As small a business as you can find...
on
Pay vs. Happiness
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· Score: 1
Right now I'm in physics graduate school, but last year I spent working for a very small studio (and freelancing on the side) as a music teacher (and computer fixit schmuck), supplementing my income with two church jobs as a musician.
I have a feeling this is going to wind up being the happiest year of my life. It's much more satisfying to get a check and a thank-you, what-should-my-son-practice? at the end of working rather than getting some paycheck whose connection to the work you're performing is nebulous at best.
Working like this, there's a direct connection between the job you do and how well you do in business.
The Firefox devs are much, much more likely to acknowledge flaws and try to fix them, while Microsoft likes to downplay such things. Notice that the article said "vendor-confirmed flaws"?
Since OSS projects have a better security track record in general, they're more likely to actively seek out bugs and try to squash them because security holes are less tolerated. Likewise, a flaw that might be considered minor in IE might be classified as severe in Firefox.
I certainly agree, and I think the Internet is similar to the civil rights era in an important respect: the law has failed. The law has failed to prevent things happening on the 'Net that should be (spam), and has forbidden some things that should be permitted (realizing the potential of the Internet to provide a more effective distribution means for information) (by a copyright regime that benefits neither producers nor consumers of information).
We have a term for violating another country's sovereignity to enforce your own laws: act of war.
If someone is standing over border threatening your countrymen, and the other country won't apprehend them or allow you to cross the border and apprehend them, then you certainly have the ethical right to do something about that -- with the awareness that you've stepped outside the bounds of law to do so. In many cases protecting life is more important than respecting law (Afghanistan, October 2001); almost by default, (non-civil) war is a non-lawful procedure.
However, when Clinton fired cruise missiles into Afghanistan at terrorist training camps (which I supported!), he committed an act of war. This had nothing to do with concepts like "criminal liability"; this was blowing people up, without a trial, because you think you're sufficiently safer with them blown up.
Likewise with destroying websites hosted in a country without said country's permission: you're destroying property in another country, without the blessing of applicable law. Maybe it's justified, maybe it's ethical, but it's not legal. Neither is it necessarily illegal (unless international treaty or the laws of the aggressor forbit it), for war is beyond considerations of law.
Even without any license at all, I can't copy software and sell it. Copyright law prevents that, with or without any contract.
If I buy a piece of software, I am allowed to do anything with it I want... within the bounds of the law, and one of the things that's not within those bounds is to copy it and start selling it.
What people object to is blind, overly restrictive license agreements: buying a piece of software and then later finding out that "You agree that this software can only be run on our hardware, while wearing a pink fedora." Nothing in copyright law prevents me from buying a copy of Windows XP, for instance, and then running it on a quantum supercomputer with an x86 emulator.
There's a very clever clause in the GPL that says something to the effect of "You can obviously use this software without agreeing to this license, since you've not signed it and aren't bound to it." The drafters of the GPL apparently support, as I do, an end to post-sale (i.e. EULA) license agreements that *take away* from your rights.
The GPL then goes on to say: "If you agree to the terms of this license and agree to do certain things, you may copy the software." This is NOT taking away from your rights: this is giving you extra rights to do certain things (copying) which would otherwise be forbidden.
Personally, I think all sorts of post-sale licenses that take away from rights are wrong. We've already shown that purely IP products (CD's) can be "sold, not licensed" just fine. I'm not permitted *by law* to copy and sell a new CD (with no need for a contract telling me I can't), but I can do anything else I please with it. Why can't this work with software? I should be able to buy a copy of Tiger, or of Starcraft, and I can do any damn thing I please with it, as long as it's not restricted by law.
So someone in, say, Pakistan violates UK conspiracy laws on a website hosted in Pakistan. Big deal. They're not in the UK.
The UK does *not* have jurisdiction to enforce UK law abroad. I have a picture of my girlfriend and I holding hands on my website. This is illegal according to Saudi Arabian law; do the Saudi authorities have the right to take down my website?
