At the UNHCR camp in Ghana, the last I heard, tuition for a year in grades 3-8 was about $10/term.
So my question is, given the choice between a term of schooling for one child and two Talking Books (or half a term and one Talking Book), if you had only ten dollars to spend on your children's education, which would you get and why?
No one's saying denying workers their rights under CA law is a good thing. But slavery is also a huge problem, and a much worse one on an individual level than not getting one's work break.
It would be like someone living in a normal apartment in Boston that had a problem with the hot water heater every four hours complaining that they were being forced to live in an outhouse. Or a tar pit. Only like there really were millions who had to live in outhouses and tar pits. The claim takes the focus away from the hot water heater.
Agreed--they should be compensated for their time, but they shouldn't be calling it slavery. Slavery is a massive problem. We have millions of people worldwide (including many in the US) who actually do live as slaves.
The difference between not being allowed to take your meal breaks and being told you'll need to be raped until you've earned your way out of an $80,000 debt is... the difference between a mosquito bite and being impaled by a triceratops. Twice. Each day.
Only it's harder, because after you've been a slave, people look at you differently, and you look at yourself differently. Sometimes your family won't have anything to do with you, and it's common to have major health problems or psychological problems because of it. And then there's the trick of trying to get back into society.
River of Innocents is a good, accessible primer on the subject. The Wikipedia Human Trafficking page also has some info.
By all means, go after the most egregious offenders--but that is a relatively small bunch. As I said, I am in favor of copyrights, because of course artists need incentives to create and investors need incentives to invest in those artistic creations that are expensive.
But copyrights should be used to protect your work against exploitation, and even as stick to use if people refuse a request that they stop doing something that you don't like with your work. (They're welcome to criticize, of course, and they have a legal right to.) But the request should be made first. Not as part of a $5,000 settlement fee complete some rather restrictive terms. (Doesn't the agreement limit your ability to speak out against copyright law? I vaguely remember that.)
Perhaps I should sprinkle iron filings into the toothpaste prior to applying it to the floppy. Magnets work well on iron filings, so I know they'll work well with a magnetic medium.
I suppose the iron-toothpaste mix could get stuck in the floppy drive, but I can just pull it with a big electromagnet, like the ones they use to lift shipping containers.
Then I will be able to read the floppy disks quite well. A happy ending!:)
Of course, 3.5" floppies are in cases, so I'll have to just squeeze the toothpaste into the case, and then use the disk drive to spread it out over the surface of the disk.
It might be worth it just for the tech support call.
Often Police Officers are reasonably doing what members of the public commonly do, out of a belief that someone is a criminal. If the belief is reasonably formed, I applaud them for it--the police shouldn't be prevented from, in the course of an investigation, pretending to be a regular Joe or Sally in order to see if someone is selling drugs, for example.
But you run into real problems, too--I've heard stories from people who work in environments where, because the police expect there to be corruption, the police send in undercover people all the time and repeatedly try to get non-criminals to engage in criminal activity. It's one thing to notice someone is dealing drugs or traveling with drugs--it's quite another to ask them to help you transport those drugs by weaseling them into it. "Oh, you're flying down to such-and-such a city for your sister's birthday? Could you drop this package of mine off with an old friend?" That kind of thing.
Some cops behave better than others, and of course they have a job to do. It's hard to find the line, sometimes, but it's important to remember that there is one.
With the RIAA, obviously it's different: this is a private group copying something they've sold to you, saying you're the one who's copied it, and then suing you for it.
As an Artist, of course I think we need copyrights, because I spend months or years of my life writing a book. But going after a pirate (or a ninja) who probably wouldn't have paid for the book in the first place isn't helpful to me: it generates bad will, it's a bigger drain on society than the copy is, and I'd rather have the book read by someone who didn't pay for it than have it be not read by someone who wouldn't have read it otherwise.
I'm not saying I'd never enforce copyright, nor that people should be violating it. But suing everyone who does is not the right answer.
Realistically, we want some middle ground between regulation and lack of regulation. Obviously we don't want the government to do something overly obstructive and bureaucratic, or something that makes it difficult to have a web presence, but we also don't want to have so much power in the hands of a few telecoms and providers that essentially they can do whatever they want, including stifling competition, charging twice for bandwidth, or taking billions of dollars in government subsidies to lay unneeded cable.
