That's an interesting point! Assume for a moment that everyone who can "afford" (by some definition) software buy it. The rest steal it. We're assuming here, for the sake of simplicity, that all pirates would simply do without the software if purchase was the only means to acquire it.
Now, if you remove the pirates here, we don't see any increase in software sales (by definition), but the productivity of all those pirates goes down.
Philip Bond, the Commerce Department's under secretary for technological policy, said cyber-pirates steal an estimated $12 billion worth of technology and goods a year, according to the Business Software Alliance. American leadership in computers and software is "very much at stake" because of piracy, he said.
Right... Because people pirate software, American companies are going to loose out to foreign companies, since software produced overseas is much harder to pirate. Oh yeah, and all those countries have more clout that the US government does when it comes to getting foreign governments to cooperate with enforcements efforts. Yep, American Leadership in Software Development is definatley at stake. Uh-huh. Yep.
it's also been shown that they have used the net to transmit messages, and now maybe even TV.. if putting harsh restrictions on cryptography can hinder him as well, what all is lost?
They also used air to encode those verbal messages! Let's only let people we know for sure are not terrorists use air.
They already HAVE strong crypto; the cat's out of the bag. Also, you point out that they may be using code talk and television. If that the case, how are crypto controls supposed to do anything except keep law abiding people like you and I from protecting our privacy. The terrorists of the world won't worry too much about using "banned encryption software/hardware"
It's sorta like gangstas with AK-47s. They ain't legal, but the badguys have them.
It's no crime. Maybe MAPS's strategy is bad, as if my ISP allows spammers to operate, those with MAPS-using ISPs won't get my mail.
If I make a list of spammers (according to my own definition) and post it on the web, and you decide to hunt them down and kill them, does that make me an accessory to murder? I hope not.
I should still be OK if I post the list and say "somebody oughta kill these f&ckers". Jim Bell's case might have proved me wrong on this one, I forget the details
Well, since you're a person, and Adobe sells a software program, they'd have a harder time nailing you for infringing on their mark.
Yes, Illustrator is a common english word. But it also a widely recognized mark. When somone says "send me the illustrator files with the log art", everyone infers that they're talking about files created in Adobe Illustrator.
And if my spotty memory serves me well, adobe was the first to use the word Illustrator to describe a vector-based drawing program.
I also use speakeasy. Have 5 ips, and run several servers - no problems. I have heard friends complain about various DSL woes, but everything has been very smooth with speakeasy. I just hope Covad doesn't die, though speakeasy has sent email assuring users that if they do, they have plans to migrate users.
Go back and read the original post. I don't know about the license, but it's clear you weren't paying attention to the poster. You go to the trouble of quoting "copy and hack the SOURCE as much as you like", then come back saying "Read the license! you can't distribute modified binaries!" The original poster seemed to be saying that "screw modified binaries, we can distribute modified source".
I don't know whether or not that's true, but your point is invalid either way.
It's really a shame that it's so traditional. The problem I always had with, for example, ACM Collegiate programming contests is that the teams are encouraged to work very quickly in order to maximize their points.
So what's supposed to be a programming competetition becomes a hacking competition. This clock-is-ticking sort of setup makes it easy to rank people based on simple criteria:
Is the solution correct?
Relative to other competitors, when did it get sumitted.
Many problems were just classic CS problems (sorting, graph traversal,...) written up in a nice paragraph about Woolies or whatnot, so thinking of a solution is usually not too difficult - especially when you can bring books that contain the algorithm in question.
A more interesting approach (though the tendency to go for AI problems is high), is to work it out so that the programs themselves compete. See this link for a contest set up by a former professor of mine. The problem given to contestants is "write a program that plays chinese checkers". After several months of development, the programs face off.
That example is a little more of an AI competition than a programming one, but there are other grounds on which a programs can compete. More mainstream things might be creating very optimized code - measured in instructions, or memory usage, or a combination of the two. These sorts of contests give a better indication of how good a programmer is than hack-up-a-slightly-modified-depth-first-search-in- 7-minutes-or-less.
From reports I've heard from friends who've travelled in the third world, places like Ghana or Nepal have a lot of non-schedule-oriented citizens.
This doesn't do very well for Development, but neither are they nations of criminals.
Re:One man's child labor abuse is another mans liv
on
Nike: Just Don't Do It
·
· Score: 2
The solution to this is for corporations to pay a reasonable wage to the workers.
90% of the cost of a pair of shoes to nike does not go to manufacturing wages. You're paying for materials (and R&D for the same?), but mostly marketing, marketing, marketing.
I suspect a small reduction in advertizing, or (gasp!) a price increase of a few dollars (which really isn't going to hurt any of us overweight americans) would provide enough available funds to pay a living wage to a 3rd world factory worker.
