A few thoughts

@Michael R. Bernstien:
I saw the trailer for "The end of suburbia"
It looked interesting, and while I agree that rising fuel prices and overconsumption may indeed lead to the end of America's sprawled infrastructure, it did feel very alarmist and sensational.

This news really doesn't bother me.
I live in Brooklyn, so mass transit easily connects me to work, school, and most places I want to go, whenever I want to go there.
And during nice weather, everything is close enough together that I can just bike to where I want to go.

For the few exceptions, (like if I want go somewhere at 3am, or go somewhere not reachable by train), I just rent a zipcar.

Every major city in America used to have a public, zero-emissions, electric tram service, and was connected to the national rail infrastructure.

If someone really wanted to live outside of a major metro area, they had to pay for it.

I don't see why America can't go back to being like that.

I remember, back in the 90s, as a teenager, being able to spend a lazy summer day in the park, lying belly-up on a bench and reading a book.

A nice conventional bench is great -- I can take a nap, or eat some food on it with a friend, whatever.

So I appreciate people's disgust at seeing these benches that force people to sit, and only sit on them.

But if you have lived in a large city with a chronic homeless problem, you may have a different opinion.

See, I am sure that if they had nice benches in some of these parks, EVER SINGLE BENCH would be staked out and become the permanent living space of some transient.
And while we, as a society should certainly try to address the underlying problems that create this situation, that shouldn't also prevent us from treating the immediate symptoms too.

Unfortunately, the times we live in demand these measures.

Wow, they even throttled their servers to 1994 speeds!

Stop bitching omg it's not a big deal why don't you just cooperate with them!!

If you just submitted it would be over and done with and you could get on with your life, and instead you make a big scene and hold up the line for no good reason.

Besides it's just poor working people in those costumes why do you have to make their lives difficult.

There, I think I have made a good run through the different apologies for it.

There is no way this is intentional.

People who use DRM are, in general, idiots when it comes to technology, otherwise they would no be using DRM in the first place!

Think about all of the laughably stupid anti-user DRM schemes we have seen in the last few years.

There was an e-book reader software that printed your full credit card info on each page, that was supposed to discourage you from sharing it, there was the trainwreck known as SDMI.
My friend who worked at Radio Shack back in 2003 told me that they couldn't pay people to buy an SDMI player.
Once people found out that they had to spend an hour encrypting their CD just to put it onto the player they returned it.

In the minds of the people who set this up, obfuscating the location of the stream url is the same as encrypting it.
And playing that video stream in VLC instead of the iPhone makes you a cyber terrorist and a criminal.

DRM is a pyramid scheme, with the content producers screwing the consumer, and the content producers in turn getting screwed by DRM vendors.

@Rick Fletcher:

Good job on the Javascript, that's neat.

Also..

Just because we *can* find it online unlawfully doesn't change anything.
Of course if someone wanted the book they could find it any number of ways.

Way back, around 2000, when I was a poor high school student, I would download ebooks off irc, run them through a script to make them palm text databases to be read in palm's excellent reader application.

I could read three novels at the same time, without having to carry around books.
There was no more convenient way to do it.

It's funny; the "pirate" market filled demand so well.
Back in 2000, when the "legitimate" ebook vendors were just getting started, the pirates already had tens of thousands of books, in a more convenient format.

Yeah, it is an internet argument, lol.

The last thing I will say is that what happened in Abu Ghairb is relevant and a fair comparison because it happened right beforehand, in the same place.

I would agree with you if it had happened on the other side of the country, or a decade beforehand, but it didn't.

And all I am trying to say is that it is heartless to ignore that.

And if you still don't think it is a relevant comparison, when would it be relevant?
What if the prison was partitioned between Iraqi and Americans, and we could literally see how they treated their prisoners side by side?
Would you still feel the same way?

I am NOT, repeat NOT defending their actions.
The Americans who are responsible should be punished severely, just like every corrupt cop and prison guard.
Since they abused their authority to commit crimes, they are actually far worse than common criminals.

Now then.

We have two instances of torture, that happened in the same place, within the frame of a few years.

1) The Americans: Low level abuse, no one was killed or maimed.
No worse than what happens every day under the watch of someone like Joe Arpaio.
Horrible, yes, but I don't believe it crosses the line into being *evil*
And Abu Ghairb is just a symptom of a much larger problem in American society...

2) The Iraqis: High level war crimes, unspeakable acts of carnage and brutality, mass murder.
A glaring example of the worst of humanity.

So we have two instance of torture, and everyone ignores #2 and only cares about #1.

