What if I produce that one brilliant work, and then crap.
If you only produce one brilliant idea, why is it in my interest -- or anyone's interest, or the interest of the nation as a whole -- to distort technology, the laws, the courts, or the market to subsidize you for the rest of your life?
Expiring copyrights prior to the life of the artist is, IMHO, unfair. Even when you're talking about code -- if a person or company owns the code, they should choose what to do with it. Even if what they choose to do is selfish, it's their right.
Except they don't "own" the code. They hold the copyright to the code, an entirely different thing. Once you accept the fallacy that you can "own" code -- or music or literature, or what have you -- than it makes no sense for there to be any expiration of copyright. That, after all, would be a taking.
But since intellectual output is not property, it cannot be owned. Copyright is a state-granted monopoly on a service (copying), not a state-granted piece of property. The intellectual output is licensed, so to speak; and of course, thus the license can expire. It's more like leasing mineral rights on federal land than purchasing property from the federal government.
Not true. Copyright is a property that can be bought, sold, traded. It's a commodity, and as such, can be passed via the will; you know, that thing you pass your private property down to.
Repeat after me, class: Intellectual "property" is not property. The whole stupid term only came into use within the past two decades, for goodness' sake; and only because the Content Cartel wanted to push its insane definition of copyright infringement as "piracy". In other words, the people calling it property are -- amazingly enough -- the people who most benefit from the misidentification of intellectual output as property.
It boils my blood to see the argument framed using terms that were designed to bias the debate toward one side. It especially boils my blood to see the opposing side accept that stupid definition of terms. It's time to get over it, so we don't keep refighting a battle that shouldn't have to be fought in the first place.
If you really want to stop this, that's a tack you could take -- try to convince management that there IS a security risk in releasing even the obfuscated code. I don't see companies like Microsoft or Cisco releasing even obfuscated source to code they consider valuable.
But then, as I understand it, they could not use the GPL'd stuff they want to use, since use of GPL stuff mandates making the source code available.
90% of the success is in the posts. If there were no posts, there would be no visitors and THEREFORE nobody would pay to put ads on the site.
No argument here. But let me state something so obvious it's trite: If there were no slashdot site, there would be no slashdot posts. Without the site there is no such thing called "slashdot" and the audience is, conceivably, vastly fragmented. This site provides a service in that it offers "one-stop shopping", a communal marketplace of ideas (some good, some less so), and a place to go. People whine a lot... but they apparently keep coming back, so it must offer them something.
If all the posts to slashdot were distributed all over the Net, each would receive much fewer reads. Indeed, due to the loss of feedback, most likely there would be a lot fewer posts. And I believe that the higher quality posts would suffer the most.
I'm not trying to say that the posters are unimportant to the success of slashdot. Being one myself, I have a very high opinion of them.:) But the site is more than just the posts -- it's the collection, display, and archiving of them. And that is a legitimate service, compensation for which those running site certainly can ask.
Time will tell if they add enough value to entice people to subscribe. But there is nothing illogical, immoral, or inconsistent for their asking.
That a formerly free site is now attempting to charge people for content THEY, the customers, provide?
Actually, it's perfectly valid to view this as slashdot charging for the service, not the content. They organize the servers, the software, maintain the archives, etc. Through their reputation (such as it is) and their userbase, they supply the eyeball.
Apple would do well to consider this the next time they tell you to Rip, Mix, and Burn.
I think they're safe, especially since none of these are illegal activities. Violation of copyright is illegal. Unlimited distribution without permission of the copyright holder (not "owner") is illegal. But for music you've made, or music you've purchased, ripping, mixing, and burning are entirely legal for your personal use. Not only does common sense say so. So does the law and quite a number of federal courts.
Despite efforts to grab the mindspace, the Content Cartel is simply wrong when it claims that ripping, mixing, or burning are, prima facie, illegal. Don't yield that ground to them.
Actually, no. The time delay is a frequency-dependant thing. To quote this paper (or rather, its googlized text at this location),
The ionized interstellar medium causes a dispersion ofthe pulses, such that pulses emitted at low radio frequencies arrive later than those emitted at higher frequencies
So radio waves will travel slightly less quickly than visible light.
To be fair to the poster, there is also an effect due to traveling through the dilute plasma of interstellar space. Honest to goodness, there is an Insterstellar Medium whose magnetic properties affect the propogation of radio waves. See, for example, this page.
