Does RMS actually argue that we all have the inalienable right to modify and distribute everything that other people create? That for someone not to offer me those rights is not just a choice not to be altruistic, but an act of oppression?
I have an 'inalienable right' to read a book of recipes, modify some recipes to my liking, and publish a new book containing the modified recipes (and the original ones, too). Good recipes take a lot of work to come up with, too...
At one point some people simply decided that software should be treated differently. This idea has then been hammered into your head. Congratulations, you have been brainwashed into believing that you can own software (duh, just like you can own cooking recipes and building designs and mathematical formulas...)
No. Anonymity is irrelevent in an argument. It is what is said that matters, not who says it.
Agreed -- and I never said anything to the contrary. Anonymity indeed is irrelevant to the validity of the argument -- to say otherwise would be argumentum ad hominem. However, it DOES matter -- anonymity provides one with a convenient cover from behind which one can say any kind of crap they want, without being responsible for their words.
This is why I address the arguments by ACs -- they are no less valid for their lack of discernible authorship. However, to me, it is a matter of respect -- I prefer knowing who I am speaking to, I despise voices from the crowd, and I prefer to argue with someone I can respect.
I can understand one being unwilling to take the time to identify themselves for a quickie one-time post. However, when a push comes to shove, the implied lack of responsibility for their words makes me regard the my AC opposition without any respect (this does not apply to their arguments, though, to which respect does not apply).
Just an opinion of a man who prefers honesty and responsibility...
P.S. The "dude" thing is a little too cute.
Glad you like it, dude.
Victor comes to the "rescue"
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(sigh) Ideas are information. The difference is merely in degrees of specificity. Unlike material goods, there is no qualitive distinction between idea and its implementation in information trade, just a qualitive one. You say information is not cost-free to obtain? Well, DUH, neither are design ideas, for example! You have a problem with someone patenting, say, the object-oriented language design, but not with someone copyrighting a specific OO language -- even though the former (idea) took a lot more effort to come up with?.. get real.
BTW, patents are NOT granted on ideas, but rather on processes -- which is why software patents are a very thorny legal issue, they have to be issued for a combination of software and computer (which thus form a processing unit where the software is the essence of the process), rather than the software itself.
The current copyright laws were written in a different era, under different technology. They made sense for books, when the reproduction mechanism was either the printing press or hand-copying (so only your competitors had the means to mass-produce the books, thus fundamentally undermining fair competition); the world has changed. There WAS a qualitive difference between an idea for a book and a book itself (although the difference was purely pragmatic); this distinction has gone away with our newfound ability to replicate information virtually for free.
You DO realize that 'code' is also ideas, just more specific than design?.. it's a continuum, dude, from conceptual design to a specific instance of code on a disk.
P.S. Here is another tip, since you liked my previous one so much. Sit down and think a bit about what information is, and its ontological status. Once you do THAT, sit down again and think about how material property laws apply to something like information.
P.P.S. Post under a name, will you? Anonymity in an argument is a refuge of cowards and fools.
Dude, you completely missed HIS point -- which was that WRT 'intellectual property', the distinction between an 'idea' and 'implementation of idea' is not nearly as strong (and even arguably non-existint) as with material goods.
Your example about the bookshelf was the classic bit of lunacy that is spewed forth by people too lazy to think about what the words 'intellectual property' mean. Use your brain, for pete's sake -- you don't OWN ideas (in specific form or not), you are instead granted RIGHTS TO RESTRICT OTHERS' USE OF THEM!
In short -- the poster's underlying statement was that 'intellectual property' is a linguistic sleight of hand designed to trap people into thinking about information as about something of the same nature as cars and tables. When you made your answer, you fell into this trap, making yourself look like a fool who does not know the difference between the ontological status of material objects and information.
P.S. Asserting yourself to be the winner in an argument does not make you one.
Russian language also does not have a word for sex, it was borrowed from the west;-)
English does not have a word for 'sex' either, 'sex' is borrowed from Latin through French -- unless you count 'fuck'. However, if you allow English to have 'fuck', then Russian has 'yebat'. QED.
Did you know that in russian peasant is pronounced krestianin, very close to Christian. Why is that?
I don't know -- but I am not convinced that the two are etymologically related. I wish I had a good Russian dictionary here...
Education in much of the US is excellent. I imagine that your 50th rating probably comes from some statistic on percentage of GNP spent on public higher education.
Education is still a field where the USA is a leader. If you don't believe me, go to a major university and look around, you will see a great number of students who pay huge sums of money to attend US schools.
