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Re: Hey: They’re Gonna Confiscate Your iPod
Hey: They're Gonna Confiscate Your iPod
Posted by George Hulme, May 30, 2008 06:12 PM
From border guards to copyright cops. Get busted with ripped music at the border, and you just may have your iPod, notebook, or smartphone confiscated on the spot. Maybe even if you acquired the music legally.
I dropped a slice of pepperoni pizza on my iPod while I was reading "Border Security To Become Copyright Police" today at PopSci.com. According to the story, a trade agreement under development may make it legal for border agents to search your notebook and MP3 players for copyrighted material.
Sounds scary, but straightforward, right? It's what border agents do: They search for contraband at the border. To me, this usually means your stash of vodka and smokes.
From the story, by Matt Ransford:
Guards and security personnel would be authorized to search electronic devices for any content that "infringes" on copyright laws, whether the copies are from legally purchased CDs or DVDs or not, and decide on the spot which content is infringing. The officials would be given authority to take action without any formalized complaint from the rights holders and without a lawyer present on behalf of the accused. The draft allows for the confiscation or destruction of any device the agents deem suspect.
Wow. The way this reads, it appears that even if all of the music on the player was copied from legally purchased CDs you could be deemed an "infringer."
Furthermore, it seems as if you're at the whim of a single border guard, who doesn't have to prove the material is stolen, just decide that it is and you are guilty.
I wonder what border agents will be giving to their relatives on birthdays and holidays? Confiscated iPods, notebooks, and iPhones?
Re: Hey: They’re Gonna Confiscate Your iPod
Well as long as we are becoming a more fair society, socialism is just one sideways step from Socially conscious (right Dr. Zhivago). It would be fair to share the rich's toys with the poor according to some candidates? This process of don't work worked out so well historically. So we should really not mind this compared to the new proposed UN tax some candidates want to levy on all American Citizens, that way the world would be more fair since socialism works so well. Where do we get these politicians from that pass these unthought out laws and can we send them back?
Re: Hey: They’re Gonna Confiscate Your iPod
Furthermore, it seems as if you're at the whim of a single border guard, who doesn't have to prove the material is stolen, just decide that it is and you are guilty.
This is the worst part.. Well, the whole thing is absurd, but border agents in charge of determining illegal downloads or whatever?? c'mon. We got more to worry about in whats entering our country than demo's of "Better" of 'The Other New Metallica Song'.
Re: Hey: They’re Gonna Confiscate Your iPod
While we are on the subject of the absurd just looked what Carbon emmisison economic impact will be on my state (suggest everyone research just how much money Gore is making and what his carbon footprint is as well as how many new taxes we will get) with his carbon admissions standards looks like this British program and that we are moving this direction scares the shit out of me...It all sounds good falling from politicians mouths but this stuff is really dicey... scary controlling and I am more willing to take my Chances that Mother Nature can regulate herself better than politicians regulating us.
I'm not a global warming believer. I'm not a global warming denier. I'm a global warming agnostic who believes instinctively that it can't be very good to pump lots of CO2 into the atmosphere, but is equally convinced that those who presume to know exactly where that leads are talking through their hats.
Predictions of catastrophe depend on models. Models depend on assumptions about complex planetary systems -- from ocean currents to cloud formation -- that no one fully understands. Which is why the models are inherently flawed and forever changing. The doomsday scenarios posit a cascade of events, each with a certain probability. The multiple improbability of their simultaneous occurrence renders all such predictions entirely speculative.
Yet on the basis of this speculation, environmental activists, attended by compliant scientists and opportunistic politicians, are advocating radical economic and social regulation. "The largest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity," warns Czech President Vaclav Klaus, "is no longer socialism. It is, instead, the ambitious, arrogant, unscrupulous ideology of environmentalism."
If you doubt the arrogance, you haven't seen that Newsweek cover story that declared the global warming debate over. Consider: If Newton's laws of motion could, after 200 years of unfailing experimental and experiential confirmation, be overthrown, it requires religious fervor to believe that global warming -- infinitely more untested, complex and speculative -- is a closed issue.
But declaring it closed has its rewards. It not only dismisses skeptics as the running dogs of reaction, i.e., of Exxon, Cheney and now Klaus. By fiat, it also hugely re-empowers the intellectual left.
For a century, an ambitious, arrogant, unscrupulous knowledge class -- social planners, scientists, intellectuals, experts and their left-wing political allies -- arrogated to themselves the right to rule either in the name of the oppressed working class (communism) or, in its more benign form, by virtue of their superior expertise in achieving the highest social progress by means of state planning (socialism).
Two decades ago, however, socialism and communism died rudely, then were buried forever by the empirical demonstration of the superiority of market capitalism everywhere from Thatcher's England to Deng's China, where just the partial abolition of socialism lifted more people out of poverty more rapidly than ever in human history.
Just as the ash heap of history beckoned, the intellectual left was handed the ultimate salvation: environmentalism. Now the experts will regulate your life not in the name of the proletariat or Fabian socialism but -- even better -- in the name of Earth itself.
Environmentalists are Gaia's priests, instructing us in her proper service and casting out those who refuse to genuflect. (See Newsweek above.) And having proclaimed the ultimate commandment -- carbon chastity -- they are preparing the supporting canonical legislation that will tell you how much you can travel, what kind of light you will read by, and at what temperature you may set your bedroom thermostat.
Just Monday, a British parliamentary committee proposed that every citizen be required to carry a carbon card that must be presented, under penalty of law, when buying gasoline, taking an airplane or using electricity. The card contains your yearly carbon ration to be drawn down with every purchase, every trip, every swipe.
There's no greater social power than the power to ration. And, other than rationing food, there is no greater instrument of social control than rationing energy, the currency of just about everything one does and uses in an advanced society.
So what does the global warming agnostic propose as an alternative? First, more research -- untainted and reliable -- to determine (a) whether the carbon footprint of man is or is not lost among the massive natural forces (from sunspot activity to ocean currents) that affect climate, and (b) if the human effect is indeed significant, whether the planetary climate system has the homeostatic mechanisms (like the feedback loops in the human body, for example) with which to compensate.
Second, reduce our carbon footprint in the interim by doing the doable, rather than the economically ruinous and socially destructive. The most obvious step is a major move to nuclear power, which to the atmosphere is the cleanest of the clean.
But your would-be masters have foreseen this contingency. The Church of the Environment promulgates secondary dogmas as well. One of these is a strict nuclear taboo.
Rather convenient, is it not? Take this major coal-substituting fix off the table and we will be rationing all the more. Guess who does the rationing?
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