So said by a starry-eyed british-columbian (you're from there, right?) who has **NO IDEA** of the continuous constitutional encroachment by the federal government, who doesn't have a foreign language, foreign laws, foreign customs shoved down his throat constantly, who doesn't have his economic interests quashed in favour of english canada
I couldn't agree less with your assessment. I'm not from B.C. (which has more than its share of prejudice against Quebec). I'm originally from a small English town in Quebec. I was there when Bill 101 was passed. I was there for the first referendum. Separation would destroy my country (not my nation - I don't want Canada to be a nation), and would not be in the interest of the people of Quebec. Nonetheless, I support the right - affirmed by the Supreme Court of Canada - to separate. It would be wrong as well as futile to thwart the democratic choice of a clear majority of Quebecers. Despite the bombastic rhetoric of a few Canadians, I'm sure the vast majority outside Quebec would agree with me. But it's pretty clear that people like you (who have here refused to even recognize a distinction between the people of France and the people of Quebec) won't listen to what people like me have to say. There's no use accusing me - because in the end the people of Quebec will have to work out their destiny among themselves.
given how english Canada hates the french, it would have been political suicide to buy french submarines
You have got to be kidding me. The British have a long history of hating the French; the Americans seem to think that even speaking the language a mark against a candidate for president. But Canadians? Meh. Rude jokes about French manliness, courage, etc. don't fly here they way they do in other English-speaking countries. We don't care a whole lot about France one way or the other. (That includes many Quebecois, who know that a sizable proportion of French are snobs who see the Quebecois as as country bumpkins with, as one such snob once told me, "un accent paysanne".) Dealings with America can be politically explosive. Dealings with France, not so much. Sure there's the "divorce Quebec" contingent, largely in the West - but most are clever enough to know the difference between Quebec and France, and we are oriented towards Asia anyway, not Europe or France.
You assert that I should be able to get by solely on public transport? You can see *no* reason for me to own a car?
He didn't say you have no reason to own a car; he said you should have no need to own a car. In other words, you should have the (practical) option not to.
I'll even pretend that if I was taking efficient public transport that my commute would not QUADRUPLE!
That is often the case for existing transit. It's why there's a need to invest in better transit, combined with good walkable transit-oriented development.
Your big mistake is to assume that everything will stay pretty much the same, except you won't have a car. That's not how it works. Roads and parking lots take a huge amount of space (many stores have parking lots several times the size of the building itself). With fewer cars, distances decrease significantly. When walking, biking, and taking transit are practical, many people choose to live more centrally, often forgoing the exorbitant $6,000-$7,000+ annual expense of keeping a car (or second car). Businesses respond by providing goods and services that make sense for people who don't have a vehicle to take things home (e.g., IKEA's $50 delivery service is peanuts beside the cost of car ownership).
Then there is no need to lug groceries on transit, or to use transit to trek off to the doctor. Shopping, medical services, and so on are within reasonable walking distance. Shopping doesn't have to be a weekly event - you can do most of it by buying a few things on your way home from work. You have six kids? Send some of them. My mother regularly sent me to buy groceries when I was a kid. Better still, you don't have to schedule play dates when you drive them to their friends' houses - they can make the trip themselves on foot or on transit. Occasional needs to carry large or heavy things are easily met by delivery services whose quality is bound to increase with demand.
I know this because I'm in my mid-30s; since my teens I have always lived within walking distance (no more than 15 minutes, usually less than 10) of most of these things: in Ottawa, in Toronto, in Calgary, in Switzerland, and in a suburb of Vancouver. The town I was in in Switzerland is about the size of your town: 70,000 people. The quality of life there was very high (I would rate it much higher than Canada), but I rarely had to step inside a vehicle of any kind due to local shops, services, and employment. Where I live now is still car oriented, but that's changing. From my suburban house I can walk to most shops and services within 5-10 minutes. My wife's commute by transit takes her twice as long as driving in light traffic (which it seldom is), but she is able to read or relax on the train. The local Safeway has a parking space reserved for a co-op vehicle (join the co-op for a few hundred dollars, then reserve it and pay for usage on those rare occasions when you need a car).
Frankly, Metro Vancouver is not that progressive despite its claims. But downtown, which has densified dramatically over the past 15 years, has experienced a drop in traffic as the number of people has increased, yet it is extremely trendy (to the point where it's too expensive). No-one is saying you shouldn't have the choice to own a car - only that you should also have the choice to not own one. The evidence is that given that choice, many people would take it.
Are Groklaw, etc, really suggesting that several standards bodies in several nations are all corrupt? And not one leak? Not one failed, incorruptible whistleblower?
Political failure is so commonplace as to be unremarkable. Whether due to corruption, ignorance, or other factors, it constantly afflicts more important politics than this. And it is often overlooked. The more it happens, the less exceptional it is and the more likely it is to be overlooked or accepted as simply the way things are. In that context, whistleblowers will be few and far between. You cannot take their absence - or, more importantly, an absence of reporting about them - as evidence of the integrity of a process (you certainly can't depend on the trustworthiness or relevance of reports on their incorruptibility or otherwise). Only a proper analysis of the process can determine its integrity. Though as others are pointing out, there are whistleblowers aplenty in this case.
This is excellent advice. We've done the next best thing. There's only one TV in the house, it's in our bedroom, and we only watch DVDs from the library. Our son's exposure to Disney etc. comes from daycare, hand-me-down clothes, and from gifts from friends (though I try to filter out the Disney), so it's not great, but it's more than I had hoped.
