If you hand in your paper in Fall term, and I hand mine in for Spring, then I'd say it was pretty obvious who wrote the original. Obviously if two students have been working legitimately together on a project, there is going to be a lot more leeway. The article made this sound a lot more like they were finding clear examples of successful stuff being reused from former classes.
Post #144 does not mention the word sharing. Nor is sharing the exclusive domain of socialism. In fact, the Republicans talk about it all the time with their compassionate conservatism and faith-based charity schemes.
Most non-profits and charities are based on sharing, or helping people by donating money, goods, or services to them. In this sense, the FSF is no different than the Red Cross or any other United Way type group.
The poster does make some rather misleading statements about the FreeDevelopers trying to implement taxation to fund their work. While all government budgets are derived only from taxation, the goal is not to implement a 1% Free Software tax, but rather to convince government to use 1% of its IT budget to develop Free Software, rather than spending that money on proprietary software. As a tax-payer, an American, and a voter, I don't think 1% is sufficient.
Furthermore, the alleged troll's arguments with regards to Argentina are based on a logical fallacy: "the slippery slope". There is no demonstrated link in his/her A therefore B therefore C, chain of disaster that results in a socialist state. Even if there were, I think I'd prefer a little socialism, as opposed to government-subsidized corporate monopolies on software.
Another book featuring a space elevator is "Jumping Off the Planet", by David Gerrold. Lots of great stuff about the economy, social impacts, etc of the "Beanstalk".
dear moderators who have +1'ed the above post: it's an obvious troll when someone says that mp3s, warez, and bomb making instructions are "all Bad Things". Even if it is provable that mp3s are stealing, or that there is no legitimate reason for someone to know how to build bombs, it is completely contradictory to say that the biggest danger to freedom is too much freedom-- which is exactly what the AC is saying.
Unless WMA is a lossless compression scheme, converting mp3s to wma may save disk space, but it most certainly will not result in better quality because the data will have to be first decompressed, then recompressed. The effect would be the audio equivalent of opening and saving a JPEG too many times-- depending on compression factor this could very distracting or nearly transparent.
Actually, you've pointed out a potentially destructive outcome of this sort of "no warranty needed" mindset. If Free Software is exempt from warranty, whereas proprietary software is required by law to accept certain warranty conditions, the vast majority of consumers who stop to think about it for two seconds might decide they prefer a warranty to an open barn door of programs with bugs and no responsibility for fixing them. On the other hand, if this makes it possible to return buggy or otherwise crappy software to Fry's or Computer City, then it's hard not to like it at least a little bit.
I don't know about Canada, but the U.S. Government (more specifically several states) has no problem enacting taxes on illegal activities. For instance, technically, you owe sales tax on drug sales-- I've even seen (don't know how it ended) legislation designed to require specific tax stamps to be purchased by marijuana sellers. Once arrested for the original crime, they could always throw tax evasion onto the list of charges with laws like this.
I can see where using a painting in a movie is likely to raise some interesting questions, since a movie set is a wholly created backdrop-- and frequently every frame of a movie is subject to whatever the cinematic equivalent of airbrushing is. Similarly, sets used for commercial photography. Now if this same attitude holds in the cases of documentary film or photojournalism (in which the presence of copyrighted works is wholly incidental), then I'd say we have a copyright system that is overly strong.
Re:The problem with open source languages...
on
Apocalypse 2
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· Score: 2
On one hand, I agree with you. On the other I'd say, tough. Yes, it would be nice if good languages were somewhat static, especially with regards to major syntax points. I must say I'm disturbed by what appears to be a future shift to Perl 6 calling object methods by using $foo.bar rather than $foo->bar(). But then, the new syntax is simpler to look at and will make it easier to distinguish from anonymous list indices as in $foo->[$bar]. Seems to me this is similar to the shift from using $Foo'bar to $Foo::Bar for explicitly naming variables within namespaces. The reason C doesn't change much is simple: it's extremely low-level. There just isn't much to change until the nature of computers themselves changes.
Great illustrative example, but I don't personally think as a photographer that I would make any attempt to locate every copyright holder whose work might appear in a photograph I took. The courts might or might not interpret copyright as you suggest, but I think litigation on this topic would go to the most tenacious (i.e. most funded) litigant.
