Surrogates. Bruce Willis does more than just destroy asteroids!
Avatar had live sentient animals being grown and controlled by humans. In Surrogates, they're robots, and surrogacy starts on the battlefield.
Mmm... to me, Surrogates absolutely reeked of Keith Laumer's novelette "The Bodybuilders". The plot differed, but the basic meme - people use mechanical surrogates for social interaction, so they can be as handsome/beautiful, and in as good apparent shape as they'd like to be in meatspace - is a straightforward copy, as is Willis's reaction when he's forced to confront external reality in his own, very vulnerable, biological body.
I always wondered why his estate didn't sue, but I guess the fact that he left no children (and his wife died before he did) has something to do with it.
Man. if this is the stretch people have to go through to blame Google for something, Google must be doing pretty damn good.
Seriously, this is, yet again, another NTSH article about Google. They are doing what the user opted in for them to do.
I think it's worth noting that, although I allow scripts and cookies directly from Google, I disallow them from google-analytics.com (via Cookiesafe and NoScript), and that choice does NOT appear to disable ANY Google function that I can determine.
As evil behavior goes, I'm with geekoid: this is pretty weak beer.
Basically, it costs too much, it doesn't actually deter criminals from committing murder or high treason, and it is provably misapplied from time to time. It's past time we did away with it, and saved the taxpayer the expense of an expensive, ineffective, and occasionally supremely unjust Medieval legal sanction.
Arguably, from a purely practical standpoint, you could take the Judge Dredd option and remove objections A and B at the expense of increasing C: make executions so cheap and so common that even if they don't deter, they stop reoffending. And if you decide that the worth of a human life isn't that big after all - or if you just don't bother to investigate the false positive rate - you don't have to worry about C. This is the route that a lot of dictatorships ended up going.
This is why I prefer a moral objection rather than a "practical" one. Because entirely practical arguments historically haven't stopped the practice.
I opined:
Basically, it costs too much, it doesn't actually deter criminals from committing murder or high treason, and it is provably misapplied from time to time. It's past time we did away with it, and saved the taxpayer the expense of an expensive, ineffective, and occasionally supremely unjust Medieval legal sanction.
Leading lennier to argue:
Arguably, from a purely practical standpoint, you could take the Judge Dredd option and remove objections A and B at the expense of increasing C: make executions so cheap and so common that even if they don't deter, they stop reoffending. And if you decide that the worth of a human life isn't that big after all - or if you just don't bother to investigate the false positive rate - you don't have to worry about C. This is the route that a lot of dictatorships ended up going.
This is why I prefer a moral objection rather than a "practical" one. Because entirely practical arguments historically haven't stopped the practice.
Here's the thing, though: there's a significant fraction of the population - and I would argue that it's currently a solid majority in the USA - that has no moral objection to the death penalty (I am part of that fraction - I happen to think that killing a person is a lot less morally objectionable than imprisoning him for life). For those people, purely moral arguments against the death penalty are a complete waste of breath. Practical arguments, however - and especially cost-based arguments - carry weight with death penalty proponents.
Now, granted, a certain proportion of death penalty advocates base their position on the notion that it is a Good Thing that society exact revenge on those evil enough to commit crimes that expose them to the death penalty. For them, neither moral nor practical arguments will make any impression - they want payback, and will settle for nothing less. (Personally, I view appropriate application of the death penalty as more in the line of pesticide: I think the world is better off without people like Charles Ng, for instance, and his death at the hands of society wouldn't bother me in the slightest, morally, ethically, or otherwise. I don't want revenge against him for his heartless string of torture-murders, I'd just like to see him permanently absent.) But the majority of death penalty advocates are, I think, amenable to the practical arguments I outlined above.
As I see it, you can choose to stand on the moral high ground, and have no meaningful effect on the debate, or you can choose to push practical reasons to eliminate the death penalty, and thereby potentially effect actual change in society's attitudes and policies. After all, there's no inherent conflict between your moral objections and my practical ones. The only real question is: Which is the most effective argument in winning hearts and minds?
BTW - as a Babylon 5 fan, I admire your handle - and your arguments are exactly those I'd expect from your namesake.
I find it difficult to see practicality in the death penalty. Abortion now, at least indeed has undeniable practicality in some cases. It's hard to argue against that point.
But the death penalty -- at least in its incarnation where you don't just shoot/hang/burn the first person you think is guilty -- seems awfully impractical. Compared to life imprisonment it costs the same (or sometimes even more) and has the same outcome of preventing recidivism (re-offending). But, unfortunately it does cause psychological strain on those having to dish out the penalty (that life imprisonment certainly doesn't) and prevents any sort of future moral insight in the guilty, no matter how unlikely you deem it.
A further difference is what some victims feel, namely the warm gut feeling of satisfied murderous revenge... which is most likely what the person who got the penalty also got at some point and is even maybe what they might have gotten the penalty for to begin with. But since the logical outcome of life and death penalty is ultimately the same anyway (death); only one with more delay than the other, you can't really say that the latter is more practical in that regard either. In both cases, they will never see freedom again or get a chance to repeat their action until they die (and if you're not religious and there's no after-life, this lack is permanent).
As such, I see no reason how practicality could decide the question of the use of the death penalty, as it seems to me just as practical (or even a smidgeon less practical, I admit) than real life imprisonment.
Of course, practicality and morality are two different things that need to be evaluated differently, and thus -- at least for me -- the question is a moral, and not a practical one.
I agree that the death penalty is impractical, but for entirely different reasons than the ones you put forth.
You admit that your objection to the death penalty is a moral one, and your arguments all flow from that. Mine are entirely practical ones:
A. The death penalty, as practiced in the United States of America, costs FAR more than life imprisonment. With automatic and discretionary appeals, the taxpayer-financed legal costs are astronomical. And
B. It is a totally ineffective deterrent. Although the story is somewhat different in backward states such as Texas and Florida, in most states of the Union, the appeals process draws out the actual infliction of the death penalty to the point that, in California (to take another extreme), the chances that a Death Row inmate will actually be executed by the state are so remote that, for all practical purposes, they're nearly equivalent to those of winning the lotto. That is profoundly ineffective as a deterrent, and it certainly does not justify the expense of the protracted appeals process (or that of maintaining a separate Death Row facility within the larger prison facility. Finally,
C. If an innocent prisoner is executed, there's no calling that penalty back. If life imprisonment is the ultimate penalty, at least a wrongfully-convicted prisoner has some chance of eventually gaining release.
Basically, it costs too much, it doesn't actually deter criminals from committing murder or high treason, and it is provably misapplied from time to time. It's past time we did away with it, and saved the taxpayer the expense of an expensive, ineffective, and occasionally supremely unjust Medieval legal sanction.
The founders of the USA - which is to say the delegates to the Continental Congress and its successor bodies - were, admittedly, mostly at least nominally Christian. But the country that they created was, by design, emphatically a secular entity.
That's all I was trying to say. Nowhere in my post did I ever communicate anything remotely non-secular.
Oh? So this is "non-secular"?
understand this country was founded by Religous people and we will always be fighting to govern it, because we know our rights are provided by our Creator.
Horseshit, sailor. That's as "non-secular" as a Papal bull.
So, in conclusion, Jesus loves you.
But, you see, I don't love him. And that's the point: because the USA is, by design, a non-secular entity, I don't have to love him.
Don't believe in a creator? That's fine, but understand this country was founded by Religous people and we will always be fighting to govern it, because we know our rights are provided by our Creator.
Advocates of a Christian theocracy in America constantly repeat that meme, despite the fact that it's patently untrue.
Christian cultists immigrated to America on the Mayflower specifically so that they could practic religious intolerance free from interference by the English government. Other cults followed their lead over the ensuing century-and-a-half or so, but they were not the only sort of people who immigrated to America. Most of those who came here in the 150+ years before this country was actually founded did so for economic reasons - because land was free for the taking, and opportunities to get rich abounded in the New Woirld.
The founders of the USA - which is to say the delegates to the Continental Congress and its successor bodies - were, admittedly, mostly at least nominally Christian. But the country that they created was, by design, emphatically a secular entity. That, in turn, was because for many decades before (and, indeed, after) the founding of the USA various of those Christian cults mentioned above were in a practically continuous state of war with one another. Take the so-called Great Awakening in Connecticut during the period 1735-1745, a time of tremendous turmoil in the Congregationalist (i.e. - "Puritan) faith. The Massachusetts Bay Puritans even went so far as to hang four Quakers for the crime of not being Puritans. So the founding fathers explicitly made the USA a secular nation, to prevent any of the cults from gaining supremacy over the others and establishing itself as a national religion.
Basically, you and your ilk want to undo that and make the USA into a Christian theocracy. The problem is, you fail to understand that, if the USA became an officially Christian theocracy, chances are that it would be a Catholic one - because adherents of the Catholic Church comprise the single largest denomination in the USA, with more than 65.5 million members (although there are more Protestant adherents collectively, they are fractured into hundreds of denominations with serious doctrinal and dogmatic divisions from one another, and cannot be considered as a single religious entity), with Southern Baptists at just over 16 million members being the next-largest denomination.
If you believe that Southern Baptists would be happy at the prospect of an explicitly Catholic theocracy in the USA, you aren't very well acquainted with Southern Baptists, or their ingrained hatred of and contempt for what they like to call Papists.
So, in conclusion, kindly shut the fuck up, because you obviously don't know what the hell you're talking about.
King's "I Have a Dream" speech has rather famously been the source of numerous copyright lawsuits by the King Estate. See here for example.
The PBS special the OP was speaking of was "Eyes on the Prize", which was out of print for years until the producers got nearly $1 million in grants in order to pay off copyright holders after their original five-year rebroadcast rights had expired.
I would think that most everyone here knows that just because something can be found on YouTube doesn't mean that it's there legally. The vast majority of music on that site violates US copyright law.
Now, this deserves a +5 Informative mod (although it actually got a +5 Insightful one, instead).
The King estate copyright claim (and MLK's original claim) IS abuse of the copyright system. I'm old enough to have watched the "I have a dream" speech live on TV, before a crowd that covered the Mall, and it seems to me that a challenge to the original copyright claim could and should have been mounted right after King made the speech - and I think it would have succeeded, then. The other part of the problem here is the concept of legal precedent, which idiotically holds that, once a court has ruled on an issue, that decision is somehow graven in stone, and, in subsequent trials of approximately-similar cases, the judge must abide by the arguments advanced by the judge who presided over the original case, no matter how fallacious his/her logic might be, and irrespective of actual facts.
