the Controlled Substances Act allows the attorney general's office to unilaterally declare drugs to be illegal. That is why police forces can recycle seized assets into their own budgets. That is why we have paramilitary police at all levels of government, signals intelligence vans, the use of NORAD for law enforcement purposes, the TSA, the latest NDAA "let's just skip due process" bill, etc., etc., etc.
Politicians, and especially the president, gain power by trading favors with other powerful people. It is pretty hard to repay those people when your power is limited by the law, and so we see the weakening of legal protections of our basic rights and the strengthening of the government's power over us. Since most people will willingly submit to these abuses -- and have been trained to be submissive by the education system in this country -- any effort to thwart these attacks is severely disadvantaged.
Slashdot Mirror
Or India will just produce its drugs domestically, using its intelligence service to procure samples of high-priced drugs in other countries.
More likely, though, the WTO and the USA will attack India for "stealing" and threaten India with various trade sanctions as retribution for this action. We would not want the Indian government to work for the benefit of its citizens at the expense of foreign corporations' profits, would we?
If other countries want to maintain Bayer's profits, let them. Why should the Indian government forbid Natco from exporting the drug to those countries that are willing to import it?
if you're going to keep the system as-is
I'll just throw in a vote for "let's change the system and not keep it as-is."
Did I say that the US government is killing people en masse? The truth is that we do have a lot of prisoners, and that only the Soviets and the Nazis had more. It is not possible for a country to have so many prisoners while simultaneously giving each person a jury trial before their incarceration -- court procedures are too expensive, too time consuming, and people would start to notice (and complain) that they are being called to jury duty every other week. That is basically the point of the right to trial; as with the rest of the bill of rights, the 6th amendment is intended as a protection from tyranny.
Really, the issue should not be that I am willing to make the comparison to Nazi Germany and the USSR, but whether or not the comparison is valid. You may not think the comparison is valid, but the actual number of prisoners is a hard and undeniable fact. The only question that needs to be considered is whether or not the US is justified in having so many prisoners, particularly given the fact that only a minority of those prisoners are actually found guilty by a jury. I would say that the fact that we have millions of prisoners and that many of them were not even convicted by a jury is evidence that the system is beyond simply being broken; we are not even bothering with the system at all, despite proudly declaring that we have one.
Liberal = Democrat
This was only true for a short period of time during the mid 20th century. These days, the Democrats are slightly right of center, and the Republicans are right wing.
For all their complaining, conservatives have the dominant ideology in this country.
Why do we want to crash the government? It's our tool to serve the public good. It's not perfect, but we're better off with it than against it.
We do not want to crash the government, we just want to reclaim our rights. America has more prisoners (not per capita, simply "more") than any other country, and historically the only countries to maintain larger prison populations were Nazi Germany and the USSR. We make more and more things criminal in this country, to the point where the government itself has lost track of how many laws are on the books. We imprison people for having feral hemp growing on their land. We even convicted someone of importing illegal comic books (which contained nothing but cartoons).
The Nazis and the Soviets were able to arrest mass numbers of people because they did not have a drawn out procedure for establishing guilt. The police would simply show up and arrest people. Now in the USA, we are coercing people to forgo their right to a trial, to just plead guilty to a "lesser" crime and spend some years in prison.
The point here is that we should not be abandoning rights that protect us from tyranny. If the entire government collapsed just because people exercised their rights, then the government needed to be abolished and rebuilt anyway.
What's the difference?
While I'm on this subject, who came up with the idea of sending 25 armed agents and a small tank to get some geek out of their basement?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWAT#History
Heck, for some of these guys you could just write a note, 'report to jail tomorrow and drop your computer off on the way there' and they would do it.
Paramilitary police is not about arresting people, it is about keeping the population terrified of the government. The point is to show people that the government can send a tactical team into any home at any time, so that people will be afraid to take a stand against the government.
In the USA, we are lucky if a simple majority of people vote at all. Internet based voting might help with that, since it takes some of the effort out of voting.
What you have failed to realize is that the "App Store Lock-In", and even the "iOS Development Licensing" are actually there to benefit USERS (by keeping Malware OUT, OUT, OUT).
As well as keeping pornography and political cartoons, software that might compete with Apple, software that might allow people to develop more software in a sandboxed environment, software that might allow people to play old SNES games, etc. OUT OUT OUT. The "this benefits users" argument is nothing more than a cover story; Apple could benefit users without forbidding jailbreaking, without bricking phones that were jailbroken, and without having a policy that forbids lampooning politicians.
Sony's Rootkit and Playstation DRM battles are there to benefit SONY.
So how is that not-locked-down gaming platform working for you? Oh yeah, malware:
https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=windows+malware&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
Apple's iOS DRM serves exactly the same purpose as PS3's DRM: to thwart competition, prevent customers from controlling their computers (which includes phones and gaming systems) and to tap developers' revenue streams.
other people do bad and they just get a slap on the wrist. Sony does bad and it gets a death sentence
You must be new here. Take a look at the comments on any Apple or Facebook story, and you will see people attacking their policies just as much as Sony's.
