Actually, what you are exploiting is that they are desperate for work and because of that you can get away by paying them less money. Exploitation isn't a black & white issue. Yes, they benefit from it by not starving to death and so do you. But that doesn't mean that you aren't exploiting them.
You do know that slaves benefit from the slave owner giving them food and water and keeping them safe from outside danger. Some black people had it worse after slavery was abolished. That doesn't mean that slavery isn't exploitation. Ok, that is a little vulgar, brining up slavery, as it is unvoluntary, but is the choice between starving to death and working for pennies any less unvoluntary?
Some of our outsourcing isn't much exploiting at all and have good work conditions. IT india is probably the best example.
However, look at some other outsourcing scenarios. There has been many reports of terrible conditions in work factories in Asia. Conditions that would be heavily punished in many countries due to the unhuman conditions.
I am not asking to shutdown all outsourcing and importing, but I very well feel that there needs to be some ethic limits to which countries you do business with and how that business is conducted.
Free Trade is increasingly becoming synomynous with Coorporate Free Reign.
(b) I can pay someone at Dell $500 & fire someone making $5000 here.
Oh, I get it know. Let me see how I should explain this.
We have 1 low price worker (willing to work for 1/10 the price), 1 ordinary worker (that can do the same work as the low price worker but costs more) and a third ordinary worker at dell that does the work of producing 10 peoples worth of computers.
So the ordinary worker at dell creates 10 times the worth of what the other two workers do. Talk about efficency. Those two other workers should also work for dell as they could do another 20 peoples worth of job that way. Ok, that doesn't work in infinity as there is diminishing return on what computers can do but it is the reason we have a big computer industry.
This isn't to say that paying less money is bad. Actually I agree with you to a large degree. Usually when you pay less money for something it is because what you are paying for is more efficent.
However, when it comes to outsourcing, a big reason for the lower cost has more to do with worse living conditions (and lower taxes due to less goverment services) of those you outsource to. Same when buying products produced in low cost countries (maybe even parts of that dell computer). Sometimes the lower living conditions go in several steps. One common argument is that indian programmer don't need as much money because you can live well in india with less. But why is that? Mostly because it is cheaper to pay worse off people in India to do stuff for you.
Still, what is the alternative. To leave the Indian computer programmers in the dust doing nothing. That will very likely be even worse for both parties, and is a big reason why Indian workers are cheaper. If they couldn't create wealth by programming they would doing something much less wealth creating. The american worker however can more likely find some other work.
And on the bright side, as countries such as India and China gets hard money infused into them and their workers begins to demand more the wage rises and it basically acts as a huge kick start for the whole country allowing them to run without western demand and job will travel back or more likely outsourced to the next country that needs a kickstart.
Still, there are things to watch out for when outsourcing. If the unemployment within your own population gets to big due to outsourcing, it may be wise to react. Same if vital skills are lost. Finally, if your own country doesn't allow workers to do XXX. Should it then be allowed to make deals with other countries where workers can/have to do XXX. Where do the limits of ethics go? These are all difficult issues that are important for goverments.
My argument is that any rule saying that society owns your wealth is wrong. Your response seems to be "society owns your wealth...hence they own your wealth".
What I am saying more exactly is that society owns you down to every last bone. It isn't a question of right or wrong. It just is. It is the same in any society, you abide what rules there are or get punished. What you "own" is what society says that you own. Nothing more, nothing less.
Of course, if you manage to say create a society with all economic libertarians there will be no redistribution of property except for the funding of military/police to protect those property laws. But the wealth of that society is still the sum of all its individuals. It is just an unevenly distributed wealth that won't get redistributed.
Computers make me wealthy at the cost of someone else - by your logic, computers have made society poorer.
Sorry, but if you can't see the difference between a zero sum action and a non zero sum action you aren't worth debating with.
Computers create wealth because they increase efficency, allowing one person to do more. Paying someone more or less doesn't create wealth. It is simply a lesser or bigger transfer of wealth from one person to another.
This isn't to say that you should just pay anyone more just because you can. Supply & demand is a useful tool for distributing limited resources. And in the case of salaries it can be used to transfer skilled people to workplaces where they can do jobs creating more wealth.
However, the act of paying itself is just a zero sum action.
Do you know what petitio principii means?
Yes. I don't find how I did that however. I just stated the obvious which is that by living in a society you have no more right to any wealth you create than that society allows you to have. That is the price you pay for living in a society.
I agree that I have been a little harsh in my last post. Sorry about that. A better response to "Society doesn't create wealth. People do." would have gone like this.
That statement is incorrect. Society is a grouping of people. The wealth a society creates is simply the sum of what all the people in that society creates. Yes, the individuals create the wealth specifically, but it doesn't belong to that individual unless the rules of society says so.
If a cheaper person produces the same thing/service, it definitely makes me more wealthy by having him do a task than having someone else do it.
It makes you more wealthy, but at the cost of someone else less wealthy.
In other words, the wealth of society as a whole remains the same. It is a zero sum action.
Society doesn't create wealth. People do.
So? Who creates the wealth isn't important. As long as you live in a society you play by the society's rules.
If you don't like that you have to move somewhere else. May I recommend a desert island or Sudan where you can live with libertarian "friends". Just don't complain if (when) they backstab you.
Somebody earning $1000 a month in India can maintain a standard of living above someone in US earning $4k-5k a month. So no, these companies are not explioting anybody.
Yes, but that is because they in turn are exploiting those who are poorer than they are (meaning cheaper access to the service and land sectors). A chain of exploitation down to the poor who will work for single digit $ a day so that they can survive.
So, yes it is exploitation.
Oh, and for those things were you can't exploit the poorer like buying quality or tech items like computers/cars, you still have a huge difference.
You can of course say that it isn't exploitation, but helping them by funneling money into their society. But the truth is, that as long as there is a huge salary difference for the same amount and type of job, there is exploitation going on.
