I am very disturbed. There's a lot of corruption, and sheer stupidity. I really think we need to spell out, in writing, a whole bunch of things that the powerful aren't allowed to do. No EULAs, copyrights, or other claims of legal rights that aren't actually true. For instance, the National Football League claims ownership of everything about every broadcast of every football game, including things that are clearly not theirs to claim. They assert so at the end of the game.

I have an anecdote to share. I got a letter from the city claiming that my grass was too high, and was therefore a Nuisance. It was a bullying, insulting, and insincere letter that they should be ashamed they ever composed. The letter informed me that they could fine me $2000 per day that the property was in violation. That's an absolutely absurd amount to fine someone over grass that was a few inches over their arbitrary height. I do not agree that high grass is a nuisance. Nor do I agree that my grass was high, not when the city's grass in the nearby median was even higher. That's the bullying part. I don't believe they have the power to collect such a huge fine, and they may know that, and are just trying to scare me. Then the letter lectured me on how clean neighborhoods reduce crime and increase property values, as if I had never heard that sort of thing before. Finally, the letter concluded with a helpful list of lawn care services I could employ, with a disclaimer that they don't endorse any of them. I thought that list highly improper. I wonder how many officials have shady connections with those lawn care services, maybe get a little kickback? They don't care about neat neighbors nearly as much as they care about revenue, and the letter seemed to me to be more about that, about abusing the law to wring money from compliant and fearful citizens. Outrageous. But this is everywhere. What is to be done?

You ask if I think it is immoral to own physical property. Of course not! With some exceptions. For instance, it is immoral to own slaves, not because ownership is immoral, but because slavery is immoral. Also, owners have responsibilities. For example, owning a car does not give a person the right to dump used engine oil into storm sewers, or drive anywhere they want, tearing up vegetation on public lands. Landowners cannot divert all the water from streams and rivers that happen to cross their properties.

I've been saying that because the material and immaterial are very different, they should be handled differently, with different legal frameworks. Big Media has been trying to twist our laws and public perceptions. They use a seductive simplification that "property is property" which is completely wrong.

No, I am saying DRM is unfair, period. It's not just the implementation, or the excesses. It is the goal. They are trying to make ideas and thinking no different than material property. They want people to have to buy and sell ideas as if they were no different than material goods such as clothes. They have resorted to propaganda, equating copying to stealing at every opportunity, calling people who do it by the loaded term "pirates" no matter how innocent the copying, calling ideas "property" with the terminology "intellectual properties", and even referring to all of us as "consumers", as if listening to a song is no different than eating a slice of bread. Further, they are trying to pull that one on the public only where it suits them. These are the guys who brought us the really unethical and cheating practices of Hollywood Accounting. They conveniently exempt themselves from the rules they say everyone else should follow.

Equating material and immaterial things, to try to turn our entire society into an ownership game at which they can easily win because they're so good at it, is a terrible vision. Civilization itself depends upon the sharing of ideas. We did not rise to the top of the animal kingdom because we are stronger or faster than all other animals. We obviously aren't. Of animals about our size, we are the slowest and weakest by far. We made it to the top because we work together to invent and build things other animal cannot. Now these tyrants of the mind want to control all commerce of thought. If they had their way, no one would be able to communicate anything at all without paying them a big toll. Through bribery and corruption of our public officials, they have had far too much success at lengthening copyright beyond all sense, despite the vast majority, of perhaps over 90%, in favor of scaling copyright back. They've expanded the scope of copyrights and patents to cover things they were never meant to cover originally. Should software be patentable? They've actually had the hubris to patent genes, and laws of nature, copyright mere lists of data and facts. They are allowed to try to fool people with EULAs and contractual terms that are in fact not enforceable, though they claim they are of course. When they whistle, our police forces, who we pay for and who serve us, come running to do their bidding. They've tried to make us pay to police every network packet, to check whether it contains copyrighted material. They would shut down and abolish the Internet, the used book store, the public library, the university, and the grade school. Our children would not be allowed to learn a thing without having to pay and pay again for the privilege, because knowledge is valuable.