The car manufacturer intentionally chose to sell a car with bad brakes. Both he and the pirate are at fault in your scenario, since both took a conscious decision that led to a car with faulty brakes being present on the road.
... which is ironic, since by moral arguments piracy is less of a crime than theft, since the thief actually deprives the victim of property, while the pirate merely creates property without authorization without depriving another.
This is the point I was making in the grandparent, that piracy shouldn't be compared to theft because theft is (should be) the greater crime.
No, it's more like someone sneaking into a car company and xeroxing the blueprints for the car. They then build the car and start driving it.
Three months later they hear that all of those cars have been recalled since the mufflers are on backwards and the door locks can be picked with a toothpick, and taking their car in for recall service.
It is a municipality's right to run a public library, in any way they and their voters choose. If the voters of Podunk want to run a library that distributes translations of the Canterbury Tales in Swedish, that's their right.
It's one of those federal-interference-in-local-matters issues, commonly called "states' rights", that Republicans once got their panties in a wad over but have now forgotten about.
Because in order to change the SSID, you have to go into the router configuration page. Right next to the option to change the SSID are several options that all indicate a desire not to have guests on the AP (broadcast off, encryption on, MAC filtering, etc.)
There are enough people who don't mind the public using their AP that it seems reasonable to assume that, if someone went to that page and changed the SSID but *didn't* change the broadcast/encryption/filtering settings, they don't mind guests.
I consider any AP with a non-default broadcast SSID (that isn't something like "NoLeechers" to be intended for public use. If someone goes to the page on their router with the option that says "Change SSID" and uses it, but doesn't turn off broadcast or turn on WEP/WPA using the adjacent option, they probably intended it to be that way.
I have a leech who's been using my connection for months. I packet-sniff him every once in a while to see what he's up to, but I don't mind him using the connection.
We had already levelled Tokyo and most other Japanese cities. We spared Kyoto, however, for cultural reasons.
The Japanese, like everyone else, integrated military production into cities; both Hiroshima and Nagasaki had military activity in/around them.
Historians debate whether use of the bombs was necessary to force Japan to surrender, but it's rather clear that, with the intelligence the American leadership had, they thought their use was necessary.
Read about the extremely high morale of Japanese last-ditch defenses at Iwo Jima and Okinawa and the final sortie of the HIMS Yamato...... there was an incident where a captured and severely wounded Japanese sailor grabbed a scalpel from an American surgeon preparing to save his life and killed him with it.
America had been through a long and bloody war and had scrabbled up from near defeat to a position of overwhelming superiority at sea and in the air, and had been trying to use that superiority to end the war without invading the Japanese mainland (risking a repeat of Iwo Jima on a massive scale)... and we couldn't figure out a way to do it. Hell, we levelled Tokyo, and that didn't work.
Nobody's proposing "joining hands and singing kumbaya", as you ignorantly put it, on *any* side of this issue.
And war isn't the only situation. Look at the issues surrounding the creation of this country (hint: our first government didn't work, we had to scrap it and start again); look at the independence of India and numerous other colonies; look at the trade disputes between Japan, the US, and the EU that pop up all the time.
Wars make history books, but problems can be solved by means other than war.
To present war and "singing kumbaya" as the only two means of problem-solving, with nothing in between, is a rather poor attempt at a typical hawk straw-man argument.
Agreed. I support a minimum standard of universal health care; I should be able to go to the hospital with a broken arm, point to it, and say "fix me", and they will.
This is mainly for pragmatic reasons: sure, public projects tend to be inefficient, but the level of waste in our medical system brought on by the bureaucratic nightmare that is the American insurance system is even worse.
Now, there's no way that a public system could pay for artificial hearts at the current price point -- but that's no reason that people shouldn't be able to pay for them themselves!
The government provides roads to me for my use, but I can build my own roads if I don't like the public ones!