Incidentally, we didn't get rid of cable for him - we did it for ourselves. We found we weren't watching it. We watch want we want to, when we want to, and we read. I think we're much happier, not least because we don't see the travesty that is television news.
I like the Thomas the Tank Engine TV show. I'm sure I would have enjoyed it if it had been around when I was a kid. We often borrow it from the library and watch a couple of episodes together before bed. But then when he sees the toys, he wants them too, and the clothes, and so on. If the TV show was just a show, I would be happy. If the toys were just toys, I would be happy too. But they're a big system designed to capture kids.
Research has shown that children discriminate brands from a young age. Like adults, they are seduced by them - but children are too young to understand that. As a parent, I want my child to have the chance to make up his own stories. I don't want him hooked on certain (often inferior, less creative, and more expensive) products simply because of the branding. I don't want Disney to replace the older versions of Grimm's Fairy Tales and Mother Goose. (Actually, I much don't like Disney at all. I didn't grow up with it. I find it very American in a way that's foreign to my Canadian values. I am not speaking for other Canadians here, or criticizing their choices or those of Americans, but there it is.)
I don't want to tell anyone else how to bring up their kids. But for my child, I would rather see him playing with wooden blocks, Lego bricks, markers and paper, cardboard boxes, old telephones pots from the kitchen. He thinks Thomas is a friendly train. But it's not, it's marketing by a company for profit. Yet he commits emotionally to it. It's too early for him to bypass his own imagination for that of someone else. When he grows older, I want him to understand what brands are, and what they are not. Then if he wants to give his allegiance to Apple or Sony or Nike or whatever that's his choice. For now though, I want him to be free of them.
Trademarks support brands, and brands create and extend monopolies. Toys illustrate this best of all. Because while adults at least understand what brands are, and can make their choices, kids don't understand. They are at the mercy of brands. The problem of marketing to kids is much larger than this, but trademarks are certainly part of the problem. And despite adults' greater ability to make their own choices, they too are subject to brand monopolies.
Trademark law was created to benefit consumers. That purpose has changed. From Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks (p. 290):
in 1995, the U.S. Congress enacted a new kind of trademark law, the Federal Antidilution Act, which for the first time disconnects trademark protection from protecting consumers from confusion by knockoffs. The Antidilution Act of 1995 gives the owner of any famous mark -- and only famous marks -- protection from any use that dilutes the meaning that the brand owner has attached to its own mark. It can be entirely clear to consumers that a particular use does not come from the owner of the brand, and still, the owner has a right to prevent this use. While there is some constitutional free-speech protection for criticism, there is also a basic change in the understanding of trademark law -- from a consumer protection law intended to assure that consumers can rely on the consistency of goods marked in a certain way, to a property right
Trademarks are undergoing the same change as copyright and patent. These began as privileges intended to promote the public good. They have been transformed into property rights for private benefit, at the expense of the public they were originally intended to serve.
Trademarks are often abused to achieve an effect similar to copyright. For example, trademarks can be registered on names from the public domain. IANAL, and I know courts have ruled that this is not the purpose of trademarks, but they are used this way regardless. Want to publish a Conan story in Canada (where Robert E. Howard's works are unambiguously in the public domain)? Go ahead - but don't call it Conan. Or look at the continued abuses of the Olympics to force already-existing businesses to change their names.
Trademarks are used to create monopolies on whole categories of products. I have a young son and recently discovered how effective this is for toys. Toys have gone from being simple products to being cross-promoted product and entertainment lines. You no longer buy your child a toy train - you buy a Thomas the Tank Engine train. Sure, kids love Thomas, so there's some value there. But it pushes out competition and diversity, dominating the whole product category. How can you compete unless you too have a TV show, books, toy trains - the whole bit? One by one, the categories in toy stores are turning into brands. In a Toys R Us I found the "trains" section should simply have been labeled "Thomas and Friends" - because that's virtually all that was there (and boy was it overpriced). Now Disney seems to be trying to do the same thing with Cars.
Kids learn brands at a very young age, and I don't think they're good for kids. Despite my efforts, my son knew about Thomas by age 2. Then he started asking about other products. I taught him the word "logo" because I didn't want him to think "Dairyland" was the word for yoghurt. I want him growing up in a world of trains and cars and music and so on, not of Thomas(TM), Cars(TM), and Apple(TM). I want a chance to teach him what a brand is (and what it is not) before he assimilates them into the kinds of objects that exist in the world. Brands were supposed to enable consumer choice, not narrow the kinds of things we can think about.
In the end the average Joe Sixpack buys what he finds familiar. He doesn't make buying decisions based on facts or critical thinking or anything related to clear, precise, logical thought. Kinda scary when you think about it.
I don't think this phenomenon is limited to Joe Sixpack. I know plenty of intelligent, thoughtful people who, when confronted with new evidence about something they care about, try to fit the evidence to their opinions rather than the reverse. For one it's global warming, for another it's the evils of the United States, and so on. Not that their conclusions are necessarily wrong: but they are not rationally arrived at (perhaps they once were - if so, they no longer are). I imagine I'm different, but rationally I concede this must also apply to me.
To some extent, this is not a terrible strategy: it allows for rapid decision making and may be better than constant vacillation. Something similar has been described as a conservative principle:
The individual is foolish, but the species is wise, Burke declared. In politics we do well to abide by precedent and precept and even prejudice, for the great mysterious incorporation of the human race has acquired a prescriptive wisdom far greater than any man's petty private rationality.
I do not, in general, agree with this. It's all very well to talk about the wisdom of the species, but any given individual must judge precedent somehow. Rationality has significant flaws, but I'll take it over a "mysterious incorporation". Nonetheless, there is some truth here.
