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5326

Living Room / Re: Thoughts in remembrance of the 6 million (est.) murdered in the Holocaust

« Last post by IainB on April 20, 2012, 09:55 PM »

I am requesting that you move further discussion regarding censorship (or whatever you want to call it) in this thread into the discussion I have set up: The case for and against Censorship on the forum, as it otherwise risks derailing/hijacking the subject of the original post of this thread.

If I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, I wouldn't have supposed that posting a remembrance to the 6 million murdered in the Holocaust could have provoked such an outpouring of...something (I can't quite describe it) like what is seen in some of the ensuing comments.
This post is "political"? "Religious"? "Borderline appropriate for DC and is only becoming more so"?
The thread is "disruptive"?

I tried to take on board, and I did respond (as best I could) to, the comments regarding the inclusiveness of this post about the annual Holocaust Remembrance Day, so that we could perhaps (and not unreasonably) include all the other horrors committed by Man on their fellow men, and I asked for a suggested subject title-change, but that seemed to be ignored in the ensuing off-topic "discussion".

If I had wanted people to defecate all over my post in the Living Room, I think I would probably have thought myself better-off writing on the subject of (say) "toilets", but this beggars belief. I have never seen anything quite like it before.
Anyway, let's hope the discussion The case for and against Censorship on the forum can help to release the pressure-valve.
There is clearly an unfinished debate about forum censorship, cutting across various threads in the forum, from a while back and more recently.
Let's have it in a rational, frank and open manner, only please not in this thread.

5327

Living Room / Re: The case for and against Censorship on the forum

« Last post by IainB on April 20, 2012, 09:19 PM »

Just to get my ten cent's worth in:
From my comment above - useful if we wanted censorship - let's get some definition:

I would be interested in any non-arbitrary definition you might consider for this.  It could form a basis for "Living-Room" censorship rules, where we could all know where we stand and thus what we need to conform to - i.e., the rules thus set. You would presumably (?) be the decision-taker on this.

- and if we didn't want censorship, then I thought these commenting guidelines (following) look like they could be of use and seem to be based on a pretty reasonable laissez-faire philosophy: (They are copied from PJ Media's comments section)
   

   PJ Media appreciates your comments that abide by the following guidelines:
   1. Avoid profanities or foul language unless it is contained in a necessary
       quote or is relevant to the comment.
   2. Stay on topic.
   3. Disagree, but avoid ad hominem attacks.
   4. Threats are treated seriously and reported to law enforcement.
   5. Spam and advertising are not permitted in the comments area.
   

5328

Living Room / The case for and against Censorship on the forum

« Last post by IainB on April 20, 2012, 09:12 PM »

I have started this thread in a constructive effort to try and pull together the discussion around aspects of censorship (of the Living Room discussions) covered in these two threads:
1. A change I've seen in the forum
2. Thoughts in remembrance of the 6 million (est.) murdered in the Holocaust

In the first, @wraith808 starts the ball rolling by giving focus with the opening post:

...and not necessarily a good one, in my experience/opinion, is the constant derailing (or dovetailing) on topics, especially in the living room area.  I've found myself doing the same.  It seems that no matter what's posted in the topic, the discussion degenerates into a general discussion of/commenting on anything that comes to mind.  It makes notifications of topics less than useful- I'm interested in the subject, not tangential conversations and posting of links to only peripherally related articles.  It makes this less a place that things can be discussed in a fruitful and rewarding way (IMO) and more of a schizophrenic melange of ideas on some bizarre stream of consciousness.  If some of these discussions took place in real life, I'd either be confused or walk away.  And it seems that more and more people that used to contribute are doing so... I'm not sure if that's the reason, or something else.
Anyone else notice this/have a problem with this?  And if so, is there anything we can do to make this less prevalent?

-wraith808 (March 15, 2012, 10:19 AM)

- and this is followed by some quite useful discussion.
 
In the second, aspects of censorship are discussed mixed-in completely off-topic with the original post, risking derailing/hijacking the original topic, but these comments give the idea some focus:

...borderline appropriate for DC...

-mouser (April 19, 2012, 11:43 AM)

I would be interested in any non-arbitrary definition you might consider for this.  It could form a basis for "Living-Room" censorship rules, where we could all know where we stand and thus what we need to conform to - i.e., the rules thus set. You would presumably (?) be the decision-taker on this.

