(At least, that's how/. probably would have worded the headline when Reno's Justice Department declined to investigate Gore -- assuming/. editors weren't the foaming-at-the-mouth, Bush-hating, knee-jerk liberals we all know they are!!)
Had to get that off my chest...now, as to your comment about Reno having had "balls"...
...yes, it takes "balls" to order men with guns to point them at marginalized, impoverished right-wing white and Hispanic Christians, I suppose.
Goodness knows Reno avoided doing her actual job when it came to investigating Gore.
Now that would have taken true courage, since, unlike with other scandals she did hand over to Ken Starr, there was plenty of credible evidence of criminal behavior on hand!
(And to think I started out as a fan of Janet Reno, even through the Waco debacle and her testimony! Sure, I like to give people a chance to do a job well, but she fairly quickly blasted through the floor of my expectations, such as they were....)
We need to be able to rationally discuss these issues, not hold rain dances.
Then this:
You sir, are a bigot, plain and simple
Finally, these:
In other words, you do not respect raitonal [sic] discussion
you never cared about rational arguement anyway
After all this, you ask me questions, as if expecting answers?
Sorry, but I feel the need to relieve you of ever having to endure my hatred of rational discussion again, so I must decline to answer further questions. Please make sure you never again read anything I write.
...because the US Government won't fund research on cryogenically-preserved corpses.
Sure, some people (including those who thought they might live through the preservation process) may believe those corpses have the possibility of living, someday, down the road, if we decided to restore them and had the technology to do so.
But, we need to do the science (and that means getting federal funding) now, so, as long as whoever is living allows us to unfreeze these corpses and extract whatever tissues we need, there's no reason to be concerned over the fact that such an action inevitably "kills" these corpses, because they're already dead. Just because they might someday, through some scientific discovery, be resuscitatible is not our problem.
After all, this isn't about Morality, i.e. what a bunch of white European redneck racist homophobic Southern (they're always Southern, y'see?) Christian baptists that George W. Bush listens to.
This is about Science.
(Oh, yeah, and Federal Funding for it. Can't forget that, can we? It's so much more convenient for us scientists -- I include myself in that, since I'm the one withholding $100M from supporting them -- to have the Federal government collect money from y'all by force than for us to have to go door to door, hat in hand, pleading for money. We simply don't have the time for that -- we're scientists, after all! We're doing important work! The rest of you can just be happy that your tax dollars are going to fund whatever we decide is science at any given moment.)
Remember, just like embryos, these corpses aren't going to contribute anything to society ever again -- especially if we destroy them, which we've decided is inevitable. (Please ignore the fact that there are children walking around today who were once frozen embryos slated for destruction -- especially since that cannot be said for anyone who was once a cryogenically preserved corpse!)
Now, if Bush changes his policy and allows federal funding for extracting organic materials from cryogenically-preserved corpses, I'll have only one thing left to worry about, namely...
...where in the world will I get that $100M so I can give it to Science??
Re:The ACM code of ethics has deliberate loopholes
on
ACM vs. RIAA
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Well, slap my cigar and call me Willy, when I looked over the code specifically for the wording you found in 2.3, I didn't see it!
So, you're right, the ACM has already answered the most important of my questions, leaving only my belief that software is close enough to speech, aka research, that software patents pose a greater and longer-term threat to secure systems than the DMCA.
(Remember, the DMCA applies only to software distributed under it, while software patents apply to all software, even free software, so while we can theoretically avoid "DMCA-contaminated" software in our research -- as impractical as that might be -- we can't avoid working with software that might be "contaminated" with algorithms already, or being, patented, without leaving the field of software altogether...something I often consider doing myself, to be honest.)
At this point, I consider my concerns about the ACM's recent position to pale in comparison to the good they've done by highlighting the risks posed by legislation such as the DMCA, especially in the short run.
Ultimately, as the ACM's own section 2.3 says, it's not, to me, a matter of "software patents are bad" or "the DMCA is bad". I believe it's simply a matter of helping everyone, especially those involved in deciding the acceptability of such law, understand the long-term, possibly unintended and/or unforeseen, consequences, so they can see more clearly what they are already accepting responsibility for.
(I guess what I am saying is that, while section 2.3 specifically identifies those going against some laws in favor of higher moral/ethical laws as bearing the risks and responsibilities of doing so, I believe that's true of everyone, regardless of whether they're "playing by the rules", violating the rules, or writing the rules. Not that everyone's "equally guilty", but since everyone has the capacity to decide how to proceed, they have to recognize that they have a responsibility for the freedom to make whatever choices they make. The more enlightened they can be about the potential outcomes, the better, is how I see it.)
Caning? Ouch. That's where they hit your buttocks and stuff.
They don't hit your stuff, just your buttocks.
What About Research That IS Computer Technology?
on
ACM vs. RIAA
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Years ago, I dropped my membership in the ACM, mainly because they came out enough in favor of software patents that I felt unable to (morally, practically, effectively?) abide by their code of conduct requiring members to treat them as valid.
(That code of conduct is, generally, in my opinion, excellent, and well worth reading and abiding by, to the extent it's possible.)
Unlike most any other industry, the computer industry is one in which research on the technology is often presented as the technology itself. In that sense, even well-established, free, "production" software like GNU Emacs, GCC, and the Linux kernel can be reasonably considered "research" as well -- they're distributed as source code, and everyone is encouraged to study it, learn from it, modify it, and distribute what they learn and/or their modifications.
Since the existence of software patents directly infringes peoples' individual rights to distribute research in that form (free source code), I found the ACM's requirements, as much as I agree with the basic ethical, moral, and practical basis for them (that is, it's generally ethical, moral, and practical to obey existing laws), to be too much for me in the case of software patents.
So, while I'm happy to see the ACM recognize the specific new threat, I wonder how they view software patents today, since software patents can easily render much practical research either infeasible (can't be distributed as free software without authors losing their houses and other property in court due to patent-infringement lawsuits) or illegal?
For example, without things like the DMCA, software patents can be used to prevent (or punish for) distributing things like DeCSS and other "IP-security" softwarez. (I used that term on purpose; "warez" denotes illegal software, it should perhaps also denote immoral, self-delusional, or tyrannical software as well.;-)
True, ideally, software patents make an invention's nature plain enough for all (adequately schooled in the arts) to understand, and what the ACM's complaining about here is the "security-through-obscurity" approach presently used by certain companies enjoying an artificial, and ultimately too-fragile, legal fence built around it, known as the DMCA.
But, in practice, software patents are not used by typical programmers or computer-science researchers as a source of information on how stuff works; and, further, the lawyers who help write them up apparently try to make sure they are as inscrutable as possible (while still passing muster with the Patent and Trademark Office, or whatever it's called), so as to provide the least useful information, while carving out the most intellectual "property" possible.
So, even absent the DMCA, it seems to me that a much broader problem, including much of what the ACM is presently worried about, is posed by software patents, which too-often amount to inscrutable, unhelpful "explanations" of just what a person (or even a computer program) might, on its own, be doing, that is illegal, because the owner of the software patent a) says so and b) can afford expensive lawyers.
I guess what I'm asking is, given that the DMCA and software patents do exist:
Does the ACM expect its members to abide by the legal restrictions of the DMCA, even if the result (not publishing weaknesses in a timely fashion) might be loss of property or even life of innocents?
Similarly, does the ACM expect its members to strive to avoid infringing software patents, by:
not publishing software that even might infringe
not publishing research papers that describe patented properties, if it's fairly straightforward to convert any pseudocode or descriptions in the papers into software (in languages ranging from assembly code to Haskell, ML, Prolog, and so on)
spending so much time researching the constant stream of software patents which they might otherwise infringe that they have little or no time to actually research and publish computer technologies?
And does it expect its members to do these things even if doing so prevents them finding and/or publishing security flaws, again, even if the result of withholding such information might include the loss of property or life?
Beyond specifics such as the DMCA and software patents, does the ACM generally expect its members to abide by legal restrictions when the result of doing so could have severe moral repercussions, such as loss of life or property due to inadequate, or even hostile, computing technology being deployed by companies using "intellectual-property" law to protect such deployments against ACM members dutifully informing the public?
Of course, these are really general questions of ethics, but since the ACM is making a statement, one which I support, I'd like to see them continue to think through issues like these, so their members have appropriate guidance from them regarding ethical issues, and so they serve as an ethically-consistent "voice", for computing professionals, to be heard by those who take on the responsibility of authoring and enforcing human laws.
Not true! Personally, I'm involved in a cdr culture. I'm always chasing some tail....
;-)
Re:BRAVO! Re:Why the DMCA is Just The First Step
on
The Internet Backlash
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· Score: 1
A bit rambling...
A bit? A *BIT*!!??
Sheesh, guess I'll have to type longer next time!
(Yeah, I do tend to be verbose. I'm a charter member of On And On Anon...say *that* three times fast!;-)
Why the DMCA is Just The First Step
on
The Internet Backlash
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· Score: 4, Interesting
First, imagine there's a planet-full of people with little or no communication between smallish groups whose individuals, due primarily to being physically close to each other, interact in ways that might be called "primitive" by some future standard.
Second, imagine what happens when a new technology comes along that allows these groups to communicate with each other, not so much directly via voice, but communicate stuff like "I've got something I'm willing to part with, which someone else might want" and "I could sure use something I'm thinking about, does anyone know where I can find something like that".
Except, the big thing about this "new technology" is that this form of communication is primarily about abstracting these communications in a way that makes obstacles formerly difficult to surmount -- such as knowing lots of details about a local group before communicating with it -- nearly completely disappear.
And, this technology, while it supports "Peer-to-peer" communication, is most effective because it supports arbitrary many-to-many communications at this level.
That is, a person in group A doesn't have to know much of anything about a person in group B to communicate these kinds of statements, queries, requests, offers, etc., nor do those two people have to rendezvous to communicate, using this new technology, in a fashion that automatically excludes either of them from communicating with other people in other groups.
But, there's a problem. There are entities -- let's call them "interests" -- that depend, they believe anyway, on the difficulty of communication between groups in this manner. They believe they have to keep these groups effectively separate, so they can be the "intermediaries" through which these groups do most, ideally all, of their communication.
And these interests become very alarmed at the prospect of the groups of humans communicating so easily and openly, that they try to shut down the new technology.
But, guess what! The new technology almost automatically "routes around" any blatant roadblocks set up to restrict it, because if communication is shut down directly between group X and group Y, it'll naturally, with only a little extra effort, flow indirectly via other groups.
Even in cases where specific groups, or collections of groups, are "successfully" shut off from the outside world, this new technology allows people within the isolated groups to communicate effectively, even in "hiding" if necessary, enough so they yearn, more and more every day, for the opportunity to communicate freely with all those other groups out there, with whom they now communicate only sporadically and at great risk.
So, these "interests" inevitably try yet another tack.
For one thing, they try to convince enough people in each group that, somehow, people in their group who communicate the most, and gain the most from the communication, benefit unfairly from the new technology.
They also start setting up beauracracies to try to centralize, or channel, these communications, and encourage more and more people to consider any communications outside of these channels to be, somehow, immoral or unethical.
Oh, sure, at first these beauracracies are designed to "smooth the flow" of communications, to "enable" them for "newbies" who don't know the system all that well, so as to protect them from themselves, so to speak.
But, inevitably, these beauracracies do almost nothing but grow, and not by simply participating, like everyone else, as equals, in this communications system -- no, they have to use force to interfere with, and maybe "skim off of", communications that would ordinarily happen just fine without them. Only by reducing the natural flow of communications can they really grow the way their proponents dream they should.
And the irony is that they've convinced so many people of the necessity of this, that even people who haven't yet even begun to really use and understand this wonderful new technology are educated, or indoctrinated, to believe that it is, in fact, evil, or at least enables a great deal of evil, and that, in the long run, it should be shut down, by force if not voluntarily by its users, to return to a "simpler time", before the technology became available, or at least to a time when it wasn't so widely and effectively used by individual people as they saw fit.
After all, the beauracracy, by controlling communication, is able to emit a constant stream of "examples" of "horrible things" that happen when communication happens freely. They get better and better at focusing people's attention on those comparatively rare examples, successfully hiding the fact that the vast majority of uses of this new technology are benign, if not obviously beneficial to society as a whole, as well as the individuals engaging in them.
Yet, as anyone who pays attention knows, wherever the anti-technology interests succeed in "roping off" several groups for awhile, those "horrible things" happen so much more often. They don't publicize that, of course, and a whole cottage industry arises to defend, and mislead regarding, those roped-off areas, even after the ropes have been overrun by the people within them. These areas are, therefore, regarded by many as "safe" areas, potential utopias where the constant access to worldwide communication is reduced to a pleasant, nearly noiseless, trickle by the beneficent dictators who decide exactly who communicates with whom, when, and how.
Sure, these interests, in trying to achieve these results, occasionally overreach, provoking harsh reactions from a (usually small) segment of the overall population.
But, with rare exception, there are never enough people in any given group that truly see the threat these artificial impediments to this form of communication, imposed on behalf of the "interests", represents to the body of humanity as a whole.
The divide-and-conquer strategy thus appears to work, and work well. Over time, as more and more people begin to define their well-being based on how much they communicate with the beauracracy, rather than freely with other groups, people who might otherwise fight against the whole idea of such a beauracracy resort instead to fighting in favor of just this or that specific form of beauracratic interference with how this new technology would naturally work, so as to ensure that the beauracracy becomes more firmly entrenched between groups that would otherwise communicate freely, so people already depending (at least somewhat) on the beauracracy for their communications will have more to enjoy, safe in the knowledge that their friendly beauracracy provides them a "safe", "reliable" connection to the outside world.
For example, notions of "fairness" arise that, while simply and directly handled in an unfettered system, seem to require yet more beauracracy to balance things out. Instead of someone who spots such an unfairness simply offering their ability to communicate on behalf of the disadvantaged, they're encouraged to call on the beauracracy to explicitly disadvantage those who are seen as, comparatively, advantaged. The result is that the widespread urge to do good for one's neighbor in need is replaced by a widespread urge to call on the use of force to make someone else "do good" for that neighbor.
The only thing that could dismantle such a beauracracy is if a substantial number of citizens made it their goal to dispel not just with the beauracracy, but with the whole notion that it's ever necessary to intervene between two or more people communicating using this new technology.
But that's not likely to happen, because the "interests" ultimately end up controlling the media and educational establishments, making even openly discussing reducing the interference something that must be done in whispers.
Now, if you think I'm talking about the Internet/WWW as the "new technology", and the "interests" as corporate and governmental bodies using tactics like the DMCA, the CDA, and other things (like the French government banning certain materials on Yahoo), you're only partly right.
Because, in reality, I'm mostly describing a system of communication between humans that's nearly language-independent (it works well even between people who do not share the same spoken or written language), "agnostic" (it doesn't care about the race, religion, gender, or other attributes of the people involved in the communication), nearly instantaneous (information about each communication almost naturally communicates itself to everyone else using the same system, almost like being in a chat room), and, most interestingly of all, that's probably over 10,000 years old.
That system of communication?
It's called the "price system".
That's right, I'm talking about the free market, the "place" where two or more people can go, communicate effectively regarding their needs and wants to conduct a transaction, often without the need to know much of anything about each other, and communicate almost perfectly compressed information on the transaction to everyone else in the same market.
And who are the interests that oppose or seek to fetter this communication?
They're the people who brought you Collectivism, Communism, Socialism, Taxes, Levies, Fees, all the largely involuntary means by which communications via this system are either impinged upon or forced to occur.
And, just as decreasing the ability of people to freely exchange "data" on the Internet is easily seen by "geeks" as having an overall detrimental effect on the ability of society to function in an ideal way, these fetters on the free market have nearly the exact same effect on humanity, multiplied by several orders of magnitude or so.
For example, laws restricting naturally-free trade across international borders prevent important information from flowing between them -- information on inefficiencies on one side or the other -- just as laws restricting discussing security or performance flaws in software prevent information on those flaws from freely flowing.
In both cases, the Powers That Be, or that want to be anyway, claim there's insufficient need for such freely-flowing information, compared to the "damage" it'd do to one side or the other.
But, those of us who already understand the importance of a truly free market, and have confidence that it's the humanity of individual humans, not the individual wills of a comparatively small elite with a great deal of gunpower, that'll, in the long run, best guide humanity to the highest uses of these technologies, consider what's happening to the Internet today, including the DMCA, the encroachment of national borders on this supposedly "borderless" territory, as merely a modest replaying of the gradual neutering of a bit player (compared to the free market, anyway).
Sadly, even though the Internet is not necessary for the price system, or free market, to flourish, it is impossible for the Internet to truly flourish without the price system or free market. No government that infringes on the free market will ever permit a free Internet to flourish, because, in many important ways, they're the same thing, or just different manifestations of the same fundamental urge all humans have to communicate with each other in all sorts of ways regarding their needs, wants, hopes, desires, abilities, energy, and so on.
And, as long as our children are indoctrinated in the schools, via the media, and by our own laws to view the market as some sort of enemy to be constantly tamed by the use, or at least the threat, of force (aka government intervention), they'll inevitably, directly or indirectly, view the Internet in just the same way, especially once they "get over" the "newness" of it.
Those of us who've been "online" long enough already recognized the symptoms years ago, such as, people claiming the Internet isn't "fair" because not everyone has identical access, bandwidth, etc.