But I'm straying from the point. I think it is arrogant for us - with our various convictions about Linux, Microsoft, copyright, free markets, and so on - to claim to be exempt from the unthinking judgments of a Joe Sixpack. We all make most of our judgments based on fixed categories, existing opinions, personal interests, and emotional attachments. It is a tragic problem for politics. I believe I recently saw a report of a study (on Slashdot?) that scientific evidence only contributes 15% of people's opinions (whatever that means). I saw another finding that sports fans are unable to see violations by their own team. This isn't even deliberate: one study participant figured the evidence presented him was faked, because he couldn't imagine his preferred team could play so cleanly. They didn't, but he was unable to see that in spite of his rational skepticism.
It's not enough to say the dangers of mercury are certain but the environmental benefit is not. You need to assess the magnitude of the risk. I understand that the consequences of global warming could be catastrophic. The overall dangers of widespread CFL bulbs use are relatively insignificant. It's an expected value calculation: probability times magnitude.
Yes: the public and scientists expect science to be objective and independent of judgments by those outside the scientific community. In order to function effectively, scientists and others must believe the myth of scientific objectivity.
But: science and politics are inseparable. Science has political motivations and political effects. Without the politics, it is meaningless. For example, one of the scholars quoted in the article suggests that "scientists should present scientific progress as our best hope for an improved future". The idea of progress itself is political: today and historically it has been politically contentious. What do we mean by progress - economic efficiency, environmental sustainability, quality of life, spirituality? Do we even believe it is possible? (Some conservatives would say human nature and human society don't really get better; some radicals would argue the myth of progress is dangerous.)
Philosophers of science explain that science is grounded in community standards that are not themselves scientific. For example, Habermas argues that the standards of evidence accepted by a scientific community rely on a consensus that cannot be arrived at scientifically. Thomas Kuhn, in his theory of scientific paradigms (origin of the expression "paradigm shift") explains that while scientists believe they choose theories that best fit the evidence (I will not say "truth" or "facts", because these lie in the domain of philosophy, not science, and are doubtful), but because those theories are productive in driving future research. Scientists depend on the myth of the objectivity of science in order to achieve the peer consensus necessary to do their work, but it is still a myth.
None of this is to say that science should not conform the scientific method, the norms and practices of the scientific community, and so on. It should. It has proven to be incredibly powerful and useful. It is simply an argument against trying to cut off science from politics. For that is impossible: every scientific community is built on and directed by human values and judgments that are themselves unscientific. Pretending that science is a purely rational enterprise not subject to human judgment conceals the values that drive it, making them impossible to question. Then science becomes a dangerous political weapon immune from political judgment.
Unfortunately, much of that judgment is flat-out dishonest. Many creationists, for example, have a field day with claims that evolution is "just a theory" without caring or understanding what that means. But I see a number of posts here arguing that science should just objectively evaluate the facts. It doesn't, it can't, - and frankly, if we want science to contribute to making human life better, rather than a means of exerting political control, it shouldn't: because "better" is a political question.
That may be true in scientific disciplines. Right now, I have about two dozen books from the university library. Only a couple of them would be available online. Intensive reading is also much easier with physical books, which I read far more than papers: one of my courses required students to read two books a week.
University libraries are one thing; public libraries another. The local public library is very popular. Students do their homework there, access the Internet, or hang out after school. They have children's programs and other events. The building looks out over a sports field, with a view of mountains beyond: it's the sort of place people like to be. I drop by there several times a week. I borrow a lot of DVDs, but I also peruse the books. The key, I think, is that it's close by - I can walk there or drop in on my way somewhere else. If a library is integrated into the community, somewhere nearby and convenient, I don't see any reason why it shouldn't thrive. Books, movies, forums about the future of copyright, whatever - it will find a role. Unfortunately most of our communities are planned so that activities are isolated and reachable only by car. A library treated as a warehouse, to which patrons must trek to take out and return materials, is likely doomed.
I think your description is somewhat idealized. There are plenty of ways to use money to influence politicians. I believe several have left public office for plum jobs in industry, for example - often with businesses connected to their job in government. For them, reelection didn't matter.
I am tremendously proud of Canadians for standing up in the thousands to let it be known they do not support the adoption of the failed copyright regime suffered by citizens the United States. Our action has been essential to preventing the adoption of this law - so far.
But we have also been very lucky. The previous government introduced a bill (admittedly not as bad as what is reported to be in the current plans). An election was called before it could become law. Timing may again be on our side: the current minority government is likely to fall in the near future. If so, the clock would probably be reset.
For us to really win this, we need meaningful consultation (i.e. where we not only talk, but the government listens) to ensure the views and interests of all Canadians are taken into account. Very few politicians understand why most Canadians would care - I suspect many of them are not quite sure what to make of the current outcry. Until recently, media stories seldom even reported that the issue had another side. Until our politicians acknowledge the significance of copyright and the public passion over the issue, we must keep fighting.
As far as the recent cable cuts go, what I am about to say is a conspiracy fantasy: I don't believe the U.S. is about to attack Iran. But if it were to do so, cutting off Internet might make good sense.
A couple of years ago, I attended a talk given by Iranian blogger Hossein Derakshan. He suggested that war with Iran would be much more politically difficult than the war with Iraq, because Iranian bloggers would tell the world about the suffering on the ground. And blogging is extremely popular in Iran. So, if the U.S. were to attack Iran, the aim might not be to censor what Iranians see of the rest of the world, but what the rest of the world sees happening in Iran.
