"Last year, U.S. computer- and video-game revenue surpassed domestic box-office receipts, and this year, the game industry is expected to widen that gap with more than $10 billion in sales."
Perhaps you and the original poster missed the memo, but games already make more than domestic movie sales. I'm sourcing this Fast Company article as one of many that state this fact.
When the Slashdot community make comments to the effect that the costs involved in creating a Westlaw or a Lexis-Nexis - with maintaining databases, OCR and so forth - need to be compensated or that these services are like the public highway system, which doesn't entitle you to a free car, you are missing the point.
Let me see if I can get at that point. Lexis-Nexis and Westlaw provide a valuable service that essentially has become the standard if you want to practice law. While it is possible to look some of the information in print, you simply cannot practice law and expect the same level of performance when you are arguing against another attorney that has it - when you don't.
In most circumstances, this would be simply a matter of convenience and nothing further need be said. Convenience is convenience and you can either pay for it or you can't. However, we are talking about the law here - which means that by creating an artifical monopoly in order to support your business model, you are effectively biasing the judicial system against people who do not have access or cannot afford this service.
It's an issue. It may not be as sexy as healthcare, education, freedom of speech and other social topics of the day - but free access to information and an informed citizenry is considered one of the cornerstones of a democracy. It's the reason why we have the Federal Depository Library System. Lexis-Nexis and Westlaw pose a serious challenge, and raise the question - should a privelege group be able to buy access - and thereby buy better treatment in court? I hope not.
There are so many problems with your question, I'm not really sure where to start. In the interest of disclosure, I should probably state that I am trained as a librarian, but I do not work in a public library setting. So, I don't have any special concerns about filtering beyond my professional ones.
You see, in practice, librarians have always been censors. They decide which books get on the shelves, which books get weeded from the collection, etc., and this is not necessarily a bad thing. Editors edit books in order to make them more focused, lucid, and pleasurable to read. Librarians are a kind of editor - for whole collections. Due to their efforts, you can find the books you are looking for if they are in the collection. You might be able to find other books by looking nearby. Of course, libraries are no longer just about books, there are article databases, special collections, music, videos, and so forth. But for discussion, let's just talk about books.
If I go to my local library looking for John Zerzan's book Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization, I'm likely not going to find it. However, I can inter-library loan the item and read it. Some library, somewhere has a copy and I can access it. So, you aren't necessarily limited by the local censor. You have a means around him/her, if you don't have the means to purchase the book yourself.
Now, let's talk about filters. Filters are essentially limiting your collection to what's on site. It's like taking away inter-library loan for books. It means you do not have access to the material, period - if your librarian doesn't choose to select it. Think about that for a moment in the context of books. If my librarian doesn't know about Zerzan, then I would not have access to the book.
You might say that I could buy my own, assuming I had the money, but buying your own is kind of counter to the whole point of libraries - its a community collection where people can spend time educating and thinking for themselves. Ideally, they should help diversify thinking, not homogenize it.
Or how about we put it another way, let's talk about your SPAM filters. No customizing of filters, we are all going to use the same one and then people can submit new sites to add to the allow list. How effective would it be to have all incoming mail screened for SPAM only at the sysadmin level. To be effective, it would probably mean that you would not get some of the mail you would have liked to recieved. But no fear, you can always ask for a particular address to be added to the allow list. Or hopefully, someone else has submitted it already. In the mean time, you have no idea what your missing.
Would that work for you? Part of the whole idea is that you need to know what's out there, and with filters that you don't create yourself - you can't.
How about "war on Al Qaeda"? You can only "win" a war if you can identify the enemy and you can identify objectives - like kill or capture 80% of leadership, reduce cash flows of the network by 90%, eliminate all training facilities, etc. "War on terrorism" is a euphemism like "war on drugs" - which is effectively a war on the freedoms of the American people.
There was a fairly interesting interview with a group of foriegn policy experts that describe themselves as "realists" on NPR (with Ira Glass?) that make a pretty convincing argument that the very lack of definition of a "war on terror" is undermining the efforts. In the interview, these experts provided a number of interesting facts to support their position. For example, only 40% of the Al Qaeda leadership is in custody and that the network still has the capabilities to deliver devestating style attacks.
