Dammit, I need to stop getting into discussions about
Communism.
Communism, as Marx saw it, did not have socialism as an
intermediary stepping stone. He was rather explicit in this: the
working class of an industrialized capitalist economy would gain a
collective class consciousness, and would rise up in a revolution
against the business leaders (the bourgeoisie). A temporary
'dictatorship of the proletariat' would ensue, during which class
boundaries would be forcibly erased. Then Communism would 'happen',
with a lack of class distinctions, and then... who knows. I don't
remember.
But one thing that was explicitly excluded was
a Socialist stepping stone. In fact, one of the defining
features of Marxist Communism (if we want to refer to his theories
specifically, and not the later hybrids) is that the master-subject
relationship, expressed in so many ways throughout history
(master/slave, lord/subject, bourgeoisie/proletariat) would
persist until the proletariat revolution. It would not
gradually segue from division, to greater equality (presumably
through socialism) and finally to complete Communism. Marx never saw
it that way, and, even among alternate Communist theories, I don't
think that gradual change was ever predicted.
However, it might be accurate to say that Socialism was an
intermediate ideology for the formation of Communism. The
19th century had lots of Socialist thinkers before Marx came along,
although by and large they're forgotten because the influence that
Marx and Communism had on our century pretty much dwarfs that of the
the other thinkers. I have no doubt that Marx was influenced by the
socialist ideologies of his time, even though he did eventually
reject them to make his economics-based argument.
You were modded up for noting that Slashdot's moderation was driven
by psychological conformity... which, depending on your perspective,
could be viewed either as a vindication or as a counterpoint to your
comment.
Slashdot moderators became self-aware at 7:29PM, April 21, 2008...
Bill Gates has donated kagillions. I'm sure Microsoft has
probably donated a lot as well, although I don't know if it's
comparably larger than other companies their size. But it's Gates, as
a private citizen, that's really been doing the remarkable amounts of
philanthropy.
More likely, they're upgrading their server environment and don't want to spend the time updating the application's codebase. (You know, legacy codebases. Ugh.)
Okay, help me out here. Do you mean "how well that turned out" in the
sense that HTML has been a huge success (you know, what with being the
medium that we're using to display our comments right now...) or in the sense of being a huge disaster?
I mean, I can sympathize with both views. I'm just wondering which
one I should sympathize with in the context of your post.
Just to clarify, you never have to "explain" music on your computer to anyone. It can certainly be used as evidence that you distributed (which has now been expanded to "made available"), either by showing that the music was present on your HDD, or by inspecting logfiles on the disk, but the crime is not possession (yet): it's distribution that violates copyright law.
What (generally) gets people in trouble is when RIAA&co see their IP addy on a P2P network, and choose (I'd imagine it's largely random) to investigate further that IP addy instead of one of the thousands of others.
What the hell is it with Ron Paul? Does he just have a fetish for getting his legions out spamming? Normally I'm "Whatever floats your boat" but his getting off is getting in the way of my enjoyment of/., YouTube, and most anything else that sits still long enough for one of you crazies to stencil that website up.
Hell, there was a fricken "Grandmas for Ron Paul" campaign bus at my bus stop - can't I have a moment of peace in the offline world? I mean, Libertarians have always been kind of weird, but in a "You're Libertarian? Oh, you poor thing" kind of way. Now it's more along the lines of "Shut UP already!"
Seriously, you Ron Paul proselytizers need to get a grip on reality. The Gold Standard, total gun freedom, and opposing income taxes are wonderful positions - for the 18th century.
His policies are blatantly reactionary. Instead of a system of education that even aims for equality, he'd prefer that our schools be funded by the taxes of the people in a state or city jurisdiction. In other words, richer people get better schools - in even blunter terms, private, segregated schools, in everything but name.
And his opinions about court decisions show an astounding lack of respect for the separation of powers and the judicial tradition. This guy thinks he knows better than the Supreme Court what the Constitution says about Federal vs. State Jurisdiction. Ever heard of "hubris?"
Man, I'm sorry for losing it like this, but this guy has been pissing me off. My only comfort in the whole thing is that he doesn't have a chance of winning, but the level of viral spam he's triggered is annoying to say the least.
I think it's time for a Greasemonkey script that removes any text with his web site in it. Ten bucks for whoever writes one.
Except for the fact that you cannot read someone's email as a routine matter of simly handling it, as in a mail carrier. It takes extraordinary effort to access/read someone's email, akin to steaming open an envelope. Ergo, your assertion is wrong.
Counterpoint: Wireshark. Reading someone's plaintext email with off-the-shelf hardware, for either ethernet or WiFi, does not take "extraordinary effort." It hardly takes effort at all. If you ever want to try it out, be warned: it'll scare you.