As for the hackers, I suspect it was a matter of opportunity. Sony was probably easier to attack from the comfort of one's home (where most of the hackers were working) than other companies that the hackers probably wanted to target.
And who, pray tell, decides what is legitimate?
Those with power decide what is a legitimate form of protest; that is how they protect their power, by forcing people to play the game on their own terms. It is a classic trick, and when I did martial arts my sensei said as much: when you fight, if your opponent gets to choose how you fight, you are already disadvantaged. Thus politicians say that the proper form of protest is to get petitions signed, to stand with a sign in a free speech zone, to elect a new candidate, etc.
No, iOS has DRM that is designed to prevent its user from running software that Apple does not approve of. You can read more than the first sentence, you know...
But media playback is a traditionally DRM- and patent- infested territory
No it is not. They used to have DRM-free satellite broadcasts, and people used to just tune in with giant C-band antennas. Then some bright folks at HBO hired some bright folks at a company now owned by Motorola to develop a DRM system for satellite TV. Video cassettes used to be DRM free also, until some bright folks at Macrovision started attacking AGC circuits in VCRs.
The tradition is for media of all kinds to start out DRM-free, then for DRM to creep in. The removal of DRM from iTunes music was a rare event. In general, corporations (including Sony) have little respect for their customers.
you can play unprotected media
Only some un-restricted media; here is a large class that your PS3 will not play unless you receive Sony's seal of approval:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_games
It's not that Sony, like Google, is plotting to insert DRM into the open standard that governs the Web.
"Google does evil things too! Let's praise Sony!"
did Apple and other phone manufacturers issue any apology for installing CarrierIQ
Well, much as I disagree with Apple, yes they did, in roughly the same language of corporate-PR-speak that Sony used when talking about the rootkit. Neither company has changed its attitude about its customers.
Do Google apologise
Oh look, another "all the other kids are being naughty too" argument.
If you put your own stuff in a drm-free format inside a blu-ray disc authored by yourself, the PS3 will play it
Both are very closed, but one is a lot more open than the other (the PS3),
Except for the whole, "Sony can and will remotely disable features you paid for" feature.
Funny how these guys keep growing without being evil:
http://www.redhat.com/
Apple has no DRM on its OS
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS#Digital_rights_management
Otherwise I agree, Apple is less evil than Sony. Not that that is saying much.
None of these seem terribly far-fetched as regulations on the Internet...
On the other hand, if you feel that 'big brother' is silently watching your every move, then you must have a huge ego.
I find this statement to be pretty interesting. Google certainly does monitor all the email you send, for advertising purposes (but will fork it over when law enforcement presents a court order). Facebook monitors even more details of most people's lives, and is not going to take a stand against government requests for information. Big brother is watching everyone; the government just has not figured out how best to use the flood of information to its advantage (and the friendly relationship between the government and corporations makes it hard to distinguish between corporate invasions of privacy and government invasions).
Even totalitarian states do not take action on every single piece of information that they are aware of. The point of governments collecting information on citizens is not to target everyone, it is to maintain government power by spotting potential dissidents before their movements grow to "dangerous" sizes. The struggle for privacy is a struggle for power; privacy rights are fundamental to individual empowerment and democracy.
So is big brother going to come after you because of your secret affair? Of course not. Is big brother going to release information about your secret affair when you start talking about changing the social order, reducing political corruption, or working for the benefit of the common people? It is not unthinkable that such a thing could happen.
More like, "The same group of rights-hating cops who fly helicopters over my house looking for marijuana now want to fly quieter, cheaper drones." Anything that makes violations of our civil rights -- a category which should include the war on drugs as a whole -- easier, cheaper, or in any way more efficient is a bad thing. Constitutional protections have done little to protect people from being charged with drug law violations over feral hemp growing on their land:
http://www.myabc50.com/news/local/story/Attorney-argues-Lisbon-mans-pot-crop-was-actually/O0ZqB3dQhEOVy4uSFyh9dQ.cspx
Or worse still, being killed for no reason at all:
http://www.drugwarrant.com/articles/drug-war-victim/
Government agencies always want to spy on us; drug laws are simply an excuse to do so, as is terrorism, child pornography scares, and so forth. The real goal is to expand the power of the executive, a trend that we have observed for many years in this country. That is why the Controlled Substances Act allows the attorney general's office to unilaterally declare drugs to be illegal. That is why police forces can recycle seized assets into their own budgets. That is why we have paramilitary police at all levels of government, signals intelligence vans, the use of NORAD for law enforcement purposes, the TSA, the latest NDAA "let's just skip due process" bill, etc., etc., etc.
Politicians, and especially the president, gain power by trading favors with other powerful people. It is pretty hard to repay those people when your power is limited by the law, and so we see the weakening of legal protections of our basic rights and the strengthening of the government's power over us. Since most people will willingly submit to these abuses -- and have been trained to be submissive by the education system in this country -- any effort to thwart these attacks is severely disadvantaged.