While I do not know if this is true, there seems to be every indication that the current approach is being bungled - part of that is because the objectives (and enemies) are not well-defined.
It looks like they are still developing the protocols or even how it will transmit data, but you can jam most any electronic transmission if you know how it works.
With that said, a battlefield is not somewhere where you have the leisure to put together a jamming device using RadioShack parts and a soldering gun. Where's you Iraqi or Afghan (for example) going to get the hardware? Will they be able to carry it in the field?
Then there is the issue of how you would know these sensors were in place, would the act of jamming enable them to accomplish their objective of locating hostiles, etc. I think you can safely say that as a military scouting application, it has unlimited possiblities and opens up a whole new dimension for tactics and strategy.
There is also the issue that development of this kind of application might make a significant contribution to the efficiencies of other networks such as the Internet. Trying to figure out an efficient network protocol that conserves power seems like it would present new technical insights that would be applicable to other areas as well.
Obviously, there are big brother concerns too -- and not just the government. Can you imagine the pop-unders we'd see when a X10-like company gets a hold of this tech? That alone makes me want to write my Congressman.
If the Founders felt the common man or woman was too stupid to pick the President, they wouldn't have permitted a popular vote at all.
You are making a couple of false assumptions. First, women were obviously not a factor in the Founders decision making process, see the 19th amendment, ratified on August 26, 1920. Women haven't been able to vote for even half of U.S. history yet.
Second, you assume that the Founders had absolute control over the creation of the Constitution and could do whatever they wanted to do and that they were of one mind. In fact, they considered "[a] number of proposals, including direct election by the people, by state legislatures, by state governors, and by the national legislature, were considered. The result was the electoral college, a master stroke of compromise, quaint and curious but politically expedient." [see the national archives]. Note: The popular vote did not then nor does it now determine who becomes president of the U.S. Frankly, I'm not sure what the point is of even including the President on ballots, since it has no bearing on who becomes President. Perhaps it is a kind of opinion polling for the electoral college. Or if you are of a more cynical mind-set, it's a component of the framework of Necessary Illusions that help us believe that we live in a democracy and have some voice in it. Those in power need to keep the hoi polloi docile, don't they?
What I find especially difficult to understand is the incapacity to differenciate between a republic and democracy - despite the fact that the Constitution itself explicitly states: "The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government". Yet, everyone seems to believe the U.S. is a democratic system and that the U.S. is somehow keeping the world safe for democracy. That smell kosher to you?
One other thought, there is a thesis out there that suggests that the Constitutional Convention had bigger fish to fry than worrying about whether the voting system was fair for the President. You could probably make analogous comments about our efforts in helping the world become more "democratic". Maybe it is time to relook at voting and our system a bit more objectively and with a critical eye. Don't you think?
I work as a corporate researcher in an advertising agency. For the work I do, it is simply unacceptable to have a 5Mb limit. Putting together reference documentation for a major project, project materials and so forth often have many files that are all above this size. Often these all need commentary as to what they are, what page/file you need to go to and so forth.
Asking me to waste my time going back and forth between loading it up on a server, writing commentary on where you need to go in which file to get the key info in an email, making sure that whoever is recieving the mail can get access the server, etc., is simply not a good use of my time. It would also be confusing to the people recieving my research - they often have a hard enough time with simple attachments.
You can go on about what is the "right" way to do things but in terms of my company's bottom line, it is cheaper to use email and deal with the bandwidth issue than for me and the people I do research for to waste our time.
We don't live in an ideal world, and human factor efficienies are often more important than machine efficiencies. Enough said.
There is no good quantifiable measurement for intelligence.
Physical structure of the brain may not indicate ability, e.g., even with identical brain structures is it possible for the twins to have defniitely levels of ability?
Sample size of the study leaves considerable margin for error. Perhaps these 20 twins were an anomoly.
I know next to nothing about brain functioning, and it does not seem based that this study, as reported here, provides any real evidence -- although, it may be provide some interesting points of departure for further research.
Seeing comments like 'Lexis-Nexis, Google's coming for you.' just drives home the point for me that the vast majority of users -- even the technology savvy users on Slashdot often have no clue about how to search and find information. A subscription service is a subscription service is a subscription service. Right?