Dude, you speak in ignorance. The "50'th place" figure is very real; it was based on some international testing of school (not university) students, so it reflects knowledge and not education spendings. However, I think it is old -- I believe US is somewhere in the teens right now (which is still pretty pathetic). Bottom line is, US public education sucks royally. As far as industrial countries go, it is very weak. US universities are good, but think -- people get to universities by acquiring a lot of knowledge in schools first. I go to a graduate school in a major university. I would guess that at the very least, 1/3 of students here are foreigners (and they do not pay any money to attend UMass). This, if anything, speaks detrimentally about the quality of US education -- it implies that US, rather that raise their own brains, steals them from other countries.
As to Russians -- their academia IS one of the best, pity they don't have money to do what they can do so well. They have the knowledge and the ability, but not the money or the technology.
Ayn Rand is an American [wannabe] 'philosopher' -- just a passably good writer, really -- of the middle of the century. She got away from USSR, and apparently foreverafter harbored hatred of anything remotely resembling communism or socialism.
Essentially, her 'philosophy' (which does not really deserve the title), which she calls 'objectivism' (thus usurping a term with a rather respectable philosophical history) is supposed to be an all-encompassing philosophical worldview, which she expressed as something to this effect (pasraphrasing from memory):
1) Metaphysics -- objective reality (i.e. 'I see it, it exists)
2) Epistemology -- reason ('reason is not just a tool, it's an entire toolbox')
Not too bad so far, eh?..
3) Ethics -- selfishness (she tacks on to this an idea that humans have a natural right to be not subject to violence, a VERY ad-hoc idea that is essential to making her ethics even remotely workable)
4) Economics/politics -- laissez-faire capitalism (anything goes as long as you don't commit violence upon others, more or less).
Even these points don't sound TOO bad (although her actual arguments are as full of holes as a sieve, and show a lack of familiarity with the existing body of philosophical thought), until you check out the Ayn Rand institute (www.aynrand.com) for a more detailed explanation of this stuff. Read the publication section, there's some scary stuff there (just two examples: environmentalism is evil, European conquest of America is good )...
Oh, free software has been here for as long as software existed. What FSF did is keep it alive through the late 70ies and the 80ies, when the cultural support for it dwindled and when proprietary software almost became THE software paradigm. Without FSF -- without GNU and GPL -- whole generations of hackers would have grown up without having been soaked in the idea of freedom of code. It would have been a far sadder world.
'Show me the code' IS about ideology -- it is about intellectual freedom, freedom of ideas, about Free Software. The fact that you refuse to think about the meaning of 'show me the code' does not make that meaning go away.
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Does RMS actually argue that we all have the inalienable right to modify and distribute everything that other people create? That for someone not to offer me those rights is not just a choice not to be altruistic, but an act of oppression?
I have an 'inalienable right' to read a book of recipes, modify some recipes to my liking, and publish a new book containing the modified recipes (and the original ones, too). Good recipes take a lot of work to come up with, too...
At one point some people simply decided that software should be treated differently. This idea has then been hammered into your head. Congratulations, you have been brainwashed into believing that you can own software (duh, just like you can own cooking recipes and building designs and mathematical formulas...)
No. Anonymity is irrelevent in an argument. It is what is said that matters, not who says it.
Agreed -- and I never said anything to the contrary. Anonymity indeed is irrelevant to the validity of the argument -- to say otherwise would be argumentum ad hominem. However, it DOES matter -- anonymity provides one with a convenient cover from behind which one can say any kind of crap they want, without being responsible for their words.
This is why I address the arguments by ACs -- they are no less valid for their lack of discernible authorship. However, to me, it is a matter of respect -- I prefer knowing who I am speaking to, I despise voices from the crowd, and I prefer to argue with someone I can respect.
I can understand one being unwilling to take the time to identify themselves for a quickie one-time post. However, when a push comes to shove, the implied lack of responsibility for their words makes me regard the my AC opposition without any respect (this does not apply to their arguments, though, to which respect does not apply).
Just an opinion of a man who prefers honesty and responsibility...
P.S. The "dude" thing is a little too cute.
Glad you like it, dude.
(sigh) Ideas are information. The difference is merely in degrees of specificity. Unlike material goods, there is no qualitive distinction between idea and its implementation in information trade, just a qualitive one. You say information is not cost-free to obtain? Well, DUH, neither are design ideas, for example! You have a problem with someone patenting, say, the object-oriented language design, but not with someone copyrighting a specific OO language -- even though the former (idea) took a lot more effort to come up with?.. get real.
BTW, patents are NOT granted on ideas, but rather on processes -- which is why software patents are a very thorny legal issue, they have to be issued for a combination of software and computer (which thus form a processing unit where the software is the essence of the process), rather than the software itself.
The current copyright laws were written in a different era, under different technology. They made sense for books, when the reproduction mechanism was either the printing press or hand-copying (so only your competitors had the means to mass-produce the books, thus fundamentally undermining fair competition); the world has changed. There WAS a qualitive difference between an idea for a book and a book itself (although the difference was purely pragmatic); this distinction has gone away with our newfound ability to replicate information virtually for free.