And the grandparent was correct. These companies are employing workforce at below minimum wage salaries. Why are they allowed to sell products in the US?
I actually live in Europe, but I often have the same question over here. We have laws and regulations that offer our own workers protection, but then we go and buy goods and services from countries that don't have such protections. Isn't that the height of hypocrasy?
Yup, and wealth is not money. Money is just a tool for allowing people to exchange wealth.
Making more money flow through society (GDP) is just a way to create illusionary wealth. Real wealth is created by making wanted/nescessary things more efficent.
Hiring a cheaper person is not creating wealth. Decieving/Lying to your customers isn't creating wealth. Giving extreme salaries to some people doesn't create wealth. Having some professions pay $100000/year insurance just to work (Neurosurgery) because of insane lawsuits isn't creating wealth. Allowing monopolies to earn lots of money because of lacking supply & demand definitly doesn't create wealth. Having unemployed people doesn't create wealth. Throwing sick people to the wolfs doesn't create wealth. Destroying stuff doesn't create wealth.
Making skilled people worked in high wealth producing jobs does create wealth. Making less skilled people work with less wealth producing but needed jobs create wealth (as long as there is more wealth producing jobs for the more skilled people). making things more efficent definitly creates wealth. Reducing corruption creates wealth. Giving enough incentive (but not too much as it is a limited resource) for someone to work creates wealth. Finally, making people feel happy and satisfied creates wealth because those feelings are by most considered wealth in itself. (This last one I added, because it is important to remember that material wealth isn't all that is)
Also, remember that a large part of the disagreement behind people isn't about creating wealth, but about which way creates wealth more efficently, and more importantly how the wealth society creates should be distributed.
I just think it would make the laws come into line with society - trying to go the other way is trouble.
This is probably the most important thing. Doing otherwise just decreases the faith the population have in the justice system. And that is a very bad thing.
Beyond what you said, I personally believe in a far shorter copyright terms. While I will usually argue for a low 5-10 limit that aims at the ordinary investment return analysis, I am however much more compromising on this issue. There is a second limit around 20-50 years. After that, any IP that is still in use should really be considered a classic and incoorporated into the public domain. It is just sad the way it is now when an old classic traditional birthday song can't be sung because it still is copyrighted. Also, it makes it easier to save those works of art that aren't in use any longer. Finally, it could provide a boosting to the low budget adapation industry, meaning more works of art.
There is like, what, one, two banners that are displayed and only in an area that you see for two seconds before you join a game. Oh yes, I am giving up my mind! How they control us!
And bnetd has 0 banners, meaning that it is the better product. Of course, that is the real truth about coorporations. They don't want to provide the best possible product because it isn't in their own interest.
So you expect Blizzard to give their mechanism to validate keys to anyone that wants to reverse engineer their products? Do you know how stupid and unreasonable it sounds?
Of course it is unreasonable. But so is the opposite, to ban a software because it doesn't look at the license keys in a way that it can't know how before connecting two players together.
bnetd was a tool that people used to run illegitimate copies of Blizzard software yet still enjoy the benefits of online play.
And to run legal copies copies in environments where internet access wasn't availible. a.k.a. lan parties.
And to play on the internet with banned keys. Another reason why the battle.net legally enforced monopoly is pure evil. Oh, I fully support the right of Blizzard to ban players. I however equally support the right of those players to play on other servers that isn't under Blizzards control.
If you were a stockholder in Blizzard, you would want this shut down
Of course. And if I was a hardcore muslim I would want all atheists converted or executed.
If you were a reasonable person, you would understand why any business would want to prevent this
Understand yes. I also understand why hardcore muslims want to kill me, but that doesn't mean that I am going to let them trample on my rights.
It has nothing to do with anti free market,
It has all to do with the free market. When only one company is allowed to perform a service it isn't a free market. Battle.net doesn't work on LANs, and it doesn't allow play with banned keys. That makes it an obviously inferior product.
It isn't strange that some people developed a better server.
This isn't a company that created their own RTS and is competing against blizzard.
No, it is a company (ok, volunteers) that created their own superior connection service and are competing against blizzard.
You all seem to have the inability to put yourself in the shoes of people who develop software.
I really feel those poor bnetd developers that was forced to stop developing their software because of a lawsuit from an immoral coorporation (sorry about the tautology). Oh, you weren't talking about those developers...They don't matter to you?...Hypocrite.
And I also feel for all those who got banned by blizzard and can't play on the internet any longer. OK, actually I don't because I despise cheaters, but I still protect their rights, because I know what happens when you only look after yourself.
You come off as arrogant and selfish
You come off as extremly arrogant and selfish.
How dare a company make profit on a quality product!
Oh, I have no problem with them making a profit. I do have a problem with them shutting down another product to make even more profit while reinforcing their dictatorial control. (because control is very important to those in power. They are simply addicted to it)
If it was only pirates using bnetd you would atleast have a point to stand on, but it far from isn't.
I really hope some day people damage your income illegally. I am sure you will just sit by and let them do it, right?
It is a bigger chance that people will damage my income legally. That seems to be all that coorporations are doing nowadays.
"In the original description, the Diffie-Hellman exchange by itself does not provide authentication of the communicating parties and is thus vulnerable to a man-in-the-middle attack. A person in the middle may establish two distinct Diffie-Hellman key exchanges, one with Alice and the other with Bob, effectively masquerading as Alice to Bob, and vice versa, allowing the attacker to decrypt (and read or store) then re-encrypt the messages passed between them. A method to authenticate the communicating parties to each other is generally needed to prevent this type of attack."
So no Diffie-Hellman doesn't protect againt MITM attacks by itself.
Cutting it in pieces, rearranging it, using it privatly for any other purpose including making private copies. Oh, and if it is something visual I can also print it out and piss on it. Basically anything I can do with an ordinary item except for the exception of redistributing a copy which is restricted under copyright law.