If I have a room in my house that is going to be featured in a magazine article on redecorating, believe me, no one is going to track down the copyright owners for all the works of art on the walls or the publishers of the magazines on the coffee table before they print a picture of the room. However, if the photograph consists only of the coffee table and the majority of the image is simply the magazine covers with a bit of the table surface peeking through, then there may be an issue (um, no pun intended).
What I've gathered from my layman's inquiries and readings on the topic is that this is largely about intent. If a copyrighted work is included incidentally in a larger work of a wholly different nature, there is probably no violation. But if a work serves as the primary derivative for a second work, that probably is a violation. It's a matter of degree, which is a decision to be made by the judge or jury.
The same must be true of the GPL, a clearly derived piece of software based on another piece of GPL software must abide by the GPL. But if I simply quote a few lines of the GPL software in an article for Byte magazine, I don't have to GPL my article-- that's Fair Use.
Oddly enough, the GPL is not designed to protect the "us... who wrote code". The GPL is designed to protect users' freedoms, not those of software developers. It seems to be a frequently overlooked thing that RMS got all in a fit, not because he was having a hard time giving away software, but because he was having a hard time using software.
Apple's responsibilities to its customers have not changed. Provide value for payment. If Apple's customers don't value freedom of speech in terms of the software running their machines, then Apple is fine. Probably this is the reality of the situation, generally speaking. Most Mac lovers started on Macs which they couldn't even open the cases to, let alone look at the source code to the software. Most of them still don't want to do this anymore than they have to.
To Apple's credit, from everything I've ever heard, they've done a fantastic job of working with software developers and releasing specs and toolkits and stuff that makes for good software. There are other large firms in the OS market who are notorious for the exact opposite behavior. I don't think Apple has been acting unethically at all though (except maybe with their price gouging on memory and inflicting those ugly new iMacs on the world). I seriously doubt the licensing was the primary issue when it came to what software to include in OS X, even moreso I think it would be less of a consideration for the kernel and key software that runs the machine. I'd expect technical considerations to trump most everything else.
Hmmm. And if I want to carry fewer little, easily lost or damaged devices, I'd buy the new Sony. The stick memory looks like the single best reason to get this device, imho. I can't wait to see a movie player for this device, and an appropriately compressed copy of a film from DVD. The possibility to have a feature film on a device like this is something I would spend the money on, just because it's there. And imagine the possibilities for staying awake during dull meetings!
On that note, the very first person to ever demonstrate the mp3 format for me was an executive-- not some 20something dotcom hipster, a parent of teenagers with a corner office in a skyscraper.
In Minnesota law (this may vary by state) I could get no search results in the statutes for "lock pick". It may be completely legal to own these devices here. I did find a parallel technology, though. Apparently possession of a code-grabbing device (like the tape recorder Matthew Broderick used in Wargames to get out of the infirmary room) is prohibited, but only if there is intent to use it for an unlawful purpose. The penalty for that is up to 3 yrs in prison or up to $5k.
As to what can the government ban? Whatever it wants apparently. After all, they've banned certain weeds and decorative plant by-products for years-- and everybody loves it!
Correct me if I'm mistaken, but doesn't Walmart sell simple, easy-to-use stuff like dish soap, clothing, and CDs? How the heck does service make any kind of difference in that environment? As long as the clerks at Walmart are not rude and the lines to checkout are not too long, that's the reason to go there instead of some small store. I mean, do customers actually call Wal-Mart, "hey, I can't figure out how to work this mop... which end goes in the bucket, and which end goes on the floor?"
Price is only one feature in a transaction, and often not the most important factor. People don't automatically gravitate to cheaper just because. They gravitate to value-- however they define it for that transaction. There is no other explanation for diamond ring sales. The value there is definitely not the low price tag. I mean, it's a rock!
As to software support, the problem is that most companies see themselves as providing widgets of software, rather than building relationships with customers. Microsoft, oddly enough, seems to be getting it. They charge a boatload for a decent relationship, but then their products add a lot of value when used fully (rather than simply using Word 2k to type one page letters). The more you pay the more willing big software firms seem to be to work with you to fully utilize their software. And what's wrong with that? The average user doesn't need a lot of support IMHO. If they do, it's usually basic computer education type stuff, in which case they should be paying well for it. A computer education is valuable, and tech support shouldn't have to give it away. Unfortunately, like most customer contact people, tech support is one of the least rewarded positions in a tech company from what I can see and this isn't a position where you deal with any customers who are having a good day before you talk to them. Add management on the inside who are penny-pinching, quota-minded, and don't provide decent education, training, and internal support for the tech support staff and you have a recipe for a lot of bungled calls.