In contrast, sniffing SSL traffic is for most practical purposes neigh-impossible. It's so nice how public-key encryption gives us this wonderful, thick solid line to be drawn between "private" and "not private" communications... now if only legislators would stop trying to modify this seemingly perfect, clearly drawn boundary, etched in the universal laws of mathematics.
Okay, man, you do get that there is a fundamental, legal difference between "Stop distributing until you're in compliance with the terms of the license" and "Show the source code, period, or go to jail and/or face other legal sanctions"? Here's a hint: citizens have the power to sue to get #1, but generally #2 only comes about when said source code is involved in a lawsuit, and even then, you only have to show the code to the judge, not license it under the GPL. We're not talking about a mugger here. We're talking about the Rule of Law - you know, that thing that well-adjusted people respect and follow. And to the Law, there is a huge difference between the two choices. I'm no law student - and not being one of those said well-adjusted people I'm not likely to ever be one - but I thought that the distinction between these two was elementary.
(Step Two: Make a point) You seriously somehow got the illusion that the 'billions' poured into computer simulations even begins to approach the scale of money involved modern industrial production?
(Step Three: Condescension, with implication of lack of real-world knowledge) I'm afraid you simply have a lot to learn about how money works in the real world.
(Step Four: ???) Irish line dancing is the single largest cause of global climate change, after everything else.
(Step Five: Profit!) You, sir, are just plain dead wrong. There is no "real" money in science research... if they were doing it for Profit!, they wouldn't be spending their days being ridiculed by the likes of you - they'd be out shorting stock for flood insurance companies.
Obfuscation of binaries is, regrettably, an increasingly refined art. I would take a look at this, a presentation about how Skype does a lot of it's obfuscation, to see the state of the art today. Admittedly, this is Skype, with resources, know-how and a lot of people, but it's quite possible to make reverse engineering difficult. It's just usually not worth it.
"Open the code or stop selling your one single product" isn't a way to force you to open the code?
Not in the slightest. "Open it up or stop" is incredibly far from "Open it up, period," both legally and practically. They can stop you from distributing your code if it's violating copyrights, but that's copyright law, not GPL licensing.
I haven't read the lawsuit myself, but I feel compelled to point out that there being a way to turn off an indexer does not an API make. Can the indexer be turned off programatically (EG, during the Google Desktop install process)? Anything less is unacceptable to users. Frankly, it's ridiculous to expect people to have to go into the Windows settings just to install an application.
Absolutely do this.
I also like to swap my tab and alt keys, although that's not nearly as dramatic a change as caps lock/control.
Since the GP was using Ubuntu, do sudo apt-get install xkeycaps for a great program to make the remapping easy without having to worry about xmodmap tweaking.
No. If you're taking someone to court for copyright infringement and you submit a copy of their book as evidence, you do *not* have to license redistribution rights for the book. It's evidence. The same is true with CC - they're not bound to keep it CC, because they're not distributing it, they're submitting it for evidence.
The reasons for Chinese imports being cheap are twofold - complete lack of environmental control and use of slave labour.
Jesus Christ. Have you ever been to China?
The reason for their extemely low prices is simple supply and demand. Labor is dead-cheap because there is so much of it. I got a beautiful painting about an hour outside of Guangzhou for about a buck twenty five. The painting is a very large, rougly seven-feet wide one. For the record, the painter was not a slave. It's just that that's the price he can charge, since there were literally thousands of others I could have gone to.
Now, I'm not saying that there isn't any slave labor in China. I have no idea; there probably are some instances of it, just like there probably are instances of it here in the US. But it is simply not what drives their economy. It's not even remotely related to their success as an economy.
Pollution is another matter. I've never been to a traditionally smoggy city in the US (say, Houston or LA) but Guangzhou had a blanket of smog a couple hundred feet above the surface at all times... I can actually remember the air being "heavy." It was a releif to get out to countryside, so we could see the sun again.
I was too young to care about DMCA, Sonny Bono, and DeCSS when they happened, so I missed Valenti's 'best' years.
However, I do know that suggesting that people's dislike of him is about 'watching movies for free' or even about copyright law is disingenuous. This is about My freedoms as an American, freedoms that he cast aside as outdated and irrelevant.
In the technological age, protected, free and anonymous speech and copyright law are mutually exclusive. If it had not been for Valenti, we may have done away with Copyright by now and embraced freedom; instead, because of him, it is unlikely we will ever do so.
What is being said about him is obviously juvenile and distasteful. But at the end of the day - it's just juvenile and distateful. Valenti did things that are orders of magnitude more important - he made it the norm for the rights of the People to be cast aside when so convenient. That is not distasteful - that's disgusting.