-IainB (April 19, 2012, 05:43 PM)

Not censorship per-say, but focus.  If this isn't a place to discuss religion and politics, then that's just not the focus, and calling that censorship is IMO cheapening the effect of the word when used if not an outright misuse of the word.  There's a big difference between having a set of rules so that people that come to the site know what to expect and censoring posts.

-wraith808 (April 19, 2012, 06:27 PM)

- and this too is followed by some quite useful discussion.

5329

General Software Discussion / Re: Script to sort your Gmail messages by size using Google docs

« Last post by IainB on April 20, 2012, 05:36 PM »

Conclusion:

• I left the script running all day and night yesterday, and then switched off the 10-minute trigger interval. (Note to self: Remember to switch such triggers off at some stage!)
• The spreadsheet listed about 470Mb in total, saved in 135 sizeable emails ranging in size from 21Mb to 1.01Mb.
• Just by deleting the 21Mb file (a Photoshopped image someone had sent me ages ago that I had forgotten about - oops!) and three 8Mb-sized files (containing attached images), my percentage storage utilisation fell from 20% to 19%.
• I am now embarked on a progressive archive and deletion of the contents of the remainder of the population of 135 emails (i.e., not expunging the emails themselves, just the fat contents/attachments).
  

5330

Living Room / Re: LHC Researchers Expect First Glimpse of the Higgs Boson Next Week

« Last post by IainB on April 20, 2012, 04:25 PM »

Hiding in the Higgs data: hints of physics beyond the standard model
Looks like some seriously good science is going on here, demonstrated by the openness to revealing positive results as well as negative results.
It will be interesting to see whether a theoretical model - Standard ("Higgs") or Higgsless - might eventually be supported by the results of this research.

5331

Living Room / Re: Thoughts in remembrance of the 6 million (est.) murdered in the Holocaust

« Last post by IainB on April 20, 2012, 02:35 AM »

Well, before this thread goes away, I'd just like to add my condolences, sorrow, and prayer in remembrance of the six million who were killed in the Holocaust. I didn't realize that there was such a period of remembrance every year. But I do now. It was a terrible time that thankfully ended when it did.
Jim

-J-Mac (April 19, 2012, 12:22 PM)

You have a good heart and have seen the salient point about this Holocaust Remembrance Day - condolences, sorrow, and prayer. I add to that in my mind the hope that we will never allow such a thing to happen again. "Lest we forget", as is said on that other Remembrance Day (Poppy Day) in the UK, Australia and New Zealand.

I knew the Holocaust was remembered in lots of ways (e.g., Holocaust museums, films, books and related media) but I did not previously know that a remembrance day was set as an annual fixture - dates and time.
Nor did I know about the 2-minute silence whilst the sirens sounded in Tel Aviv.

5332

Living Room / Re: Thoughts in remembrance of the 6 million (est.) murdered in the Holocaust

« Last post by IainB on April 19, 2012, 08:28 PM »

Not censorship per-say, but focus.

-wraith808 (April 19, 2012, 06:27 PM)

Yeah, right.
Bet I can I can think of more euphemisms for it than you!   

5333

General Software Discussion / Re: Script to sort your Gmail messages by size using Google docs

« Last post by IainB on April 19, 2012, 08:17 PM »

weehaa... muchos fantasticos

-eleman (April 19, 2012, 06:32 PM)

Yes, that's sort of what I said too.  
I am still running the script. It's doing quite a lot of work! - covering thousands of emails. It keeps getting timed-out by Google with the warning message:

Oops
Exceeded maximum execution time

When that happens I just restart it ("Scan mailbox" from the script's new Gmail dropdown menu) and it seems to continue from where it last left off in the spreadsheet.  
But when it's done, the spreadsheet should be a very useful tool for taking stock of your bloated emails.
You should then be able to deal with the top 20% of your biggest emails first, and apply the Pareto principle to removing 80% of your remaining Gmail bloat.

We shall see.
EDIT: I've just edited the thing per where the labnol post says Scan Gmail Messages with a trigger, so that the scan runs every 10 minutes instead of my having to manually start/restart he scan.
Smart thinking Batman.    

5334

General Software Discussion / Re: dynamically updatable bookmark database from any browser

« Last post by IainB on April 19, 2012, 06:41 PM »

^ +1 for xmarks.
Wot @wraith808 said.
I had used it for a couple of years.
I thought it was brilliant in concept. The only problem I had with it was in practice, in that it kept fully duplicating and partially duplicating my bookmarks and sub-folders, distributed across my PCs, which gave me a huge mess to clear up. At which point I disabled it.
I haven't revisited it for a while. I might do so now. It's probably all been fixed.

