Does anyone have a link to a page explaining what's really going on? Last I heard, XML doesn't even have a concept of newlines -- most of the time all white space gets normalized (collapsed). The only problem that I could see is if the character wasn't part of the spec for white space. Now, people may have written XML software that chokes, but I think that's a slightly different story. So is the problem that the new character shows up as bogus text content in elements? And is that true for all XML processing software, or does software that relies on a proper Unicode engine not have the problem? What's the deal?
It seems to me that the toughest thing facing an author
today is an industry that's going to ask for one compromise after
another
That's crap. Good editors -- and there are plentyofthem out there -- are a writer's best friend, where the quality of the work is concerned. (They may not be where the money's concerned, but that's why you have an agent. Which you don't need until you already have an unsigned contract in your hand, by the way.)
The toughest thing facing an aspiring author today is getting the damn book written. (All of you would-be writers in this forum wondering if Xlibris would be the way to go if, as, and when you get around to writing that book are putting the cart before the horse.)
The second toughest thing is writing a good book. Interestingly, probably 95% of the aspiring writers and up-and-coming writers I've met fall into one of two categories: Either they write really well but don't get much done, or they already have two manuscript the size of phone books that they're trying to get published, and they're crap. (The other 5% are Tim Pratt, who doesn't seem to have either problem.)
Writers of the first sort have trouble because their drive for quality makes them spend more time on their stuff, more time revising, and even yet still more time throwing it out and starting over.
("Writer's block isn't not being able to write. It's thinking that everything you write is shit." -- Maureen McHugh)
Writers of the second sort have trouble because they don't understand why they can't sell their stuff, and so they blame the editors, the publishers, the slush pile readers and the reading public, instead of putting the blame where it belongs: on themselves, for not working to improve their writing.
I did a little digging into what would be needed to get one's works published.
What would be needed is to write good books.
Seriously. It's not rocket science. There is no conspiracy. Publishers are always looking for good new writers. You don't need an agent (until you have a contract in hand), you don't need an editor or a book doctor or a ghost writer, you don't need to self-publish. (In fact, self-publishing can hurt your chances of having a commercial career as a writer.) You just need to write well.
This is a good thing, because it's the only part of the process that's under your control.
The publishing industry is not the music industry. By and large, writers do get paid.
If you're serious about writing and you want to write science fiction or fantasy, I highly recommend applying to one of the major SF/F writing workshops -- Clarion,
Clarion West, Viable Paradise, Odyssey. You'll have a chance to improve your writing, make friends and contacts, and get the straight dope on the industry from working professionals.
Last, any aspiring writer should keep in mind Yog's Law: Money Flows Toward The Writer. If you see an "opportunity" that violates that law, you should look at it with extreme skepticism.
Thinking about self-publishing? Think carefully.
on
Reflecting Fires
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· Score: 4, Informative
So the original developer is liable even if they had no business relationship with RedHat? That's annoying. I suppose that means that there's no reason the end user couldn't sue the original developer directly, either.
*sigh* Annoying, but predictable.
How does the GPL's "No Warranty" clause actually take effect? "Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License; they are outside its scope."
Open source software can restrict you from distributing the software... but AFAIU the OSI guidelines did not allow licenses to place restrictions on using the software.
A clickwrap license could be interpreted as a restriction on using the software. So here's a scenario: you could have a non-free license for using the software, but a separate free license for distributing it... which free redistribution license could not require you to also include the clickwrap code and non-free use license.
The clickwrap license restricts you only from using that copy; it doesn't restrict you from using any copy that doesn't include the clickwrap.
Anyone who wants to bypass the clickwrap license does so by modifying the software to remove the clickwrap code and "redistributing" it to him/herself.
Sounds perfect... except for the entity hoping to be protected by the clickwrap license. Big headache.
That's not the purpose for click-through software on free apps. The major reason is liability of the software on a computer. If I install LILO and it wipes out my hard drive, I can sue the writer of the software.
I believe that under current law it's the person who sold you the software who's liable, not the author. But IA definitely NAL. Would someone who is like to chime in?
Copyright law says no one can make copies, period (with a few "fair use" exceptions, which are more limited than many/. readers seem to think). Without a license, you can't make copies; it doesn't matter whether you've "agreed" to the license or not. The only way you can make copies is under the terms of the license. If you make copies in violation of the license, you're in violation of copyright law. The reason commercial software has click-wrap licenses is that they want to restrict rights evem further than the law already does.