What good would open source search engine code do? Unless you wrote it in such a way that it ran on some sort of distributed basis, only your direct competitors would have the hardware to run it. I mean, Google is in the business of providing search results. If they give away the software that does this, anyone with a server farm can build the same engine. Now if they were a not-for-profit company (you know, a charity) or a volunteer effort like DMOZ, then I could see it, but I expect the stakeholders at Google prefer black ink on their bottom line.
Free software makes all kinds of sense when users demand it, especially when it comes to operating systems, programming languages, and "productivity" applications. But it makes zero sense for a company who has not only written the software, but has the only machine running that software, to give away the software.
I don't see how it's going to be a problem. It's not like you can grow a human in a vat of goo like in the Matrix. This process, at least for many years to come, will still involve implanting what is essentially a zygote into a human womb (although it would be interesting to see them try a chimpanzee womb to get rid of that whole informed consent thing). A human child inside a human womb will have to be born just like all other children, and would therefore have a birth certificate and be a regular citizen. No one, not even the clone, will necessarily know it is a clone-- except for the newspaper clippings and science papers that will be written about it.
I'm guessing that success with a human in a non-human womb is unlikely for some time as well. There are few, if any, discrimination issues with humans who resulted from artificial insemination or surrogate motherhood. The biggest problems seem to be legal, and not social.
On the other hand, there is a big difference between a straight-up clone and a genetically altered clone. Adding non-human genes or purposefully altering the human genes in the process of cloning probably will result in someone who may be evidently not quite human, and yes, I'd say this is going to take some time to solve in the social arena. But given that we'll need to perfect the straight clone methods before we get all Dr. Moreau, I'm more worried about global warming than clonism. That would seem to me to be a much more pressing issue.
What I find interesting is that this is the FBI doing this, which I've always thought was a domestic agency. Am I wrong when I suppose that international matters of this sort should be in the hands of the CIA or the military? Of course, I'm also willing to believe the whole thing was orchestrated by Microsoft to get their source code back.
And most inner cities aren't war zones now. Crime is decreasing. DECREASING.
I don't know which "majority" you're thinking of that finds the police abusive. Is that the same overwhelming majority of Republicrats that voted for Gore / Bush / More-of-the-same / We-are-not-soft-on-crime for president? In spite of this, civil liberties are improving over the last 100 years. Just look at who they let into voting booths these days! Blacks and women and the poor, oh my!
I agree, though, the war on drugs is a massive failure with huge social costs which are completely unnecessary and certainly worse than the original problem they are intended to solve. I also agree that we need to be vigilant in protecting our freedoms, many of the gains we've made could be erased. I'm just not sure we need to soft-sell the past or exaggerate the current situation to point out the injustices that still need correcting.
Larger cities have always had less than ideal neighborhoods. Every large city in the world seems to have a place where poor people live. Even smaller towns seem to have their trailer parks in the USA. I don't buy that the drug war itself is responsible for the conditions of the "projects". That there is a large criminal syndicate that is able to make a profit from selling illicit goods is beyond question. What isn't clear to me is that this is inexorably linked to inner city poverty and social issues. Drugs are not imported to this country by the residents of the poorest neighborhoods, nor are most of the users in those neighborhoods, nor are a great deal of the sales happening in those neighborhoods. If anything, real antisocial crime like theft and assault are at the root of the gang problem, and most of that is rooted in poverty, not the drug trade.
Second, if I ask my grandparents about criminal justice in their day, I'd probably learn that simply for being suspected of communism one could be branded for life. I'd probably find that society frowned heavily on single mothers and divorce-- and that discrimination on these grounds was legitimate. I'd find that blacks were systematically barred from decent employment-- legally. I'd find that being Japanese was a crime for four years in the US-- it certainly warranted dispossession and incarceration. Let's have none of this phony "good old days of freedom" nonsense. We've never had it so good.