Yeah, probably. But Canadian libel laws are so harsh it's probably not worth taking the risk. They place the burden of proof on the defendant, who must demonstrate that the statement was true. IANAL.
The expression/idea dichotomy is a doctrine in copyright law; the legal usage of the word "idea" does not correspond well to what most people mean by the word.
What would you call the intangible product of intellectual and creative activity? "Idea" and "ideas" seem to capture it the best. "Work" is problematic because it assumes those ideas have been captured in a medium. I realize copyright doesn't protect ideas until that has happened, but once it has happened it nevertheless protects intangibles.
The idea/expression dichotomy is actually quite problematic. One court case found that the "idea" of a drawing of Mickey Mouse was "mouse" - which rather ignores all the other ideas that go into the image of Mickey, from the big ears and white gloves to the various feelings people have about Disney, their childhoods, and so on. What is the "idea" of a song? If you can't define one, does that mean every other intangible part of a song is protected? A character can be considered an idea according to copyright law. It's all very mixed up, and makes some significant assumptions at odds with what we now know about human communication (e.g. there is not any one idea corresponding to an expression, but a wide variety of interpretations, implications, connections to different contexts, etc. - but copyright imagines a single Platonic transcendental idea to which a given expression refers). I saw a fantastic presentation on this by Natasha Gerolami of the University of Western Ontario, but unfortunately I haven't been able to find a published version of what she said.
My point is that the law is one thing, ordinary language is another, and the actual world these attempt to refer to and categorize is something else altogether.
That was my reaction, but they call it a "website that's not online". However, from the sounds of it, the users probably don't own the computers, so I would still call it access control.
If it is DRM, itt appears to have a major advantage of most systems: the users want it to enforce its rules.
she noticed that people turned away when certain images came up on screen. . ..
"The way people were looking at the photos was embedded in the social system that already existed in the community," she said.
"People would come in and out of the area of the screen to look when they could look."
Your argument makes sense. Here is a comment from a discussion elsewhere:
how many students from non-rich countries do you know who are studying in the humanities? Being "an educated person from a non-rich country" is to a large degree synonymous with "a person from a non-rich country with a science, economics or business degree". So if there's a positive correlation between higher levels of education and belonging to a terrorist organization (which could at least partly be an artifact of selection bias as alluded to in some of the comments above) it shouldn't be a surprise that engineering backgrounds appear to be correlated with belonging to a terrorist organization. But this doesn't mean there's ANYTHING about the "engineering mindset" (whatever the hell that is) that makes one more likely to join one.
Disconnecting your customers (or suing them or otherwise alienating them) is business suicide.
This guy understands that suing kids and old ladies looks bad and they don't have much money. Big companies, on the other hand, have lots of money and little sympathy:
I suggest we shift the focus of moral pressure away from the individual P2P file thief and on to the multi billion dollar industries that benefit from these countless tiny crimes
The problem is that filtering, as proposed by this guy and others, sideswipes innocent users who will find their communications spied upon and legitimate uses of the network blocked. But I don't think this fellow particularly cares. For him, Chinese censorship is a promising sign, not an indication that his proposal has ominous implications:
Another show of power was Google's acceptance of the Chinese Governments censorship conditions.
I shouldn't call it "his" proposal though. This is part of a coordinated effort by the recording industry to institute ISP filtering worldwide. We have AT&T's efforts in theU.S., a position paper in Canada, and legislation in France and Belgium.
You're right to compare music to software. The key characteristic of software is that it's infrastructure: when software becomes cheap and plentiful, we are able to use it for more things. Even if the software industry shrank in dollar terms, the overall benefit on the economy would be positive. But it won't shrink in dollar terms because software is infrastructure for more software: the more useful software we can have, the more useful software we can - and will - make.
Music is similar. It is used in movies, videogames, TV shows, YouTube videos. It's used at restaurants, clubs, schools, and so on. When music goes down in price, it makes these other activities more efficient, benefiting the economy. And, like software, new music is made of old music. It becomes easier to make more music. It is not obvious that the overall music industry will shrink.
Music has one other clear benefit. It is a social good. People use it to cope with stress, to relate to others, to communicate. They play music to learn, to engage their minds, to express themselves. When these uses are more accessible, we all benefit - economically, but even more importantly in other ways. It improves human well-being.
The digital economy isn't going to collapse because of an abundance of music any more than science will collapse because of an abundance of mathematics.
The U.S. has roughly ten times our population, so in terms of political significance it's more like 380,000 Americans. At one point we had about two people joining every minute. Imagine if every 3 seconds an American signed up to protest the DMCA.
all the nations you mentioned as having better mobility are white nations. where is the bulk of our poverty in America? it is with the blacks and hispanics.
Let me be quite clear. Race is not a credible explanation for the lack of income mobility in the United States.
First, my comment is about income mobility, not poverty. According to the study, "When the data are not controlled for income, blacks and whites have similar changes of having adult incomes higher than their parents." In other words, though middle class blacks are less likely than whites to achieve higher incomes than their parents, they do not skew the numbers overall because there are more poor blacks and they are likely to achieve higher incomes.
Second, France is nearly 10% Muslim. Over 18% of Canadians are foreign born, and the vast majority of immigrants come from places other than Europe. The comparable number for the U.S. is 11%. In 2001, 13.4% of Canadians identified themselves as visible minorities. That is obviously much less than the U.S., which is about 13% black and 12% Hispanic. Nevertheless, Canada has relatively high income mobility even when compared to many countries with less diverse populations. Finally, the United States has a relatively high immigration rate when compared to European countries; this should result in higher income mobility as the children of immigrants from developing countries gain an education and climb the ladder.