Fortunately for all of us, imposition and enforcement of their vision is impractical. The universe does not work in accordance with their desires.

But the first step is to take that aura of respectability off these Big Media bandits. They are not fine upstanding business people, they commit worse thievery than anything they accuse us of. Bank reputations are much tarnished for their role in causing the Great Recession through blatant dishonesty, cheating, and fraud. Why do people like you accord the practitioners of Hollywood Accounting respect, and listen to their propaganda as if it was genuinely meant? Over and over, they have exposed themselves as bullies, cowards, liars, manipulators, and thieves. But they're rich, and that's all that matters to far too many people. Many of us realize that the mental shortcut of measuring the worth of a person by the worth of their material possessions is wrong, but we do it anyway.

What is the point of driving a single mother into bankruptcy and taking her home away, over a measly 24 songs? Her children certainly did nothing to deserve being kicked out of their home. They are notorious for picking people they think they can beat up, to make an example of, to terrorize the rest of us. A number of young people have been forced to give up their dreams of getting a college education, because these scumbags decided that making that financially impossible was suitable punishment for sharing a few songs. And those are the people you think still deserve a hearing?

Give that some more thought. DRM is unfair, period. Big Media has been running a massive propaganda campaign to convince everyone that piracy is immoral, and no different than stealing. It sounds like they still have you halfway convinced. Neither of those claims is correct. If they stuck to just trying to prevent copying, that would bolster their position, but they don't. They've shown that they cannot be trusted. They get greedy, and do unethical things like unskippable commercials on Blu-Ray, and region encoding on DVD. There have even been a few infamous incidents where they callously put their good customers at risk on the thinking that protecting their intellectual property justified any intrusive and damaging measure, stuff like the Sony rootkit and Turbo Tax boot sector rewrite. Then there's the entire shakedown and terror campaign where they threaten to sue ordinary citizens into oblivion for not even copying, but only "making available" material that might or might not even be copyrighted. Even if guilty, a punishment of $222,000 or $1.92 million for "making available" 24 songs, is completely over the top. As many people have noted, the punishment for an actual theft, a shoplifting of one CD, which can easily hold those 24 songs, is comparatively light, maybe a few hundred dollars.

Copyright is only a means to promote art and science. It is neither a good way to do it, nor the only way. Big Media propagandists would have us all believe that artists will starve without copyright. That is simply not true. We have crowdfunding now. We ought to expand that, and abolish copyright.

Think about what copyright blocks. Our public libraries should be much more digital. It would save us huge amounts of money. No more having to travel to the library to pick up a physical copy, and then having to make a second trip to return the copy. No more unavailable items because all copies are currently checked out. You'd just download a copy, and delete it when you didn't want it any more. Libraries could have far, far more content, including current stuff which libraries are notoriously poor at stocking, losses from damaged media would be almost nothing, and most of all, it would be so much more searchable. The only reason the private bookstore succeeded is that they occupied a niche, current fiction and non-fiction, that the public library wasn't nimble enough to fill.

I think the police must and can change. The bullying can be kept to a minimum, through screening and training. The training also needs to change.

