Why don't you do a modicum of research and find out? The story has been presented far and wide by RMS himself, and is easy enough to find. What you insinuate is that the trouble fixing the printer was somehow RMSes fault, which history shows to be untrue. The printer manufacturer wouldn't acknowledge the problem, and refused to let RMS see the source code so he could "fix" a bug they wouldn't acknowledge. This irrespective of how often said bug bit their customers. RMS spotted a severe social/technical problem and wrote the GPL to solve it (which it does, very successfully). Unscrupulous people have sought out loopholes to subvert the GPL, hence GPL v2, and now, with the advent of MS's "trusted computing initiative" and tivoization, GPL v3 to protect those freedoms in the face of some very powerful entities manipulating very powerful copyright and patent laws with the intent of subverting, even destroying, those same freedoms.
The GPL v2 and v3 are, whatever else one may say, the most successful attempt so far at creating a "constitution" that protects users rights in perpetuity, within the current framework of law designed to do just the opposite. It may not be perfect, but it's a damn sight better than most options out there.
Nationalism is in many ways a religion, with the country playing the role of church. Sometimes the leader will be revered as a prophet, sometimes (as in the case of North Korea) something more akin to a god.
Almost every religion makes people stupid. Such stupidity can express itself in many forms (racism, sexism, ethnocentricity). Nationalism, as a particular class of cult doesn't seem to do this any more or less harm than the rest of the cults. Which is to say, it is toxic as hell, and profoundly destructive to a society and to humanity at large... but then, so are the desert cults infecting the planet with their memes generation after generation.
Or are you saying that Miss take-a-self-portrait-at-arms-length-on-her-cell-phone is a developer because she knows how to post a picture as her background?
That sounds very much like a Redmond definition of developer to me.
Yes, the global wavefunction would include many variations (maybe even variants where historical events played out differently because millions of quantum branches biased events a certain way instead of another way), but all of these variations are ruled by the same deterministic physics. And, importantly, it's not a matter of "whatever universe you can imagine is out there somewhere!"--the possibilities are strictly limited by deterministic evolution of the wave function and the initial conditions of the universe.
Yes, but how strictly limiting were the initial conditions of the universe at the time of the big bang? Does the wave function only include universes with our physical laws, or did the big bank propagate entire genres of parallel universes, some with laws quite different than ours? Even if all laws are identical across the set, how varied and variable were possible outcomes of the initial conditions? Given that we don't understand the inflationary periods of our observable universe's evolution, I'm inclined to suspect the variety of parallel worlds may be far greater than is perhaps politically correct to discuss in scientific circles.
Yes, and we're going to buy our colony back, the Queen doesn't like what you've done with it.
Tell her to take it up with King George (the current one, not the one we managed to get off our back two centuries ago. This one is far more difficult to get rid of). We the people had little enough to do with his first election (he lost numerically, as proven in the recount), and there is mounting evidence (blackboxvoting.org) that he may have stolen the second one as well. If true, then we never elected him, and the only thing we're guilty of is not rising up in revolt when he usurped the throne^H^H^H^H^H white house.
Either way, he certainly has managed to devalue the currency, so the Queen is picking up quite a bargain.
£24.00/month, even at today's rates, is still only $48.00/month, and with a little research you can probably do much better than that. That's a far cry from the $720 you're looking to charge. Oh right, the US has artificially killed the high-speed broadband market. All hail the FCC and the Bush administration...and America's entry into the technological backwater.
When I was working in Chicago, I was fingerprinted by each of the three exchanges where we had computer equipment, booths, and traders working in the pits. This was in order to get a clerk's badge, to facilitate quick access to the floors and interstitial spaces should equipment issues arise. It wasn't the firm that did the fingerprinting in my case (it was a privately held fund--no customers, in other words), but SEC requirements meant that my fingerprints would be on file, and all of my banking and private investment details disclosed to ensure I wasn't engaged in insider trading or what have you.
Many of the SEC requirements are big-brotherish and Orwellian (e.g. keeping logs of all electronic chats, keeping two archives of all incoming and outgoing emails going back years, etc.), but the blame needs to be placed where it belongs: on the SEC, and the crooks that have made such a hash of the markets at times that such draconian measures are thought to be unavoidable if the financial integrity and viability of the markets is to be protected.
I'm extraordinarily familiar with the Mormon penchant for arguing black is white (and dismissing facts and deriding sources they don't like). Yes, I cited both pro- and anti-mormon sources. Outside of cults, we call this "balance" (or at least an effort to be so).
The Mormon murders (yes, I've read it) places the events of the late 20th in context with a long history of terror and intimidation by the cult against people, including the Mountain Meadows massacre you've chosen to dismiss (an event that has been documented both by LDS records and non-Mormon records). It was concluded that the bombings were a private crime, but not before a whole lot of dirt on the Mormon church was dug up and aired as a result--one of the reasons the police feared the bombing was a return to Mormon militancy was exactly that--the Mormon veneer of civility and mainstream faith is quite new, and sometimes quite thin.
You imply you are not a Mormon (I am sceptical of that, as you are quick to adopt their "black-is-white" and "no sources but ours are valid" pseudo-logic, but that is neither here nor there) and present a "I'm fine with bashing x, but don't make up y" argument, where y is more damning, and quite well documented. Nice attempt to shift focus and debunk something with no facts (or citations) that even try to actually debunk the facts in question.
In any event, I am not going to waste my life, or my time, being drawn into yet another "show me the references" "here ya go" "those aren't real references, stop lying you gentile!" "ok, here are some more" "those don't count either!" until the rational person is exhausted and the irrational Mormon apologist considers it a rhetorical victory by default.
