Zirjin

I have had my name in my signature for the past year, but I post very rarely. It seems to be a general longterm trend.

This actually is my field since I work on DRM technology for a living. The key to understanding DRM is understanding the nature of what you are purchasing. You are not purchasing the physical medium that it comes on, a blank CD is useless if you want to listen to mozart for example. What you are gaining access to, is the content or information on the CD. That information is not sold to you. What you are essentially buying, is permission to access that data to be able to listen to the song or watch the movie or whatever. When you purchase that permission to access it, it is on the terms of the purchase contract that is made at the point of sale. Breaking the DRM, violates those terms of the permission that you have, so it is a violation of the intellectual property rights of the reseller / author.

I am only a young Objectivist, I am almost 22 years of age. I am one of those silent lurkers on this forum, I don't post much but I read a lot of the posts on here. I really respect you and your knowledge Stephen. It is a great loss to see you go. Could you possibly let me and other like-minded people know as to which forum you will call home next, if you do decide to move to another forum?

Before the topic is finished with, I would like to add one more point to it. It is a mistake to think of roads as a market in themselves. Roads are part of a wider industry sector known as transport. Currently, the transport industry is heavily distorted. The users of roads have their infrastructure paid for them free by government extortion of everybody. People who prefer to use trains, monorails or other forms of transport have their money extorted out of them to cover the cost of building roads. Why pay for something twice when you have already paid for one form of transport? When roads are privatised, I think that we will see a resurgance of profitable subways, trams and other forms of transport appear throughout our cities.

The Airbus A380 has finally been released. It was developed with the help of billions of dollars of EU government help. Now, in order to make it appear that their socialist spending sprees are a wise investment and a commercial success, the European Union is blackmailing other nations to purchase it, or face tariffs on their exports. Their first victim is Thailand. Tsunami-hit Thais told: Buy six planes or face EU tariffs

Just a quick tip, rename Australia to "Oceania", that is what we call the region of Australia, New Zealand and the nearby pacific islands south of Asia.

I think he is setting it in the future not because of the technology, the book itself is timeless, but so as to give people reason to believe the world will goto hell in the next 15 years because of the logical outcome of the philosophy that is often said today. That way the movie serves a bit more as a warning sign to people who see it instead of people just disregarding it as an alternate timeline that ain't gonna happen.

I am extremely curious about that movie. In some ways, I am concerned due to the large differences between Contact the movie and the original book. The movie had a compromise between faith and reason, whereas the book didn't. James Hart wrote the screenplay for Contact. But reading some interviews, he seems to really love the story of Atlas Shrugged, reading the book a great deal, having gone through some kind of transformation at some stage in his life that changed his outlook. The movie instead of being set in the past, will be set 15 years into the future of this world. So I am hoping the movie turns out to be really good.

My assessment of myself is that I am like Rearden in my development. In my current form, I would be denied access to the Gulch due to still sorting out the philosophy in my mind. (Just as he couldn't join until he saw near the end what everything was about and sorted out his own contradictions). But in terms of business potential, I fully intend on being a prime mover without letting anything get in my way. After the philosophical reform in my mind is 100% complete and several years have passed in my business, I might possibly be granted access.

Yeah, you are right there Greedy Capitalist. I had a few friends in HK and heard about how it works and Hong Kong already is screwed up. Offiecally, things appear the same. But unoffiecally, China waits til a business starts to run out of money for whatever reason, and gives them a giant loan from the Bank of China. From that point on, the business owes China a favour so they take their orders from Beijing. So you can go there, you can do whatever you want, but you will be competing against businesses that take orders from Beijing and also have unlimited supplies of money. Even the academic establishment there has already been hijacked too by Red China. You get into the universities based on who you know and not based on your merits. It has really shocked some of the locals but their nation is in the dragons den now so to speak so not much can be done.

A link to the North Korean properganda. It would almost be funny to assasinate their leader as the method of response to deal with their WMD thread because of the comments on their page along the lines of "Our dear leader will eternally be with us." http://www.korea-dpr.com/

There are some serious problems that need to be fixed with the chatroom. I don't know if it is my lag causing it, but a lot of the messages I post, do not appear at all in the chat room so I gotta retype it. Extremely annoying. Hopefully it is fixed soon.

Looking at a map of the region, I fail to see where those mentioned mountain peaks are. Seoul is on the west of the peninsula. All the giant mountain ranges are on the East side. Artillary can be stuck north of Seoul without much stuff blocking their line of sight. A possibility however remains that the maps I am looking at, are low resolution and thus not showing all the detail that should be looked at. If you find a high res map on the net that refutes my point, I will be very curious to see it. --- I like that laser technology because a single beam can destroy several artillary shells across the sky in a single pass if it was equipped with the right software. The beams are at light speed so it can track at short notice multiple targets. It has a bit of a cooldown time in it's present form which is it's only downfall. If there are a lot of those emplacements, they mightn't get all the shells, heck, they might get only 20% of them, it is still an amount that could reduce the casualties and damage to infrastructure done, which will help sell the South Koreans onto the idea of taking on the North.

Quarantine is required, if you are known to be sick with a deadly virus and you knowingly go out in public and transmit the virus to me knowing it could cause great harm, you have effectively violated my rights.

There is one last aspect that you guys are forgetting. There are 10,000 pieces of artillery fortified along the North Korean border. Seoul, the capital city of South Korea, is 35 miles from the DMZ, well within range of the NK long range artillery. Seoul, is a city of 14 million people(29% of the South Korean population). So if there were to be a war, it will be a logistical nightmare to evacuate 14 million South Koreans to safety away from their capital city. North Korea do not need to use nukes to hurt South Korea badly, they only need to fire their artillery pieces to cause massive civilian death tolls. The fact of the matter is, even tho it will the North Koreans fault for their deaths and the blame will rest on NK’s head for all it’s threats it has done over the years, you can’t expect South Korea to agree to a course of action to support a US invasion with such a huge possible death toll looming over their heads. The gun is just too well pointed. To put it bluntly, the job of the North Korean war should have been completed in the 1950s and not left to fester for so long allowing them to fortify the border and heavily complicate the situation. NK is just too big a problem to deal with at this present time. Leaving them for 2-3 years won’t change how screwy the situation with them is to make it much worse because it already is pretty bad. However, we got a nation, Iran, that is starting to develop into quite a problem right at this present time. Deal with the middle east first so that the same mistake isn’t repeated there as what happened with NK. Stop the middle east from turning into a future giant problem and eliminate all possible threats there. In the meantime with the conflict in the Middle East, back at home in the US, develop new attack scenarios to deal with N Korea, as well as accelerate possible new technology designed especially for fighting North Korea. I am no expert on military technology by any means, but I see a possible candidate in the following - http://www.defenselink.mil/photos/Apr1996/...-0000U-001.html & another article here on it - http://www.spacedaily.com/news/laser-00g.html Once the Middle East campaign is completed and the new technology is operational(an artillery/rocket shield) and rolled out in South Korea, they will potentially be more cooperative and then full attention can be given to the North Korean threat to wipe out that threat as soon as possible.