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This is what happens when capitalism is unrestrained. In every country undergoing an industrial revolution there's a mix of outdated feudalistic modes of thought and inefficiency matching worker to task that allows this sort of thing -- whether it's mining camps, heavy industry, or middle commerce. Scrooge's shop in A Christmas Carol wasn't at all far from the common, nor Song of the Shirt unrealistic. Only government reigning in corporate interests for the common man can stop these travesties. So here's my hope for the Chinese people to say, "enough" and make their government fix this.

And why shouldn't they? You use someone else's property, you should pay them for it. End of story.

I have absolutely no sympathy for people profiting off of other's work.

The founding fathers apparently didn't see it that way.

http://www.victorianweb.org/au...

Oh, please, pirating books was just a way for the publisher to make more money by not having to pay the author royalties. It has nothing to do with the morality (or otherwise) of downloading freely copiable digital material over the internet.

And why shouldn't they? You use someone else's property, you should pay them for it. End of story.

I have absolutely no sympathy for people profiting off of other's work.

The founding fathers apparently didn't see it that way.

http://www.victorianweb.org/au...

the most insidious vicious freedom destroying authoritarian government possible, would dose the populace with heroin, as the ultimate exertion of absolute control

there exists nothing that is capable of destroying free will better than hard drugs

bars in the mind, an interrupt switch in your very consciousness, is far greater control against your free will than any physical restraint possible

and look:

authoritarian control via hard drug:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

the fascist origins:

http://www.tofugu.com/2012/04/...

war and imperialism achieved through hard drug:

http://www.victorianweb.org/hi...

you want to destroy freedom? meth, heroin, coke... nothing destroys freedom better

that some cotton candy heads might actually *choose* to destroy their freedom is only a testament to ignorance, stubborn deluded cluelessness, desperate pain without proper social help, and loopy rationalizations

there is no greater fight at preserving and extending freedom than the basic maintenance effort of civilization to minimize the drug trade

drugs destroy lives and freedom at a root far deeper than any social hierarchy or political ideology: chemistry over mind

Yes, it was much better in the nineteenth century when government was less invasive in people's lives, and heroic private sector food manufacturers used to pad out food with poisons and excrement.

http://www.victorianweb.org/sc...

how many people suffered, and some died, because the government mandated airbags in every car before the technology was ready?

Safety technologies get better. But you have no evidence whatsoever that there were more people killed by 1990s airbags than were saved by them. It's ridiculous. The very notion shows how far your mind has to warp reality to make it fit your libertarian religion.

Can you give me an example of where an insufficiently regulated market resulted in less safety?

Can you give me an example of a libertarian state where the most dangerous stuff hasn't already been banned? You'd have to go somewhere like Somalia, where everything is dangerous, other than products that have the benefit of being brought in from other countries that do have safety regulations.

When you go back in history to a time when there was little consumer safety legislation, there was very little that was safe, Most things were consciously made more dangerous if doing so could make it cheaper to produce. e.g.
http://www.victorianweb.org/sc...

Everything would be more dangerous were it not for safety regulation in every significant jurisdiction in the world.

Yes, Think of the children. Yum!

I was taught metrics in 1st grade, that was back in the 70s, and it's so easy a 7 year old can master it.
This imperial crap almost everyone else in the US uses is rather incomprehensible.

What it vaguely reminds me of is the old British system of money before decimalization. And children could master that easily too?

I mean look at this shit. It's ridiculous.

