> Why would breaking the laws en masse help anything?
Because if a large portion of the population is a 'criminal' then the law ceases to be effective, the judicial system would break down during the enforcement of the law. It only works when the percentage of criminals is relatively small compared to the 'upstanding citizens'.
> Firstly
that's secondly:)
> how are you intending to break the laws, by putting out products with a non-compliant DRM?
No, by breaking the DRM. While the EU seems to have gained the right to legislate criminal law they do not seem to have the right to set the penalties, only that there must be some. This will create the possibility for member states to set the punishment to nothing or to something very harsh, effectively negating the EU criminal legislative powers.
I want to consume my digital media wherever I want in whatever form suits me, so I want to have the ability to transcode and back up as much as I want. Obviously DRM is going to interfere with that, which means there will be efforts to insure that I can still exercise my fair use rights.
I agree with you that standardized DRM is better than lots of different formats, but the weak point in that argument is that many different formats are going to be harder to crack than a single one... This is just a typical example of the EU trying to close the barn after the horse has bolted, it is not going to be done in time to make any significant difference anyhow.
Personally I won't buy anything that is drm'd, I have tons of dvd's and cd's but I have them all stored on a hard drive because it is so much more convenient.
A DMCA type law (which will try to stop me from breaking the DRM) isn't going to be worth the paper it's written on, but it will serve to illustrate how much in the pockets of the corporations the EU politicians really are. DRM, even standardized DRM is not to the advantage of the consumer.
If the EU really wants to do something good for the copyright owners then they should work on a restructuring of copyright in such a way that consumers and copyright owners will *both* feel treated fairly, instead of wasting their time and our money on this standardized DRM nonsense.
If not then I think that copyright is going to die completely. After all copyright was invented in a time when copying something was about 1,000 times harder and slower than it is today, and when the medium, distribution and packaging was the excuse for the price charged.
The tricky bit here is that it depends on the law.
If a local law is 'restrictive', in other words it takes away a right that the EU explicitly grants then it can only apply to nationals of the country that made the law, for everybody else EU law is prevalent.
I can't make it make much more sense than that, it makes no sense (that a foreigner would have more rights abroad than in their own country is of course crazy) but that's the way the EU is structured.
This gives rise to all kinds of EU-based legal loopholes and that's one of the reasons I think that the memberstates are less than happy about this particular turn of events, they used to be 'boss in their own house' and now they find that only works when they're talking to their own nationals.
The above mentioned 'belgium route' has already caused some political parties to try to restrict the influx of dutch people that are fleeing their own country because they're discriminated against:
That's in dutch though, I'm not sure I'll be able to find an article that explains this craziness in english but I'll keep looking.
By the way this nasty trick is not used by every European country, some of them try to follow EU legislation in their local law wherever possible and practical, but some (in the above case the netherlands is an obvious example) do to their own subjects things they could not do to subjects of other memberstates.
In one sentence: the EU giveth, the memberstates can take away *from their own members*, but not from the members of other states.
So every memberstate has to respect EU law for all EU citizens in so far as rights are granted *except* for their own citizens who they may discriminate against.
I'm not sure what the situation is when it comes rights granted by your own government being trumped by a more strict EU law, but in practice local laws are usually far more strict than local laws, and off the top of my head I would not know of an example.
The original article is a direct consequence of the opening up of the market for the 'local gema/buma/whatever', who are now free (or will be free soon) to license their content with third parties for countries other than the one of their origin. Another driver is the fragmentation of the market here, a single stop for negotiations would facilitate things greatly for the smaller labels.
This is significant for content creators because the percentages paid out to artists/rights holders differ quite a bit from country to country due to the varying 'overhead'.
The DRM was relevant when this plan was first put forward, but with more and more companies switching to DRM free downloads and the speed at which the EU moves I doubt that that part of it (and the subsequent technical implementation and distribution) will happen in time to plug the holes.