You DO realize that 'code' is also ideas, just more specific than design?.. it's a continuum, dude, from conceptual design to a specific instance of code on a disk.
P.S. Here is another tip, since you liked my previous one so much. Sit down and think a bit about what information is, and its ontological status. Once you do THAT, sit down again and think about how material property laws apply to something like information.
P.P.S. Post under a name, will you? Anonymity in an argument is a refuge of cowards and fools.
Dude, you completely missed HIS point -- which was that WRT 'intellectual property', the distinction between an 'idea' and 'implementation of idea' is not nearly as strong (and even arguably non-existint) as with material goods.
Your example about the bookshelf was the classic bit of lunacy that is spewed forth by people too lazy to think about what the words 'intellectual property' mean. Use your brain, for pete's sake -- you don't OWN ideas (in specific form or not), you are instead granted RIGHTS TO RESTRICT OTHERS' USE OF THEM!
In short -- the poster's underlying statement was that 'intellectual property' is a linguistic sleight of hand designed to trap people into thinking about information as about something of the same nature as cars and tables. When you made your answer, you fell into this trap, making yourself look like a fool who does not know the difference between the ontological status of material objects and information.
P.S. Asserting yourself to be the winner in an argument does not make you one.
Russian language also does not have a word for sex, it was borrowed from the west ;-)
English does not have a word for 'sex' either, 'sex' is borrowed from Latin through French -- unless you count 'fuck'. However, if you allow English to have 'fuck', then Russian has 'yebat'. QED.
Did you know that in russian peasant is pronounced krestianin, very close to Christian. Why is that?
I don't know -- but I am not convinced that the two are etymologically related. I wish I had a good Russian dictionary here...
Education in much of the US is excellent. I imagine that your 50th rating probably comes from some statistic on percentage of GNP spent on public higher education.
Education is still a field where the USA is a leader. If you don't believe me, go to a major university and look around, you will see a great number of students who pay huge sums of money to attend US schools.
Dude, you speak in ignorance. The "50'th place" figure is very real; it was based on some international testing of school (not university) students, so it reflects knowledge and not education spendings. However, I think it is old -- I believe US is somewhere in the teens right now (which is still pretty pathetic).
Bottom line is, US public education sucks royally. As far as industrial countries go, it is very weak. US universities are good, but think -- people get to universities by acquiring a lot of knowledge in schools first.
I go to a graduate school in a major university. I would guess that at the very least, 1/3 of students here are foreigners (and they do not pay any money to attend UMass). This, if anything, speaks detrimentally about the quality of US education -- it implies that US, rather that raise their own brains, steals them from other countries.
As to Russians -- their academia IS one of the best, pity they don't have money to do what they can do so well. They have the knowledge and the ability, but not the money or the technology.
Ayn Rand is an American [wannabe] 'philosopher' -- just a passably good writer, really -- of the middle of the century. She got away from USSR, and apparently foreverafter harbored hatred of anything remotely resembling communism or socialism.
Essentially, her 'philosophy' (which does not really deserve the title), which she calls 'objectivism' (thus usurping a term with a rather respectable philosophical history) is supposed to be an all-encompassing philosophical worldview, which she expressed as something to this effect (pasraphrasing from memory):
1) Metaphysics -- objective reality (i.e. 'I see it, it exists)
2) Epistemology -- reason ('reason is not just a tool, it's an entire toolbox')
Not too bad so far, eh?..
3) Ethics -- selfishness (she tacks on to this an idea that humans have a natural right to be not subject to violence, a VERY ad-hoc idea that is essential to making her ethics even remotely workable)
4) Economics/politics -- laissez-faire capitalism (anything goes as long as you don't commit violence upon others, more or less).
Even these points don't sound TOO bad (although her actual arguments are as full of holes as a sieve, and show a lack of familiarity with the existing body of philosophical thought), until you check out the Ayn Rand institute (www.aynrand.com) for a more detailed explanation of this stuff. Read the publication section, there's some scary stuff there (just two examples: environmentalism is evil, European conquest of America is good )...
All in all, appealing to Ayn Rand in this context is not much better that appealing to Institute for Creationist Research (www.icr.org) as an authority of paleontology...
Oh, free software has been here for as long as software existed. What FSF did is keep it alive through the late 70ies and the 80ies, when the cultural support for it dwindled and when proprietary software almost became THE software paradigm. Without FSF -- without GNU and GPL -- whole generations of hackers would have grown up without having been soaked in the idea of freedom of code. It would have been a far sadder world.
'Show me the code' IS about ideology -- it is about intellectual freedom, freedom of ideas, about Free Software. The fact that you refuse to think about the meaning of 'show me the code' does not make that meaning go away.