5335

Living Room / Re: Thoughts in remembrance of the 6 million (est.) murdered in the Holocaust

« Last post by IainB on April 19, 2012, 05:43 PM »

Would it be wrong for me to suggest this thread started off as being borderline appropriate for DC and is only becoming more so..   It's not that these discussions aren't valuable to have, just a question of whether they are most appropriate for this forum..  Of course there is great latitude for going off topic in the Living room section, but still..

-mouser (April 19, 2012, 11:43 AM)

I couldn't say whether it would be "wrong" per se, but I would suggest that it is arguably little different in intent to the humanitarian aspects (i.e., thoughtful remembrance of those who have been pointlessly murdered en masse) associated with remembering (say) the waste of life in the 911 attack, or the WACO massacre.

Therefore:

While the scale doesn't compare, I'd like to remind you all that today is also the 19th anniversary of the massacre at Waco. 74 men, women, and children were murdered by US government agents, and not a thing was ever done about it. The scale might be wholly different, but in this case the blood is on our hands.

-CWuestefeld (April 19, 2012, 11:34 AM)

+ 1 from me for what @CWuestefeld says.

This is one of those cases where we might be able to use one more category, Other Discussions etc. There's value in getting this crew's opinions about any topic that isn't pure trolling, because y'all put more work into your posts than almost any other forum I've seen. Given our efforts to discuss the various censorship problems, it WOULD bother me (open mouth, insert foot moment coming up), "Oh, it's fine to refuse all censorship, until it hits YOUR pet topic, THEN it's "not appropriate".
That's precisely the profound fundamental problem with censorship - it starts with the edge cases of "not appropriate" and then according to people's agendas, slowly scope-creeps its way into people getting arrested for tweets.

-TaoPhoenix (April 19, 2012, 12:04 PM)

+ 1 from me for what @TaoPhoenix says.

...borderline appropriate for DC...

-mouser (April 19, 2012, 11:43 AM)

I would be interested in any non-arbitrary definition you might consider for this. It could form a basis for "Living-Room" censorship rules, where we could all know where we stand and thus what we need to conform to - i.e., the rules thus set. You would presumably (?) be the decision-taker on this.

It would be a shame if this was censored. Discussion of such things/incidents - Man's inhumanity to Man - are relevant to our humanitarian principles. If we wanted to be equitable about spreading our remembrances, we could probably group these incidents into 365 bunches - one for each day of the year - and have a Remembrance Day for each bunch.
Some (including me) might find that a bit too much to cope with, but I categorically do not have any difficulty with thinking upon, remembering and discussing the more modern 20th century incidents that (hopefully) have provided salutary lessons enabling us to make the choice to become more human, more civilised and less barbaric towards our fellow men.
This is not so much an opinion as a philosophical approach that my mother taught me, and which I see as standing up to hard critical scrutiny as a valid and useful philosophy for the development of the Self. It is decidedly not a PC approach.

So I would embrace in that the Armenian massacre, the Holocaust, the 911 massacre, the WACO massacre, the Native Indian massacres, and the American-African slave massacres, etc.. Sadly, only the second seems to figure in terms of lessons that have been extended so that they were properly addressed in Law - i.e., with legal remedies - so as to help deter/avoid/mitigate a future recurrence.

By the way, and getting back to topic, there is a rather spine-tingling video here of what happened in Israel when the Remembrance-Day sirens went off.
Holocaust Remembrance Day Tel Aviv, Israel
Hear that noise in the background? Those are the air-raid sirens going off...
That's right, the Israelis still need air-raid sirens. The only time I have heard them before was in old WW2 London blitz newsreel footage.

5336

Living Room / Re: Thoughts in remembrance of the 6 million (est.) murdered in the Holocaust

« Last post by IainB on April 19, 2012, 04:36 PM »

However, though over 10 million [North American slaves] were killed during this exercise, the same level of remembrance is not paid, nor power conferred.  Perhaps it is because of a lack of shared cultural identity since the same exercise destroyed that cultural identity in a systematic manner.  