I don't believe this is about ad revenues at all. AOL makes money off its subscribers. AIM is a service to those people, which if it's going to be of any value is going to need to allow non-subscribers to use it as well. The volume of non-subscribers who use AIM at any level is probably not a large consideration. I seriously doubt their ad rates add much to their revenues as far as AIM goes. Yes, they may well be discouraging the use of non-AOL OSCAR clients, but I'd guess that's for technical and/or bandwidth reasons moreso than some huge financial concern. Heck, the added developer time and other human resource costs are probably quite a bit more than any internet advertising can bring in. Actually, if they can get middle of the road MSN or Qwest or other large ISP subscribers to use their official client and see how nice it is, they may be able to more easily convince people to switch to AOL.
Have you been paying attention? The last people who are going to see any money from any new revenues generated from internet music distribution are the artists. First comes Napster, then the RIAA, then the lawyers, then the executives, then the label's agents, then marketing, then production, THEN the artist.
He does not leave his right to speak behind when he steps onto school property. If the quotes are accurate, he did not make a threat. Not even an implied one, to my mind.
Sounds to me like someone's teenager needs to learn to get a grip. But of course, why should he? They were already picking on this kid, and what better way to mess with someone in school than to get them suspended. For doing nothing more than cracking wise, no less.
My daughter recounted to me a story wherein she told on a classmate for breaking some inane, and the lad knocked her in the arm (a move for which he did not get in trouble, btw). And here's what I told her (and what I'd say to any kid), "you don't tell on kids for stuff that doesn't matter." Doesn't mean she deserved to get hit, but c'mon, when I was a kid we called this being a tattle-tale.
In the Katz story we're hearing about a kid who hadn't done a thing, hadn't indicated he was going to do a thing. The other kids were so afraid he was actually going to shoot them that they stood there and joked about it? And he's the one that gets suspended? Personally, I think it's sad the father pulled his son out of the district. I would have contacted the local ACLU reps. They've been winning cases on this "no tolerance" crap at a rather nice clip lately.
Frankly, kids tattling all the time is not a good trend. Next they'll be turning their parents in for this kind of nonsense. (Woo, a 1984 reference!)
Right. The internet makes possible what would have been an unthinkable absurdity in the real world, since the only major obstacle keeping two connected computers from sharing files is bandwidth and disk space-- neither of which are difficult to obtain. Your newspaper analogy is not comparable. The newspaper company itself provides content online for free in many cases. This does not give you the right to print it out and give away free or sell versions of their newspaper on the street (again, somewhat absurd) or give you the right to make an exact duplicate of the online newspaper and serve it to the public yourself. You do retain fair use rights to the news you read, and as long as the online paper isn't in some unprintable PDF file, saving a copy (hard or soft) for your own needs is entirely possible.
I never once made a statement that internet sharing shouldn't be allowed because of a supposed drop in profits. If you read my post I said internet sharing is probably helping these companies make MORE money.
And let's get one thing straight. Most musicians have little control over their creations. This is even more true with the MPAA than with the RIAA-- but fortunately for the actors and others involved in movie production the movie industry pays its people well and the workers are often unionized in a way that prevents the outright exploitation that occurs so frequently in the music industry.
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If you hand in your paper in Fall term, and I hand mine in for Spring, then I'd say it was pretty obvious who wrote the original. Obviously if two students have been working legitimately together on a project, there is going to be a lot more leeway. The article made this sound a lot more like they were finding clear examples of successful stuff being reused from former classes.
Post #144 does not mention the word sharing. Nor is sharing the exclusive domain of socialism. In fact, the Republicans talk about it all the time with their compassionate conservatism and faith-based charity schemes.
Most non-profits and charities are based on sharing, or helping people by donating money, goods, or services to them. In this sense, the FSF is no different than the Red Cross or any other United Way type group.
The poster does make some rather misleading statements about the FreeDevelopers trying to implement taxation to fund their work. While all government budgets are derived only from taxation, the goal is not to implement a 1% Free Software tax, but rather to convince government to use 1% of its IT budget to develop Free Software, rather than spending that money on proprietary software. As a tax-payer, an American, and a voter, I don't think 1% is sufficient.