One problem is higher up. It's not just the police, it's local governments. For example, a few weeks ago, I got a letter about my grass being too high. In a neighboring city, the bureaucrats actually escalated an unmown lawn into jail time! They had kept a dossier of lawn care violations dating back nearly 20 years! Wow, welcome to East Germany. I had mowed 2 weeks before, but it had rained a lot recently and the city's own medians were not in compliance. But none of that mattered. The tone of the letter is what I find most troubling. It was insulting, threatening, demeaning, and belittling all in one. There was no due process, the property was simply declared in violation. I had no idea what the height limit was until the letter informed me that it was 12 inches, and only a vague notion that there probably was a city ordinance about it. The letter informed me that the city could fine me up to $2000 per day that the property was in violation, If I don't pay, they can file a lien and may sue me. Also, it seems I'm on probation for a year, as the letter also said I would not receive another warning for 12 months, they'd just start the punishment the next time the property was found in violation. Pretty heavy handed for a little grass. I doubt whether they can really do all the terrible things they say, and it may be in part a scare tactic. They also stated in the letter that the purpose is "that the property be maintained in an attractive and pleasant manner free of all nuisances. Premises that become unattractive because of of high vegetation or other nuisance invite deterioration, vandalism and infestation and undermine the integrity of the neighborhoods and commercial areas where they exist." That's damned insulting, lecturing me about that. I have done much to clean the property up. It had a lot of trash scattered around before I moved in, and I have disposed of it all. Nor do I agree with their premise that high vegetation is a nuisance, or that over 12 inches is "high". So, according to that, my grandparents, who were farmers and good people, are public nuisances because they never mowed their yard? They had 4 foot high grass, and a vegetable garden. As a citizen with a clean record, I deserve better treatment than that.

Finally, the letter concluded with a list of lawn mowing services I could employ, with a disclaimer that they do not endorse any of them. Yeah, right! That list struck me as highly improper. So, the city is being run as a racket for lawn care profiteering? With a city being run like that, is it any wonder that their cops aren't totally fair either? What I would like to see is the people rise up against such petty racketeering. Citizens who want to keep our hard won rights should descend upon the city of Grand Prairie Texas for jailing a man for not mowing enough, and set them straight. No escalation of civil violations into criminal ones. No de facto debtor prisons. Sadly, I have not heard that anything further is being done in this case. Looks like the episode is going to be forgotten, and Mr. Yoes will not receive any apology or compensation. Maybe the media attention they got is enough to scare the bureaucrats from pulling that one again.

Codes are not as simple as they may seem. The issue is complexity. Both insurance and medical use and abuse complexity to confuse people and hide the real costs. It may seem that doctors are as much victims as patients, both struggling with byzantine insurance rules, but actually doctors are to blame for much of it by charging outrageous fantasy prices. Time Magazine's "Bitter Pill" story fingered the "chargemaster" as the main culprit behind the crazy pricing.

For example, last year, I had a kidney stone, and went to emergency 3 times. The first visit, I was given a CT scan. The hospital would not trouble me with any confusing and boring details until I demanded that they send me a bill that included all the items, with codes. Instead, they at first presented me with an enormous bill with no details, and when I didn't pay up immediately, started getting nasty, threatening to turn me over to debt collectors, ruin my credit, etc. They were testing me, seeing if I'd let them walk all over me. They and the insurance (Blue Cross Blue Shield in this case) could have done their jobs, but they find it easier to bully patients. I should sign a blank check? I think not!

With a more detailed bill in hand, I learned that the "CT scan - body" was code 74176, and the hospital charges $9107.20 for it. That's an absolutely ridiculous price of course. Insurance cut them down to $193.85. But that's not the whole story. I also got a bill from a lab on that same code 74176, for $660, reduced by insurance to $56.15. What's the deal? Was I being double billed? The explanation I was given, and which I don't know whether to believe, is that it was legit, and that labs which analyze CT scans use the same code as facilities which actually operate the CT machinery. If true, this practice of doubling up codes like that can only lead to confusion. To further confuse matters, the hospital has their own internal code for the CT scan: 162889. When I check the Medicare price for a particular code, how am I to know which of several possible items or procedures they're talking about? They should have different codes, maybe 74176a and 74176b.