For example, take the odious decision in State of Ohio v Anderson (please forgive the horrible PDF scan), where Justice Resnick, writing for the Ohio Supreme Court, retails a laundry list of supposed characteristics unique to pit bulls that includes a staggering number of misrepresentations (e.g. - pit bulls are the only dogs that bite and hold), assertions unbacked by evidence of any kind (e.g.- pit bulls are the only dogs that can climb trees!), and outright fabrications (e.g. - pit bulls bite with a force of 2000 pounds per square inch, a bite force unmatched by any other breed). These canards, in turn, are all based on State of Florida v Peters (a much-better-quality PDF), a case in which the Peters's defense counsel should have been shot for gross incompetence for not challenging the assertion of fairy tales as fact. And the U.S. Supreme Court denied review of Anderson, despite the clearly-unconstitutional assertion by Resnick that any law enforcement officer is capable of determining whether a mixed breed dog is or is not a pit bull, and that anyone who is unsure whether the dog they propose to adopt is a pit bull in the meaning of the law can definitively determine that question by asking any clown with a badge to pass judgement (totally ignoring the excellent possibility that some other cop will reach a different conclusion, and charge you with violating Ohio's requirement that you maintain $100,000 in liabilty insurance for each pit bull you own - insurance that it's impossible to obtain, unless you're a licensed breeder, btw). And this is not a mere theoretical conundrum of which I speak. I'm currently charged with exactly this crime, for owning a bullmastiff mix, even though the Ross County Dog Warden has evaluated her and stated (before four witnesses), "There's no pit in this animal." (I'm also charged with the same "crime" for owning a boxer that my wife and I adopted from the county animal shelter two years ago.)
It's not just copyright law - the legal system itself is broken. And the MAFIAA is no worse than your typical local prosecutor - because, just like the MAFIAA, the prosecutor's favorite exercise is overreaching.
None of which obviates my point that only Congre
Re:Your right to what?
on
BTJunkie No More?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
hairyfeet blathered:
Except you can't use "I have a dream" or "Ask not what your country can do for you" in a video without cutting a big fat check. PBS had a great special years ago on the civil rights movement...yet you can't see it, why? because its all behind paywalls now. This isn't just about the latest titney spears pop song you know, this is about media cartels locking the entire history of modern society behind paywalls. Nearly every spoken word of any note is now behind a paywall and all for Walt Disney, a man whose been dead longer than many of us have been alive, so that his first works which were made when planes were made from cloth and antibiotics were but a dream, all so his works can stay behind a paywall.
This drivel was rated Insightful +5? You have got to be kidding me. Kennedy's inaugural address is available on Youtube. So is MLK's "I have a dream" speech. And Kennedy's address to the nation cannot be copyrighted. It's public domain by law.
You want something to have one of those petitions for on the White House website? demand an end to the sonny Bono act, and demand that copyrights take sane terms again. watch how quickly our media shill of a POTUS tells you to go fuck yourself, he knows whose paying his salary and it AIN'T you. It is time we really start voting third parties across the board, its obvious to anyone with eyes that the two party system is simply no longer functional. We frankly need four five and six parties but lets start with three and work from there. I urge everyone to vote green across the board, they have already made gains in many states, lets give the shills a reason to fear for their jobs again!
Yep, waste your time petitioning the President to do something he has no power to do. Congress passed the Sonny Bonehead Act, and only Congress has the Constitutional power to repeal it.
And simply voting Green is an equal waste of time - and your vote. Want to do something that will actually make a difference? Contact your local Green party headquarters, and volunteer to campaign. Then, put your time and effort where your mouth is and actually DO that. Bone up on the talking points for your local Green Party candidates, then go canvass for votes the old-fashioned way: door-to-door. It's not sexy and it's definitely NOT easy, but it wins hearts and minds in a way that posting drivel to/. simply doesn't. That's how the wingnut right took over the Repugnican party back in the Reagan administration, and those inmates have been in charge of that asylum ever since. (Ever wonder why obvious loonballs like Santorum and Gingrinch seem to have such appeal to the Repubs? It's because EVERY state-level Republican central committee is absolutely dominated by "social conservatives" and evangelicals. Reagan got them fired up to do the grass-roots organizing necessary to, for instance, actually field a slate of candidates for local and state Republican central committees - and that gave them control over the party's MONEY and its endorsements at a state level. That's why Schwartzenegger had to run without their endorsement in California's gubernatorial races - because he's a moderate, pro-choice Republican, and the California Republican Central Committee HATED him for it. It's also why Romney is pretending to be a super-conservative right now - because Nixon's advice to Reagan still holds: "Run as hard to the right as you can, until you get the nomination. Then run as hard to the center as you can until the election.")
But NONE of that will help in the upcoming Presidential election. It's far too little, and far too late. Vote Green, and the Republican party will take over all three branches of government again. Look at how well THAT worked out in 2000 and 2004. Nader voters in Florida handed the 2000 election to Bush - and that got us th
Thomst: I feel for you. My mother developed Alzheimer's some years ago and died from it. If you have not read The 36 Hour Day, you may want to get it. Understanding your mother's humanity and growing lack of control over her own life are the most important things you can use to help her. I was very lucky in being of a mind not to try to change my mother's behavior, and instead to help her experience as complete a life as she could.
I'm sorry for your loss.
I'm not familiar with The 36 Hour Day, but I'm acutely conscious of my Mom's state of mind, and the fear and depression I know she's experiencing as her disease progresses. I try to be as supportive as possible, without becoming maudlin, whenever I speak to her. Lately, I've been urging her to record her memoirs as a legacy for her yet-unborn grandchildren. (It's something she's talked about doing for years, so it's really her idea, not mine.) I just want her to enjoy as much of her remaining lifespan as possible, and to face the progression of her disease with as much composure and dignity as possible.
My best wishes go with you.
Thank you. I very much appreciate your recommendation, your advice, and your good wishes.
Alzheimer's is a terrible disease, not just for the person who has it, but especially so for those who are close to the afflicted. The slow, degenerative, wasting of the mind is horrifying to watch, as the person that was once bright and lively gets turned into a shell of their former self. Not able to grasp what's going on around them, or who they're talking to, the person can easily become terrified, lost, and confused, made all the more painful by the fact that they don't know who their children are or why they're here.
I know that identifying the underlying cause and developing a treatment are often worlds apart, but I'm glad nonetheless to see this advancement, if merely for the fact that one day others won't have to experience the pain I did as I watched people I love succumb to Alzheimer's.
Amen to that.
Last August, my mother was diagnosed with "mild to moderate" Alzheimer's. I had been certain for some time prior to then that she had the disease. She would sometimes repeat as if it had just occurred to her a story she'd told me just minutes earlier, she'd get stuck trying to recall the names of people she'd known for years (such as her 22-year-old granddaughter), and was only strongly confident about the details of events long past. In November, she was examined by two doctors at the Copper Ridge Institute (which is affiliated with Johns Hopkins), which specializes in Alzheimer's research and treatment. She knew the President of the U.S. was black, but couldn't recall his name, thought my youngest sister was 40 (she turned 53 in December), and couldn't remember which day of the week it was (it was Friday).
I call her at least once a week, and she seems to deteriorate more every time I speak with her - and yet, she's still fundamentally the same warm, sweet, vibrant woman she's been as long as I've known her. Just... a little confused. What I fear is that, over time, she will lose all the memories that make her that person. I've known several people with advanced Alzheimer's, and watched them become progressively emptier shells of themselves, until they're little more than slack-jawed zombies, incapable of caring for themselves, or communicating with others - and I don't want to see that happen to my Mom.
But I know it will, because none of these new discoveries will make it out of the lab in time to save her from the ravages of this loathsome disease. And that breaks my heart.
It wasn't the defaults that caused this, but the invented derivatives.
Separate from this is the racism that comes out about it. I've seen it blamed on black people. Those people should never have been allowed to own land, let alone have a government agency encourage it. And those poor white bankers ("poor" meaning "some of the richest people in the country") were taken advantage of by those shifty no-good negroids. "Sub-Prime" was the name for a crisis caused by rich white male bankers committing fraud when creating derivatives, but they are also the ones who got to name it, and rather than the "1%ers say, Fuck You America" crisis, it's the "minority caused sub-prime lending" crisis. The poor people didn't cause it. They didn't lie. Who did lie are the mortgage brokers and the bankers. And the rich white bankers blamed the poor blacks. And sadly, that's what the conservatives wanted to hear, so there's so much out there on the blacks causing the crisis by defaulting less than norms that the truth will be buried by the real criminals, like always.
It's actually worse than that.
It wasn't poor people who took out the majority of the loans that went bad when the market collapsed. It was speculators - people who bought houses and (especially) condominiums specifically to flip them. With mortgage bankers offering 0% down loans based on "stated income" (i.e. - "please lie to us about your income"), the industry practically got down on its collective knees and begged house flippers to abuse the system. And they did. In droves. That's why, today, Las Vegas is crammed with high-rise condos that're lucky if they have 15% occupancy rates - because the majority of the mortgages that were taken out during the bubble were for investment properties, not for owner-occupied residences.
And the problem isn't confined to just Las Vegas and Modesto and Boca Raton, either. In freakin' Bulgaria, the so-called "Bulgarian Riviera" is lined with a wall of empty high-rise condominiums a hundred miles long - yet another artifact of the global speculative housing bubble.
It wasn't poor black people who caused the bubble. It was (mostly) white speculators trying to get rich by flipping properties.
If you want to blame a politician, blame Bush for deregulation that let the banks invent the fraudulent derivatives.
Not just Bush - Clinton, too. Where Washington is concerned, there's plenty of blame to go around. (Although, admittedly, Bush appointed nothing but foxes to guard our collective henhouse. Clinton just tore down the Glass-Steagall fence around it.)
California is a clear example of why direct democracy doesn't scale. I think the reform has to happen on lobbying level. Should politicians be able to become lobbyists?
I have to disagree. California's referendum system really has very little to do with "direct democracy". Yes, that was the original logic behind its inclusion in the state constitution, but the current-day reality on the ground is that very, very few California ballot initiatives have anything to do with grassroots movements. The vast majority of the propositions that make the ballot do so because they are conceived and financed by some special interest that's willing to spend the money on paid signature gatherers that's necessary to acquire a sufficient number of valid signatures in a sufficient number of electoral districts to qualify their petition for the ballot - and then spend a buttload of additional money on advertising and promotion during campaign season. If that's direct democracy, I'm the Galactic Overlord.
And reform "on the lobbying level" won't work, either. Even a Supreme Court considerably further to the left than the one under which we currently suffer would balk at forbidding politicians from becoming lobbyists (especially in states that have term limits - keep in mind here that lobbying is far from a Washington-only phenomenon) on free speech grounds, alone.
What's needed - and is the ONLY strategy that would actually WORK - is a combination of:
100% pubic financing for Federal political campaigns, and
the overturn of the Citizens United decision (hold your breath on that one), or a Constitutional amendment denying all political free speech rights to corporate "persons" (like THAT's going to happen).