Wrong. The LEXIS-NEXIS database environment encompasses more than 11,000 databases with data from nearly 29,000 news, business, and legal sources. More than 2.5 million documents are added each week. Most of which is not available on the web and not indexable by Google.
Want an example to further illustrate the point? Try finding any kind of newspaper article from the 1980s on the web. Try finding legal decisions to build your legal brief around. Try getting Harvard Business Review articles in full text. Try finding Microsoft's credit report. So forth, so on.
Nexis, Dialog, Westlaw, Dow Jones, Profound, Dun & Bradstreet and similar services have nothing to fear from Google and the other companies mentioned in this article. They aren't even playing in the same ballpark.
The concept of "property" has not *always* existed, much less the idea of intellectual property.
Simple counter-example, Native American Indians of North America prior to contact with the Europeans did not "own" land and did not sharply delineate what we would think of as theirs from what other people "owned" in their communities. If one wanted to get into the realm of conjecture, one could probably make some good arguments that the idea of property, with its individualistic formulation that we currently have, probably started with the agricultural revolution.
Surely, property has *not* always been around. Moreover, this kind of reasoning stinks a bit of the whole is/ought fallacy, where you argue that something is "right" on a moral dimension simply because it has historically or is currently the case.
Apologists for slavery said many of the same things. Slavery has *always* been around. It is a fact of nature that some men dominate others or what have you. Even if slavery had always been around, which I think is hard to argue convincingly, it still does not mean that it should not be abolished or allowed to continue. Its fact does not give it moral legitimacy.
Similarly, I think your arguments for intellectual property have the same problems. Intellectual property is an artifact of living in a world where everything is commodified. What do you produce? How much do you make? For people whose work are ideas, there is an obvious need to view ideas as property that can be bought and sold. If your ideas are popular or useful (read useful as adding to someone's bottom line), then you have increased status, money, or what have you.
It seems to me that a social order could and does exist where people are not valued only by how much they can make from selling their "intellectual property". Free software is one example, although it still has many of the problems associated with commodifying ideas.
In essence, intellectual property is not a public good. It is a private good that often benefits individuals other than the creator. Still, it appeals to our sense of what is right in a world where value is measured in dollars. Maybe one day we can move beyond that...
Unfortunately, you miss the point. The question is not whether or not the Dean should have been doing it. The question is whether or not the Dean should have what he was doing communicated to others and then called into account for it.
Following your logic, you could also say that the Dean's reading habits based on material he has checked out from the library could be similarly examined. Suppose a computer technician notices that the Dean of Divinity seems to check out way more Marquis de Sade than a Dean of a Divinity School should. It is the University's books. He is using the University's ID card to check them out, right? Wrong.
It seems pretty clear that, in a University setting and in a supposedly "free" society, a person should be entitled to check out books and read topics of interest without having to worry about the possibility that their reading choices will be publically debated and bear possible consequences. If you do not believe this, then you are essentially advocating an environment that fosters the worst kind of self-censorship and undermines the meaning of what it means to be "free".
The analogy to the Internet seems pretty straight-forward. It may be the University's house. It may be the University's computer. Still, it does not give the University the right to monitor or debate how you use these resources anymore than they have the right to track individual use of the library.
With a 30+ year shelf life, it's a great archiving format for 10+ years where magnetic tape is not.
While I do not doubt that DVD-RAM on Linux is the greatest thing since sliced bread, I do doubt that at this stage of the game that you can predict how long the media will last. Last I checked, the preservation issues are still an open question. Check out the little blurb on the Library of Congress website to get a feel for how much is really unknown about preserving data on optical discs.
My guess is that is probably will not matter for the average user. I could care less about whatever may be backed up on the hundreds of discs that once held data for my old Windows 3.1 box. I probably will not care about the backups from my current linux machine 10 years from now either.
Yet, there are going to be people out there making the same assertions/assumptions you are making here. They are going to back their data up and forget about it. Then, they are going to have to live through all the issues that plagued books, film, photographs, computer media, and on and on. Anyone remember all the trouble there was reading census tapes, space mission data tapes, etc.? Anyone notice that drawer of color photographs in your grandmother's house starting to fade?