Furthermore, the alleged troll's arguments with regards to Argentina are based on a logical fallacy: "the slippery slope". There is no demonstrated link in his/her A therefore B therefore C, chain of disaster that results in a socialist state. Even if there were, I think I'd prefer a little socialism, as opposed to government-subsidized corporate monopolies on software.
Another book featuring a space elevator is "Jumping Off the Planet", by David Gerrold. Lots of great stuff about the economy, social impacts, etc of the "Beanstalk".
dear moderators who have +1'ed the above post: it's an obvious troll when someone says that mp3s, warez, and bomb making instructions are "all Bad Things". Even if it is provable that mp3s are stealing, or that there is no legitimate reason for someone to know how to build bombs, it is completely contradictory to say that the biggest danger to freedom is too much freedom-- which is exactly what the AC is saying.
Unless WMA is a lossless compression scheme, converting mp3s to wma may save disk space, but it most certainly will not result in better quality because the data will have to be first decompressed, then recompressed. The effect would be the audio equivalent of opening and saving a JPEG too many times-- depending on compression factor this could very distracting or nearly transparent.
Actually, you've pointed out a potentially destructive outcome of this sort of "no warranty needed" mindset. If Free Software is exempt from warranty, whereas proprietary software is required by law to accept certain warranty conditions, the vast majority of consumers who stop to think about it for two seconds might decide they prefer a warranty to an open barn door of programs with bugs and no responsibility for fixing them. On the other hand, if this makes it possible to return buggy or otherwise crappy software to Fry's or Computer City, then it's hard not to like it at least a little bit.
I don't know about Canada, but the U.S. Government (more specifically several states) has no problem enacting taxes on illegal activities. For instance, technically, you owe sales tax on drug sales-- I've even seen (don't know how it ended) legislation designed to require specific tax stamps to be purchased by marijuana sellers. Once arrested for the original crime, they could always throw tax evasion onto the list of charges with laws like this.
I can see where using a painting in a movie is likely to raise some interesting questions, since a movie set is a wholly created backdrop-- and frequently every frame of a movie is subject to whatever the cinematic equivalent of airbrushing is. Similarly, sets used for commercial photography. Now if this same attitude holds in the cases of documentary film or photojournalism (in which the presence of copyrighted works is wholly incidental), then I'd say we have a copyright system that is overly strong.
On one hand, I agree with you. On the other I'd say, tough. Yes, it would be nice if good languages were somewhat static, especially with regards to major syntax points. I must say I'm disturbed by what appears to be a future shift to Perl 6 calling object methods by using $foo.bar rather than $foo->bar(). But then, the new syntax is simpler to look at and will make it easier to distinguish from anonymous list indices as in $foo->[$bar]. Seems to me this is similar to the shift from using $Foo'bar to $Foo::Bar for explicitly naming variables within namespaces. The reason C doesn't change much is simple: it's extremely low-level. There just isn't much to change until the nature of computers themselves changes.
Great illustrative example, but I don't personally think as a photographer that I would make any attempt to locate every copyright holder whose work might appear in a photograph I took. The courts might or might not interpret copyright as you suggest, but I think litigation on this topic would go to the most tenacious (i.e. most funded) litigant.
If I have a room in my house that is going to be featured in a magazine article on redecorating, believe me, no one is going to track down the copyright owners for all the works of art on the walls or the publishers of the magazines on the coffee table before they print a picture of the room. However, if the photograph consists only of the coffee table and the majority of the image is simply the magazine covers with a bit of the table surface peeking through, then there may be an issue (um, no pun intended).
What I've gathered from my layman's inquiries and readings on the topic is that this is largely about intent. If a copyrighted work is included incidentally in a larger work of a wholly different nature, there is probably no violation. But if a work serves as the primary derivative for a second work, that probably is a violation. It's a matter of degree, which is a decision to be made by the judge or jury.
The same must be true of the GPL, a clearly derived piece of software based on another piece of GPL software must abide by the GPL. But if I simply quote a few lines of the GPL software in an article for Byte magazine, I don't have to GPL my article-- that's Fair Use.
Oddly enough, the GPL is not designed to protect the "us... who wrote code". The GPL is designed to protect users' freedoms, not those of software developers. It seems to be a frequently overlooked thing that RMS got all in a fit, not because he was having a hard time giving away software, but because he was having a hard time using software.