No, I'm afraid that what we REALLY need is a good, old-fashioned American Sulla.
I'm not saying that isn't happening. I'm saying it's wrong, illegal, immoral, and against the spirit of the amendment.
And I agree with all but the "illegal" part. As Dickens's charater Mr. Bumble observes in Oliver Twist, "The law is an ass."
There are so many, many, MANY things that are both perfectly legal and morally despicable at the same time - corporations being allowed to donate unlimited amounts of money to influence political campaigns is one that springs immediately to mind. Likewise, there are bunches of things that are illegal - marijuana, for instance - that absolutely should not be.
That's because there's logic, common sense, and ethical integrity on one side - and, on the other side, there's the law. And, if you don't like that situation... tough titties. The law, the Supreme Court, and the Legislature don't give a damn about your opinion.
Suck much? Aye, Cap'n, it does. And that sad fact alters nothing, whatsoever.
To exercise the power of eminent domain, the government must prove that the four elements set forth in the Fifth Amendment are present: (1) private property (2) must be taken (3) for public use (4) and with just compensation. These elements have been interpreted broadly.
Even broadly, malls are not 'for public use'.
Sorry, but you're wrong... sorta.
In practice, urban redevelopment, in which a government entity declares an area within its jurisdiction to be "blighted", and declares its intent to "redevelop" it in order to mitigate or eliminate that "blight", entitles that entity to use its power of eminent domain to acquire ownership of the land in the "blighted" area, and then to convey ownership of that land (frequently a consolidated package of adjacent, individual parcels) to a private developer in exchange for the developer's committment to raze existing structures and build new ones in their place. Often, the government entity in question offers tax and other incentives to the developer to bild there, as well, because "blighted" areas are typically not in development-attractive neighborhoods. Very often, the new development consists of a retail element (malls or shopping centers), along with a residential element (high-rise apartment or condominium buildings) that includes some percentage of "affordable" housing ("affordable", in this case, is defined as "affordable by a family or individual who makes the median wage for the area"). The government entity's interest, beyond mitigating urban "blight", is in the affordable housing component, and the developer's interest is typically in the retail component - which is by far the more profitable of the two.
So, when used as a tool of redevelopment, yes, broadly speaking, acquiring private land with public funds in order to allow a private developer to build a mall as part of a program to mitigate "blight" is, legally speaking, well-defined as a "public use" of the power of eminent domain.
Disclosure: I spent the best part of a decade in the last century battling an out-of-control California redevelopment agency hell-bent on squandering taxpayer money on redevelopment boondoggles of the very kind I just described, so I know whereof I speak.
How about scanning a book within a few minutes of its release in the United States, so that poor people in South America can have access to it? No? We are not allowed to ever paint copyright infringement in a positive light?
There are plenty of books, music, movies, and software that are simply not being made available by the people who hold copyrights on them, except in select places in the world, or in some cases not being made available anywhere. For people living in those places, those works might as well be lost to history.
And your point is what?
There are plenty of people in the world who lack access to all kinds of things: sufficient food, clean water, medical care. Those are actual needs. Entertainment is not. That someone else desires my property in no way obligates me to satisfy his desire. As for "those works might as well be lost to history," hyperbole much?
You are starting from the premise that "intellectual property rights" are "natural rights" like the right to live; not only is not universally agreed upon, it is not even in agreement with the very people who created such rights in this country. Yes, created those rights, because without a legal framework those rights do not exist at all -- which is not true of natural rights (nobody "created" your right to live; you were born with it).
I don't give a flying fuck at a rolling donut if my contention that intellectual property is a natural right is "not universally agreed upon". That slavery was morally right, that ALL humans have a natural right to be free was "not universally agreed upon" in this country until after the Civil War. Today, however, with the exception of pimps and the employers of illegal aliens, it IS universally agreed upon. Societies evolve. What you are advocating is the tyrrany of the majority - a concept that both I and the Constitution reject.
In reality, "intellectual property rights" are a myth designed to make people forget that we created the copyright/patent/trademark systems for a reason: to benefit everyone. You were not born with the right to tell people they are not allowed to make copies of the books you write, that right was conferred to you by the law, in an effort to establish a system whereby the public would have access to books (etc.). There was no concept of "intellectual property" before such systems were created; at one time, anyone could simply copy books or retell stories (compare to the right to live, which has existed in one form or another for as long as we have historical records -- every society protected the right of at least some of its members to live).
Oh, bosh.
I was born with the right to be free. That the laws of the United States did not grant that right to every law-abiding resident of the U.S. until after the Civil War doesn't affect the fact that freedom is an inherent, natural right of all human beings. It just took a long freakin' time for society (and law) to acknowledge that right exists for everyone. The same logic applies to my right to control the fruits of my creative labor - right now, international copyright agreements accord that right only limited status. In time, it will come to be seen as an inherent natural right, just like freedom from slavery, free association, voting, freedom from discrimination, and many, many others have done, because societies evolve.
Sure societies evolve, but natural rights do not evolve. Natural rights do not require complex legal frameworks to exist.
See above.
The concept of "natural rights" is a construct of human civilization. The Universe at large recognizes no such rights. "Right to life?" Tell it to the great white shark. Or Ebola. "Right to freedom from slavery?" Tell that to aphids. "Right to freedom of association?" Well, the l
Saying, "Hey, you got your book published, so you have no right to complain if I scan a copy into PDF, Epub, or text format and upload it as a torrent," is sophistry of the most self-serving kind, and profoundly immoral.
Profoundly immoral? To scan a book and share it with the world? You have an interesting moral code. If you wanted to read books that were lost to history, I think your view would change.
Way to conflate out-of-print and orphan works with currently published material. I'm impressed with your intellectual honesty.
Wait a minute... no, I'm not.
To scan and upload a book that is no longer in publication, whose author is dead or missing, and whose nuturing and promotion has been abandoned by everyone with a claim to its copyright is one thing - and something of a special case. To do the same with a book in current publication is quite a different matter.
And YOU KNOW THAT, very well. That's why you choose "conference papers from the 1970s" as your example, rather than, for instance, "The Jefferson Key" or "The Help". It's as intellectually dishonest an argument as possible, because it deliberately couches your position in terms that make it appear as though scanning and uploading essentially abandoned works, and scanning and uploading currently-published and actively-promoted works by living authors who make their living from their books are morally equivalent acts. They're not.
No, the only people who turn to insults are people whose arguments are so poorly grounded that they have no other choice.
Cynician, heel thyself.
I find it interesting that you did not bother to cite this part of the constitution, which forms the basis for our patent and copyright laws:
The Congress shall have Power...To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
I suppose you tried to avoid it because it neither mandates the copyright system and it clearly indicates that copyrights must only exist for limited periods of time. Perhaps if you had spent whatever time it took you to think up your insults reading the constitution, you would have spotted this...or maybe the constitution is not even relevant in your mind, because you think that copyrights are natural rights like life, liberty, and property (although as plenty of people have pointed out, none of those rights come with expiration dates).
I didn't bother to cite the Copyright Clause, because it's non-germane. The question at hand is the validity of the concept of intellectual property, not the existence of copyright law, or the Constitutional authority therefor.
I do think intellectual property (NOT "copyright") is a natural right, just like life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. (Property ownership is not, per se a natural right - it's a matter of law and custom. Miwok Indians ran afoul of the white settlers of Mariposa County because they had no cultural concept of individual property, so they simply took any of the white folks' chattels that captured their fancies - and were massacred by those same settlers for their cultural ignorance.) That it has not yet been recognized as a natural right by the non-creative majority doesn't matter, because, as I pointed out in an earlier post on this subject societies evolve. What today is granted by copyright law will, eventually, be undstood as an inherent human right: the right to own and control your own creative product.
Anyway, I have to say that I'm amused to see that, thus far, my original post - which has sparked more than 150 subsequent comments - was modded to +0 Flamebait. Seems pretty contradictory to me, given the number and range of viewpoints of the commenters, but, hey... it's Chinatown.
In any case, I personally see no reason that copyright should exist in any form. I don't care for artificial scarcity, and I wouldn't mind if less works were produced because there was no copyright.
Fair enough. If the loss to society of some unquantifiable - but undoubtedly large - number of new creative works due to the absence of the copyright protection that allows writers, musicians, and other non-physical-medium artists to profit from their works is an acceptable trade-off from your perspective, then I have no basis for argument with you. Our world-views and values are simply too different to permit meaningful dialogue between us.
The thing is, I suspect you're lying. Not to me, and not purposely, but lying nonetheless: to yourself, and out of philosophical/ideological blindness. See, if there were any way of establishing the truth of the proposition, I'm pretty sure that, were you suddenly to be deprived of the experience of every form of art and literature that copyright enables to exist - the works of professional writers, musicians, artists, filmmakers, etc., who depend (or, very critically to this thought experiment, who depended) on the protection of copyright law to enable them to make a living at their art, you would feel that deprivation rather more keenly than you imagine.
Consider that you would lose most of the works of Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway (to name only the tip of the tip of the literary iceberg); of Orson Welles, Stanley Kubrick, and Ridley Scott (to name only... well, you get the idea); of The Beatles, Nirvana, and, yes, even Radiohead (I know, this is getting monotonous, but, still, just the tiniest fraction of the recording acts I could include on this list), of Alfred Esenstaedt, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Richard Avedon (etc., etc., etc.); and on, and on, and on. "Well," you might say, "I've already read/seen/heard all those, anyway, so... so what?"
So what if you had never had those experiences? You would certainly not be the same person you are now, because we are the sum total of our experiences, plus our genes. What about your children, if any? Would you want to deprive them of Star Wars (no copyright, no Star Wars)? Of Dr. Suess (no copyright, no Dr. Suess)? Of... I don't know your musical tastes, but let's take Etta James' version of "At Last", for instance (no copyright, no such song, and no recording of "At Last"). Und so weiter.
Do you begin to see what you would lose without some kind of protection for intellectual property? Your personal world would be vastly different, as would the world as a whole... and not, I think, for the better.
Those of us who create for a living need a mechanism that allows us to do that. Without it, no Blade Runner... and no Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep to inspire it. Without it, no Sgt. Pepper's... and very probably no Beatles, either. No pop culture, in fact, because so much of pop culture depends so heavily on copyright simply to provide the conditions that make group creative endeavors possible. I wouldn't want to have to give up that incredible treasure... and I doubt that you would, either.