One of the great things about 802.11 is that there are no restrictions on its use. I can, using cheap hardware available anywhere, set up a wireless network anywhere for pretty much any purpose I want, subject to the limitations of the technology.
I can play Starcraft with someone in another car next to me. I can let guests use my internet connection when they visit. I can check my email from my parking lot.
Wifi has, IMO, been such a great success because it goes back to the P2P nature of the Internet. Rather than being a captive customer to (say) a cell phone company that owns all the cards, it's a technology for me to use for free for whatever I want.
Will WiMax be the same? Can I go to Circuit City, shell out $whatever for WiMax equipment, and check my email from a mile away from my apartment?
Google has shown, time and again, that it's good at things other than search.
Has he ever really checked out Google Maps, where you can see high-res maps and aerial images side by side? (I'm right now looking at high-res pictures of the building on the army base where I used to work. Score one for freedom of information!) Or gmail, which does webmail far, far better than anything anyone else can come up with?
They've got other services, too: Froogle, image search, usenet, a translator...
Google, as part of their business, has lots of smart people and an enormous amount of computer juice under one roof. Unlike Microsoft, they've shown again and again that they can come up with nifty ways to use those people and computers to get information into the people's hands...... and they do it all without being oppressive or looking to create "brand lockin" like Microsoft does with their Passport system.
Microsoft competes with marketing tricks and coercive business practices: business model first, product second.
Google competes by creating a product that's better than anything anyone else has, and then figuring out a way to make money off of it. In the long run, this approach works better. If you make good stuff, you'll always have a market.
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Right now I'm in physics graduate school, but last year I spent working for a very small studio (and freelancing on the side) as a music teacher (and computer fixit schmuck), supplementing my income with two church jobs as a musician.
I have a feeling this is going to wind up being the happiest year of my life. It's much more satisfying to get a check and a thank-you, what-should-my-son-practice? at the end of working rather than getting some paycheck whose connection to the work you're performing is nebulous at best.
Working like this, there's a direct connection between the job you do and how well you do in business.
Sued for what? All you're doing is publishing a list of what amounts to their names.
Is it illegal for me to publish a list of the companies that sent me junk mail last week?
The Firefox devs are much, much more likely to acknowledge flaws and try to fix them, while Microsoft likes to downplay such things. Notice that the article said "vendor-confirmed flaws"?
Since OSS projects have a better security track record in general, they're more likely to actively seek out bugs and try to squash them because security holes are less tolerated. Likewise, a flaw that might be considered minor in IE might be classified as severe in Firefox.
Regardless of whether it's illegal or ethical, copyright infringement is not stealing, which requires depriving someone of property.
I find it ironic that the penalty for actual theft is much less than that for copyright infringement.
It strikes me as interesting that running Linux is considered a greater offense than, say, spraypainting the walls, or cheating on tests.
I certainly agree, and I think the Internet is similar to the civil rights era in an important respect: the law has failed. The law has failed to prevent things happening on the 'Net that should be (spam), and has forbidden some things that should be permitted (realizing the potential of the Internet to provide a more effective distribution means for information) (by a copyright regime that benefits neither producers nor consumers of information).
How is Option #2 any different than the sit-ins done during the 1960's civil rights movement to businesses in Alabama?
Those are lauded in all of the history books as an application of peaceful economic pressure.
We have a term for violating another country's sovereignity to enforce your own laws: act of war.
If someone is standing over border threatening your countrymen, and the other country won't apprehend them or allow you to cross the border and apprehend them, then you certainly have the ethical right to do something about that -- with the awareness that you've stepped outside the bounds of law to do so. In many cases protecting life is more important than respecting law (Afghanistan, October 2001); almost by default, (non-civil) war is a non-lawful procedure.
However, when Clinton fired cruise missiles into Afghanistan at terrorist training camps (which I supported!), he committed an act of war. This had nothing to do with concepts like "criminal liability"; this was blowing people up, without a trial, because you think you're sufficiently safer with them blown up.