So go ahead and dismiss as many facts as you like, cling to whatever beliefs those facts seem to threaten as much as you like, and slander those that point them out as much as you like. The rest of the thinking world has come to expect little else from Mormonism, its adherents, and its apologists.
Cue final post to this thread, Mormon supporter getting the last word in by default...
So under your definition of religion, Zen Buddhism is not a religion?
I meant religion in general, not all religions (but certainly most). I should have made that clear. Zen Buddhism is one of the few religions that does not interfere with rational thought, but then again, if I recall correctly it is one of the few religions that does not require faith or belief in a creator. Which by many definitions would rule it out as a religion (zen Buddhism is arguably more of a philosophy). In any event, it should be clear from the context that we're discussing Scientology and Mormonism, and perhaps by association the other Abrahamic religions. Certainly not Buddhism.
Wrong. The difference between a cult and a religion is that you can leave a religion. The Church of Scientology disconnects its members from their families so they have nowhere to go when they leave, and brainwashes them under hypnosis to keep them from wanting to. The Church of Scientology is also the only "religion" to keep its core beliefs secret, to be run for profit,
All very true--though your definition of cult is interesting. I would define a cult as an organisation that requires its adherents to place it at the centre of their lives, bar nothing. Given that definition, I would argue that most (all?) religions aspire to be cults, and that cults are the most successful of religions. But then, I would also argue that religion is institutional and communicable mental illness (as they systematically undermine their adherents' ability to think rationally--a fundamental requirement and definition of sanity). Regarding your last point, however:
and to have its own paramilitary[1] and counter-intelligence[2] operations.
The Mormon Cult (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints) also has had (and still has, in various forms) its own paramilitary and counter-intelligence operations (c.f. the "Council of Fifty" and Church Security apparatus). The CIA and FBI have in the past recruited heavily from the LDS church, something that should send chills down everyone's spine given the power those organisations wield today.
The Mormon church has been known to tap the telephones of members and ex-members trying to get free of the "faith." People have died under suspicious circumstances as recently as the 1990s. So while I agree with your characterisation of Scientology as a cult, they are by no means the only cult with its own paramilitary and counter-intelligence operations. Having said all that, Scientology is, without a doubt, at least as dangerous as the Mormon church, quite possibly more so.
What does matter is that the software economy could not thrive solely on open source. If people had to produce code - small people who do back office work and what have you - and then rely on installation, support, and various other charges, they couldn't make enough to live.
That isn't the case at all. It isn't just "celebs" like Bruce earn well, or generate wealth, from free software--a surprisingly huge number of unknown people (such as myself) do very well from free software. Why? Because free software generates a tremendous amount of wealth and opportunity unrelated to revenue streams reliant on software sales.
The mistake you (and the post you defend) make is to assume a zero-sum scenario dependent on software sales to generate wealth, when in point of fact the production of useful items (be it software or not) is a positive-sum activity that creates value greater than the sum of its parts, the vast majority of which is not directly related to the actual retail sale of the item. In situations where there is no physical scarcity (software), retail sales is entirely decoupled from these secondary, tertiary, and subsequent levels of wealth created (obviously, in the case of physical scarcity the sale is required for the item to exist, even though it is usually a vanishingly small percentage of the resulting wealth generated).
A purely open source world wouldn't have a Bill Gates (big loss), but will (and does) have dozens, perhaps hundreds, of millionaire entrepreneurs offering support, turn-key package solutions, custom installation, maintenance, support, administration, and customisation. And that's just the primary impact, secondary impacts include wealth generated by trading firms, banks, shops, and other businesses who make use of free software and hire local talent to tailor solutions to their needs, or simply install and support third-party turn-key solutions (in addition to the wealth created by the savings in licensing fees, and the savings in businesses not finding themselves beholden to orphaned software, forced to upgrade against their own best interests by vendors pulling support, etc.).
The only ones who lose in a free software/open source economy vs. a proprietary, closed-source economy are the Bill Gates of the world. Even the cadre of programmers who think they'll lose out because the business approach of Apple, Microsoft, or Oracle is all they know are unlikely to lose out at all, provided they are willing to learn new products and adjust their assumptions about how software generates wealth, and how demand for their talents and skills fit into such an economy.
The author in question cites an ethereal 'anti-copyright crowd' and proposes that this 'crowd' are those who would license their software under the GNU/GPL.
He also ignores the obvious fallacy of his argument:
Even if there is a crowd opposed to copyright (there probably is, somewhere on the planet), and even if it would release its software under the GPL (a subset of this hypothetical group), it does not follow those people cannot logically support the GLP consistent with their ideals. Arguably, the GPL is a clever means by which copyright law is used to turn itself on its head, ensuring information is shared rather than hoarded. Were there no copyright, the GPL would become superfluous (no one could lock down code/information via the law), and software libre would become the default. One might oppose copyright, but work within its legal framework from necessity by employing the GPL or similar free license.
I am not saying this is what most free software supporters want or believe (quite the opposite I imagine), just pointing out the obvious stupidity and logical fallacy of the argument "if you support the GPL, you must support copyright, else you're a hypocrite."
Alternatives to state sponsored monopolies such as copyright include author-right, the idea that the author keeps credit for their creation without imposing a monopoly on its distribution and use (i.e. plagiarism made explicitly illegal) and the notion of default royalties (e.g. the Author is entitled to some percent of any revenues generated by the use of their work, but is not allowed to restrict who may make use of that work to generate said profits. In other words, as the author of "Autonomy" I would not be allowed to stop Disney, Time-Warner, or Joe-Shmoe's backyard-shack publishing from using my work, but each of them would be required to pay me some percentage of their gross revenues, perhaps collected as a federal tax and disbursed to me by the government, or perhaps collected by myself or a third party I hire to make such collections (tax man collects info and shares it publicly via a central data clearing house, but my responsibility to collect funds).