(To pick a few examples.)
Similarly, we want enough anonymity that people can report corruption anonymously, but not so much anonymity that it's impossible to track down people who abuse kids and post videotapes of that on the web. Web regulation is a complicated issue.
A Phoenix putting something into an oven... there go our tax dollars! Any competent phoenix would wait until its body burst into flame, then use the spare heat to analyze the sample.
I don't know about you, but I intend to write to my Congressperson.
He's saying pushing or pulling an asteroid is better than hitting it with a nuclear weapon, but the interesting thing is that he's claiming NASA issued its pro-nuclear statement last year in response to political pressure to put nuclear weapons in space.
Assuming these were targeted more specifically than "Congressional Computers," it is interesting to note that this could easily be criminal crackers as opposed to national crackers--Rep. Smith was a fairly substantial motivating force behind the US Government's Anti-Trafficking legislation.
Note that's anti-Human Trafficking, as opposed to anti-Drug Trafficking; slavery is one of the largest criminal enterprises in the world, and people with a financial interest in it suffer, somewhat, from the consequences of legislation Smith introduced.
That doesn't necessarily mean it is cracking by or on behalf of slave-traders, of course; they've been hurt, slightly, by some Congressional action and some consequent State Department action, but I'm not sure what the financial advantage of the crack would be, and criminals usually go for those.
Still, some of the people involved clearly have strong ties to criminal organizations with significant cracking experience, so it's worth noting the possible connection.
Lots of sci-fi/fantasy folk have tremendously enjoyed literature outside the genre, too--Shakespeare comes to mind, if you haven't finished his complete works. He's hysterical and a good diversion, though he's not necessarily as effortless as a lot of S/F.
The Last Unicorn's a wonderful book, if you haven't read it, btw. Beagle's first book--A Fine and Private Place--is also wonderful, and with many similar themes to TLU.
The Scarlet Letter is good if you read it sentence-by-sentence. (Pretend you're reading it out loud to someone, and it becomes good.)
Thoreau's Walden is definitely a perennial geek favorite.
Uncle Tom's Cabin is a quick but thick read, and played a huge role in American History.
River of Innocents is a book about human slavery today.
There are a lot of books out there--SF/F can be wonderful, but stepping outside the conventions of a familiar genre can be rewarding and insightful.
It is a company and not a person, but its board members, its stockholders, and its employees all share responsibility for its actions and decisions. (From both a moral and a financial point of view.)
Very few of those people--at this I'm guessing, though I think reasonably--are for the kind of blanket censorship that China indulges in. But they also have to deal with the reality of how to get penetration into the Chinese marketplace. Add to that the fact that since it's a large group of people that shares this responsibility, they're working with diffusion of responsibility.
So there isn't one person who says "I'm personally responsible for my company's bad acts," which is unfortunate. Sometimes such a person has to look at himself in the mirror, which can lead to change.
So while I recognize--and I think we all do--that Google's not in a position to strongarm the Chinese government, I also think that professional ethics should not be put aside too easily. We need companies to be--at least a little bit--about building a better future.
Maybe that's just part of the professional ethics you put aside, but it does provoke a question: where do we draw the line? It's a slippery-slope question, of course, but it's also quite real. On the flip-side of the censorship question but still very much on the ethics question, should Google censor criminal sites?
Phishing sites are one obvious example, but how about pyramid schemes? They're illegal in most of the world, and even caused the Albanian economy to collapse a few years back. Or human-slavery: should they censor mail-order-bride sites that are selling human slaves?
Google is a company, and its general purpose is to survive and make profit, as you say. But we don't want profit at any cost: the losses and abuses of human lives (and human minds) are often discounted when they are abstractions, but we should remember--even when we want to thicken our bank accounts--that they are very real.
Slashdot Mirror
At the UNHCR camp in Ghana, the last I heard, tuition for a year in grades 3-8 was about $10/term.
So my question is, given the choice between a term of schooling for one child and two Talking Books (or half a term and one Talking Book), if you had only ten dollars to spend on your children's education, which would you get and why?
