> Sometimes "good" is the enemy of "best" and rich & powerful people using their money to buy drugs at ridiculous prices allows them to avoid pressuring our world governments to level the playing field a little for the poorest of the poorest.
The laws and systems that allow the rich & powerful (people or companies or governments) to be as rich & powerful as they are are *our* doing - we vote them into government, we grant them inpunity with corporate law, we give them the explicite power to have monopoly position by IP laws, we serve in the armies to protect their power agains our very self would we feel suddenly fed up with them. Don't blame them, they are just very greedy for power and money and instead of treating their megalomania and sociopathy, we allow them to rule and we serve their desires voluntarily. Maybe because sitting in front of TV one occasionally sees pictures of the poorest of the poorest it seems that sitting in front of the TV is actually a quite good alternative, so our overlords are pretty decent towards us, afterall...
> David Hicks was an Australian man who broke no Afghan or Australian laws, but he's still sitting in Guantanamo five years later.
Even better, the A-G in an ABC interview said that he had to be kept there for that very reason: if we bought him home, we could not punish him, since according to our (and Afghanistan's) law, he did nothing wrong. Goebbels would be green from envy...
There are many holes in Europe too. A handful of them due to terrorists. You possibly heard of ETA, IRA, the Bader Meinhof group, the Red Army Fraction and a handful of others, or possibly heard Lockerby been mentioned. Europe dealt with its terrorist problem in her own way. First of all, if the perceived or real threat from the terrorist causes, well, public terror, then they won. If it can serve as an excuse to a power-freak elite, driven mostly by greed, to install mechanisms for unchecked control of the population, then the terrorists won again. So Europe dealt with her terrorist problem trying to avoid instituting terror herself.
The mere fact that you openly declared "war on terror", formed the "coalition of the willing", invaded a sovereign country which had nothing to do with New York (but has oil, of course), the Patriot Act, Guantanamo, your declaring that international law does not apply to your freedom fighters against the axis of evil, so all that what you've done while delivering us from the evil was itself the proof that you lost that war too. The war on (or possibly more aptly of) terror did not decrease the terrorist threat, it actually increased it because there are a lot more people who despise America than before. Incidentally it also increased the wealth a few people and their control over your society back at home, but of course that should not give us strange ideas about their motivations. Nevertheless, you eroded and still eroding day after day the very democracy you so fervently try to force on to other nations, all in the name of fighting terrorism - the terrorist couldn't be happier.
As per fascism, it is not so far fetched. Here is a short fragment of what Wikipedia says about it:
"Many different characteristics are attributed to fascism by different scholars, but the following elements are usually seen as its integral parts: nationalism, authoritarianism, militarism, corporatism, anti-liberalism, and anti-communism."
Nationalism? Check. Authoritarianism? More and more. Militarism? Check. Corporatism? Double check. Anti-liberalism? Not yet, although there are attempts. Anti-communism? Triple check. You may not be there yet, but you are definitely heading to the right direction.
As per the solution for the European problem when those real nasty people wanted to take over the world, well, you were not part of the whole thing until Japan attacked you - before that you were happily doing business with those real nasty people. Now there were other really nasty people east of these nasty people and it seemed that the eastern nasty people do not mind sacrificing 20 million people to win over the western nasty people and thus turning most of Europe to a very disturbing colour indeed. So it seemed like a good investment to send a few hundred thousand people to prevent that, while in the same time gaining a lot of influence in Europe (most of which remained the desired colour).
No, they do not forget. They remeber all too well. Europe knows a lot more about wars than you do - since the Civil War, when you were fighting against yourself, you heven't had war on your soil. Europe knows what living in war means. Europeans don't have to watch epic Hollywood films to learn about it, it is enough if they ask their grandparents or often just their parents. People who lived through war tend to remember.
Try to look at it this way: This is the only piece evidence that proves, beyond doubt, that Joe killed 20 kids. The evidence was obtained by illegal means (say, illegal search).
USA: Evidence is not admissible, Joe is a free man, gets his job back at the local kindergarten. Police officer is screamed at by the DA. Some people look at Joe with suspicion when kids start to disappear again.
Finnland: Joe is a bloody mass murderer who should, and will, rot in jail for what he committed. Police officer broke the law, goes to trial for breaking and entering. Parents of the 20 children petition the president to pardon him.
If someone committed a crime, (s)he should get punished for it. The way of unearthing the truth does not change its truth value. The way might be illegal and a crime in itself, but that is a separate case which should be dealt with on its own merit. When deciding if someone is guilty you want the "truth, the full truth and nothing but the truth". No matter how the evidence was obtained, if it isn't tainted then it is part of the "full truth" the verdict should be based on. If you throw evidence which you know is real out on some technicality, you violate your own principle about the full truth.
If you say that it is to keep the government in check, the Finnish way is actually better. Look:
USA: You obtained the evidence illegally. Bad Government! Now you will watch the bad guy walk! Hah!
Finnland: You obtained the evidence illegally! Bad Government! You will go to jail together with the bad guy!
Well, I do not get any tax deductions on my mortgage. In fact, in Australia, if you buy an investment property then it is a business therefore the interest you pay on the loan as well as the depreciation of the building are tax deductible. If you buy a house to live in it then no tax deductions for you. None at all.
By the way, as affordability of owning your home goes down, so does the affordability of renting. As more and more people are forced to rent, rental prices go up due to higher demand.
Furthermore, if after N years finally you own your own home, then shelter is going to cost you nothing, which is going to be a great help when you'll have to rely on pension and your savings to maintain your existence. If you rent, you pay the rent as long as you live.
> To be more precise, the rich get richer, and the poor get richer, just not as fast. It's that disparity that people focus on.
Not necessarily. In Australia to own your house was much less of a financial burden ~20 years ago than it is today. The actual dollar figures are not that important, what's important is your disposable income relative to the cost of obtainable assets. This includes a lot of things, not just the absolute amount of money you receive. The current Aussie government proudly tells you how good life became because people earn more due to tax cuts and because the economy has been booming since they took control, but they are not that vocal about the fact the mortgage foreclosures have surged to levels higher than the levels during the recession in the early nineties, even though the interest rates were >16% then and are around 7% today (called "record low" by the treasurer).
You still live in the leftie dream that the government is for the people. That idea is way outdated. The government is here to provide a lucrative business environment. The current Aussie government rebuts any environmental or social issue by explaining how it would hurt this or that industry. Kyoto? Would hurt our coal industry! Protecting ancient aboriginal rock art? Would hurt the gas industry! Not selling uranium to countries that didn't sign the NPT? Would hurt the uranium industry! The list goes on.
By the way, if you can create a law which makes most people criminals, but you do not necessarily strictly enforce that law, then you have a tool to control the population. If Joe is too vocal against the actions of the government, we can always lock him up for ripping his CDs or taping some TV show. It's basically the same idea as the black car arriving at your door at dawn with silent men in black leather coats, only you don't need to waste money on leather coats and petrol.
