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I'd side with Amazon on that one for a couple of reasons at least:
1- Amazon is selling at least two books that advocate stuff much worse that animals being made to hurt each other : murder, rape, slavery... but since these two books are the Quran and the Bible, there's very little chance that they'll get banned. Why ?
2- We in France are in the middle of a high-visibility court case, with Islamic organizations suing a newspaper that printed caricatures of their Prophet. I undertsand that lawsuit is a good opportunity to discuss worthwhile issues (dont equate islam with terrorism, backwardness...), but still, I'm uncomfortable with that attempt at censorship, and I don't think that suing is conveying a very positive image.
If what Amazon is selling is legal, they can sell it. They SHOULD sell it. If you don't like what it describes/advertizes, vote, and get the law changed to make it illegal. That's what democracy is about, I think.
they bring in some poor caricature of an expert from a different group to mock and make fun of and never let them finish a sentence, and always cut them off when they start citing facts.
Funny how I see those same experts on all the other networks as well. Some of these "experts" even work for left-wing outlets. Juan Williams and Maria Liason are big names on both Fox News and NPR. They are respected, integral parts of the shows they host or act as "the panel". I have never seen either one of these two ridiculed or not allowed to make their point. They are on Fox's payroll to make those points.
Maybe you should watch sometime.
Excuse me? Iraq is already in a state of civil war. Thousands of civilians being slaughtered every year, armed rebellion in the streets, the official military can't even step outside of their controlled zones safely. I don't know what you think a civil war is, but this certainly counts.
For those of you who haven't watched Fox News, they don't present both sides. They present their side, and then they bring in some poor caricature of an expert from a different group to mock and make fun of and never let them finish a sentence, and always cut them off when they start citing facts. It's embarassing to watch.
I agree completely: the problem is that the alternatives are usually worse. While the popular abuse of materialist explanations is often fraught with cliches and crude caricatures from evolutionary psychology or cognitive neuroscience, the alternative winds up being an appeal to older folk-methods of explanation, such as substance-dualistic or even religious ones (whether explicit or covert - it is startling how much of the metaphysics, epistemology and ethics of Western-educated people who think themselves secular are still essentially Christian - this includes especially so-called liberal humanism!)
Viacom does not object to their content being on YouTube as such. What they don't agree with is that YouTube gets ad revenue from their videos, and Viacom doesn't get a cut. YouTube (Google) has already negotiated deals to pay a portion of ad revenue to other content providers, such as CBS. Viacom, however, feels (probably rightly so) that their content provides far more traffic to YouTube than the other providers that have deals, and so they want a sweeter deal than the others got. Until they have that deal, they will continue to make YouTube take down their content.
It's not so much that Viacom hates their stuff being on the Internet, it's that they don't like other people posting their stuff on the Internet without getting a piece of the pie themselves.
This does make a certain amount of sense. After all Colbert frequently refers to YouTube and has even directed his audience there to look at parts of his show, like the infamous chinese caricature voice bit that was only initially (and accidentally) broadcast to certain markets. He even covers YouTube stuff on his show (as have a number of "real" news shows. And as I have said before YouTube does a better job of hosting Viacom's content than Viacom does. If they were smart they would negotiate a deal with YouTube for some of the revenue and post the shows themselves, or else make their site better and easier to use like YouTube has.
No, you think they think that. That's because it's easier for you to bloviate about outrageous caricatures than to actually learn about the world around you. Look how emotionally you reacted to a single unverified comment on Slashdot. Because the previous poster said something that conformed to your cartoonish stereotype, you took it as gospel and made up a bunch of additional slurs to go along with it.
William James said that "A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.". I'm pretty sure he had you in mind.
Aristophanes wrote a play titled "The Clouds," in which he lambasted the state of education in ancient Athens. In the process, he also lampooned Socrates, who was depicted as one of the corrupters of youth... even though public opinion at the time considered him no such thing.
Socrates attended the production of the play... and laughed as uproariously as anyone else at his on-stage caricature.
Mind you, he might not have had the same remedies available as today had he been thoroughly offended by the play, but the big thing was that the concept of "grin and bear it" was known then. Too bad it seems to be unfashionable these days.