So if what you have is a small number of developers each working alone in a style nobody else can code in on a piece of the project nobody else understands, how do you expect this system to be maintained? It sounds to me like in the long run you're dead anyway.
Except in the Real World where you don't have enough developers for people to work in pairs all the time
This is a common fallacy, and a lot of us at the company where I work believed it until we'd had a few weeks of exposure to pair programming. Over the long term, two developers working in a pair will be at least as productive as they would be working alone -- first, the code they produce has fewer bugs; second, there are now two people who can maintain that code, so you've lowered your truck factor; and third, while they're pairing they can't be reading Slashdot.
and the project is too big for everyone to understand every part of it.
We thought that, too. But you don't need everyone to understand every part of the project. What you do need is for more than one person to understand each part of the project. I'd estimate that with most areas of our software, there's one person who knows it inside and out, one person who's at about 70%, and two people who are at 20-30% and could get up to speed quickly if they had to. (For reference, this is in a development team of ten, with a large multi-tiered cross-platform Java/C++ project containing about 1200 classes.)
Also, when I'm deep in "the zone", I don't want to be bothered by someone leaning over my shoulder.
No offense, but I hate trying to debug really tight code written by someone else who was deep in the zone. Unless we happen to think a lot alike, it's often a real bastard to try to understand what in hell they were doing. Pity your fellow developers and allow them some insight into your thought process.:)
And when I'm following a very careful train of thought while trying to debug a once-in-a-while seg fault, I definitely don't want to be interrupted.
If your pairing partner was with you when you started the train of thought, they wouldn't be interrupting you.
If I want help, I'll go ask for it.
Yes, but will you ask for it when you need it, or only several hours later when you've given up on figuring it out on your own?
You need someone (not you) riding herd on those developers and making sure they're actually getting work done. The company I'm at uses a lightweight process called SCRUM, where features (or "stories" in XP terms) are divided into small tasks, each developer is responsible for taking on and providing estimates for a fair share of tasks, and every morning there's a (short -- ten minutes, max) meeting where each developer has to go over:
which tasks they worked on yesterday
how long they've spent on each task
how much more time each task will take to complete
what they're going to be working on today
any blocking issues they might have
(Any design, problem solving, etc. is deferred till after the meeting, and only the people that need to be involved in those discussions are pulled in.)
The project manager (who is not a developer and not a manager manager) is responsible for keeping track of the tasks and the hours and making that information available. It's always clear who has responsibility for what and who's blocking whom from getting their work done.
This does a great job of keeping developers productive, and since developers get to make their own estimates (and the total amount of work that can get done in a development cycle is based on 40-hour weeks), it also does a good job of keeping them sane.
(It works well with eXtreme Programming practices like pair programming and story-driven design, too.)
I disagree; take a look at other industries. Some of the highest-quality
products are produced by the tiny, niche-market manufacturers. The best
cigars in the world are not from Phillip-Morris. The finest cuisine on your
block is not the mega-corporation with the giant yellow 'M'. The most
accurate watches don't come from time-giant Timex. The finest literature on
the bookshelf isn't necessarily from the biggest publisher.
I think that's sort of the point. Small niche players have an incentive to
produce quality products, because they're going after the small segment of
the market that is willing to pay more for quality. Dominant players have
less incentive -- they've already got their current market share with their
current quality level, so why should they change? Particularly if they have
other things going for them -- strong brand identity (making customers less
likely to want to switch), deep pockets (allowing them to win a price war),
or vendor lock-in (making it hard for customers to switch) -- that make it
difficult for a small player to use quality as a differentiator to eat into
their market share.
GM may not make the best cars in the world, but they do (generally) make the cheapest in their market segments, and they have a strong base of loyal customers that value the idea of owning a Chevy or a Pontiac more than they value fit and finish or MTBF. It's only in the last ten or fifteen years, with European and Japanese competition across all market segments, that they've been kicked into paying attention to quality and reliability.
(Of course, if the Big Three had the ability to exclude Honda and Toyota from the Interstate Highway System, it would be another story.
)
We obviously just have different first principles. I happen to hold teleological beliefs (that's not a misspelling of theological, btw, it's from the greek telos) and you don't.
I know what teleological means (have you noticed that the default assumption on/. is that everyone is an indifferently educated 16-year-old?), and I think that characterizes our situation very well. I'm glad we were able to establish that. I think most argument is wasted because people mistake a difference in first principles for an error in logic.