Worse can be said of the Native American genocide.  

from http://hnn.us/articles/7302.html

...according to Ward Churchill, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado, the reduction of the North American Indian population from an estimated 12 million in 1500 to barely 237,000 in 1900 represents a"vast genocide . . . , the most sustained on record."

Thus, I think if you were to draw any uniqueness from the Holocaust, it would be summarized in this one line:

So the 6 million deaths might not have been entirely in vain.

-IainB (April 19, 2012, 05:35 AM)

-wraith808 (April 19, 2012, 11:03 AM)

+1 from me - Very good points indeed.  
I did wonder how come the USA didn't seem to figure on the table of 20th Century Mortacracies provided (above) by @Renegade, but I didn't like to ask as it might have been going rather off-topic.

5337

General Software Discussion / Script to sort your Gmail messages by size using Google docs

« Last post by IainB on April 19, 2012, 04:14 PM »

When my Gmail mailbox got to about 40% storage utilisation, I set about clearing out the large emails. I deleted those I didn't want to keep, but those I did had their bulky contents archived.
My search-and-archive process was:

• identify those emails with documents attached or containing embedded images;
• save the attachments/images to disk or Gdocs;
• forward the containing emails - but now containing nothing - to myself, adding links or references to where embedded/attached items had been stored.
• delete the original email and its contained/attached items.

Over time, using this method, I reduced my Gmail storage utilisation to 20%, and without losing/deleting any emails that I wanted to keep.

The process I used is an ironically manually intensive approach to cleaning out a sophisticated hi-tech computer data storage and retrieval system. It pained me to do it, as I really could have used something that automated aspects of the search-and-archive process to make it more efficient.
Today I came across this script. It seems to work, and I am running it now:
Sort your Gmail Messages by Size using Google Docs

5338

Living Room / Re: Thoughts in remembrance of the 6 million (est.) murdered in the Holocaust

« Last post by IainB on April 19, 2012, 05:35 AM »

By no means do I wish to trivialize the deaths of 6 million people...we need to come to grips with that [Mortacracies] vast scale of evil before we can try to prevent it from happening again.

-Renegade (April 18, 2012, 09:34 AM)

+1. I quite agree.  

I could change the subject of the opening post to something more appropriate to all historical humungamass-murders, but I'm not sure what it could be.
What would you suggest?

By the way, though you say:

...the Jews were very far from unique...

- several things about the Holocaust do make it, historically, kinda unique, including for example:

• There is a "Remembrance Day" held for the 6 million. I'm not sure, but as far as I am aware, there is not a similar remembrance day held for (say) the Armenian genocide. (Is there?)
• I think the word "genocide" was coined to describe the 20th century's then known systematic exterminations committed by a nation/government on a people (I think the Armenian genocide was the first, and the Holocaust was the second), and the term was originally used in the Nuremberg trials.
• The perpetrators of the Holocaust meticulously recorded most of what they did for posterity, thus creating lots of incriminating historical evidence, used in the Nuremberg trials.
• The Nuremberg trials were arguably the turning-point where civilization (or democratic Western civilization, at least) said "Enough" to humungamass-murders, and showed how these "crimes against humanity" could be addressed in an unbiased, international law.
• The Holocaust led to the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which was manifestly adopted for humanitarian and civilizing purposes - the idea being to discourage the repetition of history in this regard, or at least, if it was, then how it would be punished under international law.

That is, the Holocaust was a historical landmark and a trigger that released the idea of an indelible and greater humanitarianising and civilizing force into a world which previously had nothing quite like that before. So the 6 million deaths might not have been entirely in vain. The Holocaust taught us something which has arguably enabled humanity to take a further social evolutionary step - not that all societies/nations necessarily want to take that step, unfortunately.

5339

Living Room / Re: Thoughts in remembrance of the 6 million (est.) murdered in the Holocaust

« Last post by IainB on April 18, 2012, 08:53 AM »

My newsfeed from the Times of Israel had an intriguing post "The Intelligent Person's Guide to Holocaust Denial", so I clicked on it thinking it (The Times) must be extraordinarily balanced to publish such an article at this time - and got Rickrolled! 

5340

Living Room / Re: CISPA is the New SOPA/PIPA/OPEN/ACTA/etc. etc. etc.

« Last post by IainB on April 18, 2012, 08:41 AM »

+1 for Sergey Brin there! Totally on board there....

-Renegade (April 18, 2012, 07:28 AM)

+1 Yes, me too. I thought it was very heartening to read that.