But that was film, analog tape, or some other medium, this time it will be different, right? Well, if you believe that, you are quite a bit more optimistic than I.
Don't worry, I promise not to say, "I told you so," when all those files you snapped of your family using your digital camera and saved on your 30+ year media are lost ten years from now.
Re:I almost completely agree with everything RMS s
on
Thus Spake Stallman
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· Score: 2
Not so sure about the lack of relativism: if I prefer one kind of tea over someone else I don't think either of us is "wrong" in any meaningful sense - it truly is relative. I believe the same holds for less trivial examples of differing opinion.
I think he was specifically addressing the perspective of ethical relativism, e.g., people that believe that what is right and wrong depends upon circumstances and/or social, cultural, political, and other perspectives as they exist in a particular time and place. When you say "right" and "wrong", there is an implied moral/ethical dimension. As a counter-example, tea preference is a bit unsatisfying because it lacks this dimension, so you may want to reconsider this objection.
It is not clear to me that Stallman is even against "relativism" per se. His comments about China and copyright protection, in conjunction with his evasiveness concerning the ability to apply basic tenets of the GPL in other areas, seem to me to show some ethical relativity as it relates to circumstances such as place, time, use, and so on. Specifically, he says, "The ethical issues about copying and modifying works depend on the kind of work and how people can use it."
I read this as basically saying that, when there is a moral dimension to a question and all the circumstances have been accounted for, there is one and only one "right" or "most moral" answer. Furthermore, you will never know if your answer will correspond to the "right" one. Despite this, the "right" answer is NOT whatever answers to life's moral questions you come up with when your not coding.
All and all, I think RMS is a fine role model, not only as a programmer but as a human being. It is unfortunate that with all the intelligent people that read and post to Slashdot, that there has to be a warning posted on his responses. Warning: Herein lies a post that might challenge you or get you thinking about things differently than you currently do. Does this really require a warning?
If it does, what warning is it really giving? The warning that perhaps we are so far gone that we cannot tolerate discussions that go outside a limit bounds of agreement or well-worn dichotomies? The warning that "freedom" has come to mean thinking the cage you live in is big and free enough for your needs? And should be good enough for the next person too?
If I recall correctly, the domain name Passport used to belong to International Broadcasting Services, Inc., to promote their book Passport to World Band Radio. The transfer to Microsoft happened sometime during the summer of this year -- I seem to remember noticing the change in mid-June. While it may be fun to poke fun at Microsoft and there really is no excuse for failing to renew the domain, it seems somewhat understandable when you consider the fact that this domain is new to them.
Why is there such need to gloat about Microsft's mistakes? Does pointing them out make Linux or whatever operating system you use better?
In the end, Chaney did a good turn and set a good example. Enough said.
Yes, this is a double standard. Let's examine why.
First, the Melissa virus is possible due to the dominance of one specific piece of software on the average users desktop. The only open source equivalent to this kind of dominance -- that I know of -- is sendmail. It is not the same for a variety of reasons, but let's continue on for the sake of discussion.
Compare the closest open source equivalent "virus" -- again, that I know of -- that happened with sendmail to the Melissa-Macro Virus. You will notice two interesting things. First, the CERT advisory for Melissa states: "This macro virus is not known to exploit any new vulnerabilities." Second, note the options they give for correction: block the mail, utilize virus scanners, and encourage users to disable Word macros. The free software solution would be to fix the problem at the source -- pun intended. In a free software environment the option to: fix the problem, is available whereas in a closed source solution it is not. You have to wait for company X to fix the problem for you, and in the mean time, get by with blocking, anti-virii programs and the like. Since this problem is not new and any user that buys Microsoft products has to wait for them to deign to fix it, it would seem that there is a powerful argument for some culpability on Microsoft's part.
There are of course the issues that other people have mentioned here: no warranty, free software is not a "product" sold by a business (let us remember companies like Red Hat make money off the service not the CD), etc. However, I think this is the central point. They have different standards because they are not analagous. You are not comparing like things.
Or to put it another way: Sure, a "thief" is responsible for his own actions. However, if I entrust the security of my home to some company, it seems quite reasonable to say that if someone steals something because that company left my door open, the company is also at fault.