I can even make copies for personal use as long as I don't redistribute them, although even that isn't 100% true as lending a recorded videotape to a friend may very well be seen as fair use. (although that whole part of the copyright law is way too diffuse in general)
it is an application of first-sale doctrine.
And the first sale doctrine is about owning things you buy. I choose to use that as an example exactly because it is the main ruling that shows how owns the copy. (and no, it isn't the creator).
this is Slashdot, and no one here gets it unless you do it my way. We're saying the exact same thing, except you're using proper terminology and I'm putting it in terms that Slashdotters understand.
No, you are using improper terminology to try and equalize copyright infringment with theft.
What have you bought? A can't-be-further-copied copy of the IP?
Yes. And if you break the copyright law to copy that can't-be-further-copied copy that you own, then you are guilty of copyright infringement, not theft.
What you've effectively done purchased the right to use the IP
And when I buy a table I have effectivly purchased the rights to use the table. That doesn't really say much.
but no one here buys into copyrights, so it's impossible to have dialogue about how to fix the actual problem.
Actually, it is fully possible to have a dialogue. However, as soon as you begin calling copyright infringement, theft, you will get labeled and have all responses focusing on just that.
Also, I think most people here wants to retain copyright although in far more limited forms than exists today.
The actual problem being how to allow IP creators to be compensated for their work.
Yup, and that is a question that definitly needs discussing. It is a damn big problem due to how IP costs to produce but have a very very low marginal costs because of the ease of copying.
In general it is very easy to convince most people about the usefulness of commercial copyright, although some economic libertarians will argue that copyright goes against the idea of the free market and that if people want IP produced they will pay for it.
The length of copyright is another matter. The current lengths are seen as obscene by many. A popular suggestions in the US is 14 years due to it being the original length. Personally I think that is a little long in todays fast moving climate, especially since businesses have to plan on getting their many back in a far shorter time than that.
On the socialist side you will of course hear about taxing and distributing money to people who produce IP. The problem with this is of course how you determine how much money to give to each person. Also there is the question of what kind of tax. A general one, or one specific to internet or storage media?
This whole thing won't grow any smaller either. As people in poorer countries gain internet access, the amount of piracy going on will increase. If something can be copied cheaply it will be.
If we continually vote for the less evil candidate, the other candidates will become less evil to try and get votes.
You are right in the basic assumption. However, what you aren't mentioning is that lesser evil won't become any more good. By voting for the lesser evil you are acknowledging the lesser evil.
Sometimes it must be done out of nescessity, but usually it is a bad idea. Polticians love to play on this however as it is yet another way to use fear (fear of the other candidate in this case) to manipulate the voters.
The only way to pull a lesser evil towards more good is by not voting for him when he does something evil. (Well, that or bribe him to do good)
but the kooks on the far left are running the Democrat party
Not really. If that was true you would be seeing Dennis Kucinich as the presidential candidate. And he isn't even that far left compared to real european leftists.
Of course, if you are confusing authoritarian with leftist (easily done since the big leftist boggieman soviet also was very authoritarian), then it isn't that strange. Especially something like banning violent video games which is completly neutral on the left-right scale, but very authoritarian. The nanny state and the religious morality state are just two sides of the same coin and neither has anything to do with left or right.
how do you prevent votes from being bought and sold as commodities?
The death penalty?
Ok, that is an exaggeration, especially since I am against the death penalty, but the basic idea is correct. Laws against buying (as well as selling) votes or probing into the voting patterns of any person. There should be pretty hefy penalties as it is a direct attack on society itself.
And at the same time we can do away with positive connotations of words like bullshit, marketing and propaganda and newspeak and instead call it
Well, I like the term "intellectual rape". Actually, just drop the term intellectual as it is superfluous. And most of all it makes them mad when you ask them to stop with the raping.
Any "sale" of IP is the sale of a right to use the IP
Wrong, completly incorrect.
A sale of is IP is a sale just like any other item which give me full rights to do anything I want it. The courts have ruled on that again and again when it comes to the rights of reselling items.
The only thing I am not legally allowed to do is redistribute a copy of the item in question, because every single piece of IP produced automatically gets assigned a copyright that prevents anyone but the owner of the copyright to do just that. That copyright can in turn be sold and traded, transfering the rights of copying the item for redistribution.
However, every specific copy is consider its own and can be resold.
the only party who is able to sell rights to use the IP)
Wrong, you can not sell rights to use IP. You can only sell the IP itself while maintaining the exclusive right to copy and sell more of it.
Actually, it is also possible to use contracts (leases) to rent software to others, which would be more similar to what you are talking about, but that falls under completly different laws than ordinary store bought IP.
LOL I want to have my cake and eat it too please... copyright is what gives the GPL it's teeth. You people CAN'T HAVE IT BOTH WAYS.
Yup. This is an issue that has been discussed somewhat extensivly on the swedish pirate party forum.
And the current party line is that GPL has to deal with it just like everyone else. The party program aims for a five year commercial monopoly, meaning that other companies couldn't use it for those five years, but beyond that the code would be...well...free with a small f.
Because if someone only has $60, then it doesn't really matter how many games they pirate once the $60 is gone. There is only $60 total available. If a kid plays 1 game or 100 games, no more money is available. From an economic perspective, his piracy has absolutely no effect.
In fact, his piracy makes the society a richer place by creating wealth (entertainment) from nothing (copying). Of course, the economic field is at a total loss on how to measure real wealth so you are completly right that it has no effect from an economic perspective.
Now, in the real world, a game pirate probably NEVER buys the games - so they don't even get his $60..
This statement goes against all research that indicates that pirates are more likely to buy IP than non pirates. Of course, some of the reason for this is that someone is more likely to pirate if they are interested in what is pirated in the first place. Cause and effect makes it difficult to determine which way it goes.
THAT is a problem for game publishers
Yup. The real question that has to be balanced is the earnings of IP producers vs the profit of society as a whole.