But ultimately, though Rand should be lauded for such things as assigning individual worth to individuals and not merely to society, or a dogged insistence on personal freedom of action, she fails to take her notions anywhere particularly grand or glorious. The novels start getting dull and repetitive, and one might arrive at the end of a work, and wonder, "what was the point of all that?" The philosophy seems to cover a few basic ideas like this and then... well... spins in some sort of busy-loop repeating the same sort of concepts. Perhaps some future philosopher will take this bright little engine, brush off the dust and the dirt and the icky stuff, polish it up, and actually really go somewhere with it. It will be a good day for the world if that happens.
Can Twitter look Cute?
No, but even if he looked good, he'd still be that asshole claiming that everybody who doesn't suck Richard Stallman's dick is an astroturfer.
Twitter is more like his caricature each day: deranged, paranoid douchebaggery. In most ways, the more things change the more they are the same.
Can Steve Ballmer look Cute?
No, but even if he looked good, he'd still be that asshole talking about "fucking killing" people and companies.
Windoze, like it's makers, is more like it's caricature each day: bloated, buggy and controlling. In most ways, the more things change them more they are the same.
Yeah, granted. Maybe I wasn't clear about "EM drools." I didn't mean that EM was negligible or contemptible in the slightest-- just aping the (opposite) caricature of the parent.
But if I actually hurt you in some way, no Libertarian is going to suggest that I shouldn't be punished. My responsibility to society is to keep from doing bad things to others, and that's where it ends. Everything I do most emphatically is not the concern of every other human being; I'm somewhat amazed you would even claim that, except in the vaguest philosophical sense. Society has absolutely no right to regulate what does not concern it - to me, this does not seem selfish at all, and certainly not anarchistic or intellectually dishonest.
And yes, I know the parent was just an anti-Slashdot troll...I don't know why I bother...
I don't really sympathise with him at all, on any level. Anshe Chung is not his wife. Anshe Chung does not resemble his wife in the slightest. The 'phlying phalanx of phalluses' attack was roughly the equivalent of an eight year old drawing a pointy-hatted stick-figure, labeling it 'Teechur' and adding lightning bolts flying toward it-- only in this case, it's Mrs. Graef drawing the caricature herself. His overreaction was on par with that same teacher seeking the young critic's expulsion because the drawing noted previously was a 'death threat'.
The attack was juvenile, certainly, but flying off the handle and trying to smother it was the worst thing that he could have possibly done.
Copyright is supposed to be imperfect and leaky. I do not want a scheme for perfectly enforcing it via architecture.
This goes for most laws. The difficulty of enforcing laws is what keeps a lot of laws from being horribly onerous burdens rather than simply being annoying inconveniences. I'm against any scheme for perfectly enforcing laws. Laws should always be tempered by human understanding.
Well said, and true, but this is the POV from a free thinking intelligent individual. This is not a shared opinion for many of those that are in power like the head of the media corps, government, etc.
The classic and humours take on this is in South Park where the balding, wimpy head of the RIAA repeatedly slicks back his hair over his bald spot with a squeak, and then shouts "I am above the law!"
This is a caricature, but its not complete fiction either.
DRM is an oxymoron, and has no value to the end user whatsoever. My first experience with DRM came when I bought my first DVD player. At the time, my TV was a TV/VCR combo where the output from my DVD player went through something that had Macrovision, and when I played a Macrovision encoded movie the picture faded in and out and looked like crap.
I did an internet search, and found out what was wrong. A USENET post said that what I was experiencing was a silly hack, DRM of sorts (although macrovision is in the analog spectrum), and the solution was that had to walk across the street, pay $20 for a macrovision defeater (which is basically a lowpass filter), and then I was allowed to view the movies on my brand new DVD player.
The thing is that the price/value ratio is wrong for digital media, but it is correct for printed media.
Let me elaborate. Books, magazines, etc are covered by the same copyright laws as CDs and DVDs. Books can be illegally copied just like a CD/DVD. The difference is that its just cheaper and easier to buy printed material or borrow it from someone or do without than to copy it.
Now, video and audio media cannot seem to get it right and provide a product to fill a market. There are tons of options here, but the current one is the sue the customer until they want to buy our product. Or using guilt/shame marketing techniques into that buying products that you don't want is morally superior to acquiring these things another way.