There are any number of scenarios where copyright might be deprecated without harming authors' and creators' moral and financial rights, but where monopoly entitlements are eliminated. Few, if any, of these scenarios require that one renounce support of free software, or the GPL's implementation of free software which happens to make use of the existing copyright framework we are all currently required, by law, to live with.
This rant reads more like an ad homonem attack on free software advocates and opponents to existing copyright law, by (1) lumping the two very different groups together and (2) making sweeping logically falacious statements implying the two points of view are mutually incompatibel when they demonstrably are not (as I have just done, above.) This suggests an author with a political or economic ax to grind (perhaps as a shill for someone else), rather than someone interested in pondering the issues in an intellectually honest discussion.
You would find yourself at home, I would think, among at least some forward thinking, humanistic Liberal groups
I think you're right, although as you point out, some of these groups ascribe to politically-correct dogmas that are themselves as detestable as some of the (US political party) libertarian and (US political party) republican dogmas.
Of course you also have to be ok with non-libertarian things like nationalized health care, etc., specifically, the whole humanistic approach
Not only am I ok with nationalised healthcare, I live in a country where it is practised and can tell you it is no less efficient than the private healthcare system I was used to in the US. This includes waiting times, which were actually worse in Chicago under my PPO as they are in Europe.
So I am very much on the same wavelength as you on all of these issues. Indeed, you sum it up best:
people are more important than corporations/profits and progress can be very humanistic (and often is).
Hopefully we WILL have to wait 62 million years to test this hypothesis. The alternative is to have a cataclysmic event (of unknown type) that decreases biodiversity happen SOONER, which is bad news for most life on this planet (probably including humans, if we're still around).
Massive die-offs tend to take larger, more complex life (like people), leaving simpler, more robust life (such as lichens, bacteria, and cockroaches) to inherit the Earth.
Am I the only one that sees a statement like "hopefully we don't have to wait 62M years" for some cataclysmic event (implying "hopefully we'll get to see this") and is forced to wonder at the common sense of someone expressing such a desire?
I hate ads as much as the next guy, but seriously, I do not get what is with all the bitching and moaning about *GASP* having to watch ads before you view some video content.
You obviously do not hate ads as much as the next guy. If you did, you would be bitching about them just like the next guy. The fact that you spend the rest of your post defending forced viewing of ads proves that you do not find them nearly as offensive as many of us, making your first sentence flat out inaccurate (to put it kindly).
There are business models that do not rely on forced advertising. Google has been quite successful in making their ads inoccuous enough that few, if any, bother to filter them. Indeed, google has been intelligent enough to make their advertising useful at times--but they do so by making them text only, relevant to what the person is searching for, and keeping them out of the way of the main product. Forced ad viewing does the opposite of all of these things, and frankly, as far as I'm concerned, any "forced-ad viewing" site that goes out of business makes the world a better place.
Not so secretly, I long for a libertarian to lower taxes, and leave me and everybody else the f*ck alone to live their lives as they see fit. Sadly, the very sort of people who are attracted to and ultimately end up in positions of power are those who won't leave you alone, and insist on bending you to their will.
While I agree with much of what the Libertarians say with regard to less government restrictions on individual freedoms and lower taxes, they also advocate less government regulation of industry (in fact, they advocate virtual no restriction on corporate behaviour). This poses a problem and is their achialles heel: unregulated capitalsim tends to evolve into corporate fascism, as the 19th century proved very dramatically (c.f. child labour, private police murders of early union organisers, etc.).
Having a weak democratically elected government, and undemocratic corporatism running rampent is a sure recipe for the very authoritarianism you and I both decry. The only difference is that the dictators will come from captains of industry and private armies, rather than politicians and publicly funded armies.
What we need is a hybrid of Libertarianism and social liberalism, where indivudual freedom is held sacrosanct, but corporations are treated as governance bodies and required to submit to the same constitutional limitations on their treatment of human beings just as political governance bodies (i.e. the "government"). Alas, I see no one advocating such a thing--which leaves a gaping political hole in the landscape where a non-dystopian future might lie.
Most people today wouldn't realize it, but OpenServer and UnixWare were excellent products to use even into the late 1990s. Before about 1999, Linux just wasn't suitable to use for most serious server applications. Sure, you could run a small web or FTP server on a PC running Linux, but that's where it maxed out.
That's just not true. Linux was perfectly suitable for serious server applications. I know of several enterprises that used Linux servers for mission critical applications as early as 1996, including a firm I worked for in the financial industry. At that time, Linux on high-end PCs was a better solution than Solaris 2.6 on Sparc hardware for a number of trading applications. Of course, both Sun and Linux have moved on from there, with Sun taking the lead on some out-of-the-box enterprise solutions, and Linux taking the lead in other ways (custom solutions, cost, openness, etc.).
As for SCO having been one of the better Unicies around, it had a terrible reputation as early as 1989, and was never thought highly of by myself or any of my colleagues, in constrast to HPUX, Sun, BSD, the various free BSDs, and Linux. Obviously some industries embraced SCO, but others (the financial industry in particular, where latency, uptime, performance, and security are paramount) soundly rejected it from day one. So to characterise it as "often the best UNIX systems to use on PC hardware" post 1994 is IMHO pretty erroneous. Pre-1992 there was no Linux or FreeBSD on PC hardware, so with MINIX being SCO's main competition, your argument becomes stronger, but by the late 1990s it certainly wasn't the case.
In the context of copyright law, distribution implies distribution, nothing else. Certainly not transfer of ownership. Consider broadcast television, DVDs, etc. If a copy is made and presented to someone else in whatever form, it is distribution, whether its a one-off license to view (pay-per-view), an over-the-air broadcast, or a free DVD stuffed into a magazine. The former transfer no ownership, the latter ownership of media (but not content). In all cases it is distribution.