I was at a presentation of the dutch BUMA last year where they were doing their best to impress on people that there was no need to switch when the time came but you can be sure they're pretty nervous about this development.
If there is going to be a free market wrt rights negotiations (and it looks like that is inevitable) then I don't doubt in the long term there will be only one such agency left standing.
I hope you can read dutch, just in case here is a translation of one section of the article:
"Discrimination of own subjects.
European law trumps national law. And yet, every member state is free to apply more strict rules to its own subjects. This so-called 'reverse discrimination' can not be remedied by Communitylaw, because it is a direct consequence of the limited powers of the Community. The obligations with respect to liberalization, such as described in the Communitylaw, has according to the current jurisprudence of the Court in principle only applicability to the cross border traffic. This indicates exactly the necessity of living (temporarily) abroad before you can use European law."
and the original dutch:
"Discriminatie van eigen onderdanen
Het Europees Recht gaat boven Nationaal Recht. Toch staat het elk lidstaat vrij, om haar eigen onderdanen aan strengere regels te onderwerpen. Deze zogeheten omgekeerde discriminatie" kan door het Gemeenschapsrecht niet worden verholpen, omdat deze het gevolg is van de beperkte bevoegdheid van de Gemeenschap. De verplichting tot liberalisering, zoals dat staat in het Gemeenschapsrecht, heeft namelijk volgens de geldende jurisprudentie van het Hof in beginsel alleen betrekking op het grensoverschrijdende verkeer. Welke dus exact de noodzaak aangeeft waarom het nodig is om (tijdelijk) in het buitenland te wonen, alvorens je gebruik mag makenvan het Europees recht."
I realize this is highly confusing but this really is the way how things are. In other words, if everybody in the EU would retain their nationality and would move to a different EU country (farfetched but theoretically possible) all the national laws would cease to be applicable overnight.
Yes, for the foreign parties it does, but for the local parties it doesn't !
I'll give you an example:
A dutch guy wants to marry a woman from Africa. In the netherlands he'd have to fulfill all kinds of BS requirements so he moves to Belgium, then marries the woman while in Africa and then moves with her to Belgium. In Belgium the dutch person can claim EU resident status, so EU law will trump belgium law.
(this is known as the 'belgium route' in the netherlands)
But in the Netherlands because he's Dutch he would not be able to do that, for a Dutch national in the Netherlands Dutch law trumps EU law.
(which is why the belgium route exists)
I know this sounds crazy but it really is true, an eu-resident but non-dutch person in the Netherlands has more rights in the Netherlands than a Dutch person does and conversely a Dutch person has more rights in other European countries than those countries nationals.
The EU is pretty fragmentary and local law trumps EU law when it comes to the citizens of your own country. This creates all kinds of loopholes.
Also, and I know that's a weird line of reasoning but I think that it is valid, the sooner we get through this shit the better, and if it takes getting these idiotic laws and then breaking them en masse then so be it.
The population is slowly starting to wake up to the idiocy of some of these laws. Right now chinese law (see the recent RIAA vs Baidu suit) is more reasonable when it comes to some of this stuff than the so called bastion of democracy and privacy that the EU is supposed to be.
We're being sold out here and that has never before been more apparent, maybe this is what it takes to get people to wake up, I sure hope so.
It's going to take more than a few torrent sites to get taken down for people to realize that their rights are being eroded left right and center.
- theft of time - theft of energy - theft of other resources
If it wouldn't be for spam I could probably run my email in the corner of some small machine, because of spam we've had to upgrade our server, just rejecting all those messages (thanks SpamHaus !!) takes up quite a bit of effort.
For every spam message sent that makes it through all the filtering that effort goes up because at a minimum it takes several seconds to delete the spam.
Multiply that by several hundreds of millions of spam messages sent every day and you're into significant damage.
Spam only works because even at a ridiculously low success rate the spammer still comes out ahead because their cost is essentially 0, especially if they use hijacked machines to do the original sending. If the cost to the spammer would be as low as 1/10th of a cent per message I doubt it would be profitable any more, but I don't have any proof to back that up. It would be interesting to see that figure though, what the 'break-even' cost of a spam message would be.