The federal courts have already spoken, so how can a few states go against that ruling?
The courts have spoken, but only to the effect that Microsoft is a convicted monopolist. The DoJ and 9 states have proposed a settlement with Microsoft that would take the case out of the hands of the federal court by settling it. These other 9 states have refused to be part of that settlement and want the case to proceed.
Also, "jeremiah" is an awfully odd name for someone nowadays
Besides being the 85th most common name in 2001 (as mentioned by someone else), Jeremiah is also a prophet of the Old Testament. Quoting liberally from The Prophet Jeremiah:
The prophet Jeremiah was active in Jerusalem during the tragic period of the city's destruction by the Babylonians, which occurred over several stages... Jeremiah prophesied an ineluctable, unavertible disaster... Jeremiah castigated the people bitterly for forsaking God and the Torah and turning to idolatry. With a sense of the inevitability of a terrible punishment, he felt disgusted with his life. Gradually he became the leading exponent of the approach which called for surrender to Babylonian might and not attempting a rebellion against its awesome strength under the auspices of Egypt... Although Jeremiah was saliently a prophet of apocalypse, he emphasized the temporary nature of the destruction and the consolation to be found in the certainty of the nation's return to its land. (emphasis added)
Not really hard to see a connection to the show's theme, is it?
Legend of the Rangers was not short lived or a spin-off, it was a one-off movie that just air recently.
Well, yes and no. The actual spin-off wasCrusade, and this was not that. But there is some thought that SciFi might turn Legend of the Rangers into a running series, which explains why it had a subtitle.
Making it criminal to support legislature that violates the Constitution would mean that no Amendment could ever be introduced again in history.
No. The Constitution provides a process for amending it. The bill to amend the Constitution merely need follow that process. Once the amendment has passed, it becomes part of the Constitution and no longer "violates" it.
American public corperations have only one ethic - to be profitable to their shareholders.
I don't believe this is true, although it is certainly the viewpoint promulgated by the larger culture -- especially by public corporations, who obviously have something to gain. But one might wonder if the same could apply to individuals. Can a doctor claim that his/her sole ethic is to increase his revenue? And thus substandard medicines are acceptable so long as no laws are broken? I think most would say, No. Doctors have a code of ethics that includes the long-term welfare of their patients even at the cost of revenue. Why should corporations -- which enjoy some of the rights of citizens -- not be held to such a standard?
Ethics is a code of behavior that contrains you from doing things you would otherwise do... A corporation exists to make a profit, of course; so there's no gold lollipop awarded for that. Ethics tells us when certain actions are unavailable despite the motivation to do them and the theoretical power to do them.
People say there shouldn't be censorship, yet they don't wont kiddie porn, which is censorship, as well.
Well, the legal argument -- which is a good one, IMHO -- is that participating in pornography is potentially damaging to a person, and that children cannot make an informed decision for themselves as to whether to do so. It's similar to child labor laws. This of course opens up the issue of CGI child pornography (where there are no actors to be harmed) -- I actually can't wait to see how the Court deals with that.
Jesus, people. There are no "inalienable rights" being violated here.
I guess we disagree. Freedom of thought -- freedom of access to information so as to allow balanced and reasoned judgements -- does strike me as an unalienable right. Not everyone enjoys the exercise of that right, not even in the good old USA, but everyone possesses it. And that fact alone is enough to be an itch under the skin of any freedom-loving person, that where and when we can, we push toward the exercise of it and that we oppose its restriction.
The Chinese nation will sort themselves out over a long time, and probably peacefully, too - that's the Chinese way, to take the long, nonconfrontational view.
Um, what about the extended civil war and the eventual Communist revolution? Were those "peaceful"? How about Tianamen Square? How about three thousand years of emperors and warlords?
It doesn't help for us to view China as backward. It also doesn't help for us to view China as forward, as somehow mystically enlightened and benign. The fact of the matter is, the Chinese are human and have the same drives and desires as other humans. The Communists want to cling to power. The ordinary citizen probably wants a decent living and some peace. Some high muckety-mucks want wealth and power.