So yes, lending a laptop would technically constitute distribution, and I suppose if your friend demanded source code from you, you'd better be able to give them the URL where they can go and get it. But that's a rather silly, extreme scenario that isn't likely to ever result in a copyright dispute.
Certainly making copies of software and leasing them out to people all over the place constitute distribution, and thus fall under the relevant clause of the GPL for GPLed software. The only way someone could get around the GPL would be to run GPLed code on a central server and have non-gpled clients connect to it, thereby limiting distribution to non-GPLed code (As I recall, GPL v3 closes this "loophole"). But if you distribute GPLed code, then you must adhere to the terms of the GPL, and any "transfer of ownership", or not, has nothing whatsoever to do with whether or not the code has been copied and distributed.
I'm sure the format has a boatload of patents associated with it that would preclude it from being used in any open source projects.
In the US, sure. But the US is already more or less a technological backwater, and the rest of the world can move right along and include support for this format in any product anyone likes, be it GPLed or not.
That having been said, I doubt anyone would want to bother unless Microsoft leverages its desktop dominance to force it down our throats (as others mentioned, via "vista certified" logos coercing camera manufacturers to adopt the technology, etc.) and makes it commonplace. If that happens, it will only be free software in the United States that is limited, not the rest of the world. Much like PGP, individuals will just download from overseas sites and "route around" the issue.
On a philosophical/strategic note, this format needs to be resisted. The US may be falling ever further behind the technological/social/political curve, but it is still a sizeable market, and one worth fighting for. The point is, though, that if this particular battle is lost (and Microsoft does succeed in inflicting this format on the world), the damage is to one backward country foolish enough to adopt software patents, and really, only to the industry of that country (as the end user can route around the problem and download the software from overseas).
Fifteen words. To go with their fifteen second attention span, and their fifteen minutes of fame for being the dumbest of the dumb on the next generation of reality television shows. It could also refer to the resulting IQ of perfectly intelligent people passing through that particular gem of an educational system, after 12 (maybe 15?) years of concentrated dumbing down.
Your analogy is flawed because cars are mostly NOT protected by copyright (only the manual(s) for it). Cars are protected by patents/trademarks.
His analogy is perfectly correct. The only reason cars are not copyrighted is that we don't currently have the technology to copy them (except, of course, to build an identical production line, for which patents and trademarks are sufficient protection).
Once we have inexpensive replication technology (whether it is nano+recipe or something a little more esoteric) and the ability to copy physical objects, copyright will be used to artificially maintain the scarcity our current economic models rely on. Whether that copyright is applied to the object (people do copyright buildings, making commercial photography of them without paying royalties for a license illegal. C.f the Eiffel tower in Paris as an example) or on the recipe will be immaterial, the end result will be artificial scarcity and deliberate as well as unnecessary impoverishment of the masses to support outdated business models and, perhaps, even outdated economic systems. Much like the entertainment industry is doing today.
The thing is (before you dismiss your brainstorming), your idea may be a(n arguably important) part of a multifaceted solution. Its unlikely there will be just one, grand panacea that fixes global warming worldwide. More likely a comprehensive solution will be a combination of things, not least of which is emitting less carbon into the atmosphere. Reforestation, planting the tops of every flat-roofed building with foliage to consume a little carbon here and there, switching from fossil fuels to solar (not necessarily photo-voltaics, but perhaps large chimney turbines driven by air heated in large greenhouses in desert regions), etc.
Any solution will almost certainly involve dozens, perhaps hundreds, of smaller solutions that make a modest impact here and there. Which unfortunately is not a solution Branson's $25M is likely to find (though it is likely to generate ideas that lead to components of such a solution, and therefore remains a valuable contribution in its own right).
"He fled to Canada after being found guilty of "interfering" with a religion."
I certainly hope the law is more precise (and just) than that phrase implies, although given who was arrested, and how long they've hounded him, I rather doubt it.
So we can't "interfere" with religion. What, pray tell, constitutes "interference?" Speaking out against the irrationality of religious belief? (Better arrest most of the brightest 5% of the country then)
Speaking out against specific religious practices? If so, which ones? Catholicism's stance on gays and women? Mormonism's stance on women and polygamy? Islam's stance on women and jihad. Sounds like women are screwed regardless.
Or do they imprison you for picketing a church these days? If so, better go arrest all those civil rights activists who, in the 1960s in the US picketed their churches (protestant and Catholic alike) for not allowing blacks to worship in the same building as whites.
Religions have absolutely no compunction when it comes to interfering in our lives, whether it is sending missionaries to our doors to harass us, organizing boycotts to impose their choice on what products, music, television, and films are available to us (often in censored form), passing laws that define sizeable portions of us as second class citizens (gays being denied rights the rest of us enjoy, women losing out when the Equal Rights Amendment was squashed, largely as a result of Mormon and right-wing Christian mobilization), imposing their beliefs on our school systems ("intelligent design", anyone?) or even threatening our lives when we dare disagree with their dogma (as numerous cults, including $cientology, are reputed to have done).
Seems to me that allowing religions to interfere with the rest of us the way they are, and then disallowing the rest of us from interfering with their often toxic agendas, is a sure-fire recipe for a theocratic hell-state.
