mweiss

As a proponent of the Gold Standard for many years, I too felt that the Greenbacks were successful only because the government at that time had an interest in gaining public trust in their currency. As with all fiat money, the risk of monetary depreciation through the printing of excess paper exists. And another question I had was, how did Jackson determine the amount of scrip to circulate and what value was it based upon? An interesting thing that I recall even Alan Greenspan admitting, is that an economy based purely on paper can work, as it has been in America since 1963. All it takes is a reasonable degree of stability in the money supply and the faith of the people that the money is legal tender and they will use it. Where this paper comes from, and what its intrinsic value is, seems unimportant, so long as the number of pieces of paper chasing after goods is stable. The documentary points out that with the Fed banking system, the fed can manipulate currency to bring boom and bust, to influence governments to do their bidding; ultimately it doesn't matter who is king or president, because the men who control the money supply control everything. For those that didn't watch because they were quick to write off the whole thing as anti-semetic and conspiracy theory, it goes through the whole history of banking, going back to ancient Rome, and shows how the bankers manipulated governments by tightening the money supply at will, by funding nations at war (both sides) and how the bankers always emerge with profit from wars. This documentary provides a believable scenario and reasoning for why modern nations are always at war--war is big business and the most profitable business for the bankers. That said, I've yet to watch part 2, but unlike most of the other documentaries I've seen, this one seems to be strongly based on verifiable historical writings of our past presidents and bankers. "He who controls the money supply, controls the world."

For those interested in economics, this two-part discussion on the Federal Reserve and the dangers it poses to the American economy: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8...86947&hl=en

Sure, go on strike and lose your domicile to the tax collection agencies. Sounds like a self-destructive decision.

When I read Clinton's name on this list, my jaw nearly dropped to the floor. Where did you get this information? THat woman is the epitomy of what Ayn Rand considers evil!

...as is my Al Hibbler repetoire.

V for Vendetta “Behind this mask, is more than just flesh… behind this mask, is an idea” Rarely does a film come along that makes me sit up and take notice for it’s philosophical message. V for Vendetta is such a film. Here is one solitary man, who stands alone against a corrupt future government, and single-handedly manages to topple a corrupt dictatorship with many parallelisms to pre-WWII Germany. That he does it through the clever use of his mind is what makes this story refreshingly unique. This film is set about 20 years into the future. A plague has killed nearly 100,000 people, America has been reduced to civil war, and England has emerged victorious, or so it’s leaders claimed. But they live in an era where all civil liberties have been given up for their own protection. In their Parliament is a madman (who seemed not terribly unlike the madman we currently have in our White House) who asserts authority of the religious right-wing. Anyone with deviant behavior or ideas is put to death. It is a total surveillance society. Our masked character, masked, because of the burns he suffered while at the hands of one of these ‘concentration camp’-like facilities where they locked people up like rabid animals and performed cruel experiments- carries out his vendetta, with a calm, implaccable certainty of self-confidence and the brilliance of more than a decade of devoted study of his enemies, and systematically, one by one, he eliminates these corrupt government officials, one by one. Early in the story, he befriends a young woman who worked in some unimportant position at the TV network, by saving her from what would have been certain imprisonment and death for violating the curfew put in place by this totalitarian dictatorship. Upon dispatching her attackers with theatrical aplom fitting of a fine martial artist, he invites her to be present at a “concerto” of a very different sort, which he would orchestrate. So began a very intriguing relationship.. and her loyalty was about to be discovered.. and tested. A terrorist, as so-called by the national media, but a liberator and freedom fighter to the oppressed, “V”, as he called himself, was the epitomy of a man who used his intellect to neutralize his enemies and who moved a nation into revolution. His broadcast, all over national television, was remeniscent of John Galt’s speech at the end of Atlas Shrugged, in some general ways, as he informed the viewers that their government’s time was up, and that on the 5th of November, things would change. He became an underdog folk hero to many, as could be seen later in the film, when thousands of people, wearing the same mask, marched on Parliament. It was a powerful and inspiring film, and it was also a warning to government, that it should not seek to steal the People’s liberties in the name of perceived safety, that such deals are raw deals and the People can only lose if they accept such terms. I think this is one of the more worthwhile films, with a less overused plot and a dark, but true hero. I highly recommend it.

If you think income tax is bad, wait til you own your own home and have to pay property tax! Now THAT is a most unfair situation. Take me, for instance... I average about $3000-6,000 annual income lately in my freelance work. My house taxes are $11,443 a year. And my house is paid for! No mortgage to speak of, since it was self-built. And here's the hit: if you can't pay, a SWAT team will eventually come and remove you from your own home so the town can sell your house to some one else who CAN pay the taxes! Anger? You bet I have anger! I'm being watched as a 'terrorist' by our local police, after some confrontations over what I feel to be a grossly unfair assessment in 2000. It's a lose-lose situation though, one that can only end badly. Income taxes? You don't have to pay them if you don't earn above the poverty level. But they'll steal your house if you're poor. Damned thieves ought to be executed in a public trial...

