Rights are not enumerated. Rights are not granted. Rights exist independently from any law or more.
There is a reason the constitution used the term "inalienable rights". Because those are the rights that it was decided that government must not attempt to interfere with.
While this may be true, your right is meaningless if it is not enforced. All that rights boil down to is "This is how it should be, what I consider fair, just, natural, and proper" and is purely opinion and belief. Only those rights acknowledged by the US government are applicable legal defenses to your actions in this country.
Your statements are true from a standpoint of the American legal system, because the government is built around stated axioms that the founding fathers deemed beneficial. The government corporately "believes" in those rights, and is defined as holding those opinions.
However, that does not make it a universal truth, natural law, or a feature of the nature of humanity itself simply because one country decided to intentionally live that way. It's just the official stance of American government.
I still do not see how you arrive at "The ability to copy is the right to copy" as either a natural right, or as a legal right within the USA. You personally might believe that it's your natural right, but you still cannot act on it without being in conflict with the legal system.
But you will have to be deliberately obtuse to say that you cannot see that there really are prior rights that the law is attempting to protect.
Of course. There are very many cases where the stated rights of 2 separate individuals come into conflict, and the legal system must make a judgment call as to which right will be protected. This defines new precedent and triggers new legislation to deal with messy legal grey areas, better defining how our freedoms interact in specific cases.
To anyone about 3 years old, who's been taught to share toys with his siblings/classmates/friends, for one. To the parents and teachers who naturally taught those kids what they know is right, for another.
How is cultural indoctrination "natural"? So kids who forged out a scratch-out-what-you-can life who didn't get drilled in your completely arbitrary cultural rules about possession are somehow unnatural? Shouldn't "natural law" by its very existence emerge from unindoctrinated instinct and impulse?
Who decides that it's naturally/obviously "right" to share and "wrong" to steal? Because with the rates of incidence of petty theft, I can guarantee there's a whole lot of people out there who see no wrong in it. In any case, again the justification behind the claim of right/wrong and innate rights boils down to claiming philosophical/theological opinion as axiomatic. You cannot justify it with any other means.
Heck, I'm guessing you also believe that for some arbitrary reason humanity has the innate right to survive and prosper, while there are plenty of people out there who see humanity as a futile pursuit that has no inherent right to continue. Which claim is more "natural"? Which axioms do you defer to in order to defend it?
I can't believe you're trying to draw absolutes about pure belief systems like with the sharing toys example. It's unadulterated elitism; your beliefs about what's natural and proper are just as arbitrary and unfounded as any "negative" example, it's just a reflection of your own indoctrination. Sure, there are a few very high level concepts that many western-style people will agree as beneficial, but that house of cards crumbles fast when you drill down any deeper.
Obvious to whom? And whose view of natural rights? I assure you that the natural rights obvious to jihadist Muslims differ from the natural rights obvious to, say, western agnostics.
Any claims of "natural rights" are based in philosophy, theology, and idealism. Distilled to its core, it all boils down to "Why are we here?" which is not a legal nor scientific question, and has no "obvious" answer.
Thank you for snipping out a context-breaking fragment, instead of understanding the full sentence. Classy.
All rights are just ideals, opinions, and moral stances. Only when either the government or unwavering social pressure enforces them can these ideals regulate society.
We have rights because the founders settled on a shared opinion of their view on how a union would work best.
I never said anything about it being "OK" if rights were removed, but these are the processes by which rights are declared, enforced, and revoked.
The "certain unalienable rights" were the opinions and beliefs of the founding fathers, nothing more, nothing less, peers to any other view of rights that anybody here has; those particular beliefs, however, were codified into American law. Other cultures & countries have completely different ideas of what the natural rights of humans are; the American view is not some universal truth about the morality of human society, but that which we prefer and view as beneficial to our ideals.