Again, I'm certain we both agree that present copyright and patent law is broken. The better solution to that problem is not to throw out the baby with the bathwater - it's to change the bathwater. I endorse the Berne Convention precept that copyright be automatic, for instance, but not the notion that it should extend to the author's life plus 70 years. I think that a copyright term of, say the date of creation of the individual work to the author's death, or 25 years, whichever is longer, is plenty. (That way, if I write an international bestseller, but drop dead during the promotional tour, my surviving spouse and/or children get at least a reasonable benefit from the products of my labor
Bluefish is just a text editor. It's a powerful, capable, lightweight text editor that can handle a huge number of open files simultaneously - but it's just a text editor. Handy for coders, but the OP asked for WYSIWYG editors, not text editors. (Personally, I still use good, ol'd PFE 32 1.01.000.)
Kompozer does a pretty good job of cut-and-paste for tables, and I like the integrated FTP client and the ability to call W3C's HTML validator service from within the app. That said, it's still a beta application, and there hasn't been any development on it since 2009 (which means, among other things, that it's still broken on Linux). On the good foot, it's OS, so anyone with coding skills is free to fix any bugs or add any features they like.
Good of you to actually address the OP's question. However:
NVU - only useful for sites hosted by the program's vendor.
Quanta Plus - only runs on Linux (DW is a Mac/Windows application).
Amaya - hasn't been updated since 2009, and it's utterly broken in many respects (can't cut-and-paste tables, for instance).
Blue Griffon - shows promise. I haven't used it, so I don't know how well it works, but at least it's currently under development. Otoh, it's still in beta, it's "free to download" - which means they plan to charge some unknown amount for the commercial release version - and it has a bunch of add-ons that are NOT free, and do not appear to be OS.
Visual Web Studio Express - is a Windows application. OP may well be working in a Mac environment. Also, resulting HTML is likely bloatacious and nearly impossible to hand-tune.
So, in your philosophy, authors have no rights to the fruits of their own, individual labor?
Leading betterunixthanunix to riposte:
If you think there is a moral argument for allowing authors to continue to profit from their work decades after it was done, I would like to hear it. If I produce a hammer, will I receive payment for the use of that hammer decades after I produced it? Let's turn things around -- what makes authors so special?
Way to conflate apples and oranges. A hammer is a physical good. Unless you're talking about coming up with a complete redesign of "a hammer", as a product, it has NOTHING in common with works of art (excepting physical works of art that are by nature unique, such as paintings, where there is only one original, and it can be physically possessed and displayed by only one owner). People like you, who poo-poo the notion of intellectual property tend overwhelmingly to be non-artists. It's not your work that's being appropriated without recompense, so why should you care?
If you made your living by creating music, art, or literature, I suspect you'd look at things very differently. Saying, "Hey, you got your book published, so you have no right to complain if I scan a copy into PDF, Epub, or text format and upload it as a torrent," is sophistry of the most self-serving kind, and profoundly immoral. And to put forward the argument that, prior to the invention of the printing press, it was considered perfectly fine to make copies of existing works of literature and pay only the scribe, and not the author, for them somehow makes it okay to copy them without recompense today is utterly laughable. Prior to the 19th century, slavery was universally acceptable, too. Do you argue that slavery is therefore morally defensible in the modern world? I doubt it.
Societal mores evolve over time. I do not approve of the current U.S. patent and copyright laws - but I wholeheartedly endorse the notion of an artist's intellectual property rights to his/her own creations. (Note, I equally strongly disapprove of the notion of intellectual property rights inhering to a corporation, because I fundamentally disagree with the fiction of corporate "personhood" for any purpose other than providing some limited - VERY limited - degree of shielding from individual liability on the part of a corporation's officers.)
For the benefit of/.'s Randroids, let me give you the example of a theoretical architect - let's call him Howard Roark - who designs a house with unique, Frank-Lloyd-Wright-quality features. Ultimately, the original purchaser of the house pays him for that work, and later purchasers OF THE SAME HOUSE owe him no additional payment. But, if someone decides they like the design of that house so much that they want to construct an exact copy of it elsewhere for themselves, that person is both morally and legally obligated to pay Mr. Roark for re-using his original design to build an architecturally-identical copy of the house in question. Leaving the legal issue out of the discussion, the MORAL obligation is clear - the owner of the copy is appropriating Mr. Roark's intellectual property for his own benefit - not inheriting or buying your stupid hammer, but instead using Roark's unique design to construct a "hammer" of his/her own. That's theft. And it's not the blueprints, or the Autocad files that he/she is necessarily stealing - even reverse-engineering those blueprints and creating a new set of Autocad files doesn't absolve the actor in question of being a thief, because the design is what is being stolen. The fact that the design pura is an intangible doesn't change the fact that re-using it without recompense to its creator, or obtaining his prior permission is THEFT.
Full stop.
The same is equally true of music, literature, or the design of a better mousetrap - the fact that intellectual property is intangible
For some strange reason, king neckbeard got a +5 Insightful rating for saying:
Copyright gives authors a specific opportunity to make money that a market without it would not offer. And I do not accept that even having that is a right of an author.
So, in your philosophy, authors have no rights to the fruits of their own, individual labor? You maintain that they should just be humbly grateful that you deign to enjoy the products of their labor, with no obligation on your part to provide quid pro quo?
Would you care for a little gander sauce, your majesty?
Why would then content of torrent change if you downloaded via magnet link or.torrent -file?
It doesn't. The thing about.magnet links (which CAN contain trackers - and frequently do - but don't HAVE to) is that they contan the hash of the actual torrent file contents, whereas.torrent files (which CAN contain DHT information - and now frequently do - but don't HAVE to) simply list the filenames in the torrent and the trackers for that torrent.
So, it's not the contents of the TORRENT that change, depending on whether you join it via a.magnet link or a.torrent file, but the information ABOUT the torrent that differs in the two LINKS. The torrent itself doesn't care how you join it - and its contents remain the same.
The thing about the.magnet link containing the file hash is that you get all the CRC information you need to ensure that the file(s) you download will be digitally intact - which is what prompted my comment about scenebalance and his superfluous RAR files. RAR files contain file integrity information - but that doesn't guarantee that the RAR files themselves can't wind up becoming corrupted during your download. The difference is that, with the file hash info at hand, your Bittorrent client KNOWS whether the data it's downloading is intact - and can discard and re-download any data that gets corrupted during your download. Without it, you download the whole torrent, un-RAR the contents, and only THEN does your RAR application tell you that the contents are corrupted.
So, to sum up, fuck scenebalance and his stupid RAR files.
Can someone explain how a.magnet bypasses.torrent blocking? I don't see how changing the file suffix could do that.
But in practice, I'm finding it takes 50-90 seconds to download a.magnet vs. 2-3 seconds for a.torrent, so it must be a HORRIBLY inefficient protocol in the way it uses bandwidth, 'cause the end result is the same checksum and peer search data as a.torrent.
There are lots of other explanations of the protocol out there, but... really? You're too lazy to query Google on your own?
Magnet URIs take longer to "download" because they're a hash check on the target file's content, not just a text file, like a.torrent file. The advantage of.magnet links over.torrent links is that.magnet links don't require trackers, so even if the MAFIAA manages to get every tracker on the planet shut down,.magnet links will still work.
The disadvantage of using.magnet URIs is that you wind up with your download directory cluttered up with pointless and annoying subdirectories filled with ads for wanker "warez" groups and "samples" about which you couldn't possibly care less (I'm looking at YOU, TVTeam), or - again, pointless - RAR files (I'm looking at YOU, scenebalance) that are totally unnecessary with.magnet links, because the hash check eliminates any possibility of file corruption in your download (n.b. - If the original file is corrupt when it is uploaded, all the hash checks and RAR archiving in the world won't fix it. Or, in other acronyms, GIGO).
I imagine that is the plan. Iran couldn't win an actual war, and their leadership are smart enough to know that. But they also know that the US doesn't *want* a war right now. The public are already sick war. So they have a good chance at intimidating the US into backing down to avoid a politically-embarassing conflict.
You don't understand Americans very well.
Americans hate Iran. We've never forgiven them for the 1979-1981 hostage crisis, and Ahmadinejad is utterly despised here. If they're stupid enough to actually attack an American naval vessel, especially if that causes the price of gasoline to spike, Americans will overwhelmingly back military action against Iran. The GOP will be howling for Ahmadinejad's head on a plate, Middle America will break out in a fresh new wave of "Support Our Troops" stickers and flag pins, and Obama will be assured of re-election merely by pushing the "schock and awe" button.
The Cheney administration had to spend months propagandizing the American people against Saddam Hussein, because he purposely did not present a clear and present threat to Americans or American assets. If Iran is foolish enough to attack an American naval vessel, while threatening (or even actually sinking) civilian oil tankers in the process, the American people won't give a damn how much it costs to retaliate. We're terrible at math, anyway, and the opportunity to put our collective boot up the ass of an almost-comically exaggerated, self-made villain would be just the thing to make us feel good as a nation, and to take our minds off how abysmal our economy is doing, and how generally unpleasant the forthcoming election season is undoubtedly going to be.
As for Iran presenting any meaningful threat to American naval assets - it can't. It might get lucky enough to sink one or two smaller boats, but then our capital ships will simply stand off, out of range of Iran's Silkworms, and use our own cruise missiles to destroy every harbor facility along the coast of Southern Iran. After that, we send in minesweepers to clear the shipping lanes, and it's back to business as usual, except that Iran no longer has a functioning navy.
Iran cannot win such a confrontation - and the reality of that fact explains why Gen. Masoud Jazayeri, a Revolutionary Guard commander, was just quoted (on the Revolutionary Guard's own website, sepahnews.com - which is currently down) as saying "Discourse about closing the Strait of Hormuz belongs to five years ago," and Iran's navy chief Adm. Habibollah Sayyari yesterday stated that Iran has no intention of closing the Strait (even though he insisted that they could do so, if they wished).
Sorry, but the reality is that we have already intimidated Iran into backing down on their threat, not the other way around.
If that's the case, then you're completely wrong.....the Tower of Babel depicted in the Bible is at 1500BCE at the absolute latest. The one in this Slashdot article was built ~600BCE.
No, the ziggurat in TFS is the rebuilt Tower. The original was destroyed by the Assyrian king Sennacherib in 689 BCE, and rebuilt by Nabopolassar and his successor Nebuchadnezzar II after Esarhaddon became king of Assyria.Three hundred or so years later, Alexander III had the much-neglected Etemenanki (the Babylonian name for the Tower) demolished in preparation for rebuilding it - a project that fell through after his unexpected death in June, 323 BCE.
IF this is the Tower of Babel mentioned in the bible, it basically proves that the bible is wrong.
It does nothing of the sort. Otoh, it provides no support to the biblical account of the Tower, either.
Which is to say, the Etemenanki was and is real. The Tower of Babel story, by contrast, is a myth.