No one's saying denying workers their rights under CA law is a good thing. But slavery is also a huge problem, and a much worse one on an individual level than not getting one's work break.
It would be like someone living in a normal apartment in Boston that had a problem with the hot water heater every four hours complaining that they were being forced to live in an outhouse. Or a tar pit. Only like there really were millions who had to live in outhouses and tar pits. The claim takes the focus away from the hot water heater.
And there really are millions of slaves.
Agreed--they should be compensated for their time, but they shouldn't be calling it slavery. Slavery is a massive problem. We have millions of people worldwide (including many in the US) who actually do live as slaves.
The difference between not being allowed to take your meal breaks and being told you'll need to be raped until you've earned your way out of an $80,000 debt is... the difference between a mosquito bite and being impaled by a triceratops. Twice. Each day.
Only it's harder, because after you've been a slave, people look at you differently, and you look at yourself differently. Sometimes your family won't have anything to do with you, and it's common to have major health problems or psychological problems because of it. And then there's the trick of trying to get back into society.
River of Innocents is a good, accessible primer on the subject. The Wikipedia Human Trafficking page also has some info.
By all means, go after the most egregious offenders--but that is a relatively small bunch. As I said, I am in favor of copyrights, because of course artists need incentives to create and investors need incentives to invest in those artistic creations that are expensive.
But copyrights should be used to protect your work against exploitation, and even as stick to use if people refuse a request that they stop doing something that you don't like with your work. (They're welcome to criticize, of course, and they have a legal right to.) But the request should be made first. Not as part of a $5,000 settlement fee complete some rather restrictive terms. (Doesn't the agreement limit your ability to speak out against copyright law? I vaguely remember that.)
Perhaps I should sprinkle iron filings into the toothpaste prior to applying it to the floppy. Magnets work well on iron filings, so I know they'll work well with a magnetic medium.
I suppose the iron-toothpaste mix could get stuck in the floppy drive, but I can just pull it with a big electromagnet, like the ones they use to lift shipping containers.
Then I will be able to read the floppy disks quite well. A happy ending! :)
I wonder if that works on 3.5" floppies...
Of course, 3.5" floppies are in cases, so I'll have to just squeeze the toothpaste into the case, and then use the disk drive to spread it out over the surface of the disk.
It might be worth it just for the tech support call.
Often Police Officers are reasonably doing what members of the public commonly do, out of a belief that someone is a criminal. If the belief is reasonably formed, I applaud them for it--the police shouldn't be prevented from, in the course of an investigation, pretending to be a regular Joe or Sally in order to see if someone is selling drugs, for example.
But you run into real problems, too--I've heard stories from people who work in environments where, because the police expect there to be corruption, the police send in undercover people all the time and repeatedly try to get non-criminals to engage in criminal activity. It's one thing to notice someone is dealing drugs or traveling with drugs--it's quite another to ask them to help you transport those drugs by weaseling them into it. "Oh, you're flying down to such-and-such a city for your sister's birthday? Could you drop this package of mine off with an old friend?" That kind of thing.
Some cops behave better than others, and of course they have a job to do. It's hard to find the line, sometimes, but it's important to remember that there is one.
With the RIAA, obviously it's different: this is a private group copying something they've sold to you, saying you're the one who's copied it, and then suing you for it.
As an Artist, of course I think we need copyrights, because I spend months or years of my life writing a book. But going after a pirate (or a ninja) who probably wouldn't have paid for the book in the first place isn't helpful to me: it generates bad will, it's a bigger drain on society than the copy is, and I'd rather have the book read by someone who didn't pay for it than have it be not read by someone who wouldn't have read it otherwise.
I'm not saying I'd never enforce copyright, nor that people should be violating it. But suing everyone who does is not the right answer.
> The implications for privacy and surveillance, are not insignificant.
Tarnation! I relocated a parenthetical and left a comma in!
Ah, well. Maybe I can captain a starship now.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four
The implications for privacy and surveillance, are not insignificant.
(Plus there's the implied assumption that citizens are doing something wrong until they can prove otherwise.)