For free software, you use it with the understanding that you are not entrusting anything to anyone so the same standard does not apply.
Slashdot Mirror
"Last year, U.S. computer- and video-game revenue surpassed domestic box-office receipts, and this year, the game industry is expected to widen that gap with more than $10 billion in sales."
Perhaps you and the original poster missed the memo, but games already make more than domestic movie sales. I'm sourcing this Fast Company article as one of many that state this fact.
Since the one posted doesn't work, how about this one: (if you don't mind the pop-ups)
Student loans come back to haunt single mom."Still, I wish there was a little more content in some of this stuff."
Legitimate point. Although, Wired had an interesting article that has me hoping that the Enter the Matrix game might start a trend to change that.When the Slashdot community make comments to the effect that the costs involved in creating a Westlaw or a Lexis-Nexis - with maintaining databases, OCR and so forth - need to be compensated or that these services are like the public highway system, which doesn't entitle you to a free car, you are missing the point.
Let me see if I can get at that point. Lexis-Nexis and Westlaw provide a valuable service that essentially has become the standard if you want to practice law. While it is possible to look some of the information in print, you simply cannot practice law and expect the same level of performance when you are arguing against another attorney that has it - when you don't.
In most circumstances, this would be simply a matter of convenience and nothing further need be said. Convenience is convenience and you can either pay for it or you can't. However, we are talking about the law here - which means that by creating an artifical monopoly in order to support your business model, you are effectively biasing the judicial system against people who do not have access or cannot afford this service.
It's an issue. It may not be as sexy as healthcare, education, freedom of speech and other social topics of the day - but free access to information and an informed citizenry is considered one of the cornerstones of a democracy. It's the reason why we have the Federal Depository Library System. Lexis-Nexis and Westlaw pose a serious challenge, and raise the question - should a privelege group be able to buy access - and thereby buy better treatment in court? I hope not.There are so many problems with your question, I'm not really sure where to start. In the interest of disclosure, I should probably state that I am trained as a librarian, but I do not work in a public library setting. So, I don't have any special concerns about filtering beyond my professional ones.
The whole notion of Internet filtering goes against a central librarian tenet, namely: We uphold the principles of intellectual freedom and resist all efforts to censor library resources. It's a great idea, but it has never really been put to the test until the development of the Internet and libraries providing access.
You see, in practice, librarians have always been censors. They decide which books get on the shelves, which books get weeded from the collection, etc., and this is not necessarily a bad thing. Editors edit books in order to make them more focused, lucid, and pleasurable to read. Librarians are a kind of editor - for whole collections. Due to their efforts, you can find the books you are looking for if they are in the collection. You might be able to find other books by looking nearby. Of course, libraries are no longer just about books, there are article databases, special collections, music, videos, and so forth. But for discussion, let's just talk about books.
If I go to my local library looking for John Zerzan's book Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization, I'm likely not going to find it. However, I can inter-library loan the item and read it. Some library, somewhere has a copy and I can access it. So, you aren't necessarily limited by the local censor. You have a means around him/her, if you don't have the means to purchase the book yourself.Now, let's talk about filters. Filters are essentially limiting your collection to what's on site. It's like taking away inter-library loan for books. It means you do not have access to the material, period - if your librarian doesn't choose to select it. Think about that for a moment in the context of books. If my librarian doesn't know about Zerzan, then I would not have access to the book.
You might say that I could buy my own, assuming I had the money, but buying your own is kind of counter to the whole point of libraries - its a community collection where people can spend time educating and thinking for themselves. Ideally, they should help diversify thinking, not homogenize it.
Or how about we put it another way, let's talk about your SPAM filters. No customizing of filters, we are all going to use the same one and then people can submit new sites to add to the allow list. How effective would it be to have all incoming mail screened for SPAM only at the sysadmin level. To be effective, it would probably mean that you would not get some of the mail you would have liked to recieved. But no fear, you can always ask for a particular address to be added to the allow list. Or hopefully, someone else has submitted it already. In the mean time, you have no idea what your missing.
Would that work for you? Part of the whole idea is that you need to know what's out there, and with filters that you don't create yourself - you can't.