So, I don't see how DMCA can end up being anything but a short stop -- perhaps a temporarily-overreaching one -- on a long march towards the same degree of restrictions on free communication of "digital" data that we already have -- AND WITH A GREAT DEAL OF SUPPORT FROM THESE SUPPOSEDLY "BRILLIANT" INTERNET "GEEKS" -- imposed on the free market.
Oh, the new restrictions will have to be better-packaged than the DMCA and CDA, to be sure. And the Supreme Court and legislatures will have to be "taught", just as FDR taught them, to view the U.S. Constitution as requiring governmental intervention in Internet communication (a la the free market) instead of preventing it. (But this issue transcends the Constitution of one nation anyway, of course.)
So, you can complain about the DMCA all you want now, but just you wait.
In another 20-40 years, tax rates for most anybody working for a living in the "free market" will start at around 70%, the Internet as we know it will have been replaced by a network that allows "free" access for its citizens to communicate efficiently only with corporate and governmental sites (the former paying high taxes, perhaps in the form of bandwidth and content) and very limited, low-bandwidth access to truly free intercommunication between arbitrary people...
...and anytime you complain about the situation, you'll be told, in no uncertain terms, how "extreme" you are, how you want everything back the way it was in the "bad old days", back when only the super-rich had decent bandwidth, and how, without the new government programs doling out access, a vast sea of people (who you might find to be contributing little anyway) might actually be -- gasp! -- unconnected from the Social Network (or the People's Network or whatever it'll be called to make the bill sound unopposable in Congress, a la "Campaign Finance Reform").
In summary: if you want to fight infringements on your freedoms, it's about time you figured out that it's your freedom to communicate, including discussing and exchanging price information (of which an actual monetary exchange for goods and services is a crucial component), that's the basis for most practical aspects of all the other freedoms you do seem to care about right now.
But as long as you take up the banner against the free exchange of price information, as so many of you "geeks" do, your efforts to repeal things like the DMCA will be nothing more than temporary successes for the benefit of a limited audience that'll, sooner or later, look to even more governmental limitations on freedoms formerly enjoyed widely by users of the Internet.
I wonder whether the rebroadcast will include the Pink Floyd bit (when the gang first sets foot on some planet)? That was funny, but I heard or read that it was removed from subsequent broadcasts due to "copyright issues" or something.
(How some 20-odd seconds of music, clearly used as a parody, can be copyright infringement, I'm not sure. But I've still got that short segment of the show "memorized", and they can't jail me for playing it back in my own head! Not yet anyway! Free Dmitri! Free Dmitri!!!;-)
Why, I am pretentious. I'm also arrogant, self-righteous, antisocial and elitist. And *your* problem is?
I don't know about him, but my problem is that, while I'm also pretentious, arrogant, self-righteous, and at least a bit elitist, I'm no longer nearly as antisocial or fully elitist as I used to be.
Naturally, I blame TV. I watch too much of it. Especially The Weather Channel and Fox News.
(I used to watch CNBC, but that was back when the market was fun and Maria Bartiromo was single. Now all I do when reading about the NYSE switching to Linux is wonder what it really means.;-)
Oh, by the way, I forget to address your sarcasm regarding the Nazis and leftism: as far as I can tell, Nazi Germany was much more left-wing than right-wing. I realize that there's much willing distortion of the facts, by first seeing nationalism as the main thrust of Naziism and then associating nationalism with American patriotism, which is, finally, easy enough to associate with today's right-wing politics.
But, as far as the actual conduct of those in power in Nazi Germany, their use of national industry to wage war, the means by which they came into power, and their "social darwinism" and other anti-life experiments, the more I learn about it, the more I see its "fascism" as more like today's left-wing than right-wing politics.
And you might want to explore the deep history of that well-known left-wing organization called "Planned Parenthood", if you really want to understand the connection between today's debate over advocating embryonic stem-cell research and yesterday's Nazi-driven desire to create a "master race" (which, ultimately, is difficult to distinguish from the left's desire to create a utopian society by destroying almost every vestige of the forms of society that have proved their worth over the millenia).
In this debate, anyway, the impulse to force every American to help fund embryonic stem-cell research is much more fascist than the willingness to let each American decide for himself whether and how to fund it.
Nice rant. Of course, I didn't say anything like what you sarcastically set up (as a sort of strawman), although I agree there are people who believe that sort of stuff.
After all, as I myself pointed out, there are many on the right who do not oppose stem-cell research (even of the embryonic type; I note that, typical of left-wing zealots, you omit that key adjective, since it distinguishes that form of research from all other types of stem-cell research, the other types not requiring the destruction of otherwise-viable embryos).
I wrote:
...notion that life isn't a fundamental right given to us by God
To which you replied:
rights come from the law, and the vigalence of the values of the people
Objectively speaking, which notion, taught to generations of children, does more to discourage them from taking life so lightly as to destroy it?
By acknowledging, even if just via lip service, that we are endowed by our Creator with inalienable rights, including life, liberty, etc., we teach our children that everyone is created equal in God's eyes, that everyone has an equal right to life.
But what does your prescription teach? That life, or at least the right to it, is nothing more than the result of laws and vigilance of the people. (Which may be true as practiced on earth.)
In other words, people indoctrinated into your worldview will not only view life as easily swept away, with no moral culpability, by simply changing the law or even being less "vigilant", they will assume there is no moral basis from which to construct or modify law in the first place, and they'll believe that they needn't be vigilant about anything more than their own self-interest, as modified by the impositions of the law of the day.
So, under your "system", we can each just try to convince the government to change the laws to suit our convenience, and the most persuasive and forceful will, as usual, win. In a sense, you're arguing that Might Makes Right, since, here on earth, those in power make the laws that you claim are the basis of rights such as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Therefore, it isn't really wrong to kill your spouse; all that's important is that it's illegal, as well as whether you actually get caught and convicted. (I note little irony in the fact that apologists for Clinton and now Condit, as compared to those for Republicans in trouble, were far more likely to resort to exactly these sorts of claims. "Well, there's no indictment, so we shouldn't be discussing this, right?" "But it's not illegal, so what business is it of ours?" "Hey, he wasn't convicted, so he did nothing wrong.")
The commoners just wouldn't be able to function if they didn't believe God existed! They'd rape and kill each other at the drop of a hat! I mean, no one is really capable of valuing other human beings unless they are threatened by eternal torment or authority! Everyone is basically an inhuman monster, accept maybe you and me.
The former Soviet Union: tens of millions of innocents murdered in the name of Communism and atheism. Cambodia under Pol Pot: Ditto. China: Maybe just millions, but, basically, ditto. If everyone already taught, by our culture and our public schools, all about the crimes committed over the last 18 centuries by those wearing the label "Christian", were also to read "The Black Book of Communism", you wouldn't have made a statement like that.
(Christianity has been learning, over the centuries since the 3rd or 4th, and in fits and starts, the futility of imposing itself on people, e.g. via government. Communism has learned no such thing, perhaps because, as far as I can tell, without government, it's nothing more than people deciding to live together and share resources, at least until they decide to stop doing it.)
So, no, while I'm not saying everyone would commit violence against their fellow man without believing in God, I'm pointing out that there is a substantial body of evidence that belief in God, specifically, the belief that life is a right divinely given to all human beings, gives most people an extra, and important, natural resistance to committing violence against innocents, as well as an extra willingness to fight and die to protect the lives of innocents from tyrants. (Note that I do distinguish between living a Christian lifestyle, which is fundamentally nonviolent, and being willing to commit violence to defend those living such a lifestyle, which is not nonviolent. But that distinction doesn't seem relevant here.)
I'm saying that, when you compare how POWs were treated in WW2 by the USA, Germany, and Japan, you'll see a fairly close correlation between belief in one Creator and decent treatment of prisoners of war. Perhaps there are other explanations, but I haven't heard one yet that is nearly as credible.
As far as how mankind treats animals, who are supposedly "more advanced than stem cells" (or embryos, or sufficiently retarded or even unconscious adult human beings, perhaps? justifying their termination to serve science?)? Unlike those animals, embryos, could, if their right to life was respected, contribute far more to the well-being of all mankind than any chicken ever will.
Keep in mind the fact that, until you get down to microorganisms, mankind is the dominant species on this planet. That is, animals can't fight back, in any practical way, as a means to defend themselves against man's inhumanity to animals, any more (and far less) than they can prevent animal "inhumanity" to animal. So, the only way you can prevent man's mistreatment of animals is to stop man doing it, by force or by preaching. Until we manage to convince enough people to stop oppressing each other for their own convenience, we'll never take even the first baby steps towards stopping oppressing those in the animal kingdom, and, needless to say, if you choose force to achieve your aim of preventing mistreatment of animals, you'll only be encouraging the belief that use of force is justified against them, since you've used it against mankind.
(Treating dogs and cats as pets is little more than the first baby step, if a step at all, in such a direction. I note, however, that many people treat their pets better than their fellow man, so there is already progress here. But many, many others treat their fellow man as pets, that is, as if they can't choose for themselves how to live their lives, how best to earn a living, how to spend or invest their earnings, with whom to associate, and so on, so the "front" here is chaotic, not uniform by any means.)
Note that neither my religious beliefs, nor Christianity as properly taught, requires me or anyone else to kill animals or people. Nor does it require us to tax other people, or to steal from them, or to even covet their property (which is the seed of all taxation, naturally). Compare that to the preachings of the Left, which requires several of these things, to the point that someone like myself, for the "crime" of not agreeing to ever-higher taxation, regulation, and so on, is castigated as an "idiot", a "fool", "delusional", and so on.
But, as a pro-life meat-eater, I'm grateful for any steps individuals choose to take away from tyrannizing their neighbor, even if their path seems hypocritical to me. That is, even a strict vegetarian who might also favor abortion as birth control, the death penalty, and federally-funded embryonic stem-cell research, at least is making a personal sacrifice of sorts (vegetarianism) that contributes to an overall atmosphere standing against violence, tyranny, against other beings, and that I applaud, even if I don't do the same thing myself, and even though I tend to believe their other beliefs might, when preached, overwhelm their "message" about mistreating animals to the point of spreading, overall, a pro-violence message.
As far as Plato refuting "nonsense" -- I'm unaware of him healing the leper, casting out sins, raising the dead, and preaching the gospel that everyone else is capable of doing the same things. That's an authority I consider higher than even a master logician like Plato. As far as where logic itself comes from? If not from Mind, which is God to many of us, then it has no validity since it is not intelligent, in which case it can tell us nothing about the existence of God or from where we derive whatever "rights" we may have. (Read the book of Job for questions just like these, and try answering them from an atheistic viewpoint.)
I must also stress that my post about left vs. right was primarily about the fundamental ideals of these respective thought-systems. You are wise to utterly reject the notion that people on the left vs. right, or who claim to be, necessarily reflect the values I'm talking about better than people on the other side.
Yes, I do believe the general mass of people on the right are less willing to tyrannize their fellow citizens for their own convenience than those on the left, but I also believe that there's still a great distance between both masses and true acceptance a la that professed by Christ Jesus.
But to blindly trust that someone saying "I'm a conservative Republican" is less likely to cherish oppression in their hearts, or assume that someone saying "I'm a liberal Democrat" is more likely to do so, than the other, is to engage in unnecessary prejudice.
What I do know is that every time I've reasoned out a basis on which I believed I might have the right to impose my will on someone else via some means (usually government, but occasionally I admit I just feel like beating the #@!$ out of some loser;-), and I looked for support for that belief in one of the fundamental texts of the Right -- the Holy Bible -- I am always unable to find sufficient justification for my belief.
(Note that I impose the same kind of requirement on imposing one's will on another as our judicial system does of convicting a criminal, as in "beyond a reasonable doubt". That is, I don't justify my desire to impose my will based on at least a 50/50 support for it in the Bible; I have to see at least a 90/10 support for it. I have yet to find an instance of this.)
Instead, what I find in the Bible, and in primitive Christianity generally, are statements that directly contradict any attempt to justify imposing one's will on another. Consider, for one, the best-known prayer of a Christian, as emphasized by me for this purpose:
Our Father, which art in heaven,
Hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdom come.
Thy will be done, in earth, as it is in heaven.
[...]
And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil,
for Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever.
Amen.
Note the recurring them of God's government, His will, being the only valid will to be exercised, and how the final verses seem to suggest, if not shout out, that, among the temptations and evils from which we are asking, in praying this prayer, to be delivered, is any belief in a kingdom, a government, a system of law and order, other than God's, as expressed in His heaven.
I just don't see sufficient room in prayers like that, or in the life of Christ Jesus and his closest followers (some of whom left government, or quasi-government, positions as soon as they "converted", rather than hold on to positions from which they could tyrannize the populace, such as Saul), to meet the "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard I set for myself for imposing my will on others.
Now, can you point me to any fundamental texts of the left that contain language like that? I read Marx's Communist Manifesto so long ago that I can recall little from it, but can you point to statements such as that, which you might be able to persuade me are horribly misinterpreted by his followers of the 20th Century, as a means to dismiss their crimes as not being derived largely from their fundamental teachings?
Not that I'm claiming Marx is the only author of fundamental texts of the left. But we already had Gore and Liebermann (sp?) put on the mantle of God in their campaign, e.g. when the latter talked about how the Commandment "Honor thy father and mother" requires us to grant Medicare coverage for prescription medicines, as if God had really intended to say "You must take up arms against your fellow man, so as to force them to fund the medicines your father and mother need." Thus the left happily puts on the cloak of religion to justify their proposed tyrannies and oppressions, all of which seem, to me, to be Marxist prescriptions for what they believe ails society.
So, sorry to say, I find "if thine enemy strikes thee on the one cheek, turn to him the other cheek also" much more persuasive as a moral basis by which humans should interact with each other, because I find persuasion, preaching, and cherishing the individuality of each and every human being (from conception forward), so they may find their way to live their life the best way they can according to their understanding, to be a far less brutal way to live compared to seeking to impose my will on others. Yet the latter approach is what I find to be pretty much the constant drumbeat of the left, as compared to the right (though there are, of course, exceptions).
Remember, the origin of this thread is the claim that George Bush is an "idiot" because he's refusing to force American citizens to fund research based on the use of stem cells that are extracted only by destroying otherwise-viable embryos.
In my opinion, there's no way someone can make such a claim without regularly fantasizing about exercising tyrannical control over millions of peoples' lives, with little regard for the necessity or effects of that control. (Important: when you have power over someone, your need to exercise it properly is diminished compared to their need, absent your power over them, to exercise self-control. That's why power tends to corrupt -- because those who wield it are insulated somewhat from the effects of wielding it poorly. So people who dream of tyrannizing others in whatever form rarely give serious consideration to the effects their dreams, once realized, might actually have.)
But you won't be sure whether someone is a tyrant-wannabe by checking whether their label reads "Republican", "Democrat", "left-wing", "right-wing", "atheist", "agnostic", "Christian", "Buddhist", etc. You have to look at how they live, what they preach, and how enthusiastically they wear those labels, knowing what the labels represent.
So I certainly agree with your call to generally ignore such labels!
I believe the reason for the contrast is that there is a fundamental difference in the "reason for living" outlook in the left vs. the right.
To those on the left, the only reason for living is to enjoy living in the now. That means, basically, take no thought for the generations to come, whether they'll have as much freedom, opportunity, safety, health, etc. as those living now do, or, at least, subordinate those concerns to the primacy of those already living.
Hence, abortion on demand, by the millions in the USA, one of the richest and most secure nations in the history of the planet for women, who nevertheless choose to abort purely for their own convenience. (I'm not talking about abortions that are medically necessary here.)
The right generally dismisses the bright, shiny object known as "instant gratification" in favor of instilling beliefs, systems, etc. that it believes most effectively transmits civilization and culture to subsequent generations.
To those on the right, abortion and, by extracting stem cells, destroying (even frozen) embryos that might be saved before being otherwise destroyed (and, yes, saving such embryos does happen, there are people alive today who once were frozen embryos slated for destruction), contributes to a reduced regard for life in civilization.
Clearly those whose right to life are being advocated in favor of, by the right, and yet will die due to being aborted or destroyed, will never vote Republican, will never be taxed to fund a missile-defense system, will never contribute to their local Baptist church, will never buy loads of Proctor & Gamble products (to pick four stereotypical examples of why right-wingers supposedly advocate various positions). Yet the right expends vastly more energy and takes much bigger risks trying, mostly in vain, to save these voiceless, often faceless, human beings than does the left in saving animals, trees, the environment, and so on, even though all the right asks for is laws restricting individual choice in abortion on demand and such, while those on the left insist that every one of us change our way of life vastly (stop emitting greenhouse gases, which means "stop breathing", by the way; stop generating trash; stop doing business; etc.).
Those on the right believe that fundamental human values are life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and the ownership of property, and that only civilization, including the presence of some sort of military to defend those rights, is sufficient to ensure that future generations will get to enjoy them as we do.
Those on the left act, generally, out of the assumption that, either those rights just naturally sprang forth from the ground (hence their general disregard for those who fought and died to carve them out, e.g. the USA's Founding Fathers) or that they're unimportant in the first place ("but those embryos are just clumps of cells" -- a statement that is 100% true of each one of us, as the scientists of Nazi Germany would explain if they were still around, given that there's no clear, scientific point at which we become more than a clump, other than conception).