> What is a "submarine patent troll?" The 1995 Amendments to the patent laws pretty much ended the endless > continuation practice that Lemelson, the original "submarine patent guy" used to his advantage.
Apparently for example Rambus managed to pull it through... You don't need endless continuation in the high-tech business. You can get a patent for how many, maybe 20 years? The whole PC business is around that old! A patent on floppy storage wouldn't be worth much today but it was a big deal 10 years ago. If you happen to know that there is some development on foobar then you create a BS patent and wait. If foobar hits the market in the next few years, you wait maybe a year more until it is well established, with multiple, preferably large sources and then emerge from the shadows and sue. If foobar doesn't quite become a hit, well, you just write it off, it was a lost investment. If you can generate enough BS patents, you can get by this business model (as some "intellectual property portfolio" companies do).
> BTW, patents are public record -- they are all publicly available on the USPTO website. > Should a patent holder have to go out and notify any potential infringers before they begin developing a product?
On the same token, do you expect every balding man to check the USPTO website before combing in the morning to see if their way of combing their hair over the bald spot violates a patent or not? (Yes, there is/was a US patent on the way combing your hair over a bald spot to hide it, although I think it expired a year or two ago).
> I do think he's over the top (GNU/Linux? C'mon....)
Well, there was GNU software way before Linux and Linux (i.e. a unix-ish kernel) was developed using GNU software and every distro comes with the GNU shell, dev. tools and so on, not to mention the GNU C library, pretty much sucked in first thing by every program you run.
He wanted recognition for GNU not necessarily because he envied Linus' fame but because the popularity of Linux made it a household name but people never made the connection to the Free Software Foundation. RMS believes, and I think rightly so, that the activities of the FSF and the availability of GNU code was what made Linux possible in the first place and he wants people to know that. He believes that if people see that what the FSF stands for (i.e. the ideology of free software, not the code per se) can give them a system like a typical Ubuntu distribution they'll see the light, understand the philosophy and will join him in his crusade against corporate control of thought processes and for our retaining the right to think, create and as a matter of fact, read.
RMS might not be very presentable to a meeting of suits but he is damned bright and thinks way more ahead than most of us. He was often accused of scaremongering and being a loony but if you look at the current patent litigation frenzy, the SW/business model patents, the more and more obtrusive DRM, the HW "protected" machines, the DMCA, the **AA's activities (and all the European equivalents the these) he was actually underestimating things, not over.
He has an agenda and insisting on GNU/Linux is to further that agenda, yes. However, if you consider the agenda, it might be worth of typing 4 characters more.
> Close, but not quite analogous. A lossless bitmap file needs 24 bits per pixel to store color > information. Actually printing on paper would theoretically allow you to map 24 bits against > a single colored dot, providing a form of compression.
Assuming that you have a printer that actually uses 16M colour shades for each pixel. Which they don't, at least the commodity printers (laser or inkjet) do not. You can instruct an inkjet printer to deposit ink at a location or not. Most inkjets use 4 inks but the black is used only when otherwise you would deposit the other three simultaneously. Thus, you really have only 8 colours to paint a single dot to. When the printer (driver) renders a 24-bit image it uses dithering or error diffusion to cheat - it trades in spatial resolution for colour. The printer's resolution is much finer than the feature size of your image so it can use multiple dots to average the actual colour you want.
So yes, the printer represents multiple bits per pixel, but its 3 bits per pixel rather than 24. Some use more than 4 inks, but they are still nowhere near to 24 bits per pixel (more like 5).
> I don't go around converting people to atheism but if they bring up the subject I'm going > to make sure they know that they believe in a fairy tale.
Actually, if you accept Popper's definition of scientific questions, you can not tell them that they believe in a fairytale. You can not envision an experiment which would falsify their premise of the existence of God, neither can they come up with one to falsify your statement of God's non-existence.
That question is scientifically undecidable, thus can not even be the subject of scientific debate. It is pure belief on both sides. If you think about it, you can not disprove a statement like "the world was created just a picosecond ago, with space, time and all particles suddenly popping up from nothingness in their present (quantum) state and all of our memories have been created so that we think that we (and the Universe) have been around for ages". Your argument against such a statement is that why on Earth (or Heaven, rather) would a god do such a thing, trying to fool us? The believers would argue that you can't comprehend the reasons behind God's actions so you shall not ask that question; the agnostics would point out that since it is undecidable, Occam's razor tells them to assume that there's no God until positive evidence pops up and the atheists just discard the whole thing as complete rubbish. However, all of them do it based on their personal beliefs, not solid logic or scientific arguments.
When creationists come around with easily falsifiable pseudo-science, by all means whack them on the head. When people come around and do nasty things "in the name of God", ditto. But you can not attack them for their believing in a god, for you have no way of telling that they're wrong.
> These people are selling your product for you. In other words, you're suing your own salesmen! > I can't think of a more stupid strategy for any business.
Well, this particular salesman wanted to make a little profit. Wouldn't a druglord order the wasting of a pusher who's making a bit on the side? Doesn't seem to hurt their business and they have the same business model: selling shit to the junkies, total control of the product from manufacturing to the customer, extortion prices and very heavy-handed treatment of customers or distributors who don't want to toe the line or pay the price.
I don't think that the grandparent meant the so-called communist regimes, rather, the communism in its theoretical form, at least I'd assume that from the context. Now that thing is not a brutal dictatorship at all. However, it has a problem - it doesn't work (as the grandparent pointed it out). The theory's fundamental assumption, that everybody gives to society as much as they can and only take as much as they need, is false as long as we're talking about human society. That's where the brutal dictatorship comes into the picture in practice: the thought of the labour camp can significantly boost your conscience with regards to the needs of society and your comerades (some of whom are more equal than the others). Kind of like in theory thou shalt not kill, but to keep the less strong in the faith in check, just in case we build a few gallows...
> In fact the copyright balancing is the interests of the content producers versus the > interests of the content users (of a number of types - including the content PURCHASERS > who want to format-shift their property in order to player-shift or space-shift it, whom > he carefully ignores).
Actually, the whole copyright thing has been set up to advance the arts in the interest of the PUBLIC. The two players in the whole business are the artists on the one side and the public on the other. The publishers are simply a tool to disseminate the artist's work to the public. If they can make money out of it, then good, if not, tough. However, the copyright as such has never been intended to guarantee profit for a publisher. Unfortunately, that is the direction that most legistlations with regards to the so-called "intellectual property" take - guarantee profitability and market control for large corporate bodies, at the expense of the public (and the artists, for that matter). Advancement of arts or sciences and the benefits for society have not been playing any role for a long, long time - it's all about buying laws that allow certain business entities to make more money for less work.
The RIAA et al are not into the music business to sponsor art or to satisfy your needs, they are there to make money. If they can make money by legally restricting you more and more, they will buy all the laws they can to do so. They have quite a large purse so they can buy a lot of laws. The rest is just PR rubbish.
