1. No, but if you consider pre-1982 PRC and the CCCP throughout most of its history, both were what you could legitimately call communist countries, countries which paid more than lip service to centralized economies and the assignment of capital to "the people". I don't think the PRC today can legitimately be referred to as communist. Period. Oppressive? Yeah. communist? No. not in anything resembling the traditional Marxist sense of that word. The recent reductions in state employment rolls did nothing, to say the least, to reverse that trend.
2. The thought that the Chinese government could or would mandate Linux is a bit ludicrous.
3. I think the PRC could be viewed as several steps behind, in many ways, where they were in the summer of '96, and certainly behind where they were on, say, June 3, 1989. The persecution of the leaders of the CDP and Falun Gong are testimony to that. In other ways, they have moved forward, in large part because the government can't control people's lives like they used to. The don't control as much of the money or as much of the information. Linux may also be a part of that.
That's not the point I was trying to make, though. I'm saying that the Chinese, in some large measure, don't really care whether or not they've got more freedom than they used to. It's not as big a deal to the Chinese as it is to the Americans. Which, granted, isn't saying much.
1) People here who are saying that the PRC is not communist aren't (necessarily) doing it because they're communist{s/ sympathizers:)}. The fact is that about half of the PRC's GDP comes from the private sector, and that Deng XiaoPeng's "Socialism with Chinese Characteristics" isn't really...socialism, in a lot of ways. In China Wakes, Nicholas Krystof discusses this and ends up saying that the PRC is fascist, or authoritarian. Structurally and Economically speaking, "communist" just doesn't fit, except that in America, it's a catch-all for anything that's Bad(tm). See completely random usage of "that's so GAY," for corroborating case studies.
2) Just because the PRC government is bad doesn't mean that the Chinese people are bad. Don't forget that.
3) Things have changed a bit, i hear, since the bubble bu...sort of deflated, but from what i've heard, most of the people in the PRC don't currently give a crap about the government one way or the other. They will, I'd bet money on it, but right now they don't.
4) General Pinochet was our friend. The guy(s) in Guatemala were our friends. Suharto was our friend. With friends like that, where the fuck do you find the moral standing to say who is your enemy?
i mean, you only need the encoding algorithm to make encoded DVDs. You can make ones without encoding if you want. Personally, I don't think I'd bother making encoded ones, just because I seriously doubt it saves you any piracy-related money.
4 - Crack the region coding, the Macrovision coding, and the CSS encryption, make dozens of free copies, and give them away to homeless people, 'cuz them m*****f*****s are rich, arrogant b******s and they're fun to f***k over, and they so richly deserve it.
they've been forcing me to buy mass quantities of astroglide over the years, and i'm going to laugh my ass off when the shoe's on the other foot.
Ya, I just meant that if it did come to an appeal (and given MS's hubris and lack of common sense regarding this case, to date, it might, IMHO), I don't think that the Supreme court is necessarily going to refuse to hear such an appeal, either on the fast track or through normal channels.
Hmmm....there's no constitutional issue involved here, really (although microsoft will almost certainly try to find one, as part of the coming PR campaign), but the Court has appeals jurisdiction over this case, ultimately, and they tend to take on major cases, even if there are no constitutional issues. Also, the judges rule not only on constitutional issues, but on issues of federal law, and you can bet that microsoft is going to make this a big issue with regard to federal law interpretation. They will if they're smart, anyway--the findings of fact are the wrong way to go with this.
Fed up with what? Put your money out? Sure. Where can I get a player app for linux. Gimmee an address and the check is in the fucking mail.
No dice? Okay, I'll just code it myself, then. Err, no, wait. that's not very easy, is it? I mean, it took forever for a bunch of pretty damned on-the-ball-guys to crack the CSS stuff, so the IFC stuff is probably going to take a while, too. And, it's a bit over my head anyway.
Fine, okay, yah, bitching doesn't help much, though, does it?
Well, maybe, maybe not. I know for a fact that there are people at Creative and at Sigma Designs who read Slashdot. People who read slashdot and work at Creative and/or Sigma proooobbbbabbbblly read stories about things near and dear to their hearts. Like DVD decoder driver stories. They read the stories, they see people bitching. They see people bitching, maybe they start to realize there's some demand out there for this sort of thing.