Slashdot Mirror
mcgrew pointed out:
Surrogates. Bruce Willis does more than just destroy asteroids!
Avatar had live sentient animals being grown and controlled by humans. In Surrogates, they're robots, and surrogacy starts on the battlefield.
Mmm ... to me, Surrogates absolutely reeked of Keith Laumer's novelette "The Bodybuilders". The plot differed, but the basic meme - people use mechanical surrogates for social interaction, so they can be as handsome/beautiful, and in as good apparent shape as they'd like to be in meatspace - is a straightforward copy, as is Willis's reaction when he's forced to confront external reality in his own, very vulnerable, biological body.
I always wondered why his estate didn't sue, but I guess the fact that he left no children (and his wife died before he did) has something to do with it.
geekoid commented:
Man. if this is the stretch people have to go through to blame Google for something, Google must be doing pretty damn good.
Seriously, this is, yet again, another NTSH article about Google. They are doing what the user opted in for them to do.
I think it's worth noting that, although I allow scripts and cookies directly from Google, I disallow them from google-analytics.com (via Cookiesafe and NoScript), and that choice does NOT appear to disable ANY Google function that I can determine.
As evil behavior goes, I'm with geekoid: this is pretty weak beer.
Basically, it costs too much, it doesn't actually deter criminals from committing murder or high treason, and it is provably misapplied from time to time. It's past time we did away with it, and saved the taxpayer the expense of an expensive, ineffective, and occasionally supremely unjust Medieval legal sanction.
Arguably, from a purely practical standpoint, you could take the Judge Dredd option and remove objections A and B at the expense of increasing C: make executions so cheap and so common that even if they don't deter, they stop reoffending. And if you decide that the worth of a human life isn't that big after all - or if you just don't bother to investigate the false positive rate - you don't have to worry about C. This is the route that a lot of dictatorships ended up going.
This is why I prefer a moral objection rather than a "practical" one. Because entirely practical arguments historically haven't stopped the practice.
I opined:
Basically, it costs too much, it doesn't actually deter criminals from committing murder or high treason, and it is provably misapplied from time to time. It's past time we did away with it, and saved the taxpayer the expense of an expensive, ineffective, and occasionally supremely unjust Medieval legal sanction.
Leading lennier to argue:
Arguably, from a purely practical standpoint, you could take the Judge Dredd option and remove objections A and B at the expense of increasing C: make executions so cheap and so common that even if they don't deter, they stop reoffending. And if you decide that the worth of a human life isn't that big after all - or if you just don't bother to investigate the false positive rate - you don't have to worry about C. This is the route that a lot of dictatorships ended up going.
This is why I prefer a moral objection rather than a "practical" one. Because entirely practical arguments historically haven't stopped the practice.
Here's the thing, though: there's a significant fraction of the population - and I would argue that it's currently a solid majority in the USA - that has no moral objection to the death penalty (I am part of that fraction - I happen to think that killing a person is a lot less morally objectionable than imprisoning him for life). For those people, purely moral arguments against the death penalty are a complete waste of breath. Practical arguments, however - and especially cost-based arguments - carry weight with death penalty proponents.
Now, granted, a certain proportion of death penalty advocates base their position on the notion that it is a Good Thing that society exact revenge on those evil enough to commit crimes that expose them to the death penalty. For them, neither moral nor practical arguments will make any impression - they want payback, and will settle for nothing less. (Personally, I view appropriate application of the death penalty as more in the line of pesticide: I think the world is better off without people like Charles Ng, for instance, and his death at the hands of society wouldn't bother me in the slightest, morally, ethically, or otherwise. I don't want revenge against him for his heartless string of torture-murders, I'd just like to see him permanently absent.) But the majority of death penalty advocates are, I think, amenable to the practical arguments I outlined above.
As I see it, you can choose to stand on the moral high ground, and have no meaningful effect on the debate, or you can choose to push practical reasons to eliminate the death penalty, and thereby potentially effect actual change in society's attitudes and policies. After all, there's no inherent conflict between your moral objections and my practical ones. The only real question is: Which is the most effective argument in winning hearts and minds?
BTW - as a Babylon 5 fan, I admire your handle - and your arguments are exactly those I'd expect from your namesake.
Jappus argued:
I find it difficult to see practicality in the death penalty. Abortion now, at least indeed has undeniable practicality in some cases. It's hard to argue against that point.
But the death penalty -- at least in its incarnation where you don't just shoot/hang/burn the first person you think is guilty -- seems awfully impractical. Compared to life imprisonment it costs the same (or sometimes even more) and has the same outcome of preventing recidivism (re-offending). But, unfortunately it does cause psychological strain on those having to dish out the penalty (that life imprisonment certainly doesn't) and prevents any sort of future moral insight in the guilty, no matter how unlikely you deem it.
A further difference is what some victims feel, namely the warm gut feeling of satisfied murderous revenge ... which is most likely what the person who got the penalty also got at some point and is even maybe what they might have gotten the penalty for to begin with. But since the logical outcome of life and death penalty is ultimately the same anyway (death); only one with more delay than the other, you can't really say that the latter is more practical in that regard either. In both cases, they will never see freedom again or get a chance to repeat their action until they die (and if you're not religious and there's no after-life, this lack is permanent).
As such, I see no reason how practicality could decide the question of the use of the death penalty, as it seems to me just as practical (or even a smidgeon less practical, I admit) than real life imprisonment.
Of course, practicality and morality are two different things that need to be evaluated differently, and thus -- at least for me -- the question is a moral, and not a practical one.
I agree that the death penalty is impractical, but for entirely different reasons than the ones you put forth.
You admit that your objection to the death penalty is a moral one, and your arguments all flow from that. Mine are entirely practical ones:
Basically, it costs too much, it doesn't actually deter criminals from committing murder or high treason, and it is provably misapplied from time to time. It's past time we did away with it, and saved the taxpayer the expense of an expensive, ineffective, and occasionally supremely unjust Medieval legal sanction.
The founders of the USA - which is to say the delegates to the Continental Congress and its successor bodies - were, admittedly, mostly at least nominally Christian. But the country that they created was, by design, emphatically a secular entity.
That's all I was trying to say. Nowhere in my post did I ever communicate anything remotely non-secular.
Oh? So this is "non-secular"?
understand this country was founded by Religous people and we will always be fighting to govern it, because we know our rights are provided by our Creator.
Horseshit, sailor. That's as "non-secular" as a Papal bull.
So, in conclusion, Jesus loves you.
But, you see, I don't love him. And that's the point: because the USA is, by design, a non-secular entity, I don't have to love him.
So, in conclusion, go thou and fuck thyself.
poormanjoe blathered:
Don't believe in a creator? That's fine, but understand this country was founded by Religous people and we will always be fighting to govern it, because we know our rights are provided by our Creator.
Advocates of a Christian theocracy in America constantly repeat that meme, despite the fact that it's patently untrue.
Christian cultists immigrated to America on the Mayflower specifically so that they could practic religious intolerance free from interference by the English government. Other cults followed their lead over the ensuing century-and-a-half or so, but they were not the only sort of people who immigrated to America. Most of those who came here in the 150+ years before this country was actually founded did so for economic reasons - because land was free for the taking, and opportunities to get rich abounded in the New Woirld.
The founders of the USA - which is to say the delegates to the Continental Congress and its successor bodies - were, admittedly, mostly at least nominally Christian. But the country that they created was, by design, emphatically a secular entity. That, in turn, was because for many decades before (and, indeed, after) the founding of the USA various of those Christian cults mentioned above were in a practically continuous state of war with one another. Take the so-called Great Awakening in Connecticut during the period 1735-1745, a time of tremendous turmoil in the Congregationalist (i.e. - "Puritan) faith. The Massachusetts Bay Puritans even went so far as to hang four Quakers for the crime of not being Puritans. So the founding fathers explicitly made the USA a secular nation, to prevent any of the cults from gaining supremacy over the others and establishing itself as a national religion.
Basically, you and your ilk want to undo that and make the USA into a Christian theocracy. The problem is, you fail to understand that, if the USA became an officially Christian theocracy, chances are that it would be a Catholic one - because adherents of the Catholic Church comprise the single largest denomination in the USA, with more than 65.5 million members (although there are more Protestant adherents collectively, they are fractured into hundreds of denominations with serious doctrinal and dogmatic divisions from one another, and cannot be considered as a single religious entity), with Southern Baptists at just over 16 million members being the next-largest denomination.
If you believe that Southern Baptists would be happy at the prospect of an explicitly Catholic theocracy in the USA, you aren't very well acquainted with Southern Baptists, or their ingrained hatred of and contempt for what they like to call Papists.
So, in conclusion, kindly shut the fuck up, because you obviously don't know what the hell you're talking about.
brianerst pointed out:
King's "I Have a Dream" speech has rather famously been the source of numerous copyright lawsuits by the King Estate. See here for example.
The PBS special the OP was speaking of was "Eyes on the Prize", which was out of print for years until the producers got nearly $1 million in grants in order to pay off copyright holders after their original five-year rebroadcast rights had expired.
I would think that most everyone here knows that just because something can be found on YouTube doesn't mean that it's there legally. The vast majority of music on that site violates US copyright law.
Now, this deserves a +5 Informative mod (although it actually got a +5 Insightful one, instead).
The King estate copyright claim (and MLK's original claim) IS abuse of the copyright system. I'm old enough to have watched the "I have a dream" speech live on TV, before a crowd that covered the Mall, and it seems to me that a challenge to the original copyright claim could and should have been mounted right after King made the speech - and I think it would have succeeded, then. The other part of the problem here is the concept of legal precedent, which idiotically holds that, once a court has ruled on an issue, that decision is somehow graven in stone, and, in subsequent trials of approximately-similar cases, the judge must abide by the arguments advanced by the judge who presided over the original case, no matter how fallacious his/her logic might be, and irrespective of actual facts.
For example, take the odious decision in State of Ohio v Anderson (please forgive the horrible PDF scan), where Justice Resnick, writing for the Ohio Supreme Court, retails a laundry list of supposed characteristics unique to pit bulls that includes a staggering number of misrepresentations (e.g. - pit bulls are the only dogs that bite and hold), assertions unbacked by evidence of any kind (e.g.- pit bulls are the only dogs that can climb trees!), and outright fabrications (e.g. - pit bulls bite with a force of 2000 pounds per square inch, a bite force unmatched by any other breed). These canards, in turn, are all based on State of Florida v Peters (a much-better-quality PDF), a case in which the Peters's defense counsel should have been shot for gross incompetence for not challenging the assertion of fairy tales as fact. And the U.S. Supreme Court denied review of Anderson, despite the clearly-unconstitutional assertion by Resnick that any law enforcement officer is capable of determining whether a mixed breed dog is or is not a pit bull, and that anyone who is unsure whether the dog they propose to adopt is a pit bull in the meaning of the law can definitively determine that question by asking any clown with a badge to pass judgement (totally ignoring the excellent possibility that some other cop will reach a different conclusion, and charge you with violating Ohio's requirement that you maintain $100,000 in liabilty insurance for each pit bull you own - insurance that it's impossible to obtain, unless you're a licensed breeder, btw). And this is not a mere theoretical conundrum of which I speak. I'm currently charged with exactly this crime, for owning a bullmastiff mix, even though the Ross County Dog Warden has evaluated her and stated (before four witnesses), "There's no pit in this animal." (I'm also charged with the same "crime" for owning a boxer that my wife and I adopted from the county animal shelter two years ago.)