There are freedoms that I will never have once I turn 18. A century ago, the mere thought of infringing them would have been laughed off. Today, however, largely because of the efforts of Valenti and others, 'protecting' the 'investments' of studios is more important.
Slashdot Mirror
And it would still be far, far worse.
Dammit, I need to stop getting into discussions about Communism.
Communism, as Marx saw it, did not have socialism as an intermediary stepping stone. He was rather explicit in this: the working class of an industrialized capitalist economy would gain a collective class consciousness, and would rise up in a revolution against the business leaders (the bourgeoisie). A temporary 'dictatorship of the proletariat' would ensue, during which class boundaries would be forcibly erased. Then Communism would 'happen', with a lack of class distinctions, and then... who knows. I don't remember.
But one thing that was explicitly excluded was a Socialist stepping stone. In fact, one of the defining features of Marxist Communism (if we want to refer to his theories specifically, and not the later hybrids) is that the master-subject relationship, expressed in so many ways throughout history (master/slave, lord/subject, bourgeoisie/proletariat) would persist until the proletariat revolution. It would not gradually segue from division, to greater equality (presumably through socialism) and finally to complete Communism. Marx never saw it that way, and, even among alternate Communist theories, I don't think that gradual change was ever predicted.
However, it might be accurate to say that Socialism was an intermediate ideology for the formation of Communism. The 19th century had lots of Socialist thinkers before Marx came along, although by and large they're forgotten because the influence that Marx and Communism had on our century pretty much dwarfs that of the the other thinkers. I have no doubt that Marx was influenced by the socialist ideologies of his time, even though he did eventually reject them to make his economics-based argument.
Meh. Why do I care anyway?
You were modded up for noting that Slashdot's moderation was driven by psychological conformity... which, depending on your perspective, could be viewed either as a vindication or as a counterpoint to your comment.
Slashdot moderators became self-aware at 7:29PM, April 21, 2008...
Bill Gates has donated kagillions. I'm sure Microsoft has probably donated a lot as well, although I don't know if it's comparably larger than other companies their size. But it's Gates, as a private citizen, that's really been doing the remarkable amounts of philanthropy.
More likely, they're upgrading their server environment and don't want to spend the time updating the application's codebase. (You know, legacy codebases. Ugh.)
Yes.
Okay, help me out here. Do you mean "how well that turned out" in the sense that HTML has been a huge success (you know, what with being the medium that we're using to display our comments right now ...) or in the sense of being a huge disaster?
I mean, I can sympathize with both views. I'm just wondering which one I should sympathize with in the context of your post.
Just to clarify, you never have to "explain" music on your computer to anyone. It can certainly be used as evidence that you distributed (which has now been expanded to "made available"), either by showing that the music was present on your HDD, or by inspecting logfiles on the disk, but the crime is not possession (yet): it's distribution that violates copyright law.
What (generally) gets people in trouble is when RIAA&co see their IP addy on a P2P network, and choose (I'd imagine it's largely random) to investigate further that IP addy instead of one of the thousands of others.
I very seriously doubt that the "owner" (assuming there is only one guy) is in the US. I'd imagine it's a group of people, anyway.
What the hell is it with Ron Paul? Does he just have a fetish for getting his legions out spamming? Normally I'm "Whatever floats your boat" but his getting off is getting in the way of my enjoyment of /., YouTube, and most anything else that sits still long enough for one of you crazies to stencil that website up.
Hell, there was a fricken "Grandmas for Ron Paul" campaign bus at my bus stop - can't I have a moment of peace in the offline world? I mean, Libertarians have always been kind of weird, but in a "You're Libertarian? Oh, you poor thing" kind of way. Now it's more along the lines of "Shut UP already!"
Seriously, you Ron Paul proselytizers need to get a grip on reality. The Gold Standard, total gun freedom, and opposing income taxes are wonderful positions - for the 18th century.
His policies are blatantly reactionary. Instead of a system of education that even aims for equality, he'd prefer that our schools be funded by the taxes of the people in a state or city jurisdiction. In other words, richer people get better schools - in even blunter terms, private, segregated schools, in everything but name.
And his opinions about court decisions show an astounding lack of respect for the separation of powers and the judicial tradition. This guy thinks he knows better than the Supreme Court what the Constitution says about Federal vs. State Jurisdiction. Ever heard of "hubris?"
Man, I'm sorry for losing it like this, but this guy has been pissing me off. My only comfort in the whole thing is that he doesn't have a chance of winning, but the level of viral spam he's triggered is annoying to say the least.
I think it's time for a Greasemonkey script that removes any text with his web site in it. Ten bucks for whoever writes one.