> Science and religion are both belief systems. Science bases all beliefs on knowledge and has > rigorous ways of determining fact from fiction. If science cannot answer a particular question > it doesn't attempt to guess. If it does guess, the guess is based on available evidence and > is called a theory. Religion on the other hand bases beliefs on faith and (typically ancient) > teachings.
The major difference between the two lays not just in the methodology. Science, at least if you accept the Popperian approach, does never tell you that what it states is true. It only says that so far there was no evidence otherwise. Religion tells you that its statements are true. Also, science requires that any of its statements should be disprovable, i.e. you should be able to set up a theoretical scenario where the statement is proven false. Religion refuses even the *questioning* of its statements let alone demanding them to be falsifiable.
Yes, science is belief: Newton's laws were believed to be true because even though there were experiments done to prove them wrong, all those attempts failed. For a while. Then, as experiments got better the results started to disagree with the theory and thus Newton was proven wrong. Currently we believe in the theory of relativity. We know that Newton's laws are just very good approximations of the more general theory under special circumstances - everyday life being a special circumstance. When in more extreme cases Einsten's theory is going to be proven wrong, we will move along and get an even more general theory, of which Einstein's theory will be a special case. So in science you believe in something because although it is possible to prove it wrong, noone managed to do so yet. As new evidence comes in, science evolves, theories get thrown away or get stronger (for no evidence against them was found). Science is dynamic and implicitely qualifies every of its statements with a "by our best knowledge today...."
Religious belief if very different. First of all, its statements can't be disproven. You can not set up a though experiment that, with a certain result, would prove that Deity of Your Choice doesn't exist. Especially in case of omnipotent deities any experimental result can be explained with "Because this was Deity's will". Thus, experiments are meaningless. Religion is *not* science because it can not be examined using scientific methods. Religious belief is based on entirely the individual's will in believing in whatever Faith (s)he has. Believing in any of the popular gods is no different from believing in Great A'Tuin, for example, except that I don't think Pratchet wants us all to worship Great A'Tuin, unlike the proponents of the mainstream religions. Religion is also static. I don't think they have changed much in the Sacred Book of the Religion of Your Choice in the past few hundred years. You are told the absolute truth, which is true because the priest says so and you believe in that because that is the truth. All people who believe in something else adore a False God - if they don't believe in what you believe, they must be mistaken since everybody knows that your belief is the truth.
> That's not true. Some people like to point out clear evidence that some religious beliefs are false.
You can't, not for an omnipotent deity. Due to being omnipotent, the deity could arrange things the way they are, if for nothing else, just to show to the infidels that its omnipotence even includes of disproving its very teachings. You can only prove a religious belief to be false if you approach it from a scientific standpoint, which you can't do, for religion is *not* a scientific theory - it is a l'art pour l'art belief in something. Science can't and shouldn't question the existence of a deity for it can not examine it with scientific methods. As long as a divine intervention is not needed to explain things, Occam's razor cuts the gods out of the scientific theories. However, what people believe
> If, to return to the WW2 example, no one had opposed Nazism would you call that "peace"?
Well, if the nazis didn't attack other nations and start mass exterminate jews, communists, gipsies, homosexuals, retards and so on, then yes, I would call it peace. You may agree or disagree with any ideology, as long as it is just a blurb that you have to echo back to please the Supreme Leader, it is peace. Does not mean that it is not opression or totalitarianism but it is peace.
> Is it "peace" when the state can kill anyone who is deemed inferior? Is it "peace" when there is > no freedom of religion, of though, of the press. Is this your idea of "peace"?
Well, yes. In the Eastern Block there were (and, for example in China still are) severe limitations on the press, religion, even thought. The state does effectively have the power to kill anyone whom it wants (whether it is formally legalised or not) in practically any country. I don't consider the Chinese to be involved in any war, I consider them living in peace, even though they are subject of ideological oppression (and so are we, actually).
> The problem with pacifism is this: it only takes one person to destroy peace. If you have 20 people > in a room and one of them starts beating people up - where is the peace?
Yes, you are right. It is indeed the case - anyone can start a war.
> In short: yes. Maybe you think all killing is the same. I do not - and I don't think you really do > either. If a man walks into a bank and starts shooting people, one by one, do you honestly believe > that the cop who takes him down is doing morally the same thing? Is that seriously your opinion? > I want you to answer this exact question directly.
No, I do not think that the cop and the robber are on the same moral ground. However, it is because both you and I share the idea that killing random people in a bank for financial gain is a bad thing. If the cop takes someone out who is urinating on the picture of Chairman Mao, on the other hand, both you and I would scream totalitarian regime, police state, oppression and whatnot. What if the policeman and maybe a lot of his countrymen do believe that desecrating the picture is just as bad as murder? In the early years of the Soviet Revolution most people honestly believed in the whole thing and would have lynched anyone pissing on Lenin's picture. Probably you would not have minded if someone took out Stalin or Hitler for they were murderous bastards. However, Stalin defeated Hitler, so surely he must be a good guy? On the other hand, Hitler attacked the oppressive red terror state of Stalin, so he must have been a good guy too?
> Now you want to say that all violence (or at least, all war) 0is the result of economic discrepency. > How naive can you be? Not only is this not always the case, it almostt never is. History shows that > non-democratic nations are more prone to war. That means that the war is started, for all intents and > purposes, by an authoritarian ruler. E.g. somone who's already rich. When, in the history of the > world, has a nation gotten together and decided by consensus "we're poor, so let's invade our > neighbors". This is absurd.
Hm. Yes, I am that naive. I do believe that wars are waged mostly for economic reasons. I guess you would categorise the US as a democratic nation. Since WW2 I do not know a single nation that attacked the US, yet the US is seemingly continuously waging wars (never on her own soil, of course). On the other hand, how many wars did the totalitarian regimes of the Eastern Block fight? How about say Cuba (apart from the Bay of Pigs)? Pinochet? Pol Pot? Franco? He, a military dictator, remained neutral during WW2. Wars are good for several reasons. One, if you win them, you have direct economic results. Two, if you have internal problems a good handy war can steer public curiosity away from the issues you don't want to air too much. Third, you can pass legistlatio
So, do you say that some dude is doing killing, and *that* killing is bad, so I hop in and do some killing on my own, because *my* killing is good because I kill the guy doing the bad killing?
Pacifism is not about not fighting back - when there is a fight, any fight, there is no peace. Pacifism is about having peace. What you do when there is no peace is a different question. The issue is that when there's peace you try to keep it. One way of doing it is spending billions on developing technology so that you can kill more people than anyone else and hope that you can scare them enough. Unfortunately it doesn't work with fanatics who are not afraid to die or people who have nothing left to lose and learned not to fear death. Alternatively, one could imagine the theoretical scenario where you spend the money to mitigate the economic discrepancies so that there is no reason for war in the first place from either side. The problem with that latter approach is that human life is dirt cheap and saving it usually costs you money rather than earning it, while starting/joining/supporting wars is a quite lucrative business, especially is you happen to be in the position of using country A's taxpayers' money to develop weapons that you sell to country B (which of course pays for them from taxpayers' money) to kill the citizens of country C in the (name of|war on) while the *profit* on the sale goes to your very personal pocket. If you can also work out a nice weapons sale to C in the same time (possibly through intermediary countries D, E and F, so that your ideological integrity remains rock-solid) the gain could be enormous. War is about money and currently money trumps human life on a large part or the world.