It is interesting to note that income ta protester Irwin Schiff was just sentenced to 43 years in prison for ta evasion. He did not commit murder or even rob anyone. Is that fair either? (Sorry for the typos--the key between z and c is broken on this laptop)

Cogito is correct in stating my intent with regard to the morality of Microsoft acting in favor of the film & music industry. By creating many difficulties for the common user to access and enjoy media (and to create media of their own, original ideas), MS has backed themselves into a corner, where on one hand, they're damned if they don't deliver on their appeasement of the music industry, and on the other, they risk losing market share to a less restrictive OS like Linux, if they don't allow computer owners to be master of their own PCs. The public resents having "Big Brother" inside their PC, deciding what content will display on their $5000 flat panel, and what content will display on their 14" CRT from 1990. As with the example of the New Zealand TV stations in the link I provided at the start of this thread, MS is in a position of controlling access to the audience and can very well say "up yours" to the music industry. Given that it is predicted that 95% of the audience for content will be using a PC, MS is in a very strong position to dictate whether it wants to be bothered with DRM or not and the music industry be damned. They can lose that 95% audience share by refusing to cooperate with MS, but they'd be foolish to do so, because they would be limited to a shrinking audience of people who listen on traditional vintage means of playing recordings. The new world is in personal computers, and MS is not legally or morally compelled to modify their OS just to protect those industries. Yes, they could tell the MPAA and RIAA to 'take a hike' if they don't like it. What stands to happen is a lot of counter-productive code, hardware development and other distractions to meet this set of onerous requirements. Instead of using resourses to improve computing speeds and quality of graphics and sound, they will be utilizing huge resources just to do the opposite.

Here is the angle I'm thinking along: the computer is intended to be our servant--to perform as we instruct it. What DRM does is make the comptuer our master, putting Big Brother in every CPU, there to judge what we can do and not do with our computers. We buy our computers, so therefore we own them. Therefore, I think it is only reasonable that our computers should not twart our every attempt to creatively modify media for our own edification, or to create content of high quality. What MS appears to be doing is working in collusion with the film and music industry to create a closed system where only the powerful corporations can produce content on PCs. If the article I posted is accurate in the least, these new technologies would prevent "indie" filmmakers and musicians from producing high quality content. They would be forced to produce degraded quality audio and video, because the DRM systems within the OS would instruct the devices to feed the data through the costrictor to degrade it. What this issue boils down to is licensing your PC to control what content you can view/listen to and produce. Anything that reeks of a reversal of the progress that technology has made is abhorrent to me. With the advent of faster CPUs, the industry wants to hobble that performance now, to incorporate this 'policing' of our daily behavior. Where does it end? How far will it push if we don't oppose it in large numbers?