All rights start off as philosophy, theology, and idealism, and may be agreed upon and codified into legal rights. However, it's only the legal rights (not the "moral" or other arbitrary "rights") that people may claim in terms of legality of action, which is the subject at hand. Unless that codification and authoritative sanctioning has happened, any other rights you might claim or believe in are impotent.
However the composer was arguing that the teenager was morally and ethically wrong...and that I think is far more debatable.
Exactly. And just as his morals about what she shouldn't be allowed to do are debatable, so are your morals about public performance debatable.
As soon as you bring the word "moral" into the picture, it's just a free-for-all of opinion and belief, since everybody holds their own personal understanding of morality as axiomatic.
No. According to the law as I understand it, your right to free speech/expression ends in cases of slander, libel, national security, copyright violation, threats, child pornography, and others. Just as your right to freedom ends where your jail term starts, your right to pursue happiness ends when that pursuit involves illegal acts, etc. Freedom is something that's relative and defined for particular cases; "absolute freedom" is an undefinable term.
Rights must be agreed upon to be of any value. If you assert that you have a moral right to X and believe it with all your heart, but few others agree, then you will never see your right exercised. Tough cookies. Now, since the USA law has already established rights surrounding copying of IP, you can not claim that your "moral right" permits your behavior because that area's already legally covered. But you can plea a case based on this sort of subjective judgment of societal benefit in order to change the law itself. (and it helps to line some pockets of the powers that be to see your point of view:-P)
But in general, IIRC congress is authorized to create copyrights and patents to promote the progress of science and the useful arts. I do believe that the current IP laws can therefore be seen as unconstitutional, but these IP laws are the only actual IP rights that exist in the USA. "Moral rights" are simply individual opinions; "legal rights" are agreed-upon opinions.
A right is something you can do without the hindrance or the requirement of assistance from another.
I'd disagree with that. First, the right to socialized systems like military protection and even civil systems like due process definitely requires the assistance of another. A right is an agreement among society that a behavior will be allowed, or a service will be available/performed. And just because you can do something without repercussion doesn't mean that you have a bona fide right to it. Financial burden can prevent you from doing many things you'd otherwise do without hindrance, and you cannot demand a right to continue doing what you cannot afford.
So how is copying a "right"? Rights are established by governments as acknowledged and enforced (legal rights), or held and enforced as social/religious/cultural norms within subgroups of people. Now, you might classify the "right to copy" as a right claimed by some growing social convention, but if it clashes with how the government views that field of behavior then trouble brews. There are no legal rights without legal infrastructure, and "innate/natural rights" are the realm of philosophy and theology with no single answer and serious conflicts between differing cultures.
And again, the fact that only physical force can stop you from making copies does not mean that it you have the right to make such copies, when the laws of the land specifically grant the right (yes, the right) to control copying of their work to the author.
Sure, you can claim that the government's stance on IP needs to change, but you cannot claim any authentic right to copy whatever you want, at least not here in the USA and similar western countries.
You fail to grasp what the word "copyright" is: The right to copy. The capability to copy something easily does not automatically grant you the legal right to do so.
I love how everybody always points fingers to "big bad CEOs", when the vast, vast superdupermajority of corporate leaders are small business owners who often have a difficult time scaling up their business because of the tax burden of hiring employees.
So somebody from a repressive religious state has the "natural right" to exact deathly punishment on women who dress too skimpily. That's respecting the order of the universe. Any law against that is unjust and violates their natural rights. Would you support their right to break murder laws in western nations?
People with strong beliefs willing to stand against a government in the name of change must expect conflict, not appeasement.
ITA's core technology is written in Lisp. It's nice to see more real-world success stories like this, and that using a less popular language for the core IP doesn't prevent sale of a software company.
For once, we're hearing about an authentically clever, afaik new physical design which solves a real problem and is actually sanely applicable to be patented. I wasn't expecting that when I clicked on this story. Gotta hand it to Microsoft for this one.