Slashdot Mirror
Why don't you do a modicum of research and find out? The story has been presented far and wide by RMS himself, and is easy enough to find. What you insinuate is that the trouble fixing the printer was somehow RMSes fault, which history shows to be untrue. The printer manufacturer wouldn't acknowledge the problem, and refused to let RMS see the source code so he could "fix" a bug they wouldn't acknowledge. This irrespective of how often said bug bit their customers. RMS spotted a severe social/technical problem and wrote the GPL to solve it (which it does, very successfully). Unscrupulous people have sought out loopholes to subvert the GPL, hence GPL v2, and now, with the advent of MS's "trusted computing initiative" and tivoization, GPL v3 to protect those freedoms in the face of some very powerful entities manipulating very powerful copyright and patent laws with the intent of subverting, even destroying, those same freedoms.
The GPL v2 and v3 are, whatever else one may say, the most successful attempt so far at creating a "constitution" that protects users rights in perpetuity, within the current framework of law designed to do just the opposite. It may not be perfect, but it's a damn sight better than most options out there.
Nationalism is in many ways a religion, with the country playing the role of church. Sometimes the leader will be revered as a prophet, sometimes (as in the case of North Korea) something more akin to a god.
... but then, so are the desert cults infecting the planet with their memes generation after generation.
Almost every religion makes people stupid. Such stupidity can express itself in many forms (racism, sexism, ethnocentricity). Nationalism, as a particular class of cult doesn't seem to do this any more or less harm than the rest of the cults. Which is to say, it is toxic as hell, and profoundly destructive to a society and to humanity at large
Or are you saying that Miss take-a-self-portrait-at-arms-length-on-her-cell-phone is a developer because she knows how to post a picture as her background?
That sounds very much like a Redmond definition of developer to me.
Yes, the global wavefunction would include many variations (maybe even variants where historical events played out differently because millions of quantum branches biased events a certain way instead of another way), but all of these variations are ruled by the same deterministic physics. And, importantly, it's not a matter of "whatever universe you can imagine is out there somewhere!"--the possibilities are strictly limited by deterministic evolution of the wave function and the initial conditions of the universe.
Yes, but how strictly limiting were the initial conditions of the universe at the time of the big bang? Does the wave function only include universes with our physical laws, or did the big bank propagate entire genres of parallel universes, some with laws quite different than ours? Even if all laws are identical across the set, how varied and variable were possible outcomes of the initial conditions? Given that we don't understand the inflationary periods of our observable universe's evolution, I'm inclined to suspect the variety of parallel worlds may be far greater than is perhaps politically correct to discuss in scientific circles.
Yes, and we're going to buy our colony back, the Queen doesn't like what you've done with it.
Tell her to take it up with King George (the current one, not the one we managed to get off our back two centuries ago. This one is far more difficult to get rid of). We the people had little enough to do with his first election (he lost numerically, as proven in the recount), and there is mounting evidence (blackboxvoting.org) that he may have stolen the second one as well. If true, then we never elected him, and the only thing we're guilty of is not rising up in revolt when he usurped the throne^H^H^H^H^H white house.
Either way, he certainly has managed to devalue the currency, so the Queen is picking up quite a bargain.
Doing a quick look around at the local market...
p eid=35&kt=323&gclid=COyx-ev4gY4CFQ0eEgoddkfJOw
http://www.broadbandchoices.co.uk/products.asp?ty
£24.00/month, even at today's rates, is still only $48.00/month, and with a little research you can probably do much better than that. That's a far cry from the $720 you're looking to charge. Oh right, the US has artificially killed the high-speed broadband market. All hail the FCC and the Bush administration...and America's entry into the technological backwater.
You are correct. It is an SEC requirement.
When I was working in Chicago, I was fingerprinted by each of the three exchanges where we had computer equipment, booths, and traders working in the pits. This was in order to get a clerk's badge, to facilitate quick access to the floors and interstitial spaces should equipment issues arise. It wasn't the firm that did the fingerprinting in my case (it was a privately held fund--no customers, in other words), but SEC requirements meant that my fingerprints would be on file, and all of my banking and private investment details disclosed to ensure I wasn't engaged in insider trading or what have you.
Many of the SEC requirements are big-brotherish and Orwellian (e.g. keeping logs of all electronic chats, keeping two archives of all incoming and outgoing emails going back years, etc.), but the blame needs to be placed where it belongs: on the SEC, and the crooks that have made such a hash of the markets at times that such draconian measures are thought to be unavoidable if the financial integrity and viability of the markets is to be protected.
I'm extraordinarily familiar with the Mormon penchant for arguing black is white (and dismissing facts and deriding sources they don't like). Yes, I cited both pro- and anti-mormon sources. Outside of cults, we call this "balance" (or at least an effort to be so).
The Mormon murders (yes, I've read it) places the events of the late 20th in context with a long history of terror and intimidation by the cult against people, including the Mountain Meadows massacre you've chosen to dismiss (an event that has been documented both by LDS records and non-Mormon records). It was concluded that the bombings were a private crime, but not before a whole lot of dirt on the Mormon church was dug up and aired as a result--one of the reasons the police feared the bombing was a return to Mormon militancy was exactly that--the Mormon veneer of civility and mainstream faith is quite new, and sometimes quite thin.
You imply you are not a Mormon (I am sceptical of that, as you are quick to adopt their "black-is-white" and "no sources but ours are valid" pseudo-logic, but that is neither here nor there) and present a "I'm fine with bashing x, but don't make up y" argument, where y is more damning, and quite well documented. Nice attempt to shift focus and debunk something with no facts (or citations) that even try to actually debunk the facts in question.
In any event, I am not going to waste my life, or my time, being drawn into yet another "show me the references" "here ya go" "those aren't real references, stop lying you gentile!" "ok, here are some more" "those don't count either!" until the rational person is exhausted and the irrational Mormon apologist considers it a rhetorical victory by default.
So go ahead and dismiss as many facts as you like, cling to whatever beliefs those facts seem to threaten as much as you like, and slander those that point them out as much as you like. The rest of the thinking world has come to expect little else from Mormonism, its adherents, and its apologists.