So, maybe it's not such an exercise in futility after all. Mayber there's a point. Or, you know, maybe not, or something.
ummm....i could be wrong, but, having read the article, i would assum that '1 word...illuminati' is a short-hand form of 'yes, i think the author has gona all looney on us and is positing this massive intel conspiracy where there exists, in point of fact, only greed, malice, and incompetence.'
presumably, it's a commonwealth of counties. the british commonwealth isn't a commonwealth with anything, either....i think what you've got here is a variation on a fencepost error.
Re:You will have to consider the time difference
on
Snow Crash
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· Score: 1
You forgot to mention the 'Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind' undercurrent that runs through this novel, a very interesting play on a very ineresting (if possibly slightly wacky-sounding) theory. It's a much more subtle take on it than was found in The Big U.
[btw -- if NS reads this: The Big U. wasn't a bad book at all. Cheel, Winstohn.]
Also, I think Stephenson does a better job of evoking the feel of ``cyberspace'' than Gibson ever did. Not that I think Gibson sucks, but I think in this particular aspect, Stephenson is more on-the-ball.
Just to throw some random stuff in here, I think Shirow did a better job than Gibson at that whole 'what does it mean to be human' thing.
I would like to declare this the honorary first post attached to the inevitable Salon/Andrew Leonard and Linuxworld/Nicholas Petreley follow-up stories...:P
hell, i'da thought waco'd be mor'n happy to have *anything* attributed to 'em. i'm sorry, but i run from college station to fort worth on a regular basis, and i think i can say, with some authority, that *mexia* is more interesting than waco. hell, *corsicana* is....ummmm.....never mind that one...
That's not necessarily true...I've got two major issues here:
a) The popular acceptance of amorality in business is a relatively recent phenomenon, and a bad one, IMHO. Nevertheless, there are several more pragmatic arguments that are relevant here.
First, there is the slippery slope argument, which I doubt I need to elaborate upon, except to say that this regulation may open the door for more regulation which, at some fuzzy point in the future, may expose Lotus (etc.) to liability. Second, just because a company isn't in the content business now doesn't mean that they won't be in the future. This doesn't require you to visualize some fuzzy point in the future. Take Yahoo! for example: they may have had some liability under this stature before they purchased GeoCities, but that purchase certainly increased their exposure exponentially; given the lightning pace of mergers and acquisitions in the industry, it's not at all inconceivable (although not terribly likely) that this regulation could negatively impact Lotus' mid- to long- term exposure. It's easier to keep legislation from being passed than it is to repeal it; legal inertia, you might say.
B) Accusing companies of being [im/a]moral for dealing with China jumps to a rather unwarranted conclusion.
This is true because it assumes that doing business with China is bad for the Chinese people (assuming that you have their welfare in mind), a conclusion that isn't really supported by the facts. Perhaps pouring money into the PRC actually improves the political situation there; there certainly is a correlation between prosperity in post-Mao PRC and individual freedom, although you might be premature to jump to a cause-effect conclusion there.
On the other hand, there is a fair body of supporting evidence for that hypothesis: Taiwan comes to mind, and Cuba and North Korea stand out as examples of the situation getting worse or not changing when investment is withheld. One might surmise that withholding investment hurts the masses (not the leaders), and investing helps everybody out (a rising tide lifts all boats, or something like that). I'm no friend of big business, but even as a stopped clock is right twice a day and you can lead a horse to a cheesy aphorism, but you can't make him read it, they might be doing the wright thing for the wrong reasons here.