I’m so glad you brought up this topic. I had reached the conclusion that depression is by and large the result of one’s inability to accept or control unfavorable circumstances, and not so much a matter of chemical imbalance. Barbara Branden, on OL, tried to convince me that I needed drugs to solve my problem, but I have a compelling believe that the problem is caused by some deep-rooted premises. In my case, I could over-simplify the situation and blame my depression on the government. The town is in the process of seizing my otherwise fully-owned home for back taxes. This is causing me great stress. I thought I could solve my problem by making a lot of money through selling life insurance and financial services as an agent of a large company. Then I realized that my personality just isn’t the type that “wins friends and influences people.” After months of zero success in recruiting and selling to the cold market, I began once again to sink into hopeless depression. I would think: if the government would only leave me alone, I could be happy enough on the $6,000/year I earned as a freelance JoaT (Jack of all Trades), doing a little video here, a little graphic design there, a little radio work there, etc. But I realized that I can’t change the unfair nature of property taxes. Stealing from the poor may not seem like a popular thing, politically, but towns evict scores of senior citizens every year after jacking up taxes to the point where one is paying the original purchase price of their home, twice a year today, in taxes—and the public doesn’t seem bothered by this. I concluded that I need to figure out what’s been stopping me from making more than poverty wages for more than fifty years, and that, I believe, leads to an investigation of premises. It is hard to live as a rational being in an irrational society with inane laws that make the rational person very angry just to think about there devastating effects on free people. But it isn’t going to change any time soon, as the Socialists and the Kantian thinkers are in control of the educational system and it perpetuates and grows. Just thinking about the losing battle we Objectivists are fighting is enough to make me depressed. But for me, personally, it is the lack of money, the worry, the lack of clients, the lack of other people in a position to buy my services who don’t consider what I have to offer, worth paying for—and the resultant poverty that this creates for me—coupled with the fact that now pay five times the purchase price of my piece of property in taxes every year and I can’t pay it and have money to eat and keep the utilities on at the same time—that constant pressure gets to one after 20 some odd years of struggling in a losing economic battle. I for one, know that if I had money, and was able to earn it doing what I’m good at, I would feel efficacious, secure financially, and feel happiness. It’s the lacking of those things that for me, causes me severe strife, sleepless nights, etc. I’ll admit that I spend a substantial part of my waking day thinking about military countermeasures for when the SWAT teams come to evict us from our home. I find it easy to get ensnared in that depressing train of thought, as I’ve been doing it for the last 20 years, as I became personally in conflict with more and more unjust laws without the money to shield me from those laws’ harsh effects. I keep reading self-help books, but it is all ‘feel good’ words—just words—and words alone don’t affect the way I feel or bring me to action. Now I remember when I was young, and constantly mistreated in the most viscious manner by gangs of bullies. They’d never come one on one, it was always 12-15 other kids against one. But they’d taunt, and attack my self-image until I started to feel that not only that ugly face I saw in the mirror was my only problem, but that I was a loser on the whole. Years later, I could not function socially in high school—I was the most unpopular kid in the whole school. In fact, I was unofficially voted “most likely to fail” (a parody on “Most like to succeed”, a category in our HS yearbook.) I remember the tortured years of seeing a girl with whom I would become infatuated to a point of becoming unable to think about anything else. And the big countdown would start, in which I’d go from enjoying the site of the girl whenever I caught a glimpse, to the thought that I need to approach that girl and tell her my feelings. Over a span of weeks, the urgency to approach the girl would intensify, as would my uneasiness. It became a very stressful situation, where my stomache would get all screwed up, my face would turn white, my hands would turn purple and stone cold, and I would be unable to speak without stuttering. But as I saw the opportunity’s window of availability slipping away, I would force myself to plan an interception and hope for a sympathetic response. But, in each of 105 instances throughout my teen and early adult years, the response was always one of disgust—I was always treated like a creature, not even a human being, and I would fall into intense despair and by the time I was 25, I believed that I would never find a woman, ever. In fact, I had some arranged dates that sent conflicting signals and almost drove me over the edge. I wound up as a bum for a number of years, unable to hold a job, deep in despair and shock from one particularly nasty instance where a ‘carrot’ was dangled before me long enough to rekindle long lost hopes that there was a chance for me, only to have it mysteriously yanked away, for no reason I could fathom at the time. I never held a good job after that. I got some stinking, godawful factory job that was so boring that my mind literally rotted away for the several years that I packed those items into boxes for 12-16 hours a day. Then one day I retired. And I didn’t have enough money on a fixed income to keep up on the taxes on my otherwise paid-for home. But before things got really bad, I met my betrothed via the internet. Don’t ask me why, but this time, I knew it was for real, not just another cruel trick of fate. That was almost a decade ago. A few years ago, we had a child, despite the concerns that at advanced age, the parents often conceive autistic children. Fortunately, our daughter is normal. I was inclined to believe in miracles because of these two events. And I would be happy today still, were it not for the fact that our home is about to be seized for back taxes. And with the exponential increases in the price of energy utilities, I can see that we would soon not be able to afford them either. This late realization that I can’t beat the ‘system’ has put me on an emergency journey of self-discovery, as I seek to find out if there is a mental blockade between me and financial success. Why do I hate people? How can I stop hating people enough so that they don’t sense that I’m only out to get their money? How can I become a likeable person? How can I stop making enemies everywhere I go? Am I afraid of success? Is it the tax burdens and bookkeeping burdons that repell me from going all-out for success? These are just of few of the questions I am asking myself. Depression, I believe, is rarely chemically-caused. Drugs treat symptoms. My mother was deeply depressed after Ayn Rand passed away. Within four years, she died, in a mental institution—her life had gone so quickly downhill. But the underlying reason was that my parents had severe money problems and they were getting old and had not achieved even a small fraction of their dreams. One could blame their physical illnesses, but one may also blame them for using those illnesses as crutches, or excuses for failing to achieve their goals. They both died in abject poverty, and horrible, painful deaths—mom, by choking on her own vomit in a mental institution because they had tied her up to a chair to force feed her, dad, of Leukemia in a hospital with cardiac arrest being the cause of death. Success seems to come more easily for those who have a good head-start—ie., wealthy parents who put them through college. Sure, there are many who goof off and achieve only mediocre results, but there are the majority who enjoy good, middle income lifestyles. There are very few people who have that incredible power to rise above poverty though. Many of us who are born into it, die that way. Depression comes from a desire to live dreams of a means beyond one’s reach. Happiness is a direct relationship between where one is today and where one expected to be today. If the two are at unity, one is content. If one’s situation is far worse than one expected to achieve by this stage of life, one is miserable. Ie., the waitress who believed that she should have been in a successful acting career by now. One thing is for certain: the pharmaceutical industry is making a lot of money off miserable and sick people. There is financial motivation to keep people on drugs. Unless drugs caused your depression, drugs can’t fix your depression.