Cue final post to this thread, Mormon supporter getting the last word in by default...
Aside from having relatives that are in the cult and seeing much first-hand, Google is your friend:
the Mountain Meadows massacre
The Mormon Murders
CIA and FBI recruitment of Mormons (Time Magazine)
The Mormon Army
The list goes on, but I'll leave further research as an exercise for the reader.
So under your definition of religion, Zen Buddhism is not a religion?
I meant religion in general, not all religions (but certainly most). I should have made that clear. Zen Buddhism is one of the few religions that does not interfere with rational thought, but then again, if I recall correctly it is one of the few religions that does not require faith or belief in a creator. Which by many definitions would rule it out as a religion (zen Buddhism is arguably more of a philosophy). In any event, it should be clear from the context that we're discussing Scientology and Mormonism, and perhaps by association the other Abrahamic religions. Certainly not Buddhism.
Wrong. The difference between a cult and a religion is that you can leave a religion. The Church of Scientology disconnects its members from their families so they have nowhere to go when they leave, and brainwashes them under hypnosis to keep them from wanting to. The Church of Scientology is also the only "religion" to keep its core beliefs secret, to be run for profit,
All very true--though your definition of cult is interesting. I would define a cult as an organisation that requires its adherents to place it at the centre of their lives, bar nothing. Given that definition, I would argue that most (all?) religions aspire to be cults, and that cults are the most successful of religions. But then, I would also argue that religion is institutional and communicable mental illness (as they systematically undermine their adherents' ability to think rationally--a fundamental requirement and definition of sanity). Regarding your last point, however:
and to have its own paramilitary[1] and counter-intelligence[2] operations.
The Mormon Cult (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints) also has had (and still has, in various forms) its own paramilitary and counter-intelligence operations (c.f. the "Council of Fifty" and Church Security apparatus). The CIA and FBI have in the past recruited heavily from the LDS church, something that should send chills down everyone's spine given the power those organisations wield today.
The Mormon church has been known to tap the telephones of members and ex-members trying to get free of the "faith." People have died under suspicious circumstances as recently as the 1990s. So while I agree with your characterisation of Scientology as a cult, they are by no means the only cult with its own paramilitary and counter-intelligence operations. Having said all that, Scientology is, without a doubt, at least as dangerous as the Mormon church, quite possibly more so.
What does matter is that the software economy could not thrive solely on open source. If people had to produce code - small people who do back office work and what have you - and then rely on installation, support, and various other charges, they couldn't make enough to live.
That isn't the case at all. It isn't just "celebs" like Bruce earn well, or generate wealth, from free software--a surprisingly huge number of unknown people (such as myself) do very well from free software. Why? Because free software generates a tremendous amount of wealth and opportunity unrelated to revenue streams reliant on software sales.
The mistake you (and the post you defend) make is to assume a zero-sum scenario dependent on software sales to generate wealth, when in point of fact the production of useful items (be it software or not) is a positive-sum activity that creates value greater than the sum of its parts, the vast majority of which is not directly related to the actual retail sale of the item. In situations where there is no physical scarcity (software), retail sales is entirely decoupled from these secondary, tertiary, and subsequent levels of wealth created (obviously, in the case of physical scarcity the sale is required for the item to exist, even though it is usually a vanishingly small percentage of the resulting wealth generated).
A purely open source world wouldn't have a Bill Gates (big loss), but will (and does) have dozens, perhaps hundreds, of millionaire entrepreneurs offering support, turn-key package solutions, custom installation, maintenance, support, administration, and customisation. And that's just the primary impact, secondary impacts include wealth generated by trading firms, banks, shops, and other businesses who make use of free software and hire local talent to tailor solutions to their needs, or simply install and support third-party turn-key solutions (in addition to the wealth created by the savings in licensing fees, and the savings in businesses not finding themselves beholden to orphaned software, forced to upgrade against their own best interests by vendors pulling support, etc.).
The only ones who lose in a free software/open source economy vs. a proprietary, closed-source economy are the Bill Gates of the world. Even the cadre of programmers who think they'll lose out because the business approach of Apple, Microsoft, or Oracle is all they know are unlikely to lose out at all, provided they are willing to learn new products and adjust their assumptions about how software generates wealth, and how demand for their talents and skills fit into such an economy.
The author in question cites an ethereal 'anti-copyright crowd' and proposes that this 'crowd' are those who would license their software under the GNU/GPL.
He also ignores the obvious fallacy of his argument:
Even if there is a crowd opposed to copyright (there probably is, somewhere on the planet), and even if it would release its software under the GPL (a subset of this hypothetical group), it does not follow those people cannot logically support the GLP consistent with their ideals. Arguably, the GPL is a clever means by which copyright law is used to turn itself on its head, ensuring information is shared rather than hoarded. Were there no copyright, the GPL would become superfluous (no one could lock down code/information via the law), and software libre would become the default. One might oppose copyright, but work within its legal framework from necessity by employing the GPL or similar free license.
I am not saying this is what most free software supporters want or believe (quite the opposite I imagine), just pointing out the obvious stupidity and logical fallacy of the argument "if you support the GPL, you must support copyright, else you're a hypocrite."
Alternatives to state sponsored monopolies such as copyright include author-right, the idea that the author keeps credit for their creation without imposing a monopoly on its distribution and use (i.e. plagiarism made explicitly illegal) and the notion of default royalties (e.g. the Author is entitled to some percent of any revenues generated by the use of their work, but is not allowed to restrict who may make use of that work to generate said profits. In other words, as the author of "Autonomy" I would not be allowed to stop Disney, Time-Warner, or Joe-Shmoe's backyard-shack publishing from using my work, but each of them would be required to pay me some percentage of their gross revenues, perhaps collected as a federal tax and disbursed to me by the government, or perhaps collected by myself or a third party I hire to make such collections (tax man collects info and shares it publicly via a central data clearing house, but my responsibility to collect funds).