Likewise with destroying websites hosted in a country without said country's permission: you're destroying property in another country, without the blessing of applicable law. Maybe it's justified, maybe it's ethical, but it's not legal. Neither is it necessarily illegal (unless international treaty or the laws of the aggressor forbit it), for war is beyond considerations of law.
Bad analogy.
... within the bounds of the law, and one of the things that's not within those bounds is to copy it and start selling it.
Even without any license at all, I can't copy software and sell it. Copyright law prevents that, with or without any contract.
If I buy a piece of software, I am allowed to do anything with it I want
What people object to is blind, overly restrictive license agreements: buying a piece of software and then later finding out that "You agree that this software can only be run on our hardware, while wearing a pink fedora." Nothing in copyright law prevents me from buying a copy of Windows XP, for instance, and then running it on a quantum supercomputer with an x86 emulator.
There's a very clever clause in the GPL that says something to the effect of "You can obviously use this software without agreeing to this license, since you've not signed it and aren't bound to it." The drafters of the GPL apparently support, as I do, an end to post-sale (i.e. EULA) license agreements that *take away* from your rights.
The GPL then goes on to say: "If you agree to the terms of this license and agree to do certain things, you may copy the software." This is NOT taking away from your rights: this is giving you extra rights to do certain things (copying) which would otherwise be forbidden.
Personally, I think all sorts of post-sale licenses that take away from rights are wrong. We've already shown that purely IP products (CD's) can be "sold, not licensed" just fine. I'm not permitted *by law* to copy and sell a new CD (with no need for a contract telling me I can't), but I can do anything else I please with it. Why can't this work with software? I should be able to buy a copy of Tiger, or of Starcraft, and I can do any damn thing I please with it, as long as it's not restricted by law.
So someone in, say, Pakistan violates UK conspiracy laws on a website hosted in Pakistan. Big deal. They're not in the UK.
The UK does *not* have jurisdiction to enforce UK law abroad. I have a picture of my girlfriend and I holding hands on my website. This is illegal according to Saudi Arabian law; do the Saudi authorities have the right to take down my website?
Of course not.
Well, I imagine whoever built the Eisenhower Interstate System had to have a huge budget, and fifty years on it seems to be working pretty well.
The car manufacturer intentionally chose to sell a car with bad brakes. Both he and the pirate are at fault in your scenario, since both took a conscious decision that led to a car with faulty brakes being present on the road.
... which is ironic, since by moral arguments piracy is less of a crime than theft, since the thief actually deprives the victim of property, while the pirate merely creates property without authorization without depriving another.
This is the point I was making in the grandparent, that piracy shouldn't be compared to theft because theft is (should be) the greater crime.
No, it's more like someone sneaking into a car company and xeroxing the blueprints for the car. They then build the car and start driving it.
Three months later they hear that all of those cars have been recalled since the mufflers are on backwards and the door locks can be picked with a toothpick, and taking their car in for recall service.
Piracy is not theft. Bzzt.
Actually, yes, it is a fundamental right.
It is a municipality's right to run a public library, in any way they and their voters choose. If the voters of Podunk want to run a library that distributes translations of the Canterbury Tales in Swedish, that's their right.
It's one of those federal-interference-in-local-matters issues, commonly called "states' rights", that Republicans once got their panties in a wad over but have now forgotten about.
Because in order to change the SSID, you have to go into the router configuration page. Right next to the option to change the SSID are several options that all indicate a desire not to have guests on the AP (broadcast off, encryption on, MAC filtering, etc.)
There are enough people who don't mind the public using their AP that it seems reasonable to assume that, if someone went to that page and changed the SSID but *didn't* change the broadcast/encryption/filtering settings, they don't mind guests.
I consider any AP with a non-default broadcast SSID (that isn't something like "NoLeechers" to be intended for public use. If someone goes to the page on their router with the option that says "Change SSID" and uses it, but doesn't turn off broadcast or turn on WEP/WPA using the adjacent option, they probably intended it to be that way.