Third, the United States suffers from a great deal income inequality when compared to the other countries I listed - not just at the low end, but also at the high end. This is a far more likely explanation for the lack of mobility. The greater the variation in parental income, the greater the effect that is likely to have on children (e.g. because of private schooling, social connections, etc.). Many of the causes of this are well-known, and would be likely to reduce income mobility. But I don't want to appear to attack the U.S. here - the situation truly is unfortunate. I only want to point out that the original claim that the U.S. is particularly open to mobility is mistaken.
Unfortunately this is not the case. The recent Pew study on income mobility found that:
in America, about half of the advantages of having a parent with a high income are passed on to the next generation. This means that one of the biggest predictors of an American child's future economic success . . . is predetermined and outside that child's control. . . .
There is little available evidence that the United States has more relative mobility than other advanced nations. . . . a number of countries, including Denmark, Norway, Canada, Sweden, Germany, and France have more relative mobility than does the United States. . . . Compared to the same peer group, Germany is 1.5 times more mobile than the United States, Canada nearly 2.5 times more mobile, and Denmark 3 times more mobile.
This in turn implies that the society is not making the best economic use of its citizens, for in many cases their potential is not being fulfilled and their contributions are not being rewarded (or encouraged).
Copyleft licenses depend on copyright. But they can't afford to pay a penny in tax, or to track all their contributors and copyright holders. (This latter problem applies to collaborative works more generally.) Perhaps there's some way to craft an exemption when material is released under an open license, but it doesn't seem obvious and would risk locking out innovation in licenses and business models (perhaps a fair trade for all the innovation the scheme might encourage).
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I couldn't agree less with your assessment. I'm not from B.C. (which has more than its share of prejudice against Quebec). I'm originally from a small English town in Quebec. I was there when Bill 101 was passed. I was there for the first referendum. Separation would destroy my country (not my nation - I don't want Canada to be a nation), and would not be in the interest of the people of Quebec. Nonetheless, I support the right - affirmed by the Supreme Court of Canada - to separate. It would be wrong as well as futile to thwart the democratic choice of a clear majority of Quebecers. Despite the bombastic rhetoric of a few Canadians, I'm sure the vast majority outside Quebec would agree with me. But it's pretty clear that people like you (who have here refused to even recognize a distinction between the people of France and the people of Quebec) won't listen to what people like me have to say. There's no use accusing me - because in the end the people of Quebec will have to work out their destiny among themselves.
You have got to be kidding me. The British have a long history of hating the French; the Americans seem to think that even speaking the language a mark against a candidate for president. But Canadians? Meh. Rude jokes about French manliness, courage, etc. don't fly here they way they do in other English-speaking countries. We don't care a whole lot about France one way or the other. (That includes many Quebecois, who know that a sizable proportion of French are snobs who see the Quebecois as as country bumpkins with, as one such snob once told me, "un accent paysanne".) Dealings with America can be politically explosive. Dealings with France, not so much. Sure there's the "divorce Quebec" contingent, largely in the West - but most are clever enough to know the difference between Quebec and France, and we are oriented towards Asia anyway, not Europe or France.
He didn't say you have no reason to own a car; he said you should have no need to own a car. In other words, you should have the (practical) option not to.
That is often the case for existing transit. It's why there's a need to invest in better transit, combined with good walkable transit-oriented development.
Your big mistake is to assume that everything will stay pretty much the same, except you won't have a car. That's not how it works. Roads and parking lots take a huge amount of space (many stores have parking lots several times the size of the building itself). With fewer cars, distances decrease significantly. When walking, biking, and taking transit are practical, many people choose to live more centrally, often forgoing the exorbitant $6,000-$7,000+ annual expense of keeping a car (or second car). Businesses respond by providing goods and services that make sense for people who don't have a vehicle to take things home (e.g., IKEA's $50 delivery service is peanuts beside the cost of car ownership).
Then there is no need to lug groceries on transit, or to use transit to trek off to the doctor. Shopping, medical services, and so on are within reasonable walking distance. Shopping doesn't have to be a weekly event - you can do most of it by buying a few things on your way home from work. You have six kids? Send some of them. My mother regularly sent me to buy groceries when I was a kid. Better still, you don't have to schedule play dates when you drive them to their friends' houses - they can make the trip themselves on foot or on transit. Occasional needs to carry large or heavy things are easily met by delivery services whose quality is bound to increase with demand.
I know this because I'm in my mid-30s; since my teens I have always lived within walking distance (no more than 15 minutes, usually less than 10) of most of these things: in Ottawa, in Toronto, in Calgary, in Switzerland, and in a suburb of Vancouver. The town I was in in Switzerland is about the size of your town: 70,000 people. The quality of life there was very high (I would rate it much higher than Canada), but I rarely had to step inside a vehicle of any kind due to local shops, services, and employment. Where I live now is still car oriented, but that's changing. From my suburban house I can walk to most shops and services within 5-10 minutes. My wife's commute by transit takes her twice as long as driving in light traffic (which it seldom is), but she is able to read or relax on the train. The local Safeway has a parking space reserved for a co-op vehicle (join the co-op for a few hundred dollars, then reserve it and pay for usage on those rare occasions when you need a car).
Frankly, Metro Vancouver is not that progressive despite its claims. But downtown, which has densified dramatically over the past 15 years, has experienced a drop in traffic as the number of people has increased, yet it is extremely trendy (to the point where it's too expensive). No-one is saying you shouldn't have the choice to own a car - only that you should also have the choice to not own one. The evidence is that given that choice, many people would take it.