Instead, the fundamental values on the left do not have to do so much with life and liberty as with the "right" to enjoy the fruits of another man's labor, the "right" to take the life of an innocent who cannot speak for himself if it serves some short-term convenience, and so on. Left-wing propaganda therefore tends to portray what scientists call "life" as merely a happy accident, something to which no being has any real right, unless, let's say, that being happens to be on death row in a state whose governor is the Republican candidate for President. (This also explains why those in the right can seem insanely opposed to scientific pursuits such as SETI or teaching evolution -- even when those opposing these things are scientists! It's not so much the teaching of theories that's really bugging them, it's the indoctrination of children into the notion that life isn't a fundamental right given to us by God, a view the right believes is, itself, regardless of whether God actually exists, necessary to the preservation of a free society over many generations.)
So, to the left, it just doesn't matter one whit that embryos, fetuses, or perhaps even terminally ill children, elderly, and, someday of course (if we do go down the left's road), adults might be sacrificed to the gods of medical necessity, if not medical convenience. As long as the valuable research springs forth, one would think, the destruction is worthwhile, but even results aren't necessary -- the left claims 100% success is required only for things like missile defense, never for things like abortion on demand (wasn't that supposed to reduce unplanned pregnancies over time?) or welfare (aka the "war on poverty", which did for poverty what the "war on drugs" did for drug use in the USA).
That is, in 50 years, if there are no substantial benefits arising out of research on embryonic stem cells, despite President Clinton (#44, aka Hillary) reversing Bush and forcing American taxpayers to fund the creation and destruction of millions of embryos to a) create vast quantities of stem cells for "research" and b) further inoculate the American public against the notion that conception might signal the beginning of life, I can assure you there will be no apology from those on the left for the millions of lives sacrificed for no real good. (But remember, boys and girls, we can't go building a missile-defense shield to prevent real enemies from even bothering to build vast numbers of real nukes, unless we can prove, before even conducting research and testing, that such a shield would, when attacked simultaneously by every nation on earth plus UN, NATO, and Greenpeace, exhibit a 100% success rate! Never mind that we aren't killing human beings to research such a shield. In fact, I wonder if we could convince the left to build the shield if we could find a way to use aborted fetuses as crucial components in the research? JUST KIDDING -- the Right would never tolerate such a thing anyway.)
After all, the ideology of the left is much closer to that of those who have murdered tens of millions of innocents adults, children, and fetuses in the 20th century alone -- a feat that so-called "religious persecution" did not come anywhere near to matching in all the 20 centuries that preceded it. (Of course, most successful religious persecution is actually carried out as government-sponsored persecution shrouded in the garb of religion, just as this century's massacres have been carried out by governments claiming they're communist, socialist, whatever. There is, however, a much greater distance between murder and Christ than between murder and Marx, which may explain why followers of the former run out of steam following a murderous tyrant more quickly than followers of the latter. In the extreme cases, the idea that killing everyone lets God sort them out is dangerous, but is not nearly so, due to its more-obvious illogic, than the left's version, namely, kill everyone who doesn't agree everyone should be made equally poor.)
The tyrannical mind-set of the left is so pervasive in this world that even those on the right accept it, in at least limited form, in their own thinking. That's why even prominent "conservative" news organizations, like Fox News, don't have frequent interviews with survivors of abortion attempts, people who've used firearms (even just "cocking", if that's the right word, a shotgun) to defend their life, loved ones, and/or property, and so on. That's why Bill O'Reilly says things like "Republicans don't want lower-mileage cars" instead of something vastly closer to the truth, namely, "Republicans don't want to cram artificially low-mileage cars down the throats of the car-buying American public".
In that context, and given the fact that the politically active tyrants tend to care less about ideology than about control of power and money (which explains why abortion advocates and advocates of embryonic stem-cell research go hysterical -- witness the vicious treatment of Presidents who cross them here -- over mere withdrawal of federal funds for their "pet projects", despite the fact that vast amounts of private funds are at hand to fund such activities -- because they can't control the populace as effectively when funded by charity, however substantial it might be, compared to when they're funded by force, i.e. tax dollars), it's not surprising that this debate has been largely framed as "George Bush decides the fate of stem-cell research", often leaving out key words such as "federally-funded" and "embryonic".
Nor is it surprising that, even in a story that clearly includes the pertinent information, many here (highly-modded-up, I'll point out) scream as if Bush is the stupidest President in history simply because he refuses to use force, i.e. the same "men with guns" that "liberated" Elian so he could return to being the property of the State of Cuba, to force every American taxpayer to fund a form of research many of them would, if they knew the facts rather than just the left-wing-media hype, find repugnant.
So, yes, this is a religious issue. The left is upset because their religion requires them to make sacrifices to their gods by forcing fellow citizens to part with their hard-earned property and money so as to fund whatever those gods claim is most important Right Now.
Meanwhile, the right is still upset because our society still celebrates abortion on demand as if it's the only means by which women can celebrate being "equal", having "choice", etc. So much for the use of the word "choice", when most who favor it in the context of abortion oppose it in the context of the ordinary citizen deciding whether to fund embryonic stem-cell research.
In the end, given the fact that even prominent "pro-life" Republicans have trouble opposing the continued use of stem cells newly extracted by destroying viable embryos, it's unlikely Bush's decision will long stand, and impossible that it'll shut down research on embryonic stem cells, any more than the US prohibition on slavery will keep that activity shut down worldwide.
Ultimately, in another 100 years or so, anyone with diseases such as Parkinson's, taking medication to alleviate or eliminate their suffering, will have to live with the fact that their added comfort and longer lives resulted from the unwilling sacrifices of many who never got a chance to voice their opinions on these issues, never got to vote, and never got to research harmless and moral ways to achieve the same results, perhaps even faster. Just as we Americans (especially those who are white) are constantly told that their country was "built on the backs of slaves", there'll be a guilt factor. (Of course, among several big differences are that at least the slaves had a shot at escaping, and, in the meantime, they got to live. I wonder: why wasn't it okay to enslave people, given that they were all going to die anyway, just like most frozen embryos? Hmmm....)
I think you're confusing me with the FSF. I'm not the FSF.
However, I'll point out that, unlike with books, which could perhaps remotely be claimed to contain "instructions" run by "people", software runs machines, mainly computers, that do not have the same rights or responsibilities as people.
In that context, it no more strains credulity, in my opinion (and perhaps the FSF would agree, or take a different tack entirely), to claim that software should be open and free, as source, to avoid technology problems, than it does to claim that the materials you put in your the medicine you sell, while you might have plenty of reason to keep the "recipe" secret, should be similarly open and free -- so doctors have some idea what they might be potentially fighting, for just one example, should your medication prove dangerous.
In that sense, I believe software is closer to internal medicine than to writing in books, when those two are viewed as extremes on a continuum of the importance of content, what mechanisms mostly directly use the content, how much opportunity humans have to determine, ahead of time, the effective nature of the content, and so on.
Another problem with the analogy with books is that, in all pertinent ways, they are source code. That is, any reasonably educated reader can study them and see what they're saying. They have an insignificant amount of "meta" information that requires reverse-engineering the actual stored instructions, but that largely drives the behavior of the reader of the book (i.e. a human).
That's very different from an executable vs. source. An executable delivered by a proprietary software vendor, which you're executing on your computer, may well be spying on you, deleting your files, etc., but your ability to find that out is severely constrained, since you don't have the source code.
Same with internal medicine. If that industry worked, and had government protection, a la the software industry, your right to know, ahead of time, what's in medicine you're taking (or are given, say, force-fed by a nurse in the elementary school to which you might be going), would not exist. Your right to publish what you do know about the content would not exist. Your right to study (reverse-engineer) the content would not exist. And, to the extent you and others did these things regularly because of ordinary freedoms and opportunities to do so, and because y'all felt such study, discussion, criticism, etc., was crucial to leading a healthy life, both as individuals and as a society, you'd find those freedoms and opportunities being increasingly curtailed by the medical industry and government nearly every day.
With books, you don't have that problem. Somebody can come into your house and try to bake those biscuits in Penn & Teller's book, but you have the freedom, the choice, and the opportunity to look over their shoulder, note the "dangerous" combination of ingredients, and say "no thanks; not only will I not eat those biscuits, you're not even allowed to make them in my kitchen".
Because of language used by FSF/GNU supporters, I tend to think, people looking at these issues often labor under the assumption that the goal is to protect and promote "freedom of software". It isn't, in my opinion; the phrase "software freedom" is more precisely rendered "freedom of people to read software".
So, one overarching question is, to what extent is the ability to read and otherwise fully embrace software that, in one way or another, is running some machinery in your household, business, or infrastructure, a fundamental human right?
And, orthagonally to the rights issue, another overarching question is, to what extent is that ability critical to the long-term safety, stability, flexibility, and inventiveness of a society?
Those two questions are primarily, but not exclusively, the realm of the free-software movement and the Open-Source-Software movement, respectively, and I believe they both need to be considered, and seriously so, with little (but not zero) weight given to issues such as short-term profitability of a few commonplace business models.
So, for now, it seems that only the FSF is fighting and standing on the line that human rights include the right to know, view, consider, replicate, criticize, and discuss the instructions that machines with which a human might interact are running.
The FSF might well be drawing that line too far towards the "book end" of the continuum.
But, if they didn't, and if society took that opportunity to jump even further over that line in the sand, I suggest that the danger would greatly increase that the line you, and many others, might wish to draw (say, before we lose similar freedoms regarding medicine, or before the freedoms we've already lost regarding bioengineered or genetically-engineered organisms, including crops, in our environment have effects as visible to ordinary people as the ILOVEYOU, Melissa, and other software vermin already have) may well be more in danger in the long run, especially since the primary objection, by far, voiced in response to the FSF's line is "but profits are so important", not anything fundamental regarding rights, and those other potential lines have no inherent defenses that turn corporate profits into allies (as can happen with other issues, in other dimensions, for example).
In short, those who concede that corporate profits trump the importance and advantages of ordinary people having access to the source code of software that runs the machinery of their lives have, as far as I can see, little more they can pull out of their hats, should they desire to do so, to prevent corporate profits trumping the ability of ordinary people having access to similar information regarding the air they breathe, the clothes they wear, the various ointments they apply externally, the food they eat, and the medicines they ingest.
While I strongly support the free/open software movement, I can't abide this attitude of extremism. Do you honestly believe that anyone who find fault with the FSF or RMS should shut
up and toe the party line in order to promote the greater good? Do you really think that people shouldn't be able to choose non-GPL licenses? That's really Orwellian coming from
someone who is ostensibly advocating freedom.
To suggest my post displays "extremism" in its attitude strikes me as, frankly and honestly, extreme.
As I believe I made clear, anyone who finds fault with the FSF or RMS can choose whether to publically air those concerns, whether to privately engage them, or whether to just put them aside, as everyone does with regard to most every issue they consider.
We all consider priorities when determining whether to publically beat up on someone, or some organization, over some issue. I sure do; I have many issues over which I part company with the FSF, but none of them are as important as preserving the right to use, create, modify, and distribute free software.
But, as I pointed out, whoever criticizes the FSF should consider whether an unintended effect of their public criticism, added to everyone else's perhaps, is to make the FSF so unpopular and irrelevant that it no longer can serve any useful role defending free software.
Such people cannot both claim their right to criticize (whether their target is the FSF or someone or something else) while disclaiming their responsibility if the effect of the criticism is not what they may have intended.
It's just like, whack your kid upside the head to "knock some sense into him", he falls, hits his head, and dies, the responsibility is yours, no amount of "well, that's not what I intended" will change that fact.
For some time I've seen much, IMO, rather mindless, often informed, sometimes outright false, but, overall, mostly irrelevant criticism of the FSF aired in public, by people who at least pretend to support the FSF's goals, but just want to take issue with this or that.
(How many of these people really contribute to the FSF, financially or otherwise, I wonder?)
The motivations for most of that criticism are, I believe, mostly childish, not unlike the "piling on" against John Rocker as displayed by various talk-show hosts a year or so ago. (Yes, he said things that upset some people and weren't PC, and, being white and southern, he couldn't be allowed to "get away" with doing that the way others are on a routine basis. That should have been a one- or two-day story. But the cowardly members of the peanut gallery chose to go much, much further than that, knowing nobody would dare stand up to what they were saying in the way they might if, say, they were criticizing a minority athlete who said something far more hateful.)
In summary: those who criticize the FSF, especially in childish ways, should ask themselves what they really want to achieve, why they think their criticism will achieve that, and whether they're ready to bear the responsibilities for the possible consequences of their joining the mob criticizing the FSF.
Similarly, those who read such criticism would do well to ask themselves "what does this person really want to change, in terms of making the world a better place, by airing his grievances here and now? can I trust the motives he claims to have? with his criticism, is this person part of the solution, part of the problem, or simply irrelevant? e.g. does this sort of criticism ever lead to positive change in the target? is it informative, does it give me info which I can check out for myself, or is it designed to get me to just react, go with the flow, whatever -- is it written in a manner that treats an uninformed reader like myself as a thoughtful person unwilling to spread malicious gossip, or as just a carrier of hatred or resentment?".
All of this is true for any organization or person being criticized, of course, but I was responding to an unsupportable inference, criticizing the FSF, drawn from my earlier comment, so I focused on the FSF.
"Visual! Tactical! Stand by torpedoes! Fire! [pause, oops] Evasive!"
These lines were spoken in Klingonese, of course.
Best line heard in a movie theatre when ST:TMP premiered came at that point:
Damn, if I'd known this was a foreign film, I wouldn't have bothered!
;-)
The other thing I love about that scene is the music. Awesome music. In fact, the soundtrack, which I have on CD, has been a modest favorite of mine for years, once I got "past" the romantic "excesses" on it.
Oh, and here's what the/. "quote of the moment" happens to be as I preview this comment:
You have a tendency to feel you are superior to most computers.
This is an interesting observation, and bears out my long-held belief that free/open source software has succeeded in spite of the FSF at least as much as because of it. (FWIW, Russ Nelson's excellent comment here about the FSF alienating more people than it converts is right on the money.)
Note that I was talking mainly about the "Linux phenomenon".
Without the FSF, there would have been no substantial free-software or open-source-software movements, in my opinion.
While RMS (not the FSF per se) has definitely alienated many people, including potential contributors, and Linux attracted lots of potential contributors as well as becoming the focal point of the "phenomenon", it was the FSF, its Project GNU, and the GNU General Public License (GPL) that both pioneered and founded the free-software movement.
Without those, any nascent movement would have been picked apart by proprietization of software a la the Symbolics situation (which helped convince RMS that more than just enthusiasm and trust was necessary; that an organization, with legal teeth and muscle, was needed to specifically make free software happen and endure).
It is always easy for the pampered citizens within the walls of a relatively safe city to pooh-pooh the contributions of those who built the walls and those who man them, weapons in hand, as "radicals", "extremists", and so on. "The outside world loves us now; our former enemies now seek to embrace us; they simply find our armaments and walls off-putting, and we'd have so many more people join us in building our clay pots and weeding our gardens if we'd just lay down our arms", they say.
The fact that Microsoft now tries to divide and conquer the movement by specifically targeting the GPL shows that they know where the true long-term strength of the movement lies: in the protections offered by the combination of the GPL and the holding of important copyrights by the FSF, and in the relevancy to the movement still granted the FSF by those who matter (those who choose to contribute their efforts, not just those in the movement who criticize the FSF in public).
Microsoft knows that if it can convince enough in the movement to go along with its proposed marginalization of the FSF and the GPL, which it accomplishes by means such as calling the GPL "viral", "Pac-man-like", etc., criticisms neither new nor accurate (but that has never stopped MS or its minions, has it?), the foundations and defenses will crumble. Individual programmers may well, of course, continue to enthusiastically contribute to "free software", but, at that point, the proprietary-software proponents will be able to "pick off" the cream without ever again having to contribute back to the community that forwarded the movement, and the software, in the first place. (Just as, the walls having been destroyed, some people will still plant seeds in the gardens within, until they tire, or die of starvation, due to the raiders constantly stealing the fruit just as harvest begins.)
The ultimate goal of Microsoft and its minions is to eliminate free software as serious competition, to validate the "long-held beliefs" of many people that the free-software development model simply cannot compete, when it comes to features, performance, and robustness, with proprietary software. (I speak from direct experience with the mindsets of MS's minions, who seem to have a constant stream of snappy, but inaccurate or misleading soundbites, ready to explain why the movement in which I've participated for some 10 years is unworkable or inadequate. They rarely seek out my advice; why should they, since their goal is to co-opt, if not outright destroy, the free-software movement, rather than learn about how it truly works for the betterment of the entire computing industry, including its users?)
I will say it was my distinct impression that, during at least half the time Linux was becoming the phenomenon it became, the relationship between Linux developers and FSF/GNU developers was, at least, somewhat strained. Despite this, they had the freedom and, to a fair extent, obligation to build upon and improve each others' work, and, of course, users of either could freely intermingle both.
For example, most of the time I developed g77 as an FSF volunteer, my workstation ran Linux, even though I sometimes worried that Linux developers had insufficient regard for long-term portability concerns as expressed by the FSF. And I continued to work on g77 long after becoming frustrated by various aspects of the FSF (and RMS), because I believed more in the cause than in imposing my world-view on an organization as important as the FSF. Neither organization sought to prevent me mixing the fruits of its output with that of those with whom it might be arguing at any time.