necrovore makes a clear and compelling description of the problem here, so I don't need to add much but to bring up the aspect of 'fair use' that protects the consumer's right to transfer media to convenient means of playback, such as making a cassette copy to play in the car, or making an mp3 copy to play on their portable mp3 player. Under the new DMCA law, this would become illegal, as the content would be blocked from copying by the Vista OS. This raises the ethical question, is it moral for a corporation to dictate where and how a media file can be played? (Does it justify selling the consumer three different versions of an album, one as a CD, one as a cassette and one as an MP3?) Or should the consumer be free to decide how he will use that media and copy/convert to the appropriate media formats?

Quite possibly, "Vista could be the longest suicide note ever written," to quote the article. But I think you're right--MS will correct it's mistakes if it goes too far against consumer wishes. What does the consumer wish? For the product to work. And also for the ability to do as they please with their copies of whatever content they paid for. The author talks about a scenario in which a Vista OS and Vista-approved hardware would make it impossible for independant filmmakers to produce their films. Now we're not only talking about content protection but racketeering by the entrenched film industry. The potential for abuse is just staggering.

I think I've got the solution to the problem of finding the right actors. Why not produce Atlas Shrugged as an animated film? Why? Consider these supporting reasons: CGI animation is getting to the point where one can almost not tell a CGI character from a live actor (case in point, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within). Animation makes possible the ability to project the characters' true self through their expressions. Totally new and unknown "characters" can appear fresh and without prior context of other film appearances. Animation can provide a range of precise expressions that would be frustratingly near-impossible to achieve with human actors. IOW, the director can achieve that "certain" expression, working closely with a master animator. Actual cost of production can be reduced because you wouldn't have to pay huge actors' salaries and there would be no sets to build, no streets and railroads to shut down for filming and no problems with the weather. CGI is advancing at a stunning pace. They now have virtual camera controllers that a director can use to hand-hold the animation camera so that scenes appear to be shot with natural camera motion, as if a person were moving the camera, not a computer. Character movements and facial expressions are done through motion capture now. Yes, 120 reflective dots on the actor's face are now captured as data, so full facial expressions can be captured as well as the body's movements. You would only need actors capable of the physical tasks that your film requires. It didn't matter if they looked like Attila the Hun or your aging Aunt Ethel. The facial expression data can be creatively altered later in the computers. The remaining challenge would be to maintain the fidelity of the original story, and, given two hours, that would be THE biggest challenge. Many whole scenes from the book would have to be cut. In short, about 97% of the novel's dialogue and scene descriptions. Visuals would take the place of scene descriptions, but Rand's novels have a lot of dialogue, which would be much harder to distill. That's my thought on this challenge. Think outside the box.

Well, if you're working with data, multiple monitors can work out fine, but then you must have enormous desk real estate to support all those monitors, where one huge one, like the Apple 37" Cinema display, would fit nicely. What always turned me off was the bezels dividing up my desktop. But I come from a graphic design and CAD world, where the more pixels we can get on a single large screen, the better. As for reliability, that's almost academicly theoretical today. I can't recall ever having a graphics card fail. It is extremely rare. And then you would have to shut the PC down to replace whatever card it is, even a multihead, just to restore full function again. On my video editing system, the main monitor is a 21" high quality color-calibrated CRT, which provides enough real estate to run Adobe Premiere Pro and Sonic Scenarist, which both require lots and lots of screen space to work efficiently. The video output is viewed on a separate Sony PVM1261Q professional grade broadcast monitor. In this application, for industry standard color accuracy, the video must be monitored on an NTSC1953 phosphor colorspace. Hence, it also gives the ability to see if the frame is composed right, if interlacing is in the correct order, and if color and saturation is good. That is one example of a multiple output with specialized monitors that has a practical requirement.