The evidence of human history -- including Chinese history -- is exactly that the revolution, when it comes, will not come peacefully. Government that try to control thought end up tightening their grip so much that the entire system cracks under the pressure. What will most likely result is a sucession crisis (though perhaps not in this iteration) and chaos. Maybe, on the other side, the Chinese people will be free. Maybe not.
Cisco is out to make money, if they didnt build the firewall someone else would've.
That is such an ethical non-starter. The fact that someone else -- over whom you have no control -- will do something awful never justifies doing it yourself. You are responsible for your own actions.
It is not always -- perhaps not even often -- possible to stop evil from being done. But at all times, you have the power to say, "I, at least, will not do evil." You aren't responsible if someone else does what you have renounced... but they don't justify you doing it, either.
We'll pass only briefly over the idea that, if everyone conducted themselves ethically and no one took this moral short-cut, then in fact the Great Firewall of China is a far from inevitable fact. In other words, the poster did not offer a justification, only a rationalization -- an excuse for doing something known (by the doer) to be wrong.
Couldn't this same logic be used to prove that nothing can move faster than the speed of sound?
No. I am not arguing an observational effect. In the case of sound -- which does not involve the metric of the Universe, just a collection of gas -- all observers will agree that B (I arrive at SF) followed A (I leave Boston). Yes, you will arrive at SF before a sound wave emitted at Boston -- but you will arrive at SF after you left Boston. It's almost hard to state the opposite...
Until relativity enters the picture -- that is, until you have speeds near or, hypothetically, exceeding that of light in a vaccum. In this case, for some observer, the actual time ordering of events A and B are swapped. It is bound up in things like how relativistic velocities add.
It is not important that we be observing using electromagnetic rays. Although light travels at c, we are not using the light to make the observation. We are doing a purely mathematical transformation of coordinates.
Not theoretically impossible. Travelling exactly at c is the problem
Um, no. You're probably thinking of the infamous "tachyons", one of the most benighted missteps in theoretical physics ever. It can be shown by relatively basic relativity that, if for one observer, event B occurs after event A but separated by less than the time it would take light to travel from A to B, then there is some observer for whom the time-ordering of A & B is reversed. That is, for some observer moving at constant velocity relative to the first, B occurs first.
So if event A is "I leave Earth" and event B is "I arrive at alpha Centauri", and for one observer, B is (say) two years after A, then for some other observer, B occurs before A. Which means causality flies right out the window: What if you then sent a signal from B to A that is encoded as follows:
If the ship has arrived, send a signal telling us not to send the ship.
If the ship has not arrived, send a signal telling us to send it.
You may add such automation as you desire to ensure that we contrary humans don't boggle the experiment. Of course we now have the situation wherein the ship is both sent and not sent, and we seem to be in a bit of a tizzy.
Note that it does not matter what method of FTL travel our ship uses: teleporter, transwarp, pixie dust. All that matters is the fact that the two events (ship leaves Earth, ship arrives at alpha Centauri) are separated in time by less than the light travel time.
Tachyons are bunk because -- besides requiring things like complex mass -- they can't deal with this issue. Other clever physicists have come up with ways that might allow us to cheat: You never exceed light speed, but you shorten the distance between the points using Gen Rel and some "exotic matter". But you still don't beat c
Which seems more likely to you - bill gates telling everyone at MS to go submit feedback to an online poll ? Or Larry ellison and scott mcnealy telling all their employees that if they want their options to ever get in the black, theres a certain website they had better visit ?
Since you asked my opinon: the former option. Microsoft has in fact engaged in black-helicopter antics. The Linux crowd has not. I think I'd put my faith in the Linux people.
Slashdot Mirror
If you only produce one brilliant idea, why is it in my interest -- or anyone's interest, or the interest of the nation as a whole -- to distort technology, the laws, the courts, or the market to subsidize you for the rest of your life?
Except they don't "own" the code. They hold the copyright to the code, an entirely different thing. Once you accept the fallacy that you can "own" code -- or music or literature, or what have you -- than it makes no sense for there to be any expiration of copyright. That, after all, would be a taking.
But since intellectual output is not property, it cannot be owned. Copyright is a state-granted monopoly on a service (copying), not a state-granted piece of property. The intellectual output is licensed, so to speak; and of course, thus the license can expire. It's more like leasing mineral rights on federal land than purchasing property from the federal government.