There's really nothing of value that we can say to each other.
I'm not sure that's true -- for instance, I probably ought to read more ethical philosophy, and I'd argue that you ought to read more law and economics -- but I agree this conversation isn't likely to go anywhere.
Yes, I grant the point that most of a corporation could be duplicated through an enormous and complicated set of contracts. It still lacks the limited liability of a corporation.
Implicitly, the legal structure around corporations is already an enormous and complicated set of contracts. It's not a legal fiction (except to the extent that any contract is a legal fiction); it's more like a standardized shorthand (or, to make an analogy to code, a set of standard libraries).
I'd suggest you look into the economic and legal theory of transaction costs -- Coase's The Firm, the Market, and the Law is a good, short, cheap, highly respected introduction that doesn't require a degree in either law or economics.
As an example, all sorts of books were quite illegal in communist Russia.
That might be an infringement of freedom of speech or freedom of the press, but it's not infringement of freedom to think, which I thought was what part of your definition of "the right to own intellectual property" was.
There were plenty of opinions that were illegal to hold, plenty of thoughts illegal to think. (From the government's point of view, there was simply the inconvenience of it being difficult to find out if someone was thinking illegal thoughts.)
Not "simply" and not just "from the government's point of view". Look, if a law is absolutely, unequivocally, 100%, in all cases unenforcible, it has no force as a law. It may tell me some unpleasant things about the people making the laws, it may be a symptom of other problems... okay, it may even have "chilling effects", but it does not make it possible for the government to actually prevent me from thinking or knowing. It has roughly as much effect as passing a law that the sun shall always shine, or that bill that died in the Louisiana legislature or wherever it was setting pi equal to three on Biblical grounds.
Actually, it comes from the fact that I cannot easily change into my shoes if they're on your feet. Moreover, you wearing them causes wear and tear on them and thus reduces their usefulness to me. Physical property is of its nature the sort of thing that bestows its benefits in an exclusive manner. Generally, there's no getting around it. Exceptions are made for some things which can be usefully shared, e.g. roads.
You're confusing the history of property rights with their philosophical underpinnings. And I still don't understand what you think intellectual property is if it's a right that doesn't exclude any rights of others.
Of course [that certain rights must not be taken away] is a value judgement. Noone could possibly have believed otherwise. The only point of contention is whether it's a correct value judgement.
Who decides?
It seems to me that if you can say whether something is "correct" or not, it's not a judgement, it's a statement of fact. What I'm trying to get at is that, unless you believe that inalienable rights are what we're endowed with by our Creator, there are no facts with respect to rights, there is no "correctness" or "incorrectness".
Moreover, society cannot grant an inalienable right. The very nature of being inalienable is that it is inherent.
And that's what we're arguing about.:) I'm saying there's no such thing as an inherent right, and even if there was, there's no way for us to tell whether intellectual property rights are more or less "inherent" than physical property rights, though we may find them more or less sensible or useful.
Now, it may be that "are there, or are there not inherent rights?" is itself a subjective question -- either you take them as a given, or you don't. If you think there's some way to demonstrate that the existence of inherent rights is more than an unproven hypothesis (albeit one under which our society operates), I'll be interested to see it. The fact that we have a word ("inalienable") for inherent rights doesn't prove that they exist, or that they are what we think they are.
... our government has created the legal fiction of corporations and copyrights, and many people (including the owners of microsoft) have taken advantage of these legal fictions. That is the situation we're in, and that is the government which is attempting (however imperfectly and perhaps corruptly) to rectify abuses of certain legal fictions that it created for the public good.
All I'm saying is that those fictions are no more or less fictitious than, for instance, the right to physical property.
The unit, since it is not a legal person, could not make such a
contract, someone who is part of that unit would have to make
such a contract on the unit's behalf, and thus they would be
personally responsible for said contract. You'll have a hard time
finding people to take on that roll, i.e. to take full liability
for billions of dollars in possible damages.
Nonsense. That's like saying you can't have a contract with more
than two signatories. If I can sign a contract that obliges me to
do certain things, and Jane and I can sign a contract that
obliges the two of us to do certain things, then Jane and I can
sign a contract with Doug that obliges us to abide by any
contract he signs on our behalf, within certain restrictions.