That is what makes pacifism idealistic, not WW2, IMHO.
> Surprisingly, Australia and New Zealand have already allowed this patetnt, though!
The Aussie bit is not so surprising, considering that under the FTA Australia is obliged to "harmonise" her IP system with that of the US - i.e. copy as much of it verbatim as possible.
As a non-American, I have always thought that the American Way, or AmWay for short, was about making loads of profit by selling overpriced washing powder to housewifes using the same housewifes as cheap labour? Then clapping on a big meeting to cheer for those who sold the most washing powder and then clap and cheer for those who bought the most washing powder and then singing the AmWay song?:-P
Um, let's see, I'm very sick at home, must go to hospital, I can't drive, call ambulance, $300. I have a toothache, let's see the dentist (if I can get an appointment), $70 (if it's simple). I feel constantly sick, do some lab tests, here's my Medicare card: No, thanks, do you have Mastercard? My back is aching, let's go to physio, cheque, savings or credit, sir? My knee is killing me, let's see, I can have elective for free, in 2 years, but if I can cough up the money, I can go private now... Have cataract and need an IOL? Go to the bank first!
Our public health system is not good at all. My daughter was born in a public hospital. They did not have ultrasound (literally, they only had 1 machine but that was broken and had not been fixed during that ~5months we've been around), they measured everything with a tapemeasure. Regular pregnancy checkup, which is compulsory: you went there at the appointment time and stood around (not enough chairs) for maybe 4-5 hours.
I think you should do some digging about the publich health benefits in some European countries, of the more decadent pinko social-democratic kind.
I know that whatever is here is Labors's doing (a large part of any public good was the result of the Whitlam govt's short reign) and that Libs would like to abolish all that begins with "public", but that still doesn't mean that our public health, public education, public transport and infrastructure is so good. It isn't, and believing that it's the best of the best of the best is self-delusion. I don't say that there aren't countries with much worse but there are ones with a lot better too.
> This all of course pails in comparison to what the USFTA is doing to Australian healthcare. > You Americans bag Canadians public health system but Australia's is one of the best in the world.
You are not serious, are you? The Australian public health care is anything but good. Plus, under our great visionary Tony Abbot, even what little was good in it is getting destroyed slowly but surely. The fact that the US health system is possibly even worse (don't know, never lived there) doesn't make ours any good.
Our politicians like to state that we have the best healthcare, the best education and in general the best of everything in the world - it's fairly easy to say and unless you socialise with migrants who came from countries with much better health, education and whatnot, you can't check it.
I remember when we were told that Sydney's water supply was of world-leading quality, then lo and behold, we had those nasty little buggers in the water so that you couldn't dring tap water without boiling it for more than a week... We have world-class electricity supply, as far as I hear, with power outages every now and then. We have the best education except that you can finish highschool without being able to read fluently. I know highschool kids who can't multiply in year 9 and have no clue about decimal fractions.I have kids in highschool: for English they don't read but watch DVDs like the Lord of the Rings and Harrison Ford action for history and of course the Gladiator which is indeed a must to the understanding of the Roman Empire. From French they watched the Rugrats in Paris for that authentic Gallic feel. The list goes on and on and on. Best of the world, yeah.
The sad thing is that while I understand that any oppressive government is glad to keep the population dumb and thus easily steerable, the general health of the population is actually in their interest. Although, the savings on pensions might be an issue...
> When you're violating the copyright of citizens from other countries, it has moved out from being "purely internal" to "international".
Well, do they violate it? By *your* laws maybe. By theirs, they don't. The USA is just one country of many and just because it happens to have a massively corporatist and anti-consumer law with regards to intellectual works (not as if the word "intellectual" would be relevant to most Hollywood films) doesn't mean that all other countries have it or should have it. If citizens of a foreign country, in their country, do something that the USA doesn't like, well, that's just tough. I guess you would oppose if Saudi Arabia demanded the public beheading of US citizens who violate some Saudi laws? Even if they commited it overseas (but not in Saudi Arabia)?
> "You're allowing wholesale violation of our citizens' internationally recognized copyrights" is hardly the worst reason I've ever heard for objecting to membership in trade organizations, too.
Well, maybe the problem is that "internationally recognised copyright" is not exactly the the same as the "Sonny Bono Act", at least not on that side of the US border where that insignificant 95% of the world's population happens to live.
So, how does it exactly "promote the progress of science and useful arts" that after Walter Disney has been dead for most part of a century, the Walt Disney Corporation is being paid if someone puts Mickey Mouse on a cup and actually the named corporation has a right to ban anyone the right to create copies of Mickey Mouse, i.e. they could ban your kids to draw it and show it to you?
I don't think that progression of the art of an artist can be promoted much further when, to put it bluntly, the artist has turned into a lump of rotting meat six feet under.
If you want a system that pays the *artist*, I'm with you. A system that pays corporations and individuals who had absolutely nothing to do with the artistic creation of the work is, however, unfair at best. The publisher did not create the art, it merely published it. It provided a service to the artist, to disseminate his/her work. Why should the public pay the publisher for what the artist created, long after the artist is dead? Why should the public accept that if the publisher decides that the work of the artist is not financially feasible for them, then it can no longer be obtained by the public? Isn't it strange that the artist himself/herself, *the creator of the work* can not copy his/her own work without the permission of the publisher?
The current copyright system has absolutely nothing to do with the progression of arts (or science, for that matter). It has to do with one and only one thing: making money.
Um, Dr. Tannenbaum has been crunching out a) books that you can use to succeed and accomplish so much more than he did, and b) people (his students) of whom some will be so "lame" as he is - only advancing knowledge and creating a new generetion of their breed - and some who will be one of those who accomplish.
L'art pour l'art education might be useless (although it is still better, IMHO, than l'art pur l'art being a thick dumb) but being a research scientist and most of all being a (good) teacher and (good) educator beats being successful.
As you pointed out, Linus has applied his education very well to achieve his goals, and he did, and quite a lot of clever and successful people did too. Now, that well used education of theirs was provided by the brethen of Dr. Tannenbaum. If the prof, in his entire lifetime, educated and inspired just two of the likes of Linus, then I believe he accomplished more than any one of them. If he educated and inspired just one like himself, he managed to assure that the future likes of Linus will have the chance the obtain the education they can use so well to accomplish.
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> Sometimes "good" is the enemy of "best" and rich & powerful people using their money to buy drugs at ridiculous prices allows them to avoid pressuring our world governments to level the playing field a little for the poorest of the poorest.
