I'd just like to point out to whatever dipshit marked that "troll" that it was an attempt (apparently failed) to make a joke about offshoring jobs/offshore wind farms. Durp.

Hey, government. Yeah, that's right, I'm talking to you, the guys that I voted for or against. That's right, I'm a U.S. citizen, and you're representing me to the world when you say things like this.

Come closer, I have something to tell you. Closer. There you go. It's real simple.

Copyright should last for 15-20 years, renewable once. It's a civil matter if someone violates copyright; the author can go after them for damages in court.

That's it. That's all you need to ensure a great deal of creative effort on the part of "authors" whose interests you claim to represent. This 95 years, or lifetime plus 70 years stuff, it's horseshit. With these ridiculous laws that you have let corporations buy from you, nothing created since I was born will enter the public domain before my sons have both grown old and died. There is plenty of impetus to innovate and create without locking up ideas for centuries. You do realize that the end result is that giant corporations will own the rights to just about all ideas -- there are only so many ways to tell a story, and eventually giant corporations will control enough of them that nobody will be able to publish anything new without sounding kinda similar to something a giant corporation owns the rights to.

So seriously, cut it out. These laws are bullshit. They need to stop. You are hurting the U.S., and hurting the world by doing this.

That's all.

So now they're offshoring wind production, too? What, good ol'-fashioned landlocked American wind isn't good enough for your Cape Cod liberal sissies?

Name ideas:

- Yetanotherium
- Unremarkablum
- Irrelevantium
- Onehundredseventeenium
- Instantlydecaysium

Every time I see a story like this, it reinforces the idea that there should be a hard limit on the size of corporations. Number of employees, amount of revenue, whatever. Exceed the number and we break you into tiny little pieces.

Too big to fail means too big to exist.

I remember several years ago seeing an ad for an oil company, where the whole ad was talking about clean energy and the environment and all that. At first I thought, "Cool, I'm glad they're doing something positive." Then a while later I read an article which pointed out that such ad campaigns were of course feel-good nonsense, and the oil companies were acting just the same as before. I felt like an idiot, and that was a big wake-up call to me. I'm not dumb by any means, but I had just been accustomed to the normative view that advertising is at least MOSTLY true, right? I mean, they can't outright lie, right?

Yeah, now I know better.

Oh, my eldest is 5. In a couple of years I'm going to start training him hardcore to recognize deceptions and lies -- in a word, advertising. Here's what they do to trick you. He's too young to really comprehend it at this point, so I think it's better if he just doesn't see it.

I might start with magazine ads soon, actually -- being static, and usually aimed at an older audience (we only subscribe to two magazines, neither aimed at children) they're less likely to have a negative impact on him, especially if I'm explaining how they trick us.

It's become obvious to me lately that advertising is a big culprit here. For the last sixty years, Madison Avenue and friends have been refining ways to convince us to do things that aren't in our best interests: buy more than we can afford, buy things that we don't need, buy, buy, BUY!

Advertising is corrosive. It sells an idea of a world where everything has a simple solution. Buy our product, and life will be BETTER! Even if you're smart and assume that advertising is always lying to you, being exposed to lies for years on end will start to make you believe them, or at least believe the normative view they come from.

My friends' kids, and my older son's friends are frequently obsessed with this cartoon character or that. Ours aren't. Why? We don't have TV. We haven't for about three years now, and so our son isn't getting exposed to constant advertising that exhorts him to eat shitty fake food at shitty fast-food chains, or to harass us to buy character-branded toys. All the video we watch, we watch on our computers after he's in bed. (And it's all ad-free; I don't really want to see ads any more than I want him to. In fact, I'd happily pay $2-3 per episode for the few shows we watch, if it meant no ads.)

A huge problem with "free" TV (that is, ad-supported TV) is that there's a cost associated with watching ads. As I said, it promotes a false worldview; even if the ad is relatively accurate, its sole purpose is to get you to spend money on something that you may not actually have any real need for. And the advertisers don't care if you spend money you don't have, or spend money on a product you don't need instead of saving for retirement, or your kids' education.

Okay, okay, I could go on for hours. Rant over.

Oh, I think it will eventually exist. See how the RIAA has basically given up on DRM schemes for music. They figured out it cost them more to build and implement those schemes than they'd ever make up in revenue from the few nimmers who couldn't find DRM-broken content.

The movie industry is farther behind because video piracy took longer to get started (what with the vastly larger amount of data needed per second of video compared to audio; the average mp3 back in the day was a few megabytes, but the average pirated video these days is a few hundred to several thousand megabytes), but eventually they too will figure out that there's just no profit in it, and will give up, and provide inexpensive high-quality video downloads that don't require bizarre DRM schemes or custom software.

At least, it seems a likely path.

George Boole.

I think it stands to reason that if Boole hadn't worked it out, someone else might have eventually worked it out. :P

I love Hanlon's Razor as much as the next guy, but this phenomenon cannot be adequately explained by stupidity; it is extraordinarily unlikely that the marketing departments at every major processor manufacturer have, for the past 20 years, been populated entirely by morons.

I think I speak for us all when I ask...

Novell still exists?

You think they don't provide a clear chart of performance differences because they're incompetent? They do it because they're deliberately trying to confuse people into buying the highest-margin CPUs.

and the stuff that is radioactive for 10,000 years is dangerous... but not any more dangerous than the chemicals that get spewed from Coal-fired plants or the chemicals that are used in manufacturing photo-voltaic solar panels.

It's usually a good deal less dangerous than that, because frequently the "low-level" waste you hear about is stuff like gloves, screwdrivers, and other equipment that is used in nuclear plants but is not normally directly exposed to high levels of radiation. It's contaminated by proxy, and the extremely stringent rules dictate that it has to be treated as if it were highly radioactive.