When people here at Slashdot advocate buying CDs, which is seldom, this is the way they usually suggest doing it. Often "I'd buy the CD if I could get it directly from the artist" is used as justification form illegally downloading music because the RIAA tax is a dealbreaker.
The thing everyone advocating this idea should realize is that the artists have expressed their desire to be free of distributing their own material by virtue of their having contracted with someone else to do it. We do not want or need you people to wade into this fracas and rescue us. Put away your hero complex and buy the CDs where we obviously want you to buy them.
It would certainly seem like cancer has been cured many times over, particularly if you get your medical news from Slashdot, where there is both a tendency to react to mostly theoretical research as if it would be available on the shelf tomorrow and a strong desire to place on the front page any article with any mention at all of nanoparticles, or nanobots, or nanos in general.
There is a lot of nice glass out there, alomost any Leupold, Burris' Black Diamond series. Way upmarket are Nightforce and Swarovski.
For longer range I prefer larger objectives, 50mm or better. I have excellent eyesight but larger objectives just bring in so much more light things are easier to see. Even top quality scopes with small objectives never seem bright enough for my taste.
The problem is that long before any court sets things straight all of the people who are harmed by actions taken based on a signing statement will have had their lives more or less destroyed. Read My Country Against Me, which is Wen Ho Lee's recounting of all of the nefarious carryings on surrounding his trial for being a spy for China. The guy was ruined, and when a court finally got around to apologizing the world had moved on, that part of the story didn't get the same front page coverage as his arrest.
On the other hand one might just shrug and say that governments don't need signing statements to be evil, so why does it matter.
What do you call an accurized M1A with a 3-9x40 scope if not a kilometer range sniper rifle?
I would call it in need of bigger glass if I planned to shoot man sized targets at 1km.
Yesterday in an article I read some reference to a P90 being some kind of ultimate military weapon, and now today I read about fully automatic AKs in the same category.
The truth of the matter is that a fully automatic rifle isn't significantly better than than a semi in the hands of someone who has done much shooting. Most of the US riflemen you see today are outfitted with select fire M4s (or some other variant) that fire 3 round bursts or in semi auto mode. This is because firing much more than 3 rounds in succession results in uncontrollable barrel rise that prevents anything from being hit other than at random. Full auto in a shoulder fired weapon is really only useful for laying down covering fire for movement.
In poorer countries there are still a lot of full auto AKs, mainly because of availibility and because the people carrying them are largely untrained. In practice they tend to spend a lot of ammunition while firing on the move and not hitting much.
People who shoot a lot, like Jeff Cooper, will tell you that in well trained hands a bolt action rifle is just as effective as any other shoulder fired arm. I never really believed that until I saw an actual demonstration but it is certainly true. Not that the general population in the US constitutes 'well trained', nor does the military when it comes to handling firearms, but fully auto rifles are certainly not the trump card people seem to think they are.
Re:Joe McCarthy would be proud
on
Wikinomics
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The best part about government is that if you don't quite want to share as much as they want you to share, or if they plain don't like the expression on your face, you get the buttstock of a rifle planted between your eyes.
Advertisers and retail consultants of all sorts have a tremendous hunger for information. Anything they can measure might give them an advantage over their competition and the lengths they will go to are determined only by the competitiveness of the market they are in.
I do a fair amount of product photography. I sometimes sit in meetings where advertising and marketing people will go over my photos to pick the ones they want to use. The bulk of what they base their decisions on is how a particular shot makes them 'feel'. That and a whole host of boring antocedotes about how many seconds X type of person will spend making a buying decision about Y product and what factors will weight most heavily in determining the purchase. Some of the things they claim to know amaze me, that anyone would bother to study them.
What I've learned from all this is that every single aspect of any large chain store you visit will be the way it is because of some study (and sometimes by some vendor paying for a better position for their product). The color of the walls, the floor, the lighting. The way items are arranged on the shelf. The position of the packages. Their height above the floor. The quantity of each item and the selection within a category. The graphics on the package. The music playing overhead. The uniforms on the employees. The presence or absence of employees in a particular area. The relative position of competing products, of complementary products. The arrangement of departments throughout the store. The ease of ingress or egress in the parking lot. The lighting in the parking lot. The type of front doors. Signage. Leaflets. Whizzing spinning blinking lights to alert you the something wonderful is about to happen, some item will be deeply discounted.
Absolutely everything about every visit to every national level retailer will have been picked over in meetings both by the marketing department of the store you are in and by the marketing department of the product in that store.
It is also worth noting that even in the USA, the general public are not allowed armour piercing weapons (eg - P90)
This is not quite correct. The ability to pierce body armor is more a function of the cartridge than the firearm itself, and the P90 fires a 5.7x28mm cartidge. In the US I can purchase a pistol over the counter chambered for 5.7x28 with nothing more than the standard background check and without any waiting period.