I think that a number in the 10's of millions would be more appropriate. Think about what you could do if someone convinced EV1/ThePLanet of donating all their unsold inventory as cpu cycles to BOINC...
According to your own sig science would be fine, bring it on. You've just made the perfect case for SETI, even if it doesn't do anything else that alone will save more lives than a cure for cancer ever will! I'll take the 'unpredictability' of those results for what it is when the shit hits the fan, until then there is no way of knowing. Maybe I just have more faith in humanity in being able to deal with such a crisis than you do, but if we're going that route anyway sooner is better than later.
Cancer is systemic though, a real cure for cancer would probably have some mechanical component. If you live long enough you *will* develop tumors, if you're going to die of them or not is another matter altogether. Put another way, if your average lifespan would be 35 years instead of about 70 in most 'developed' countries then the chance of dying from cancer would go down substantially.
And who knows, maybe the aliens *do* have the cure for cancer and by diverting cycles away from the 'search for aliens' we miss out on that:)
I'll ignore your strawman with your permission, and stick to your main points:
> Sure. However, wouldn't it be awful if, because everybody was expected to know English, people who didn't speak it natively were an > underclass? And don't you think that that would lead to the death of all those languages and cultures that you say would be nice to > preserve?
That is a real risk, but there are plenty of examples of peoples living in one country right now where they are separated in a caste system, I don't think the language in and of itself is to blame there.
Cultural poverty is a real risk though, and that would be something not to take lightly.
> "And what's worse is that minority ethnic groups that lose their language do not thereby become integrated with the mainstream society whose > language they adopt. Most Native American groups have lost their native languages to a colonial language, and they are still marginal.
Agreed. I've lived in Canada for a while and the treatment of minorities there is absolutely shameful. They are literally bought off. There is this weird collective guilt in Canada that the Canadian government seems to think can only be absolved with large amounts of money. Which is strange because the problem is not rooted in lack money but in something much simpler, lack of respect.
> The point is that what "universal language" really means in practice is "forced integration of other people into my culture and society, > where we do not value them and have no place for them.""
That's an excellent point, I had not thought it through that far, I think my idealism got the better of me.
But somehow there must be a way to do such a thing in a way that it doesn't lead to someone losing out. I don't want anybody to lose anything, I would like for all of us to gain something.
As they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions...
The biggest visible light laser that I've seen at work was about 3W with all the optics freshly cleaned and that's already pretty scary, it was quite an oldie (and it has died since) here is a picture of what it's output looked like when it was still operational:
Ancient picture, sorry for the quality. This is before it moved to it's last resting place at my friend Theo's house.
This is the handheld device that Theo built for the Genesis tour, Peter Gabriel would hold it much like a microphone and paint fans of light all over the concert hall.
These images are all from Jeffrey Shaw's website, he's an artist that was born in Australia and lived in the Netherlands for a long time. Theo and him did a lot of pretty awesome stuff, Jeffrey being the artistic type and Theo an amazing engineer and designer.
I'd hate to think what you could do with a bigger one...
And you & your buddy below (assuming you're not one and the same, always a risk with AC's) are a silly city spamming AC, and probably a moron to boot but that's fine by me.
Incidentally don't you find it funny that you don't even dare to reveal your nick in an online forum but instead hide behind another layer of cowardice ? You've got something to lose maybe ?
You're probably 15 and a real tough guy, but as long as you're AC I can't really know that, so until then I'll treat you like you're only 12 ok ?
Already you've made a couple of strategic mistakes, if you think real careful you'll be able to figure it out, I'll leave that as an excercise for you:)
And as for me being a vigilante, did you really think you could just go on and on spamming your shit without someone getting pissed off at you ? If you grafittied all over your dads newspaper each morning do you think he'd like that ?