5341

Living Room / Re: CISPA is the New SOPA/PIPA/OPEN/ACTA/etc. etc. etc.

« Last post by IainB on April 18, 2012, 08:39 AM »

I started a thread with a link where people can sign a petition against CISPA here. Hint hint.

-Renegade (April 18, 2012, 06:30 AM)

Thanks! Signed.

5342

Living Room / Thoughts in remembrance of the 6 million (est.) murdered in the Holocaust

« Last post by IainB on April 18, 2012, 08:20 AM »

These people are quietly remembered on Holocaust Remembrance Day (Yom HaShoah), which begins in the evening of Wednesday, April 18, 2012, and ends in the evening of Thursday, April 19, 2012.

There's a post at The Times of Israel entitled: The Holocaust in film
There are 4 YouTube videos with the post.

For many, the observance of Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, revolves around the two-minute siren sounded throughout the country at 10 o’clock in the morning and the Holocaust films from Hollywood blockbusters to documentaries and testimonies — broadcast on television throughout the day.

At the Hebrew University film archive, movies have always been considered as relevant as books in documenting history, particularly with regard to the story of the State of Israel. Founded in 1969, the Mount Scopus-based archive — known since 1988 as the Steven Spielberg Jewish Film Archive after film director Spielberg helped fund the project — holds 18,000 titles, said Deborah Steinmetz, director of the archives.

Within those titles, there are more than 400 movies about the Holocaust, but the focus of the archive “isn’t the Holocaust, but Jewish life for everyone,” commented Steinmetz.
That said, the archive staff pulled out the following four films for Holocaust Remembrance Day, a mixture of testimony and history ranging from the war to the 1980s.

• 1. Hitler-Mussolini on the Eastern Front (1942) – A rare color movie shot by a German soldier stationed in Eastern Europe. The movie depicts soldiers on the front and documents a meeting between the two Fascist leaders.
• 2. Habricha (1947) – Jewish refugees escape Europe and journey to pre-state Palestine after the Holocaust.
• 3. Report on the Living (1947) – Holocaust survivors in Europe are rehabilitated by the Joint Distribution Committee.
• 4. A Bunch of Grapes (1985) – Child survivor Eveline Goodman-Thau talks about her personal experiences during the Holocaust, from her childhood in Vienna to the family’s escape to Holland.

5343

Living Room / Re: CISPA is the New SOPA/PIPA/OPEN/ACTA/etc. etc. etc.

« Last post by IainB on April 18, 2012, 06:19 AM »

CISPA Sponsor Says Protests Are Mere 'Turbulence'

CISPA Sponsor Says Protests Are Mere 'Turbulence'
Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday April 18, @02:14AM
from the don't-make-us-shut-down-the-internet-again-buddy dept.

SolKeshNaranek writes with news that Representative Mike Rogers (R-MI), sponsor of CISPA, has decided to tempt fate by referring to the protests that are springing up as 'turbulence on the way down to landing.' From the article: "What really comes through in the article — which mostly talks about how Rogers has been supposedly working with Google to change some of the language in the bill to make it more acceptable -- is how little concern Rogers has for the public. Instead, most of the article just talks about how he's been working with tech companies to make sure they're okay with the bill. And while that's a start, it's no surprise that lots of tech companies would be okay with CISPA, because it grants them broad immunity if they happen to hand over all sorts of private info to the government. But to then call the protests mere 'turbulence' is pretty damned insulting to the actual people this will impact the most: the public, whose privacy may be violated."

Such churlish disregard for the proles!

Translation:

"This bill is going through whether you like it or not, so shove it."

5344

General Software Discussion / Re: can any explorer alternative do this?

« Last post by IainB on April 18, 2012, 05:34 AM »

I have been using xplorer² and its predecessors for years.   
Amazingly powerful explorer tool. It does all that you seem to require, and a lot more.
If you wish, it can also act as an automatic replacement for your Windows Explorer.
You can download a 21-day free trial from here: http://zabkat.com/

5345

Living Room / Re: CISPA is the New SOPA/PIPA/OPEN/ACTA/etc. etc. etc.

« Last post by IainB on April 18, 2012, 04:27 AM »

Looks like Brin may have felt he was misquoted or quoted out of context, or something. See the clarification on his G+ here.

5346

Living Room / Re: CISPA is the New SOPA/PIPA/OPEN/ACTA/etc. etc. etc.