That's the reality that scares Microsoft, the inability to shut out competition (as in the marginalization or exclusion of Java as forwarded by Sun, by "extending" or omitting it, or by things like installing bugs that prevent competitive products from interoperating, as it did to attack DR-DOS).
Given the choice, seeing the comparatively poor PR efforts on the part of the FSF, they'd be crazy to go around claiming Linux is a threat to the American way, and I doubt they stress (much), while they're attacking the GPL along those lines, that Linux itself is licensed under the GPL. Linux might well be the primary target in their sites for now, but they know that, among the real reasons Linux hasn't been so easy to displace (or "embrace and extend"), the FSF and the GPL rank quite high. Since Linux is "popular", but even the hordes of Linux enthusiasts include many who spend a fair amount of time and energy dissing the FSF and/or the GPL for whatever reasons, MS is wise to openly target the FSF and the GPL, just as a starfish openly targets the clam's shell, so it can ultimately get at the chewy center that it really wants.
After all, displace the FSF and you knock out the primary defense against proprietizing Linux, since it's unlikely enough individual copyright holders would successfully band together and sue Microsoft for attempting to do so the way the FSF can, and has at least threatened to with corresponding success, over similar attempts to proprietize GCC and Emacs. (What stops Linux from being "safely" proprietized? IMO the biggest factor is what I'll call the "Chandra Levy factor" -- it'll be so visible, the publicity over the mere attempt could be disastrous, in a way that proprietizing some other large GPL'ed product, whose copyright is widely held, wouldn't be. But other significant factors include the FSF's vigorous defense against violations of the GPL, and the fact that Linux seriously and deeply depends on GCC. Fear of Linux copyright holders actually banding together and threatening to sue is way down the list. Why Linux enthusiasts enjoy helping a company like MS by attacking the FSF, thus risking chopping down two of the three strong walls defending Linux against the inevitable attempts at proprietization, is truly hard to understand, especially since, once those two walls are down, there will be even less incentive, in the form of community support, for Linux developers themselves to defend its licensing.)
And nobody need question or debate what would happen if the FSF or GPL was successfully weakened, since we've already seen what happens -- and I doubt Microsoft will need any guidance from the executives who used to run Symbolics regarding how to effectively spit on the contributions of talented programmers by proprietizing their efforts and shutting them out of works derived from them. (This isn't a GPL vs. BSD argument at all; this is a "we chose the GPL, we darn well expect it to rule in both the legal system and in society when it comes to our software". BSD'ers who try to convince GPL'ers to use a BSD-like license, should they inadvertently help weaken the FSF and/or the GPL, will more likely drive potential developers away from the whole free-software scene than "convert" us.)
In my opinion, there are basically two types of people who spew at the FSF in public. One wishes (however secretly) to enable companies like Microsoft to proprietize the efforts of programmers like myself, who labored (often voluntarily, without pay) to create a body of public software that would not be proprietized, yet would be free for use and improvement. This sort cleverly uses commonly-repeated, but undocumented, charges against the FSF that are most likely to be repeated as gospel and depict the FSF as "just as power-mad as MS" or whatever -- charges like "the FSF tried to claim all the credit for Linux", "the GPL is a viral license", and "FSF types are really just communists in disguise".
The other sort is less intent on evil, wishes free software to succeed, etc., but joins the chorus of FSF critics to appear "cool", "above all that", "moderate", whatever, rather than properly engage the FSF in private. If the FSF ever withers away and dies, it will be this group, not the former, that shoulders the blame for the external factors causing its death, for they chose to attack an organization that was fighting in the trenches for their freedoms (and, in fact, dug most of those trenches in the first place). And such an occurrence will probably signal the beginning of the end of the free-software movement, given the general lack of willingness for any of the FSF's critics to take the same kinds of risks, slings, and arrows borne by the FSF and its supporters over the years to make free software a long-term reality.
So, "Dub", which kind of FSF critic are you: the kind that wishes the FSF to die, so the rest of the free-software movement can wither away to unimportance, leaving proprietary vendors free to return to their past ability to charge $$ for products that work poorly, don't interoperate, and contain serious security flaws? Or the kind that would rather the FSF fail than be willing to stop publically criticizing it for past actions it cannot possibly "set right", as well as for things it has, in fact, never done, figuring that, well, if they don't do everything just the way you want, let 'em die and the whole movement ultimately founder, as long as everyone knows you had all the answers?
(Looking at your/. user page, I guess you're the former kind -- a number of your comments were foaming-at-the-mouth, believe-whatever-other-critics-say rants against the FSF, GPL, and/or GNU. BTW, I think your first tag for the Reno link might be unclosed.)
Personally, I've chosen to refrain from constantly publically criticizing the FSF (or Linus etc.), since they're so important in forwarding values I care much more deeply about than my quibbles with them -- values like freedom, choice, and opportunity. (Freedom to develop, study, modify, and distribute software; choice to use it instead of proprietary software; and opportunity to do so, the result of a usable body of free software that works on contemporary hardware.)
True hypocrisy? It was A-OK for the FSF to use proprietary software to achieve their goals from 1984 to the early 1990's, but it's not OK for you to use them for your (unrelated to free software) goals, no matter how noble.
"True hypocrisy? It was A-OK for the Founding Fathers to use slavery to achieve their goals from the 1700's to the mid-1800's, but it's not OK for you to use it for your (unrelated to founding and preserving a free country) goals, no matter how noble."
Really, it's one thing to dirty one's hands when convenient, and quite another to do so when necessary to carve out a right to cleanliness.
Hypocrisy, on the other hand, is typically the act of saying one thing and doing another. The FSF doesn't generally do that -- it has never, to my knowledge, told people to not use proprietary software even if necessary to create free-software replacements for it, so why is it hypocrisy that they did so for years?
I think a fair case can be made for the GNU project to be at least an equal parent with the kernel to the current success of the Linux phenomenon.
I'd have to disagree. I'd say the GNU project was an important enabler of the "phenomenon", which was due primarily to the dynamism of the Linux-kernel community, which was unique.
I'd been working on Project GNU (specifically, GNU Fortran, or g77) for a few years when Linux came along, and the difference in attitude between maintainers of the "big" GNU projects and Linus and his cohorts was definitely a big factor in why the latter become the focus of the free-software phenomenon in the average person's view.
Sure, the fact that Linux ran on popular PCs was also a factor, but other Unix kernels could do that. And the FSF could have had a Unix kernel that did that earlier, if they'd decided to focus on that goal rather than a much more elegant, portable, high-fallutin' kernel (and especially if RMS had answered "yes" to my offering to write the kernel instead of asking me to write g77 instead).
But while project leaders/maintainers like myself were trying very hard to produce "clean", elegant releases, to keep ugly stuff out of "our" code, and, generally, to keep the uneducated, unwashed masses of budding hackers at arms' length (some would say ten-foot-poles' length;-) from our precious projects, Linus invited a much closer relationship.
This might partly have been due to his inexperience (he started out much younger and less experienced on his project than I did on g77, RMS did on GCC or Emacs, etc.), but I perceived a much more welcoming, casual attitude in the early Linux discussions than I tended to see elsewhere. (And, remember, "elsewhere" includes my own project.)
So, the "Linux phenomenon" is properly named, in my view, even if "the Linux Operating System" ain't necessarily so. With Linux, "we" (the GNU, or free-software, advocates) not only had a decent-performing free kernel usable on 386s and up, we had a project that nearly anybody could contibute to, and feel as though they were part of "something big".
Yes, "the rest of us" muddled along, and our projects (especially GCC and Emacs, plus the FSF as an organization, since it created and maintained the GPL) were important, perhaps crucial, components of the system being developed around the Linux kernel, just as they were (or were becoming) in many other venues.
I'm not arguing that "we" should be forgotten, just that the "something-special" quality of Linux, and of Linus' running of the Linux project, should always be remembered. I've never thought of the Linux code as being particularly "special", and I still have plenty of reservations about running an "important project" the way Linus did (he might have them too, by now;-), but I can't deny the excitement and breadth-of-buzz that he created.
The result? To my knowledge, he's the only free-software author whose supporters insisted, against his own recommendation, to name the project's output -- the Linux kernel -- after him. (Well, let's face it, if his name was "Mortimer", "Linux" would still be a cool name, but I think that shows how highly valued and appreciated he was, not just as a coder or project administrator, but as a leader.)
As to the GNU/Linux debate -- while I think the name has technical and cultural advantages (it describes the Unix variant concisely, and it helps remind "the children" from whence it came), of all the cases where the "last component to arrive" got to be the one that named the whole system, this has got to be the best example of that being appropriate.
After all, even if it's the GNU/Linux system, it is the Linux phenomenon that launched a thousand media events, IPOs, and the like, and there's an important cultural touchstone in the "Linux" name being the sole identifier: that, more important to many people than the details of software freedoms, was the welcoming arms of a sort of meritocracy, i.e. a bazaar rather than a cathedral, in participating in the creation of something not so much awe-inspiring, but practical and even, at times, enjoyable dirty, as well.
Put another way: while the rest of his "elders" were carefully writing symphonies and conducting performances, in which each participant was expected to play his or her carefully-outlined part, Linus played bass in the biggest, baddest blues jam session going, where nearly anyone could solo, even if just for a few bars, and most everyone knew the chord progressions by heart.
No amount of technical acumen (or jumping around on stage like a lunatic, *cough*Ballmer*cough*;-) can substitute for inspiring leadership.
(After replying to this post once, I read it again, and realized it was almost certainly a willing attempt at FUD, it contains so many "persuasive", but inaccurate or misleading, statements.)
I'm getting a little tired of the GNU/FSF folks trying to take all the credit for Linux.
Despite my concerns over how the FSF and RMS handled the naming issue, I can't recall a single example of them trying to "take all the credit for Linux". Seems like that claim is just extremism in the guise of claiming someone else is an extremist.
there is not a single piece of GNU software that is completely essential to Linux
An assertion that is meaningless in context: one cannot tell what he means by "completely essential", since he seems to allow for an arbitrary amount of time to replace that software. (In which case, there is not a single piece of Linux that is completely essential to Linux!)
This is just a flat-out lie. I know patents aren't popular here because so many in the community have learned from the FSF to hate them.
I find that hard to believe, given how "so many in the community" reject other statements the FSF makes.
Instead, I suggest that the reason software patents are so "hated" is that a bunch of people, including myself, actually researched the issue, observed the effects of software patents in practice, and came to the conclusion that, on the whole, granting this particular form of government monopoly has done more to retard progress than forward it; further, that the mere existence of software patents makes developing free software a very dangerous crapshoot, one in which the software author could lose his home, his lifestyle, etc., all because he dared release a GPL'd (or AL'd or public-domain) package that a) became popular and b) was later found to violate a patent that had not existed, or perhaps even been filed (in secret, of course) for, at the time of the software's release to the public.
(Note that I did read his letter to LWN, and didn't see him address the software-patent issue per se, other than to slap down anyone who thoughtfully questions whether software, aka mathematics and algorithms, should be patentable as engaging in a "knee-jerk reaction". Bradley Kuhn had, of course, referred only to software patents in his post. Perhaps "Dub" is unable to distinguish between a type of patent that prevents me building a factory and one that prevents me from using paper and pencil to compute an equation, but most of the rest of us understand the difference well enough.)
An alternative view held by many would be that Apple has explicitly preserved the freedom of private modifications. In reality, the APSL is less restrictive and more free than the GPL in this regard.
How anyone could come to the conclusion that the GPL disallows private modification without distribution, thus allowing modification only if immediately followed by distribution, is beyond me. Perhaps these "many" people who hold this belief could try actually reading the GPL, maybe with the help of a competent IP lawyer?
This is very interesting to those of us that have long held that despite their protestations to the contrary, the free software movement is indeed inextricably tied to a communist worldview. RMS and others routinely deny this even though it's the only logical conclusion one can reach upon reading and thoughtful consideration of their positions on the issues. The fact that they are more aggressively pursuing subversive tactics should come as a sharp warning to those that are "a bit uncomfortable" with GPL/FSF/GNU.
Normally I use the term "McCarthyism" only in conjunction with left-wing editorializing and political correctness, but, in this case, I gotta say, "Thank you for your opinion, Senator McCarthy".
I mean, really, this paragraph got written in response to a statement about how Bradley Kuhn has decided to dress and shave?? In what cave has "Dub" been living for the past couple of decades?
As a point of comparison, I was recently reminded, upon coming across an old photo ID of myself, that I used to go for a few months at a time without shaving. At all. I.e. not just a beard, but a wolfman face.
Needless to say, as any thoughtful examination of my web site and/. posts would reveal, I'm about as far from "communist" as one could be. Apparently "Dub" is less interested in joining forces with those of us who value freedom (whether in software usage or life generally) than with those who meet the strict requirements of his "Completely-Clean-Cut Party (CCCP)".
BTW, I encourage you to thank the GNU project by reminding people that the system so often called "Linux" is actually the GNU system with Linux as its kernel
No, it's not. This is true for most distributions, but many of us prefer real Unix-flavored (usually derived from BSD) versions of the utilities
Yes, it is, but that's because what he was describing was literally the operating system that consist of the GNU utilities, plus the Linux kernel.
Whereas you seem to be taking his statement as if, instead of "the system so often called Linux", he'd said "any system that includes Linux".
The naming issue has long been an emotional one (and poorly handled, IMO, by RMS, especially early on), but the cold, hard, technical question remains:
What do you call a system with the Linux kernel plus BSD Unix utilities?
If the answer is "the Linux operating system", then I suspect you'll find most people find the name relatively useless in practice, since the utilities are what they most interact with (at a CLI level anyway).
If the answer is "BSD Unix", then you're excluding the importance of the Linux kernel, of course.
If the answer is "Unix", well, again, that name works just as well for pretty much any Linux, *BSD, Solaris, etc. system. I'm asking for a name that helps distinguish it from a system that shares just the kernel, but little else, with a GNU/Linux system.
So, are you going to call it "BSD/Linux"?
Great. That's why "GNU/Linux" isn't exactly out of bounds as a name.
(And, no, you can't just plug the Linux kernel into a BSD system in the complete sense that it's part of a GNU system, because it's way too dependent on GNU's extensions, some might say breakages, to the C language. For an up-and-running system without kernel recompilation as an important option, though, I don't know why a BSD/Linux system wouldn't be a workable option.)
Me, I'd rather be working on GNU/Solaris right now than Solaris, though I mitigate the pain somewhat by using XEmacs, even though I find it confusing, since I'm used to GNU Emacs.
What you seem to be unaware of is the fact that, in the USA, slavery is illegal even if the slave agrees to become one while still "free".
It is the ability to enter into a contract involving voluntarily restricting your own freedom to do what you want with software that he's talking about restricting, either by government fiat, or by society deciding, individual by individual, that we will neither accept such arrangements nor seek to get others to accept them for our own profit or convenience.
So, for example, absent any government restriction on slavery, there would still be plenty of people who would, under no circumstances, willingly become a slave, and plenty of people who would, under no circumstances, willingly offer to make someone else their slave.
In my opinion, the general lack of fringe-level violation of a millenia-long practice (slavery) suggests the US ban on slavery reflects, rather than imposes, society's morality on this topic.
The FSF would like to see society develop a similar "morality" regarding a person's right to share information, even if it's in the form of computer software. (This is my opinion, of course; I don't speak or work for the FSF.)
It's not as far-fetched as it sounds: in some ways, information that's useful to you in almost any form requiring you to agree to not share it (e.g. a computer program, but not a microwave's embedded computer's ROM so much), will make its way into your brain, via its user interface, its responsiveness, its "gestalt", and so on. (That's why Apple and Lotus long-ago launched their "look-and-feel" litigation, essentially seeking to restrict the ability of others to reproduce an "experience" using a computer system even by writing all their own code from scratch, especially since that experience would be usefully, and profitably, be sold to others who also wanted to enjoy it without having to pay just Apple or just Lotus.) Agreeing to never share stuff that has found its way into your brain with anyone else amounts to a (very) limited form of self-imposed slavery, in that the "portions" of your brain, or thinking, that touch sufficiently on the copyrighted matter are unavailable for the rest of your conscious being to willingly employ in, say, conversation with a neighbor.
(Having signed a few NDA's in my life, I know how silly this sounds, and how true it is, even though it is, in practice, a rather minor thing, especially because I try to avoid work that involves signing NDA's. I like sharing info, helping people, drawing analogies, etc., so having to erect mental walls around portions of my brain to satisfy my legal, and some would say moral, commitments is not something I enjoy.)
Also, just as many people violated the laws against slavery in various ways, it's pretty clear most Americans don't see intellectual privilege (aka intellectual property) as anywhere near the "property right" they do the right to own and keep real property. Based on observation, I'd say many Americans would be willing to "pirate" a copy or two of proprietary software yet not shoplift even if they could just as easily get away with it. (Don't know how it compares it to ripping off insurance companies, workman's compensation, etc. But I'd guess, the easier it is to convince oneself that the "ripped-off party" didn't really "lose" anything, the easier it is to rationalize the "theft", among other factors.)
So, while the quest to raise American morality sufficiently to marginalize proprietary software may seem quixotic, I'd say the quest (by organizations such as the RIAA, MPAA, and BSA) to marginalize freely sharing copies of information (software) with one's neighbor is within an order of magnitude (plus or minus) of the FSF's quixoticness.