Do you really think it is your god-given right to pollute the web with your stupid links ?
You're a tool, grow up, get an account (they're free, look, I'm cheap too and never 'got around' to signing up but they won't hold it against you here), forget your silly city shit and get a life. Maybe one day you'll grow up and have something to contribute to the discussions here instead of being a traffic whore.
I don't speak english natively, I overcame that difficulty, and so can anybody else. If the world would standardize on chinese tomorrow that would be just fine by me too... Culture is a great thing, and I hope that everybody will be able to retain their own somehow, but wouldn't it be nice if there was a way to communicate with everybody ?
Hm, troll ? Maybe, maybe not. When I was 14 or so one of my main motivations in learning english was to be able to work better with computers, all the books I could find where in english. In the early 80's when everybody was too busy solving problems instead of customizing their desktop and putting the right accents on letters that are unambiguous anyway.
The PC, the web and the laser printer changed all that. Mainframe printers were mostly 'chain' printers with a very limited (EBCDIC) character set, not much chance to get your fancy local script there, so people worked around it and on the whole were ok with the solutions.
Now we get top level domains with all kinds of accents in them and completely local scripts. This 'internationalization' of computing is a good thing for many people because they can now access the digital world in their own language, but at the same time it removes us one step from having a universal language, and the web could have easily given us that holy grail. Because not to be part of the cyber community or learning English ? It would have been an easy choice for most, one or two generations and English would have become a de-facto world standard.
The situation we have right now will long term probably mean that the amount of content on the net will be proportionally spread out over the various languages, with English only being a (slightly) disproportionally high fraction.
That universal language window of opportunity is probably lost for a long time, whether it ever was a serious possibility if of course open to debate, I for one had some hope that it was.
You have a problem with my sig ? I guess that's just too bad then... In case you didn't get it yet, the effect is quite measurable. I'm not promoting them, I've managed to - substantially - increase their cost of doing business and if enough people join up I wouldn't be surprised to see myminicity.com fold completely. But don't take my word for it, if you want I can mail you a logfile or two, I hope you can handle large attachements:)
See, myminicity.com is not set up smart, the multiplier is about 1:500 for an unchecked hit on a page, it does not increase the status of the minicity jokers one mm but it causes a big headache for the people that pay for the bandwidth. They foresaw people trying to fraudulently increase the traffic through fake hits on the pages but precisely because of that we can hit them hard without benefit to the jerks. (you need to run a little javascript on their page for the hit to count and the way I embed the pages that javascript does not get activated).
In other words, if before they could get a click every 50..100 hits on their pages or so on the minicities that are in the blacklist that has increased to one click every 60,000 hits or so. And every time they piss off a few more people that number goes up.
Long term myminicity can do only one thing, which is disable those accounts that have made it into the blacklist, they'll never turn a profit on those now.
But hey, you're an anonymous coward and we all know anonymous cowards are geniuses at economy, programming and networking so why would I even bother explaining all this to you, you already realized all of that.
Slashdot Mirror
In fact copyright and anti-pollution are the two exceptions to the EU not administering 'interior affairs'.
This thread is not about tech, though no doubt it would make some difference, it is all about licensing.
I don't think microsoft would have a problem paying microsoft their license fees...
Of course to the producer of the software licensing fees are irrelevant, but to others it would be a significant factor.
It would be really cool if google ever did a TCO analysis of their farm based on linux vs the same thing based on solaris or microsoft.
Not that google would ever put their eggs in other peoples basket.
And of course they're much too secretive about their architecture to make such an analysis possible for an outsider.
> Why would breaking the laws en masse help anything?
:)
Because if a large portion of the population is a 'criminal' then the law ceases to be effective, the judicial system would break down during the enforcement of the law. It only works when the percentage of criminals is relatively small compared to the 'upstanding citizens'.
> Firstly
that's secondly
> how are you intending to break the laws, by putting out products with a non-compliant DRM?