Or, they may be doing the wrong thing, but it's definitely not a black and white choice.
a) my last post came off as a bit harsh. sorry, it was unintentional.
b) library databases are among the immediately affected parties in this case, but they aren't the only ones affected. the precedent set will probably have broader scope than that, for better or worse.
c) that should been 'core biomedical *collection*'
d) if lexis-nexis is stealing my stuff and selling it on the street, then i'm not going to be very impressed if they get caught and claim that they should be allowed to steal from me because there would not otherwise be stolen goods for sale on the street.
e) the decline and fall of big bib, article, and full text databases hasn't been completely written yet.
of course demand for these services has fallen with the the rise of the web: in many cases, the web provides an equivalent service for free! why would i want to pay anybody for it?
now, one could very correctly argue that these databases provide services for writers, doctors, researchers, and scientists that the web can never provide. in fact, the argument is so stock and in in many ways so true that i'm not going to repeat it here.
i would argue, however, that these services will continue to be provided as long as there is demand for them, i.e. the forseeable future. the only difference is that this service will not be effectively subsidized by those with less rigorous informational needs.
if i want to be authoritatively kept up to date on research involving human papilloma virus or the current editorial mood regarding cannabis legalization, then i still need to pay for that. but if i want to find all the gossip about what Gong Li is doing nowadays, or satisfy my personal curiosity about current psychological opinion regarding Julian Jaynes' bicameral mind hypothesis, then i no longer need to pay for it, and i don't see why, as a society, we should.
i find rather interesting the parallels between this issue and that of traditional vs. online news sources.
idunno, i'm a sysadmin for bib databases at a large research library consortium, and i gotta say, we pay a bunch of bucks for medline & core biomedical abstracts & wilson & current contents & ntis & lexis-nexis & etc.
maybe you're not getting yours, but somebody, somewhere, is getting theirs.
well, if you look at it that way, then we might as well get rid of taxes -- hey, companies just pass them on to consumers, right? ditto environmental regulations and, in fact, litigation.
Philosophically speaking, you may be right. Legally speaking, we'll find out. But, practically speaking, I might point out that when you print an article from microfilm, neither the NYT nor the writer makes money off of it. When you print it off of the web, the NYT does and the writer does not.
I'm quite sure that the writer who signs away paper republishing rights to a newspaper or magazine takes that into account when determining what price is acceptable. As a matter of fact, they probably aren't too terribly concerned about it, since republication isn't going to be a terribly profitable business. Putting the same article in a database, however, is legally and pragmatically a different story entirely. Lemmee say that again: publishing an article in an anthology and sticking it in a big database full of other articles are two different things, at least to your average person.
Legally speaking, it's not a work for hire arrangement. Staff writers are on a work for hire arrangement. Freelance writers, IIRC, sell the rights to publish and republish their works, which I believe is what makes them freelancers.
Under current copyright law, selling your rights in one medium doesn't deprive you of your rights in another: just because you let Penguin Paperbacks publish your screenplay doesn't mean they can make a movie out of it without paying you.
The decision that we have to make is whether or not electronic media and paper media are both actually part of a larger 'meta media' that includes visual representations of the written word. As long as we continue to decide that they are not, this ruling does make sense.
PS -- if the NYT was making audio recordings of the articles, and then putting those in the database, would you feel the same way?
The really odd thing about this case is that the publishers are whining about the double-bladed nature of very laws that they use to protect their industry. Live by the sword, die by the sword.
And what objections to the ruling do their lawyers come up with? "Oh, the poor researchers will be denied access to these materials!" Yeah, well, thos researchers that can't afford to pay Lexis-Nexis's or NYT's exhorbitant fees are also denied access to those materials, and I don't see the learned counsel whining about that. There's big bucks in them thar databases, and the people who help create that value should get a cut.
"This ruling has the the effect of tampering with the historical record." Not really. The articles still exist in private electronic and paper archives. They can be retrieved by anyone with a bit of diligence, and they can be put back online just as soon as the NYT pays up.
Of course, those are just objections they came up with after the fact. What did they say in the trial? That the databases consituted a revision to an anthology of the works? That's just disingenuous. I'd love to read a brief detailing how they justified making that particular connection.
Actually, I think the question is a bit thornier than a simple matter of law and ethics.
I think according to law and ethics the answer is no.
Given American society's current mindset, I think that's true (and, actually, I think it's true also, but, as a current member of American society, I would); however, in the fifties and sixties, American tolerance for militant social activists was a bit lower than it is today (and tolerance for them in today's society, it seems, is going down rather than up).
So, more generally, the question is whether we should assist any kind of government in repressing groups that we would repress ourselves. Sometimes, even when the people being repressed are `on our side,' the answer may be yes.
