I’m loathe to pay for music (though not television programming or movies) because I know I’m not rewarding the artist. Artists for a century or more have become victims of flim flam men selling them predatory deals which usually impoverish them in the long run unless they’re among a tiny minority of superstars. I’d love to simply pay the artist directly, and would probably pay more than the stated worth of the work as a tip and gesture of appreciation.
What the article fails to mention is that these computers are often equipped with malicious proprietary software, some of which is documented as having been used by an education system to photograph students while they used them in their private homes, even in various states of undress. “It’s great to suggest that every student should be equipped with a laptop or given 24/7 access to Wi-Fi, but shouldn’t our federal bureaucrats figure out how to stem the tidal wave of layoffs in the teaching ranks and unrelenting cutbacks in school programs and maintenance budgets first?
As censorship spreads, it’s important to note that corporations are composed of human beings who really ought to care about what they’re doing to their neighbors. Bowing to repressive regimes helps no one. “Google said last month it was directing users to localized country domains on Blogger to provide it flexibility to comply with content removal rules in various countries. Twitter also decided last month to withhold certain content from users in a specific country, when required by local laws, while keeping it available to the rest of the world.
Complacency is among the worst things a citizen of any democracy can be guilty of. This is an important lesson. “I signed ACTA out of civic carelessness, because I did not pay enough attention. Quite simply, I did not clearly connect the agreement I had been instructed to sign with the agreement that, according to my own civic conviction, limits and withholds the freedom of engagement on the largest and most significant network in human history, and thus limits particularly the future of our children.
Aside from content sharing, I can see a lot of practical use for peer to peer mechanisms like this in a future where primitive nations attempt to impose their views on the client-server model Microsoft and its cohorts fashioned the Internet into. The Internet was initially built of peer to peer nodes, unstoppable even by nuclear Holocaust, and so it should be again. http://torrentfreak.com/tribler-makes-bittorrent-impossible-to-shut-down-120208/
“I know that some of the people working for Twitter were activists … If we look at countries like Egypt, like Syria, like Yemen, of course all our tweets are breaking the law. And that’s what activists do, they break the law because they want to make changes to these unjust laws. They have the right to do that, and if you prevent them from this right then you are attacking human rights itself.
Think that’s your phone in your hand? Think again. The below article proves that all communications in and out of contemporary cellphones is actively monitored, either by heuristics or agents or a combination of both. http://ca.news.yahoo.com/muslim-man-workplace-quip-made-terror-suspect-211334769.html
“The seven step, ten minute download process (which will be about ten seconds when US internet speeds catch up with the rest of the world) is the real enemy the studios should be trying to tackle. Right now, the industry is still stuck in the past, and is crawling oh-so-slowly into the future. They still believe people are going to want to buy DVDs or Blu-rays in five years, and that a movie ticket is well worth $15.
“I share the opinions of those who from the beginning said that consultations were not complete,” Tusk said, according to a report in Wirtualna Polska. The 54-year-old prime minister added that a Polish rejection of ACTA is now on the table, and admitted that he had previously approached the agreement from a “20th century” perspective, due to his age. http://torrentfreak.com/polish-protests-put-acta-on-hold-120203/
Our society teaches people to judge programs solely based on practical convenience. To ask: - How easy to use is it? - How reliable? - How efficient? - What does it cost? And to ignore more important, deeper questions, like: - If I use this program, what does it do to my freedom? - What does it do to my community? The mere fact that people are using a non-free program is a social problem.