My take on the matter is fuck them. If you refuse to offer me goods or services that fit my lifestyle in 2007 and you have refused to do so for a decade, then you don't deserve my money. So, sue me. I don't care.
This post has been made with my current understanding of the problem; if a more informed person can correct me wherever I am wrong, I'd be grateful.
Ok. You use the logical fallacy "straw man" twice. "this is the fallacy of refuting a caricatured or extreme version of somebody's argument, rather than the actual argument they've made. Often this fallacy involves putting words into somebody's mouth by saying they've made arguments they haven't actually made"
For instance. You imply that "green eco-activists" say that CFCs are (solely) responsible for the antartic ozone hole. Most of us do NOT say that. We KNOW that ozone degradation occurs naturally. And by the way, ozone is not decayed by lack of sunlight. UV radiation breaks down oxygen molecules, and ozone molecules, so it both creates and destroys ozone. Cold however, accelerates the breakdown.
The problem is that the degradation was accelerated to dangerous levels.
And the same thing is true for global warming. We know climate goes through natural fluctuations. You are again using a strawman when you say the claim is that it has been caused by "the U.S., industry or humanity".
That is not the claim, the claim is that human activity has caused a huge increase in the rate of change.
In my actual experience, the areas where open source was even a remote contender were few and far between (in some cases, they were better, but it was very rare). Even when my employers were cash strapped, when I was far more optimistic about the state of open source software and when I used much of it myself, I could rarely say with a straight face that it was the best or even cheapest solution when all was said and done. This is particularly true when I had to consider the time involved in maintaining the systems (esp. training/managing my department well enough so it wasn't dependent on just 1 or 2 people) and making things clear to the users.
No offense, but I read your resume. You've been out of school and working for real companies for maybe 3 actual years? In that time you've managed some web servers and done some web development work? Web server/programming is one of the few where open source is relatively strong. There is, however, a much broader world out there to consider. What's more, your level of responsibility and the duration for which you saw it through would have a huge impact on your views on cost vs. benefit.
And for the record, I'm not all "happy-happy" about closed source software. I do have my gripes, especially with some of the stuff Microsoft has put out. We, however, are comparing the relative strengths of open vs closed systems. I've experienced a wide array of software quality, however the general trend was that the proprietary alternatives were dramatically better than the open source ones (with some notable exceptions)
Then please name some of them and tell me which open source alternative was superior and why. I think we may find a pattern here.
Huh? This doesn't make sense. I certainly sought out open source solutions when possible. I know I was not alone in that. Often times it was initially attractive because we could obtain it quickly and at an attractive price point (~$0), little/no impact on the budget and no approval necessary for big ticket alternatives,
So, if you compare the ideal case for commercial software against the worst case for open source software, commercial software wins.
Big surprise there.
Neither your caricature of commercial software, nor your caricature of open source software, has much to do with reality. Bad open source basically doesn't exist for a commercial company, because they most likely won't even encounter it, and it certainly won't last long in their selection system unless it's completely broken. And I've been involved in buying many closed-source libraries, and your happy-happy portrayal of closed-source software doesn't really remind me of any of those experiences. By far I have more trouble with the closed-source stuff just being unsupported, and sometimes it's the big vendors (as in Microsoft, Oracle, etc.) who are the worst!
That was from Steve Sailer. http://isteve.blogspot.com/2007/01/study-25-millio n-mexican-americans.html
"Study: 25 million Mexican-Americans failing to contribute to high tech in America -- For years, I've been pointing at the dog that didn't bark -- the remarkable failure of Latin American immigrants to contribute to California's high tech industries. Granted, the new much-publicized Duke study finding that 1/4th of technology start-ups are founded by immigrants never gets around to saying that in so many words, but if you check the data carefully, that's what you find. You are going to hear a lot of heehawing over how this study proves we benefit from Open Borders, but what it shows instead is that tens of millions of illegal immigrants have contributed almost nothing to high tech in America.
For example, Graph 5a is "Immigrant Groups Founding Engineering and Technology Companies in California." India is out in front at 20%, followed by Taiwan (13%), and China (10%). This time, Mexico makes the chart, but with only 1% (and that's not of all tech / engineering firms but 1% of just those with immigrant participants). That's not a lot of return for having 10,000,000 Mexicans in California.