No, by breaking the DRM. While the EU seems to have gained the right to legislate criminal law they do not seem to have the right to set the penalties, only that there must be some. This will create the possibility for member states to set the punishment to nothing or to something very harsh, effectively negating the EU criminal legislative powers.
I want to consume my digital media wherever I want in whatever form suits me, so I want to have the ability to transcode and back up as much as I want. Obviously DRM is going to interfere with that, which means there will be efforts to insure that I can still exercise my fair use rights.
I agree with you that standardized DRM is better than lots of different formats, but the weak point in that argument is that many different formats are going to be harder to crack than a single one... This is just a typical example of the EU trying to close the barn after the horse has bolted, it is not going to be done in time to make any significant difference anyhow.
Personally I won't buy anything that is drm'd, I have tons of dvd's and cd's but I have them all stored on a hard drive because it is so much more convenient.
A DMCA type law (which will try to stop me from breaking the DRM) isn't going to be worth the paper it's written on, but it will serve to illustrate how much in the pockets of the corporations the EU politicians really are. DRM, even standardized DRM is not to the advantage of the consumer.
If the EU really wants to do something good for the copyright owners then they should work on a restructuring of copyright in such a way that consumers and copyright owners will *both* feel treated fairly, instead of wasting their time and our money on this standardized DRM nonsense.
If not then I think that copyright is going to die completely. After all copyright was invented in a time when copying something was about 1,000 times harder and slower than it is today, and when the medium, distribution and packaging was the excuse for the price charged.
The tricky bit here is that it depends on the law.
If a local law is 'restrictive', in other words it takes away a right that the EU explicitly grants then it can only apply to nationals of the country that made the law, for everybody else EU law is prevalent.
I can't make it make much more sense than that, it makes no sense (that a foreigner would have more rights abroad than in their own country is of course crazy) but that's the way the EU is structured.
This gives rise to all kinds of EU-based legal loopholes and that's one of the reasons I think that the memberstates are less than happy about this particular turn of events, they used to be 'boss in their own house' and now they find that only works when they're talking to their own nationals.
The above mentioned 'belgium route' has already caused some political parties to try to restrict the influx of dutch people that are fleeing their own country because they're discriminated against:
http://www.filipdewinter.be/page.php?linkID=379
(man, I *NEVER* thought I'd ever link to Flip de Winter, but never mind that)
The full text of the belgium route handbook is here:
http://webmaster.zattevrienden.be/handboek.htm
That's in dutch though, I'm not sure I'll be able to find an article that explains this craziness in english but I'll keep looking.
By the way this nasty trick is not used by every European country, some of them try to follow EU legislation in their local law wherever possible and practical, but some (in the above case the netherlands is an obvious example) do to their own subjects things they could not do to subjects of other memberstates.
In one sentence: the EU giveth, the memberstates can take away *from their own members*, but not from the members of other states.
So every memberstate has to respect EU law for all EU citizens in so far as rights are granted *except* for their own citizens who they may discriminate against.
I'm not sure what the situation is when it comes rights granted by your own government being trumped by a more strict EU law, but in practice local laws are usually far more strict than local laws, and off the top of my head I would not know of an example.
The original article is a direct consequence of the opening up of the market for the 'local gema/buma/whatever', who are now free (or will be free soon) to license their content with third parties for countries other than the one of their origin. Another driver is the fragmentation of the market here, a single stop for negotiations would facilitate things greatly for the smaller labels.
This is significant for content creators because the percentages paid out to artists/rights holders differ quite a bit from country to country due to the varying 'overhead'.
The DRM was relevant when this plan was first put forward, but with more and more companies switching to DRM free downloads and the speed at which the EU moves I doubt that that part of it (and the subsequent technical implementation and distribution) will happen in time to plug the holes.
I was at a presentation of the dutch BUMA last year where they were doing their best to impress on people that there was no need to switch when the time came but you can be sure they're pretty nervous about this development.