Consider Taiwan, for example. I don't think that action by militant reformers in the early- to mid-eighties would have helped anybody out, and might, in fact, have been a major setback, considering the KMT's typical reaction to such things.
Please understand that I am so some extent playing Devil's Advocate here. I am extremely opposed to a lot of the things that our government has done, and has assisted other governments to do (hell, one word--Diem). However, stopping radicals from forcing governments that are already reforming down the wrong path at a critical juncture isn't necessarily a bad thing.
One might raise the objection, of course, that there's no way for us to know which is the 'right' path. However, doing nothing is also doing something, if you know what's going on, so you're placing a bet either way, it seems to me....
Jeez...I can't seem to write this morning. Please excuse my poor grammar and horrible sentence stucture, lack of cohesiveness and, at points perhaps, lack even of coherence. I think, however, that you can get the gist of what I'm saying.
errrr.....no. FUD may be an acronym for Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt, but the connotation of that term, way back to the ol' IBM and DEC days, is of unjustified F, U, and D.
If someone says your product sucks, and your product does indeed suck, then it is diingenuous to accuse them of spreading FUD.
I'm not saying that the w2k problem is better than Linux, or anything...
idunno about you, but ya gotta be pretty insecure if you feel the need to demonstrate your control over a hunk of inert silicon. in any case, it's easier to just pull the plug out of the wall.
i like having a command line. i really do. it allows me to do whatever i need to do when i need to do it. 99% of the time, however, what i'm doing doesn't require a lot of control over anything.
and in that case, not only are GUIs more aesthetically pleasing, but they are often more efficient, and provide an environment wherein learning by experiment and analogy is much more productive than similar strategies would be at the command line.
Re:"the Linux de facto standard desktop"?
on
KDE 1.1.2 is out
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· Score: 1
ummm, not to rain on your parade or anything:), but the guy you're flaming referred to US users because that's who the original poster cited for the 20 mil number. I feel quite sure that the flamee would be much more likely to accept a 20 mil world-wide figure....
Slashdot Mirror
1. No, but if you consider pre-1982 PRC and the CCCP throughout most of its history, both were what you could legitimately call communist countries, countries which paid more than lip service to centralized economies and the assignment of capital to "the people". I don't think the PRC today can legitimately be referred to as communist. Period. Oppressive? Yeah. communist? No. not in anything resembling the traditional Marxist sense of that word. The recent reductions in state employment rolls did nothing, to say the least, to reverse that trend.
2. The thought that the Chinese government could or would mandate Linux is a bit ludicrous.
3. I think the PRC could be viewed as several steps behind, in many ways, where they were in the summer of '96, and certainly behind where they were on, say, June 3, 1989. The persecution of the leaders of the CDP and Falun Gong are testimony to that. In other ways, they have moved forward, in large part because the government can't control people's lives like they used to. The don't control as much of the money or as much of the information. Linux may also be a part of that.
That's not the point I was trying to make, though. I'm saying that the Chinese, in some large measure, don't really care whether or not they've got more freedom than they used to. It's not as big a deal to the Chinese as it is to the Americans. Which, granted, isn't saying much.
4. Good answer.
1) People here who are saying that the PRC is not communist aren't (necessarily) doing it because they're communist{s/ sympathizers :)}. The fact is that about half of the PRC's GDP comes from the private sector, and that Deng XiaoPeng's "Socialism with Chinese Characteristics" isn't really...socialism, in a lot of ways. In China Wakes, Nicholas Krystof discusses this and ends up saying that the PRC is fascist, or authoritarian. Structurally and Economically speaking, "communist" just doesn't fit, except that in America, it's a catch-all for anything that's Bad(tm). See completely random usage of "that's so GAY," for corroborating case studies.
2) Just because the PRC government is bad doesn't mean that the Chinese people are bad. Don't forget that.
3) Things have changed a bit, i hear, since the bubble bu...sort of deflated, but from what i've heard, most of the people in the PRC don't currently give a crap about the government one way or the other. They will, I'd bet money on it, but right now they don't.