You hear all this talk about how ip producers want to control their "moral right to own their own work", but in reality that simply isn't true as you can see by how IP rights are sold back and forth. No, it is all about money and economy and in that case you have to look at the societal use of copyright.
While few will argue aganst a limited commercial monopoly on IP (although the length can be debated), the question is, Is it worth the societal cost of restricting the private piracy that generates huge amounts of wealth so that IP producers can earn more money.?
I would say no, while other would say yes. I am fine debating with those saying yes as long as they don't try to play the moral superiority (a.k.a.) stealing card. Calling it stealing if I share some information on my hardrive is ridicioulus. And, no you don't own what is on my harddrive or in my head. You can't own information. As best you can get a state granted monopoly on redistributing it.
I am just waiting for someone to invent star trek replicators. Can you imagine the kind of panic manufacturing owners would get if it was easy to replicate physical goods.
bnetd? The reverse engineered version of their free online service,
Yes, a free alternative to the ad supported (as in not really free unless you are willing to give up your mind) online service.
Choice is good.
check for a legitimate copy of the game?
It is a little difficult to provide such functionality when the only one who could provide it is Blizzard who refused to. Besides, it isn't the job of a connection service to ensure that its users are using legitime copies.
How exactly can they justify not shutting that down?
Actually, I am amazed that bnetd was shut down. It shows just how insanly pro coorporate and anti free market the US is when providing an alternative connection service is made illegal.
One more advice. Don't buy three harddrives from the same batch as it very much increases the likelyhood that all of them will fail nearly at the same time.
Make sure you connect via eSATA, not something stupid like USB, which would take forEVER.
Not really. Even with USB you can copy atleast 1-1.5GB per minute (that is real life numbers, not theoretical ones), meaning that copying would take a few hours which is quite acceptable for most uses as it can run as a background task.
The only use I see is for a program like FRAPS, which records your screen and sound.
Exactly, and I for one am a person that uses that functionality to record stuff legally (voiced go lessons on the Kiseido Go Server to be exact). Heck, it is impossible to do it illegally as it falls under the same category as recording videos. Why should I be restricted from using my own computer as I wish.
What I am really afraid of however is how these people are colluding by using a mix of cryptography and laws to prevent "unauthorized" equipment from being able to interface with the system. Right now I can always get another more free piece of equipment, but what about in 10-15 years when you can't run the software on anything but authorized hardware, and trying to bypass that is a federal offense.
The above may be a nightmare to me, but for some rich people it is an utopian vision. I mean it when I say that I am afraid. Afraid because people tolerate minor restrictions being added all the time with just minor protests. It will become worse much worse and by the time people wake up it will be too late...again. Have you heard some of the people behind this. They are not acting as individuals but instead as lunatic powerhungry agents for powerful immoral organisations.
And I used immoral instead of amoral deliberatly. Earning money is an amoral stance, but the idea of earning money above anything else is simply immoral.
where did science come from? can you prove, with only science, that all the laws of science have always existed
The old greeks would be my first guess, but my history in that area isn't that good. You can't prove anything with science, you can only disprove. And you can only disprove things about an observed reality, not about a philosophical system.
or explain how our 1 in 10^99999999999999999999999999999999999 chance of evolving into an intelligent species just happened even though out of the millions of stars we've studied ours is one of very few that might possibly contain a planet that might possible support life
This one is simple. We exist, therefore there is a 1:1 chance of us existing. Propabilities after the fact is useless because it has already happened.
You could just as well say that there is 1:10^X chance of me breathing in that exact air molecule that I just breathed in. Don't you see, it is impossible, so it must be work of god. It is a bad argument, plain and simple.
Just curious. you can blindly accept evolution as fact
If you mean blindly as in having seen lots and lots of biological facts concerning evolution, also having seen the effectiveness of natural selection as a mathematical algorithm used in computer AI and being impressed how such a simple system can tie to many observed things, such as fossiles, dna similarties between species, 1000s of years of farming and much much more.
All in all it is more solid than our theories concering gravity where we basically only have a formula that says, this is how it works, but have no real working theory of the underlying reasons why the formula works.
thought with an open mind and see WHY someone might be inclined to believe such irrational nonsense as ID
I have. Psychology is an interesting subject which among other things studies why humans believe irrational nonsense.
Indoctrinated upbrining is commmon. As is peer pressure. The human brain also is very good at partitioning information allowing irrational beliefs to coincide with rational ones that often contradict the irrational part.
Don't view third parties as "throwing your vote away". Almost everyone has been throwing their votes away and the people we have representing us are just the proof of that!
Exactly. The only power you have over a candidate is not voting for him.
That is why it is incorrect to say that voting for a third party is throwing your vote away. While not voting is one way to indicate your power over a candidate, it is usually better to vote blank or third party as that more clearly indicates exactly why you are dissatisfied.
In the same manner if you have no intention at all of voting for a candidate whatever he does, then you have no power over him either. The power comes only from the threat of losing your vote. If he doesn't have it to begin with, there is nothing to lose.
A candidate has no need at all to cater to the party followers because he'll get those votes for free (unless he does something really stupid). The ones a candidate has to cater to are those who are undecided. That basically means three groups. Those who are considering voting for the other big party, those who are considering voting for a third party and those who are considering not voting at all.
Being in one of those three groups is the only way you can affect policy.
Of course, voting against one party by voting for the other big party is an acceptable strategy. But just remember that such a vote gives up your opportunity to affect policy if you do, because you aren't voting for a candidate but against someone else. And while at it, each individual vote is worth nothing, but you are part of the statistics that the candidates has to monitor to decide what is more important.
If you aren't prepared to give up on a politician because of how he votes, then you have no real power over him. Obama should have known that he would lose some tech votes if he voted for immunity. If he didn't know that, he really needs better advisors. I am presuming he did know and made the choice that those votes weren't important enough, thinking that few enough techs would jump ship because of it.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, what you are exploiting is that they are desperate for work and because of that you can get away by paying them less money. Exploitation isn't a black & white issue. Yes, they benefit from it by not starving to death and so do you. But that doesn't mean that you aren't exploiting them.