I have a leech who's been using my connection for months. I packet-sniff him every once in a while to see what he's up to, but I don't mind him using the connection.
There were no military targets left.
... there was an incident where a captured and severely wounded Japanese sailor grabbed a scalpel from an American surgeon preparing to save his life and killed him with it.
We had already levelled Tokyo and most other Japanese cities. We spared Kyoto, however, for cultural reasons.
The Japanese, like everyone else, integrated military production into cities; both Hiroshima and Nagasaki had military activity in/around them.
Historians debate whether use of the bombs was necessary to force Japan to surrender, but it's rather clear that, with the intelligence the American leadership had, they thought their use was necessary.
Read about the extremely high morale of Japanese last-ditch defenses at Iwo Jima and Okinawa and the final sortie of the HIMS Yamato...
America had been through a long and bloody war and had scrabbled up from near defeat to a position of overwhelming superiority at sea and in the air, and had been trying to use that superiority to end the war without invading the Japanese mainland (risking a repeat of Iwo Jima on a massive scale)... and we couldn't figure out a way to do it. Hell, we levelled Tokyo, and that didn't work.
War is hell.
If it was indeed radical Islamists who set these bombs, then it is indeed time to be making fun of religion -- it was loony religious nuts who did it!
Nobody's proposing "joining hands and singing kumbaya", as you ignorantly put it, on *any* side of this issue.
And war isn't the only situation. Look at the issues surrounding the creation of this country (hint: our first government didn't work, we had to scrap it and start again); look at the independence of India and numerous other colonies; look at the trade disputes between Japan, the US, and the EU that pop up all the time.
Wars make history books, but problems can be solved by means other than war.
To present war and "singing kumbaya" as the only two means of problem-solving, with nothing in between, is a rather poor attempt at a typical hawk straw-man argument.
They're trying to kill all of the terrorists. That's the current plan, at least, but it's not working very well.
Agreed. I support a minimum standard of universal health care; I should be able to go to the hospital with a broken arm, point to it, and say "fix me", and they will.
This is mainly for pragmatic reasons: sure, public projects tend to be inefficient, but the level of waste in our medical system brought on by the bureaucratic nightmare that is the American insurance system is even worse.
Now, there's no way that a public system could pay for artificial hearts at the current price point -- but that's no reason that people shouldn't be able to pay for them themselves!
The government provides roads to me for my use, but I can build my own roads if I don't like the public ones!
One of the great things about 802.11 is that there are no restrictions on its use. I can, using cheap hardware available anywhere, set up a wireless network anywhere for pretty much any purpose I want, subject to the limitations of the technology.
I can play Starcraft with someone in another car next to me. I can let guests use my internet connection when they visit. I can check my email from my parking lot.
Wifi has, IMO, been such a great success because it goes back to the P2P nature of the Internet. Rather than being a captive customer to (say) a cell phone company that owns all the cards, it's a technology for me to use for free for whatever I want.
Will WiMax be the same? Can I go to Circuit City, shell out $whatever for WiMax equipment, and check my email from a mile away from my apartment?
Google has shown, time and again, that it's good at things other than search.
... and they do it all without being oppressive or looking to create "brand lockin" like Microsoft does with their Passport system.
Has he ever really checked out Google Maps, where you can see high-res maps and aerial images side by side? (I'm right now looking at high-res pictures of the building on the army base where I used to work. Score one for freedom of information!) Or gmail, which does webmail far, far better than anything anyone else can come up with?
They've got other services, too: Froogle, image search, usenet, a translator...
Google, as part of their business, has lots of smart people and an enormous amount of computer juice under one roof. Unlike Microsoft, they've shown again and again that they can come up with nifty ways to use those people and computers to get information into the people's hands...
Microsoft competes with marketing tricks and coercive business practices: business model first, product second.
Google competes by creating a product that's better than anything anyone else has, and then figuring out a way to make money off of it. In the long run, this approach works better. If you make good stuff, you'll always have a market.