Similarly, Chart 10 shows patent applications by non-citizen immigrants over the last 20 years. Mexicans, who are by far the largest number of non-citizens in America, don't even make the top 20: Chinese & Taiwanese are first, followed by India, Canada, UK, Germany, France and Russia. Heck, Turkey makes the top 20, and there are hardly any Turks in America. But not Mexico (or any other Latin American country).
Dennis Mangan adds:
Uhh, hold on... the fact that 25% of these startups had "at least one senior executive... born outside the United States" would seem to exaggerate just a smidgen the responsibility of immigrants for these companies. If a company had a native-born founder, CEO, and president, but the CTO was from India, then supposedly immigrants are "behind" the company.
A reader writes:
Possibly the most politically incorrect joke in the history of South Park (which of course is saying something) is about this topic, from the episode "Fat Butt and Pancake Head" about Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck. The main story is about Cartman doing an over-the-top heavily-accented caricatured impersonation of Lopez, and Kyle's frustration that no one ever calls him on the offensive nature of it. But at the very beginning, just before Cartman unleashes his offensive prank at an Hispanic Cultural Appreciation Day assembly at their school, we catch the tail end of Kyle's more conscientious presentation. As we enter the scene, he is just concluding with words to the effect of: "...and that's my report on Hispanic contributions to the field of American technology." He gets an appreciative round of applause from the diversity judges and then it's off with the Cartman bit. The joke (which of course is: what the heck did his report SAY?) is slyer than the show's usual style and even more mischievous."
The jury pool is comprised of citizens of the United States (largely: one presumes the assorted illegal is sucked into the system). Unless we're willing to have some sort of jury qualification exam, i.e. disenfranchise a chunk of the citizenry, which I think's largely a non-starter and probably should be (that's a hell of a consequence for false negatives). However, I think that there are certain *suits* that it is reasonable to remove people from, and if you could rely on lawyers to not be a toxin in the bloodstream of humanity (oh, darn), then you could hope that this selection would be a decent process.
But it's not. The company I work for is the largest private contractor (non-government) in the south of the *state*, and is 80% engineers. But for all that, almost everyone I know is instantly removed from the jury pool: saying "engineer" is like announcing that you have the Monopoly "Get Out of Jury Duty Free" card. Oh my GOD, they might consider the evidence! They might be capable of understanding complicated matters and not voting based on what they had for lunch!
This happens because, for lawyers, there is no incentive not to game and fuck the system. No, no one expects them to act like humans and simply consider what is proper and correct for justice's sake! You can't have the defense and prosecution teams get together and, like DECENT GODDAMN HUMANS, simply say, "Unfit, fit, unfit, fit" based purely on intellectual, etc. merits. No, it has to be this goddamn caricature of a process where each looks for the person mostly likely to be swayed to their point of view, regardless of the consequencs.
And there is no oversight to say, "Oh, bullshit, you picked 4 illiterate hicks from the pool of 60 people in the profession under discussion?" NOTE: you could probably easily stick the 4 illiterate hicks in various criminal cases where their judgment, if unlikely to be considered "as good", should be "sufficient". But we
This doesn't happen in engineering. Here is Feynman on the Challenger Shuttle debacle: For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled. And it is rarely in the financial (and thus, corrosive) interests of engineers to fuck people. Definitely it happens, but ask if institutions run by engineers are as fucking TOXIC as organizations run by lawyers. Anyone disagree?
And I have worked with engineers I personally loathed and whose work and careers it would absolutely tickle me to destroy, but I don't, because the end result is a bad product, and you cannot HIDE that. Also, I have a soul. Also, there are consequences. Can you say the same about the law? I don't think so.
My job is produce things that work. A lawyer's job should be to produce justice. But we've decided that only lawyers can be in charge of the incentives to behave for lawyers, and that's simply a receipe for disaster for everyone except lawyers.
Business software isn't the problem. The software that is the problem is the software that runs on every naive home user's PC
Berger sounds like a VM-language bigot (or paid ($30K from MS)
who doesn't understand how most software is really made, and prefers to believe in caricatures of programmers.
Great, you've called the guy a bigot, a shill, and an idiot, without even having understood what he was talking about.