Ok, I shouldn't post that fast.;-) It seems that kgsl_pm4types.h does at least describe the commands shipped off to the chip, so somebody willing to put the effort into banging away at it could generate actual high-level documentation on how to use the chip via trial-and-error and/or intercepting command buffers from simple OpenGL test programs through the userland blob through this driver.
Seeing such documentation exist with the code already would of course be the better situation, and I still don't see any barrier for Qualcomm to release that given as much as they've released now.
So nosing through the posted code, it seems like it deals with shuffling commands through to the chip, but I don't see any header files helping to define what data gets sent through the actual "issueibcmds" call. There's some gfx-level stuff in yamato_reg.h so I could be wrong.
I guess companies like this want to keep their trade secret optimization techniques in how they convert OpenGL state to chip buffer commands, but if they would open up the actual chip-level communications then the community could create their own open source OpenGL layers. I suspect there's a lot of command styles and user-space optimization techniques that could be reused across multiple chipsets, yielding a lot of benefit to true open source 3d hardware acceleration drivers. I just really don't understand their business case for not letting people develop new software to their chip, even if their proprietary driver stays proprietary.
Plus, WHERE ARE THE COMMENTS? Does nobody actually document their code anymore? This is your companies' public relation and an olive leaf to the Linux community for crying out loud! Show at least some semblance of competence in writing maintainable software!
Re:intelligence doesn't matter, communication does
on
Empathy Is For the Birds
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The best example of this that I've heard is in the story of Helen Keller. Since she didn't learn to communicate until age 7 or so, she could remember what life was like beforehand, describing her early mind as a chaotic mess of strange sensations. It was only after she learned language that she was able to have actual organized thoughts and think conceptually.
I'm not worried, though - Steam's track record is far superior to these other distribution services. XBoxLive/PSN will be good and dead before Steam disappears.
Past performance is not an indicator of future performance. From Square almost going bankrupt after The Spirits Within, to banks going bust, all it takes is one bad decision or association/environment change and old steady establishments can tank just as easily as flighty newcomers.
Don't you think the governments already have enough data to count as a catastrophic, worldwide privacy breach with as much as they can cross-reference? Don't tell me that certain three-letter folks can't also just talk to their contacts inside Google/Facebook/Skype/etc and get whatever info they might not already have.
The only difference is that it's not a for-profit corporation with that amount of reach into the data, it's the for-power structures.
Your 24" would have to be about 2400x1800 to match DPI with one of these. They look quite nice up until you're closer than a foot away.
800x600? 8"? This is supposed to be a serious contender?
Have you been to a store lately? Developing film is expensive. Do a few rolls and you pay for some of this stuff.
Film? Rolls? What the heck are you talking about?
It really depends on how much volume you have. My parents have really gotten into using their digital cameras, so they now take about 2000 pictures per year. I suspect developing that many pictures would be more expensive than a laser printer and a few digital photo frames.
Calculate the cost per picture, including paper and actual averaged ink costs. I bet they're paying well over 50 cents a picture, while you can get them professionally printed at any WalMart or whatever for less than half of that.
Then their job contract should specify public-image requirements for their behavior outside of their on-the-clock hours. Let's see how well that goes over.
Digital picture frames still suck. You get a tiny, low-res screen for prices sometimes comparable to a 24" 1920x1200 monitor. Sure, the display electronics will add some cost, but come on.
I always tell people to go to the store to get their digital pictures printed out. It's far cheaper than owning & maintaining your own printer, and typically higher quality. Commodity color lasers (of which I am a fan, too) really don't produce nice super-high-res color glossies.
The best part for me is that it runs a normal, just-like-the-desktop Linux. I have a N800, but as somebody who isn't a Linux über-hacker, it's always a real pain to try to get non-Maemoified Linux apps compiled & running on it. Plus, I'm not really a fan of Maemo's UI decisions.
Oh, and a true full-size USB host port. That's awesome.
Slashdot Mirror
Rights are not enumerated. Rights are not granted. Rights exist independently from any law or more.