The laws and systems that allow the rich & powerful (people or companies or governments) to be as rich & powerful as they are are *our* doing - we vote them into government, we grant them inpunity with corporate law, we give them the explicite power to have monopoly position by IP laws, we serve in the armies to protect their power agains our very self would we feel suddenly fed up with them. Don't blame them, they are just very greedy for power and money and instead of treating their megalomania and sociopathy, we allow them to rule and we serve their desires voluntarily. Maybe because sitting in front of TV one occasionally sees pictures of the poorest of the poorest it seems that sitting in front of the TV is actually a quite good alternative, so our overlords are pretty decent towards us, afterall...
> David Hicks was an Australian man who broke no Afghan or Australian laws, but he's still sitting in Guantanamo five years later.
Even better, the A-G in an ABC interview said that he had to be kept there for that very reason: if we bought him home, we could not punish him, since according to our (and Afghanistan's) law, he did nothing wrong. Goebbels would be green from envy...
There are many holes in Europe too. A handful of them due to terrorists. You possibly heard of ETA, IRA, the Bader Meinhof group, the Red Army Fraction and a handful of others, or possibly heard Lockerby been mentioned. Europe dealt with its terrorist problem in her own way. First of all, if the perceived or real threat from the terrorist causes, well, public terror, then they won. If it can serve as an excuse to a power-freak elite, driven mostly by greed, to install mechanisms for unchecked control of the population, then the terrorists won again. So Europe dealt with her terrorist problem trying to avoid instituting terror herself.
The mere fact that you openly declared "war on terror", formed the "coalition of the willing", invaded a sovereign country which had nothing to do with New York (but has oil, of course), the Patriot Act, Guantanamo, your declaring that international law does not apply to your freedom fighters against the axis of evil, so all that what you've done while delivering us from the evil was itself the proof that you lost that war too.
The war on (or possibly more aptly of) terror did not decrease the terrorist threat, it actually increased it because there are a lot more people who despise America than before. Incidentally it also increased the wealth a few people and their control over your society back at home, but of course that should not give us strange ideas about their motivations.
Nevertheless, you eroded and still eroding day after day the very democracy you so fervently try to force on to other nations, all in the name of fighting terrorism - the terrorist couldn't be happier.
As per fascism, it is not so far fetched. Here is a short fragment of what Wikipedia says about it:
"Many different characteristics are attributed to fascism by different scholars, but the following elements are usually seen as its integral parts: nationalism, authoritarianism, militarism, corporatism, anti-liberalism, and anti-communism."
Nationalism? Check. Authoritarianism? More and more. Militarism? Check. Corporatism? Double check. Anti-liberalism? Not yet, although there are attempts. Anti-communism? Triple check. You may not be there yet, but you are definitely heading to the right direction.
As per the solution for the European problem when those real nasty people wanted to take over the world, well, you were not part of the whole thing until Japan attacked you - before that you were happily doing business with those real nasty people. Now there were other really nasty people east of these nasty people and it seemed that the eastern nasty people do not mind sacrificing 20 million people to win over the western nasty people and thus turning most of Europe to a very disturbing colour indeed. So it seemed like a good investment to send a few hundred thousand people to prevent that, while in the same time gaining a lot of influence in Europe (most of which remained the desired colour).
No, they do not forget. They remeber all too well. Europe knows a lot more about wars than you do - since the Civil War, when you were fighting against yourself, you heven't had war on your soil. Europe knows what living in war means. Europeans don't have to watch epic Hollywood films to learn about it, it is enough if they ask their grandparents or often just their parents. People who lived through war tend to remember.
Try to look at it this way:
This is the only piece evidence that proves, beyond doubt, that Joe killed 20 kids. The evidence was obtained by illegal means (say, illegal search).
USA: Evidence is not admissible, Joe is a free man, gets his job back at the local kindergarten. Police officer is screamed at by the DA. Some people look at Joe with suspicion when kids start to disappear again.
Finnland: Joe is a bloody mass murderer who should, and will, rot in jail for what he committed. Police officer broke the law, goes to trial for breaking and entering. Parents of the 20 children petition the president to pardon him.
If someone committed a crime, (s)he should get punished for it. The way of unearthing the truth does not change its truth value. The way might be illegal and a crime in itself, but that is a separate case which should be dealt with on its own merit. When deciding if someone is guilty you want the "truth, the full truth and nothing but the truth". No matter how the evidence was obtained, if it isn't tainted then it is part of the "full truth" the verdict should be based on. If you throw evidence which you know is real out on some technicality, you violate your own principle about the full truth.
If you say that it is to keep the government in check, the Finnish way is actually better. Look:
USA: You obtained the evidence illegally. Bad Government! Now you will watch the bad guy walk! Hah!
Finnland: You obtained the evidence illegally! Bad Government! You will go to jail together with the bad guy!
Well, I do not get any tax deductions on my mortgage. In fact, in Australia, if you buy an investment property then it is a business therefore the interest you pay on the loan as well as the depreciation of the building are tax deductible. If you buy a house to live in it then no tax deductions for you. None at all.
By the way, as affordability of owning your home goes down, so does the affordability of renting. As more and more people are forced to rent, rental prices go up due to higher demand.
Furthermore, if after N years finally you own your own home, then shelter is going to cost you nothing, which is going to be a great help when you'll have to rely on pension and your savings to maintain your existence. If you rent, you pay the rent as long as you live.
> To be more precise, the rich get richer, and the poor get richer, just not as fast. It's that disparity that people focus on.
Not necessarily. In Australia to own your house was much less of a financial burden ~20 years ago than it is today. The actual dollar figures are not that important, what's important is your disposable income relative to the cost of obtainable assets. This includes a lot of things, not just the absolute amount of money you receive. The current Aussie government proudly tells you how good life became because people earn more due to tax cuts and because the economy has been booming since they took control, but they are not that vocal about the fact the mortgage foreclosures have surged to levels higher than the levels during the recession in the early nineties, even though the interest rates were >16% then and are around 7% today (called "record low" by the treasurer).
You still live in the leftie dream that the government is for the people. That idea is way outdated. The government is here to provide a lucrative business environment. The current Aussie government rebuts any environmental or social issue by explaining how it would hurt this or that industry. Kyoto? Would hurt our coal industry! Protecting ancient aboriginal rock art? Would hurt the gas industry! Not selling uranium to countries that didn't sign the NPT? Would hurt the uranium industry! The list goes on.
By the way, if you can create a law which makes most people criminals, but you do not necessarily strictly enforce that law, then you have a tool to control the population. If Joe is too vocal against the actions of the government, we can always lock him up for ripping his CDs or taping some TV show. It's basically the same idea as the black car arriving at your door at dawn with silent men in black leather coats, only you don't need to waste money on leather coats and petrol.
> What is a "submarine patent troll?" The 1995 Amendments to the patent laws pretty much ended the endless
> continuation practice that Lemelson, the original "submarine patent guy" used to his advantage.