The ammunition I can buy in the same shop as the pistol is a hollow point version of the fully jacketed round usually used in the P90, but both can pierce Level II body armor. Level III body armor, more common in the US military, stops both rounds. Commonly available 308 Winchester ammunition available at every Wal-Mart I've ever been in does just as well in terms of getting past body armor.
The P90 itself is a class III weapon in the US by virtue of it being fully automatic and having a short barrel. Civilians can still have all of them they like if they pay the government their $200 fee each time they buy one. Without the $200 fee we can buy the PS90, a semi-automatic version with a 16" barrel. It can fire the same round as the P90 and will achieve the same external ballistic performance.
I too seek out inanimate objects on which to focus blame for the deeds of evil people. For instance, from the same article:
In a written statement to police, he said he had to kill McDermott because she was poisoning him with X-rays
A ban on X-rays would also have prevented this crime and allowed the victim (it is important to use the word victim, you failed to do so in your post) to continue walking the streets. It is simple logic.
The consumer does have a voice in making things fair. It's called the government
You were doing reasonably well up to that point.
One of the last things I need my government to trouble themselves with is cell phone chargers. I would prefer they concentrate on sitting on their hands so they don't kill any more people who don't need to be killed. I'd rather they point their brains toward figuring out how to extricate themselves from the quagmire of special interest they are now mired in, so that they could actually govern instead of spending their time pandering to whomever contributed to their last campaign.
Propose cell phone charger legislation and you'll have 1000 cell phone charger industry lobbyists knocking on every lawmaker's door across the country. Committees will be set up to study the various bribes to determine which one merits further consideration by the secondary consideration committee. Trips will need to be taken. Drinks will need to be bought. Undisclosed sums of money will have to change hands before a specific charger design can be settled upon and a list of approved suppliers chosen up from the list of approved lawmaker-brother-in-law owned shell companies. In the end I'll have a go to the license branch to get my cell phone charger and my cell phone bill will have a Federal Cell Phone Charger Cost Reclamation Fee line added to it.
If you are in the US good places to read up on this are here and here and here. That last link is from Andrew Kantor, who describes himself as a "writer photographer geek" and has written a lot on the subject as it applies to digital photography and publishing.
The attention paid to anyone on the street with a camera has gone up since 9/11. If you spend much time taking pictures of a federal building you'll probably get to talk with the security guards. If you are actually standing on their grounds when you take the shots they'll confiscate your gear and at the very least give it a thorough going through before giving it back.
You also have some people who just don't want their stuff photographed. If you look too professional while shooting the Flat Iron building in New York their guys will come tell you that the building's likeness is protected and you can't shoot it, which is wrong but they'll give it a go anyway. I've kept my camera in the face of doped up militia troops in the Congo though, so I'm a harder target for them than most.
I won't take it personally but most of what I do with a camera involves a lot more peril than some guy on the street smashing my camera. Also, if I'm on the street it is probably a digital so as long at the write is finished smashing it won't do much good.
There are various laws in various places concerning what kind of permission is necessary before publishing photos depicting identifiable people. Many of them concern advertising only but some, Canada is maybe the most clear cut, cover anything that is published. Also if you read the TOS of most photo sharing sites you'll find that they require permission from everyone in the shot before it can be uploaded even if that is almost impossible to police.
But regardless of the laws, information wants to be free, or however the saying goes. I put up a photo of you withouy your cosent and by the time I get the order to take it down the facial search engines have crawled and cataloged it.
I do some street photography and, although I don't personally publish material on the web, some of the people who hire me do. So even if you don't put your photo on Flickr because you are afraid of being identified by search engine there is nothing stopping me from putting it up there for you.
I know the forthcoming example does not implicate all lawyers, but my brother's son drove an ATV into the side of a barn and screwed himself up quite a bit. There was an article in the local paper about it, because my brother is kind of well known in the community, and he had no shortage of lawyers calling his house offering to help him ease his pain and suffering. For months afterward he would have people come into his shop, ask how his son was doing, then hand him a business card identifying themselves as personal injury attorneys.
As with this particular lawsuit, the bad side gets a lot more press than the good side. A few baseless class action lawsuits and you have people decrying the entire legal system. A few bottom feeding attorneys and you get thousands of bottom feeding attorney jokes.
And I'm curious to hear whether you think it is a good thing that whatever you create is still under copyright more than 40 years after you die
No I do not think that life+40 years is a good thing. Any length of time is likely to be some arbitrary guess, but anything more than the life of the creator is too long in my estimation.