There were
          20 shillings in £1 - a shilling was often called 'bob', so 'ten bob' was 10/-
        12 pennies in1 shilling
        240 pennies in £1
Pennies were broken down into other coins:
          a farthing (a fourth- thing) was ¼ of a penny
          a halfpenny (hay-p'ny) was ½ of a penny
        three farthings was ¾ of a penny
Other coins of a value less than 1/- were
        a half-groat (2d) 6 x 2d = 1/-
        a threepenny bit (3d) made of silver 4 x 3d. = 1/-
        a groat (4d) 3 x 4d = 1/-
        sixpence (silver) - often called a 'tanner' 2 x 6d = 1/-
Coins of more than 1/- but less than £1 in value were
        a two shilling piece (called a florin) 10 x 2/- = £1
        a half-crown ( 2/6d) 8 x 2/6d = £1
        a crown (5/-) 4 x 5/- = £1
        ten shillings (a half-sovereign) 2 x 10/- = £1
        a half-guinea (10/6d) 2 x 10/6d = £1/1/-
A £1 coin was called a Sovereign and was made of gold. A paper pound often was called a 'quid'.
Coins of more than £1 were
        a guinea (£1/1/-)
        a £5 coin

But children could still get it. Hell, I'm sure kids understand how Harry Potter money works and quite frankly that's just plain nonsense to most of us.

According to Rubeus Hagrid, there are 17 Sickles in a Galleon, and 29 Knuts in a Sickle, meaning there are 493 knuts to a Galleon.

Simply saying it's "difficult to learn" isn't really something against it. Shit, I'm pretty sure Chinese is a confusing as hell language, but that doesn't mean we should stop a billion plus people from speaking it. Or to loosely quote Fred Colon in Jingo by Terry Pratchett, "Well of course they spoke Morporkian. It's an easy language. Even babies speak it. After learning something as difficult as Klatchian it must be easy."

Hell, if anything learning Imperial measurements might *increase* a child's capacity to subdivide crap into random numbers. Now they can think not only in base 10 but also in base 12. Now we just need kids to learn in base 16 and hex will no longer be a confusing maze for the average joe. Or even fucking binary.

But to bitch about it without recognizing the historical precedent we set here in the US is being disingenuous. For a very long time we ignore European copyright (Dickens was angry about this) and the Industrial Revolution being kicked off in Pawtucket, Rhode Island by Mr. Slater was a feat of "intellectual property theft" and he was a hero for it.

I can get as mad as I want at China, but once I step back a second, I can understand the motivations.

We taught them well.

--
BMO

Footnotes:
Slater's Mill: http://www.slatermill.org/
Dickens and Copyright: http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/dickens/pva/pva75.html

Surely thats meaningless as I'm fairly sure the ruling class didn't approve the use of the guillotine the first time around.

Greater men than me have failed to answer that question but I'm arrogant enough to give it a try anyway.

In ancient Rome slaves provided for Roman citizens such that there was a large group of people who didn't have to work at all. Everything they wanted was given to them. They spent their time at theaters, bath houses, and feeding each other. Some turned to philosophy, some to learning, many to simply wasting their lives away in whatever they liked to do.

In today's UK there are many people living on the public welfare system. Their standard of living is significantly lower than that of Rome but their pursuits are about the same. It's not fair to say they aren't as intellectual: you would be comparing the average of today's time wasters with the progress of a thousand years of Roman philosophers.

In America there are many people in the inner cities existing with a very low standard of living (by today's ideas of a proper standard of living), most of that wealth given to them by the government. They have very poor lives and a high crime rate. It has been alleged that government handouts are causing this low standard living but another way to look at is that insufficient knowledge, improper allocation of handouts, and not enough handouts are causing the problems. If enough time and energy could be spent on those neighborhoods (especially in solving the social problems) they WOULD improve.

So what I'm saying is that given high enough productivity per person you would have the same social structures that have been seen where wealth is concentrated: look at Dubai's hotels and massive public works projects, the activities of today's ultra rich (often composed of wealth wasting contests like seeing who can get the most and best horses and proving who had enough time to spend learning just the right set of mannerisms) and the activities of the Roman wasters.

It may also by beneficial to compare lifestyles across times when wealth was plentiful and not so plentiful.It is not whether someone is working or not that determines their standard of living but only how much wealth they have. Below a certain point you have ghettos and severe social malignancy; above that level you have the desire to be warm, comfortable, well fed, and able to move about; and above that there is an increasing amount of conspicuous consumption where anything goes as long as it obviously cost enough.