How about "war on Al Qaeda"? You can only "win" a war if you can identify the enemy and you can identify objectives - like kill or capture 80% of leadership, reduce cash flows of the network by 90%, eliminate all training facilities, etc. "War on terrorism" is a euphemism like "war on drugs" - which is effectively a war on the freedoms of the American people.
There was a fairly interesting interview with a group of foriegn policy experts that describe themselves as "realists" on NPR (with Ira Glass?) that make a pretty convincing argument that the very lack of definition of a "war on terror" is undermining the efforts. In the interview, these experts provided a number of interesting facts to support their position. For example, only 40% of the Al Qaeda leadership is in custody and that the network still has the capabilities to deliver devestating style attacks.
While I do not know if this is true, there seems to be every indication that the current approach is being bungled - part of that is because the objectives (and enemies) are not well-defined.
It looks like they are still developing the protocols or even how it will transmit data, but you can jam most any electronic transmission if you know how it works.
With that said, a battlefield is not somewhere where you have the leisure to put together a jamming device using RadioShack parts and a soldering gun. Where's you Iraqi or Afghan (for example) going to get the hardware? Will they be able to carry it in the field?
Then there is the issue of how you would know these sensors were in place, would the act of jamming enable them to accomplish their objective of locating hostiles, etc. I think you can safely say that as a military scouting application, it has unlimited possiblities and opens up a whole new dimension for tactics and strategy.
There is also the issue that development of this kind of application might make a significant contribution to the efficiencies of other networks such as the Internet. Trying to figure out an efficient network protocol that conserves power seems like it would present new technical insights that would be applicable to other areas as well.
Obviously, there are big brother concerns too -- and not just the government. Can you imagine the pop-unders we'd see when a X10-like company gets a hold of this tech? That alone makes me want to write my Congressman.
You are making a couple of false assumptions. First, women were obviously not a factor in the Founders decision making process, see the 19th amendment, ratified on August 26, 1920. Women haven't been able to vote for even half of U.S. history yet.
Second, you assume that the Founders had absolute control over the creation of the Constitution and could do whatever they wanted to do and that they were of one mind. In fact, they considered "[a] number of proposals, including direct election by the people, by state legislatures, by state governors, and by the national legislature, were considered. The result was the electoral college, a master stroke of compromise, quaint and curious but politically expedient." [see the national archives]. Note: The popular vote did not then nor does it now determine who becomes president of the U.S. Frankly, I'm not sure what the point is of even including the President on ballots, since it has no bearing on who becomes President. Perhaps it is a kind of opinion polling for the electoral college. Or if you are of a more cynical mind-set, it's a component of the framework of Necessary Illusions that help us believe that we live in a democracy and have some voice in it. Those in power need to keep the hoi polloi docile, don't they?
What I find especially difficult to understand is the incapacity to differenciate between a republic and democracy - despite the fact that the Constitution itself explicitly states: "The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government". Yet, everyone seems to believe the U.S. is a democratic system and that the U.S. is somehow keeping the world safe for democracy. That smell kosher to you?
One other thought, there is a thesis out there that suggests that the Constitutional Convention had bigger fish to fry than worrying about whether the voting system was fair for the President. You could probably make analogous comments about our efforts in helping the world become more "democratic". Maybe it is time to relook at voting and our system a bit more objectively and with a critical eye. Don't you think?
I work as a corporate researcher in an advertising agency. For the work I do, it is simply unacceptable to have a 5Mb limit. Putting together reference documentation for a major project, project materials and so forth often have many files that are all above this size. Often these all need commentary as to what they are, what page/file you need to go to and so forth.
Asking me to waste my time going back and forth between loading it up on a server, writing commentary on where you need to go in which file to get the key info in an email, making sure that whoever is recieving the mail can get access the server, etc., is simply not a good use of my time. It would also be confusing to the people recieving my research - they often have a hard enough time with simple attachments.
You can go on about what is the "right" way to do things but in terms of my company's bottom line, it is cheaper to use email and deal with the bandwidth issue than for me and the people I do research for to waste our time.
We don't live in an ideal world, and human factor efficienies are often more important than machine efficiencies. Enough said.
Couple of points:
- There is no good quantifiable measurement for intelligence.