Myself, while I don't dismiss the possibilities, I prefer to stress a more practical aspect of the issue, namely, I question whether contract law should allow individuals (and/or corporate bodies) to voluntarily enter into agreements to not do things that are, put simply, nearly impossible to avoid doing in practice, and believe that some forms of copyright infringement are, especially in today's computing environment, in that category of "nearly impossible to avoid".
E.g. it's one thing to agree to not make physical, i.e. paper, copies of that NDA'd document and send it to competitors, so contract law can, at least from a feasability point of view, restrict that. (That is, having entered into a contract, one party has a reasonable opportunity to avoid acting contrary to it, and the other party has a reasonable ability to prove, in a court of law, that the other has acted contrary to it.)
But it's entirely another thing to expect someone to not let one or another detail of a new computer chip's performance envelope slip in casual conversation, or to expect someone to somehow remember to not share a song's tune with others (by whistling or singing it), or to expect someone to remember to exclude proprietary documents on their computer from a list of files needing to be backed up (onto a web site that serves as a backup, onto a CD-R to send to a friend for them to hold onto "just in case", etc), or to assume that a programmer can "forget" some "inside info" on how an operating-system interface actually works when writing an app for someone else down the road.
It seems to me this angle, of considering the burden on the legal system (and the rest of the government) to support detailed, work-by-work, party-by-party copyright-infringement law, is rarely considered, but, to me, it's important, since I'd rather have FBI agents help stop the purported rush of briefcase-with-nuke-inside-carrying terrorists (you know, the ones that supposedly render missile defense impotent) than arrest people like Dmitry Sklyarov. Our legal system is too important, in protecting our lives, limbs, and real property, to burden it with the quixotic task of preserving intellectual "property" at a fine-grained level.
And since it's even sillier to keep people from possessing floppy disks or CD-RW drives and using an open network than it is to keep them from keeping and bearing arms, I believe the best approach, in terms of relieving law enforcement of an unnecessary burden, is to allow some kind of blanket-level copying of digital data, with exceptions made only for cases where the parties have entered into an explicitly signed agreement, and then only if the data, as well as the mechanisms (such as computer programs that manipulate it), reflect a sincere effort to make it natural and easy for the parties to remain in conformance with the contract.
(And, no, I don't consider clicking on an "I Accept" button some software program sticks in a dialog box when you run it to be an explicitly signed agreement under contract law, any more than I consider the father of a three-year-old girl to have entered into a contract when he answers her question "Daddy, when I grow up, will you marry me?" with "Yes, dear". Those who want to restrict IP beyond the simple, blanket level that society widely understands and agrees to will have to bear the burden of arranging proper contractual agreements. No more free lunches like the DMCA, which makes things easier for corporations, but far more confusing, threatening, and worrisome -- all needlessly, from the point of view of the security of the state and its people -- for the ordinary citizen.)
Slashdot Mirror
Had to get that off my chest...now, as to your comment about Reno having had "balls"...
Goodness knows Reno avoided doing her actual job when it came to investigating Gore.
Now that would have taken true courage, since, unlike with other scandals she did hand over to Ken Starr, there was plenty of credible evidence of criminal behavior on hand!
(And to think I started out as a fan of Janet Reno, even through the Waco debacle and her testimony! Sure, I like to give people a chance to do a job well, but she fairly quickly blasted through the floor of my expectations, such as they were....)
Then this:
Finally, these:
After all this, you ask me questions, as if expecting answers?
Sorry, but I feel the need to relieve you of ever having to endure my hatred of rational discussion again, so I must decline to answer further questions. Please make sure you never again read anything I write.
Sure, some people (including those who thought they might live through the preservation process) may believe those corpses have the possibility of living, someday, down the road, if we decided to restore them and had the technology to do so.
But, we need to do the science (and that means getting federal funding) now, so, as long as whoever is living allows us to unfreeze these corpses and extract whatever tissues we need, there's no reason to be concerned over the fact that such an action inevitably "kills" these corpses, because they're already dead. Just because they might someday, through some scientific discovery, be resuscitatible is not our problem.
After all, this isn't about Morality, i.e. what a bunch of white European redneck racist homophobic Southern (they're always Southern, y'see?) Christian baptists that George W. Bush listens to.
This is about Science.
(Oh, yeah, and Federal Funding for it. Can't forget that, can we? It's so much more convenient for us scientists -- I include myself in that, since I'm the one withholding $100M from supporting them -- to have the Federal government collect money from y'all by force than for us to have to go door to door, hat in hand, pleading for money. We simply don't have the time for that -- we're scientists, after all! We're doing important work! The rest of you can just be happy that your tax dollars are going to fund whatever we decide is science at any given moment.)
Remember, just like embryos, these corpses aren't going to contribute anything to society ever again -- especially if we destroy them, which we've decided is inevitable. (Please ignore the fact that there are children walking around today who were once frozen embryos slated for destruction -- especially since that cannot be said for anyone who was once a cryogenically preserved corpse!)
Now, if Bush changes his policy and allows federal funding for extracting organic materials from cryogenically-preserved corpses, I'll have only one thing left to worry about, namely...
So, you're right, the ACM has already answered the most important of my questions, leaving only my belief that software is close enough to speech, aka research, that software patents pose a greater and longer-term threat to secure systems than the DMCA.
(Remember, the DMCA applies only to software distributed under it, while software patents apply to all software, even free software, so while we can theoretically avoid "DMCA-contaminated" software in our research -- as impractical as that might be -- we can't avoid working with software that might be "contaminated" with algorithms already, or being, patented, without leaving the field of software altogether...something I often consider doing myself, to be honest.)
At this point, I consider my concerns about the ACM's recent position to pale in comparison to the good they've done by highlighting the risks posed by legislation such as the DMCA, especially in the short run.
Ultimately, as the ACM's own section 2.3 says, it's not, to me, a matter of "software patents are bad" or "the DMCA is bad". I believe it's simply a matter of helping everyone, especially those involved in deciding the acceptability of such law, understand the long-term, possibly unintended and/or unforeseen, consequences, so they can see more clearly what they are already accepting responsibility for.
(I guess what I am saying is that, while section 2.3 specifically identifies those going against some laws in favor of higher moral/ethical laws as bearing the risks and responsibilities of doing so, I believe that's true of everyone, regardless of whether they're "playing by the rules", violating the rules, or writing the rules. Not that everyone's "equally guilty", but since everyone has the capacity to decide how to proceed, they have to recognize that they have a responsibility for the freedom to make whatever choices they make. The more enlightened they can be about the potential outcomes, the better, is how I see it.)
They don't hit your stuff, just your buttocks.
(That code of conduct is, generally, in my opinion, excellent, and well worth reading and abiding by, to the extent it's possible.)
Unlike most any other industry, the computer industry is one in which research on the technology is often presented as the technology itself. In that sense, even well-established, free, "production" software like GNU Emacs, GCC, and the Linux kernel can be reasonably considered "research" as well -- they're distributed as source code, and everyone is encouraged to study it, learn from it, modify it, and distribute what they learn and/or their modifications.
Since the existence of software patents directly infringes peoples' individual rights to distribute research in that form (free source code), I found the ACM's requirements, as much as I agree with the basic ethical, moral, and practical basis for them (that is, it's generally ethical, moral, and practical to obey existing laws), to be too much for me in the case of software patents.
So, while I'm happy to see the ACM recognize the specific new threat, I wonder how they view software patents today, since software patents can easily render much practical research either infeasible (can't be distributed as free software without authors losing their houses and other property in court due to patent-infringement lawsuits) or illegal?
For example, without things like the DMCA, software patents can be used to prevent (or punish for) distributing things like DeCSS and other "IP-security" softwarez. (I used that term on purpose; "warez" denotes illegal software, it should perhaps also denote immoral, self-delusional, or tyrannical software as well. ;-)
True, ideally, software patents make an invention's nature plain enough for all (adequately schooled in the arts) to understand, and what the ACM's complaining about here is the "security-through-obscurity" approach presently used by certain companies enjoying an artificial, and ultimately too-fragile, legal fence built around it, known as the DMCA.
But, in practice, software patents are not used by typical programmers or computer-science researchers as a source of information on how stuff works; and, further, the lawyers who help write them up apparently try to make sure they are as inscrutable as possible (while still passing muster with the Patent and Trademark Office, or whatever it's called), so as to provide the least useful information, while carving out the most intellectual "property" possible.
So, even absent the DMCA, it seems to me that a much broader problem, including much of what the ACM is presently worried about, is posed by software patents, which too-often amount to inscrutable, unhelpful "explanations" of just what a person (or even a computer program) might, on its own, be doing, that is illegal, because the owner of the software patent a) says so and b) can afford expensive lawyers.
I guess what I'm asking is, given that the DMCA and software patents do exist:
-
-
- not publishing software that even might infringe
- not publishing research papers that describe patented properties, if it's fairly straightforward to convert any pseudocode or descriptions in the papers into software (in languages ranging from assembly code to Haskell, ML, Prolog, and so on)
- spending so much time researching the constant stream of software patents which they might otherwise infringe that they have little or no time to actually research and publish computer technologies?
-
Of course, these are really general questions of ethics, but since the ACM is making a statement, one which I support, I'd like to see them continue to think through issues like these, so their members have appropriate guidance from them regarding ethical issues, and so they serve as an ethically-consistent "voice", for computing professionals, to be heard by those who take on the responsibility of authoring and enforcing human laws.Does the ACM expect its members to abide by the legal restrictions of the DMCA, even if the result (not publishing weaknesses in a timely fashion) might be loss of property or even life of innocents?
Similarly, does the ACM expect its members to strive to avoid infringing software patents, by:
And does it expect its members to do these things even if doing so prevents them finding and/or publishing security flaws, again, even if the result of withholding such information might include the loss of property or life?
Beyond specifics such as the DMCA and software patents, does the ACM generally expect its members to abide by legal restrictions when the result of doing so could have severe moral repercussions, such as loss of life or property due to inadequate, or even hostile, computing technology being deployed by companies using "intellectual-property" law to protect such deployments against ACM members dutifully informing the public?
Yeah, and always on the positive edge....
Not true! Personally, I'm involved in a cdr culture. I'm always chasing some tail....
A bit? A *BIT*!!??
Sheesh, guess I'll have to type longer next time!
(Yeah, I do tend to be verbose. I'm a charter member of On And On Anon...say *that* three times fast! ;-)
Second, imagine what happens when a new technology comes along that allows these groups to communicate with each other, not so much directly via voice, but communicate stuff like "I've got something I'm willing to part with, which someone else might want" and "I could sure use something I'm thinking about, does anyone know where I can find something like that".
Except, the big thing about this "new technology" is that this form of communication is primarily about abstracting these communications in a way that makes obstacles formerly difficult to surmount -- such as knowing lots of details about a local group before communicating with it -- nearly completely disappear.
And, this technology, while it supports "Peer-to-peer" communication, is most effective because it supports arbitrary many-to-many communications at this level.
That is, a person in group A doesn't have to know much of anything about a person in group B to communicate these kinds of statements, queries, requests, offers, etc., nor do those two people have to rendezvous to communicate, using this new technology, in a fashion that automatically excludes either of them from communicating with other people in other groups.
But, there's a problem. There are entities -- let's call them "interests" -- that depend, they believe anyway, on the difficulty of communication between groups in this manner. They believe they have to keep these groups effectively separate, so they can be the "intermediaries" through which these groups do most, ideally all, of their communication.
And these interests become very alarmed at the prospect of the groups of humans communicating so easily and openly, that they try to shut down the new technology.
But, guess what! The new technology almost automatically "routes around" any blatant roadblocks set up to restrict it, because if communication is shut down directly between group X and group Y, it'll naturally, with only a little extra effort, flow indirectly via other groups.
Even in cases where specific groups, or collections of groups, are "successfully" shut off from the outside world, this new technology allows people within the isolated groups to communicate effectively, even in "hiding" if necessary, enough so they yearn, more and more every day, for the opportunity to communicate freely with all those other groups out there, with whom they now communicate only sporadically and at great risk.
So, these "interests" inevitably try yet another tack.
For one thing, they try to convince enough people in each group that, somehow, people in their group who communicate the most, and gain the most from the communication, benefit unfairly from the new technology.
They also start setting up beauracracies to try to centralize, or channel, these communications, and encourage more and more people to consider any communications outside of these channels to be, somehow, immoral or unethical.
Oh, sure, at first these beauracracies are designed to "smooth the flow" of communications, to "enable" them for "newbies" who don't know the system all that well, so as to protect them from themselves, so to speak.
But, inevitably, these beauracracies do almost nothing but grow, and not by simply participating, like everyone else, as equals, in this communications system -- no, they have to use force to interfere with, and maybe "skim off of", communications that would ordinarily happen just fine without them. Only by reducing the natural flow of communications can they really grow the way their proponents dream they should.
And the irony is that they've convinced so many people of the necessity of this, that even people who haven't yet even begun to really use and understand this wonderful new technology are educated, or indoctrinated, to believe that it is, in fact, evil, or at least enables a great deal of evil, and that, in the long run, it should be shut down, by force if not voluntarily by its users, to return to a "simpler time", before the technology became available, or at least to a time when it wasn't so widely and effectively used by individual people as they saw fit.
After all, the beauracracy, by controlling communication, is able to emit a constant stream of "examples" of "horrible things" that happen when communication happens freely. They get better and better at focusing people's attention on those comparatively rare examples, successfully hiding the fact that the vast majority of uses of this new technology are benign, if not obviously beneficial to society as a whole, as well as the individuals engaging in them.
Yet, as anyone who pays attention knows, wherever the anti-technology interests succeed in "roping off" several groups for awhile, those "horrible things" happen so much more often. They don't publicize that, of course, and a whole cottage industry arises to defend, and mislead regarding, those roped-off areas, even after the ropes have been overrun by the people within them. These areas are, therefore, regarded by many as "safe" areas, potential utopias where the constant access to worldwide communication is reduced to a pleasant, nearly noiseless, trickle by the beneficent dictators who decide exactly who communicates with whom, when, and how.
Sure, these interests, in trying to achieve these results, occasionally overreach, provoking harsh reactions from a (usually small) segment of the overall population.
But, with rare exception, there are never enough people in any given group that truly see the threat these artificial impediments to this form of communication, imposed on behalf of the "interests", represents to the body of humanity as a whole.
The divide-and-conquer strategy thus appears to work, and work well. Over time, as more and more people begin to define their well-being based on how much they communicate with the beauracracy, rather than freely with other groups, people who might otherwise fight against the whole idea of such a beauracracy resort instead to fighting in favor of just this or that specific form of beauracratic interference with how this new technology would naturally work, so as to ensure that the beauracracy becomes more firmly entrenched between groups that would otherwise communicate freely, so people already depending (at least somewhat) on the beauracracy for their communications will have more to enjoy, safe in the knowledge that their friendly beauracracy provides them a "safe", "reliable" connection to the outside world.
For example, notions of "fairness" arise that, while simply and directly handled in an unfettered system, seem to require yet more beauracracy to balance things out. Instead of someone who spots such an unfairness simply offering their ability to communicate on behalf of the disadvantaged, they're encouraged to call on the beauracracy to explicitly disadvantage those who are seen as, comparatively, advantaged. The result is that the widespread urge to do good for one's neighbor in need is replaced by a widespread urge to call on the use of force to make someone else "do good" for that neighbor.
The only thing that could dismantle such a beauracracy is if a substantial number of citizens made it their goal to dispel not just with the beauracracy, but with the whole notion that it's ever necessary to intervene between two or more people communicating using this new technology.
But that's not likely to happen, because the "interests" ultimately end up controlling the media and educational establishments, making even openly discussing reducing the interference something that must be done in whispers.
Now, if you think I'm talking about the Internet/WWW as the "new technology", and the "interests" as corporate and governmental bodies using tactics like the DMCA, the CDA, and other things (like the French government banning certain materials on Yahoo), you're only partly right.
Because, in reality, I'm mostly describing a system of communication between humans that's nearly language-independent (it works well even between people who do not share the same spoken or written language), "agnostic" (it doesn't care about the race, religion, gender, or other attributes of the people involved in the communication), nearly instantaneous (information about each communication almost naturally communicates itself to everyone else using the same system, almost like being in a chat room), and, most interestingly of all, that's probably over 10,000 years old.
That system of communication?
It's called the "price system".
That's right, I'm talking about the free market, the "place" where two or more people can go, communicate effectively regarding their needs and wants to conduct a transaction, often without the need to know much of anything about each other, and communicate almost perfectly compressed information on the transaction to everyone else in the same market.
And who are the interests that oppose or seek to fetter this communication?
They're the people who brought you Collectivism, Communism, Socialism, Taxes, Levies, Fees, all the largely involuntary means by which communications via this system are either impinged upon or forced to occur.
And, just as decreasing the ability of people to freely exchange "data" on the Internet is easily seen by "geeks" as having an overall detrimental effect on the ability of society to function in an ideal way, these fetters on the free market have nearly the exact same effect on humanity, multiplied by several orders of magnitude or so.
For example, laws restricting naturally-free trade across international borders prevent important information from flowing between them -- information on inefficiencies on one side or the other -- just as laws restricting discussing security or performance flaws in software prevent information on those flaws from freely flowing.