However, http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/dickens/pva/pva74.html describes earlier shenanigans, including the hoops that trans Atlantic authors had to jump to in order to protect copyright. There is also the statement there that the US laws were in place to protect the printing industry.

My apologies.

they require enthusiastic liquidation in the manner of the French Revolution.
(A beautiful act, and worthy of emulation.)

I don't think any sane person would want to have a repeat of the French revolution
   

The Reign of Terror, during which the ruling faction ruthlessly exterminated all potential enemies, of whatever sex, age, or condition, began in September of 1793 and lasted until the fall of Robespierre on July 27, 1794: during the last six weeks of the Terror alone (the period known as the "Red Terror") nearly [b]fourteen hundred people were guillotined in Paris alone[/b]. The Convention was replaced in October of 1795 with the Directory, which was replaced in turn, in 1799, by the Consulate. Napoleon Buonaparte became Emperor in May of 1804..........In its early stages it portrayed itself as a triumph of the forces of reason over those of superstition and privilege,...... it descended into the madness of the Reign of Terror,

IIRC you could even be arrested for eating the wrong style of bread.

Really? Please provide proof of this.

Here is one example, there are many if you would look to actually google it.

America ignored copyright until it was profitable for them not to. Here I thought this was common knowledge.

Comparing copyright and patents is totally unwarranted. From the point of view of corporations,
one patent cannot replace another : they need the patents that will apply to their business. One patent cannot generally substitute for another.

Not so with copyright. A publisher will publish anything that brings money in, whether local or foreign. If copyright on foreign works is not protected, then it is much cheaper for corporation to use foreign work for free rather than pay royalties for local works, to the detriment of local authors. In the 19th century, the decision to protect foreign copyright was taken by Congress when people such as Mark Twain requested it to be on an equal footing when trying to be published in the United States.
http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/dickens/pva/pva74.html

This should not however be overly generalized. How foreign creations compete with local ones depends on their nature and on the structure of the market.

It doesn't look like Bowdler did anything to any Bible. He's best known for "Family Shakespeare". It seems that Boothroyd's New Family Bible appeared about the same time as "Family Shakespeare" and both were part of an already existing social trend.

I once had to email a copy of Arnold's poem "Dover Beach" (http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/arnold/writin gs/doverbeach.html) to somebody, and a Bayesian spam filter bounced it. Go figure.

The ones I have most trouble with are mailing list digests that do contain spam, but mixed in with legitimate content. Until the filters learn how to take apart the digest this looks set to remain an issue.

What New Zealanders say about themselves is often much stronger than anything Jon Stewart says. Stories about New Zealand on Slashdot all seem to give the impression that N.Z. is a country like the United States. Actually, only 4 million people live there, so it is more like a city in the U.S. than the U.S. itself.

Anyhow, apparently some New Zealanders think that N.Z. has an exaggerated self-importance. So they joke about their country. For example: Adult Sheep Finder "New Zealand's #1 Internet Dating Site". (The site is partly a reference to the fact that raising sheep is the main agricultural activity in New Zealand; although there are only 4 million people, there are 60 million sheep.)

I doubt the N.Z. parliament will stop "satire, ridicule or denigration". In fact, the idea is absurd. Remember, the story Alice in wonderland was partly a parody of the English king and queen, when saying negative things about the monarchy was illegal. That was in England, and it is sometimes said that New Zealanders are "more English than the English".

Well, that's one of the arguments for extending the copyright to life. The argument for life + n years is that you could write a best-seller and then die tomorrow, which would screw your heirs. Call it the John Kennedy Toole rule.

But there are other possibilities available, which don't place such a ridiculous burden on the commons. George Martin is probably a better writer now than when he started (most genre writers tend to improve over time, if only because they're so bad when they start!) He could rewrite his old books to remove inconsistencies with the newer versions. Or he could come out with new editions entirely.

