What you're saying, then, is that since I liked my first puff of cigarette smoke I was addicted from the first puff. I think you will find a lot of resistance to that in the scientific community. Physical addiction can only come from the body having built up a need for a specific substance over a period of time. Now, psychological addiction is another matter. Cue the crack addicts. Hooked from the first puff.
I can personally attest to a similar response to what crack addicts have with my first usage of opiates. I liked opium so much the first time I used it that it scared me, and I was a pretty heavy drug user by that time. I knew if I used more than once I was dead as the opiate-type high was something I greatly craved.
One usage was almost enough to make me use it forever. However, that one usage wasn't a physical addiction. It was a psychological response to my body's physical reaction to the drug, but there is a vast difference between a single physiological response and a physical addiction. If there wasn't, I wouldn't be writing this. I'd be dead by now as if my first usage equaled physical addiction I would never have stopped. I would never have been strong enough to even have wanted to fight my body's cravings piled on top of my psychological desire to feel that high.
I do believe you're mistaken about this. People first start smoking for different reasons, but they continue smoking because they enjoy it. They become addicted because they enjoyed it and thus began smoking more regularly after their first few experiences with it.
I'm a former smoker and I can guarantee you that I wasn't addicted at my first puff, or even my first few packs. I found I enjoyed it though through more experiences and I began to increase the regularity with which I smoked, yet I still wasn't addicted. I became physically addicted after I kept on smoking for a period of time. And, even after I knew I was addicted I still enjoyed smoking. It took a major paradigm shift in my life to get me to want to stop smoking, and want to break all of my addictions.
If I had not enjoyed smoking, I would never have become addicted. I would also say that most smokers I know enjoy smoking long after they are addicted to it. Why? Most people are addicted long before they realize they have an addiction. What's more, I knew a man who smoked himself to death--he died of emphysema. Long after he knew he was addicted, and knew his emphysema would kill him, he kept on smoking because he liked to smoke, because he got pleasure from smoking. To him that pleasure was worth more than his own life.
The same principles apply with alcoholism. You enjoy the effects of your first few drinks, and so you drink more. Pretty soon you depend on it to feel good. But, the dependence would not have occurred if enjoyment/pleasure from drinking had not preceded it. Once again, the voice of experience as I'm an alcoholic. One that hasn't had a drink in almost 20 years, but one still the same.
What is the conclusion? You cannot deny the correlation between enjoyment and addiction as the pleasure/enjoyment derived from the addictive behavior and/or substance is what keeps the person on the same path until addiction is the result.
What, exactly do you mean by this. I didn't answer right away because your statement is ambiguous enough that I could not perceive the thought behind your statement.
Reading the rest of the posts responding to you I don't think anyone else has been able to accurately say what your point was either. How about clarifying your position?
Ummm.... Do you really think it was theft that created any change in RIAA behavior? No, it was public, and jurist, opinion that the way the RIAA went about punishing what they said was theft that brought public and jurist disdain upon them.
If the RIAA had acted even half-way honorably in all of this neither public, nor jurist, opinion would have been on the side of those being sued. They screwed themselves over so badly that public opinion turned against them. Do not mistake dislike for RIAA tactics with the idea that perceived theft brought music pirates public sympathy. If you do, you're making a huge error in judgment.
Think about this. One year after her arrest all buses in Montgomery are desegregated. How did this happen in such a short time? Do you really think politicians would have made these changes if the majority of the public has not recognized the moral wrongness of Rosa being arrested for nothing more than where she sat on a bus? If you do, you do not understand politicians. Where I think you make your mistake in this case is in that you mistake the loudness of the howls of the bigots as the prevalence of the attitudes of the majority who found their caterwauling despicable.
You need to look closely at the Civil War, the events that led up to it, and how it had long(a decade at least) been the attitude of the majority of Americans that slavery was wrong. It was this fundamental belief that by the majority that brought Lincoln to power, and allowed him to cautiously navigate his way to the Emancipation Proclamation and the abolition of slavery. It was public opinion that influenced political action, not the other way around.