You do know that slaves benefit from the slave owner giving them food and water and keeping them safe from outside danger. Some black people had it worse after slavery was abolished. That doesn't mean that slavery isn't exploitation. Ok, that is a little vulgar, brining up slavery, as it is unvoluntary, but is the choice between starving to death and working for pennies any less unvoluntary?
Some of our outsourcing isn't much exploiting at all and have good work conditions. IT india is probably the best example.
However, look at some other outsourcing scenarios. There has been many reports of terrible conditions in work factories in Asia. Conditions that would be heavily punished in many countries due to the unhuman conditions.
I am not asking to shutdown all outsourcing and importing, but I very well feel that there needs to be some ethic limits to which countries you do business with and how that business is conducted.
Free Trade is increasingly becoming synomynous with Coorporate Free Reign.
(b) I can pay someone at Dell $500 & fire someone making $5000 here.
Oh, I get it know. Let me see how I should explain this.
We have 1 low price worker (willing to work for 1/10 the price), 1 ordinary worker (that can do the same work as the low price worker but costs more) and a third ordinary worker at dell that does the work of producing 10 peoples worth of computers.
So the ordinary worker at dell creates 10 times the worth of what the other two workers do. Talk about efficency. Those two other workers should also work for dell as they could do another 20 peoples worth of job that way. Ok, that doesn't work in infinity as there is diminishing return on what computers can do but it is the reason we have a big computer industry.
This isn't to say that paying less money is bad. Actually I agree with you to a large degree. Usually when you pay less money for something it is because what you are paying for is more efficent.
However, when it comes to outsourcing, a big reason for the lower cost has more to do with worse living conditions (and lower taxes due to less goverment services) of those you outsource to. Same when buying products produced in low cost countries (maybe even parts of that dell computer). Sometimes the lower living conditions go in several steps. One common argument is that indian programmer don't need as much money because you can live well in india with less. But why is that? Mostly because it is cheaper to pay worse off people in India to do stuff for you.
Still, what is the alternative. To leave the Indian computer programmers in the dust doing nothing. That will very likely be even worse for both parties, and is a big reason why Indian workers are cheaper. If they couldn't create wealth by programming they would doing something much less wealth creating. The american worker however can more likely find some other work.
And on the bright side, as countries such as India and China gets hard money infused into them and their workers begins to demand more the wage rises and it basically acts as a huge kick start for the whole country allowing them to run without western demand and job will travel back or more likely outsourced to the next country that needs a kickstart.
Still, there are things to watch out for when outsourcing. If the unemployment within your own population gets to big due to outsourcing, it may be wise to react. Same if vital skills are lost. Finally, if your own country doesn't allow workers to do XXX. Should it then be allowed to make deals with other countries where workers can/have to do XXX. Where do the limits of ethics go? These are all difficult issues that are important for goverments.
My argument is that any rule saying that society owns your wealth is wrong. Your response seems to be "society owns your wealth...hence they own your wealth".
What I am saying more exactly is that society owns you down to every last bone. It isn't a question of right or wrong. It just is. It is the same in any society, you abide what rules there are or get punished. What you "own" is what society says that you own. Nothing more, nothing less.
Of course, if you manage to say create a society with all economic libertarians there will be no redistribution of property except for the funding of military/police to protect those property laws. But the wealth of that society is still the sum of all its individuals. It is just an unevenly distributed wealth that won't get redistributed.
Computers make me wealthy at the cost of someone else - by your logic, computers have made society poorer.
Sorry, but if you can't see the difference between a zero sum action and a non zero sum action you aren't worth debating with.
Computers create wealth because they increase efficency, allowing one person to do more. Paying someone more or less doesn't create wealth. It is simply a lesser or bigger transfer of wealth from one person to another.
This isn't to say that you should just pay anyone more just because you can. Supply & demand is a useful tool for distributing limited resources. And in the case of salaries it can be used to transfer skilled people to workplaces where they can do jobs creating more wealth.
However, the act of paying itself is just a zero sum action.
Do you know what petitio principii means?
Yes. I don't find how I did that however. I just stated the obvious which is that by living in a society you have no more right to any wealth you create than that society allows you to have. That is the price you pay for living in a society.
I agree that I have been a little harsh in my last post. Sorry about that. A better response to "Society doesn't create wealth. People do." would have gone like this.
That statement is incorrect. Society is a grouping of people. The wealth a society creates is simply the sum of what all the people in that society creates. Yes, the individuals create the wealth specifically, but it doesn't belong to that individual unless the rules of society says so.
If a cheaper person produces the same thing/service, it definitely makes me more wealthy by having him do a task than having someone else do it.
It makes you more wealthy, but at the cost of someone else less wealthy.
In other words, the wealth of society as a whole remains the same. It is a zero sum action.
Society doesn't create wealth. People do.
So? Who creates the wealth isn't important. As long as you live in a society you play by the society's rules.
If you don't like that you have to move somewhere else. May I recommend a desert island or Sudan where you can live with libertarian "friends". Just don't complain if (when) they backstab you.
Somebody earning $1000 a month in India can maintain a standard of living above someone in US earning $4k-5k a month. So no, these companies are not explioting anybody.
Yes, but that is because they in turn are exploiting those who are poorer than they are (meaning cheaper access to the service and land sectors). A chain of exploitation down to the poor who will work for single digit $ a day so that they can survive.
So, yes it is exploitation.
Oh, and for those things were you can't exploit the poorer like buying quality or tech items like computers/cars, you still have a huge difference.
You can of course say that it isn't exploitation, but helping them by funneling money into their society. But the truth is, that as long as there is a huge salary difference for the same amount and type of job, there is exploitation going on.
And the grandparent was correct. These companies are employing workforce at below minimum wage salaries. Why are they allowed to sell products in the US?