There are any number of scenarios where copyright might be deprecated without harming authors' and creators' moral and financial rights, but where monopoly entitlements are eliminated. Few, if any, of these scenarios require that one renounce support of free software, or the GPL's implementation of free software which happens to make use of the existing copyright framework we are all currently required, by law, to live with.
This rant reads more like an ad homonem attack on free software advocates and opponents to existing copyright law, by (1) lumping the two very different groups together and (2) making sweeping logically falacious statements implying the two points of view are mutually incompatibel when they demonstrably are not (as I have just done, above.) This suggests an author with a political or economic ax to grind (perhaps as a shill for someone else), rather than someone interested in pondering the issues in an intellectually honest discussion.
You would find yourself at home, I would think, among at least some forward thinking, humanistic Liberal groups
I think you're right, although as you point out, some of these groups ascribe to politically-correct dogmas that are themselves as detestable as some of the (US political party) libertarian and (US political party) republican dogmas.
Of course you also have to be ok with non-libertarian things like nationalized health care, etc., specifically, the whole humanistic approach
Not only am I ok with nationalised healthcare, I live in a country where it is practised and can tell you it is no less efficient than the private healthcare system I was used to in the US. This includes waiting times, which were actually worse in Chicago under my PPO as they are in Europe.
So I am very much on the same wavelength as you on all of these issues. Indeed, you sum it up best:
people are more important than corporations/profits and progress can be very humanistic (and often is).
Hopefully we WILL have to wait 62 million years to test this hypothesis. The alternative is to have a cataclysmic event (of unknown type) that decreases biodiversity happen SOONER, which is bad news for most life on this planet (probably including humans, if we're still around).
Massive die-offs tend to take larger, more complex life (like people), leaving simpler, more robust life (such as lichens, bacteria, and cockroaches) to inherit the Earth.
Am I the only one that sees a statement like "hopefully we don't have to wait 62M years" for some cataclysmic event (implying "hopefully we'll get to see this") and is forced to wonder at the common sense of someone expressing such a desire?
I hate ads as much as the next guy, but seriously, I do not get what is with all the bitching and moaning about *GASP* having to watch ads before you view some video content.
You obviously do not hate ads as much as the next guy. If you did, you would be bitching about them just like the next guy. The fact that you spend the rest of your post defending forced viewing of ads proves that you do not find them nearly as offensive as many of us, making your first sentence flat out inaccurate (to put it kindly).
There are business models that do not rely on forced advertising. Google has been quite successful in making their ads inoccuous enough that few, if any, bother to filter them. Indeed, google has been intelligent enough to make their advertising useful at times--but they do so by making them text only, relevant to what the person is searching for, and keeping them out of the way of the main product. Forced ad viewing does the opposite of all of these things, and frankly, as far as I'm concerned, any "forced-ad viewing" site that goes out of business makes the world a better place.
Not so secretly, I long for a libertarian to lower taxes, and leave me and everybody else the f*ck alone to live their lives as they see fit. Sadly, the very sort of people who are attracted to and ultimately end up in positions of power are those who won't leave you alone, and insist on bending you to their will.
While I agree with much of what the Libertarians say with regard to less government restrictions on individual freedoms and lower taxes, they also advocate less government regulation of industry (in fact, they advocate virtual no restriction on corporate behaviour). This poses a problem and is their achialles heel: unregulated capitalsim tends to evolve into corporate fascism, as the 19th century proved very dramatically (c.f. child labour, private police murders of early union organisers, etc.).
Having a weak democratically elected government, and undemocratic corporatism running rampent is a sure recipe for the very authoritarianism you and I both decry. The only difference is that the dictators will come from captains of industry and private armies, rather than politicians and publicly funded armies.
What we need is a hybrid of Libertarianism and social liberalism, where indivudual freedom is held sacrosanct, but corporations are treated as governance bodies and required to submit to the same constitutional limitations on their treatment of human beings just as political governance bodies (i.e. the "government"). Alas, I see no one advocating such a thing--which leaves a gaping political hole in the landscape where a non-dystopian future might lie.
Most people today wouldn't realize it, but OpenServer and UnixWare were excellent products to use even into the late 1990s. Before about 1999, Linux just wasn't suitable to use for most serious server applications. Sure, you could run a small web or FTP server on a PC running Linux, but that's where it maxed out.
That's just not true. Linux was perfectly suitable for serious server applications. I know of several enterprises that used Linux servers for mission critical applications as early as 1996, including a firm I worked for in the financial industry. At that time, Linux on high-end PCs was a better solution than Solaris 2.6 on Sparc hardware for a number of trading applications. Of course, both Sun and Linux have moved on from there, with Sun taking the lead on some out-of-the-box enterprise solutions, and Linux taking the lead in other ways (custom solutions, cost, openness, etc.).
As for SCO having been one of the better Unicies around, it had a terrible reputation as early as 1989, and was never thought highly of by myself or any of my colleagues, in constrast to HPUX, Sun, BSD, the various free BSDs, and Linux. Obviously some industries embraced SCO, but others (the financial industry in particular, where latency, uptime, performance, and security are paramount) soundly rejected it from day one. So to characterise it as "often the best UNIX systems to use on PC hardware" post 1994 is IMHO pretty erroneous. Pre-1992 there was no Linux or FreeBSD on PC hardware, so with MINIX being SCO's main competition, your argument becomes stronger, but by the late 1990s it certainly wasn't the case.