Do you seriously believe that "society as a whole" considers piracy to be immoral?
Yes, I do. How many people do you know that acknowledge that lying is wrong still lie occasionally? That takes in most of the people I know. The vast majority of people never live up to their moral code 100% of the time, but that doesn't mean they don't look at violations of their moral code as wrongful behavior, even if they are the ones violating their own code. That they would judge others less harshly than they would themselves is utterly illogical and goes against proven understanding of human nature.
Mass civil disobedience works when the cause is just, right, and moral, for then it engenders the support of the majority of the public-at-large by awakening their conscience, and, at the same time, the civil disobedience cannot be construed as being self-serving greed or self-justification for dishonest behavior.
No cause can succeed by civil disobedience if that civil disobedience is perceived as dishonest, for that causes the vast majority of the public to dismiss the cause as unjust. That perception alone completely negates the wanted effect of the civil disobedience.
Promoting what is seen both legally and morally by the vast majority of the public as theft does the cause of copyright reform no favors. It breeds contempt for, and dislike of, the proponents of the reform....
Hmmm.... I seem to remember someone by the name of John Walsh. He changed society forever, and got laws passed through his dedication to a cause. He was Joe Blow from off the street until he dedicated himself to a cause. Now he's a household name and the things he campaigned for are now the law of the land.
I also remember a man named Martin Luther King. He dedicated himself to a cause and won against the combined forces of ethically challenged men in big business and government. His cause was just. His movement acted ethically. He won.
How about another man? Nelson Mandela against apartheid. He campaigned against impossible odds. He won too.
Lech Walesa. Ever heard of him? He took on business and a totalitarian government. He won. His cause was just. He won.
How about Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn?
How did all these men win? They won by capturing public opinion. None of them resorted to tactics that would have identified them as thieves to the majority of the world. They had a moral cause and they fought a moral battle. That's the only way to change things outside of bloodshed. You want the public on your side? You want their votes and pressure on legislators to change a law? You have to appeal to them in a way that makes sense to them, not to you.
You still miss my point. It's not what "you" perceive as right or wrong, but what society as a whole perceives as right or wrong that counts. I agree that price gouging is wrong, and immoral, but that doesn't give me the right to do something immoral, and unlawful, as a response.
I detest MS because of it's business practices, but I refuse to pirate their product as my response. I simply don't have anything to do with them, or their products. I'm not going to lower myself to their level by adopting their level of morality.
Since when did two wrongs make a right? They never have, and never will. All the second wrong does, especially one that's perceived as morally wrong, is paint that person in a negative light.
Now, to your reference to Rosa Parks, those who perceived her as a "scofflaw" were also perceived by many, both blacks and whites, to be in the morally wrong position too. She had an unassailable morally correct position, and legally correct one too, according to our constitution. To imply, as you do, that those who say Rosa Parks as a "scofflaw" were holding a position of the same moral worth as who supported her is absurd.
You're missing my point, and whether I believe Ghandi was right or wrong is immaterial. Ghandi's behavior was entirely ethical. He didn't advocate anything that could even be misconstrued as dishonest, or violent, behavior. That's how he took the moral high ground, and that's how he kept it. That's why and how he won....
What's being supported here is considered theft. That puts the adherents of what is being promoted here, in the public eye, as being dishonest. Maybe you guys don't consider it theft, but society at large does, and that's what counts if you want your opposition to copyright and DRM laws to be taken seriously, and not be seen as self-justification for theft.
Whether or not your motives are pure doesn't matter if your behavior is perceived as unethical. If you want to change society's view of the problem you must be perceived as being ethical or your protest loses all impact among thinking, ethical, people, and to keep those opposed to your position from painting you as thieves.
If you don't care about society changing its mind about the issue, and the law getting changed, keep on doing what you're doing.
If you can't understand that, and understand that being seen as a thief hurts your own cause, you guys aren't anywhere nearly as smart as you think you are....