I actually live in Europe, but I often have the same question over here. We have laws and regulations that offer our own workers protection, but then we go and buy goods and services from countries that don't have such protections. Isn't that the height of hypocrasy?
Yup, and wealth is not money. Money is just a tool for allowing people to exchange wealth.
Making more money flow through society (GDP) is just a way to create illusionary wealth. Real wealth is created by making wanted/nescessary things more efficent.
Hiring a cheaper person is not creating wealth. Decieving/Lying to your customers isn't creating wealth. Giving extreme salaries to some people doesn't create wealth. Having some professions pay $100000/year insurance just to work (Neurosurgery) because of insane lawsuits isn't creating wealth. Allowing monopolies to earn lots of money because of lacking supply & demand definitly doesn't create wealth. Having unemployed people doesn't create wealth. Throwing sick people to the wolfs doesn't create wealth. Destroying stuff doesn't create wealth.
Making skilled people worked in high wealth producing jobs does create wealth. Making less skilled people work with less wealth producing but needed jobs create wealth (as long as there is more wealth producing jobs for the more skilled people). making things more efficent definitly creates wealth. Reducing corruption creates wealth. Giving enough incentive (but not too much as it is a limited resource) for someone to work creates wealth. Finally, making people feel happy and satisfied creates wealth because those feelings are by most considered wealth in itself. (This last one I added, because it is important to remember that material wealth isn't all that is)
Also, remember that a large part of the disagreement behind people isn't about creating wealth, but about which way creates wealth more efficently, and more importantly how the wealth society creates should be distributed.
Very good post
I just think it would make the laws come into line with society - trying to go the other way is trouble.
This is probably the most important thing. Doing otherwise just decreases the faith the population have in the justice system. And that is a very bad thing.
Beyond what you said, I personally believe in a far shorter copyright terms. While I will usually argue for a low 5-10 limit that aims at the ordinary investment return analysis, I am however much more compromising on this issue. There is a second limit around 20-50 years. After that, any IP that is still in use should really be considered a classic and incoorporated into the public domain. It is just sad the way it is now when an old classic traditional birthday song can't be sung because it still is copyrighted. Also, it makes it easier to save those works of art that aren't in use any longer. Finally, it could provide a boosting to the low budget adapation industry, meaning more works of art.
There is like, what, one, two banners that are displayed and only in an area that you see for two seconds before you join a game. Oh yes, I am giving up my mind! How they control us!
And bnetd has 0 banners, meaning that it is the better product. Of course, that is the real truth about coorporations. They don't want to provide the best possible product because it isn't in their own interest.
So you expect Blizzard to give their mechanism to validate keys to anyone that wants to reverse engineer their products? Do you know how stupid and unreasonable it sounds?
Of course it is unreasonable. But so is the opposite, to ban a software because it doesn't look at the license keys in a way that it can't know how before connecting two players together.
bnetd was a tool that people used to run illegitimate copies of Blizzard software yet still enjoy the benefits of online play.
And to run legal copies copies in environments where internet access wasn't availible. a.k.a. lan parties.
And to play on the internet with banned keys. Another reason why the battle.net legally enforced monopoly is pure evil. Oh, I fully support the right of Blizzard to ban players. I however equally support the right of those players to play on other servers that isn't under Blizzards control.
If you were a stockholder in Blizzard, you would want this shut down
Of course. And if I was a hardcore muslim I would want all atheists converted or executed.
If you were a reasonable person, you would understand why any business would want to prevent this
Understand yes. I also understand why hardcore muslims want to kill me, but that doesn't mean that I am going to let them trample on my rights.
It has nothing to do with anti free market,
It has all to do with the free market. When only one company is allowed to perform a service it isn't a free market. Battle.net doesn't work on LANs, and it doesn't allow play with banned keys. That makes it an obviously inferior product.
It isn't strange that some people developed a better server.
This isn't a company that created their own RTS and is competing against blizzard.
No, it is a company (ok, volunteers) that created their own superior connection service and are competing against blizzard.
You all seem to have the inability to put yourself in the shoes of people who develop software.
I really feel those poor bnetd developers that was forced to stop developing their software because of a lawsuit from an immoral coorporation (sorry about the tautology). Oh, you weren't talking about those developers...They don't matter to you?...Hypocrite.
And I also feel for all those who got banned by blizzard and can't play on the internet any longer. OK, actually I don't because I despise cheaters, but I still protect their rights, because I know what happens when you only look after yourself.
You come off as arrogant and selfish
You come off as extremly arrogant and selfish.
How dare a company make profit on a quality product!
Oh, I have no problem with them making a profit. I do have a problem with them shutting down another product to make even more profit while reinforcing their dictatorial control. (because control is very important to those in power. They are simply addicted to it)
If it was only pirates using bnetd you would atleast have a point to stand on, but it far from isn't.
I really hope some day people damage your income illegally. I am sure you will just sit by and let them do it, right?
It is a bigger chance that people will damage my income legally. That seems to be all that coorporations are doing nowadays.
And btw, no bnetd developer damaged Blizzards
From the link you posted
"In the original description, the Diffie-Hellman exchange by itself does not provide authentication of the communicating parties and is thus vulnerable to a man-in-the-middle attack. A person in the middle may establish two distinct Diffie-Hellman key exchanges, one with Alice and the other with Bob, effectively masquerading as Alice to Bob, and vice versa, allowing the attacker to decrypt (and read or store) then re-encrypt the messages passed between them. A method to authenticate the communicating parties to each other is generally needed to prevent this type of attack."
So no Diffie-Hellman doesn't protect againt MITM attacks by itself.
Such as...
Cutting it in pieces, rearranging it, using it privatly for any other purpose including making private copies. Oh, and if it is something visual I can also print it out and piss on it. Basically anything I can do with an ordinary item except for the exception of redistributing a copy which is restricted under copyright law.