- Physical structure of the brain may not indicate ability, e.g., even with identical brain structures is it possible for the twins to have defniitely levels of ability?
- Sample size of the study leaves considerable margin for error. Perhaps these 20 twins were an anomoly.
I know next to nothing about brain functioning, and it does not seem based that this study, as reported here, provides any real evidence -- although, it may be provide some interesting points of departure for further research.Seeing comments like 'Lexis-Nexis, Google's coming for you.' just drives home the point for me that the vast majority of users -- even the technology savvy users on Slashdot often have no clue about how to search and find information. A subscription service is a subscription service is a subscription service. Right?
Wrong. The LEXIS-NEXIS database environment encompasses more than 11,000 databases with data from nearly 29,000 news, business, and legal sources. More than 2.5 million documents are added each week. Most of which is not available on the web and not indexable by Google.
Want an example to further illustrate the point? Try finding any kind of newspaper article from the 1980s on the web. Try finding legal decisions to build your legal brief around. Try getting Harvard Business Review articles in full text. Try finding Microsoft's credit report. So forth, so on.
Nexis, Dialog, Westlaw, Dow Jones, Profound, Dun & Bradstreet and similar services have nothing to fear from Google and the other companies mentioned in this article. They aren't even playing in the same ballpark.
The concept of "property" has not *always* existed, much less the idea of intellectual property.
Simple counter-example, Native American Indians of North America prior to contact with the Europeans did not "own" land and did not sharply delineate what we would think of as theirs from what other people "owned" in their communities. If one wanted to get into the realm of conjecture, one could probably make some good arguments that the idea of property, with its individualistic formulation that we currently have, probably started with the agricultural revolution.
Surely, property has *not* always been around. Moreover, this kind of reasoning stinks a bit of the whole is/ought fallacy, where you argue that something is "right" on a moral dimension simply because it has historically or is currently the case.
Apologists for slavery said many of the same things. Slavery has *always* been around. It is a fact of nature that some men dominate others or what have you. Even if slavery had always been around, which I think is hard to argue convincingly, it still does not mean that it should not be abolished or allowed to continue. Its fact does not give it moral legitimacy.
Similarly, I think your arguments for intellectual property have the same problems. Intellectual property is an artifact of living in a world where everything is commodified. What do you produce? How much do you make? For people whose work are ideas, there is an obvious need to view ideas as property that can be bought and sold. If your ideas are popular or useful (read useful as adding to someone's bottom line), then you have increased status, money, or what have you.
It seems to me that a social order could and does exist where people are not valued only by how much they can make from selling their "intellectual property". Free software is one example, although it still has many of the problems associated with commodifying ideas.
In essence, intellectual property is not a public good. It is a private good that often benefits individuals other than the creator. Still, it appeals to our sense of what is right in a world where value is measured in dollars. Maybe one day we can move beyond that...
Unfortunately, you miss the point. The question is not whether or not the Dean should have been doing it. The question is whether or not the Dean should have what he was doing communicated to others and then called into account for it.
Following your logic, you could also say that the Dean's reading habits based on material he has checked out from the library could be similarly examined. Suppose a computer technician notices that the Dean of Divinity seems to check out way more Marquis de Sade than a Dean of a Divinity School should. It is the University's books. He is using the University's ID card to check them out, right? Wrong.
It seems pretty clear that, in a University setting and in a supposedly "free" society, a person should be entitled to check out books and read topics of interest without having to worry about the possibility that their reading choices will be publically debated and bear possible consequences. If you do not believe this, then you are essentially advocating an environment that fosters the worst kind of self-censorship and undermines the meaning of what it means to be "free".
The analogy to the Internet seems pretty straight-forward. It may be the University's house. It may be the University's computer. Still, it does not give the University the right to monitor or debate how you use these resources anymore than they have the right to track individual use of the library.
With a 30+ year shelf life, it's a great archiving format for 10+ years where magnetic tape is not.
While I do not doubt that DVD-RAM on Linux is the greatest thing since sliced bread, I do doubt that at this stage of the game that you can predict how long the media will last. Last I checked, the preservation issues are still an open question. Check out the little blurb on the Library of Congress website to get a feel for how much is really unknown about preserving data on optical discs.