Ghandi didn't base his opposition in dishonesty. He based it solely on, and his protests in, highly moral principles and actions. That's why his opposition worked. He had the moral high ground and he kept it. What's being promoted here immediately takes to the "morally challenged ground", to put it nicely, and gets worse from there. It won't, and can't, work.
Re:Prosecuting corporations for crimes is asinine.
on
The Short Arm of the Law
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· Score: 3, Insightful
No. That's not what he's saying. He's saying, and I agree with him completely, is that it's people making these decisions, and it's those people who need to be held responsible. Find them and execute them--figuratively speaking of course--on a regular basis and this problem of corrupt decision making inside corporations, and government regulatory agencies, will disappear in a hurry.
What give you the right to ignore the laws of the country you live in? You don't like a law? Work to change it. Work to change the laws concerning DRM and extending copyright.
I'm conservative and I agree with you that DRM, and copyright, due to the never ending extensions that Congress keeps tacking on to it, laws are broken. But, that doesn't give either of us the "right" to break other laws. There's lots of laws I think are unjust and counterproductive but ignoring them is not the way to go. You only harm your own society when you champion lawlessness.
There are several instances where single individuals have proven that one person can be the prime motivator in getting a law changed. Harriet Beecher Stowe was one of those people. Her book was a prime mover in ending slavery as it had a great impact on people's consciences. She worked within the system to change something she knew to be wrong. You dislike the copyright and DRM laws? Work to change them. Keep at it until something changes, and you'll have made a very positive contribution to everyone's life. You'll be a hero to a lot of people.
Keep on promoting illegal activity and all you will accomplish is the creation of even harsher laws. Dishonesty harms your cause in the eyes of the public at large and the government, and makes your belief look to be a "professed belief" based only on self-interest and the willingness to steal.
Go out to buy a netbook today and what you'll be offered is an entry-level, full-featured subnotebook. Nothing like the original concept.
What you really mean that MS changed their policies so they could get into the netbook market and destroyed that market, by changing people's expectations of what a netbook was, just to keep Linux out of the market place.
Finland has a lot of land that it's basically uninhabitable. Yes, Australia has lots of desert, but there your big problem is lack of water, not that it's basically impossible to build infrastructure there. Large areas of Finland are basically swampland because it's so wet.
There's no way to build roads, houses, or any kind of infrastructure on it due to the extreme ranges in temperature. Anything built on it would basically either sink, or the yearly rounds of freezing and thawing that cause massive ground expansion and contraction due to ice formation and ice melt, would tear anything built on it apart.
If the Navy really wants to kill people with excessive input, I know several people I could introduce them to. A few minutes of listening to these people and you want to kill yourself to get away as they never, ever, stop talking.
possibly be any more slanted? I'm no Apple fanboy. I've never owned any Apple products and don't like the way Apple does business, nor their history of employee relations, but come on. Claiming someone "possibly" changed their LinkedIn profile due to fear of Apple is out of line.
It's nothing more than rank speculation. If fear of Apple--use of intimidation against the engineers by Apple is implied--was the motivation for changing a LinkedIn profile why didn't the rest of the engineers change their profiles back? Was Apple capable of intimidating only one out of several engineers? Are the majority of the engineers too stupid to know what Apple is like?
The slant taken by this story assumes way too many facts not in evidence.
The problem I have with corporations have some of the rights of individuals is because it allows corrupt business decisions to be made by corporate officers with very little chance of being held accountable. They get away with things that would get Joe Blow throw in jail, and that's not just nor fair.
We'll just have to agree to disagree about the first half of your post. The second half, I agree with you. Yes, she could have said no, and she was advised not to date the asshole in the first place because we knew he was an asshole. But, once she was in that relationship he bullied her into doing a lot of things she wouldn't have done on her own. Her first mistake was her choice of friends, and it all went downhill from there.
Slashdot Mirror
What you're saying, then, is that since I liked my first puff of cigarette smoke I was addicted from the first puff. I think you will find a lot of resistance to that in the scientific community. Physical addiction can only come from the body having built up a need for a specific substance over a period of time. Now, psychological addiction is another matter. Cue the crack addicts. Hooked from the first puff.