Realistically, we want some middle ground between regulation and lack of regulation. Obviously we don't want the government to do something overly obstructive and bureaucratic, or something that makes it difficult to have a web presence, but we also don't want to have so much power in the hands of a few telecoms and providers that essentially they can do whatever they want, including stifling competition, charging twice for bandwidth, or taking billions of dollars in government subsidies to lay unneeded cable.
(To pick a few examples.)
Similarly, we want enough anonymity that people can report corruption anonymously, but not so much anonymity that it's impossible to track down people who abuse kids and post videotapes of that on the web. Web regulation is a complicated issue.
A Phoenix putting something into an oven... there go our tax dollars! Any competent phoenix would wait until its body burst into flame, then use the spare heat to analyze the sample.
I don't know about you, but I intend to write to my Congressperson.
---
Thousands are enslaved every day: http://www.riverofinnocents.com/
He's saying pushing or pulling an asteroid is better than hitting it with a nuclear weapon, but the interesting thing is that he's claiming NASA issued its pro-nuclear statement last year in response to political pressure to put nuclear weapons in space.
---
Thousands are enslaved every day. http://www.riverofinnocents.com/
Assuming these were targeted more specifically than "Congressional Computers," it is interesting to note that this could easily be criminal crackers as opposed to national crackers--Rep. Smith was a fairly substantial motivating force behind the US Government's Anti-Trafficking legislation.
Note that's anti-Human Trafficking, as opposed to anti-Drug Trafficking; slavery is one of the largest criminal enterprises in the world, and people with a financial interest in it suffer, somewhat, from the consequences of legislation Smith introduced.
That doesn't necessarily mean it is cracking by or on behalf of slave-traders, of course; they've been hurt, slightly, by some Congressional action and some consequent State Department action, but I'm not sure what the financial advantage of the crack would be, and criminals usually go for those.
Still, some of the people involved clearly have strong ties to criminal organizations with significant cracking experience, so it's worth noting the possible connection.
Lots of sci-fi/fantasy folk have tremendously enjoyed literature outside the genre, too--Shakespeare comes to mind, if you haven't finished his complete works. He's hysterical and a good diversion, though he's not necessarily as effortless as a lot of S/F.
The Last Unicorn's a wonderful book, if you haven't read it, btw. Beagle's first book--A Fine and Private Place--is also wonderful, and with many similar themes to TLU.
The Scarlet Letter is good if you read it sentence-by-sentence. (Pretend you're reading it out loud to someone, and it becomes good.)
Thoreau's Walden is definitely a perennial geek favorite.
Uncle Tom's Cabin is a quick but thick read, and played a huge role in American History.
River of Innocents is a book about human slavery today.
There are a lot of books out there--SF/F can be wonderful, but stepping outside the conventions of a familiar genre can be rewarding and insightful.
It is a company and not a person, but its board members, its stockholders, and its employees all share responsibility for its actions and decisions. (From both a moral and a financial point of view.)
Very few of those people--at this I'm guessing, though I think reasonably--are for the kind of blanket censorship that China indulges in. But they also have to deal with the reality of how to get penetration into the Chinese marketplace. Add to that the fact that since it's a large group of people that shares this responsibility, they're working with diffusion of responsibility.
So there isn't one person who says "I'm personally responsible for my company's bad acts," which is unfortunate. Sometimes such a person has to look at himself in the mirror, which can lead to change.
So while I recognize--and I think we all do--that Google's not in a position to strongarm the Chinese government, I also think that professional ethics should not be put aside too easily. We need companies to be--at least a little bit--about building a better future.
Maybe that's just part of the professional ethics you put aside, but it does provoke a question: where do we draw the line? It's a slippery-slope question, of course, but it's also quite real. On the flip-side of the censorship question but still very much on the ethics question, should Google censor criminal sites?
Phishing sites are one obvious example, but how about pyramid schemes? They're illegal in most of the world, and even caused the Albanian economy to collapse a few years back. Or human-slavery: should they censor mail-order-bride sites that are selling human slaves?
Google is a company, and its general purpose is to survive and make profit, as you say. But we don't want profit at any cost: the losses and abuses of human lives (and human minds) are often discounted when they are abstractions, but we should remember--even when we want to thicken our bank accounts--that they are very real.