I can even make copies for personal use as long as I don't redistribute them, although even that isn't 100% true as lending a recorded videotape to a friend may very well be seen as fair use. (although that whole part of the copyright law is way too diffuse in general)
it is an application of first-sale doctrine.
And the first sale doctrine is about owning things you buy. I choose to use that as an example exactly because it is the main ruling that shows how owns the copy. (and no, it isn't the creator).
this is Slashdot, and no one here gets it unless you do it my way. We're saying the exact same thing, except you're using proper terminology and I'm putting it in terms that Slashdotters understand.
No, you are using improper terminology to try and equalize copyright infringment with theft.
What have you bought? A can't-be-further-copied copy of the IP?
Yes. And if you break the copyright law to copy that can't-be-further-copied copy that you own, then you are guilty of copyright infringement, not theft.
What you've effectively done purchased the right to use the IP
And when I buy a table I have effectivly purchased the rights to use the table. That doesn't really say much.
but no one here buys into copyrights, so it's impossible to have dialogue about how to fix the actual problem.
Actually, it is fully possible to have a dialogue. However, as soon as you begin calling copyright infringement, theft, you will get labeled and have all responses focusing on just that.
Also, I think most people here wants to retain copyright although in far more limited forms than exists today.
The actual problem being how to allow IP creators to be compensated for their work.
Yup, and that is a question that definitly needs discussing. It is a damn big problem due to how IP costs to produce but have a very very low marginal costs because of the ease of copying.
In general it is very easy to convince most people about the usefulness of commercial copyright, although some economic libertarians will argue that copyright goes against the idea of the free market and that if people want IP produced they will pay for it.
The length of copyright is another matter. The current lengths are seen as obscene by many. A popular suggestions in the US is 14 years due to it being the original length. Personally I think that is a little long in todays fast moving climate, especially since businesses have to plan on getting their many back in a far shorter time than that.
On the socialist side you will of course hear about taxing and distributing money to people who produce IP. The problem with this is of course how you determine how much money to give to each person. Also there is the question of what kind of tax. A general one, or one specific to internet or storage media?
This whole thing won't grow any smaller either. As people in poorer countries gain internet access, the amount of piracy going on will increase. If something can be copied cheaply it will be.
If we continually vote for the less evil candidate, the other candidates will become less evil to try and get votes.
You are right in the basic assumption. However, what you aren't mentioning is that lesser evil won't become any more good. By voting for the lesser evil you are acknowledging the lesser evil.
Sometimes it must be done out of nescessity, but usually it is a bad idea. Polticians love to play on this however as it is yet another way to use fear (fear of the other candidate in this case) to manipulate the voters.
The only way to pull a lesser evil towards more good is by not voting for him when he does something evil. (Well, that or bribe him to do good)
but the kooks on the far left are running the Democrat party
Not really. If that was true you would be seeing Dennis Kucinich as the presidential candidate. And he isn't even that far left compared to real european leftists.
Of course, if you are confusing authoritarian with leftist (easily done since the big leftist boggieman soviet also was very authoritarian), then it isn't that strange. Especially something like banning violent video games which is completly neutral on the left-right scale, but very authoritarian. The nanny state and the religious morality state are just two sides of the same coin and neither has anything to do with left or right.
how do you prevent votes from being bought and sold as commodities?
The death penalty?
Ok, that is an exaggeration, especially since I am against the death penalty, but the basic idea is correct. Laws against buying (as well as selling) votes or probing into the voting patterns of any person. There should be pretty hefy penalties as it is a direct attack on society itself.
And at the same time we can do away with positive connotations of words like bullshit, marketing and propaganda and newspeak and instead call it
Well, I like the term "intellectual rape". Actually, just drop the term intellectual as it is superfluous. And most of all it makes them mad when you ask them to stop with the raping.
So are you done raping the language today?
Any "sale" of IP is the sale of a right to use the IP
Wrong, completly incorrect.
A sale of is IP is a sale just like any other item which give me full rights to do anything I want it. The courts have ruled on that again and again when it comes to the rights of reselling items.
The only thing I am not legally allowed to do is redistribute a copy of the item in question, because every single piece of IP produced automatically gets assigned a copyright that prevents anyone but the owner of the copyright to do just that. That copyright can in turn be sold and traded, transfering the rights of copying the item for redistribution.
However, every specific copy is consider its own and can be resold.
the only party who is able to sell rights to use the IP)
Wrong, you can not sell rights to use IP. You can only sell the IP itself while maintaining the exclusive right to copy and sell more of it.
Actually, it is also possible to use contracts (leases) to rent software to others, which would be more similar to what you are talking about, but that falls under completly different laws than ordinary store bought IP.
LOL I want to have my cake and eat it too please... copyright is what gives the GPL it's teeth. You people CAN'T HAVE IT BOTH WAYS.
Yup. This is an issue that has been discussed somewhat extensivly on the swedish pirate party forum.
And the current party line is that GPL has to deal with it just like everyone else. The party program aims for a five year commercial monopoly, meaning that other companies couldn't use it for those five years, but beyond that the code would be...well...free with a small f.
Because if someone only has $60, then it doesn't really matter how many games they pirate once the $60 is gone. There is only $60 total available. If a kid plays 1 game or 100 games, no more money is available. From an economic perspective, his piracy has absolutely no effect.
In fact, his piracy makes the society a richer place by creating wealth (entertainment) from nothing (copying). Of course, the economic field is at a total loss on how to measure real wealth so you are completly right that it has no effect from an economic perspective.
Now, in the real world, a game pirate probably NEVER buys the games - so they don't even get his $60..
This statement goes against all research that indicates that pirates are more likely to buy IP than non pirates. Of course, some of the reason for this is that someone is more likely to pirate if they are interested in what is pirated in the first place. Cause and effect makes it difficult to determine which way it goes.
THAT is a problem for game publishers
Yup. The real question that has to be balanced is the earnings of IP producers vs the profit of society as a whole.