There is a reason the constitution used the term "inalienable rights". Because those are the rights that it was decided that government must not attempt to interfere with.
While this may be true, your right is meaningless if it is not enforced. All that rights boil down to is "This is how it should be, what I consider fair, just, natural, and proper" and is purely opinion and belief. Only those rights acknowledged by the US government are applicable legal defenses to your actions in this country.
Your statements are true from a standpoint of the American legal system, because the government is built around stated axioms that the founding fathers deemed beneficial. The government corporately "believes" in those rights, and is defined as holding those opinions.
However, that does not make it a universal truth, natural law, or a feature of the nature of humanity itself simply because one country decided to intentionally live that way. It's just the official stance of American government.
I still do not see how you arrive at "The ability to copy is the right to copy" as either a natural right, or as a legal right within the USA. You personally might believe that it's your natural right, but you still cannot act on it without being in conflict with the legal system.
But you will have to be deliberately obtuse to say that you cannot see that there really are prior rights that the law is attempting to protect.
Of course. There are very many cases where the stated rights of 2 separate individuals come into conflict, and the legal system must make a judgment call as to which right will be protected. This defines new precedent and triggers new legislation to deal with messy legal grey areas, better defining how our freedoms interact in specific cases.
Natural rights do not rest on the belief of the individuals. Rather, they rest on some universal value that is shared by all of mankind.
Can you list just one of these universal values that all of mankind actually does share?
To anyone about 3 years old, who's been taught to share toys with his siblings/classmates/friends, for one. To the parents and teachers who naturally taught those kids what they know is right, for another.
How is cultural indoctrination "natural"? So kids who forged out a scratch-out-what-you-can life who didn't get drilled in your completely arbitrary cultural rules about possession are somehow unnatural? Shouldn't "natural law" by its very existence emerge from unindoctrinated instinct and impulse?
Who decides that it's naturally/obviously "right" to share and "wrong" to steal? Because with the rates of incidence of petty theft, I can guarantee there's a whole lot of people out there who see no wrong in it. In any case, again the justification behind the claim of right/wrong and innate rights boils down to claiming philosophical/theological opinion as axiomatic. You cannot justify it with any other means.
Heck, I'm guessing you also believe that for some arbitrary reason humanity has the innate right to survive and prosper, while there are plenty of people out there who see humanity as a futile pursuit that has no inherent right to continue. Which claim is more "natural"? Which axioms do you defer to in order to defend it?
I can't believe you're trying to draw absolutes about pure belief systems like with the sharing toys example. It's unadulterated elitism; your beliefs about what's natural and proper are just as arbitrary and unfounded as any "negative" example, it's just a reflection of your own indoctrination. Sure, there are a few very high level concepts that many western-style people will agree as beneficial, but that house of cards crumbles fast when you drill down any deeper.
Obvious to whom? And whose view of natural rights? I assure you that the natural rights obvious to jihadist Muslims differ from the natural rights obvious to, say, western agnostics.
Any claims of "natural rights" are based in philosophy, theology, and idealism. Distilled to its core, it all boils down to "Why are we here?" which is not a legal nor scientific question, and has no "obvious" answer.
Thank you for snipping out a context-breaking fragment, instead of understanding the full sentence. Classy.
All rights are just ideals, opinions, and moral stances. Only when either the government or unwavering social pressure enforces them can these ideals regulate society.
We have rights because the founders settled on a shared opinion of their view on how a union would work best.
I never said anything about it being "OK" if rights were removed, but these are the processes by which rights are declared, enforced, and revoked.
The "certain unalienable rights" were the opinions and beliefs of the founding fathers, nothing more, nothing less, peers to any other view of rights that anybody here has; those particular beliefs, however, were codified into American law. Other cultures & countries have completely different ideas of what the natural rights of humans are; the American view is not some universal truth about the morality of human society, but that which we prefer and view as beneficial to our ideals.