4) General Pinochet was our friend. The guy(s) in Guatemala were our friends. Suharto was our friend. With friends like that, where the fuck do you find the moral standing to say who is your enemy?
ummmm.....no. not really.
i mean, you only need the encoding algorithm to make encoded DVDs. You can make ones without encoding if you want. Personally, I don't think I'd bother making encoded ones, just because I seriously doubt it saves you any piracy-related money.
also, it's 'legal'. sorry.
4 - Crack the region coding, the Macrovision coding, and the CSS encryption, make dozens of free copies, and give them away to homeless people, 'cuz them m*****f*****s are rich, arrogant b******s and they're fun to f***k over, and they so richly deserve it.
they've been forcing me to buy mass quantities of astroglide over the years, and i'm going to laugh my ass off when the shoe's on the other foot.
Ya, I just meant that if it did come to an appeal (and given MS's hubris and lack of common sense regarding this case, to date, it might, IMHO), I don't think that the Supreme court is necessarily going to refuse to hear such an appeal, either on the fast track or through normal channels.
Hmmm....there's no constitutional issue involved here, really (although microsoft will almost certainly try to find one, as part of the coming PR campaign), but the Court has appeals jurisdiction over this case, ultimately, and they tend to take on major cases, even if there are no constitutional issues. Also, the judges rule not only on constitutional issues, but on issues of federal law, and you can bet that microsoft is going to make this a big issue with regard to federal law interpretation. They will if they're smart, anyway--the findings of fact are the wrong way to go with this.
IADefinitelyNAL
Fed up with what? Put your money out? Sure. Where can I get a player app for linux. Gimmee an address and the check is in the fucking mail.
No dice? Okay, I'll just code it myself, then. Err, no, wait. that's not very easy, is it? I mean, it took forever for a bunch of pretty damned on-the-ball-guys to crack the CSS stuff, so the IFC stuff is probably going to take a while, too. And, it's a bit over my head anyway.
Fine, okay, yah, bitching doesn't help much, though, does it?
Well, maybe, maybe not. I know for a fact that there are people at Creative and at Sigma Designs who read Slashdot. People who read slashdot and work at Creative and/or Sigma proooobbbbabbbblly read stories about things near and dear to their hearts. Like DVD decoder driver stories. They read the stories, they see people bitching. They see people bitching, maybe they start to realize there's some demand out there for this sort of thing.
So, maybe it's not such an exercise in futility after all. Mayber there's a point. Or, you know, maybe not, or something.
ummm....i could be wrong, but, having read the article, i would assum that '1 word...illuminati' is a short-hand form of 'yes, i think the author has gona all looney on us and is positing this massive intel conspiracy where there exists, in point of fact, only greed, malice, and incompetence.'
of course, i could be wrong
presumably, it's a commonwealth of counties. the british commonwealth isn't a commonwealth with anything, either....i think what you've got here is a variation on a fencepost error.
hmmmmm....good point.
You forgot to mention the 'Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind' undercurrent that runs through this novel, a very interesting play on a very ineresting (if possibly slightly wacky-sounding) theory. It's a much more subtle take on it than was found in The Big U.
[btw -- if NS reads this: The Big U. wasn't a bad book at all. Cheel, Winstohn.]
Also, I think Stephenson does a better job of evoking the feel of ``cyberspace'' than Gibson ever did. Not that I think Gibson sucks, but I think in this particular aspect, Stephenson is more on-the-ball.
Just to throw some random stuff in here, I think Shirow did a better job than Gibson at that whole 'what does it mean to be human' thing.
I would like to declare this the honorary first post attached to the inevitable Salon/Andrew Leonard and Linuxworld/Nicholas Petreley follow-up stories...:P
hell, i'da thought waco'd be mor'n happy to have *anything* attributed to 'em. i'm sorry, but i run from college station to fort worth on a regular basis, and i think i can say, with some authority, that *mexia* is more interesting than waco. hell, *corsicana* is....ummmm.....never mind that one...
That's not necessarily true...I've got two major issues here:
a) The popular acceptance of amorality in business is a relatively recent phenomenon, and a bad one, IMHO. Nevertheless, there are several more pragmatic arguments that are relevant here.
First, there is the slippery slope argument, which I doubt I need to elaborate upon, except to say that this regulation may open the door for more regulation which, at some fuzzy point in the future, may expose Lotus (etc.) to liability.