If there is going to be a free market wrt rights negotiations (and it looks like that is inevitable) then I don't doubt in the long term there will be only one such agency left standing.
lots of interesting reading on this subject here:
http://ec.europa.eu/internal_market/copyright/index_en.htm
and for an idea how complicated the swamp really is:
http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/69349
that's not how it is explained here:
http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgi%C3%AB-route
I hope you can read dutch, just in case here is a translation of one section of the article:
"Discrimination of own subjects.
European law trumps national law. And yet, every member state is free to apply more strict rules to its own subjects.
This so-called 'reverse discrimination' can not be remedied by Communitylaw, because it is a direct consequence of
the limited powers of the Community. The obligations with respect to liberalization, such as described in the
Communitylaw, has according to the current jurisprudence of the Court in principle only applicability to the
cross border traffic. This indicates exactly the necessity of living (temporarily) abroad before you can use European law."
and the original dutch:
"Discriminatie van eigen onderdanen
Het Europees Recht gaat boven Nationaal Recht. Toch staat het elk lidstaat vrij, om haar eigen onderdanen aan strengere regels te onderwerpen. Deze zogeheten omgekeerde discriminatie" kan door het Gemeenschapsrecht niet worden verholpen, omdat deze het gevolg is van de beperkte bevoegdheid van de Gemeenschap. De verplichting tot liberalisering, zoals dat staat in het Gemeenschapsrecht, heeft namelijk volgens de geldende jurisprudentie van het Hof in beginsel alleen betrekking op het grensoverschrijdende verkeer. Welke dus exact de noodzaak aangeeft waarom het nodig is om (tijdelijk) in het buitenland te wonen, alvorens je gebruik mag makenvan het Europees recht."
I realize this is highly confusing but this really is the way how things are. In other words, if everybody in the EU would retain their nationality and would move to a different EU country (farfetched but theoretically possible) all the national laws would cease to be applicable overnight.
Yes, for the foreign parties it does, but for the local parties it doesn't !
I'll give you an example:
A dutch guy wants to marry a woman from Africa. In the netherlands he'd have to fulfill all kinds of BS requirements so he moves to Belgium, then marries the woman while in Africa and then moves with her to Belgium. In Belgium the dutch person can claim EU resident status, so EU law will trump belgium law.
(this is known as the 'belgium route' in the netherlands)
But in the Netherlands because he's Dutch he would not be able to do that, for a Dutch national in the Netherlands Dutch law trumps EU law.
(which is why the belgium route exists)
I know this sounds crazy but it really is true, an eu-resident but non-dutch person in the Netherlands has more rights in the Netherlands than a Dutch person does and conversely a Dutch person has more rights in other European countries than those countries nationals.
The EU is pretty fragmentary and local law trumps EU law when it comes to the citizens of your own country. This creates all kinds of loopholes.
Also, and I know that's a weird line of reasoning but I think that it is valid, the sooner we get through this shit the better, and if it takes getting these idiotic laws and then breaking them en masse then so be it.
The population is slowly starting to wake up to the idiocy of some of these laws. Right now chinese law (see the recent RIAA vs Baidu suit) is more reasonable when it comes to some of this stuff than the so called bastion of democracy and privacy that the EU is supposed to be.
We're being sold out here and that has never before been more apparent, maybe this is what it takes to get people to wake up, I sure hope so.
It's going to take more than a few torrent sites to get taken down for people to realize that their rights are being eroded left right and center.
that's an excellent idea !
- theft of time
- theft of energy
- theft of other resources
If it wouldn't be for spam I could probably run my email in the corner of some small machine, because of spam we've had to upgrade our server, just rejecting all those messages (thanks SpamHaus !!) takes up quite a bit of effort.
For every spam message sent that makes it through all the filtering that effort goes up because at a minimum it takes several seconds to delete the spam.
Multiply that by several hundreds of millions of spam messages sent every day and you're into significant damage.