You hear all this talk about how ip producers want to control their "moral right to own their own work", but in reality that simply isn't true as you can see by how IP rights are sold back and forth. No, it is all about money and economy and in that case you have to look at the societal use of copyright.
While few will argue aganst a limited commercial monopoly on IP (although the length can be debated), the question is, Is it worth the societal cost of restricting the private piracy that generates huge amounts of wealth so that IP producers can earn more money.?
I would say no, while other would say yes. I am fine debating with those saying yes as long as they don't try to play the moral superiority (a.k.a.) stealing card. Calling it stealing if I share some information on my hardrive is ridicioulus. And, no you don't own what is on my harddrive or in my head. You can't own information. As best you can get a state granted monopoly on redistributing it.
I am just waiting for someone to invent star trek replicators. Can you imagine the kind of panic manufacturing owners would get if it was easy to replicate physical goods.
bnetd? The reverse engineered version of their free online service,
Yes, a free alternative to the ad supported (as in not really free unless you are willing to give up your mind) online service.
Choice is good.
check for a legitimate copy of the game?
It is a little difficult to provide such functionality when the only one who could provide it is Blizzard who refused to. Besides, it isn't the job of a connection service to ensure that its users are using legitime copies.
How exactly can they justify not shutting that down?
Actually, I am amazed that bnetd was shut down. It shows just how insanly pro coorporate and anti free market the US is when providing an alternative connection service is made illegal.
One more advice. Don't buy three harddrives from the same batch as it very much increases the likelyhood that all of them will fail nearly at the same time.
Make sure you connect via eSATA, not something stupid like USB, which would take forEVER.
Not really. Even with USB you can copy atleast 1-1.5GB per minute (that is real life numbers, not theoretical ones), meaning that copying would take a few hours which is quite acceptable for most uses as it can run as a background task.
The only use I see is for a program like FRAPS, which records your screen and sound.
Exactly, and I for one am a person that uses that functionality to record stuff legally (voiced go lessons on the Kiseido Go Server to be exact). Heck, it is impossible to do it illegally as it falls under the same category as recording videos. Why should I be restricted from using my own computer as I wish.
What I am really afraid of however is how these people are colluding by using a mix of cryptography and laws to prevent "unauthorized" equipment from being able to interface with the system. Right now I can always get another more free piece of equipment, but what about in 10-15 years when you can't run the software on anything but authorized hardware, and trying to bypass that is a federal offense.
The above may be a nightmare to me, but for some rich people it is an utopian vision. I mean it when I say that I am afraid. Afraid because people tolerate minor restrictions being added all the time with just minor protests. It will become worse much worse and by the time people wake up it will be too late...again. Have you heard some of the people behind this. They are not acting as individuals but instead as lunatic powerhungry agents for powerful immoral organisations.
And I used immoral instead of amoral deliberatly. Earning money is an amoral stance, but the idea of earning money above anything else is simply immoral.
where did science come from? can you prove, with only science, that all the laws of science have always existed
The old greeks would be my first guess, but my history in that area isn't that good. You can't prove anything with science, you can only disprove. And you can only disprove things about an observed reality, not about a philosophical system.
or explain how our 1 in 10^99999999999999999999999999999999999 chance of evolving into an intelligent species just happened even though out of the millions of stars we've studied ours is one of very few that might possibly contain a planet that might possible support life
This one is simple. We exist, therefore there is a 1:1 chance of us existing. Propabilities after the fact is useless because it has already happened.
You could just as well say that there is 1:10^X chance of me breathing in that exact air molecule that I just breathed in. Don't you see, it is impossible, so it must be work of god. It is a bad argument, plain and simple.
Just curious. you can blindly accept evolution as fact
If you mean blindly as in having seen lots and lots of biological facts concerning evolution, also having seen the effectiveness of natural selection as a mathematical algorithm used in computer AI and being impressed how such a simple system can tie to many observed things, such as fossiles, dna similarties between species, 1000s of years of farming and much much more.
All in all it is more solid than our theories concering gravity where we basically only have a formula that says, this is how it works, but have no real working theory of the underlying reasons why the formula works.
thought with an open mind and see WHY someone might be inclined to believe such irrational nonsense as ID
I have. Psychology is an interesting subject which among other things studies why humans believe irrational nonsense.
Indoctrinated upbrining is commmon. As is peer pressure. The human brain also is very good at partitioning information allowing irrational beliefs to coincide with rational ones that often contradict the irrational part.
Don't view third parties as "throwing your vote away". Almost everyone has been throwing their votes away and the people we have representing us are just the proof of that!
Quoted for truth.
Exactly. The only power you have over a candidate is not voting for him.
That is why it is incorrect to say that voting for a third party is throwing your vote away. While not voting is one way to indicate your power over a candidate, it is usually better to vote blank or third party as that more clearly indicates exactly why you are dissatisfied.
In the same manner if you have no intention at all of voting for a candidate whatever he does, then you have no power over him either. The power comes only from the threat of losing your vote. If he doesn't have it to begin with, there is nothing to lose.
A candidate has no need at all to cater to the party followers because he'll get those votes for free (unless he does something really stupid). The ones a candidate has to cater to are those who are undecided. That basically means three groups. Those who are considering voting for the other big party, those who are considering voting for a third party and those who are considering not voting at all.
Being in one of those three groups is the only way you can affect policy.
Of course, voting against one party by voting for the other big party is an acceptable strategy. But just remember that such a vote gives up your opportunity to affect policy if you do, because you aren't voting for a candidate but against someone else. And while at it, each individual vote is worth nothing, but you are part of the statistics that the candidates has to monitor to decide what is more important.
If you aren't prepared to give up on a politician because of how he votes, then you have no real power over him. Obama should have known that he would lose some tech votes if he voted for immunity. If he didn't know that, he really needs better advisors. I am presuming he did know and made the choice that those votes weren't important enough, thinking that few enough techs would jump ship because of it.