I spotted a lot of discrepancies in the bill. Yeah, I can believe 90% of medical bills contain errors. The example that sticks out the most for my own case is the 1 liter of saline solution, code J7030. A bag of salt water, which ought to cost about the same as a 2 liter bottle of a soft drink. I received 3 of these, and the hospital charged $306.78 for each one. Why? Then, the real puzzler: insurance reduced these 3 identical items to 3 different prices, $151.74, $63.62, and $26.84 respectively. Why? I was given several excuses, like that these are sterile solutions, and that's costly. No, it's not. Boil it, and done. Or, irradiate it. Another excuse was that it wasn't a simple bag of salt water, it contained drugs. Well, no, that, if you'll pardon the pun, doesn't hold water, and the insurance company support person backtracked pretty quickly on that idea. There were no drugs added to the saline solutions Yet another excuse is that the price is not for the item alone, it includes having a medical tech jab the needle into my arm and hitting a vein, which requires some skill. Finally, they admitted I had a point and started investigating. They reduced my cost to the lowest of the 3 for all 3 saline solutions. $26.84 is still outrageous for an item that ought to cost $2, but it's a lot better than $306.

At this point the hospital tried to cut a deal. If I paid right away, they'd generously knock 20% off my original bill. I told them to hold that thought. Looked like I could do better by continuing to question the details of my bill. And yes, I could. The insurance has adjusted a lot of costs downward, more than the 20% I would have saved by agreeing to the hospital's deal.

But, I think insurance still doesn't have it correct. The cost to me for that CT scan was changed from $193.85 plus $56.15 to $56.15 x 2. They had 2 entries for code 74176, and simply forced both to the lower of the 2 prices, although they might actually be different items. That's the kind of confusion caused by reusing codes. I really do not know what is right. For the CT scan, should I pay $193.85 + 56.15 = $250 , or $56.15 x 2 = $112.30, or even just $56.15? The whole thing seems to be in limbo right now. I have still not heard from Blue Cross Blue Shield what my final bill should be.

This article is about spam, not real offers. If they were real offers, it would give the lowdown-- location, skills, duties, and pay. It would be an actual employment contract, and all the candidate would have to do is sign up, or not.

So often, these so-called jobs are fake. There isn't a real job, they're just harvesting resumes. Or maybe there is but they've already settled on a candidate, and everyone else has no real chance, the employer is only going through the motions to satisfy EEOC rules.

"Propagandists" is the correct term. They aren't lying to themselves, they're lying to everyone else. They aggressively campaign to spread disinformation and bury facts, facts that they themselves know are correct. It's not clear whether they're performing extreme mental gymnastics to justify themselves, or they know they're liars and hypocrites who don't give a damn about reality, and would as happily sell any other snake oil, if it paid well.

The problem is the people who give these organizations air by listening to them and even funding them. The name "Heartland Institute" confirmed my suspicions that the Pope wasn't being treated to honest skepticism, he was only being attacked by propaganda organs.

Are you volunteering to feed and provide health care to all these unwanted babies you want to force women to bear? No? You hate Obamacare? Then you aren't really pro-life, you're pro-overpopulation. You want those babies born, but how to care for them, how to feed all those extra mouths, well, that's someone else's problem, not yours, huh? You willing to go to war, kill off some other mouths so those babies can eat? And you think the mother can always find a way to feed her child if you make her desperate enough? And if she can't do it, then I suppose you'd blame her and call her a bad mother.

Obligatory Head of Vecna story. They didn't think about the meaning of the location of the brain....

In Spock's Brain, they could have taken Spock's entire head. Or, why not just kidnap Spock? Grab first, then take brain out. Or, or, if they have the technology to remove a brain intact, and reprogram it to serve their purposes, wouldn't that imply the ability to just copy it or make up their own brain? Oh well, that episode is unfixably bad anyway.

Until the Republicans stop their anti-science, party of stupid and mean rhetoric, no thinking person should take them seriously. And certainly don't vote for them! Anyone, even Hillary, is better than them. I'm not saying they don't have their points, or that the Democrats don't have big problems of their own, but they've really screwed up in recent decades.