If mom and or dad could get one tenth of the US minimum wage for their blood and sweat, then junior probably wouldn't have to work at all.
However, Nike's management team would rather have nice bonuses, and their Ad firm wants to spend far more than necessary on advertizing.
(DISCLAIMER: All facts presented here are actually assumptions, and statistics are made up)
Right. Except in America, the colonists kill even more of the existing NATIVE population and populated the continent with Europeans. The African people were about as able to defend their interests as the Native Americans were.
Ethiopia was colonized by western powers for many years. This imperialist behavior disrupted the natural development of their culture and government. When independence came, the governments that were set up were modeled after those that the imperialists had set up. The system was ill-suited to the culture.
Not America's fault - OK. But America is on the winning side of the colonial coin. Get a few hundred years ahead of another culture technologically, and all of a sudden it's OK to bilk them out of land and kill them.
Throw them a bone or two years later and some idiot calls you "the most generous people on the planet".
What you say is true. But there is a difference between eating some food (and thereby depriving someone else of some, theoretically), and driving an luxury sedan? Lots and lots of resources went into that luxury sedan - but we're well aware that resource scarcity is one of the main causes of human suffering.
The major problem with corporatism, is that those running the corporations have a perceived duty to maximize profit, regardless of morality or ethics. Legality and profit are the only two factors.
If living and caves and bartering for food would reduce the amount of pain and suffering that people on this planet experience, I'd probably burn my house and find a nice cave.
Maybe you wouldn't, but I think refusing to give up luxury so that others can survive is certainly bad, and maybe even 'evil'.
You make some good points, but your attitute and tone reek of thoughtless americanism.
Americans have far less leisure time than many 3rd world people. We also have low unemployment, a government that doesn't have civil wars every fifteen years, the ability to vote, and plumbing. I'd have a hell of a lot of leisure time too, if unemployment was at 80%, I couldn't read, hadn't seen a dentist in my entire life and was starving to death.
Low unemployment - how much of our economic strength is due to good old elbow grease, and how much is due to a history of western imperialism? I can't give you numbers, but it should be obvious that Western nations in general have a long history or mercantilist behavior.
Civil wars and voting: Yep, not too many civil wars. Nice thing about a well run fake democracy - everyone thinks they can elect a new king every four years. We just witnessed how much your vote counts, too.
Illiteracy: I doubt that you'd be able to read if it weren't for the schooling you received. If public schools - paid for by the taxes from an economy built on the misery of others. If private - even worse.
Why are people killing themselves to get in? Not because we've destroyed their supposedly self sufficient economies. They try to come here because our system works and the one in thier home country does not. If you bust your ass in the USA, you can get ahead. That's not always guaranteed in other countries.
Their system doesn't work precisely because their native economy has been RAPED by Western Interests. Western nations have a tendency to buy off leadership in developing countries in order to produce nations of cash-crop producing indentured servants, who previous had no interest in growing tobacco, sugar cane, etc. However, their local leaders were "convinced" by Western interests to convert their agricultural systems. Those leaders aren't the ones starving.
but by the same token they would have difficulty believing the amount of money I get for sitting in front of a keyboard and monitor for 8 hours a day.
They'd be even more surprised at the amount of money you spend on worthless consumer bullshit. They'd probably have a hard time understanding how any person could care about a DVD of "The Matrix" than feeding their fellow man who is starving. Consumer culture has done a lot to ensure that most Americans never really think about whether they're spending their money in a socially responsible sort of way.
The system in the US is far from perfect, but you are trying to make it look far worse than it is, and I think you are doing it in quite a dishonest fashion.
I don't think I'm being dishonest at all. I'm not against free enterprise and capitalism. It's a proven system. However, American corporations engage in activities abroad that they are prohibited from engaging in domestically. This is done with the full support of the US government. Case in point: at the same time all the tobabacco hearing were going on in this country, the government was simultaniously using diplomacy to open foriegn markets to US tobacco products. We've also gone to war (as a nation, we have KILLED already poor and disadvantaged people so that we fat americans can pay a few cents less for gas).
For more info, check out Year 501 by Noam Chomsky.
Cuba is a good example. They are still under an embargo because of their affiliation with the now long-gone USSR.
Communism is bad for corporations, and anyone who represented themselves as remotely socialist was shunned or persecuted in the 20th century.
This is not to say that Cuba would be an economic powerhouse if they had been allowed to trade with the US. Regardless, the interests of western capitalists were certainly behind a lot of the "red scare". Communism is very good at selling itself to the working class. The rich in this country recognized this, and engaged in a lot of propaganda in order to preempt a socialist revolution.