Apparently for example Rambus managed to pull it through... You don't need endless continuation in the high-tech business. You can get a patent for how many, maybe 20 years? The whole PC business is around that old! A patent on floppy storage wouldn't be worth much today but it was a big deal 10 years ago. If you happen to know that there is some development on foobar then you create a BS patent and wait. If foobar hits the market in the next few years, you wait maybe a year more until it is well established, with multiple, preferably large sources and then emerge from the shadows and sue. If foobar doesn't quite become a hit, well, you just write it off, it was a lost investment. If you can generate enough BS patents, you can get by this business model (as some "intellectual property portfolio" companies do).
> BTW, patents are public record -- they are all publicly available on the USPTO website.
> Should a patent holder have to go out and notify any potential infringers before they begin developing a product?
On the same token, do you expect every balding man to check the USPTO website before combing in the morning to see if their way of combing their hair over the bald spot violates a patent or not? (Yes, there is/was a US patent on the way combing your hair over a bald spot to hide it, although I think it expired a year or two ago).
> I do think he's over the top (GNU/Linux? C'mon....)
Well, there was GNU software way before Linux and Linux (i.e. a unix-ish kernel) was developed using GNU software and every distro comes with the GNU shell, dev. tools and so on, not to mention the GNU C library, pretty much sucked in first thing by every program you run.
He wanted recognition for GNU not necessarily because he envied Linus' fame but because the popularity of Linux made it a household name but people never made the connection to the Free Software Foundation. RMS believes, and I think rightly so, that the activities of the FSF and the availability of GNU code was what made Linux possible in the first place and he wants people to know that. He believes that if people see that what the FSF stands for (i.e. the ideology of free software, not the code per se) can give them a system like a typical Ubuntu distribution they'll see the light, understand the philosophy and will join him in his crusade against corporate control of thought processes and for our retaining the right to think, create and as a matter of fact, read.
RMS might not be very presentable to a meeting of suits but he is damned bright and thinks way more ahead than most of us. He was often accused of scaremongering and being a loony but if you look at the current patent litigation frenzy, the SW/business model patents, the more and more obtrusive DRM, the HW "protected" machines, the DMCA, the **AA's activities (and all the European equivalents the these) he was actually underestimating things, not over.
He has an agenda and insisting on GNU/Linux is to further that agenda, yes. However, if you consider the agenda, it might be worth of typing 4 characters more.
> Close, but not quite analogous. A lossless bitmap file needs 24 bits per pixel to store color
> information. Actually printing on paper would theoretically allow you to map 24 bits against
> a single colored dot, providing a form of compression.
Assuming that you have a printer that actually uses 16M colour shades for each pixel. Which they don't, at least the commodity printers (laser or inkjet) do not. You can instruct an inkjet printer to deposit ink at a location or not. Most inkjets use 4 inks but the black is used only when otherwise you would deposit the other three simultaneously. Thus, you really have only 8 colours to paint a single dot to. When the printer (driver) renders a 24-bit image it uses dithering or error diffusion to cheat - it trades in spatial resolution for colour. The printer's resolution is much finer than the feature size of your image so it can use multiple dots to average the actual colour you want.
So yes, the printer represents multiple bits per pixel, but its 3 bits per pixel rather than 24. Some use more than 4 inks, but they are still nowhere near to 24 bits per pixel (more like 5).
> I don't go around converting people to atheism but if they bring up the subject I'm going
> to make sure they know that they believe in a fairy tale.
Actually, if you accept Popper's definition of scientific questions, you can not tell them that they believe in a fairytale. You can not envision an experiment which would falsify their premise of the existence of God, neither can they come up with one to falsify your statement of God's non-existence.
That question is scientifically undecidable, thus can not even be the subject of scientific debate.
It is pure belief on both sides. If you think about it, you can not disprove a statement like "the world was created just a picosecond ago, with space, time and all particles suddenly popping up from nothingness in their present (quantum) state and all of our memories have been created so that we think that we (and the Universe) have been around for ages". Your argument against such a statement is that why on Earth (or Heaven, rather) would a god do such a thing, trying to fool us? The believers would argue that you can't comprehend the reasons behind God's actions so you shall not ask that question; the agnostics would point out that since it is undecidable, Occam's razor tells them to assume that there's no God until positive evidence pops up and the atheists just discard the whole thing as complete rubbish. However, all of them do it based on their personal beliefs, not solid logic or scientific arguments.
When creationists come around with easily falsifiable pseudo-science, by all means whack them on the head. When people come around and do nasty things "in the name of God", ditto. But you can not attack them for their believing in a god, for you have no way of telling that they're wrong.
> These people are selling your product for you. In other words, you're suing your own salesmen!
> I can't think of a more stupid strategy for any business.
Well, this particular salesman wanted to make a little profit.
Wouldn't a druglord order the wasting of a pusher who's making a bit on the side?
Doesn't seem to hurt their business and they have the same business model:
selling shit to the junkies, total control of the product from manufacturing to
the customer, extortion prices and very heavy-handed treatment of customers or
distributors who don't want to toe the line or pay the price.
I don't think that the grandparent meant the so-called communist regimes, rather, the communism in its theoretical form, at least I'd assume that from the context. Now that thing is not a brutal dictatorship at all. However, it has a problem - it doesn't work (as the grandparent pointed it out). The theory's fundamental assumption, that everybody gives to society as much as they can and only take as much as they need, is false as long as we're talking about human society. That's where the brutal dictatorship comes into the picture in practice: the thought of the labour camp can significantly boost your conscience with regards to the needs of society and your comerades (some of whom are more equal than the others). Kind of like in theory thou shalt not kill, but to keep the less strong in the faith in check, just in case we build a few gallows...
> In fact the copyright balancing is the interests of the content producers versus the
> interests of the content users (of a number of types - including the content PURCHASERS
> who want to format-shift their property in order to player-shift or space-shift it, whom
> he carefully ignores).
Actually, the whole copyright thing has been set up to advance the arts in the interest of the PUBLIC. The two players in the whole business are the artists on the one side and the public on the other. The publishers are simply a tool to disseminate the artist's work to the public. If they can make money out of it, then good, if not, tough.
However, the copyright as such has never been intended to guarantee profit for a publisher. Unfortunately, that is the direction that most legistlations with regards to the so-called "intellectual property" take - guarantee profitability and market control for large corporate bodies, at the expense of the public (and the artists, for that matter). Advancement of arts or sciences and the benefits for society have not been playing any role for a long, long time - it's all about buying laws that allow certain business entities to make more money for less work.
The RIAA et al are not into the music business to sponsor art or to satisfy your needs, they are there to make money. If they can make money by legally restricting you more and more, they will buy all the laws they can to do so. They have quite a large purse so they can buy a lot of laws. The rest is just PR rubbish.
> Science and religion are both belief systems. Science bases all beliefs on knowledge and has
..."
> rigorous ways of determining fact from fiction. If science cannot answer a particular question
> it doesn't attempt to guess. If it does guess, the guess is based on available evidence and
> is called a theory. Religion on the other hand bases beliefs on faith and (typically ancient)
> teachings.