The quagmire arises when the public, who will probably NOT be informed of the potentially unfriendly behavior of this OS, will scream that deceptive advertizing occured because only the positive aspects of Vista will have been touted by MS, and not the danger that their hardware could be rendered crippled or shut down because of a comprimised protection key. IOW, criminals in China could crack the key for one ATI video card, and then shortly thereafter, all copies of that model of ATI video card will have their one key revoked, rendering them useless. Why should 1,000,000 video card owners be penalized because a hacker in China, or the Netherlands, comprimised the key for that hardware to play protected content? What happens when MS doesn't clearly inform the buyer before purchase of such things as this: The author also references the potential problems that can happen with medical imaging, air traffic control and other mission-critical uses of Vista, caused by covert downgrading of image quality. It is fairly easy to avoid MS' products, if you don't use a computer, or if you're able to do your work with Linuz and open source programs, ie., word processors. It becomes more difficult when you are working with multimedia and have to share files and projects with collaborating staff. I know how tough this can be, as I started my graphic design business on a PC, and could not communicate with the Mac designers and even the service bureau to get my layouts to 4C film separations. There are just some professions where you simply must use what your partners and service providers are using. Can you imagine trying to edit video on Linux? While there might be a primative open-source NLE application available (last I checked, there was not), one would not be able to produce the kind of sophisticated projects that professionals working on the Windows platform would. In order to remain competative and offer the latest that technology can provide, one would have to adopt the Windows OS, or lose business to their competitors who do. And for those die-hard non-Windows users, this would affect you too. How? Because all the new hardware being developed will be developed for the OS with 95% of the market share. You who refuse to use Windows will be stuck using your pre-2007 motherboard, graphics cards and sound cards. If you are lucky, maybe a bootleg Chinese outfit will manufacture counterfeit hardware, so that you can replace yours with when it finally dies of old age, or a power surge. You see, the big peripheral makers are going to go where the volume and money is: Windows. I use Windows 2000 on my main machine. My editing workstation also used Windows 2000. When I upgraded to Adobe Premiere Pro a few years ago, in order to keep up with competition in terms of workflow efficiency and quality of output, I found out that it would not install on Windows 2000. I was left with no choice but to install Windows XP. But Windows XP isn't loaded with these "bombs" and so I don't really mind. But if it were Vista that was required, I might well be using old Premiere on Windows 2000 today and wondering why I'm working so many hours and able to handle so few projects. Another way in which Windows gets its steely tentacles into every computer is the pre-sale agreements. When you buy a new PC, can you buy it without Windows and NOT pay a Windows licensing fee built into the PC cost? When was the last time you could buy a new laptop or a new desktop PC with no operating system? Or with Linux preinstalled? Sure, MS has every moral right to adopt this strategy--as long as they clearly disclose all of the potential caveates. The problem arises when Joe Consumer buys his new Vista PC and a $1000 graphics card and a $4000 50" flat panel display, hoping to watch the latest blockbuster DVD on his $5000 video display, only to get a fuzzy picture, or an error message like the one David got. Chances are, Circuit City, who is motivated to sell as many PCs as possible, isn't going to provide a long list of caveates to the prospective buyer. They'll just tout the positive aspects and then Mr. Consumer will find out that he's wasted a lot of money later one when the system doesn't perform as advertized. I think that you're not grasping the full potential reach and damage that this strategy could do to both the hardware and the software industry. It may mean that you'll pay 40% more for every device you attach to your computer, as it will have to meet this stringent set of security scans and be certified and assigned a key. The possibility of revocation makes every piece of hardware a potential self-distruct candidate. Non-Windows users may not be able to use the upcoming crop of peripherals as they may not operate with a non-protected OS. Or, if they do, they may be severely crippled, and definately way more expensive than if DRM were not incorporated into the hardware. This situation is a potential mess, if things progress in the planned direction. System reliability will go down the drain because of the "tilt-bits" that Vista uses to monitor the system for what it might mistake for tampering. All this monitoring, encrypting, constricting and decrypting will have a monstrous impact on system performance. In other words, it will be like the perfect model of a Socialist monarchy, so top-heavy and slow acting.

I think the paragraph of most interest in your experience would be this one: Imagine this: You buy an expensive HDMI flat panel display to use with your PC. You decide to watch a HD DVD (premium content). You find that either there is no video at all on the big, expensive flat panel display, but you can get mediocre quality out of the VGA port. Either that, or the image you get on the big, expensive display is, well, like watching an old VHS videotape. The worst of this scenario is what happens if a hacker, somehwere, cracks the content protection key for the manufacturer of your component. The content industry may revoke the keys, rendering your hardware either downgraded to crippled levels (suddenly your 2560x1920 HD display is no longer ablet o go above 640x480), or is disabled completely and you get a message displayed to the effect that "the secuity key has been revoked, please contact technical support." What is of concern is that much of the public will not be informed of this behavior, until it bites them. It is not hard to envision that there will be cries of deception about the new system. Does MS try to appease the film industry, or its customers? That is the question that keeps surfacing in my mind.