I can personally attest to a similar response to what crack addicts have with my first usage of opiates. I liked opium so much the first time I used it that it scared me, and I was a pretty heavy drug user by that time. I knew if I used more than once I was dead as the opiate-type high was something I greatly craved.
One usage was almost enough to make me use it forever. However, that one usage wasn't a physical addiction. It was a psychological response to my body's physical reaction to the drug, but there is a vast difference between a single physiological response and a physical addiction. If there wasn't, I wouldn't be writing this. I'd be dead by now as if my first usage equaled physical addiction I would never have stopped. I would never have been strong enough to even have wanted to fight my body's cravings piled on top of my psychological desire to feel that high.
Where did I say enjoyment was a cause of addiction?
I believe you're mistaking self-destructiveness for lack of intelligence. Emotions often over-ride the thought process.
I do believe you're mistaken about this. People first start smoking for different reasons, but they continue smoking because they enjoy it. They become addicted because they enjoyed it and thus began smoking more regularly after their first few experiences with it.
I'm a former smoker and I can guarantee you that I wasn't addicted at my first puff, or even my first few packs. I found I enjoyed it though through more experiences and I began to increase the regularity with which I smoked, yet I still wasn't addicted. I became physically addicted after I kept on smoking for a period of time. And, even after I knew I was addicted I still enjoyed smoking. It took a major paradigm shift in my life to get me to want to stop smoking, and want to break all of my addictions.
If I had not enjoyed smoking, I would never have become addicted. I would also say that most smokers I know enjoy smoking long after they are addicted to it. Why? Most people are addicted long before they realize they have an addiction. What's more, I knew a man who smoked himself to death--he died of emphysema. Long after he knew he was addicted, and knew his emphysema would kill him, he kept on smoking because he liked to smoke, because he got pleasure from smoking. To him that pleasure was worth more than his own life.
The same principles apply with alcoholism. You enjoy the effects of your first few drinks, and so you drink more. Pretty soon you depend on it to feel good. But, the dependence would not have occurred if enjoyment/pleasure from drinking had not preceded it. Once again, the voice of experience as I'm an alcoholic. One that hasn't had a drink in almost 20 years, but one still the same.
What is the conclusion? You cannot deny the correlation between enjoyment and addiction as the pleasure/enjoyment derived from the addictive behavior and/or substance is what keeps the person on the same path until addiction is the result.
What, exactly do you mean by this. I didn't answer right away because your statement is ambiguous enough that I could not perceive the thought behind your statement.
Reading the rest of the posts responding to you I don't think anyone else has been able to accurately say what your point was either. How about clarifying your position?
Do not mistake dislike for RIAA tactics
That should read: Do not confuse dislike for RIAA tactics
Ummm.... Do you really think it was theft that created any change in RIAA behavior? No, it was public, and jurist, opinion that the way the RIAA went about punishing what they said was theft that brought public and jurist disdain upon them.
If the RIAA had acted even half-way honorably in all of this neither public, nor jurist, opinion would have been on the side of those being sued. They screwed themselves over so badly that public opinion turned against them. Do not mistake dislike for RIAA tactics with the idea that perceived theft brought music pirates public sympathy. If you do, you're making a huge error in judgment.
I truly believe you are mistaken.
Think about this. One year after her arrest all buses in Montgomery are desegregated. How did this happen in such a short time? Do you really think politicians would have made these changes if the majority of the public has not recognized the moral wrongness of Rosa being arrested for nothing more than where she sat on a bus? If you do, you do not understand politicians. Where I think you make your mistake in this case is in that you mistake the loudness of the howls of the bigots as the prevalence of the attitudes of the majority who found their caterwauling despicable.
You need to look closely at the Civil War, the events that led up to it, and how it had long(a decade at least) been the attitude of the majority of Americans that slavery was wrong. It was this fundamental belief that by the majority that brought Lincoln to power, and allowed him to cautiously navigate his way to the Emancipation Proclamation and the abolition of slavery. It was public opinion that influenced political action, not the other way around.