Doug can then go to Bob, show him the contract he's signed with
Jane and I, and sign a contract with Bob under which Bob can have
a reasonable expectation that Jane and I will do certain
things. The contract Jane and I sign with Doug specifies that he
can't commit our resources beyond a certain amount; the contract
Bob signs with Doug specifies that Jane and I, not Doug, are
liable for damages relating to the contract, and waives Bob's
right to anything over and above the amount our contract with
Doug specifies that he can commit.
This is an oversimplification, but it basically works. There's
nothing magical about it, except the concept of
contracts. (Whether you can enforce contracts without a
gvoernment is an anarcho-capitalist debate that I don't want to
get into -- my point is that in theory you don't need
governments to have corporations, just contracts.)
I believe in the inalienable right to intellectual property. I do
not believe in the inalienable right to exclusively own
intellectual property. By this I mean: I believe that everyone
can think whatever thoughts they want... can know anything they
can legitimately find out...
That's not a right; that really is a law of nature, as long as there's no technology that allows
someone else to prevent you from thinking something or take away
your knowledge of it. And it's not property either.
Property is by
definition exclusive. The fundamental characteristic of a
property right is that it allows you to exclude others from use
of that property.
Now, physical property is unfortunately exclusive by its
nature. We both can't usefully own the same pair of
shoes. However, this exclusivity is not a right, but an
unfortunate aspect of the nature of physical objects.
True. However, I would contend that the extension of that
property of physical objects to a right of control over those
shoes even when you're not wearing them is artificial.
Even one person cannot usefully wear more than one set of
shoes. Your right to exclude me from wearing your brown shoes while you're wearing your black shoes is artificial.
If you're not trolling you really need to read more. Noone ever
meant that an inalienable right is one that cannot be
taken away from a man. It merely means a right which must
not be taken away from him. Do you think that people who talk
about inalienable rights never heard of slavery, or prison, or
even a set of handcuffs?
<sigh> I'm not trolling; I'm trying to make a
philosophical point (which is a dangerous thing to do on/.). My point is that must not be taken away is a
value judgement. It's a decision taken by society. Certain
decisions may be more logical, or may lead to better outcomes,
than others, but there's nothing inherent in the nature of
physical or intellectual "property" that makes it more or less
possible (though it may be more or less logical, or more
or less stupid) for society to decide to grant a "right"
(alienable or in-) to it. You may prefer to live in a world with
property rights (and I may, too), but that doesn't mean it's the
only possible world, or that worlds that appear not to have
property rights are actually worlds with property rights
but in which those rights are systematically violated.
What a person does is up to them (subject to constrains of law at least theoretically designed to keep people from infringing on each others' rights). A person as such has (inalienable) rights, including those of property and freedom of speech. However, a corporation doesn't even exist until the government creates it, and copyright does not exist on its own without the government creating it.
It looks like you believe in freedom of speech. How about freedom of association? How about the freedom to contract? Can I get together with a bunch of my friends and form an association called -- say -- "Microsoft Corporation"? With contracts specifying that we delegate to the officers of the association the power to exercise some of our rights on our behalf? And contracts between that association and other associations and individuals, that agree to deal with the association as a unit as far as debts, liability, and so on are concerned? How is the government involved there?
It looks like you believe in a right to own property, by which you apparently mean physical property. What makes the right to own physical property more "inalienable" than the right to own intellectual property? Certainly there are functional arguments (ideas cannot be used up, etc.), but those have nothing to do with "inalienable rights".
There's no such thing as an inalienable right. There are only social and legal conventions. You have a "right" to free speech because the majority of society recognizes that right, and has agreed on a legal system to support it. You have a "right" to own property because the majority of society respects that right, and has agreed on a legal system to support it.
We can argue about what kind of social and legal conventions we should have. But let's not draw arbitrary lines in the sand and say some conventions are as fundamental as laws of physics and other conventions are "created by government".
Re:Gnome or KDE?
on
GNOME 2.0 Beta
·
· Score: 5, Informative
The anti aliased fonts, is that the gtk hack that came some months ago? It looked really ugly.:-P
No, it's the proper, internationalized anti-aliasing that's been in the works for a while. For a good list of all the user-visible changes in Gnome 2, check out Havoc Pennington's "What's New in Gnome 2" page.
You are playing with Mythic's code. No matter what you do in the context of the game, you have not "created" anything that Mythic did not program into the game. Therefore, you cannot SELL what you did not create.