All rights start off as philosophy, theology, and idealism, and may be agreed upon and codified into legal rights. However, it's only the legal rights (not the "moral" or other arbitrary "rights") that people may claim in terms of legality of action, which is the subject at hand. Unless that codification and authoritative sanctioning has happened, any other rights you might claim or believe in are impotent.
However the composer was arguing that the teenager was morally and ethically wrong...and that I think is far more debatable.
Exactly. And just as his morals about what she shouldn't be allowed to do are debatable, so are your morals about public performance debatable.
As soon as you bring the word "moral" into the picture, it's just a free-for-all of opinion and belief, since everybody holds their own personal understanding of morality as axiomatic.
No. According to the law as I understand it, your right to free speech/expression ends in cases of slander, libel, national security, copyright violation, threats, child pornography, and others. Just as your right to freedom ends where your jail term starts, your right to pursue happiness ends when that pursuit involves illegal acts, etc. Freedom is something that's relative and defined for particular cases; "absolute freedom" is an undefinable term.
Rights must be agreed upon to be of any value. If you assert that you have a moral right to X and believe it with all your heart, but few others agree, then you will never see your right exercised. Tough cookies. Now, since the USA law has already established rights surrounding copying of IP, you can not claim that your "moral right" permits your behavior because that area's already legally covered. But you can plea a case based on this sort of subjective judgment of societal benefit in order to change the law itself. (and it helps to line some pockets of the powers that be to see your point of view :-P)
But in general, IIRC congress is authorized to create copyrights and patents to promote the progress of science and the useful arts. I do believe that the current IP laws can therefore be seen as unconstitutional, but these IP laws are the only actual IP rights that exist in the USA. "Moral rights" are simply individual opinions; "legal rights" are agreed-upon opinions.
A right is something you can do without the hindrance or the requirement of assistance from another.
I'd disagree with that. First, the right to socialized systems like military protection and even civil systems like due process definitely requires the assistance of another. A right is an agreement among society that a behavior will be allowed, or a service will be available/performed. And just because you can do something without repercussion doesn't mean that you have a bona fide right to it. Financial burden can prevent you from doing many things you'd otherwise do without hindrance, and you cannot demand a right to continue doing what you cannot afford.
So how is copying a "right"? Rights are established by governments as acknowledged and enforced (legal rights), or held and enforced as social/religious/cultural norms within subgroups of people. Now, you might classify the "right to copy" as a right claimed by some growing social convention, but if it clashes with how the government views that field of behavior then trouble brews. There are no legal rights without legal infrastructure, and "innate/natural rights" are the realm of philosophy and theology with no single answer and serious conflicts between differing cultures.
And again, the fact that only physical force can stop you from making copies does not mean that it you have the right to make such copies, when the laws of the land specifically grant the right (yes, the right) to control copying of their work to the author.
Sure, you can claim that the government's stance on IP needs to change, but you cannot claim any authentic right to copy whatever you want, at least not here in the USA and similar western countries.
You fail to grasp what the word "copyright" is: The right to copy. The capability to copy something easily does not automatically grant you the legal right to do so.
I love how everybody always points fingers to "big bad CEOs", when the vast, vast superdupermajority of corporate leaders are small business owners who often have a difficult time scaling up their business because of the tax burden of hiring employees.
So somebody from a repressive religious state has the "natural right" to exact deathly punishment on women who dress too skimpily. That's respecting the order of the universe. Any law against that is unjust and violates their natural rights. Would you support their right to break murder laws in western nations?
People with strong beliefs willing to stand against a government in the name of change must expect conflict, not appeasement.
ITA's core technology is written in Lisp. It's nice to see more real-world success stories like this, and that using a less popular language for the core IP doesn't prevent sale of a software company.
For once, we're hearing about an authentically clever, afaik new physical design which solves a real problem and is actually sanely applicable to be patented. I wasn't expecting that when I clicked on this story. Gotta hand it to Microsoft for this one.