In both cases, the Powers That Be, or that want to be anyway, claim there's insufficient need for such freely-flowing information, compared to the "damage" it'd do to one side or the other.
But, those of us who already understand the importance of a truly free market, and have confidence that it's the humanity of individual humans, not the individual wills of a comparatively small elite with a great deal of gunpower, that'll, in the long run, best guide humanity to the highest uses of these technologies, consider what's happening to the Internet today, including the DMCA, the encroachment of national borders on this supposedly "borderless" territory, as merely a modest replaying of the gradual neutering of a bit player (compared to the free market, anyway).
Sadly, even though the Internet is not necessary for the price system, or free market, to flourish, it is impossible for the Internet to truly flourish without the price system or free market. No government that infringes on the free market will ever permit a free Internet to flourish, because, in many important ways, they're the same thing, or just different manifestations of the same fundamental urge all humans have to communicate with each other in all sorts of ways regarding their needs, wants, hopes, desires, abilities, energy, and so on.
And, as long as our children are indoctrinated in the schools, via the media, and by our own laws to view the market as some sort of enemy to be constantly tamed by the use, or at least the threat, of force (aka government intervention), they'll inevitably, directly or indirectly, view the Internet in just the same way, especially once they "get over" the "newness" of it.
Those of us who've been "online" long enough already recognized the symptoms years ago, such as, people claiming the Internet isn't "fair" because not everyone has identical access, bandwidth, etc.
So, I don't see how DMCA can end up being anything but a short stop -- perhaps a temporarily-overreaching one -- on a long march towards the same degree of restrictions on free communication of "digital" data that we already have -- AND WITH A GREAT DEAL OF SUPPORT FROM THESE SUPPOSEDLY "BRILLIANT" INTERNET "GEEKS" -- imposed on the free market.
Oh, the new restrictions will have to be better-packaged than the DMCA and CDA, to be sure. And the Supreme Court and legislatures will have to be "taught", just as FDR taught them, to view the U.S. Constitution as requiring governmental intervention in Internet communication (a la the free market) instead of preventing it. (But this issue transcends the Constitution of one nation anyway, of course.)
So, you can complain about the DMCA all you want now, but just you wait.
In another 20-40 years, tax rates for most anybody working for a living in the "free market" will start at around 70%, the Internet as we know it will have been replaced by a network that allows "free" access for its citizens to communicate efficiently only with corporate and governmental sites (the former paying high taxes, perhaps in the form of bandwidth and content) and very limited, low-bandwidth access to truly free intercommunication between arbitrary people...
In summary: if you want to fight infringements on your freedoms, it's about time you figured out that it's your freedom to communicate, including discussing and exchanging price information (of which an actual monetary exchange for goods and services is a crucial component), that's the basis for most practical aspects of all the other freedoms you do seem to care about right now.
But as long as you take up the banner against the free exchange of price information, as so many of you "geeks" do, your efforts to repeal things like the DMCA will be nothing more than temporary successes for the benefit of a limited audience that'll, sooner or later, look to even more governmental limitations on freedoms formerly enjoyed widely by users of the Internet.
(How some 20-odd seconds of music, clearly used as a parody, can be copyright infringement, I'm not sure. But I've still got that short segment of the show "memorized", and they can't jail me for playing it back in my own head! Not yet anyway! Free Dmitri! Free Dmitri!!! ;-)
I don't know about him, but my problem is that, while I'm also pretentious, arrogant, self-righteous, and at least a bit elitist, I'm no longer nearly as antisocial or fully elitist as I used to be.
Naturally, I blame TV. I watch too much of it. Especially The Weather Channel and Fox News.
(I used to watch CNBC, but that was back when the market was fun and Maria Bartiromo was single. Now all I do when reading about the NYSE switching to Linux is wonder what it really means. ;-)
But, as far as the actual conduct of those in power in Nazi Germany, their use of national industry to wage war, the means by which they came into power, and their "social darwinism" and other anti-life experiments, the more I learn about it, the more I see its "fascism" as more like today's left-wing than right-wing politics.
And you might want to explore the deep history of that well-known left-wing organization called "Planned Parenthood", if you really want to understand the connection between today's debate over advocating embryonic stem-cell research and yesterday's Nazi-driven desire to create a "master race" (which, ultimately, is difficult to distinguish from the left's desire to create a utopian society by destroying almost every vestige of the forms of society that have proved their worth over the millenia).
In this debate, anyway, the impulse to force every American to help fund embryonic stem-cell research is much more fascist than the willingness to let each American decide for himself whether and how to fund it.
After all, as I myself pointed out, there are many on the right who do not oppose stem-cell research (even of the embryonic type; I note that, typical of left-wing zealots, you omit that key adjective, since it distinguishes that form of research from all other types of stem-cell research, the other types not requiring the destruction of otherwise-viable embryos).
I wrote:
To which you replied:
Objectively speaking, which notion, taught to generations of children, does more to discourage them from taking life so lightly as to destroy it?
By acknowledging, even if just via lip service, that we are endowed by our Creator with inalienable rights, including life, liberty, etc., we teach our children that everyone is created equal in God's eyes, that everyone has an equal right to life.
But what does your prescription teach? That life, or at least the right to it, is nothing more than the result of laws and vigilance of the people. (Which may be true as practiced on earth.)
In other words, people indoctrinated into your worldview will not only view life as easily swept away, with no moral culpability, by simply changing the law or even being less "vigilant", they will assume there is no moral basis from which to construct or modify law in the first place, and they'll believe that they needn't be vigilant about anything more than their own self-interest, as modified by the impositions of the law of the day.
So, under your "system", we can each just try to convince the government to change the laws to suit our convenience, and the most persuasive and forceful will, as usual, win. In a sense, you're arguing that Might Makes Right, since, here on earth, those in power make the laws that you claim are the basis of rights such as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Therefore, it isn't really wrong to kill your spouse; all that's important is that it's illegal, as well as whether you actually get caught and convicted. (I note little irony in the fact that apologists for Clinton and now Condit, as compared to those for Republicans in trouble, were far more likely to resort to exactly these sorts of claims. "Well, there's no indictment, so we shouldn't be discussing this, right?" "But it's not illegal, so what business is it of ours?" "Hey, he wasn't convicted, so he did nothing wrong.")
The former Soviet Union: tens of millions of innocents murdered in the name of Communism and atheism. Cambodia under Pol Pot: Ditto. China: Maybe just millions, but, basically, ditto. If everyone already taught, by our culture and our public schools, all about the crimes committed over the last 18 centuries by those wearing the label "Christian", were also to read "The Black Book of Communism", you wouldn't have made a statement like that.
(Christianity has been learning, over the centuries since the 3rd or 4th, and in fits and starts, the futility of imposing itself on people, e.g. via government. Communism has learned no such thing, perhaps because, as far as I can tell, without government, it's nothing more than people deciding to live together and share resources, at least until they decide to stop doing it.)
So, no, while I'm not saying everyone would commit violence against their fellow man without believing in God, I'm pointing out that there is a substantial body of evidence that belief in God, specifically, the belief that life is a right divinely given to all human beings, gives most people an extra, and important, natural resistance to committing violence against innocents, as well as an extra willingness to fight and die to protect the lives of innocents from tyrants. (Note that I do distinguish between living a Christian lifestyle, which is fundamentally nonviolent, and being willing to commit violence to defend those living such a lifestyle, which is not nonviolent. But that distinction doesn't seem relevant here.)
I'm saying that, when you compare how POWs were treated in WW2 by the USA, Germany, and Japan, you'll see a fairly close correlation between belief in one Creator and decent treatment of prisoners of war. Perhaps there are other explanations, but I haven't heard one yet that is nearly as credible.
As far as how mankind treats animals, who are supposedly "more advanced than stem cells" (or embryos, or sufficiently retarded or even unconscious adult human beings, perhaps? justifying their termination to serve science?)? Unlike those animals, embryos, could, if their right to life was respected, contribute far more to the well-being of all mankind than any chicken ever will.
Keep in mind the fact that, until you get down to microorganisms, mankind is the dominant species on this planet. That is, animals can't fight back, in any practical way, as a means to defend themselves against man's inhumanity to animals, any more (and far less) than they can prevent animal "inhumanity" to animal. So, the only way you can prevent man's mistreatment of animals is to stop man doing it, by force or by preaching. Until we manage to convince enough people to stop oppressing each other for their own convenience, we'll never take even the first baby steps towards stopping oppressing those in the animal kingdom, and, needless to say, if you choose force to achieve your aim of preventing mistreatment of animals, you'll only be encouraging the belief that use of force is justified against them, since you've used it against mankind.
(Treating dogs and cats as pets is little more than the first baby step, if a step at all, in such a direction. I note, however, that many people treat their pets better than their fellow man, so there is already progress here. But many, many others treat their fellow man as pets, that is, as if they can't choose for themselves how to live their lives, how best to earn a living, how to spend or invest their earnings, with whom to associate, and so on, so the "front" here is chaotic, not uniform by any means.)
Note that neither my religious beliefs, nor Christianity as properly taught, requires me or anyone else to kill animals or people. Nor does it require us to tax other people, or to steal from them, or to even covet their property (which is the seed of all taxation, naturally). Compare that to the preachings of the Left, which requires several of these things, to the point that someone like myself, for the "crime" of not agreeing to ever-higher taxation, regulation, and so on, is castigated as an "idiot", a "fool", "delusional", and so on.
But, as a pro-life meat-eater, I'm grateful for any steps individuals choose to take away from tyrannizing their neighbor, even if their path seems hypocritical to me. That is, even a strict vegetarian who might also favor abortion as birth control, the death penalty, and federally-funded embryonic stem-cell research, at least is making a personal sacrifice of sorts (vegetarianism) that contributes to an overall atmosphere standing against violence, tyranny, against other beings, and that I applaud, even if I don't do the same thing myself, and even though I tend to believe their other beliefs might, when preached, overwhelm their "message" about mistreating animals to the point of spreading, overall, a pro-violence message.
As far as Plato refuting "nonsense" -- I'm unaware of him healing the leper, casting out sins, raising the dead, and preaching the gospel that everyone else is capable of doing the same things. That's an authority I consider higher than even a master logician like Plato. As far as where logic itself comes from? If not from Mind, which is God to many of us, then it has no validity since it is not intelligent, in which case it can tell us nothing about the existence of God or from where we derive whatever "rights" we may have. (Read the book of Job for questions just like these, and try answering them from an atheistic viewpoint.)
I must also stress that my post about left vs. right was primarily about the fundamental ideals of these respective thought-systems. You are wise to utterly reject the notion that people on the left vs. right, or who claim to be, necessarily reflect the values I'm talking about better than people on the other side.
Yes, I do believe the general mass of people on the right are less willing to tyrannize their fellow citizens for their own convenience than those on the left, but I also believe that there's still a great distance between both masses and true acceptance a la that professed by Christ Jesus.
But to blindly trust that someone saying "I'm a conservative Republican" is less likely to cherish oppression in their hearts, or assume that someone saying "I'm a liberal Democrat" is more likely to do so, than the other, is to engage in unnecessary prejudice.
What I do know is that every time I've reasoned out a basis on which I believed I might have the right to impose my will on someone else via some means (usually government, but occasionally I admit I just feel like beating the #@!$ out of some loser ;-), and I looked for support for that belief in one of the fundamental texts of the Right -- the Holy Bible -- I am always unable to find sufficient justification for my belief.
(Note that I impose the same kind of requirement on imposing one's will on another as our judicial system does of convicting a criminal, as in "beyond a reasonable doubt". That is, I don't justify my desire to impose my will based on at least a 50/50 support for it in the Bible; I have to see at least a 90/10 support for it. I have yet to find an instance of this.)
Instead, what I find in the Bible, and in primitive Christianity generally, are statements that directly contradict any attempt to justify imposing one's will on another. Consider, for one, the best-known prayer of a Christian, as emphasized by me for this purpose:
Note the recurring them of God's government, His will, being the only valid will to be exercised, and how the final verses seem to suggest, if not shout out, that, among the temptations and evils from which we are asking, in praying this prayer, to be delivered, is any belief in a kingdom, a government, a system of law and order, other than God's, as expressed in His heaven.
I just don't see sufficient room in prayers like that, or in the life of Christ Jesus and his closest followers (some of whom left government, or quasi-government, positions as soon as they "converted", rather than hold on to positions from which they could tyrannize the populace, such as Saul), to meet the "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard I set for myself for imposing my will on others.
Now, can you point me to any fundamental texts of the left that contain language like that? I read Marx's Communist Manifesto so long ago that I can recall little from it, but can you point to statements such as that, which you might be able to persuade me are horribly misinterpreted by his followers of the 20th Century, as a means to dismiss their crimes as not being derived largely from their fundamental teachings?
Not that I'm claiming Marx is the only author of fundamental texts of the left. But we already had Gore and Liebermann (sp?) put on the mantle of God in their campaign, e.g. when the latter talked about how the Commandment "Honor thy father and mother" requires us to grant Medicare coverage for prescription medicines, as if God had really intended to say "You must take up arms against your fellow man, so as to force them to fund the medicines your father and mother need." Thus the left happily puts on the cloak of religion to justify their proposed tyrannies and oppressions, all of which seem, to me, to be Marxist prescriptions for what they believe ails society.
So, sorry to say, I find "if thine enemy strikes thee on the one cheek, turn to him the other cheek also" much more persuasive as a moral basis by which humans should interact with each other, because I find persuasion, preaching, and cherishing the individuality of each and every human being (from conception forward), so they may find their way to live their life the best way they can according to their understanding, to be a far less brutal way to live compared to seeking to impose my will on others. Yet the latter approach is what I find to be pretty much the constant drumbeat of the left, as compared to the right (though there are, of course, exceptions).
Remember, the origin of this thread is the claim that George Bush is an "idiot" because he's refusing to force American citizens to fund research based on the use of stem cells that are extracted only by destroying otherwise-viable embryos.
In my opinion, there's no way someone can make such a claim without regularly fantasizing about exercising tyrannical control over millions of peoples' lives, with little regard for the necessity or effects of that control. (Important: when you have power over someone, your need to exercise it properly is diminished compared to their need, absent your power over them, to exercise self-control. That's why power tends to corrupt -- because those who wield it are insulated somewhat from the effects of wielding it poorly. So people who dream of tyrannizing others in whatever form rarely give serious consideration to the effects their dreams, once realized, might actually have.)
But you won't be sure whether someone is a tyrant-wannabe by checking whether their label reads "Republican", "Democrat", "left-wing", "right-wing", "atheist", "agnostic", "Christian", "Buddhist", etc. You have to look at how they live, what they preach, and how enthusiastically they wear those labels, knowing what the labels represent.
So I certainly agree with your call to generally ignore such labels!
To those on the left, the only reason for living is to enjoy living in the now. That means, basically, take no thought for the generations to come, whether they'll have as much freedom, opportunity, safety, health, etc. as those living now do, or, at least, subordinate those concerns to the primacy of those already living.
Hence, abortion on demand, by the millions in the USA, one of the richest and most secure nations in the history of the planet for women, who nevertheless choose to abort purely for their own convenience. (I'm not talking about abortions that are medically necessary here.)
The right generally dismisses the bright, shiny object known as "instant gratification" in favor of instilling beliefs, systems, etc. that it believes most effectively transmits civilization and culture to subsequent generations.
To those on the right, abortion and, by extracting stem cells, destroying (even frozen) embryos that might be saved before being otherwise destroyed (and, yes, saving such embryos does happen, there are people alive today who once were frozen embryos slated for destruction), contributes to a reduced regard for life in civilization.
Clearly those whose right to life are being advocated in favor of, by the right, and yet will die due to being aborted or destroyed, will never vote Republican, will never be taxed to fund a missile-defense system, will never contribute to their local Baptist church, will never buy loads of Proctor & Gamble products (to pick four stereotypical examples of why right-wingers supposedly advocate various positions). Yet the right expends vastly more energy and takes much bigger risks trying, mostly in vain, to save these voiceless, often faceless, human beings than does the left in saving animals, trees, the environment, and so on, even though all the right asks for is laws restricting individual choice in abortion on demand and such, while those on the left insist that every one of us change our way of life vastly (stop emitting greenhouse gases, which means "stop breathing", by the way; stop generating trash; stop doing business; etc.).
Those on the right believe that fundamental human values are life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and the ownership of property, and that only civilization, including the presence of some sort of military to defend those rights, is sufficient to ensure that future generations will get to enjoy them as we do.
Those on the left act, generally, out of the assumption that, either those rights just naturally sprang forth from the ground (hence their general disregard for those who fought and died to carve them out, e.g. the USA's Founding Fathers) or that they're unimportant in the first place ("but those embryos are just clumps of cells" -- a statement that is 100% true of each one of us, as the scientists of Nazi Germany would explain if they were still around, given that there's no clear, scientific point at which we become more than a clump, other than conception).
Instead, the fundamental values on the left do not have to do so much with life and liberty as with the "right" to enjoy the fruits of another man's labor, the "right" to take the life of an innocent who cannot speak for himself if it serves some short-term convenience, and so on. Left-wing propaganda therefore tends to portray what scientists call "life" as merely a happy accident, something to which no being has any real right, unless, let's say, that being happens to be on death row in a state whose governor is the Republican candidate for President. (This also explains why those in the right can seem insanely opposed to scientific pursuits such as SETI or teaching evolution -- even when those opposing these things are scientists! It's not so much the teaching of theories that's really bugging them, it's the indoctrination of children into the notion that life isn't a fundamental right given to us by God, a view the right believes is, itself, regardless of whether God actually exists, necessary to the preservation of a free society over many generations.)