In contrast, sniffing SSL traffic is for most practical purposes neigh-impossible. It's so nice how public-key encryption gives us this wonderful, thick solid line to be drawn between "private" and "not private" communications... now if only legislators would stop trying to modify this seemingly perfect, clearly drawn boundary, etched in the universal laws of mathematics.
Okay, man, you do get that there is a fundamental, legal difference between "Stop distributing until you're in compliance with the terms of the license" and "Show the source code, period, or go to jail and/or face other legal sanctions"? Here's a hint: citizens have the power to sue to get #1, but generally #2 only comes about when said source code is involved in a lawsuit, and even then, you only have to show the code to the judge, not license it under the GPL. We're not talking about a mugger here. We're talking about the Rule of Law - you know, that thing that well-adjusted people respect and follow. And to the Law, there is a huge difference between the two choices. I'm no law student - and not being one of those said well-adjusted people I'm not likely to ever be one - but I thought that the distinction between these two was elementary.
Apparently not.
Wait... you're kidding, right?
(Step Two: Make a point)
You seriously somehow got the illusion that the 'billions' poured into computer simulations even begins to approach the scale of money involved modern industrial production?
(Step Three: Condescension, with implication of lack of real-world knowledge)
I'm afraid you simply have a lot to learn about how money works in the real world.
(Step Four: ???)
Irish line dancing is the single largest cause of global climate change, after everything else.
(Step Five: Profit!)
You, sir, are just plain dead wrong. There is no "real" money in science research... if they were doing it for Profit!, they wouldn't be spending their days being ridiculed by the likes of you - they'd be out shorting stock for flood insurance companies.
Obfuscation of binaries is, regrettably, an increasingly refined art. I would take a look at this, a presentation about how Skype does a lot of it's obfuscation, to see the state of the art today. Admittedly, this is Skype, with resources, know-how and a lot of people, but it's quite possible to make reverse engineering difficult. It's just usually not worth it.
I stand corrected then; thanks for the clarification. I'll have to RTFL to see what exactly the complaint is... oh well...
I haven't read the lawsuit myself, but I feel compelled to point out that there being a way to turn off an indexer does not an API make. Can the indexer be turned off programatically (EG, during the Google Desktop install process)? Anything less is unacceptable to users. Frankly, it's ridiculous to expect people to have to go into the Windows settings just to install an application.
See, crazy me, I'd want a anti-trust prosecutor running anti-trust prosecutions.
But that's just me.
Absolutely do this. I also like to swap my tab and alt keys, although that's not nearly as dramatic a change as caps lock/control. Since the GP was using Ubuntu, do sudo apt-get install xkeycaps for a great program to make the remapping easy without having to worry about xmodmap tweaking.
No. If you're taking someone to court for copyright infringement and you submit a copy of their book as evidence, you do *not* have to license redistribution rights for the book. It's evidence. The same is true with CC - they're not bound to keep it CC, because they're not distributing it, they're submitting it for evidence.
Helpdesk drone here. I'd say "Guh! It's Model View Controller, not Client!"
The reason for their extemely low prices is simple supply and demand. Labor is dead-cheap because there is so much of it. I got a beautiful painting about an hour outside of Guangzhou for about a buck twenty five. The painting is a very large, rougly seven-feet wide one. For the record, the painter was not a slave. It's just that that's the price he can charge, since there were literally thousands of others I could have gone to.
Now, I'm not saying that there isn't any slave labor in China. I have no idea; there probably are some instances of it, just like there probably are instances of it here in the US. But it is simply not what drives their economy. It's not even remotely related to their success as an economy.
Pollution is another matter. I've never been to a traditionally smoggy city in the US (say, Houston or LA) but Guangzhou had a blanket of smog a couple hundred feet above the surface at all times... I can actually remember the air being "heavy." It was a releif to get out to countryside, so we could see the sun again.
I was too young to care about DMCA, Sonny Bono, and DeCSS when they happened, so I missed Valenti's 'best' years.
However, I do know that suggesting that people's dislike of him is about 'watching movies for free' or even about copyright law is disingenuous. This is about My freedoms as an American, freedoms that he cast aside as outdated and irrelevant.
In the technological age, protected, free and anonymous speech and copyright law are mutually exclusive. If it had not been for Valenti, we may have done away with Copyright by now and embraced freedom; instead, because of him, it is unlikely we will ever do so.
What is being said about him is obviously juvenile and distasteful. But at the end of the day - it's just juvenile and distateful. Valenti did things that are orders of magnitude more important - he made it the norm for the rights of the People to be cast aside when so convenient. That is not distasteful - that's disgusting.
There are freedoms that I will never have once I turn 18. A century ago, the mere thought of infringing them would have been laughed off. Today, however, largely because of the efforts of Valenti and others, 'protecting' the 'investments' of studios is more important.
That is my "Just, wow."