Spam only works because even at a ridiculously low success rate the spammer still comes out ahead because their cost is essentially 0, especially if they use hijacked machines to do the original sending. If the cost to the spammer would be as low as 1/10th of a cent per message I doubt it would be profitable any more, but I don't have any proof to back that up. It would be interesting to see that figure though, what the 'break-even' cost of a spam message would be.
tens or even hundreds of thousands of servers acting for a single common project or commercial entity ?
or as another example, try Google
I'd love to see someone do something on the scale of google and *NOT* use Linux.
Even if they're going to give it away they can keep it. There are far more benefits to open source than sticker price alone.
I think you are remembering this news article:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/08/AR2007090801654.html?nav=rss_nation
I think that a number in the 10's of millions would be more appropriate. Think about what you could do if someone convinced EV1/ThePLanet of donating all their unsold inventory as cpu cycles to BOINC...
What's so bad about religion going apeshit ?
According to your own sig science would be fine, bring it on. You've just made the perfect case for SETI, even if it doesn't do anything else that alone will save more lives than a cure for cancer ever will! I'll take the 'unpredictability' of those results for what it is when the shit hits the fan, until then there is no way of knowing. Maybe I just have more faith in humanity in being able to deal with such a crisis than you do, but if we're going that route anyway sooner is better than later.
Cancer is systemic though, a real cure for cancer would probably have some mechanical component. If you live long enough you *will* develop tumors, if you're going to die of them or not is another matter altogether. Put another way, if your average lifespan would be 35 years instead of about 70 in most 'developed' countries then the chance of dying from cancer would go down substantially.
:)
And who knows, maybe the aliens *do* have the cure for cancer and by diverting cycles away from the 'search for aliens' we miss out on that
Hey as well!
:)
No I had not spent any time on it actually, too busy recovering from the bloody flu and trying to keep my business afloat between odd jobs
But it's nice to see you're still willing to spend time on educating me!
I'll ignore your strawman with your permission, and stick to your main points:
> Sure. However, wouldn't it be awful if, because everybody was expected to know English, people who didn't speak it natively were an
> underclass? And don't you think that that would lead to the death of all those languages and cultures that you say would be nice to
> preserve?
That is a real risk, but there are plenty of examples of peoples living in one country right now where they are separated in a caste system, I don't think the language in and of itself is to blame there.
Cultural poverty is a real risk though, and that would be something not to take lightly.
> "And what's worse is that minority ethnic groups that lose their language do not thereby become integrated with the mainstream society whose
> language they adopt. Most Native American groups have lost their native languages to a colonial language, and they are still marginal.
Agreed. I've lived in Canada for a while and the treatment of minorities there is absolutely shameful. They are literally bought off. There is this weird collective guilt in Canada that the Canadian government seems to think can only be absolved with large amounts of money. Which is strange because the problem is not rooted in lack money but in something much simpler, lack of respect.
> The point is that what "universal language" really means in practice is "forced integration of other people into my culture and society,
> where we do not value them and have no place for them.""
That's an excellent point, I had not thought it through that far, I think my idealism got the better of me.
But somehow there must be a way to do such a thing in a way that it doesn't lead to someone losing out. I don't want anybody to lose anything, I would like for all of us to gain something.
As they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions...
The biggest visible light laser that I've seen at work was about 3W with all the optics freshly cleaned and that's already pretty scary, it was quite an oldie (and it has died since) here is a picture of what it's output looked like when it was still operational:
http://www.jeffrey-shaw.net/images/048_004.jpg
Ancient picture, sorry for the quality. This is before it moved to it's last resting place at my friend Theo's house.
This is the handheld device that Theo built for the Genesis tour, Peter Gabriel would hold it much like a microphone and paint fans of light all over the concert hall.
http://www.jeffrey-shaw.net/images/048_002.jpg
These images are all from Jeffrey Shaw's website, he's an artist that was born in Australia and lived in the Netherlands for a long time. Theo and him did a lot of pretty awesome stuff, Jeffrey being the artistic type and Theo an amazing engineer and designer.