Second, just because a company isn't in the content business now doesn't mean that they won't be in the future. This doesn't require you to visualize some fuzzy point in the future. Take Yahoo! for example: they may have had some liability under this stature before they purchased GeoCities, but that purchase certainly increased their exposure exponentially; given the lightning pace of mergers and acquisitions in the industry, it's not at all inconceivable (although not terribly likely) that this regulation could negatively impact Lotus' mid- to long- term exposure. It's easier to keep legislation from being passed than it is to repeal it; legal inertia, you might say.
B) Accusing companies of being [im/a]moral for dealing with China jumps to a rather unwarranted conclusion.
This is true because it assumes that doing business with China is bad for the Chinese people (assuming that you have their welfare in mind), a conclusion that isn't really supported by the facts. Perhaps pouring money into the PRC actually improves the political situation there; there certainly is a correlation between prosperity in post-Mao PRC and individual freedom, although you might be premature to jump to a cause-effect conclusion there.
On the other hand, there is a fair body of supporting evidence for that hypothesis: Taiwan comes to mind, and Cuba and North Korea stand out as examples of the situation getting worse or not changing when investment is withheld. One might surmise that withholding investment hurts the masses (not the leaders), and investing helps everybody out (a rising tide lifts all boats, or something like that). I'm no friend of big business, but even as a stopped clock is right twice a day and you can lead a horse to a cheesy aphorism, but you can't make him read it, they might be doing the wright thing for the wrong reasons here.
Or, they may be doing the wrong thing, but it's definitely not a black and white choice.
graz
Yeah, video memory is faster than system memory, but doesn't a goodly chunk of that bandwidth go to the RAMDAC?
a) my last post came off as a bit harsh. sorry, it was unintentional.
b) library databases are among the immediately affected parties in this case, but they aren't the only ones affected. the precedent set will probably have broader scope than that, for better or worse.
c) that should been 'core biomedical *collection*'
d) if lexis-nexis is stealing my stuff and selling it on the street, then i'm not going to be very impressed if they get caught and claim that they should be allowed to steal from me because there would not otherwise be stolen goods for sale on the street.
e) the decline and fall of big bib, article, and full text databases hasn't been completely written yet.
of course demand for these services has fallen with the the rise of the web: in many cases, the web provides an equivalent service for free! why would i want to pay anybody for it?
now, one could very correctly argue that these databases provide services for writers, doctors, researchers, and scientists that the web can never provide. in fact, the argument is so stock and in in many ways so true that i'm not going to repeat it here.
i would argue, however, that these services will continue to be provided as long as there is demand for them, i.e. the forseeable future. the only difference is that this service will not be effectively subsidized by those with less rigorous informational needs.
if i want to be authoritatively kept up to date on research involving human papilloma virus or the current editorial mood regarding cannabis legalization, then i still need to pay for that. but if i want to find all the gossip about what Gong Li is doing nowadays, or satisfy my personal curiosity about current psychological opinion regarding Julian Jaynes' bicameral mind hypothesis, then i no longer need to pay for it, and i don't see why, as a society, we should.
i find rather interesting the parallels between this issue and that of traditional vs. online news sources.
just my $2,148,263.
idunno, i'm a sysadmin for bib databases at a large research library consortium, and i gotta say, we pay a bunch of bucks for medline & core biomedical abstracts & wilson & current contents & ntis & lexis-nexis & etc.
maybe you're not getting yours, but somebody, somewhere, is getting theirs.
well, if you look at it that way, then we might as well get rid of taxes -- hey, companies just pass them on to consumers, right? ditto environmental regulations and, in fact, litigation.
Philosophically speaking, you may be right. Legally speaking, we'll find out. But, practically speaking, I might point out that when you print an article from microfilm, neither the NYT nor the writer makes money off of it. When you print it off of the web, the NYT does and the writer does not.
I'm quite sure that the writer who signs away paper republishing rights to a newspaper or magazine takes that into account when determining what price is acceptable. As a matter of fact, they probably aren't too terribly concerned about it, since republication isn't going to be a terribly profitable business. Putting the same article in a database, however, is legally and pragmatically a different story entirely. Lemmee say that again: publishing an article in an anthology and sticking it in a big database full of other articles are two different things, at least to your average person.