Ecept in the case of video editing, I've always been in the school of a single large monitor of 2560 by 2048 resolution. This enables me to work comfortablyh in Adobe Premiere, PhotoSHop, Ecel, and other screen hogs. Video is the only application where it makes sense to have a second monitor because of the different colorspace requirement. (Pardon my old laptop PC--the key between Zand C an G an J are broken)

It probably comes as no surprise that Microsoft is under heavy pressure from the film and music industry to implement robust digital rights management (DRM) into the very core components of it's upcoming operating system, Vista. What is less known is the cost of implementing this on a complete gamut of software and hardware and the dangers it will pose to users, economically, and maybe even worse, when used in mission-critical applications. From that economic factor comes a lot of potential economic injury to the users who buy high end computer hardware, only to have the hardware key potentially-revoked because of a code leak and thus a security breach. What made MS kowtow to the music and film industry, when they could have followed the attitude of NZ's TV industry, which essentially did "an Atlas Shrugged" when presented with onerous DRM rules by the music industry there? What sort of moral and legal quagmire is MS opening itself up to, by aggressively engaging in the implementation of DRM, including key revocation that could render a gamer's $500 graphics card as useless as a brick, just by invalidating it's key? The following articles are lengthy, but if you consider personal computers to be an essential part of your business life, this issue affects you, as it affects all computer users. Some key points: DRM will skyrocket the cost of hardware, because of the uniqueness of the method, it won't be possible to use unified drivers, or one chipset for several models of peripheral. Each card model will need to be a completely unique chipset, or it won't be accepted as secure hardware and get the digital signature assigned. Small-time hardware developers will be driven out of business, because this hardware approval process will be way out of reach of small companies and hobbyists who build their own peripherals. Keys can be revoked. As soon as one key is comprimized, all devices using that key will be rendered inoperable. The potential for class actions as a public caught unaware that their expensive hardware could be rendered useless by a few bits over the internet looms ahead. DRM methodology in Vista is to degrade video and audio quality significantly, when outputting to high quality devices. S/PDIF audio devices would be disabled when "premium content" was present on the system. The article goes into great detail on the unimaginable and potentially catestrophic side effects of this scaled degradation method of DRM, when used in mission critical apps. The overhead of all the many steps of encryption/decription will be tremendous. Users are already reporting that the performance hit is substantial. http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.txt http://www.engadget.com/2005/07/21/the-cli...iny-red-button/ Should MS have told the entertainment industry to "stick it", rather than genuflect to the industry, considering that 95% of entertainment content, in the age of Vista, will come through PCs? Will the public be properly informed at purchase time, about these and many more subtle cripplings of their system?

Hey, if you think that's bad, some politician in New York is trying to ban the use of the "n" word! We have people dying in wars. We have families displaced from their homes by unaffordable taxes. And yet we focus on this bullsh*t!