I am sure the families digging through the unmarked graves for their dissapeared loved ones would be happy to know that you're bitching about the inevitable result of some hicks given too much power.

What I am trying to say here, is that only focusing on #1 is -insane-, and insulting to the people who were murdered there.

If #1 and #2 happened at the same time, right next to each other, would you still only focus on #1?
Tell me.

@TAKUAN #11

Imagine how the Iraqis felt. Life under Saddam (who was a creature of America and helped into power by America). Total destruction of their country for a 911 they had nothing to do with and for WMDs that were lies - said destruction by Americans, "liberation" of the prison by Americans - who behave like the previous monsters....

what don't you get about this?

Um.. No?
Do you see in those pictures Americans hacking off prisoners limbs with swords?
Or burning the prisoner's skin off with boiling oil?

I am not going to post a video link here, but if you have the stomach for it, the Abu Ghairb videos are not hard to find.

Yes, you *can* compare one torturer to another.
And the Americans were not 1/100th as bad as the Iraqis.

Don't believe me? Do this thought experiment:
If you had to choose between the Iraqi prison guards, and the American soldiers, you would gladly run to the Americans.

I would much rather have a few ribs cracked by some hick and be forced to wear soiled panties on my head than have my skin ripped off in strips.

But I guess all torture is exactly the same, eh?

@JIM OCONNELL #12

Nothing like this should have ever been done by Americans. When the German concentration camps were liberated in 1945, they didn't fill them up again and beat the hell out of people, did they?

No matter how people try to justify this, it's wrong and should be accounted for completely.


Interesting to use the example of concentration camps.
*IF* the allies *HAD* put nazi officers up in concentration camps after the war, and beaten them up and otherwise abused them, and then, after that, the world media ignored the suffering of the people murdered at the camps, and focused solely on the abused nazis, I would have a problem with that, as I do with this.
If our history books said the worst thing to happen at Auschwitz was that Nazi officers were abused by allied soldiers...

Anyway, as I said, this does not *excuse* the conduct of the soldiers there, and just because someone else did something worse does not mean that they are somehow now accountable.
But lets keep this in context people.

@ERROR404 #32

Saying "But the muslims did much worse" is not actually any sort of a defense.

If you find a rape victim do you give her one gently, cause after all the other guy did much worse?

If you join in torture you don't get the motral higher ground.

Bad example, dude.
A better example might be, if you find a rape victim who was also mugged by someone else after she was raped, do you give up looking for her rapist and try to find her mugger?

It's so irrational and stupid to ignore the horrible war crimes committed at Abu Ghairb for the much lesser war crimes committed a few years later.

Why are people so willing to dismiss the war crimes of Iraqis but focus only on the (lesser) war crimes of Americans?
Is it that you think Iraqis didn't know any better and shouldn't be held to the same standards?
I find that attitude to be highly racist and offensive.

And I never said that anyone had the "motral" high ground.

I am all for punishing the people who were guilty of that, and they were punished.
I just think it's insensitive to the real victims of Abu Ghairb to ignore their plight in favor of a more tabloid-esqe story.

Not defending the actions of the American staff at Abu Gharib, but let's put it in context....

Just a few years earlier, before the fall of Saddam, in the very same prison, people were having eyes gouged out, fingers cut off one by one with rusty pliers, dropped from three stories up with their hand's tied behind them, and other unspeakable atrocities.

Abu Gharib used to be a concentration camp where mass executions and horrible acts of torture were committed, and unkown tens of thousands of people died horrible deaths.

And then the Americans came and beat and abused the staff that used to work there.

After seeing the "other" Abu Gharib videos, it's kind of hard for me to feel bad about what the Americans did.
Was anyone even killed, or for that matter, maimed?

The American soldiers abuses didn't seem any worse than the abuses carried out by tazer-happy guards at regular American civilian prisons.

Again, not trying to defend their actions, but I have to say I am a bit disturbed that people really think the worst thing to happen at Abu Gharib was the American occupation of it.

I also think that in addition to information, that potentially non-lawful activities, like file sharing, should be factored in as market forces.

For example, when I am discussing the ethics of file sharing, I like to point out that file sharing is the market's reaction to a poor distribution system for online music.

If your online music store sucks so much that you're driving your customers to risk getting malware or getting sued rather than paying you for your content, you know you're in trouble.

I have to say, I am a bit unhappy reading some of the comments in this thread and on information week.
Why do so many people object to complaining about things on the internet?

Who the loving hell said that if you complain about something online, that I have to be polite and constructive?
Are they afraid that I would be tainting the otherwise pristine pool of information that is the internet?