The major difference between the two lays not just in the methodology. Science, at least if you accept the Popperian approach, does never tell you that what it states is true. It only says that so far there was no evidence otherwise. Religion tells you that its statements are true. Also, science requires that any of its statements should be disprovable, i.e. you should be able to set up a theoretical scenario where the statement is proven false. Religion refuses even the *questioning* of its statements let alone demanding them to be falsifiable.
Yes, science is belief: Newton's laws were believed to be true because even though there were experiments done to prove them wrong, all those attempts failed. For a while. Then, as experiments got better the results started to disagree with the theory and thus Newton was proven wrong. Currently we believe in the theory of relativity. We know that Newton's laws are just very good approximations of the more general theory under special circumstances - everyday life being a special circumstance. When in more extreme cases Einsten's theory is going to be proven wrong, we will move along and get an even more general theory, of which Einstein's theory will be a special case. So in science you believe in something because although it is possible to prove it wrong, noone managed to do so yet. As new evidence comes in, science evolves, theories get thrown away or get stronger (for no evidence against them was found). Science is dynamic and implicitely qualifies every of its statements with a "by our best knowledge today.
Religious belief if very different. First of all, its statements can't be disproven. You can not set up a though experiment that, with a certain result, would prove that Deity of Your Choice doesn't exist. Especially in case of omnipotent deities any experimental result can be explained with "Because this was Deity's will". Thus, experiments are meaningless. Religion is *not* science because it can not be examined using scientific methods. Religious belief is based on entirely the individual's will in believing in whatever Faith (s)he has. Believing in any of the popular gods is no different from believing in Great A'Tuin, for example, except that I don't think Pratchet wants us all to worship Great A'Tuin, unlike the proponents of the mainstream religions. Religion is also static. I don't think they have changed much in the Sacred Book of the Religion of Your Choice in the past few hundred years.
You are told the absolute truth, which is true because the priest says so and you believe in that because that is the truth. All people who believe in something else adore a False God - if they don't believe in what you believe, they must be mistaken since everybody knows that your belief is the truth.
> That's not true. Some people like to point out clear evidence that some religious beliefs are false.
You can't, not for an omnipotent deity. Due to being omnipotent, the deity could arrange things the way they are, if for nothing else, just to show to the infidels that its omnipotence even includes of disproving its very teachings.
You can only prove a religious belief to be false if you approach it from a scientific standpoint, which you can't do, for religion is *not* a scientific theory - it is a l'art pour l'art belief in something. Science can't and shouldn't question the existence of a deity for it can not examine it with scientific methods. As long as a divine intervention is not needed to explain things, Occam's razor cuts the gods out of the scientific theories. However, what people believe
> If, to return to the WW2 example, no one had opposed Nazism would you call that "peace"?
Well, if the nazis didn't attack other nations and start mass exterminate jews, communists, gipsies, homosexuals, retards and so on, then yes, I would call it peace. You may agree or disagree with any ideology, as long as it is just a blurb that you have to echo back to please the Supreme Leader, it is peace. Does not mean that it is not opression or totalitarianism but it is peace.
> Is it "peace" when the state can kill anyone who is deemed inferior? Is it "peace" when there is
> no freedom of religion, of though, of the press. Is this your idea of "peace"?
Well, yes. In the Eastern Block there were (and, for example in China still are) severe limitations on the press, religion, even thought. The state does effectively have the power to kill anyone whom it wants (whether it is formally legalised or not) in practically any country. I don't consider the Chinese to be involved in any war, I consider them living in peace, even though they are subject of ideological oppression (and so are we, actually).
> The problem with pacifism is this: it only takes one person to destroy peace. If you have 20 people
> in a room and one of them starts beating people up - where is the peace?
Yes, you are right. It is indeed the case - anyone can start a war.
> In short: yes. Maybe you think all killing is the same. I do not - and I don't think you really do
> either. If a man walks into a bank and starts shooting people, one by one, do you honestly believe
> that the cop who takes him down is doing morally the same thing? Is that seriously your opinion?
> I want you to answer this exact question directly.
No, I do not think that the cop and the robber are on the same moral ground. However, it is because both you and I share the idea that killing random people in a bank for financial gain is a bad thing. If the cop takes someone out who is urinating on the picture of Chairman Mao, on the other hand, both you and I would scream totalitarian regime, police state, oppression and whatnot. What if the policeman and maybe a lot of his countrymen do believe that desecrating the picture is just as bad as murder? In the early years of the Soviet Revolution most people honestly believed in the whole thing and would have lynched anyone pissing on Lenin's picture.
Probably you would not have minded if someone took out Stalin or Hitler for they were murderous bastards. However, Stalin defeated Hitler, so surely he must be a good guy? On the other hand, Hitler attacked the oppressive red terror state of Stalin, so he must have been a good guy too?
> Now you want to say that all violence (or at least, all war) 0is the result of economic discrepency.
> How naive can you be? Not only is this not always the case, it almostt never is. History shows that
> non-democratic nations are more prone to war. That means that the war is started, for all intents and
> purposes, by an authoritarian ruler. E.g. somone who's already rich. When, in the history of the
> world, has a nation gotten together and decided by consensus "we're poor, so let's invade our
> neighbors". This is absurd.
Hm. Yes, I am that naive. I do believe that wars are waged mostly for economic reasons. I guess you would categorise the US as a democratic nation. Since WW2 I do not know a single nation that attacked the US, yet the US is seemingly continuously waging wars (never on her own soil, of course). On the other hand, how many wars did the totalitarian regimes of the Eastern Block fight? How about say Cuba (apart from the Bay of Pigs)? Pinochet? Pol Pot? Franco? He, a military dictator, remained neutral during WW2. Wars are good for several reasons. One, if you win them, you have direct economic results. Two, if you have internal problems a good handy war can steer public curiosity away from the issues you don't want to air too much. Third, you can pass legistlatio
So, do you say that some dude is doing killing, and *that* killing is bad, so I hop in and do some killing on my own, because *my* killing is good because I kill the guy doing the bad killing?
Pacifism is not about not fighting back - when there is a fight, any fight, there is no peace. Pacifism is about having peace. What you do when there is no peace is a different question.
The issue is that when there's peace you try to keep it. One way of doing it is spending billions on developing technology so that you can kill more people than anyone else and hope that you can scare them enough. Unfortunately it doesn't work with fanatics who are not afraid to die or people who have nothing left to lose and learned not to fear death.
Alternatively, one could imagine the theoretical scenario where you spend the money to mitigate the economic discrepancies so that there is no reason for war in the first place from either side. The problem with that latter approach is that human life is dirt cheap and saving it usually costs you money rather than earning it, while starting/joining/supporting wars is a quite lucrative business, especially is you happen to be in the position of using country A's taxpayers' money to develop weapons that you sell to country B (which of course pays for them from taxpayers' money) to kill the citizens of country C in the (name of|war on) while the *profit* on the sale goes to your very personal pocket. If you can also work out a nice weapons sale to C in the same time (possibly through intermediary countries D, E and F, so that your ideological integrity remains rock-solid) the gain could be enormous. War is about money and currently money trumps human life on a large part or the world.