It's not just copyright law - the legal system itself is broken. And the MAFIAA is no worse than your typical local prosecutor - because, just like the MAFIAA, the prosecutor's favorite exercise is overreaching.
None of which obviates my point that only Congre
hairyfeet blathered:
Except you can't use "I have a dream" or "Ask not what your country can do for you" in a video without cutting a big fat check. PBS had a great special years ago on the civil rights movement...yet you can't see it, why? because its all behind paywalls now. This isn't just about the latest titney spears pop song you know, this is about media cartels locking the entire history of modern society behind paywalls. Nearly every spoken word of any note is now behind a paywall and all for Walt Disney, a man whose been dead longer than many of us have been alive, so that his first works which were made when planes were made from cloth and antibiotics were but a dream, all so his works can stay behind a paywall.
This drivel was rated Insightful +5? You have got to be kidding me. Kennedy's inaugural address is available on Youtube. So is MLK's "I have a dream" speech. And Kennedy's address to the nation cannot be copyrighted. It's public domain by law.
You want something to have one of those petitions for on the White House website? demand an end to the sonny Bono act, and demand that copyrights take sane terms again. watch how quickly our media shill of a POTUS tells you to go fuck yourself, he knows whose paying his salary and it AIN'T you. It is time we really start voting third parties across the board, its obvious to anyone with eyes that the two party system is simply no longer functional. We frankly need four five and six parties but lets start with three and work from there. I urge everyone to vote green across the board, they have already made gains in many states, lets give the shills a reason to fear for their jobs again!
Yep, waste your time petitioning the President to do something he has no power to do. Congress passed the Sonny Bonehead Act, and only Congress has the Constitutional power to repeal it.
And simply voting Green is an equal waste of time - and your vote. Want to do something that will actually make a difference? Contact your local Green party headquarters, and volunteer to campaign. Then, put your time and effort where your mouth is and actually DO that. Bone up on the talking points for your local Green Party candidates, then go canvass for votes the old-fashioned way: door-to-door. It's not sexy and it's definitely NOT easy, but it wins hearts and minds in a way that posting drivel to /. simply doesn't. That's how the wingnut right took over the Repugnican party back in the Reagan administration, and those inmates have been in charge of that asylum ever since. (Ever wonder why obvious loonballs like Santorum and Gingrinch seem to have such appeal to the Repubs? It's because EVERY state-level Republican central committee is absolutely dominated by "social conservatives" and evangelicals. Reagan got them fired up to do the grass-roots organizing necessary to, for instance, actually field a slate of candidates for local and state Republican central committees - and that gave them control over the party's MONEY and its endorsements at a state level. That's why Schwartzenegger had to run without their endorsement in California's gubernatorial races - because he's a moderate, pro-choice Republican, and the California Republican Central Committee HATED him for it. It's also why Romney is pretending to be a super-conservative right now - because Nixon's advice to Reagan still holds: "Run as hard to the right as you can, until you get the nomination. Then run as hard to the center as you can until the election.")
But NONE of that will help in the upcoming Presidential election. It's far too little, and far too late. Vote Green, and the Republican party will take over all three branches of government again. Look at how well THAT worked out in 2000 and 2004. Nader voters in Florida handed the 2000 election to Bush - and that got us th
Dr. Joe commiserated:
Thomst: I feel for you. My mother developed Alzheimer's some years ago and died from it. If you have not read The 36 Hour Day, you may want to get it. Understanding your mother's humanity and growing lack of control over her own life are the most important things you can use to help her. I was very lucky in being of a mind not to try to change my mother's behavior, and instead to help her experience as complete a life as she could.
I'm sorry for your loss.
I'm not familiar with The 36 Hour Day, but I'm acutely conscious of my Mom's state of mind, and the fear and depression I know she's experiencing as her disease progresses. I try to be as supportive as possible, without becoming maudlin, whenever I speak to her. Lately, I've been urging her to record her memoirs as a legacy for her yet-unborn grandchildren. (It's something she's talked about doing for years, so it's really her idea, not mine.) I just want her to enjoy as much of her remaining lifespan as possible, and to face the progression of her disease with as much composure and dignity as possible.
My best wishes go with you.
Thank you. I very much appreciate your recommendation, your advice, and your good wishes.
quark101 opined:
Alzheimer's is a terrible disease, not just for the person who has it, but especially so for those who are close to the afflicted. The slow, degenerative, wasting of the mind is horrifying to watch, as the person that was once bright and lively gets turned into a shell of their former self. Not able to grasp what's going on around them, or who they're talking to, the person can easily become terrified, lost, and confused, made all the more painful by the fact that they don't know who their children are or why they're here.
I know that identifying the underlying cause and developing a treatment are often worlds apart, but I'm glad nonetheless to see this advancement, if merely for the fact that one day others won't have to experience the pain I did as I watched people I love succumb to Alzheimer's.
Amen to that.
Last August, my mother was diagnosed with "mild to moderate" Alzheimer's. I had been certain for some time prior to then that she had the disease. She would sometimes repeat as if it had just occurred to her a story she'd told me just minutes earlier, she'd get stuck trying to recall the names of people she'd known for years (such as her 22-year-old granddaughter), and was only strongly confident about the details of events long past. In November, she was examined by two doctors at the Copper Ridge Institute (which is affiliated with Johns Hopkins), which specializes in Alzheimer's research and treatment. She knew the President of the U.S. was black, but couldn't recall his name, thought my youngest sister was 40 (she turned 53 in December), and couldn't remember which day of the week it was (it was Friday).
I call her at least once a week, and she seems to deteriorate more every time I speak with her - and yet, she's still fundamentally the same warm, sweet, vibrant woman she's been as long as I've known her. Just ... a little confused. What I fear is that, over time, she will lose all the memories that make her that person. I've known several people with advanced Alzheimer's, and watched them become progressively emptier shells of themselves, until they're little more than slack-jawed zombies, incapable of caring for themselves, or communicating with others - and I don't want to see that happen to my Mom.
But I know it will, because none of these new discoveries will make it out of the lab in time to save her from the ravages of this loathsome disease. And that breaks my heart.
AK Marc raged:
It wasn't the defaults that caused this, but the invented derivatives.
Separate from this is the racism that comes out about it. I've seen it blamed on black people. Those people should never have been allowed to own land, let alone have a government agency encourage it. And those poor white bankers ("poor" meaning "some of the richest people in the country") were taken advantage of by those shifty no-good negroids. "Sub-Prime" was the name for a crisis caused by rich white male bankers committing fraud when creating derivatives, but they are also the ones who got to name it, and rather than the "1%ers say, Fuck You America" crisis, it's the "minority caused sub-prime lending" crisis. The poor people didn't cause it. They didn't lie. Who did lie are the mortgage brokers and the bankers. And the rich white bankers blamed the poor blacks. And sadly, that's what the conservatives wanted to hear, so there's so much out there on the blacks causing the crisis by defaulting less than norms that the truth will be buried by the real criminals, like always.
It's actually worse than that.
It wasn't poor people who took out the majority of the loans that went bad when the market collapsed. It was speculators - people who bought houses and (especially) condominiums specifically to flip them. With mortgage bankers offering 0% down loans based on "stated income" (i.e. - "please lie to us about your income"), the industry practically got down on its collective knees and begged house flippers to abuse the system. And they did. In droves. That's why, today, Las Vegas is crammed with high-rise condos that're lucky if they have 15% occupancy rates - because the majority of the mortgages that were taken out during the bubble were for investment properties, not for owner-occupied residences.
And the problem isn't confined to just Las Vegas and Modesto and Boca Raton, either. In freakin' Bulgaria, the so-called "Bulgarian Riviera" is lined with a wall of empty high-rise condominiums a hundred miles long - yet another artifact of the global speculative housing bubble.
It wasn't poor black people who caused the bubble. It was (mostly) white speculators trying to get rich by flipping properties.
If you want to blame a politician, blame Bush for deregulation that let the banks invent the fraudulent derivatives.
Not just Bush - Clinton, too. Where Washington is concerned, there's plenty of blame to go around. (Although, admittedly, Bush appointed nothing but foxes to guard our collective henhouse. Clinton just tore down the Glass-Steagall fence around it.)
ynicrash opined:
California is a clear example of why direct democracy doesn't scale. I think the reform has to happen on lobbying level. Should politicians be able to become lobbyists?
I have to disagree. California's referendum system really has very little to do with "direct democracy". Yes, that was the original logic behind its inclusion in the state constitution, but the current-day reality on the ground is that very, very few California ballot initiatives have anything to do with grassroots movements. The vast majority of the propositions that make the ballot do so because they are conceived and financed by some special interest that's willing to spend the money on paid signature gatherers that's necessary to acquire a sufficient number of valid signatures in a sufficient number of electoral districts to qualify their petition for the ballot - and then spend a buttload of additional money on advertising and promotion during campaign season. If that's direct democracy, I'm the Galactic Overlord.
And reform "on the lobbying level" won't work, either. Even a Supreme Court considerably further to the left than the one under which we currently suffer would balk at forbidding politicians from becoming lobbyists (especially in states that have term limits - keep in mind here that lobbying is far from a Washington-only phenomenon) on free speech grounds, alone.
What's needed - and is the ONLY strategy that would actually WORK - is a combination of:
No, I'm afraid that what we REALLY need is a good, old-fashioned American Sulla.
NatasRevol protested:
I'm not saying that isn't happening. I'm saying it's wrong, illegal, immoral, and against the spirit of the amendment.
And I agree with all but the "illegal" part. As Dickens's charater Mr. Bumble observes in Oliver Twist, "The law is an ass."
There are so many, many, MANY things that are both perfectly legal and morally despicable at the same time - corporations being allowed to donate unlimited amounts of money to influence political campaigns is one that springs immediately to mind. Likewise, there are bunches of things that are illegal - marijuana, for instance - that absolutely should not be.
That's because there's logic, common sense, and ethical integrity on one side - and, on the other side, there's the law. And, if you don't like that situation ... tough titties. The law, the Supreme Court, and the Legislature don't give a damn about your opinion.