Political failure is so commonplace as to be unremarkable. Whether due to corruption, ignorance, or other factors, it constantly afflicts more important politics than this. And it is often overlooked. The more it happens, the less exceptional it is and the more likely it is to be overlooked or accepted as simply the way things are. In that context, whistleblowers will be few and far between. You cannot take their absence - or, more importantly, an absence of reporting about them - as evidence of the integrity of a process (you certainly can't depend on the trustworthiness or relevance of reports on their incorruptibility or otherwise). Only a proper analysis of the process can determine its integrity. Though as others are pointing out, there are whistleblowers aplenty in this case.
This is excellent advice. We've done the next best thing. There's only one TV in the house, it's in our bedroom, and we only watch DVDs from the library. Our son's exposure to Disney etc. comes from daycare, hand-me-down clothes, and from gifts from friends (though I try to filter out the Disney), so it's not great, but it's more than I had hoped.
Incidentally, we didn't get rid of cable for him - we did it for ourselves. We found we weren't watching it. We watch want we want to, when we want to, and we read. I think we're much happier, not least because we don't see the travesty that is television news.
I like the Thomas the Tank Engine TV show. I'm sure I would have enjoyed it if it had been around when I was a kid. We often borrow it from the library and watch a couple of episodes together before bed. But then when he sees the toys, he wants them too, and the clothes, and so on. If the TV show was just a show, I would be happy. If the toys were just toys, I would be happy too. But they're a big system designed to capture kids.
Research has shown that children discriminate brands from a young age. Like adults, they are seduced by them - but children are too young to understand that. As a parent, I want my child to have the chance to make up his own stories. I don't want him hooked on certain (often inferior, less creative, and more expensive) products simply because of the branding. I don't want Disney to replace the older versions of Grimm's Fairy Tales and Mother Goose. (Actually, I much don't like Disney at all. I didn't grow up with it. I find it very American in a way that's foreign to my Canadian values. I am not speaking for other Canadians here, or criticizing their choices or those of Americans, but there it is.)
I don't want to tell anyone else how to bring up their kids. But for my child, I would rather see him playing with wooden blocks, Lego bricks, markers and paper, cardboard boxes, old telephones pots from the kitchen. He thinks Thomas is a friendly train. But it's not, it's marketing by a company for profit. Yet he commits emotionally to it. It's too early for him to bypass his own imagination for that of someone else. When he grows older, I want him to understand what brands are, and what they are not. Then if he wants to give his allegiance to Apple or Sony or Nike or whatever that's his choice. For now though, I want him to be free of them.
Trademarks support brands, and brands create and extend monopolies. Toys illustrate this best of all. Because while adults at least understand what brands are, and can make their choices, kids don't understand. They are at the mercy of brands. The problem of marketing to kids is much larger than this, but trademarks are certainly part of the problem. And despite adults' greater ability to make their own choices, they too are subject to brand monopolies.
Trademark law was created to benefit consumers. That purpose has changed. From Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks (p. 290):
Trademarks are undergoing the same change as copyright and patent. These began as privileges intended to promote the public good. They have been transformed into property rights for private benefit, at the expense of the public they were originally intended to serve.
Trademarks are often abused to achieve an effect similar to copyright. For example, trademarks can be registered on names from the public domain. IANAL, and I know courts have ruled that this is not the purpose of trademarks, but they are used this way regardless. Want to publish a Conan story in Canada (where Robert E. Howard's works are unambiguously in the public domain)? Go ahead - but don't call it Conan. Or look at the continued abuses of the Olympics to force already-existing businesses to change their names.
Trademarks are used to create monopolies on whole categories of products. I have a young son and recently discovered how effective this is for toys. Toys have gone from being simple products to being cross-promoted product and entertainment lines. You no longer buy your child a toy train - you buy a Thomas the Tank Engine train. Sure, kids love Thomas, so there's some value there. But it pushes out competition and diversity, dominating the whole product category. How can you compete unless you too have a TV show, books, toy trains - the whole bit? One by one, the categories in toy stores are turning into brands. In a Toys R Us I found the "trains" section should simply have been labeled "Thomas and Friends" - because that's virtually all that was there (and boy was it overpriced). Now Disney seems to be trying to do the same thing with Cars.
Kids learn brands at a very young age, and I don't think they're good for kids. Despite my efforts, my son knew about Thomas by age 2. Then he started asking about other products. I taught him the word "logo" because I didn't want him to think "Dairyland" was the word for yoghurt. I want him growing up in a world of trains and cars and music and so on, not of Thomas(TM), Cars(TM), and Apple(TM). I want a chance to teach him what a brand is (and what it is not) before he assimilates them into the kinds of objects that exist in the world. Brands were supposed to enable consumer choice, not narrow the kinds of things we can think about.
I don't think this phenomenon is limited to Joe Sixpack. I know plenty of intelligent, thoughtful people who, when confronted with new evidence about something they care about, try to fit the evidence to their opinions rather than the reverse. For one it's global warming, for another it's the evils of the United States, and so on. Not that their conclusions are necessarily wrong: but they are not rationally arrived at (perhaps they once were - if so, they no longer are). I imagine I'm different, but rationally I concede this must also apply to me.
To some extent, this is not a terrible strategy: it allows for rapid decision making and may be better than constant vacillation. Something similar has been described as a conservative principle:
I do not, in general, agree with this. It's all very well to talk about the wisdom of the species, but any given individual must judge precedent somehow. Rationality has significant flaws, but I'll take it over a "mysterious incorporation". Nonetheless, there is some truth here.