Slashdot Mirror
That's an interesting point! Assume for a moment that everyone who can "afford" (by some definition) software buy it. The rest steal it. We're assuming here, for the sake of simplicity, that all pirates would simply do without the software if purchase was the only means to acquire it.
Now, if you remove the pirates here, we don't see any increase in software sales (by definition), but the productivity of all those pirates goes down.
Perhaps they can't get any work done at all...
haha
Right... Because people pirate software, American companies are going to loose out to foreign companies, since software produced overseas is much harder to pirate. Oh yeah, and all those countries have more clout that the US government does when it comes to getting foreign governments to cooperate with enforcements efforts. Yep, American Leadership in Software Development is definatley at stake. Uh-huh. Yep.
I'm not even sure where the "you can't talk, even hypothetically, about assinating our leaders" thing ever came from.
All of a sudden it's illegal to use the words "kill" and "president" in the same day, let alone sentence.
The SS is rightfully paranoid, that's what they're paid to be, but sometimes it's like "can't you read?!"
They also used air to encode those verbal messages! Let's only let people we know for sure are not terrorists use air.
They already HAVE strong crypto; the cat's out of the bag. Also, you point out that they may be using code talk and television. If that the case, how are crypto controls supposed to do anything except keep law abiding people like you and I from protecting our privacy. The terrorists of the world won't worry too much about using "banned encryption software/hardware"
It's sorta like gangstas with AK-47s. They ain't legal, but the badguys have them.
That's pretty interesting. All you have to do is run a (really really long) statistical process on bits, until you hit MS office.
You don't need to keep them on disk, just serialize them and have a program that will produce one given the correct integer input.
Then I'll (independently) figure out which one exactly resembles MS office X.Y, and publish my results.
So long as MS's lawyers don't read this message, we'll be scott free!
Except...
All the ISPs that subscribe gave them authority, that's who. That's not nobody.
It's no crime. Maybe MAPS's strategy is bad, as if my ISP allows spammers to operate, those with MAPS-using ISPs won't get my mail.
If I make a list of spammers (according to my own definition) and post it on the web, and you decide to hunt them down and kill them, does that make me an accessory to murder? I hope not.
I should still be OK if I post the list and say "somebody oughta kill these f&ckers". Jim Bell's case might have proved me wrong on this one, I forget the details
Uh, we're talking about identifying known shoplifters. Juggling books is not likely to confuse facial recognition software.
Hmm... maybe if you're juggling books with faces on the cover?
Read the story's headline. Classic /. sensationalism ...
Yes, Illustrator is a common english word. But it also a widely recognized mark. When somone says "send me the illustrator files with the log art", everyone infers that they're talking about files created in Adobe Illustrator.
And if my spotty memory serves me well, adobe was the first to use the word Illustrator to describe a vector-based drawing program.
I also use speakeasy. Have 5 ips, and run several servers - no problems. I have heard friends complain about various DSL woes, but everything has been very smooth with speakeasy. I just hope Covad doesn't die, though speakeasy has sent email assuring users that if they do, they have plans to migrate users.
Go back and read the original post. I don't know about the license, but it's clear you weren't paying attention to the poster. You go to the trouble of quoting "copy and hack the SOURCE as much as you like", then come back saying "Read the license! you can't distribute modified binaries!" The original poster seemed to be saying that "screw modified binaries, we can distribute modified source".
I don't know whether or not that's true, but your point is invalid either way.
So what's supposed to be a programming competetition becomes a hacking competition. This clock-is-ticking sort of setup makes it easy to rank people based on simple criteria:
- Is the solution correct?
- Relative to other competitors, when did it get sumitted.
Many problems were just classic CS problems (sorting, graph traversal,A more interesting approach (though the tendency to go for AI problems is high), is to work it out so that the programs themselves compete. See this link for a contest set up by a former professor of mine. The problem given to contestants is "write a program that plays chinese checkers". After several months of development, the programs face off.
That example is a little more of an AI competition than a programming one, but there are other grounds on which a programs can compete. More mainstream things might be creating very optimized code - measured in instructions, or memory usage, or a combination of the two. These sorts of contests give a better indication of how good a programmer is than hack-up-a-slightly-modified-depth-first-search-in- 7-minutes-or-less.
Find a nice compact expression of the Axiom of Choice. One of the most interesting math objects ever. But is it true?
check out the1thatgotaway
Lots of tasteful flash work.
From reports I've heard from friends who've travelled in the third world, places like Ghana or Nepal have a lot of non-schedule-oriented citizens.
This doesn't do very well for Development, but neither are they nations of criminals.