Some 45 years ago, I was introduced to Objectivism and it brought a definate clarity into my life at the time. However, by the mid-1970s, I had largely stopped reading the books and attending lectures regularly. The last lecture I attended was Dr. Peikoff’s “Principles of Objective Communication” held at the Statler-Hilton Hotel on 9th & 33rd St in New York. That was January 1980. Being away from Objectivism for the next 25 years and being exposed to Subjectivity and quantum mechanics theories, I soon began to consider more slightly mystical ideas for a period of years lasting from 1985 to almost the present day. You see, the older a man becomes, the more religious he becomes, for he knows that the day he meets his maker, if there is one, draws near. Do we choose our beliefs? I have pondered that question too. During the 1960s, when my understanding of Objectivism was strong, you could not tell me that we don’t. I believed that we had total dominion over our minds and bodies and could command them to do as we chose. Age and a lot of having reality slam the door in my face have shaken my belief in that notion, after forty years. When I once believed that a man—any man—could rise above his circumstances, so long as he lived in a free country, I realized that it takes a lot more than just a desire to escape the ghetto. It takes brain power. It takes a LOT of brain power and a powerful sense of self-esteem. I too often wondered what makes people choose destructive lifestyles? Certainly people don’t want to wear the dunce cap in elementary school, they don’t want to be a failure in school, sports or work. They don’t want to be a paedophile or a burglar. Surely they have the willpower to overcome their urges and do the right thing. But why don’t they? Surely they must have the intellect to realize that prison and poverty are a terrible existence and therefore they must make choices that steer them toward success. So we have two representative persons. One seems aimless, always trying out this and that and whose behavior is child-like well up into the early adult years. And we have the other person who, even at the age of 6 or 7, seems to have a sense of responsibility, treats their time like a precious commodity and develops goals and focuses on those goals with commitment and intensity. The first person is distracted by the opposite sex and seems to engage in endless cycles of intense infatuation with a very narrow range of the opposite gender, ultimately experiencing rejection each time and devastating emotional depression, while the other person seems to pick up dates without trying and indeed seems to attract them by means of a magnetic personality. The first person goes on into life as a miserable failure, unhappy with every menial job and never seems to get promoted. The second person is a millionaire by age 23. Did each of these people make choices? I would say yes. Did each make the choices willingly? This question is the one that stumps me. No one willingly chooses to be a failure. Yet so many people fall into this category. Perhaps certain genetic traits tilt the scales and make the playing field uneven. Maybe the failure was born ugly and repulsive. Maybe he went bald at 15, maybe he’s overweight. Maybe he has such an overbite and buck teethe that he looks like a chipmunk. This is the guy you find working in the recycling center. Meanwhile, Mr. Successful was born with great looks, and that added confidence to his personality. But in the beginning, he didn’t concentrate on that because he seemed to have an almost instinctual tendency to focus on goals. While Mr. Failure was always dabbling in this and that and engaged in childish antics up until his 30s, Mr. Success was serious and focused on his goals. He seemed to know what they were very early in life. Mr. Failure never knew what his goals were. He seemed to be adrift on the ocean, just experiencing life, not directing it. I few of my friends were like Mr. Failure—they were Viet Nam vets and upon discharge, bummed across the country on a motorcycle for a couple of years. After that, dead-end job after dead-end job, then by age 50-60, no job at all. I once, at a diner I frequented, met a gentleman of 50-ish, who still lived with his parents. He died of a massive heart attack a few years later; he had been overweight, but I could sense that he did not really want to be alive much longer—he just ate and ate and got fatter and fatter. That was a Greek diner by the railroad tracks, in the seedy part of town. But back to the question—do people make choices willingly? I think sometimes they do not. I think choices are made for us by default—by circumstances. Often overwhelmed by peer pressure, what our elders told us, or what our experiences have been interpreted as, we develop a set of boundaries as to what we perceive our capabilities to be. Whether those boundaries are set correctly or not is something that may be worthy of investigation, but the fact that people set limits on what they believe they can realistically achieve, is a fact of life for the vast majority of people. Most people believe that they can never be millionaires, for instance. They firmly believe that only “well-connected” people have the opportunity to come into money. So they work their dead-end jobs, hoping for a better promotion “someday”. In reality, a number of those people face layoff and unemployment, fall behind on their mortgages and hit bottom. Others manage to sense the swirling action after the great toilet of employment flushes, and manage to jump into another toilet, instead of waiting for final suction, thus maintaining their tenuous existence a little longer. But it seems that the successful people have no trouble making numerous decisions all day long, and enjoy what they are doing. They are dynamic and alive, calling the shots, steering their own destiny. I used to believe that Objectivism alone would enable a person to achieve highly. Apparently there is more to the formula than philosophy though. One has to have a brain capable of quickly sizing up any situation and being creative on the spot, coming up with ways to make a good opportunity out of a bad circumstance. It takes a functioning brain. It is one thing to grasp a philosophy, then look at world politics and feel a strong sense of injustice. But it is another thing entirely to apply one’s self in a productive way that leads to the fulfillment of a market gap and thus the fulfillment of one’s financial success. How does one go from Mr. Failure’s hopeless pattern of decision by default, to Mr. Successful’s pattern of focused goal-oriented achievement? Merely wishing and wanting is not enough. It takes intelligence to know how to find out what the concrete steps are that must be taken, in order to move in the direction of success. But if one’s genetics curse one with low energy, laziness, where getting out of bed in the morning is a major battle that is often lost, if one’s brain is too dull to grasp even fifth grade subject matter, then I’d say one is pretty doomed. How can one choose to be an athlete when one feels too tired to get up off the bench? It is a complex set of many individual factors, both physical and mental, that affect one’s ability to make choices voluntarily or by default.

I would definately outlaw property tax on domiciles. THat has got to be one of the most immoral aspects of government, besides eminent domain and military draft. I would also eliminate lobbying and special interests' influence on government. Much of the country's troubles are the direct result of this.

Points understood on the compositional issues. Some of those were taken by my wife. I'll discuss it with her, in light of the possiblity of another upcoming wedding of a friend of ours. About your suggestion, I'm not quite clear on how I would get photos of their setups. How can I get permission to come into their venues before a wedding, during setup? Do I understand that correctly? And how would I counter the fact that many of these have professional photographers who already are doing this? Basically, it's the chicken or egg problem again: to get clients, one has to have a lot of past clients. So far, I've shot one wedding. The bulk of the rest of my work was product photography, not people.