But I'm straying from the point. I think it is arrogant for us - with our various convictions about Linux, Microsoft, copyright, free markets, and so on - to claim to be exempt from the unthinking judgments of a Joe Sixpack. We all make most of our judgments based on fixed categories, existing opinions, personal interests, and emotional attachments. It is a tragic problem for politics. I believe I recently saw a report of a study (on Slashdot?) that scientific evidence only contributes 15% of people's opinions (whatever that means). I saw another finding that sports fans are unable to see violations by their own team. This isn't even deliberate: one study participant figured the evidence presented him was faked, because he couldn't imagine his preferred team could play so cleanly. They didn't, but he was unable to see that in spite of his rational skepticism.
It's not enough to say the dangers of mercury are certain but the environmental benefit is not. You need to assess the magnitude of the risk. I understand that the consequences of global warming could be catastrophic. The overall dangers of widespread CFL bulbs use are relatively insignificant. It's an expected value calculation: probability times magnitude.
Yes... but.
Yes: the public and scientists expect science to be objective and independent of judgments by those outside the scientific community. In order to function effectively, scientists and others must believe the myth of scientific objectivity.
But: science and politics are inseparable. Science has political motivations and political effects. Without the politics, it is meaningless. For example, one of the scholars quoted in the article suggests that "scientists should present scientific progress as our best hope for an improved future". The idea of progress itself is political: today and historically it has been politically contentious. What do we mean by progress - economic efficiency, environmental sustainability, quality of life, spirituality? Do we even believe it is possible? (Some conservatives would say human nature and human society don't really get better; some radicals would argue the myth of progress is dangerous.)
Philosophers of science explain that science is grounded in community standards that are not themselves scientific. For example, Habermas argues that the standards of evidence accepted by a scientific community rely on a consensus that cannot be arrived at scientifically. Thomas Kuhn, in his theory of scientific paradigms (origin of the expression "paradigm shift") explains that while scientists believe they choose theories that best fit the evidence (I will not say "truth" or "facts", because these lie in the domain of philosophy, not science, and are doubtful), but because those theories are productive in driving future research. Scientists depend on the myth of the objectivity of science in order to achieve the peer consensus necessary to do their work, but it is still a myth.
None of this is to say that science should not conform the scientific method, the norms and practices of the scientific community, and so on. It should. It has proven to be incredibly powerful and useful. It is simply an argument against trying to cut off science from politics. For that is impossible: every scientific community is built on and directed by human values and judgments that are themselves unscientific. Pretending that science is a purely rational enterprise not subject to human judgment conceals the values that drive it, making them impossible to question. Then science becomes a dangerous political weapon immune from political judgment.
Unfortunately, much of that judgment is flat-out dishonest. Many creationists, for example, have a field day with claims that evolution is "just a theory" without caring or understanding what that means. But I see a number of posts here arguing that science should just objectively evaluate the facts. It doesn't, it can't, - and frankly, if we want science to contribute to making human life better, rather than a means of exerting political control, it shouldn't: because "better" is a political question.
That may be true in scientific disciplines. Right now, I have about two dozen books from the university library. Only a couple of them would be available online. Intensive reading is also much easier with physical books, which I read far more than papers: one of my courses required students to read two books a week.
University libraries are one thing; public libraries another. The local public library is very popular. Students do their homework there, access the Internet, or hang out after school. They have children's programs and other events. The building looks out over a sports field, with a view of mountains beyond: it's the sort of place people like to be. I drop by there several times a week. I borrow a lot of DVDs, but I also peruse the books. The key, I think, is that it's close by - I can walk there or drop in on my way somewhere else. If a library is integrated into the community, somewhere nearby and convenient, I don't see any reason why it shouldn't thrive. Books, movies, forums about the future of copyright, whatever - it will find a role. Unfortunately most of our communities are planned so that activities are isolated and reachable only by car. A library treated as a warehouse, to which patrons must trek to take out and return materials, is likely doomed.
I'm not trying to excuse the U.S. I'm just skeptical of my own country's virtue.
I think your description is somewhat idealized. There are plenty of ways to use money to influence politicians. I believe several have left public office for plum jobs in industry, for example - often with businesses connected to their job in government. For them, reelection didn't matter.
I am tremendously proud of Canadians for standing up in the thousands to let it be known they do not support the adoption of the failed copyright regime suffered by citizens the United States. Our action has been essential to preventing the adoption of this law - so far.
But we have also been very lucky. The previous government introduced a bill (admittedly not as bad as what is reported to be in the current plans). An election was called before it could become law. Timing may again be on our side: the current minority government is likely to fall in the near future. If so, the clock would probably be reset.
For us to really win this, we need meaningful consultation (i.e. where we not only talk, but the government listens) to ensure the views and interests of all Canadians are taken into account. Very few politicians understand why most Canadians would care - I suspect many of them are not quite sure what to make of the current outcry. Until recently, media stories seldom even reported that the issue had another side. Until our politicians acknowledge the significance of copyright and the public passion over the issue, we must keep fighting.
As far as the recent cable cuts go, what I am about to say is a conspiracy fantasy: I don't believe the U.S. is about to attack Iran. But if it were to do so, cutting off Internet might make good sense.
A couple of years ago, I attended a talk given by Iranian blogger Hossein Derakshan. He suggested that war with Iran would be much more politically difficult than the war with Iraq, because Iranian bloggers would tell the world about the suffering on the ground. And blogging is extremely popular in Iran. So, if the U.S. were to attack Iran, the aim might not be to censor what Iranians see of the rest of the world, but what the rest of the world sees happening in Iran.