90% of the cost of a pair of shoes to nike does not go to manufacturing wages. You're paying for materials (and R&D for the same?), but mostly marketing, marketing, marketing.
I suspect a small reduction in advertizing, or (gasp!) a price increase of a few dollars (which really isn't going to hurt any of us overweight americans) would provide enough available funds to pay a living wage to a 3rd world factory worker.
If mom and or dad could get one tenth of the US minimum wage for their blood and sweat, then junior probably wouldn't have to work at all.
However, Nike's management team would rather have nice bonuses, and their Ad firm wants to spend far more than necessary on advertizing.
(DISCLAIMER: All facts presented here are actually assumptions, and statistics are made up)
Because I'm an American.
That's why.
The difference is, I don't feel the need to delude myself into thinking such a lifestyle is THE RIGHT THING TO DO.
Right. Except in America, the colonists kill even more of the existing NATIVE population and populated the continent with Europeans. The African people were about as able to defend their interests as the Native Americans were.
This story makes a nice point.
Not America's fault - OK. But America is on the winning side of the colonial coin. Get a few hundred years ahead of another culture technologically, and all of a sudden it's OK to bilk them out of land and kill them.
Throw them a bone or two years later and some idiot calls you "the most generous people on the planet".
Right.
The major problem with corporatism, is that those running the corporations have a perceived duty to maximize profit, regardless of morality or ethics. Legality and profit are the only two factors.
If living and caves and bartering for food would reduce the amount of pain and suffering that people on this planet experience, I'd probably burn my house and find a nice cave.
Maybe you wouldn't, but I think refusing to give up luxury so that others can survive is certainly bad, and maybe even 'evil'.
Americans have far less leisure time than many 3rd world people. We also have low unemployment, a government that doesn't have civil wars every fifteen years, the ability to vote, and plumbing. I'd have a hell of a lot of leisure time too, if unemployment was at 80%, I couldn't read, hadn't seen a dentist in my entire life and was starving to death. Low unemployment - how much of our economic strength is due to good old elbow grease, and how much is due to a history of western imperialism? I can't give you numbers, but it should be obvious that Western nations in general have a long history or mercantilist behavior.
Civil wars and voting: Yep, not too many civil wars. Nice thing about a well run fake democracy - everyone thinks they can elect a new king every four years. We just witnessed how much your vote counts, too.
Illiteracy: I doubt that you'd be able to read if it weren't for the schooling you received. If public schools - paid for by the taxes from an economy built on the misery of others. If private - even worse.
Why are people killing themselves to get in? Not because we've destroyed their supposedly self sufficient economies. They try to come here because our system works and the one in thier home country does not. If you bust your ass in the USA, you can get ahead. That's not always guaranteed in other countries. Their system doesn't work precisely because their native economy has been RAPED by Western Interests. Western nations have a tendency to buy off leadership in developing countries in order to produce nations of cash-crop producing indentured servants, who previous had no interest in growing tobacco, sugar cane, etc. However, their local leaders were "convinced" by Western interests to convert their agricultural systems. Those leaders aren't the ones starving.
but by the same token they would have difficulty believing the amount of money I get for sitting in front of a keyboard and monitor for 8 hours a day.
They'd be even more surprised at the amount of money you spend on worthless consumer bullshit. They'd probably have a hard time understanding how any person could care about a DVD of "The Matrix" than feeding their fellow man who is starving. Consumer culture has done a lot to ensure that most Americans never really think about whether they're spending their money in a socially responsible sort of way.
The system in the US is far from perfect, but you are trying to make it look far worse than it is, and I think you are doing it in quite a dishonest fashion. I don't think I'm being dishonest at all. I'm not against free enterprise and capitalism. It's a proven system. However, American corporations engage in activities abroad that they are prohibited from engaging in domestically. This is done with the full support of the US government. Case in point: at the same time all the tobabacco hearing were going on in this country, the government was simultaniously using diplomacy to open foriegn markets to US tobacco products. We've also gone to war (as a nation, we have KILLED already poor and disadvantaged people so that we fat americans can pay a few cents less for gas).
For more info, check out Year 501 by Noam Chomsky.
Cuba is a good example. They are still under an embargo because of their affiliation with the now long-gone USSR.
Communism is bad for corporations, and anyone who represented themselves as remotely socialist was shunned or persecuted in the 20th century.
This is not to say that Cuba would be an economic powerhouse if they had been allowed to trade with the US. Regardless, the interests of western capitalists were certainly behind a lot of the "red scare". Communism is very good at selling itself to the working class. The rich in this country recognized this, and engaged in a lot of propaganda in order to preempt a socialist revolution.
Well, compared to slashdot...
But who am I to argue with the godfather of soul.