If I feel like a company misled me and stole my money, I will most certainly "bitch" about it.

Anyone that would go out of their way to make a comment on my blog, bitching about my bitching, is a retard and a hypocrite.

I find that people who engage in this type of meta-complaining fall into two categories:

1. Fanboys who know they have no reasonable rebuttal to complaints, so they concoct irrational attacks about you "whining"
or
2. Trolls trying to provoke a response from someone they know is emotional.

Really, unless you're posting your complaints in a place where they are not meant to be posted, or otherwise spamming, people should disagree about a specific fact or facts, agree with you, or move on.
The only real "bitching" that goes on is people complaining about other people's complaining, since it is not illuminating a problem for others, nor is it a form of meaningful expression or communication.

People who complain about crappy products are indeed doing us a service.
If you're planning on buying something, you can almost certainly hear an honest review of it by googling it before hand.

I have never understood why people attack others for complaining about things.
It certainly must take more effort than navigating away from the offending page.

I applaud the clubs for doing this.
These anti smoking laws are retarded.

No one is there against their will, not the patrons, and not the employees.
And it's just as simple as that.

The whole argument that this creates an "unsafe" work environment is stupid -- anyone who works there already knows there is smoke, and by working there they are implicitly agreeing to take the chance of getting themselves sick.

It's like someone who is allergic to cat dander working as a veterinary assistant.

#12, I understand that some, very few, women may find this liberating.
Although I think you may be thinking of an Abaya, not a Burka.
I know some Muslim women who wear one, but an Abaya is only supposed to cover the hair and part of the head.
From what I understand talking to Muslims, the Burka is something that is usually only worn by women in Afghanistan, because they are forced to.

I think, for an adult, in a free society, to choose to walk around with their face covered all the time is highly anti-social.

If I walked around in public with a ski-mask covering my face all the time, and insisted that I was just doing god's will, I think I would be arrested.

That kind of behavior while tolerated, should not be encouraged, or even accommodated.

Also, #12, nearly all women who wear the burka are oppressed, with a tiny fraction of a percent choosing to wear it of their own free will, therefore I would say that those few exceptions do not change it's meaning.

If a few people wore a yellow cloth star of David in a different context, would it no longer be a symbol of oppression?

I saw something yesterday that I think is relevant to this.

I was in the subway, and a large group of teens clustering on the platform, obstructing commuters.

So a police officer politely but firmly instructed the teens to either board a train, or leave the station, but to stop loitering.

All of the teenagers rolled their eyes, and some of them made rude comments, but they quickly dispersed.

Then the cop left too.

This is how an officer should conduct himself.
He didn't lose control and fly off the handle because a group of teenagers didn't give him the respect he felt he was due.

And he never even reacted to their disrespectful attitudes in the slightest, which I think does a lot more to assert his authority than putting someone in a headlock who is half your size.

#9, Regardless of how annoying the kids may have been, the officer is still a criminal.

Even if the kids were cursing and yelling at the officer, I would still expect him to maintain a professional attitude.

If the kids were out and out disobeying his lawful orders, then he should have issued them a summons and moved on.

This officer needs to be arrested, and put on trial for assault, menacing, and endangering the welfare of a child, and perhaps destruction of property.

My mother is a teacher, and no matter how bad a day she is having, and how bad the kids are, if she so much as laid a finger on one of her students, she would be fired and never be able to teach again, and may even be arrested.
Even though she has had colleagues who have been assaulted, she is not allowed to defend herself.

Anyone who deals with children is held to that standard.
But so often police are given a free pass.
I just think that the police should be held to the same standard as everyone else, and I saw that officer committing crimes.

I think this kind of behavior is caused because police are often trained to command authority and intimidate.
The problem is, officers like the one in this video are often very insecure, weak people.
So when they pretend to be tough, people see right through it.

Personally, I find most police who do that tough guy act come off more like Dwight K Schrute or Eric Cartman, and I have to bite my tongue to hold back my laughter and pretend to be intimidated.

Women are brutally executed for not wearing their Burkas straight, or accidentally "showing some ankle".

Yes, it -is- a symbol of oppression, because women in some parts of the world are forced to wear it, Muslim or not.

I could see maybe something like this being done among women in Afganistan, as a subversive way to identify each other or something.

I agree with hatekillpuke that "unlocked" isn't really the right term, it still leads people to think of music being "locked" as legitimate.

A better term might be "open" or "unrestricted".
With a tagline like "Now you're in control"

I think it will be great when companies realize that they can market the fact that they don't support drm.