These repeated attempts by media companies to extend the time periods for both their copyright and sometimes mine make a lot of news here and are often held up as examples of the way copyrights have been bent against the public. When compared with the reality of file sharing they matter very little though. A look at the most popular torrents or the number of files returned from search results in traditional P2P applications reveals that the bulk of material being traded is very recently released stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
The thing everyone advocating this idea should realize is that the artists have expressed their desire to be free of distributing their own material by virtue of their having contracted with someone else to do it. We do not want or need you people to wade into this fracas and rescue us. Put away your hero complex and buy the CDs where we obviously want you to buy them.
It would certainly seem like cancer has been cured many times over, particularly if you get your medical news from Slashdot, where there is both a tendency to react to mostly theoretical research as if it would be available on the shelf tomorrow and a strong desire to place on the front page any article with any mention at all of nanoparticles, or nanobots, or nanos in general.
Thank you for the translation. For some reason all I got out of the parent post was "I'm 12 years old" over and over again.
I don't know where the $40 comes in, but I have unlimited data with Cingular for $19.99/month. No per minute or per connection fees on data.
The OP mentions something about a smartphone plan so the price may comes from there, I use a RAZR with Opera Mobile.
How about just replacing the entire Stallman with a CGI character that reads from a wiki based on public transcripts?
I don't know if such a thing exists but you sound like just the right guy to code one up. Shoot me a message when you're done.
Not me man, I'm using copper AND VOIP.
There is a lot of nice glass out there, alomost any Leupold, Burris' Black Diamond series. Way upmarket are Nightforce and Swarovski.
For longer range I prefer larger objectives, 50mm or better. I have excellent eyesight but larger objectives just bring in so much more light things are easier to see. Even top quality scopes with small objectives never seem bright enough for my taste.
On the other hand one might just shrug and say that governments don't need signing statements to be evil, so why does it matter.
The corpse of probable cause rotted away a long time ago.
I would call it in need of bigger glass if I planned to shoot man sized targets at 1km.
Yesterday in an article I read some reference to a P90 being some kind of ultimate military weapon, and now today I read about fully automatic AKs in the same category.
The truth of the matter is that a fully automatic rifle isn't significantly better than than a semi in the hands of someone who has done much shooting. Most of the US riflemen you see today are outfitted with select fire M4s (or some other variant) that fire 3 round bursts or in semi auto mode. This is because firing much more than 3 rounds in succession results in uncontrollable barrel rise that prevents anything from being hit other than at random. Full auto in a shoulder fired weapon is really only useful for laying down covering fire for movement.
In poorer countries there are still a lot of full auto AKs, mainly because of availibility and because the people carrying them are largely untrained. In practice they tend to spend a lot of ammunition while firing on the move and not hitting much.
People who shoot a lot, like Jeff Cooper, will tell you that in well trained hands a bolt action rifle is just as effective as any other shoulder fired arm. I never really believed that until I saw an actual demonstration but it is certainly true. Not that the general population in the US constitutes 'well trained', nor does the military when it comes to handling firearms, but fully auto rifles are certainly not the trump card people seem to think they are.
The best part about government is that if you don't quite want to share as much as they want you to share, or if they plain don't like the expression on your face, you get the buttstock of a rifle planted between your eyes.
Good ol collaborative sharing.
Advertisers and retail consultants of all sorts have a tremendous hunger for information. Anything they can measure might give them an advantage over their competition and the lengths they will go to are determined only by the competitiveness of the market they are in.
I do a fair amount of product photography. I sometimes sit in meetings where advertising and marketing people will go over my photos to pick the ones they want to use. The bulk of what they base their decisions on is how a particular shot makes them 'feel'. That and a whole host of boring antocedotes about how many seconds X type of person will spend making a buying decision about Y product and what factors will weight most heavily in determining the purchase. Some of the things they claim to know amaze me, that anyone would bother to study them.
What I've learned from all this is that every single aspect of any large chain store you visit will be the way it is because of some study (and sometimes by some vendor paying for a better position for their product). The color of the walls, the floor, the lighting. The way items are arranged on the shelf. The position of the packages. Their height above the floor. The quantity of each item and the selection within a category. The graphics on the package. The music playing overhead. The uniforms on the employees. The presence or absence of employees in a particular area. The relative position of competing products, of complementary products. The arrangement of departments throughout the store. The ease of ingress or egress in the parking lot. The lighting in the parking lot. The type of front doors. Signage. Leaflets. Whizzing spinning blinking lights to alert you the something wonderful is about to happen, some item will be deeply discounted.
Absolutely everything about every visit to every national level retailer will have been picked over in meetings both by the marketing department of the store you are in and by the marketing department of the product in that store.