So, to the left, it just doesn't matter one whit that embryos, fetuses, or perhaps even terminally ill children, elderly, and, someday of course (if we do go down the left's road), adults might be sacrificed to the gods of medical necessity, if not medical convenience. As long as the valuable research springs forth, one would think, the destruction is worthwhile, but even results aren't necessary -- the left claims 100% success is required only for things like missile defense, never for things like abortion on demand (wasn't that supposed to reduce unplanned pregnancies over time?) or welfare (aka the "war on poverty", which did for poverty what the "war on drugs" did for drug use in the USA).
That is, in 50 years, if there are no substantial benefits arising out of research on embryonic stem cells, despite President Clinton (#44, aka Hillary) reversing Bush and forcing American taxpayers to fund the creation and destruction of millions of embryos to a) create vast quantities of stem cells for "research" and b) further inoculate the American public against the notion that conception might signal the beginning of life, I can assure you there will be no apology from those on the left for the millions of lives sacrificed for no real good. (But remember, boys and girls, we can't go building a missile-defense shield to prevent real enemies from even bothering to build vast numbers of real nukes, unless we can prove, before even conducting research and testing, that such a shield would, when attacked simultaneously by every nation on earth plus UN, NATO, and Greenpeace, exhibit a 100% success rate! Never mind that we aren't killing human beings to research such a shield. In fact, I wonder if we could convince the left to build the shield if we could find a way to use aborted fetuses as crucial components in the research? JUST KIDDING -- the Right would never tolerate such a thing anyway.)
After all, the ideology of the left is much closer to that of those who have murdered tens of millions of innocents adults, children, and fetuses in the 20th century alone -- a feat that so-called "religious persecution" did not come anywhere near to matching in all the 20 centuries that preceded it. (Of course, most successful religious persecution is actually carried out as government-sponsored persecution shrouded in the garb of religion, just as this century's massacres have been carried out by governments claiming they're communist, socialist, whatever. There is, however, a much greater distance between murder and Christ than between murder and Marx, which may explain why followers of the former run out of steam following a murderous tyrant more quickly than followers of the latter. In the extreme cases, the idea that killing everyone lets God sort them out is dangerous, but is not nearly so, due to its more-obvious illogic, than the left's version, namely, kill everyone who doesn't agree everyone should be made equally poor.)
The tyrannical mind-set of the left is so pervasive in this world that even those on the right accept it, in at least limited form, in their own thinking. That's why even prominent "conservative" news organizations, like Fox News, don't have frequent interviews with survivors of abortion attempts, people who've used firearms (even just "cocking", if that's the right word, a shotgun) to defend their life, loved ones, and/or property, and so on. That's why Bill O'Reilly says things like "Republicans don't want lower-mileage cars" instead of something vastly closer to the truth, namely, "Republicans don't want to cram artificially low-mileage cars down the throats of the car-buying American public".
In that context, and given the fact that the politically active tyrants tend to care less about ideology than about control of power and money (which explains why abortion advocates and advocates of embryonic stem-cell research go hysterical -- witness the vicious treatment of Presidents who cross them here -- over mere withdrawal of federal funds for their "pet projects", despite the fact that vast amounts of private funds are at hand to fund such activities -- because they can't control the populace as effectively when funded by charity, however substantial it might be, compared to when they're funded by force, i.e. tax dollars), it's not surprising that this debate has been largely framed as "George Bush decides the fate of stem-cell research", often leaving out key words such as "federally-funded" and "embryonic".
Nor is it surprising that, even in a story that clearly includes the pertinent information, many here (highly-modded-up, I'll point out) scream as if Bush is the stupidest President in history simply because he refuses to use force, i.e. the same "men with guns" that "liberated" Elian so he could return to being the property of the State of Cuba, to force every American taxpayer to fund a form of research many of them would, if they knew the facts rather than just the left-wing-media hype, find repugnant.
So, yes, this is a religious issue. The left is upset because their religion requires them to make sacrifices to their gods by forcing fellow citizens to part with their hard-earned property and money so as to fund whatever those gods claim is most important Right Now.
Meanwhile, the right is still upset because our society still celebrates abortion on demand as if it's the only means by which women can celebrate being "equal", having "choice", etc. So much for the use of the word "choice", when most who favor it in the context of abortion oppose it in the context of the ordinary citizen deciding whether to fund embryonic stem-cell research.
In the end, given the fact that even prominent "pro-life" Republicans have trouble opposing the continued use of stem cells newly extracted by destroying viable embryos, it's unlikely Bush's decision will long stand, and impossible that it'll shut down research on embryonic stem cells, any more than the US prohibition on slavery will keep that activity shut down worldwide.
Ultimately, in another 100 years or so, anyone with diseases such as Parkinson's, taking medication to alleviate or eliminate their suffering, will have to live with the fact that their added comfort and longer lives resulted from the unwilling sacrifices of many who never got a chance to voice their opinions on these issues, never got to vote, and never got to research harmless and moral ways to achieve the same results, perhaps even faster. Just as we Americans (especially those who are white) are constantly told that their country was "built on the backs of slaves", there'll be a guilt factor. (Of course, among several big differences are that at least the slaves had a shot at escaping, and, in the meantime, they got to live. I wonder: why wasn't it okay to enslave people, given that they were all going to die anyway, just like most frozen embryos? Hmmm....)
However, I'll point out that, unlike with books, which could perhaps remotely be claimed to contain "instructions" run by "people", software runs machines, mainly computers, that do not have the same rights or responsibilities as people.
In that context, it no more strains credulity, in my opinion (and perhaps the FSF would agree, or take a different tack entirely), to claim that software should be open and free, as source, to avoid technology problems, than it does to claim that the materials you put in your the medicine you sell, while you might have plenty of reason to keep the "recipe" secret, should be similarly open and free -- so doctors have some idea what they might be potentially fighting, for just one example, should your medication prove dangerous.
In that sense, I believe software is closer to internal medicine than to writing in books, when those two are viewed as extremes on a continuum of the importance of content, what mechanisms mostly directly use the content, how much opportunity humans have to determine, ahead of time, the effective nature of the content, and so on.
Another problem with the analogy with books is that, in all pertinent ways, they are source code. That is, any reasonably educated reader can study them and see what they're saying. They have an insignificant amount of "meta" information that requires reverse-engineering the actual stored instructions, but that largely drives the behavior of the reader of the book (i.e. a human).
That's very different from an executable vs. source. An executable delivered by a proprietary software vendor, which you're executing on your computer, may well be spying on you, deleting your files, etc., but your ability to find that out is severely constrained, since you don't have the source code.
Same with internal medicine. If that industry worked, and had government protection, a la the software industry, your right to know, ahead of time, what's in medicine you're taking (or are given, say, force-fed by a nurse in the elementary school to which you might be going), would not exist. Your right to publish what you do know about the content would not exist. Your right to study (reverse-engineer) the content would not exist. And, to the extent you and others did these things regularly because of ordinary freedoms and opportunities to do so, and because y'all felt such study, discussion, criticism, etc., was crucial to leading a healthy life, both as individuals and as a society, you'd find those freedoms and opportunities being increasingly curtailed by the medical industry and government nearly every day.
With books, you don't have that problem. Somebody can come into your house and try to bake those biscuits in Penn & Teller's book, but you have the freedom, the choice, and the opportunity to look over their shoulder, note the "dangerous" combination of ingredients, and say "no thanks; not only will I not eat those biscuits, you're not even allowed to make them in my kitchen".
Because of language used by FSF/GNU supporters, I tend to think, people looking at these issues often labor under the assumption that the goal is to protect and promote "freedom of software". It isn't, in my opinion; the phrase "software freedom" is more precisely rendered "freedom of people to read software".
So, one overarching question is, to what extent is the ability to read and otherwise fully embrace software that, in one way or another, is running some machinery in your household, business, or infrastructure, a fundamental human right?
And, orthagonally to the rights issue, another overarching question is, to what extent is that ability critical to the long-term safety, stability, flexibility, and inventiveness of a society?
Those two questions are primarily, but not exclusively, the realm of the free-software movement and the Open-Source-Software movement, respectively, and I believe they both need to be considered, and seriously so, with little (but not zero) weight given to issues such as short-term profitability of a few commonplace business models.
So, for now, it seems that only the FSF is fighting and standing on the line that human rights include the right to know, view, consider, replicate, criticize, and discuss the instructions that machines with which a human might interact are running.
The FSF might well be drawing that line too far towards the "book end" of the continuum.
But, if they didn't, and if society took that opportunity to jump even further over that line in the sand, I suggest that the danger would greatly increase that the line you, and many others, might wish to draw (say, before we lose similar freedoms regarding medicine, or before the freedoms we've already lost regarding bioengineered or genetically-engineered organisms, including crops, in our environment have effects as visible to ordinary people as the ILOVEYOU, Melissa, and other software vermin already have) may well be more in danger in the long run, especially since the primary objection, by far, voiced in response to the FSF's line is "but profits are so important", not anything fundamental regarding rights, and those other potential lines have no inherent defenses that turn corporate profits into allies (as can happen with other issues, in other dimensions, for example).
In short, those who concede that corporate profits trump the importance and advantages of ordinary people having access to the source code of software that runs the machinery of their lives have, as far as I can see, little more they can pull out of their hats, should they desire to do so, to prevent corporate profits trumping the ability of ordinary people having access to similar information regarding the air they breathe, the clothes they wear, the various ointments they apply externally, the food they eat, and the medicines they ingest.
To suggest my post displays "extremism" in its attitude strikes me as, frankly and honestly, extreme.
As I believe I made clear, anyone who finds fault with the FSF or RMS can choose whether to publically air those concerns, whether to privately engage them, or whether to just put them aside, as everyone does with regard to most every issue they consider.
We all consider priorities when determining whether to publically beat up on someone, or some organization, over some issue. I sure do; I have many issues over which I part company with the FSF, but none of them are as important as preserving the right to use, create, modify, and distribute free software.
But, as I pointed out, whoever criticizes the FSF should consider whether an unintended effect of their public criticism, added to everyone else's perhaps, is to make the FSF so unpopular and irrelevant that it no longer can serve any useful role defending free software.
Such people cannot both claim their right to criticize (whether their target is the FSF or someone or something else) while disclaiming their responsibility if the effect of the criticism is not what they may have intended.
It's just like, whack your kid upside the head to "knock some sense into him", he falls, hits his head, and dies, the responsibility is yours, no amount of "well, that's not what I intended" will change that fact.
For some time I've seen much, IMO, rather mindless, often informed, sometimes outright false, but, overall, mostly irrelevant criticism of the FSF aired in public, by people who at least pretend to support the FSF's goals, but just want to take issue with this or that.
(How many of these people really contribute to the FSF, financially or otherwise, I wonder?)
The motivations for most of that criticism are, I believe, mostly childish, not unlike the "piling on" against John Rocker as displayed by various talk-show hosts a year or so ago. (Yes, he said things that upset some people and weren't PC, and, being white and southern, he couldn't be allowed to "get away" with doing that the way others are on a routine basis. That should have been a one- or two-day story. But the cowardly members of the peanut gallery chose to go much, much further than that, knowing nobody would dare stand up to what they were saying in the way they might if, say, they were criticizing a minority athlete who said something far more hateful.)
In summary: those who criticize the FSF, especially in childish ways, should ask themselves what they really want to achieve, why they think their criticism will achieve that, and whether they're ready to bear the responsibilities for the possible consequences of their joining the mob criticizing the FSF.
Similarly, those who read such criticism would do well to ask themselves "what does this person really want to change, in terms of making the world a better place, by airing his grievances here and now? can I trust the motives he claims to have? with his criticism, is this person part of the solution, part of the problem, or simply irrelevant? e.g. does this sort of criticism ever lead to positive change in the target? is it informative, does it give me info which I can check out for myself, or is it designed to get me to just react, go with the flow, whatever -- is it written in a manner that treats an uninformed reader like myself as a thoughtful person unwilling to spread malicious gossip, or as just a carrier of hatred or resentment?".
All of this is true for any organization or person being criticized, of course, but I was responding to an unsupportable inference, criticizing the FSF, drawn from my earlier comment, so I focused on the FSF.
These lines were spoken in Klingonese, of course.
Best line heard in a movie theatre when ST:TMP premiered came at that point:
The other thing I love about that scene is the music. Awesome music. In fact, the soundtrack, which I have on CD, has been a modest favorite of mine for years, once I got "past" the romantic "excesses" on it.
Oh, and here's what the /. "quote of the moment" happens to be as I preview this comment:
WRONG AGAIN! Stupid computer...!
Note that I was talking mainly about the "Linux phenomenon".
Without the FSF, there would have been no substantial free-software or open-source-software movements, in my opinion.
While RMS (not the FSF per se) has definitely alienated many people, including potential contributors, and Linux attracted lots of potential contributors as well as becoming the focal point of the "phenomenon", it was the FSF, its Project GNU, and the GNU General Public License (GPL) that both pioneered and founded the free-software movement.
Without those, any nascent movement would have been picked apart by proprietization of software a la the Symbolics situation (which helped convince RMS that more than just enthusiasm and trust was necessary; that an organization, with legal teeth and muscle, was needed to specifically make free software happen and endure).
It is always easy for the pampered citizens within the walls of a relatively safe city to pooh-pooh the contributions of those who built the walls and those who man them, weapons in hand, as "radicals", "extremists", and so on. "The outside world loves us now; our former enemies now seek to embrace us; they simply find our armaments and walls off-putting, and we'd have so many more people join us in building our clay pots and weeding our gardens if we'd just lay down our arms", they say.
The fact that Microsoft now tries to divide and conquer the movement by specifically targeting the GPL shows that they know where the true long-term strength of the movement lies: in the protections offered by the combination of the GPL and the holding of important copyrights by the FSF, and in the relevancy to the movement still granted the FSF by those who matter (those who choose to contribute their efforts, not just those in the movement who criticize the FSF in public).
Microsoft knows that if it can convince enough in the movement to go along with its proposed marginalization of the FSF and the GPL, which it accomplishes by means such as calling the GPL "viral", "Pac-man-like", etc., criticisms neither new nor accurate (but that has never stopped MS or its minions, has it?), the foundations and defenses will crumble. Individual programmers may well, of course, continue to enthusiastically contribute to "free software", but, at that point, the proprietary-software proponents will be able to "pick off" the cream without ever again having to contribute back to the community that forwarded the movement, and the software, in the first place. (Just as, the walls having been destroyed, some people will still plant seeds in the gardens within, until they tire, or die of starvation, due to the raiders constantly stealing the fruit just as harvest begins.)
The ultimate goal of Microsoft and its minions is to eliminate free software as serious competition, to validate the "long-held beliefs" of many people that the free-software development model simply cannot compete, when it comes to features, performance, and robustness, with proprietary software. (I speak from direct experience with the mindsets of MS's minions, who seem to have a constant stream of snappy, but inaccurate or misleading soundbites, ready to explain why the movement in which I've participated for some 10 years is unworkable or inadequate. They rarely seek out my advice; why should they, since their goal is to co-opt, if not outright destroy, the free-software movement, rather than learn about how it truly works for the betterment of the entire computing industry, including its users?)
I will say it was my distinct impression that, during at least half the time Linux was becoming the phenomenon it became, the relationship between Linux developers and FSF/GNU developers was, at least, somewhat strained. Despite this, they had the freedom and, to a fair extent, obligation to build upon and improve each others' work, and, of course, users of either could freely intermingle both.
For example, most of the time I developed g77 as an FSF volunteer, my workstation ran Linux, even though I sometimes worried that Linux developers had insufficient regard for long-term portability concerns as expressed by the FSF. And I continued to work on g77 long after becoming frustrated by various aspects of the FSF (and RMS), because I believed more in the cause than in imposing my world-view on an organization as important as the FSF. Neither organization sought to prevent me mixing the fruits of its output with that of those with whom it might be arguing at any time.
That's the reality that scares Microsoft, the inability to shut out competition (as in the marginalization or exclusion of Java as forwarded by Sun, by "extending" or omitting it, or by things like installing bugs that prevent competitive products from interoperating, as it did to attack DR-DOS).
Given the choice, seeing the comparatively poor PR efforts on the part of the FSF, they'd be crazy to go around claiming Linux is a threat to the American way, and I doubt they stress (much), while they're attacking the GPL along those lines, that Linux itself is licensed under the GPL. Linux might well be the primary target in their sites for now, but they know that, among the real reasons Linux hasn't been so easy to displace (or "embrace and extend"), the FSF and the GPL rank quite high. Since Linux is "popular", but even the hordes of Linux enthusiasts include many who spend a fair amount of time and energy dissing the FSF and/or the GPL for whatever reasons, MS is wise to openly target the FSF and the GPL, just as a starfish openly targets the clam's shell, so it can ultimately get at the chewy center that it really wants.