« Last post by IainB on April 18, 2012, 02:36 AM »

It's not an ad hominem. I didn't attack him. I only pointed out that there is a conflict of interest, and I questioned his motives. I then pointed out my cynicism and reluctance to believe that he's doing this out of the goodness of his heart.

-Renegade (April 18, 2012, 01:43 AM)

Oh, sorry, I thought you were probably unintentionally making an inference that his argument/statement may have been invalid.
I don't think you need to attack him for it to be an ad hominem.

For example, from my old lecture notes:

Logical Fallacies - Argumentum ad hominem:
Let us suppose that a poor man is discussing the question of a capital levy with a rich man. The rich man, we will imagine, has produced a number of valid arguments which show, he claims, that the economic consequences of a capital levy would, on the whole, be bad for the community at large.

The poor man might be very likely to reply simply: "You would say all that, you're rich." Now such a method of argument is unfair and dishonest because:
(a) it carries an invitation to assumptive implication by inference that the rich man's arguments must be invalid because of something external to the construction of those arguments - i.e., he is personally prejudiced because of his wealthy status - though actually this has nothing to do with the the arguments themselves, which remain valid. (Remember that "valid" means logically valid, not whether we agree or disagree with them.)

(b) it does not in the least help to solve the question at issue, which is whether a capital levy will or will not benefit the community.

What Brin said was apparently quite valid.
Sorry if I was mistaken.

5347

Living Room / Re: CISPA is the New SOPA/PIPA/OPEN/ACTA/etc. etc. etc.

« Last post by IainB on April 18, 2012, 01:28 AM »

Meanwhile, Google co-founder Brin is worried about internet freedoms
This is a public statement by Brin. I think he is probably genuinely concerned, and probably for good reason too.

-IainB (April 17, 2012, 11:25 PM)

Not so sure about that... If you dig a bit deeper there, Brin has some financial motives for all of that. He's just playing the, "Oh~! Think of the children," card there.
Perhaps I'm a tad cynical about his motives, but seriously... how can anyone not be? Google does what is good for Google. Playing the "nice boy" is one of the things that is good for them. After all, they're at least "not as evil as Apple" or whoever.
...
One of the biggest problem that I see is that "treat people as an end" has been perverted to "treat money as THE end".

-Renegade (April 17, 2012, 11:50 PM)

Well that's really an ad hominem - a logical fallacy.
What he said seems to stand up on its own, though I did wonder about the motivation for his saying what he did, being skeptical, but I usually tend to presume that people are probably telling the truth until such time as it seems that they are deliberately disingenuous (dissembling, or have told or are telling a lie). Then you cannot rationally believe anything they say is true, after that (like the Mann Hockey Stick "trick" in Climategate).

That is quite different to someone saying something irrational/stupid - they are probably just being irrational rather than disingenuous. I put that sort of thing down to our three old companions - ignorance, stupidity and bigotry.

I therefore would give Brin the benefit of the doubt, since I do not see that he has made any irrational statement.

5348

Living Room / Re: CISPA is the New SOPA/PIPA/OPEN/ACTA/etc. etc. etc.

« Last post by IainB on April 17, 2012, 11:25 PM »

Meanwhile, Google co-founder Brin is worried about internet freedoms
This is a public statement by Brin. I think he is probably genuinely concerned, and probably for good reason too.

5349

Living Room / Re: CISPA is the New SOPA/PIPA/OPEN/ACTA/etc. etc. etc.

« Last post by IainB on April 17, 2012, 10:59 PM »

Not understanding US politics very much, I couldn't understand why the US Government seem so intent on shoving this difficult-to-digest invasive censorship and control legislation down the public's collective throat. Why must it be done?
Well, now I think I understand, after reading this post: Revolving Door Between The MPAA And The Federal Government
The post uses this informative image:

Spoiler

If this is true, then the Music/Media Industry apparently is the Government, and vice versa.
Good, at least that seems to be clear now.

Now though, what I don't understand is: How can this situation occur - apparently in full public view - without it being regarded as potentially corrupt practice, or at least brimful of rigging with conflict of interest?
I am genuinely mystified by this. Is it quite legal?

5350

Living Room / Re: Amazon Signs Up Authors, Writing Publishers Out of Deal

« Last post by IainB on April 17, 2012, 10:12 PM »

Interesting take on the US Department of Justice charging Apple and five large book publishers with conspiring to raise e-book prices:
A dark day for the future of books