After all, antibiotics are good medicine but you wouldn't administer them by putting them on the tip of a knitting needle and jamming it into your eyeball.
Y'know, I was considering posting a similar comment, but with the concepts "Big Brother" and "terrorism" reversed. I swear, Big Brother is the biggest, most overblown political grab-bag since terrorism.
This is pretty standard practice with police everywhere nowadays: the politics of policing seems to be more important than actual policing.
Not surprising really. They got to survive the constant stream of criticism, scrutiny, and at times, downright hatred from the portion of the public who instantly feel threatened by authority.
It's more to do with the US's dissident origins, and the ingrained belief in the American psyche that people in positions of power are constantly trying to screw them over.
A holographic storage system with 500 Gigs or more should be the past, not the future. The industry failed at this point. They try to sell us an old, but badly advanced technology from yesterday.
The consumer electronics market was never optimised for the expedient promotion of new technology. As with everything in capitalist societies, the process is optimised for best profit prospectives. Why would companies rush this kind of tech to market, when they can take their time, spend less money on it, and get a similar-to-better results a few years later?
Imagine two scenarios: 1. you write successful book/album and it stays copyrighted indefinitely, bringing you income forever 2. you write successful book/album and the copyright expires in 14 years, depriving you of income
Imagine a compromise. Sure we want to get all our entertainment (among other things) for free, but we give the artist some incentive to keep making more.
And it was a hugely successful novel. She could easily have hung up her writer's cap and lived off royalties from the first book, but she felt compelled to write more Potter novels. Why?
Simple. Because she can afford to. She made money off the first one (which, if you will note, was not released to the public domain). Thanks to her money, she can afford to have creative and financial freedom. And yes, a second book would make her money. Yes, that would have been a contributing factor in her decision to continue writing. I seriously doubt she would have made any more Harry Potter books if they failed to bring her significant money.
It's time to stamp out the myth that "without copyright, nothing creative would ever be produced." It wasn't true in the past, it won't be true in the future.
The argument is that our culture will suffer without copyright. There will always be people with plenty of enthusiasm (and not necessarily any talent) producing works for flimsy to non-existent profits. And what's worse, these flimsy to non-existent profits will actually decrease as society stops respecting the concept of intellectual property. People, without any moderation from the law, will forget that time and effort is put into copyrighted works, and simply view them as free information that nobody owns, and thus nobody is entitled to be reimbursed by (even by charity). The real myths are (and there are quite a few out there relating to the anti-copyright debate) that passionate==talented when it comes to artists, and that people will still respect art without any legal moderation.
... does that means that all Linux distributions now require 1GB of ram to run everyday tasks? Does it mean that all Linux distributions now have an install image in the multi-gigabytes (funny, I could have sworn there were Linux distros that fitted on thumb drives)? Does that mean that Linux has now lost both its immense configurability, and its rich library (and back catalogue) of very lean programs?
No? Well, what exactly does your rather dubious assertion mean anyway?
With proper configuration, yes Vista is more secure than XP and only slightly more annoying for advanced users. And yes I'm a Windows user (about 20% of the time, the rest on Ubuntu), and in fact do blame the developers of Windows software for its lack of security. Namely all those malware developers and black-hats homing in on Vista like a nuclear warhead.
From what I could gather from the anaemic article, the tool that the site provides searches your computer for pirated movies. Calling it a sting seems a little overstated. It just goes to show that you should never, ever, install any software made by the MPAA, unless you place no value in your privacy.
Anything that never made the news back then? Any fresh skeletons? If we find the answer is "no" then one must assume this is just more misdirection.
From what? From their ambitions to enslave the American people? To "hack" into TV stations around the world and broadcast to everyone on the planet: "All your bases are belong to us!"? To bitchslap the RIAA off the podium in the Little Miss Evil Organisation pageant? What?
...do you actually believe that? Given the inherent inefficiencies of public services, and the inefficiencies of this particular administration, do you really believe that the CIA is some uber-power, starting wars, lying, and (most impressively) keeping the whole thing under wraps? Hell, I have little doubt whatsoever that they do some spying and some lying, but they can hardly be called a "pool of dark power". Those kind of descriptions are reserved for cheap fantasy books, where you can divide good and evil with a freight train sideways, not for real life where everyone is human, and nothing is ever so simple.
They're not supposed to defend themselves. Consumers are meant to have all the rights and companies exist only to serve. When a company fights back, people get angry. To justify their anger, people find excuses to be angry. It's obviously not enough to be angry about the fact that they really, really want to be able to download what they want, when they want, so they start demonising the company, calling it names, calling it "evil", etc. They justify their desires, saying that what they want will be good for our culture, or they downplay their desire by belittling the effort taken by copyright holders, and downplaying their appreciation for their work. Worse still, some people act like there is some objective means to judge such works, and that because some of the works fail this arbitrary test, they jump to the conclusion that no work produced by such companies is worth looking at, thus cancelling their right to existence.