Repeat after me, class: Intellectual "property" is not property . The whole stupid term only came into use within the past two decades, for goodness' sake; and only because the Content Cartel wanted to push its insane definition of copyright infringement as "piracy". In other words, the people calling it property are -- amazingly enough -- the people who most benefit from the misidentification of intellectual output as property.
It boils my blood to see the argument framed using terms that were designed to bias the debate toward one side. It especially boils my blood to see the opposing side accept that stupid definition of terms. It's time to get over it, so we don't keep refighting a battle that shouldn't have to be fought in the first place.
But then, as I understand it, they could not use the GPL'd stuff they want to use, since use of GPL stuff mandates making the source code available.
No argument here. But let me state something so obvious it's trite: If there were no slashdot site, there would be no slashdot posts. Without the site there is no such thing called "slashdot" and the audience is, conceivably, vastly fragmented. This site provides a service in that it offers "one-stop shopping", a communal marketplace of ideas (some good, some less so), and a place to go. People whine a lot... but they apparently keep coming back, so it must offer them something.
If all the posts to slashdot were distributed all over the Net, each would receive much fewer reads. Indeed, due to the loss of feedback, most likely there would be a lot fewer posts. And I believe that the higher quality posts would suffer the most.
I'm not trying to say that the posters are unimportant to the success of slashdot. Being one myself, I have a very high opinion of them.
Time will tell if they add enough value to entice people to subscribe. But there is nothing illogical, immoral, or inconsistent for their asking.
Actually, it's perfectly valid to view this as slashdot charging for the service, not the content. They organize the servers, the software, maintain the archives, etc. Through their reputation (such as it is) and their userbase, they supply the eyeball.
Hey, sort of like open source.
I think they're safe, especially since none of these are illegal activities. Violation of copyright is illegal. Unlimited distribution without permission of the copyright holder (not "owner") is illegal. But for music you've made, or music you've purchased, ripping, mixing, and burning are entirely legal for your personal use. Not only does common sense say so. So does the law and quite a number of federal courts.
Despite efforts to grab the mindspace, the Content Cartel is simply wrong when it claims that ripping, mixing, or burning are, prima facie, illegal. Don't yield that ground to them.
Well, something that is truly uncrackable is "very difficult" to crack. :)
So radio waves will travel slightly less quickly than visible light.
To be fair to the poster, there is also an effect due to traveling through the dilute plasma of interstellar space. Honest to goodness, there is an Insterstellar Medium whose magnetic properties affect the propogation of radio waves. See, for example, this page.
All our Libertarian friends must be smiling at that. You probably meant "protection by the government".
The courts have spoken, but only to the effect that Microsoft is a convicted monopolist. The DoJ and 9 states have proposed a settlement with Microsoft that would take the case out of the hands of the federal court by settling it. These other 9 states have refused to be part of that settlement and want the case to proceed.
Besides being the 85th most common name in 2001 (as mentioned by someone else), Jeremiah is also a prophet of the Old Testament. Quoting liberally from The Prophet Jeremiah:
Not really hard to see a connection to the show's theme, is it?
Well, yes and no. The actual spin-off was Crusade, and this was not that. But there is some thought that SciFi might turn Legend of the Rangers into a running series, which explains why it had a subtitle.
No. The Constitution provides a process for amending it. The bill to amend the Constitution merely need follow that process. Once the amendment has passed, it becomes part of the Constitution and no longer "violates" it.
I don't believe this is true, although it is certainly the viewpoint promulgated by the larger culture -- especially by public corporations, who obviously have something to gain. But one might wonder if the same could apply to individuals. Can a doctor claim that his/her sole ethic is to increase his revenue? And thus substandard medicines are acceptable so long as no laws are broken? I think most would say, No. Doctors have a code of ethics that includes the long-term welfare of their patients even at the cost of revenue. Why should corporations -- which enjoy some of the rights of citizens -- not be held to such a standard?
Ethics is a code of behavior that contrains you from doing things you would otherwise do... A corporation exists to make a profit, of course; so there's no gold lollipop awarded for that. Ethics tells us when certain actions are unavailable despite the motivation to do them and the theoretical power to do them.
Well, the legal argument -- which is a good one, IMHO -- is that participating in pornography is potentially damaging to a person, and that children cannot make an informed decision for themselves as to whether to do so. It's similar to child labor laws. This of course opens up the issue of CGI child pornography (where there are no actors to be harmed) -- I actually can't wait to see how the Court deals with that.