Suck much? Aye, Cap'n, it does. And that sad fact alters nothing, whatsoever.
CrimsonAvenger opined:
To exercise the power of eminent domain, the government must prove that the four elements set forth in the Fifth Amendment are present: (1) private property (2) must be taken (3) for public use (4) and with just compensation. These elements have been interpreted broadly.
Even broadly, malls are not 'for public use'.
Sorry, but you're wrong ... sorta.
In practice, urban redevelopment, in which a government entity declares an area within its jurisdiction to be "blighted", and declares its intent to "redevelop" it in order to mitigate or eliminate that "blight", entitles that entity to use its power of eminent domain to acquire ownership of the land in the "blighted" area, and then to convey ownership of that land (frequently a consolidated package of adjacent, individual parcels) to a private developer in exchange for the developer's committment to raze existing structures and build new ones in their place. Often, the government entity in question offers tax and other incentives to the developer to bild there, as well, because "blighted" areas are typically not in development-attractive neighborhoods. Very often, the new development consists of a retail element (malls or shopping centers), along with a residential element (high-rise apartment or condominium buildings) that includes some percentage of "affordable" housing ("affordable", in this case, is defined as "affordable by a family or individual who makes the median wage for the area"). The government entity's interest, beyond mitigating urban "blight", is in the affordable housing component, and the developer's interest is typically in the retail component - which is by far the more profitable of the two.
So, when used as a tool of redevelopment, yes, broadly speaking, acquiring private land with public funds in order to allow a private developer to build a mall as part of a program to mitigate "blight" is, legally speaking, well-defined as a "public use" of the power of eminent domain.
Disclosure: I spent the best part of a decade in the last century battling an out-of-control California redevelopment agency hell-bent on squandering taxpayer money on redevelopment boondoggles of the very kind I just described, so I know whereof I speak.
betterunixthanunix sneered:
How about scanning a book within a few minutes of its release in the United States, so that poor people in South America can have access to it? No? We are not allowed to ever paint copyright infringement in a positive light?
There are plenty of books, music, movies, and software that are simply not being made available by the people who hold copyrights on them, except in select places in the world, or in some cases not being made available anywhere. For people living in those places, those works might as well be lost to history.
And your point is what?
There are plenty of people in the world who lack access to all kinds of things: sufficient food, clean water, medical care. Those are actual needs. Entertainment is not. That someone else desires my property in no way obligates me to satisfy his desire. As for "those works might as well be lost to history," hyperbole much?
You are starting from the premise that "intellectual property rights" are "natural rights" like the right to live; not only is not universally agreed upon, it is not even in agreement with the very people who created such rights in this country. Yes, created those rights, because without a legal framework those rights do not exist at all -- which is not true of natural rights (nobody "created" your right to live; you were born with it).
I don't give a flying fuck at a rolling donut if my contention that intellectual property is a natural right is "not universally agreed upon". That slavery was morally right, that ALL humans have a natural right to be free was "not universally agreed upon" in this country until after the Civil War. Today, however, with the exception of pimps and the employers of illegal aliens, it IS universally agreed upon. Societies evolve. What you are advocating is the tyrrany of the majority - a concept that both I and the Constitution reject.
In reality, "intellectual property rights" are a myth designed to make people forget that we created the copyright/patent/trademark systems for a reason: to benefit everyone. You were not born with the right to tell people they are not allowed to make copies of the books you write, that right was conferred to you by the law, in an effort to establish a system whereby the public would have access to books (etc.). There was no concept of "intellectual property" before such systems were created; at one time, anyone could simply copy books or retell stories (compare to the right to live, which has existed in one form or another for as long as we have historical records -- every society protected the right of at least some of its members to live).
Oh, bosh.
I was born with the right to be free. That the laws of the United States did not grant that right to every law-abiding resident of the U.S. until after the Civil War doesn't affect the fact that freedom is an inherent, natural right of all human beings. It just took a long freakin' time for society (and law) to acknowledge that right exists for everyone. The same logic applies to my right to control the fruits of my creative labor - right now, international copyright agreements accord that right only limited status. In time, it will come to be seen as an inherent natural right, just like freedom from slavery, free association, voting, freedom from discrimination, and many, many others have done, because societies evolve.
Sure societies evolve, but natural rights do not evolve. Natural rights do not require complex legal frameworks to exist.
See above.
The concept of "natural rights" is a construct of human civilization. The Universe at large recognizes no such rights. "Right to life?" Tell it to the great white shark. Or Ebola. "Right to freedom from slavery?" Tell that to aphids. "Right to freedom of association?" Well, the l
betterunixthanunix sneered:
Saying, "Hey, you got your book published, so you have no right to complain if I scan a copy into PDF, Epub, or text format and upload it as a torrent," is sophistry of the most self-serving kind, and profoundly immoral.
Profoundly immoral? To scan a book and share it with the world? You have an interesting moral code. If you wanted to read books that were lost to history, I think your view would change.
Way to conflate out-of-print and orphan works with currently published material. I'm impressed with your intellectual honesty.
Wait a minute ... no, I'm not.
To scan and upload a book that is no longer in publication, whose author is dead or missing, and whose nuturing and promotion has been abandoned by everyone with a claim to its copyright is one thing - and something of a special case. To do the same with a book in current publication is quite a different matter.
And YOU KNOW THAT, very well. That's why you choose "conference papers from the 1970s" as your example, rather than, for instance, "The Jefferson Key" or "The Help". It's as intellectually dishonest an argument as possible, because it deliberately couches your position in terms that make it appear as though scanning and uploading essentially abandoned works, and scanning and uploading currently-published and actively-promoted works by living authors who make their living from their books are morally equivalent acts. They're not.
No, the only people who turn to insults are people whose arguments are so poorly grounded that they have no other choice.
Cynician, heel thyself.
I find it interesting that you did not bother to cite this part of the constitution, which forms the basis for our patent and copyright laws:
The Congress shall have Power...To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
I suppose you tried to avoid it because it neither mandates the copyright system and it clearly indicates that copyrights must only exist for limited periods of time. Perhaps if you had spent whatever time it took you to think up your insults reading the constitution, you would have spotted this...or maybe the constitution is not even relevant in your mind, because you think that copyrights are natural rights like life, liberty, and property (although as plenty of people have pointed out, none of those rights come with expiration dates).
I didn't bother to cite the Copyright Clause, because it's non-germane. The question at hand is the validity of the concept of intellectual property, not the existence of copyright law, or the Constitutional authority therefor.
I do think intellectual property (NOT "copyright") is a natural right, just like life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. (Property ownership is not, per se a natural right - it's a matter of law and custom. Miwok Indians ran afoul of the white settlers of Mariposa County because they had no cultural concept of individual property, so they simply took any of the white folks' chattels that captured their fancies - and were massacred by those same settlers for their cultural ignorance.) That it has not yet been recognized as a natural right by the non-creative majority doesn't matter, because, as I pointed out in an earlier post on this subject societies evolve. What today is granted by copyright law will, eventually, be undstood as an inherent human right: the right to own and control your own creative product.
Anyway, I have to say that I'm amused to see that, thus far, my original post - which has sparked more than 150 subsequent comments - was modded to +0 Flamebait. Seems pretty contradictory to me, given the number and range of viewpoints of the commenters, but, hey ... it's Chinatown.
cheekyjohnson admitted:
In any case, I personally see no reason that copyright should exist in any form. I don't care for artificial scarcity, and I wouldn't mind if less works were produced because there was no copyright.
Fair enough. If the loss to society of some unquantifiable - but undoubtedly large - number of new creative works due to the absence of the copyright protection that allows writers, musicians, and other non-physical-medium artists to profit from their works is an acceptable trade-off from your perspective, then I have no basis for argument with you. Our world-views and values are simply too different to permit meaningful dialogue between us.
The thing is, I suspect you're lying. Not to me, and not purposely, but lying nonetheless: to yourself, and out of philosophical/ideological blindness. See, if there were any way of establishing the truth of the proposition, I'm pretty sure that, were you suddenly to be deprived of the experience of every form of art and literature that copyright enables to exist - the works of professional writers, musicians, artists, filmmakers, etc., who depend (or, very critically to this thought experiment, who depended) on the protection of copyright law to enable them to make a living at their art, you would feel that deprivation rather more keenly than you imagine.
Consider that you would lose most of the works of Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway (to name only the tip of the tip of the literary iceberg); of Orson Welles, Stanley Kubrick, and Ridley Scott (to name only ... well, you get the idea); of The Beatles, Nirvana, and, yes, even Radiohead (I know, this is getting monotonous, but, still, just the tiniest fraction of the recording acts I could include on this list), of Alfred Esenstaedt, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Richard Avedon (etc., etc., etc.); and on, and on, and on. "Well," you might say, "I've already read/seen/heard all those, anyway, so ... so what?"
So what if you had never had those experiences? You would certainly not be the same person you are now, because we are the sum total of our experiences, plus our genes. What about your children, if any? Would you want to deprive them of Star Wars (no copyright, no Star Wars)? Of Dr. Suess (no copyright, no Dr. Suess)? Of ... I don't know your musical tastes, but let's take Etta James' version of "At Last", for instance (no copyright, no such song, and no recording of "At Last"). Und so weiter.
Do you begin to see what you would lose without some kind of protection for intellectual property? Your personal world would be vastly different, as would the world as a whole ... and not, I think, for the better.
Those of us who create for a living need a mechanism that allows us to do that. Without it, no Blade Runner ... and no Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep to inspire it. Without it, no Sgt. Pepper's ... and very probably no Beatles, either. No pop culture, in fact, because so much of pop culture depends so heavily on copyright simply to provide the conditions that make group creative endeavors possible. I wouldn't want to have to give up that incredible treasure ... and I doubt that you would, either.
Again, I'm certain we both agree that present copyright and patent law is broken. The better solution to that problem is not to throw out the baby with the bathwater - it's to change the bathwater. I endorse the Berne Convention precept that copyright be automatic, for instance, but not the notion that it should extend to the author's life plus 70 years. I think that a copyright term of, say the date of creation of the individual work to the author's death, or 25 years, whichever is longer, is plenty. (That way, if I write an international bestseller, but drop dead during the promotional tour, my surviving spouse and/or children get at least a reasonable benefit from the products of my labor
LWATCDR inquired:
Okay how about Kompozer and Bluefish http://bluefish.openoffice.nl/index.html and http://kompozer.net/
Bluefish is just a text editor. It's a powerful, capable, lightweight text editor that can handle a huge number of open files simultaneously - but it's just a text editor. Handy for coders, but the OP asked for WYSIWYG editors, not text editors. (Personally, I still use good, ol'd PFE 32 1.01.000.)