It's ALL Mythic's property, and you have no right to it. You're paying for access to the code, not for the code outright. Just because you played for hundreds of hours doesn't mean you've created anything. All you've really done when it comes right down to it is flipped a few bits on a server.
Hell, not even your CHARACTER NAME is your property, because essentially, all you did was enter a variable in a program, but that variable was planned for. Everything you type was anticipated down to the exact sequence (which is why you can't type in names they don't allow, or characters the program can't interpret).
How can you POSSIBLY be confused.
You are typing with Microsoft's code. No matter what you do in the context of the application, you have not "created" anything that Microsoft did not program into the application. Therefore, you cannot SELL what you did not create.
It's ALL Microsoft's property, and you have no right to it. You're paying for access to the code, not for the code outright. Just because you typed for hundreds of hours doesn't mean you've created anything. All you've really done when it comes right down to it is flipped a few bits on a computer.
Hell, not even your FILE NAME is your property, because essentially, all you did was enter a variable in a program, but that variable was planned for. Everything you type was anticipated down to the exact sequence (which is why you can't type in names they don't allow, or characters the file system can't interpret).
I'm kidding, of course. But it's not as clear-cut as you think.
It strikes me that one reason the software houses may be so keen to prohibit auctioning in-game items, money, and characters is that it might open the MMORPGs up to regulation as online casinos.
After all, if, say, 100GP has a well-established market value of $1, how is getting 100GP as a result of an MMORPG server rolling random numbers any different from getting a $1 poker chip as a result of a video poker server rolling random numbers?
I'll bet most Slashdot readers can see a difference, but articulating that difference to a judge (or the Interstate Commerce Commission, or a state gaming board out to make a quick buck) could be difficult. Maybe the "software giants" just don't want to take that on.
Slashdot Mirror
Does anyone have a link to a page explaining what's really going on? Last I heard, XML doesn't even have a concept of newlines -- most of the time all white space gets normalized (collapsed). The only problem that I could see is if the character wasn't part of the spec for white space. Now, people may have written XML software that chokes, but I think that's a slightly different story. So is the problem that the new character shows up as bogus text content in elements? And is that true for all XML processing software, or does software that relies on a proper Unicode engine not have the problem? What's the deal?
That's crap. Good editors -- and there are plenty of them out there -- are a writer's best friend, where the quality of the work is concerned. (They may not be where the money's concerned, but that's why you have an agent. Which you don't need until you already have an unsigned contract in your hand, by the way.)
The toughest thing facing an aspiring author today is getting the damn book written. (All of you would-be writers in this forum wondering if Xlibris would be the way to go if, as, and when you get around to writing that book are putting the cart before the horse.)
The second toughest thing is writing a good book. Interestingly, probably 95% of the aspiring writers and up-and-coming writers I've met fall into one of two categories: Either they write really well but don't get much done, or they already have two manuscript the size of phone books that they're trying to get published, and they're crap. (The other 5% are Tim Pratt, who doesn't seem to have either problem.)
Writers of the first sort have trouble because their drive for quality makes them spend more time on their stuff, more time revising, and even yet still more time throwing it out and starting over. ("Writer's block isn't not being able to write. It's thinking that everything you write is shit." -- Maureen McHugh)
Writers of the second sort have trouble because they don't understand why they can't sell their stuff, and so they blame the editors, the publishers, the slush pile readers and the reading public, instead of putting the blame where it belongs: on themselves, for not working to improve their writing.
(P.S. Yes, IAAPW. Barely. But ask one who's been around a while. You'll get the same answer.)
Seriously. It's not rocket science. There is no conspiracy. Publishers are always looking for good new writers. You don't need an agent (until you have a contract in hand), you don't need an editor or a book doctor or a ghost writer, you don't need to self-publish. (In fact, self-publishing can hurt your chances of having a commercial career as a writer.) You just need to write well.
This is a good thing, because it's the only part of the process that's under your control.
The publishing industry is not the music industry. By and large, writers do get paid.
If you're serious about writing and you want to write science fiction or fantasy, I highly recommend applying to one of the major SF/F writing workshops -- Clarion, Clarion West, Viable Paradise, Odyssey. You'll have a chance to improve your writing, make friends and contacts, and get the straight dope on the industry from working professionals.
Last, any aspiring writer should keep in mind Yog's Law: Money Flows Toward The Writer. If you see an "opportunity" that violates that law, you should look at it with extreme skepticism.