In the Victorian era, when copyright terms were 42 years, writers were constantly revising their books -- mostly for the better. For example, Darwin wrote something like 8 editions of the Origin of Species.

The Franklin Expedition was attempting to find and establish a trade route between Europe and East Asia across the Arctic ice cap. All crew members perished within 2 years despite being stocked with enough food and supplies for 5 years. The prevailing theory of their demise is that food canned by the lowest bidder was improperly tinned and cooked, leading to lead and botulism poisoning.

However, American publishers continued to regard the work of a foreign (i. e., non-resident) author as unprotected 'common' property. Thus, although the Berne Convention greatly simplified the copyright process among European nations, numerous unauthorized American re-prints continued to appear until 1891, when the United States finally agreed to discontinue sanctioning literary piracy. In 1896 the American Congress joined the international copyright union, after petitions directed at it by such noted British novelists as Maria Edgeworth, Benjamin Disraeli, and Charles Dickens, beginning in 1837. Their pleas had fallen on deaf ears in the American government until joined by those of Americans such as Mark Twain, who complained that he was fed up with publishers' ignoring American works in favour of those of English writers, whose books could be re-printed more cheaply because there were no royalty costs. A further point of exacerbation for Twain was Canadian piracies of his works, which he attempted to prevent by establishing temporary residence in Canada on the date of publication of each of his works.

Charles Dickens complained loudly about America's failure to respect British copyrights. See Dicken's 1842 Reading Tour

I wonder how many brilliant ideas came about after a relaxing romp at the ol' Hellfire Club?

I think the christian connection is quite visible in the series. Come now, "Son of Adam", what is that but an obvious allusion to the myths of the Abrahamic faiths, the christian interpretation particularly? You see it elsewhere in the series, particularly the end of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader where Aslan says he is present in the human world, in The Magician's Nephew where the theme of downfall parallels the Eden myth, and in The Last Battle where the "very elect" are deceived in a play parallel to common interpretations of the book of Revelations.

I'm not bashing either the books or the movie on this basis. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was the first novel I ever read on my own. I love it and its following series of novels.

I could go further and point out that there is definitely some material you could see as bigoted later on, as the Calormenes are very obviously retouched Arabs, it is far from malignant. If you can accept that C.S. Lewis is going to assume that his faith and his God is *the* right one anyway - as most Western religionists do - his idea that people of other faiths do good deeds that are accepted by God as seen in The Last Battle is actually well ahead of many thinkers from the christian world, and shows a measure of compassion and respect. Like other authors going back into the depth of time, he shows his cultural bias, but he shows a more gentle and inclusive spirituality than many.

So I'm quite happy to have C.S. Lewis' christian faith visible on the big screen, and I think the best of all religions should be similarly celebrated. Further, as an agnostic, I would sooner read Narnia to my kids in their impressionable years than a number of passages from the Old Testament, and teach them that it's okay to enjoy stories that you are inspired by rather than take them for gospel. I say relax, and enjoy.

"I understand the Free as in beer analogy vs free as in speech."

OK, so you were basically saying:

While there is such a thing as Free Software, there is no such thing as free software.

Something like that?

The problem with the no free lunch idea is that it fails to consider point of view. Who pays and who gets. It also fails to consider the "free" that we get from the division of labour.

http://www.victorianweb.org/economics/division.htm l
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=economics +division+of+labour&btnG=Search

all the best,

drew
--
http://www.ourmedia.org/node/57503

In protest of the show being canceled, someone in Chicago hijacked the airwaves of 2 TV stations. It's pretty amusing, unfortunately the only site that had video clips of it is down. Here's some information though:

Google Cache with more information

Slightly less, but more direct information

To summarize, it involved a Max Headroom mask, a bare ass and a fly swatter, while Dr. Who was supposed to be playing.

I predict that in the future, stuff will happen, and some of it will be wierd.