These people then spread their views, playing upon people's fear of authority, and their lofty ideals of libertarianism, and soon they had a small but sizable movement to destroy this demon company. None of these people see piracy as a bad thing, and whether or not they actually practice piracy, they perpetuate that view. All the while, the company is trying with increasing desperation to maintain their business model against the illegal piracy movement, thus cementing the view in people's minds that they are evil, and that their business model has been legitimately challenged, and that they are losing legitimately.
/rant
That said, I also object to the RIAA's abuse of the legal system. It's a shame that they felt they had to resort to such lengths.
(Mods: if you disagree, why not reply anonymously, rather than modding me into oblivion)
This got modded to +5 Insightful? I knew it was a problem (see my sig), but seriously, this guy called us moderates "corporo-fascist trolls" for crying out loud. And here's me thinking that trolls were people who deliberately blocked discussion, or expressed their opinions in an inflammatory way (e.g. the parent post), not people who legitimately disagree with the person's viewpoint.
Slashdot Mirror
Burn the witch!
Y'know, I was considering posting a similar comment, but with the concepts "Big Brother" and "terrorism" reversed. I swear, Big Brother is the biggest, most overblown political grab-bag since terrorism.
... or just firewall it.
It's more to do with the US's dissident origins, and the ingrained belief in the American psyche that people in positions of power are constantly trying to screw them over.
... a robotic, non-lethal, rigidly honest police force, or human cops with human natures and human weaknesses?
The universe will implode.
:)
You lose your data. What did you expect?
... does that means that all Linux distributions now require 1GB of ram to run everyday tasks? Does it mean that all Linux distributions now have an install image in the multi-gigabytes (funny, I could have sworn there were Linux distros that fitted on thumb drives)? Does that mean that Linux has now lost both its immense configurability, and its rich library (and back catalogue) of very lean programs?
No? Well, what exactly does your rather dubious assertion mean anyway?
With proper configuration, yes Vista is more secure than XP and only slightly more annoying for advanced users. And yes I'm a Windows user (about 20% of the time, the rest on Ubuntu), and in fact do blame the developers of Windows software for its lack of security. Namely all those malware developers and black-hats homing in on Vista like a nuclear warhead.
From what I could gather from the anaemic article, the tool that the site provides searches your computer for pirated movies. Calling it a sting seems a little overstated. It just goes to show that you should never, ever, install any software made by the MPAA, unless you place no value in your privacy.
Problem with that though, is that I've always thought $1 or $2 a bargain for one of those trolleys.
5. Offer to fix the scanner for a small fee.
6. Sever the power supply.
7. Profit! (plus happiness from shoppers and checkout chicks alike!)
... is filled with creationists!
lol
...do you actually believe that? Given the inherent inefficiencies of public services, and the inefficiencies of this particular administration, do you really believe that the CIA is some uber-power, starting wars, lying, and (most impressively) keeping the whole thing under wraps? Hell, I have little doubt whatsoever that they do some spying and some lying, but they can hardly be called a "pool of dark power". Those kind of descriptions are reserved for cheap fantasy books, where you can divide good and evil with a freight train sideways, not for real life where everyone is human, and nothing is ever so simple.
They're not supposed to defend themselves. Consumers are meant to have all the rights and companies exist only to serve. When a company fights back, people get angry. To justify their anger, people find excuses to be angry. It's obviously not enough to be angry about the fact that they really, really want to be able to download what they want, when they want, so they start demonising the company, calling it names, calling it "evil", etc. They justify their desires, saying that what they want will be good for our culture, or they downplay their desire by belittling the effort taken by copyright holders, and downplaying their appreciation for their work. Worse still, some people act like there is some objective means to judge such works, and that because some of the works fail this arbitrary test, they jump to the conclusion that no work produced by such companies is worth looking at, thus cancelling their right to existence.
/rant
These people then spread their views, playing upon people's fear of authority, and their lofty ideals of libertarianism, and soon they had a small but sizable movement to destroy this demon company. None of these people see piracy as a bad thing, and whether or not they actually practice piracy, they perpetuate that view. All the while, the company is trying with increasing desperation to maintain their business model against the illegal piracy movement, thus cementing the view in people's minds that they are evil, and that their business model has been legitimately challenged, and that they are losing legitimately.
That said, I also object to the RIAA's abuse of the legal system. It's a shame that they felt they had to resort to such lengths.
(Mods: if you disagree, why not reply anonymously, rather than modding me into oblivion)
This got modded to +5 Insightful? I knew it was a problem (see my sig), but seriously, this guy called us moderates "corporo-fascist trolls" for crying out loud. And here's me thinking that trolls were people who deliberately blocked discussion, or expressed their opinions in an inflammatory way (e.g. the parent post), not people who legitimately disagree with the person's viewpoint.
For shame, Slashdot, for shame.
ge3425yhWEw5yw erVdfdgb;'/gslpe4gdheokhut, the reality is, the CPU's working fine.
How dare they misrepresent linux and the FOSS movement? Everyone knows that linux and the GPL are a cancer!