There's some interesting discussion on Bruce Schneier's blog. I'm hoping Global Guerrillas will return to the topic also.
Yeah, probably. But Canadian libel laws are so harsh it's probably not worth taking the risk. They place the burden of proof on the defendant, who must demonstrate that the statement was true. IANAL.
The expression/idea dichotomy is a doctrine in copyright law; the legal usage of the word "idea" does not correspond well to what most people mean by the word.
What would you call the intangible product of intellectual and creative activity? "Idea" and "ideas" seem to capture it the best. "Work" is problematic because it assumes those ideas have been captured in a medium. I realize copyright doesn't protect ideas until that has happened, but once it has happened it nevertheless protects intangibles.
The idea/expression dichotomy is actually quite problematic. One court case found that the "idea" of a drawing of Mickey Mouse was "mouse" - which rather ignores all the other ideas that go into the image of Mickey, from the big ears and white gloves to the various feelings people have about Disney, their childhoods, and so on. What is the "idea" of a song? If you can't define one, does that mean every other intangible part of a song is protected? A character can be considered an idea according to copyright law. It's all very mixed up, and makes some significant assumptions at odds with what we now know about human communication (e.g. there is not any one idea corresponding to an expression, but a wide variety of interpretations, implications, connections to different contexts, etc. - but copyright imagines a single Platonic transcendental idea to which a given expression refers). I saw a fantastic presentation on this by Natasha Gerolami of the University of Western Ontario, but unfortunately I haven't been able to find a published version of what she said.
My point is that the law is one thing, ordinary language is another, and the actual world these attempt to refer to and categorize is something else altogether.
That was my reaction, but they call it a "website that's not online". However, from the sounds of it, the users probably don't own the computers, so I would still call it access control.
If it is DRM, itt appears to have a major advantage of most systems: the users want it to enforce its rules.
Your argument makes sense. Here is a comment from a discussion elsewhere:
This guy understands that suing kids and old ladies looks bad and they don't have much money. Big companies, on the other hand, have lots of money and little sympathy:
The problem is that filtering, as proposed by this guy and others, sideswipes innocent users who will find their communications spied upon and legitimate uses of the network blocked. But I don't think this fellow particularly cares. For him, Chinese censorship is a promising sign, not an indication that his proposal has ominous implications:
I shouldn't call it "his" proposal though. This is part of a coordinated effort by the recording industry to institute ISP filtering worldwide. We have AT&T's efforts in theU.S., a position paper in Canada, and legislation in France and Belgium.
You're right to compare music to software. The key characteristic of software is that it's infrastructure: when software becomes cheap and plentiful, we are able to use it for more things. Even if the software industry shrank in dollar terms, the overall benefit on the economy would be positive. But it won't shrink in dollar terms because software is infrastructure for more software: the more useful software we can have, the more useful software we can - and will - make.
Music is similar. It is used in movies, videogames, TV shows, YouTube videos. It's used at restaurants, clubs, schools, and so on. When music goes down in price, it makes these other activities more efficient, benefiting the economy. And, like software, new music is made of old music. It becomes easier to make more music. It is not obvious that the overall music industry will shrink.
Music has one other clear benefit. It is a social good. People use it to cope with stress, to relate to others, to communicate. They play music to learn, to engage their minds, to express themselves. When these uses are more accessible, we all benefit - economically, but even more importantly in other ways. It improves human well-being.
The digital economy isn't going to collapse because of an abundance of music any more than science will collapse because of an abundance of mathematics.
The U.S. has roughly ten times our population, so in terms of political significance it's more like 380,000 Americans. At one point we had about two people joining every minute. Imagine if every 3 seconds an American signed up to protest the DMCA.
Let me be quite clear. Race is not a credible explanation for the lack of income mobility in the United States .
First, my comment is about income mobility, not poverty. According to the study, "When the data are not controlled for income, blacks and whites have similar changes of having adult incomes higher than their parents." In other words, though middle class blacks are less likely than whites to achieve higher incomes than their parents, they do not skew the numbers overall because there are more poor blacks and they are likely to achieve higher incomes.
Second, France is nearly 10% Muslim. Over 18% of Canadians are foreign born, and the vast majority of immigrants come from places other than Europe. The comparable number for the U.S. is 11%. In 2001, 13.4% of Canadians identified themselves as visible minorities. That is obviously much less than the U.S., which is about 13% black and 12% Hispanic. Nevertheless, Canada has relatively high income mobility even when compared to many countries with less diverse populations. Finally, the United States has a relatively high immigration rate when compared to European countries; this should result in higher income mobility as the children of immigrants from developing countries gain an education and climb the ladder.
Third, the United States suffers from a great deal income inequality when compared to the other countries I listed - not just at the low end, but also at the high end. This is a far more likely explanation for the lack of mobility. The greater the variation in parental income, the greater the effect that is likely to have on children (e.g. because of private schooling, social connections, etc.). Many of the causes of this are well-known, and would be likely to reduce income mobility. But I don't want to appear to attack the U.S. here - the situation truly is unfortunate. I only want to point out that the original claim that the U.S. is particularly open to mobility is mistaken.
This in turn implies that the society is not making the best economic use of its citizens, for in many cases their potential is not being fulfilled and their contributions are not being rewarded (or encouraged).
Copyleft licenses depend on copyright. But they can't afford to pay a penny in tax, or to track all their contributors and copyright holders. (This latter problem applies to collaborative works more generally.) Perhaps there's some way to craft an exemption when material is released under an open license, but it doesn't seem obvious and would risk locking out innovation in licenses and business models (perhaps a fair trade for all the innovation the scheme might encourage).