After all, displace the FSF and you knock out the primary defense against proprietizing Linux, since it's unlikely enough individual copyright holders would successfully band together and sue Microsoft for attempting to do so the way the FSF can, and has at least threatened to with corresponding success, over similar attempts to proprietize GCC and Emacs. (What stops Linux from being "safely" proprietized? IMO the biggest factor is what I'll call the "Chandra Levy factor" -- it'll be so visible, the publicity over the mere attempt could be disastrous, in a way that proprietizing some other large GPL'ed product, whose copyright is widely held, wouldn't be. But other significant factors include the FSF's vigorous defense against violations of the GPL, and the fact that Linux seriously and deeply depends on GCC. Fear of Linux copyright holders actually banding together and threatening to sue is way down the list. Why Linux enthusiasts enjoy helping a company like MS by attacking the FSF, thus risking chopping down two of the three strong walls defending Linux against the inevitable attempts at proprietization, is truly hard to understand, especially since, once those two walls are down, there will be even less incentive, in the form of community support, for Linux developers themselves to defend its licensing.)
And nobody need question or debate what would happen if the FSF or GPL was successfully weakened, since we've already seen what happens -- and I doubt Microsoft will need any guidance from the executives who used to run Symbolics regarding how to effectively spit on the contributions of talented programmers by proprietizing their efforts and shutting them out of works derived from them. (This isn't a GPL vs. BSD argument at all; this is a "we chose the GPL, we darn well expect it to rule in both the legal system and in society when it comes to our software". BSD'ers who try to convince GPL'ers to use a BSD-like license, should they inadvertently help weaken the FSF and/or the GPL, will more likely drive potential developers away from the whole free-software scene than "convert" us.)
In my opinion, there are basically two types of people who spew at the FSF in public. One wishes (however secretly) to enable companies like Microsoft to proprietize the efforts of programmers like myself, who labored (often voluntarily, without pay) to create a body of public software that would not be proprietized, yet would be free for use and improvement. This sort cleverly uses commonly-repeated, but undocumented, charges against the FSF that are most likely to be repeated as gospel and depict the FSF as "just as power-mad as MS" or whatever -- charges like "the FSF tried to claim all the credit for Linux", "the GPL is a viral license", and "FSF types are really just communists in disguise".
The other sort is less intent on evil, wishes free software to succeed, etc., but joins the chorus of FSF critics to appear "cool", "above all that", "moderate", whatever, rather than properly engage the FSF in private. If the FSF ever withers away and dies, it will be this group, not the former, that shoulders the blame for the external factors causing its death, for they chose to attack an organization that was fighting in the trenches for their freedoms (and, in fact, dug most of those trenches in the first place). And such an occurrence will probably signal the beginning of the end of the free-software movement, given the general lack of willingness for any of the FSF's critics to take the same kinds of risks, slings, and arrows borne by the FSF and its supporters over the years to make free software a long-term reality.
So, "Dub", which kind of FSF critic are you: the kind that wishes the FSF to die, so the rest of the free-software movement can wither away to unimportance, leaving proprietary vendors free to return to their past ability to charge $$ for products that work poorly, don't interoperate, and contain serious security flaws? Or the kind that would rather the FSF fail than be willing to stop publically criticizing it for past actions it cannot possibly "set right", as well as for things it has, in fact, never done, figuring that, well, if they don't do everything just the way you want, let 'em die and the whole movement ultimately founder, as long as everyone knows you had all the answers?
(Looking at your /. user page, I guess you're the former kind -- a number of your comments were foaming-at-the-mouth, believe-whatever-other-critics-say rants against the FSF, GPL, and/or GNU. BTW, I think your first tag for the Reno link might be unclosed.)
Personally, I've chosen to refrain from constantly publically criticizing the FSF (or Linus etc.), since they're so important in forwarding values I care much more deeply about than my quibbles with them -- values like freedom, choice, and opportunity. (Freedom to develop, study, modify, and distribute software; choice to use it instead of proprietary software; and opportunity to do so, the result of a usable body of free software that works on contemporary hardware.)
"True hypocrisy? It was A-OK for the Founding Fathers to use slavery to achieve their goals from the 1700's to the mid-1800's, but it's not OK for you to use it for your (unrelated to founding and preserving a free country) goals, no matter how noble."
Really, it's one thing to dirty one's hands when convenient, and quite another to do so when necessary to carve out a right to cleanliness.
Hypocrisy, on the other hand, is typically the act of saying one thing and doing another. The FSF doesn't generally do that -- it has never, to my knowledge, told people to not use proprietary software even if necessary to create free-software replacements for it, so why is it hypocrisy that they did so for years?
I'd have to disagree. I'd say the GNU project was an important enabler of the "phenomenon", which was due primarily to the dynamism of the Linux-kernel community, which was unique.
I'd been working on Project GNU (specifically, GNU Fortran, or g77) for a few years when Linux came along, and the difference in attitude between maintainers of the "big" GNU projects and Linus and his cohorts was definitely a big factor in why the latter become the focus of the free-software phenomenon in the average person's view.
Sure, the fact that Linux ran on popular PCs was also a factor, but other Unix kernels could do that. And the FSF could have had a Unix kernel that did that earlier, if they'd decided to focus on that goal rather than a much more elegant, portable, high-fallutin' kernel (and especially if RMS had answered "yes" to my offering to write the kernel instead of asking me to write g77 instead).
But while project leaders/maintainers like myself were trying very hard to produce "clean", elegant releases, to keep ugly stuff out of "our" code, and, generally, to keep the uneducated, unwashed masses of budding hackers at arms' length (some would say ten-foot-poles' length ;-) from our precious projects, Linus invited a much closer relationship.
This might partly have been due to his inexperience (he started out much younger and less experienced on his project than I did on g77, RMS did on GCC or Emacs, etc.), but I perceived a much more welcoming, casual attitude in the early Linux discussions than I tended to see elsewhere. (And, remember, "elsewhere" includes my own project.)
So, the "Linux phenomenon" is properly named, in my view, even if "the Linux Operating System" ain't necessarily so. With Linux, "we" (the GNU, or free-software, advocates) not only had a decent-performing free kernel usable on 386s and up, we had a project that nearly anybody could contibute to, and feel as though they were part of "something big".
Yes, "the rest of us" muddled along, and our projects (especially GCC and Emacs, plus the FSF as an organization, since it created and maintained the GPL) were important, perhaps crucial, components of the system being developed around the Linux kernel, just as they were (or were becoming) in many other venues.
I'm not arguing that "we" should be forgotten, just that the "something-special" quality of Linux, and of Linus' running of the Linux project, should always be remembered. I've never thought of the Linux code as being particularly "special", and I still have plenty of reservations about running an "important project" the way Linus did (he might have them too, by now ;-), but I can't deny the excitement and breadth-of-buzz that he created.
The result? To my knowledge, he's the only free-software author whose supporters insisted, against his own recommendation, to name the project's output -- the Linux kernel -- after him. (Well, let's face it, if his name was "Mortimer", "Linux" would still be a cool name, but I think that shows how highly valued and appreciated he was, not just as a coder or project administrator, but as a leader.)
As to the GNU/Linux debate -- while I think the name has technical and cultural advantages (it describes the Unix variant concisely, and it helps remind "the children" from whence it came), of all the cases where the "last component to arrive" got to be the one that named the whole system, this has got to be the best example of that being appropriate.
After all, even if it's the GNU/Linux system, it is the Linux phenomenon that launched a thousand media events, IPOs, and the like, and there's an important cultural touchstone in the "Linux" name being the sole identifier: that, more important to many people than the details of software freedoms, was the welcoming arms of a sort of meritocracy, i.e. a bazaar rather than a cathedral, in participating in the creation of something not so much awe-inspiring, but practical and even, at times, enjoyable dirty, as well.
Put another way: while the rest of his "elders" were carefully writing symphonies and conducting performances, in which each participant was expected to play his or her carefully-outlined part, Linus played bass in the biggest, baddest blues jam session going, where nearly anyone could solo, even if just for a few bars, and most everyone knew the chord progressions by heart.
No amount of technical acumen (or jumping around on stage like a lunatic, *cough*Ballmer*cough* ;-) can substitute for inspiring leadership.
Despite my concerns over how the FSF and RMS handled the naming issue, I can't recall a single example of them trying to "take all the credit for Linux". Seems like that claim is just extremism in the guise of claiming someone else is an extremist.
An assertion that is meaningless in context: one cannot tell what he means by "completely essential", since he seems to allow for an arbitrary amount of time to replace that software. (In which case, there is not a single piece of Linux that is completely essential to Linux!)
I find that hard to believe, given how "so many in the community" reject other statements the FSF makes.
Instead, I suggest that the reason software patents are so "hated" is that a bunch of people, including myself, actually researched the issue, observed the effects of software patents in practice, and came to the conclusion that, on the whole, granting this particular form of government monopoly has done more to retard progress than forward it; further, that the mere existence of software patents makes developing free software a very dangerous crapshoot, one in which the software author could lose his home, his lifestyle, etc., all because he dared release a GPL'd (or AL'd or public-domain) package that a) became popular and b) was later found to violate a patent that had not existed, or perhaps even been filed (in secret, of course) for, at the time of the software's release to the public.
(Note that I did read his letter to LWN, and didn't see him address the software-patent issue per se, other than to slap down anyone who thoughtfully questions whether software, aka mathematics and algorithms, should be patentable as engaging in a "knee-jerk reaction". Bradley Kuhn had, of course, referred only to software patents in his post. Perhaps "Dub" is unable to distinguish between a type of patent that prevents me building a factory and one that prevents me from using paper and pencil to compute an equation, but most of the rest of us understand the difference well enough.)
How anyone could come to the conclusion that the GPL disallows private modification without distribution, thus allowing modification only if immediately followed by distribution, is beyond me. Perhaps these "many" people who hold this belief could try actually reading the GPL, maybe with the help of a competent IP lawyer?
Normally I use the term "McCarthyism" only in conjunction with left-wing editorializing and political correctness, but, in this case, I gotta say, "Thank you for your opinion, Senator McCarthy".
I mean, really, this paragraph got written in response to a statement about how Bradley Kuhn has decided to dress and shave?? In what cave has "Dub" been living for the past couple of decades?
As a point of comparison, I was recently reminded, upon coming across an old photo ID of myself, that I used to go for a few months at a time without shaving. At all. I.e. not just a beard, but a wolfman face.
Needless to say, as any thoughtful examination of my web site and /. posts would reveal, I'm about as far from "communist" as one could be. Apparently "Dub" is less interested in joining forces with those of us who value freedom (whether in software usage or life generally) than with those who meet the strict requirements of his "Completely-Clean-Cut Party (CCCP)".
Yes, it is, but that's because what he was describing was literally the operating system that consist of the GNU utilities, plus the Linux kernel.
Whereas you seem to be taking his statement as if, instead of "the system so often called Linux", he'd said "any system that includes Linux".
The naming issue has long been an emotional one (and poorly handled, IMO, by RMS, especially early on), but the cold, hard, technical question remains:
If the answer is "the Linux operating system", then I suspect you'll find most people find the name relatively useless in practice, since the utilities are what they most interact with (at a CLI level anyway).
If the answer is "BSD Unix", then you're excluding the importance of the Linux kernel, of course.
If the answer is "Unix", well, again, that name works just as well for pretty much any Linux, *BSD, Solaris, etc. system. I'm asking for a name that helps distinguish it from a system that shares just the kernel, but little else, with a GNU/Linux system.
So, are you going to call it "BSD/Linux"?
Great. That's why "GNU/Linux" isn't exactly out of bounds as a name.
(And, no, you can't just plug the Linux kernel into a BSD system in the complete sense that it's part of a GNU system, because it's way too dependent on GNU's extensions, some might say breakages, to the C language. For an up-and-running system without kernel recompilation as an important option, though, I don't know why a BSD/Linux system wouldn't be a workable option.)
Me, I'd rather be working on GNU/Solaris right now than Solaris, though I mitigate the pain somewhat by using XEmacs, even though I find it confusing, since I'm used to GNU Emacs.
What you seem to be unaware of is the fact that, in the USA, slavery is illegal even if the slave agrees to become one while still "free".
It is the ability to enter into a contract involving voluntarily restricting your own freedom to do what you want with software that he's talking about restricting, either by government fiat, or by society deciding, individual by individual, that we will neither accept such arrangements nor seek to get others to accept them for our own profit or convenience.
So, for example, absent any government restriction on slavery, there would still be plenty of people who would, under no circumstances, willingly become a slave, and plenty of people who would, under no circumstances, willingly offer to make someone else their slave.
In my opinion, the general lack of fringe-level violation of a millenia-long practice (slavery) suggests the US ban on slavery reflects, rather than imposes, society's morality on this topic.
The FSF would like to see society develop a similar "morality" regarding a person's right to share information, even if it's in the form of computer software. (This is my opinion, of course; I don't speak or work for the FSF.)
It's not as far-fetched as it sounds: in some ways, information that's useful to you in almost any form requiring you to agree to not share it (e.g. a computer program, but not a microwave's embedded computer's ROM so much), will make its way into your brain, via its user interface, its responsiveness, its "gestalt", and so on. (That's why Apple and Lotus long-ago launched their "look-and-feel" litigation, essentially seeking to restrict the ability of others to reproduce an "experience" using a computer system even by writing all their own code from scratch, especially since that experience would be usefully, and profitably, be sold to others who also wanted to enjoy it without having to pay just Apple or just Lotus.) Agreeing to never share stuff that has found its way into your brain with anyone else amounts to a (very) limited form of self-imposed slavery, in that the "portions" of your brain, or thinking, that touch sufficiently on the copyrighted matter are unavailable for the rest of your conscious being to willingly employ in, say, conversation with a neighbor.
(Having signed a few NDA's in my life, I know how silly this sounds, and how true it is, even though it is, in practice, a rather minor thing, especially because I try to avoid work that involves signing NDA's. I like sharing info, helping people, drawing analogies, etc., so having to erect mental walls around portions of my brain to satisfy my legal, and some would say moral, commitments is not something I enjoy.)
Also, just as many people violated the laws against slavery in various ways, it's pretty clear most Americans don't see intellectual privilege (aka intellectual property) as anywhere near the "property right" they do the right to own and keep real property. Based on observation, I'd say many Americans would be willing to "pirate" a copy or two of proprietary software yet not shoplift even if they could just as easily get away with it. (Don't know how it compares it to ripping off insurance companies, workman's compensation, etc. But I'd guess, the easier it is to convince oneself that the "ripped-off party" didn't really "lose" anything, the easier it is to rationalize the "theft", among other factors.)
So, while the quest to raise American morality sufficiently to marginalize proprietary software may seem quixotic, I'd say the quest (by organizations such as the RIAA, MPAA, and BSA) to marginalize freely sharing copies of information (software) with one's neighbor is within an order of magnitude (plus or minus) of the FSF's quixoticness.
Myself, while I don't dismiss the possibilities, I prefer to stress a more practical aspect of the issue, namely, I question whether contract law should allow individuals (and/or corporate bodies) to voluntarily enter into agreements to not do things that are, put simply, nearly impossible to avoid doing in practice, and believe that some forms of copyright infringement are, especially in today's computing environment, in that category of "nearly impossible to avoid".
E.g. it's one thing to agree to not make physical, i.e. paper, copies of that NDA'd document and send it to competitors, so contract law can, at least from a feasability point of view, restrict that. (That is, having entered into a contract, one party has a reasonable opportunity to avoid acting contrary to it, and the other party has a reasonable ability to prove, in a court of law, that the other has acted contrary to it.)
But it's entirely another thing to expect someone to not let one or another detail of a new computer chip's performance envelope slip in casual conversation, or to expect someone to somehow remember to not share a song's tune with others (by whistling or singing it), or to expect someone to remember to exclude proprietary documents on their computer from a list of files needing to be backed up (onto a web site that serves as a backup, onto a CD-R to send to a friend for them to hold onto "just in case", etc), or to assume that a programmer can "forget" some "inside info" on how an operating-system interface actually works when writing an app for someone else down the road.
It seems to me this angle, of considering the burden on the legal system (and the rest of the government) to support detailed, work-by-work, party-by-party copyright-infringement law, is rarely considered, but, to me, it's important, since I'd rather have FBI agents help stop the purported rush of briefcase-with-nuke-inside-carrying terrorists (you know, the ones that supposedly render missile defense impotent) than arrest people like Dmitry Sklyarov. Our legal system is too important, in protecting our lives, limbs, and real property, to burden it with the quixotic task of preserving intellectual "property" at a fine-grained level.
And since it's even sillier to keep people from possessing floppy disks or CD-RW drives and using an open network than it is to keep them from keeping and bearing arms, I believe the best approach, in terms of relieving law enforcement of an unnecessary burden, is to allow some kind of blanket-level copying of digital data, with exceptions made only for cases where the parties have entered into an explicitly signed agreement, and then only if the data, as well as the mechanisms (such as computer programs that manipulate it), reflect a sincere effort to make it natural and easy for the parties to remain in conformance with the contract.
(And, no, I don't consider clicking on an "I Accept" button some software program sticks in a dialog box when you run it to be an explicitly signed agreement under contract law, any more than I consider the father of a three-year-old girl to have entered into a contract when he answers her question "Daddy, when I grow up, will you marry me?" with "Yes, dear". Those who want to restrict IP beyond the simple, blanket level that society widely understands and agrees to will have to bear the burden of arranging proper contractual agreements. No more free lunches like the DMCA, which makes things easier for corporations, but far more confusing, threatening, and worrisome -- all needlessly, from the point of view of the security of the state and its people -- for the ordinary citizen.)