Why stop at celebrities?
I sometimes forget that I live in a relatively free state.
This is not quite correct. The ability to pierce body armor is more a function of the cartridge than the firearm itself, and the P90 fires a 5.7x28mm cartidge. In the US I can purchase a pistol over the counter chambered for 5.7x28 with nothing more than the standard background check and without any waiting period.
The ammunition I can buy in the same shop as the pistol is a hollow point version of the fully jacketed round usually used in the P90, but both can pierce Level II body armor. Level III body armor, more common in the US military, stops both rounds. Commonly available 308 Winchester ammunition available at every Wal-Mart I've ever been in does just as well in terms of getting past body armor.
The P90 itself is a class III weapon in the US by virtue of it being fully automatic and having a short barrel. Civilians can still have all of them they like if they pay the government their $200 fee each time they buy one. Without the $200 fee we can buy the PS90, a semi-automatic version with a 16" barrel. It can fire the same round as the P90 and will achieve the same external ballistic performance.
In a written statement to police, he said he had to kill McDermott because she was poisoning him with X-rays
A ban on X-rays would also have prevented this crime and allowed the victim (it is important to use the word victim, you failed to do so in your post) to continue walking the streets. It is simple logic.
2007 Reply of the Year award goes to you. It took damn near the whole year, but we finally got one worthy.
You were doing reasonably well up to that point.
One of the last things I need my government to trouble themselves with is cell phone chargers. I would prefer they concentrate on sitting on their hands so they don't kill any more people who don't need to be killed. I'd rather they point their brains toward figuring out how to extricate themselves from the quagmire of special interest they are now mired in, so that they could actually govern instead of spending their time pandering to whomever contributed to their last campaign.
Propose cell phone charger legislation and you'll have 1000 cell phone charger industry lobbyists knocking on every lawmaker's door across the country. Committees will be set up to study the various bribes to determine which one merits further consideration by the secondary consideration committee. Trips will need to be taken. Drinks will need to be bought. Undisclosed sums of money will have to change hands before a specific charger design can be settled upon and a list of approved suppliers chosen up from the list of approved lawmaker-brother-in-law owned shell companies. In the end I'll have a go to the license branch to get my cell phone charger and my cell phone bill will have a Federal Cell Phone Charger Cost Reclamation Fee line added to it.
The attention paid to anyone on the street with a camera has gone up since 9/11. If you spend much time taking pictures of a federal building you'll probably get to talk with the security guards. If you are actually standing on their grounds when you take the shots they'll confiscate your gear and at the very least give it a thorough going through before giving it back.
You also have some people who just don't want their stuff photographed. If you look too professional while shooting the Flat Iron building in New York their guys will come tell you that the building's likeness is protected and you can't shoot it, which is wrong but they'll give it a go anyway. I've kept my camera in the face of doped up militia troops in the Congo though, so I'm a harder target for them than most.
There are various laws in various places concerning what kind of permission is necessary before publishing photos depicting identifiable people. Many of them concern advertising only but some, Canada is maybe the most clear cut, cover anything that is published. Also if you read the TOS of most photo sharing sites you'll find that they require permission from everyone in the shot before it can be uploaded even if that is almost impossible to police.
But regardless of the laws, information wants to be free, or however the saying goes. I put up a photo of you withouy your cosent and by the time I get the order to take it down the facial search engines have crawled and cataloged it.
I do some street photography and, although I don't personally publish material on the web, some of the people who hire me do. So even if you don't put your photo on Flickr because you are afraid of being identified by search engine there is nothing stopping me from putting it up there for you.
I hope it went down like that with these kids too.
I know the forthcoming example does not implicate all lawyers, but my brother's son drove an ATV into the side of a barn and screwed himself up quite a bit. There was an article in the local paper about it, because my brother is kind of well known in the community, and he had no shortage of lawyers calling his house offering to help him ease his pain and suffering. For months afterward he would have people come into his shop, ask how his son was doing, then hand him a business card identifying themselves as personal injury attorneys.
As with this particular lawsuit, the bad side gets a lot more press than the good side. A few baseless class action lawsuits and you have people decrying the entire legal system. A few bottom feeding attorneys and you get thousands of bottom feeding attorney jokes.
No I do not think that life+40 years is a good thing. Any length of time is likely to be some arbitrary guess, but anything more than the life of the creator is too long in my estimation.
These repeated attempts by media companies to extend the time periods for both their copyright and sometimes mine make a lot of news here and are often held up as examples of the way copyrights have been bent against the public. When compared with the reality of file sharing they matter very little though. A look at the most popular torrents or the number of files returned from search results in traditional P2P applications reveals that the bulk of material being traded is very recently released stuff.