In the context of copyright law, distribution implies distribution, nothing else. Certainly not transfer of ownership. Consider broadcast television, DVDs, etc. If a copy is made and presented to someone else in whatever form, it is distribution, whether its a one-off license to view (pay-per-view), an over-the-air broadcast, or a free DVD stuffed into a magazine. The former transfer no ownership, the latter ownership of media (but not content). In all cases it is distribution.
So yes, lending a laptop would technically constitute distribution, and I suppose if your friend demanded source code from you, you'd better be able to give them the URL where they can go and get it. But that's a rather silly, extreme scenario that isn't likely to ever result in a copyright dispute.
Certainly making copies of software and leasing them out to people all over the place constitute distribution, and thus fall under the relevant clause of the GPL for GPLed software. The only way someone could get around the GPL would be to run GPLed code on a central server and have non-gpled clients connect to it, thereby limiting distribution to non-GPLed code (As I recall, GPL v3 closes this "loophole"). But if you distribute GPLed code, then you must adhere to the terms of the GPL, and any "transfer of ownership", or not, has nothing whatsoever to do with whether or not the code has been copied and distributed.
I'm sure the format has a boatload of patents associated with it that would preclude it from being used in any open source projects.
In the US, sure. But the US is already more or less a technological backwater, and the rest of the world can move right along and include support for this format in any product anyone likes, be it GPLed or not.
That having been said, I doubt anyone would want to bother unless Microsoft leverages its desktop dominance to force it down our throats (as others mentioned, via "vista certified" logos coercing camera manufacturers to adopt the technology, etc.) and makes it commonplace. If that happens, it will only be free software in the United States that is limited, not the rest of the world. Much like PGP, individuals will just download from overseas sites and "route around" the issue.
On a philosophical/strategic note, this format needs to be resisted. The US may be falling ever further behind the technological/social/political curve, but it is still a sizeable market, and one worth fighting for. The point is, though, that if this particular battle is lost (and Microsoft does succeed in inflicting this format on the world), the damage is to one backward country foolish enough to adopt software patents, and really, only to the industry of that country (as the end user can route around the problem and download the software from overseas).
Um. 15 what?
Fifteen words. To go with their fifteen second attention span, and their fifteen minutes of fame for being the dumbest of the dumb on the next generation of reality television shows. It could also refer to the resulting IQ of perfectly intelligent people passing through that particular gem of an educational system, after 12 (maybe 15?) years of concentrated dumbing down.
Your analogy is flawed because cars are mostly NOT protected by copyright (only the manual(s) for it). Cars are protected by patents/trademarks.
His analogy is perfectly correct. The only reason cars are not copyrighted is that we don't currently have the technology to copy them (except, of course, to build an identical production line, for which patents and trademarks are sufficient protection).
Once we have inexpensive replication technology (whether it is nano+recipe or something a little more esoteric) and the ability to copy physical objects, copyright will be used to artificially maintain the scarcity our current economic models rely on. Whether that copyright is applied to the object (people do copyright buildings, making commercial photography of them without paying royalties for a license illegal. C.f the Eiffel tower in Paris as an example) or on the recipe will be immaterial, the end result will be artificial scarcity and deliberate as well as unnecessary impoverishment of the masses to support outdated business models and, perhaps, even outdated economic systems. Much like the entertainment industry is doing today.
Feh. Metric, shmetric, miles, shmiles. Nothing beats metric-60.
The thing is (before you dismiss your brainstorming), your idea may be a(n arguably important) part of a multifaceted solution. Its unlikely there will be just one, grand panacea that fixes global warming worldwide. More likely a comprehensive solution will be a combination of things, not least of which is emitting less carbon into the atmosphere. Reforestation, planting the tops of every flat-roofed building with foliage to consume a little carbon here and there, switching from fossil fuels to solar (not necessarily photo-voltaics, but perhaps large chimney turbines driven by air heated in large greenhouses in desert regions), etc.
Any solution will almost certainly involve dozens, perhaps hundreds, of smaller solutions that make a modest impact here and there. Which unfortunately is not a solution Branson's $25M is likely to find (though it is likely to generate ideas that lead to components of such a solution, and therefore remains a valuable contribution in its own right).
"He fled to Canada after being found guilty of "interfering" with a religion."
I certainly hope the law is more precise (and just) than that phrase implies, although given who was arrested, and how long they've hounded him, I rather doubt it.
So we can't "interfere" with religion. What, pray tell, constitutes "interference?" Speaking out against the irrationality of religious belief? (Better arrest most of the brightest 5% of the country then)
Speaking out against specific religious practices? If so, which ones? Catholicism's stance on gays and women? Mormonism's stance on women and polygamy? Islam's stance on women and jihad. Sounds like women are screwed regardless.
Or do they imprison you for picketing a church these days? If so, better go arrest all those civil rights activists who, in the 1960s in the US picketed their churches (protestant and Catholic alike) for not allowing blacks to worship in the same building as whites.
Religions have absolutely no compunction when it comes to interfering in our lives, whether it is sending missionaries to our doors to harass us, organizing boycotts to impose their choice on what products, music, television, and films are available to us (often in censored form), passing laws that define sizeable portions of us as second class citizens (gays being denied rights the rest of us enjoy, women losing out when the Equal Rights Amendment was squashed, largely as a result of Mormon and right-wing Christian mobilization), imposing their beliefs on our school systems ("intelligent design", anyone?) or even threatening our lives when we dare disagree with their dogma (as numerous cults, including $cientology, are reputed to have done).
Seems to me that allowing religions to interfere with the rest of us the way they are, and then disallowing the rest of us from interfering with their often toxic agendas, is a sure-fire recipe for a theocratic hell-state.