My guess is that is probably will not matter for the average user. I could care less about whatever may be backed up on the hundreds of discs that once held data for my old Windows 3.1 box. I probably will not care about the backups from my current linux machine 10 years from now either.
Yet, there are going to be people out there making the same assertions/assumptions you are making here. They are going to back their data up and forget about it. Then, they are going to have to live through all the issues that plagued books, film, photographs, computer media, and on and on. Anyone remember all the trouble there was reading census tapes, space mission data tapes, etc.? Anyone notice that drawer of color photographs in your grandmother's house starting to fade?
But that was film, analog tape, or some other medium, this time it will be different, right? Well, if you believe that, you are quite a bit more optimistic than I.
Don't worry, I promise not to say, "I told you so," when all those files you snapped of your family using your digital camera and saved on your 30+ year media are lost ten years from now.
I think he was specifically addressing the perspective of ethical relativism, e.g., people that believe that what is right and wrong depends upon circumstances and/or social, cultural, political, and other perspectives as they exist in a particular time and place. When you say "right" and "wrong", there is an implied moral/ethical dimension. As a counter-example, tea preference is a bit unsatisfying because it lacks this dimension, so you may want to reconsider this objection.
It is not clear to me that Stallman is even against "relativism" per se. His comments about China and copyright protection, in conjunction with his evasiveness concerning the ability to apply basic tenets of the GPL in other areas, seem to me to show some ethical relativity as it relates to circumstances such as place, time, use, and so on. Specifically, he says, "The ethical issues about copying and modifying works depend on the kind of work and how people can use it."
I read this as basically saying that, when there is a moral dimension to a question and all the circumstances have been accounted for, there is one and only one "right" or "most moral" answer. Furthermore, you will never know if your answer will correspond to the "right" one. Despite this, the "right" answer is NOT whatever answers to life's moral questions you come up with when your not coding.
All and all, I think RMS is a fine role model, not only as a programmer but as a human being. It is unfortunate that with all the intelligent people that read and post to Slashdot, that there has to be a warning posted on his responses. Warning: Herein lies a post that might challenge you or get you thinking about things differently than you currently do. Does this really require a warning?
If it does, what warning is it really giving? The warning that perhaps we are so far gone that we cannot tolerate discussions that go outside a limit bounds of agreement or well-worn dichotomies? The warning that "freedom" has come to mean thinking the cage you live in is big and free enough for your needs? And should be good enough for the next person too?
Why is there such need to gloat about Microsft's mistakes? Does pointing them out make Linux or whatever operating system you use better?
In the end, Chaney did a good turn and set a good example. Enough said.
Yes, this is a double standard. Let's examine why.
First, the Melissa virus is possible due to the dominance of one specific piece of software on the average users desktop. The only open source equivalent to this kind of dominance -- that I know of -- is sendmail. It is not the same for a variety of reasons, but let's continue on for the sake of discussion.
Compare the closest open source equivalent "virus" -- again, that I know of -- that happened with sendmail to the Melissa-Macro Virus. You will notice two interesting things. First, the CERT advisory for Melissa states: "This macro virus is not known to exploit any new vulnerabilities." Second, note the options they give for correction: block the mail, utilize virus scanners, and encourage users to disable Word macros. The free software solution would be to fix the problem at the source -- pun intended. In a free software environment the option to: fix the problem, is available whereas in a closed source solution it is not. You have to wait for company X to fix the problem for you, and in the mean time, get by with blocking, anti-virii programs and the like. Since this problem is not new and any user that buys Microsoft products has to wait for them to deign to fix it, it would seem that there is a powerful argument for some culpability on Microsoft's part.
There are of course the issues that other people have mentioned here: no warranty, free software is not a "product" sold by a business (let us remember companies like Red Hat make money off the service not the CD), etc. However, I think this is the central point. They have different standards because they are not analagous. You are not comparing like things.
Or to put it another way: Sure, a "thief" is responsible for his own actions. However, if I entrust the security of my home to some company, it seems quite reasonable to say that if someone steals something because that company left my door open, the company is also at fault.
For free software, you use it with the understanding that you are not entrusting anything to anyone so the same standard does not apply.
Cheers.