*sigh* Annoying, but predictable.
How does the GPL's "No Warranty" clause actually take effect? "Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License; they are outside its scope."
The clickwrap license restricts you only from using that copy; it doesn't restrict you from using any copy that doesn't include the clickwrap. Anyone who wants to bypass the clickwrap license does so by modifying the software to remove the clickwrap code and "redistributing" it to him/herself.
Sounds perfect... except for the entity hoping to be protected by the clickwrap license. Big headache.
Lawyers? Comments?
Have your lawyers read Eben Moglen on enforcing the GPL.
There you go, then! I want to hear from this guy's coworkers -- what part of the project has he been letting down? :)
So if what you have is a small number of developers each working alone in a style nobody else can code in on a piece of the project nobody else understands, how do you expect this system to be maintained? It sounds to me like in the long run you're dead anyway.
- which tasks they worked on yesterday
- how long they've spent on each task
- how much more time each task will take to complete
- what they're going to be working on today
- any blocking issues they might have
(Any design, problem solving, etc. is deferred till after the meeting, and only the people that need to be involved in those discussions are pulled in.)The project manager (who is not a developer and not a manager manager) is responsible for keeping track of the tasks and the hours and making that information available. It's always clear who has responsibility for what and who's blocking whom from getting their work done.
This does a great job of keeping developers productive, and since developers get to make their own estimates (and the total amount of work that can get done in a development cycle is based on 40-hour weeks), it also does a good job of keeping them sane.
(It works well with eXtreme Programming practices like pair programming and story-driven design, too.)
I think that's sort of the point. Small niche players have an incentive to produce quality products, because they're going after the small segment of the market that is willing to pay more for quality. Dominant players have less incentive -- they've already got their current market share with their current quality level, so why should they change? Particularly if they have other things going for them -- strong brand identity (making customers less likely to want to switch), deep pockets (allowing them to win a price war), or vendor lock-in (making it hard for customers to switch) -- that make it difficult for a small player to use quality as a differentiator to eat into their market share.
GM may not make the best cars in the world, but they do (generally) make the cheapest in their market segments, and they have a strong base of loyal customers that value the idea of owning a Chevy or a Pontiac more than they value fit and finish or MTBF. It's only in the last ten or fifteen years, with European and Japanese competition across all market segments, that they've been kicked into paying attention to quality and reliability.
(Of course, if the Big Three had the ability to exclude Honda and Toyota from the Interstate Highway System, it would be another story. )
I know what teleological means (have you noticed that the default assumption on /. is that everyone is an indifferently educated 16-year-old?), and I think that characterizes our situation very well. I'm glad we were able to establish that. I think most argument is wasted because people mistake a difference in first principles for an error in logic.
I'm not sure that's true -- for instance, I probably ought to read more ethical philosophy, and I'd argue that you ought to read more law and economics -- but I agree this conversation isn't likely to go anywhere.
Likewise.I'd suggest you look into the economic and legal theory of transaction costs -- Coase's The Firm, the Market, and the Law is a good, short, cheap, highly respected introduction that doesn't require a degree in either law or economics.
That might be an infringement of freedom of speech or freedom of the press, but it's not infringement of freedom to think, which I thought was what part of your definition of "the right to own intellectual property" was.
Not "simply" and not just "from the government's point of view". Look, if a law is absolutely, unequivocally, 100%, in all cases unenforcible, it has no force as a law. It may tell me some unpleasant things about the people making the laws, it may be a symptom of other problems... okay, it may even have "chilling effects", but it does not make it possible for the government to actually prevent me from thinking or knowing. It has roughly as much effect as passing a law that the sun shall always shine, or that bill that died in the Louisiana legislature or wherever it was setting pi equal to three on Biblical grounds.
You're confusing the history of property rights with their philosophical underpinnings. And I still don't understand what you think intellectual property is if it's a right that doesn't exclude any rights of others.
Who decides?
It seems to me that if you can say whether something is "correct" or not, it's not a judgement, it's a statement of fact. What I'm trying to get at is that, unless you believe that inalienable rights are what we're endowed with by our Creator, there are no facts with respect to rights, there is no "correctness" or "incorrectness".
And that's what we're arguing about. :) I'm saying there's no such thing as an inherent right, and even if there was, there's no way for us to tell whether intellectual property rights are more or less "inherent" than physical property rights, though we may find them more or less sensible or useful.