I'd hate to think what you could do with a bigger one...
And you & your buddy below (assuming you're not one and the same, always a risk with AC's) are a silly city spamming AC, and probably a moron to boot but that's fine by me.
:)
Incidentally don't you find it funny that you don't even dare to reveal your nick in an online forum but instead hide behind another layer of cowardice ? You've got something to lose maybe ?
You're probably 15 and a real tough guy, but as long as you're AC I can't really know that, so until then I'll treat you like you're only 12 ok ?
Already you've made a couple of strategic mistakes, if you think real careful you'll be able to figure it out, I'll leave that as an excercise for you
And as for me being a vigilante, did you really think you could just go on and on spamming your shit without someone getting pissed off at you ? If you grafittied all over your dads newspaper each morning do you think he'd like that ?
Do you really think it is your god-given right to pollute the web with your stupid links ?
You're a tool, grow up, get an account (they're free, look, I'm cheap too and never 'got around' to signing up but they won't hold it against you here), forget your silly city shit and get a life. Maybe one day you'll grow up and have something to contribute to the discussions here instead of being a traffic whore.
I guess that makes us come full circle...
night now, and don't forget you meds.
j.
Trolling AC's is so much fun...
I don't speak english natively, I overcame that difficulty, and so can anybody else. If the world would standardize on chinese tomorrow that would be just fine by me too...
Culture is a great thing, and I hope that everybody will be able to retain their own somehow, but wouldn't it be nice if there was a way to communicate with everybody ?
Hm, troll ? Maybe, maybe not. When I was 14 or so one of my main motivations in learning english was to be able to work better with computers, all the books I could find where in english. In the early 80's when everybody was too busy solving problems instead of customizing their desktop and putting the right accents on letters that are unambiguous anyway.
The PC, the web and the laser printer changed all that. Mainframe printers were mostly 'chain' printers with a very limited (EBCDIC) character set, not much chance to get your fancy local script there, so people worked around it and on the whole were ok with the solutions.
Now we get top level domains with all kinds of accents in them and completely local scripts. This 'internationalization' of computing is a good thing for many people because they can now access the digital world in their own language, but at the same time it removes us one step from having a universal language, and the web could have easily given us that holy grail. Because not to be part of the cyber community or learning English ? It would have been an easy choice for most, one or two generations and English would have become a de-facto world standard.
The situation we have right now will long term probably mean that the amount of content on the net will be proportionally spread out over the various languages, with English only being a (slightly) disproportionally high fraction.
That universal language window of opportunity is probably lost for a long time, whether it ever was a serious possibility if of course open to debate, I for one had some hope that it was.
minicity spam
You have a problem with my sig ? I guess that's just too bad then... In case you didn't get it yet, the effect is quite measurable. I'm not promoting them, I've managed to - substantially - increase their cost of doing business and if enough people join up I wouldn't be surprised to see myminicity.com fold completely. But don't take my word for it, if you want I can mail you a logfile or two, I hope you can handle large attachements :)
See, myminicity.com is not set up smart, the multiplier is about 1:500 for an unchecked hit on a page, it does not increase the status of the minicity jokers one mm but it causes a big headache for the people that pay for the bandwidth. They foresaw people trying to fraudulently increase the traffic through fake hits on the pages but precisely because of that we can hit them hard without benefit to the jerks. (you need to run a little javascript on their page for the hit to count and the way I embed the pages that javascript does not get activated).
In other words, if before they could get a click every 50..100 hits on their pages or so on the minicities that are in the blacklist that has increased to one click every 60,000 hits or so. And every time they piss off a few more people that number goes up.
Long term myminicity can do only one thing, which is disable those accounts that have made it into the blacklist, they'll never turn a profit on those now.
But hey, you're an anonymous coward and we all know anonymous cowards are geniuses at economy, programming and networking so why would I even bother explaining all this to you, you already realized all of that.