Legally speaking, it's not a work for hire arrangement. Staff writers are on a work for hire arrangement. Freelance writers, IIRC, sell the rights to publish and republish their works, which I believe is what makes them freelancers.
Under current copyright law, selling your rights in one medium doesn't deprive you of your rights in another: just because you let Penguin Paperbacks publish your screenplay doesn't mean they can make a movie out of it without paying you.
The decision that we have to make is whether or not electronic media and paper media are both actually part of a larger 'meta media' that includes visual representations of the written word. As long as we continue to decide that they are not, this ruling does make sense.
PS -- if the NYT was making audio recordings of the articles, and then putting those in the database, would you feel the same way?
The really odd thing about this case is that the publishers are whining about the double-bladed nature of very laws that they use to protect their industry. Live by the sword, die by the sword.
And what objections to the ruling do their lawyers come up with? "Oh, the poor researchers will be denied access to these materials!" Yeah, well, thos researchers that can't afford to pay Lexis-Nexis's or NYT's exhorbitant fees are also denied access to those materials, and I don't see the learned counsel whining about that. There's big bucks in them thar databases, and the people who help create that value should get a cut.
"This ruling has the the effect of tampering with the historical record." Not really. The articles still exist in private electronic and paper archives. They can be retrieved by anyone with a bit of diligence, and they can be put back online just as soon as the NYT pays up.
Of course, those are just objections they came up with after the fact. What did they say in the trial? That the databases consituted a revision to an anthology of the works? That's just disingenuous. I'd love to read a brief detailing how they justified making that particular connection.
Actually, I think the question is a bit thornier than a simple matter of law and ethics.
I think according to law and ethics the answer is no.
Given American society's current mindset, I think that's true (and, actually, I think it's true also, but, as a current member of American society, I would); however, in the fifties and sixties, American tolerance for militant social activists was a bit lower than it is today (and tolerance for them in today's society, it seems, is going down rather than up).
So, more generally, the question is whether we should assist any kind of government in repressing groups that we would repress ourselves. Sometimes, even when the people being repressed are `on our side,' the answer may be yes.
Consider Taiwan, for example. I don't think that action by militant reformers in the early- to mid-eighties would have helped anybody out, and might, in fact, have been a major setback, considering the KMT's typical reaction to such things.
Please understand that I am so some extent playing Devil's Advocate here. I am extremely opposed to a lot of the things that our government has done, and has assisted other governments to do (hell, one word--Diem). However, stopping radicals from forcing governments that are already reforming down the wrong path at a critical juncture isn't necessarily a bad thing.
One might raise the objection, of course, that there's no way for us to know which is the 'right' path. However, doing nothing is also doing something, if you know what's going on, so you're placing a bet either way, it seems to me....
Jeez...I can't seem to write this morning. Please excuse my poor grammar and horrible sentence stucture, lack of cohesiveness and, at points perhaps, lack even of coherence. I think, however, that you can get the gist of what I'm saying.
errrr.....no. FUD may be an acronym for Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt, but the connotation of that term, way back to the ol' IBM and DEC days, is of unjustified F, U, and D.
If someone says your product sucks, and your product does indeed suck, then it is diingenuous to accuse them of spreading FUD.
I'm not saying that the w2k problem is better than Linux, or anything...
idunno about you, but ya gotta be pretty insecure if you feel the need to demonstrate your control over a hunk of inert silicon. in any case, it's easier to just pull the plug out of the wall.
i like having a command line. i really do. it allows me to do whatever i need to do when i need to do it. 99% of the time, however, what i'm doing doesn't require a lot of control over anything.
and in that case, not only are GUIs more aesthetically pleasing, but they are often more efficient, and provide an environment wherein learning by experiment and analogy is much more productive than similar strategies would be at the command line.
ummm, not to rain on your parade or anything :), but the guy you're flaming referred to US users because that's who the original poster cited for the 20 mil number. I feel quite sure that the flamee would be much more likely to accept a 20 mil world-wide figure....