Now, it may be that "are there, or are there not inherent rights?" is itself a subjective question -- either you take them as a given, or you don't. If you think there's some way to demonstrate that the existence of inherent rights is more than an unproven hypothesis (albeit one under which our society operates), I'll be interested to see it. The fact that we have a word ("inalienable") for inherent rights doesn't prove that they exist, or that they are what we think they are.
All I'm saying is that those fictions are no more or less fictitious than, for instance, the right to physical property.
Nonsense. That's like saying you can't have a contract with more than two signatories. If I can sign a contract that obliges me to do certain things, and Jane and I can sign a contract that obliges the two of us to do certain things, then Jane and I can sign a contract with Doug that obliges us to abide by any contract he signs on our behalf, within certain restrictions. Doug can then go to Bob, show him the contract he's signed with Jane and I, and sign a contract with Bob under which Bob can have a reasonable expectation that Jane and I will do certain things. The contract Jane and I sign with Doug specifies that he can't commit our resources beyond a certain amount; the contract Bob signs with Doug specifies that Jane and I, not Doug, are liable for damages relating to the contract, and waives Bob's right to anything over and above the amount our contract with Doug specifies that he can commit.
This is an oversimplification, but it basically works. There's nothing magical about it, except the concept of contracts. (Whether you can enforce contracts without a gvoernment is an anarcho-capitalist debate that I don't want to get into -- my point is that in theory you don't need governments to have corporations, just contracts.)
That's not a right; that really is a law of nature, as long as there's no technology that allows someone else to prevent you from thinking something or take away your knowledge of it. And it's not property either. Property is by definition exclusive. The fundamental characteristic of a property right is that it allows you to exclude others from use of that property.
True. However, I would contend that the extension of that property of physical objects to a right of control over those shoes even when you're not wearing them is artificial. Even one person cannot usefully wear more than one set of shoes. Your right to exclude me from wearing your brown shoes while you're wearing your black shoes is artificial.
<sigh> I'm not trolling; I'm trying to make a philosophical point (which is a dangerous thing to do onIt looks like you believe in freedom of speech. How about freedom of association? How about the freedom to contract? Can I get together with a bunch of my friends and form an association called -- say -- "Microsoft Corporation"? With contracts specifying that we delegate to the officers of the association the power to exercise some of our rights on our behalf? And contracts between that association and other associations and individuals, that agree to deal with the association as a unit as far as debts, liability, and so on are concerned? How is the government involved there?
It looks like you believe in a right to own property, by which you apparently mean physical property. What makes the right to own physical property more "inalienable" than the right to own intellectual property? Certainly there are functional arguments (ideas cannot be used up, etc.), but those have nothing to do with "inalienable rights".
There's no such thing as an inalienable right. There are only social and legal conventions. You have a "right" to free speech because the majority of society recognizes that right, and has agreed on a legal system to support it. You have a "right" to own property because the majority of society respects that right, and has agreed on a legal system to support it.
We can argue about what kind of social and legal conventions we should have. But let's not draw arbitrary lines in the sand and say some conventions are as fundamental as laws of physics and other conventions are "created by government".
Oops - forgot the screenshot.
No, it's the proper, internationalized anti-aliasing that's been in the works for a while. For a good list of all the user-visible changes in Gnome 2, check out Havoc Pennington's "What's New in Gnome 2" page.
You are typing with Microsoft's code. No matter what you do in the context of the application, you have not "created" anything that Microsoft did not program into the application. Therefore, you cannot SELL what you did not create.
It's ALL Microsoft's property, and you have no right to it. You're paying for access to the code, not for the code outright. Just because you typed for hundreds of hours doesn't mean you've created anything. All you've really done when it comes right down to it is flipped a few bits on a computer.
Hell, not even your FILE NAME is your property, because essentially, all you did was enter a variable in a program, but that variable was planned for. Everything you type was anticipated down to the exact sequence (which is why you can't type in names they don't allow, or characters the file system can't interpret).
I'm kidding, of course. But it's not as clear-cut as you think.
After all, if, say, 100GP has a well-established market value of $1, how is getting 100GP as a result of an MMORPG server rolling random numbers any different from getting a $1 poker chip as a result of a video poker server rolling random numbers?
I'll bet most Slashdot readers can see a difference, but articulating that difference to a judge (or the Interstate Commerce Commission, or a state gaming board out to make a quick buck) could be difficult. Maybe the "software giants" just don't want to take that on.