So once again, it comes down to marketing. This is my #1 weakness, and where I have failed for decades in regular employment, and then after retirement in trying to earn money as a self-employed freelance typesetter, then graphic designer/product photographer, then videographer. In those businesses, I found that people either didn’t want to spend the money, or they had a supplier that was already aligned with them. How I landed this wedding gig was through mutual friends. My wife’s friends at her filipino association, to be exact. I had to work hard to convince that family that we could do the job. In fact, the package I gave them was the equivalent of the $3000 wedding video package, and I didn’t even count the photography. I just threw that in as an extra because the couple only cared about doing video. But in reality, at today’s rates, I gave them a $7000 lineup of service, all for $1495. And they were squeezing to eek out that money. Since that wedding, I have done nothing additional. The bulk of my photographic experience is with film. I had a Pentax Spotmatic since the 1960s that I learned to use well (Kodak Ektar 25 was my film of choice). It was only recently, in 2000, that I started to test the digital camera waters. I didn’t buy my first serious D-SLR until June of 1995. I’m still getting used to the different lattitudes that digital works with. Thank you for your honest comments about each photo. Photo #1 was what I’d call a formal portrait shot. I had a few of those taken at their home before the wedding. I had time to compose that shot. It was the result of a brainstorm. I saw the window with the eastern exposure, morning sunlight streaming in and got the idea for this shot. I used the equivalent (in 35mm parlance) of a 300mm lens and stood way back to take this shot and get differential focus. The softening was a series of steps I did in PhotoShop. When the bride’s mother saw this image, she was moved to tears, she told me. Some of them were taken by my wife. She definitely shot #3 & #4, as I was manning the video camera for the procession. #5 & #6 were probably done by me. Not sure about #7 & #8 though, as I was rapidly switching from video to still camera for different things and my wife was in there taking a lot of photos while I was doing video, but I suspect the low angle was necessary to catch the faces of both persons, lest the groom’s face would obscure the bride’s. Photo #10 was an experiment in bracketing. I rather liked the effect, so that’s why I included it here. Same with #11. It was the back cover of the DVD liner, hence the PhotoShop outline tracing. Perhaps some people think it’s a little overdone. Maybe I’m becoming corrupted by the 1990s graphic design philosophy of some PhotoShop artists who go for the blown highlights and grungy look. The thing about wedding photography is that one has to be transparent and unobstrusive, yet be able to get those shots in split seconds. I suppose that’s what separates the ameteurs from the true professionals. Getting back to the marketing angle, I think you’re right about how monetary success depends more on marketing than how good the shots are. I tend to let my wife do the public relations part of this, but she’s reluctant and not really fluent in English. But I look like an axe murderer and until people get to know me well, am one they generally try to avoid. But appearance isn’t the only challenge; I am batting zero on telemarketing (given that I’ve lost so many clients in my radio business last year, I was offered to get into financial services and so I did the training, got licensed and thought that would be my ticket to a $68,000/month income like the RVP that hired us) and have reached a point of utter frustration with that. Then a friend of ours called us this week to say that she’s looking for a wedding videographer and a photographer. She knew that I did extensive video work over the years, mostly volunteer work, and I started to do some research of area providers to see what the going rates were. That’s when it hit me: photographers can make a comfortable living. The ones you talked about, who make $12,000 per shoot.. that’s almost Primerica RVP level income, assuming one wedding per week, that’s $48,000/month, over half a million a year. The trick is to get the reputation built. I may not have enough years left, but if I can afford life extention technology and hang on long enough to benefit from it, then maybe I can live long enough to enjoy some success. When my youngest cousin passed away last February, I was awakened to the fact that I’m living on borrowed time. As such, I must choose a path that will earn the most money in the shortest time. I could have a massive coronary tomorrow, or I could surprise everyone and live ten more years. I’m trying to be optimistic and figure that I can remain active and able to do photography for at least a couple more years, maybe longer, if I can improve my finances and reduce my stress and worry. If I find a marketing strategy that will achieve a renowned reputation for me within two years, that might be realistic. But I need to get the work. That’s not happening at the pace I’d like.

Ugh... this president makes me ill, just thinking about his imbecillic floundering.. Sure, we could fix the problem in Iraq with more troops--we just need to start having more babies and then have a mandatory draft of every child over age 16. When we send 14 million or so new troops over there, we will achieve security--for as long as they are there... (All in levity, I wrote the above--I'm trying to illustrate how impractical a ground-based solution to this quagmire is. I'm in the camp that says "nuke 'em".