Do you seriously believe that "society as a whole" considers piracy to be immoral?
Yes, I do. How many people do you know that acknowledge that lying is wrong still lie occasionally? That takes in most of the people I know. The vast majority of people never live up to their moral code 100% of the time, but that doesn't mean they don't look at violations of their moral code as wrongful behavior, even if they are the ones violating their own code. That they would judge others less harshly than they would themselves is utterly illogical and goes against proven understanding of human nature.
Mass civil disobedience works when the cause is just, right, and moral, for then it engenders the support of the majority of the public-at-large by awakening their conscience, and, at the same time, the civil disobedience cannot be construed as being self-serving greed or self-justification for dishonest behavior.
No cause can succeed by civil disobedience if that civil disobedience is perceived as dishonest, for that causes the vast majority of the public to dismiss the cause as unjust. That perception alone completely negates the wanted effect of the civil disobedience.
Promoting what is seen both legally and morally by the vast majority of the public as theft does the cause of copyright reform no favors. It breeds contempt for, and dislike of, the proponents of the reform....
I answered your post in my post to AC just a little further down the thread.
Hmmm.... I seem to remember someone by the name of John Walsh. He changed society forever, and got laws passed through his dedication to a cause. He was Joe Blow from off the street until he dedicated himself to a cause. Now he's a household name and the things he campaigned for are now the law of the land.
I also remember a man named Martin Luther King. He dedicated himself to a cause and won against the combined forces of ethically challenged men in big business and government. His cause was just. His movement acted ethically. He won.
How about another man? Nelson Mandela against apartheid. He campaigned against impossible odds. He won too.
Lech Walesa. Ever heard of him? He took on business and a totalitarian government. He won. His cause was just. He won.
How about Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn?
How did all these men win? They won by capturing public opinion. None of them resorted to tactics that would have identified them as thieves to the majority of the world. They had a moral cause and they fought a moral battle. That's the only way to change things outside of bloodshed. You want the public on your side? You want their votes and pressure on legislators to change a law? You have to appeal to them in a way that makes sense to them, not to you.
You still miss my point. It's not what "you" perceive as right or wrong, but what society as a whole perceives as right or wrong that counts. I agree that price gouging is wrong, and immoral, but that doesn't give me the right to do something immoral, and unlawful, as a response.
I detest MS because of it's business practices, but I refuse to pirate their product as my response. I simply don't have anything to do with them, or their products. I'm not going to lower myself to their level by adopting their level of morality.
Since when did two wrongs make a right? They never have, and never will. All the second wrong does, especially one that's perceived as morally wrong, is paint that person in a negative light.
Now, to your reference to Rosa Parks, those who perceived her as a "scofflaw" were also perceived by many, both blacks and whites, to be in the morally wrong position too. She had an unassailable morally correct position, and legally correct one too, according to our constitution. To imply, as you do, that those who say Rosa Parks as a "scofflaw" were holding a position of the same moral worth as who supported her is absurd.
You're missing my point, and whether I believe Ghandi was right or wrong is immaterial. Ghandi's behavior was entirely ethical. He didn't advocate anything that could even be misconstrued as dishonest, or violent, behavior. That's how he took the moral high ground, and that's how he kept it. That's why and how he won....
What's being supported here is considered theft. That puts the adherents of what is being promoted here, in the public eye, as being dishonest. Maybe you guys don't consider it theft, but society at large does, and that's what counts if you want your opposition to copyright and DRM laws to be taken seriously, and not be seen as self-justification for theft.
Whether or not your motives are pure doesn't matter if your behavior is perceived as unethical. If you want to change society's view of the problem you must be perceived as being ethical or your protest loses all impact among thinking, ethical, people, and to keep those opposed to your position from painting you as thieves.
If you don't care about society changing its mind about the issue, and the law getting changed, keep on doing what you're doing.