The War of Choice was one of the stupidest and meanest actions performed in decades. We haven't done anything that dumb since Vietnam. Cost a great deal of lives, and cost us a lot of money and credibility. Their thinking that Iraq would happily turn into a prosperous democracy as soon as Saddam was gone, was shown to be a particularly naive fantasy. For that alone, they deserve a long sit out. But there's so much more. Why this denialism on Climate Change? Who really benefits from that? Oil companies, of course. Even the saner pro-business wing of the party royally screwed up, as the gross mishandling of Wall Street shows. They did the equivalent of sending the referees home, because the players could be trusted to obey the rules of the game. How unbelievably stupid is that? With deregulation in full force, the players of course cheated massively, and caused the Great Recession. Before that crash there was even talk of privatizing Social Security. With eagle-eyed hindsight, we can be very, very glad that didn't happen. The primary victims of the market collapse were pension and retirement funds. The banksters wanted to get their claws on the vast savings piled up in Social Security only so they could keep the bubble going a little longer.

Keep the goal in mind. We want more and better art It doesn't matter how it happens. Careful that what you are calling plagiarism really is plagiarism. And even if it is, if it is to the net benefit of society, then it is good. We can work out ways to compensate the original author, in those cases where plagiarism has really happened. It has been a long established principle that you can't copyright laws of nature or basic information. We're already contemplating the problem of someone generating every possible sequence of notes up to some small number, maybe 4, and copyrighting them all. 88^4 is only 60 million, which might seem too many to register at the copyright office, but definitely is not too many for a computer to go through.

Everyone loses when more money goes to lawyers than artists. Everyone loses when established industry bribes lawmakers to outlaw new distribution methods no matter how much more efficient they are. The entertainment industry would love, just love to turn the clock back to 1985, before mp3, Napster, and the Internet, and force the public to get new music on CDs. Never mind that distributing music via CDs costs hundreds of times more money in overhead. They would throw 90% of all our wealth away, their own included, if that increased their control. They've been told, repeatedly, that he universe does not work the way they imagine and wish, but that hasn't stopped them from foolishly wasting money on lawyers to try to force things to work the way they want.

It's likely desktop related. Probably don't have to worry over text based server boxes. I'm running Lubuntu 14.04, and I often see desktop errors on startup. As soon as I log in, a window pops up telling me that something experienced an error and has been closed, or a crash happened, and would I like to report it to Ubuntu? What cleans up a lot of that kind of trouble is wiping out all the hidden directories that the desktop environment generates in the home directory, like .local, .config, and .gnome. Had a problem in which after yet another update, the Flash plugin started running video at something like 4x normal speed, with no audio. But when I switched user accounts, Flash worked fine. Back to the first account, I deleted those hidden config directories a few at a time until I hit on the one that was messing Flash up. Would have thought the .mozilla or .macromedia directories were where the problem was, but no. Or, not enough. As I recall, it was .local. After deleting those directories, Flash worked normally. The deletions seemed to clear up a few other problems, made the desktop more stable. Of course you lose some configuration settings.

Whether that has anything to do with systemd, I don't know. It shouldn't, but as desktop environments do rely on udev to detect flash drives and discs, and udev may now have dependencies on systemd, maybe systemd is the root of those problems.

Libraries buy copies of music, then loan those out to the public. No royalties needed. Maybe not the same as a radio station, but if libraries are ever allowed and able to go mostly digital, they will become able to broadcast all over the world as easily as radio stations now broadcast to small areas near their transmitters.

This royalties scheme sounds like an attempt to quietly add a whole other business model and profit mechanism to the music industry, without them having to give up anything. Typical of the rotten deals big business offers the public.

Hardly that. Many major sites have slipped. Only a few weeks ago, Mozilla let one of their certs expire.

Making passwords expire every 90 days was dumb. All those systems that couldn't handle Y2K were problems. But for certs to fail on a specific date is a design feature.