Ok, I shouldn't post that fast. ;-) It seems that kgsl_pm4types.h does at least describe the commands shipped off to the chip, so somebody willing to put the effort into banging away at it could generate actual high-level documentation on how to use the chip via trial-and-error and/or intercepting command buffers from simple OpenGL test programs through the userland blob through this driver.
Seeing such documentation exist with the code already would of course be the better situation, and I still don't see any barrier for Qualcomm to release that given as much as they've released now.
So nosing through the posted code, it seems like it deals with shuffling commands through to the chip, but I don't see any header files helping to define what data gets sent through the actual "issueibcmds" call. There's some gfx-level stuff in yamato_reg.h so I could be wrong.
I guess companies like this want to keep their trade secret optimization techniques in how they convert OpenGL state to chip buffer commands, but if they would open up the actual chip-level communications then the community could create their own open source OpenGL layers. I suspect there's a lot of command styles and user-space optimization techniques that could be reused across multiple chipsets, yielding a lot of benefit to true open source 3d hardware acceleration drivers. I just really don't understand their business case for not letting people develop new software to their chip, even if their proprietary driver stays proprietary.
Plus, WHERE ARE THE COMMENTS? Does nobody actually document their code anymore? This is your companies' public relation and an olive leaf to the Linux community for crying out loud! Show at least some semblance of competence in writing maintainable software!
The best example of this that I've heard is in the story of Helen Keller. Since she didn't learn to communicate until age 7 or so, she could remember what life was like beforehand, describing her early mind as a chaotic mess of strange sensations. It was only after she learned language that she was able to have actual organized thoughts and think conceptually.
I'm not worried, though - Steam's track record is far superior to these other distribution services. XBoxLive/PSN will be good and dead before Steam disappears.
Past performance is not an indicator of future performance. From Square almost going bankrupt after The Spirits Within, to banks going bust, all it takes is one bad decision or association/environment change and old steady establishments can tank just as easily as flighty newcomers.
Don't you think the governments already have enough data to count as a catastrophic, worldwide privacy breach with as much as they can cross-reference? Don't tell me that certain three-letter folks can't also just talk to their contacts inside Google/Facebook/Skype/etc and get whatever info they might not already have.
The only difference is that it's not a for-profit corporation with that amount of reach into the data, it's the for-power structures.
Your 24" would have to be about 2400x1800 to match DPI with one of these. They look quite nice up until you're closer than a foot away.
800x600? 8"? This is supposed to be a serious contender?
Have you been to a store lately? Developing film is expensive. Do a few rolls and you pay for some of this stuff.
Film? Rolls? What the heck are you talking about?
It really depends on how much volume you have. My parents have really gotten into using their digital cameras, so they now take about 2000 pictures per year. I suspect developing that many pictures would be more expensive than a laser printer and a few digital photo frames.
Calculate the cost per picture, including paper and actual averaged ink costs. I bet they're paying well over 50 cents a picture, while you can get them professionally printed at any WalMart or whatever for less than half of that.
Then their job contract should specify public-image requirements for their behavior outside of their on-the-clock hours. Let's see how well that goes over.
Digital picture frames still suck. You get a tiny, low-res screen for prices sometimes comparable to a 24" 1920x1200 monitor. Sure, the display electronics will add some cost, but come on.
I always tell people to go to the store to get their digital pictures printed out. It's far cheaper than owning & maintaining your own printer, and typically higher quality. Commodity color lasers (of which I am a fan, too) really don't produce nice super-high-res color glossies.
The best part for me is that it runs a normal, just-like-the-desktop Linux. I have a N800, but as somebody who isn't a Linux über-hacker, it's always a real pain to try to get non-Maemoified Linux apps compiled & running on it. Plus, I'm not really a fan of Maemo's UI decisions.
Oh, and a true full-size USB host port. That's awesome.