If you can't understand that, and understand that being seen as a thief hurts your own cause, you guys aren't anywhere nearly as smart as you think you are....
Ghandi didn't base his opposition in dishonesty. He based it solely on, and his protests in, highly moral principles and actions. That's why his opposition worked. He had the moral high ground and he kept it. What's being promoted here immediately takes to the "morally challenged ground", to put it nicely, and gets worse from there. It won't, and can't, work.
No. That's not what he's saying. He's saying, and I agree with him completely, is that it's people making these decisions, and it's those people who need to be held responsible. Find them and execute them--figuratively speaking of course--on a regular basis and this problem of corrupt decision making inside corporations, and government regulatory agencies, will disappear in a hurry.
Hold these jackasses accountable.
What give you the right to ignore the laws of the country you live in? You don't like a law? Work to change it. Work to change the laws concerning DRM and extending copyright.
I'm conservative and I agree with you that DRM, and copyright, due to the never ending extensions that Congress keeps tacking on to it, laws are broken. But, that doesn't give either of us the "right" to break other laws. There's lots of laws I think are unjust and counterproductive but ignoring them is not the way to go. You only harm your own society when you champion lawlessness.
There are several instances where single individuals have proven that one person can be the prime motivator in getting a law changed. Harriet Beecher Stowe was one of those people. Her book was a prime mover in ending slavery as it had a great impact on people's consciences. She worked within the system to change something she knew to be wrong. You dislike the copyright and DRM laws? Work to change them. Keep at it until something changes, and you'll have made a very positive contribution to everyone's life. You'll be a hero to a lot of people.
Keep on promoting illegal activity and all you will accomplish is the creation of even harsher laws. Dishonesty harms your cause in the eyes of the public at large and the government, and makes your belief look to be a "professed belief" based only on self-interest and the willingness to steal.
Do you guys not hear a loud Whooosh! as the feepness' sarcasm goes sailing over your heads?
Go out to buy a netbook today and what you'll be offered is an entry-level, full-featured subnotebook. Nothing like the original concept.
What you really mean that MS changed their policies so they could get into the netbook market and destroyed that market, by changing people's expectations of what a netbook was, just to keep Linux out of the market place.
Finland has a lot of land that it's basically uninhabitable. Yes, Australia has lots of desert, but there your big problem is lack of water, not that it's basically impossible to build infrastructure there. Large areas of Finland are basically swampland because it's so wet.
There's no way to build roads, houses, or any kind of infrastructure on it due to the extreme ranges in temperature. Anything built on it would basically either sink, or the yearly rounds of freezing and thawing that cause massive ground expansion and contraction due to ice formation and ice melt, would tear anything built on it apart.
If the Navy really wants to kill people with excessive input, I know several people I could introduce them to. A few minutes of listening to these people and you want to kill yourself to get away as they never, ever, stop talking.
possibly be any more slanted? I'm no Apple fanboy. I've never owned any Apple products and don't like the way Apple does business, nor their history of employee relations, but come on. Claiming someone "possibly" changed their LinkedIn profile due to fear of Apple is out of line.
It's nothing more than rank speculation. If fear of Apple--use of intimidation against the engineers by Apple is implied--was the motivation for changing a LinkedIn profile why didn't the rest of the engineers change their profiles back? Was Apple capable of intimidating only one out of several engineers? Are the majority of the engineers too stupid to know what Apple is like?
The slant taken by this story assumes way too many facts not in evidence.
Dang, you beat me to it....
The problem I have with corporations have some of the rights of individuals is because it allows corrupt business decisions to be made by corporate officers with very little chance of being held accountable. They get away with things that would get Joe Blow throw in jail, and that's not just nor fair.
We'll just have to agree to disagree about the first half of your post. The second half, I agree with you. Yes, she could have said no, and she was advised not to date the asshole in the first place because we knew he was an asshole. But, once she was in that relationship he bullied her into doing a lot of things she wouldn't have done on her own. Her first mistake was her choice of friends, and it all went downhill from there.