Late 20th century: Democracy versus Communism.
Early 21st century: Democracy versus... Capitalism?
I guess we disagree. Freedom of thought -- freedom of access to information so as to allow balanced and reasoned judgements -- does strike me as an unalienable right. Not everyone enjoys the exercise of that right, not even in the good old USA, but everyone possesses it. And that fact alone is enough to be an itch under the skin of any freedom-loving person, that where and when we can, we push toward the exercise of it and that we oppose its restriction.
Um, what about the extended civil war and the eventual Communist revolution? Were those "peaceful"? How about Tianamen Square? How about three thousand years of emperors and warlords?
It doesn't help for us to view China as backward. It also doesn't help for us to view China as forward, as somehow mystically enlightened and benign. The fact of the matter is, the Chinese are human and have the same drives and desires as other humans. The Communists want to cling to power. The ordinary citizen probably wants a decent living and some peace. Some high muckety-mucks want wealth and power.
The evidence of human history -- including Chinese history -- is exactly that the revolution, when it comes, will not come peacefully. Government that try to control thought end up tightening their grip so much that the entire system cracks under the pressure. What will most likely result is a sucession crisis (though perhaps not in this iteration) and chaos. Maybe, on the other side, the Chinese people will be free. Maybe not.
That is such an ethical non-starter. The fact that someone else -- over whom you have no control -- will do something awful never justifies doing it yourself. You are responsible for your own actions.
It is not always -- perhaps not even often -- possible to stop evil from being done. But at all times, you have the power to say, "I, at least, will not do evil." You aren't responsible if someone else does what you have renounced
We'll pass only briefly over the idea that, if everyone conducted themselves ethically and no one took this moral short-cut, then in fact the Great Firewall of China is a far from inevitable fact. In other words, the poster did not offer a justification, only a rationalization -- an excuse for doing something known (by the doer) to be wrong.
No. I am not arguing an observational effect. In the case of sound -- which does not involve the metric of the Universe, just a collection of gas -- all observers will agree that B (I arrive at SF) followed A (I leave Boston). Yes, you will arrive at SF before a sound wave emitted at Boston -- but you will arrive at SF after you left Boston. It's almost hard to state the opposite...
Until relativity enters the picture -- that is, until you have speeds near or, hypothetically, exceeding that of light in a vaccum. In this case, for some observer, the actual time ordering of events A and B are swapped. It is bound up in things like how relativistic velocities add.
It is not important that we be observing using electromagnetic rays. Although light travels at c, we are not using the light to make the observation. We are doing a purely mathematical transformation of coordinates.
Um, no. You're probably thinking of the infamous "tachyons", one of the most benighted missteps in theoretical physics ever. It can be shown by relatively basic relativity that, if for one observer, event B occurs after event A but separated by less than the time it would take light to travel from A to B, then there is some observer for whom the time-ordering of A & B is reversed. That is, for some observer moving at constant velocity relative to the first, B occurs first.
So if event A is "I leave Earth" and event B is "I arrive at alpha Centauri", and for one observer, B is (say) two years after A, then for some other observer, B occurs before A. Which means causality flies right out the window: What if you then sent a signal from B to A that is encoded as follows:
You may add such automation as you desire to ensure that we contrary humans don't boggle the experiment. Of course we now have the situation wherein the ship is both sent and not sent, and we seem to be in a bit of a tizzy.
Note that it does not matter what method of FTL travel our ship uses: teleporter, transwarp, pixie dust. All that matters is the fact that the two events (ship leaves Earth, ship arrives at alpha Centauri) are separated in time by less than the light travel time.
Tachyons are bunk because -- besides requiring things like complex mass -- they can't deal with this issue. Other clever physicists have come up with ways that might allow us to cheat: You never exceed light speed, but you shorten the distance between the points using Gen Rel and some "exotic matter". But you still don't beat c
Since you asked my opinon: the former option. Microsoft has in fact engaged in black-helicopter antics. The Linux crowd has not. I think I'd put my faith in the Linux people.
I spy, with my little eye, something starting with the letter S... Stars
I spy, with my little eye, something starting with the letter M... More Stars
I spy, with my little eye, something starting with the letter E... Even More Stars