Kompozer does a pretty good job of cut-and-paste for tables, and I like the integrated FTP client and the ability to call W3C's HTML validator service from within the app. That said, it's still a beta application, and there hasn't been any development on it since 2009 (which means, among other things, that it's still broken on Linux). On the good foot, it's OS, so anyone with coding skills is free to fix any bugs or add any features they like.
LWATCDR posted:
I agree with but since no one seemed to have any answers for this person... I have not used these but they seem to be options a Dreamweaver replacement. NVU http://net2.com/nvu/ Quanta Plus http://freecode.com/projects/quantaplus Amaya http://www.w3.org/Amaya/ Blue Griffon http://bluegriffon.org/ Hope this helps the original poster. Oh and if you just want free as in beer. http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/products/2010-editions/express I have used any of them but out of this is you will probably find something that will fill the bill.
Good of you to actually address the OP's question. However:
NVU - only useful for sites hosted by the program's vendor.
Quanta Plus - only runs on Linux (DW is a Mac/Windows application).
Amaya - hasn't been updated since 2009, and it's utterly broken in many respects (can't cut-and-paste tables, for instance).
Blue Griffon - shows promise. I haven't used it, so I don't know how well it works, but at least it's currently under development. Otoh, it's still in beta, it's "free to download" - which means they plan to charge some unknown amount for the commercial release version - and it has a bunch of add-ons that are NOT free, and do not appear to be OS.
Visual Web Studio Express - is a Windows application. OP may well be working in a Mac environment. Also, resulting HTML is likely bloatacious and nearly impossible to hand-tune.
I asked:
So, in your philosophy, authors have no rights to the fruits of their own, individual labor?
Leading betterunixthanunix to riposte:
If you think there is a moral argument for allowing authors to continue to profit from their work decades after it was done, I would like to hear it. If I produce a hammer, will I receive payment for the use of that hammer decades after I produced it? Let's turn things around -- what makes authors so special?
Way to conflate apples and oranges. A hammer is a physical good. Unless you're talking about coming up with a complete redesign of "a hammer", as a product, it has NOTHING in common with works of art (excepting physical works of art that are by nature unique, such as paintings, where there is only one original, and it can be physically possessed and displayed by only one owner). People like you, who poo-poo the notion of intellectual property tend overwhelmingly to be non-artists. It's not your work that's being appropriated without recompense, so why should you care?
If you made your living by creating music, art, or literature, I suspect you'd look at things very differently. Saying, "Hey, you got your book published, so you have no right to complain if I scan a copy into PDF, Epub, or text format and upload it as a torrent," is sophistry of the most self-serving kind, and profoundly immoral. And to put forward the argument that, prior to the invention of the printing press, it was considered perfectly fine to make copies of existing works of literature and pay only the scribe, and not the author, for them somehow makes it okay to copy them without recompense today is utterly laughable. Prior to the 19th century, slavery was universally acceptable, too. Do you argue that slavery is therefore morally defensible in the modern world? I doubt it.
Societal mores evolve over time. I do not approve of the current U.S. patent and copyright laws - but I wholeheartedly endorse the notion of an artist's intellectual property rights to his/her own creations. (Note, I equally strongly disapprove of the notion of intellectual property rights inhering to a corporation, because I fundamentally disagree with the fiction of corporate "personhood" for any purpose other than providing some limited - VERY limited - degree of shielding from individual liability on the part of a corporation's officers.)
For the benefit of /.'s Randroids, let me give you the example of a theoretical architect - let's call him Howard Roark - who designs a house with unique, Frank-Lloyd-Wright-quality features. Ultimately, the original purchaser of the house pays him for that work, and later purchasers OF THE SAME HOUSE owe him no additional payment. But, if someone decides they like the design of that house so much that they want to construct an exact copy of it elsewhere for themselves, that person is both morally and legally obligated to pay Mr. Roark for re-using his original design to build an architecturally-identical copy of the house in question. Leaving the legal issue out of the discussion, the MORAL obligation is clear - the owner of the copy is appropriating Mr. Roark's intellectual property for his own benefit - not inheriting or buying your stupid hammer, but instead using Roark's unique design to construct a "hammer" of his/her own. That's theft. And it's not the blueprints, or the Autocad files that he/she is necessarily stealing - even reverse-engineering those blueprints and creating a new set of Autocad files doesn't absolve the actor in question of being a thief, because the design is what is being stolen. The fact that the design pura is an intangible doesn't change the fact that re-using it without recompense to its creator, or obtaining his prior permission is THEFT.
Full stop.
The same is equally true of music, literature, or the design of a better mousetrap - the fact that intellectual property is intangible
For some strange reason, king neckbeard got a +5 Insightful rating for saying:
Copyright gives authors a specific opportunity to make money that a market without it would not offer. And I do not accept that even having that is a right of an author.
So, in your philosophy, authors have no rights to the fruits of their own, individual labor? You maintain that they should just be humbly grateful that you deign to enjoy the products of their labor, with no obligation on your part to provide quid pro quo?
Would you care for a little gander sauce, your majesty?
Why would then content of torrent change if you downloaded via magnet link or .torrent -file?
It doesn't. The thing about .magnet links (which CAN contain trackers - and frequently do - but don't HAVE to) is that they contan the hash of the actual torrent file contents, whereas .torrent files (which CAN contain DHT information - and now frequently do - but don't HAVE to) simply list the filenames in the torrent and the trackers for that torrent.
So, it's not the contents of the TORRENT that change, depending on whether you join it via a .magnet link or a .torrent file, but the information ABOUT the torrent that differs in the two LINKS. The torrent itself doesn't care how you join it - and its contents remain the same.
The thing about the .magnet link containing the file hash is that you get all the CRC information you need to ensure that the file(s) you download will be digitally intact - which is what prompted my comment about scenebalance and his superfluous RAR files. RAR files contain file integrity information - but that doesn't guarantee that the RAR files themselves can't wind up becoming corrupted during your download. The difference is that, with the file hash info at hand, your Bittorrent client KNOWS whether the data it's downloading is intact - and can discard and re-download any data that gets corrupted during your download. Without it, you download the whole torrent, un-RAR the contents, and only THEN does your RAR application tell you that the contents are corrupted.
So, to sum up, fuck scenebalance and his stupid RAR files.
Can someone explain how a .magnet bypasses .torrent blocking? I don't see how changing the file suffix could do that.
But in practice, I'm finding it takes 50-90 seconds to download a .magnet vs. 2-3 seconds for a .torrent, so it must be a HORRIBLY inefficient protocol in the way it uses bandwidth, 'cause the end result is the same checksum and peer search data as a .torrent.
Try Wikipedia.
There are lots of other explanations of the protocol out there, but ... really? You're too lazy to query Google on your own?
Magnet URIs take longer to "download" because they're a hash check on the target file's content, not just a text file, like a .torrent file. The advantage of .magnet links over .torrent links is that .magnet links don't require trackers, so even if the MAFIAA manages to get every tracker on the planet shut down, .magnet links will still work.
The disadvantage of using .magnet URIs is that you wind up with your download directory cluttered up with pointless and annoying subdirectories filled with ads for wanker "warez" groups and "samples" about which you couldn't possibly care less (I'm looking at YOU, TVTeam), or - again, pointless - RAR files (I'm looking at YOU, scenebalance) that are totally unnecessary with .magnet links, because the hash check eliminates any possibility of file corruption in your download (n.b. - If the original file is corrupt when it is uploaded, all the hash checks and RAR archiving in the world won't fix it. Or, in other acronyms, GIGO).
SuricouRaven opined
I imagine that is the plan. Iran couldn't win an actual war, and their leadership are smart enough to know that. But they also know that the US doesn't *want* a war right now. The public are already sick war. So they have a good chance at intimidating the US into backing down to avoid a politically-embarassing conflict.
You don't understand Americans very well.
Americans hate Iran. We've never forgiven them for the 1979-1981 hostage crisis, and Ahmadinejad is utterly despised here. If they're stupid enough to actually attack an American naval vessel, especially if that causes the price of gasoline to spike, Americans will overwhelmingly back military action against Iran. The GOP will be howling for Ahmadinejad's head on a plate, Middle America will break out in a fresh new wave of "Support Our Troops" stickers and flag pins, and Obama will be assured of re-election merely by pushing the "schock and awe" button.
The Cheney administration had to spend months propagandizing the American people against Saddam Hussein, because he purposely did not present a clear and present threat to Americans or American assets. If Iran is foolish enough to attack an American naval vessel, while threatening (or even actually sinking) civilian oil tankers in the process, the American people won't give a damn how much it costs to retaliate. We're terrible at math, anyway, and the opportunity to put our collective boot up the ass of an almost-comically exaggerated, self-made villain would be just the thing to make us feel good as a nation, and to take our minds off how abysmal our economy is doing, and how generally unpleasant the forthcoming election season is undoubtedly going to be.
As for Iran presenting any meaningful threat to American naval assets - it can't. It might get lucky enough to sink one or two smaller boats, but then our capital ships will simply stand off, out of range of Iran's Silkworms, and use our own cruise missiles to destroy every harbor facility along the coast of Southern Iran. After that, we send in minesweepers to clear the shipping lanes, and it's back to business as usual, except that Iran no longer has a functioning navy.
Iran cannot win such a confrontation - and the reality of that fact explains why Gen. Masoud Jazayeri, a Revolutionary Guard commander, was just quoted (on the Revolutionary Guard's own website, sepahnews.com - which is currently down) as saying "Discourse about closing the Strait of Hormuz belongs to five years ago," and Iran's navy chief Adm. Habibollah Sayyari yesterday stated that Iran has no intention of closing the Strait (even though he insisted that they could do so, if they wished).
Sorry, but the reality is that we have already intimidated Iran into backing down on their threat, not the other way around.
phantomfive opined:
If that's the case, then you're completely wrong.....the Tower of Babel depicted in the Bible is at 1500BCE at the absolute latest. The one in this Slashdot article was built ~600BCE.
No, the ziggurat in TFS is the rebuilt Tower. The original was destroyed by the Assyrian king Sennacherib in 689 BCE, and rebuilt by Nabopolassar and his successor Nebuchadnezzar II after Esarhaddon became king of Assyria.Three hundred or so years later, Alexander III had the much-neglected Etemenanki (the Babylonian name for the Tower) demolished in preparation for rebuilding it - a project that fell through after his unexpected death in June, 323 BCE.
IF this is the Tower of Babel mentioned in the bible, it basically proves that the bible is wrong.
It does nothing of the sort. Otoh, it provides no support to the biblical account of the Tower, either.
Which is to say, the Etemenanki was and is real. The Tower of Babel story, by contrast, is a myth.