That is what makes pacifism idealistic, not WW2, IMHO.
> Surprisingly, Australia and New Zealand have already allowed this patetnt, though!
The Aussie bit is not so surprising, considering that under the FTA Australia is obliged to "harmonise" her IP system with that of the US - i.e. copy as much of it verbatim as possible.
In addition, the patent system in Oz is not much better than the USPTO, considering that they
have issued ahttp://www.ipmenu.com/archive/AUI_2001100012.pdf [PDF] patent on the wheel...
As a non-American, I have always thought that the American Way, or AmWay for short, was about making loads of profit by selling overpriced washing powder to housewifes using the same housewifes as cheap labour? Then clapping on a big meeting to cheer for those who sold the most washing powder and then clap and cheer for those who bought the most washing powder and then singing the AmWay song? :-P
Um, let's see, I'm very sick at home, must go to hospital, I can't drive, call ambulance, $300.
I have a toothache, let's see the dentist (if I can get an appointment), $70 (if it's simple).
I feel constantly sick, do some lab tests, here's my Medicare card: No, thanks, do you have Mastercard?
My back is aching, let's go to physio, cheque, savings or credit, sir?
My knee is killing me, let's see, I can have elective for free, in 2 years, but if I can cough up
the money, I can go private now... Have cataract and need an IOL? Go to the bank first!
Our public health system is not good at all. My daughter was born in a public hospital. They did
not have ultrasound (literally, they only had 1 machine but that was broken and had not been fixed
during that ~5months we've been around), they measured everything with a tapemeasure. Regular
pregnancy checkup, which is compulsory: you went there at the appointment time and stood around
(not enough chairs) for maybe 4-5 hours.
I think you should do some digging about the publich health benefits in some European countries,
of the more decadent pinko social-democratic kind.
I know that whatever is here is Labors's doing (a large part of any public good was the result of the
Whitlam govt's short reign) and that Libs would like to abolish all that begins with "public", but that
still doesn't mean that our public health, public education, public transport and infrastructure is
so good. It isn't, and believing that it's the best of the best of the best is self-delusion. I don't
say that there aren't countries with much worse but there are ones with a lot better too.
> This all of course pails in comparison to what the USFTA is doing to Australian healthcare.
> You Americans bag Canadians public health system but Australia's is one of the best in the world.
You are not serious, are you? The Australian public health care is anything but good. Plus, under
our great visionary Tony Abbot, even what little was good in it is getting destroyed slowly but
surely. The fact that the US health system is possibly even worse (don't know, never lived there)
doesn't make ours any good.
Our politicians like to state that we have the best healthcare, the best education and in general
the best of everything in the world - it's fairly easy to say and unless you socialise with
migrants who came from countries with much better health, education and whatnot, you can't
check it.
I remember when we were told that Sydney's water supply was of world-leading quality, then lo and
behold, we had those nasty little buggers in the water so that you couldn't dring tap water
without boiling it for more than a week... We have world-class electricity supply, as far as
I hear, with power outages every now and then.
We have the best education except that you can finish highschool without being able to read
fluently. I know highschool kids who can't multiply in year 9 and have no clue about decimal
fractions.I have kids in highschool: for English they don't read but watch DVDs like the Lord of
the Rings and Harrison Ford action for history and of course the Gladiator which is indeed a must
to the understanding of the Roman Empire. From French they watched the Rugrats in Paris for
that authentic Gallic feel. The list goes on and on and on. Best of the world, yeah.
The sad thing is that while I understand that any oppressive government is glad to keep the
population dumb and thus easily steerable, the general health of the population is actually
in their interest. Although, the savings on pensions might be an issue...
> When you're violating the copyright of citizens from other countries, it has moved out from being "purely internal" to "international".
Well, do they violate it? By *your* laws maybe. By theirs, they don't. The USA is just one country of many and just because it happens to have a massively corporatist and anti-consumer law with regards to intellectual works (not as if the word "intellectual" would be relevant to most Hollywood films) doesn't mean that all other countries have it or should have it. If citizens of a foreign country, in their country, do something that the USA doesn't like, well, that's just tough. I guess you would oppose if Saudi Arabia demanded the public beheading of US citizens who violate some Saudi laws? Even if they commited it overseas (but not in Saudi Arabia)?
> "You're allowing wholesale violation of our citizens' internationally recognized copyrights" is hardly the worst reason I've ever heard for objecting to membership in trade organizations, too.
Well, maybe the problem is that "internationally recognised copyright" is not exactly the the same as the "Sonny Bono Act", at least not on that side of the US border where that insignificant 95% of the world's population happens to live.
So, how does it exactly "promote the progress of science and useful arts" that after Walter Disney has been dead for most part of a century, the Walt Disney Corporation is being paid if someone puts Mickey Mouse on a cup and actually the named corporation has a right to ban anyone the right to create copies of Mickey Mouse, i.e. they could ban your kids to draw it and show it to you?
I don't think that progression of the art of an artist can be promoted much further when, to put it bluntly, the artist has turned into a lump of rotting meat six feet under.
If you want a system that pays the *artist*, I'm with you. A system that pays corporations and individuals who had absolutely nothing to do with the artistic creation of the work is, however, unfair at best. The publisher did not create the art, it merely published it. It provided a service to the artist, to disseminate his/her work. Why should the public pay the publisher for what the artist created, long after the artist is dead? Why should the public accept that if the publisher decides that the work of the artist is not financially feasible for them, then it can no longer be obtained by the public? Isn't it strange that the artist himself/herself, *the creator of the work* can not copy his/her own work without the permission of the publisher?
The current copyright system has absolutely nothing to do with the progression of arts (or science, for that matter). It has to do with one and only one thing: making money.
Um, Dr. Tannenbaum has been crunching out a) books that you can use to succeed and accomplish so much more than he did, and b) people (his students) of whom some will be so "lame" as he is - only advancing knowledge and creating a new generetion of their breed - and some who will be one of those who accomplish.
L'art pour l'art education might be useless (although it is still better, IMHO, than l'art pur l'art being a thick dumb) but being a research scientist and most of all being a (good) teacher and (good) educator beats being successful.
As you pointed out, Linus has applied his education very well to achieve his goals, and he did, and quite a lot of clever and successful people did too. Now, that well used education of theirs was provided by the brethen of Dr. Tannenbaum. If the prof, in his entire lifetime, educated and inspired just two of the likes of Linus, then I believe he accomplished more than any one of them. If he educated and inspired just one like himself, he managed to assure that the future likes of Linus will have the chance the obtain the education they can use so well to accomplish.
Zoltan
> In fact, you are quite correct. I meant oligopoly, which is entirely different. An oligarchy refers to a form of government.
So you were right, after all...