Apple's responsibilities to its customers have not changed. Provide value for payment. If Apple's customers don't value freedom of speech in terms of the software running their machines, then Apple is fine. Probably this is the reality of the situation, generally speaking. Most Mac lovers started on Macs which they couldn't even open the cases to, let alone look at the source code to the software. Most of them still don't want to do this anymore than they have to.
To Apple's credit, from everything I've ever heard, they've done a fantastic job of working with software developers and releasing specs and toolkits and stuff that makes for good software. There are other large firms in the OS market who are notorious for the exact opposite behavior. I don't think Apple has been acting unethically at all though (except maybe with their price gouging on memory and inflicting those ugly new iMacs on the world). I seriously doubt the licensing was the primary issue when it came to what software to include in OS X, even moreso I think it would be less of a consideration for the kernel and key software that runs the machine. I'd expect technical considerations to trump most everything else.
Hmmm. And if I want to carry fewer little, easily lost or damaged devices, I'd buy the new Sony. The stick memory looks like the single best reason to get this device, imho. I can't wait to see a movie player for this device, and an appropriately compressed copy of a film from DVD. The possibility to have a feature film on a device like this is something I would spend the money on, just because it's there. And imagine the possibilities for staying awake during dull meetings!
On that note, the very first person to ever demonstrate the mp3 format for me was an executive-- not some 20something dotcom hipster, a parent of teenagers with a corner office in a skyscraper.
In Minnesota law (this may vary by state) I could get no search results in the statutes for "lock pick". It may be completely legal to own these devices here. I did find a parallel technology, though. Apparently possession of a code-grabbing device (like the tape recorder Matthew Broderick used in Wargames to get out of the infirmary room) is prohibited, but only if there is intent to use it for an unlawful purpose. The penalty for that is up to 3 yrs in prison or up to $5k.
As to what can the government ban? Whatever it wants apparently. After all, they've banned certain weeds and decorative plant by-products for years-- and everybody loves it!
Correct me if I'm mistaken, but doesn't Walmart sell simple, easy-to-use stuff like dish soap, clothing, and CDs? How the heck does service make any kind of difference in that environment? As long as the clerks at Walmart are not rude and the lines to checkout are not too long, that's the reason to go there instead of some small store. I mean, do customers actually call Wal-Mart, "hey, I can't figure out how to work this mop... which end goes in the bucket, and which end goes on the floor?"
Price is only one feature in a transaction, and often not the most important factor. People don't automatically gravitate to cheaper just because. They gravitate to value-- however they define it for that transaction. There is no other explanation for diamond ring sales. The value there is definitely not the low price tag. I mean, it's a rock!
As to software support, the problem is that most companies see themselves as providing widgets of software, rather than building relationships with customers. Microsoft, oddly enough, seems to be getting it. They charge a boatload for a decent relationship, but then their products add a lot of value when used fully (rather than simply using Word 2k to type one page letters). The more you pay the more willing big software firms seem to be to work with you to fully utilize their software. And what's wrong with that? The average user doesn't need a lot of support IMHO. If they do, it's usually basic computer education type stuff, in which case they should be paying well for it. A computer education is valuable, and tech support shouldn't have to give it away. Unfortunately, like most customer contact people, tech support is one of the least rewarded positions in a tech company from what I can see and this isn't a position where you deal with any customers who are having a good day before you talk to them. Add management on the inside who are penny-pinching, quota-minded, and don't provide decent education, training, and internal support for the tech support staff and you have a recipe for a lot of bungled calls.
Maybe you should switch to herbal tea. You might find it very relaxing.
What good would open source search engine code do? Unless you wrote it in such a way that it ran on some sort of distributed basis, only your direct competitors would have the hardware to run it. I mean, Google is in the business of providing search results. If they give away the software that does this, anyone with a server farm can build the same engine. Now if they were a not-for-profit company (you know, a charity) or a volunteer effort like DMOZ, then I could see it, but I expect the stakeholders at Google prefer black ink on their bottom line.
Free software makes all kinds of sense when users demand it, especially when it comes to operating systems, programming languages, and "productivity" applications. But it makes zero sense for a company who has not only written the software, but has the only machine running that software, to give away the software.
I don't see how it's going to be a problem. It's not like you can grow a human in a vat of goo like in the Matrix. This process, at least for many years to come, will still involve implanting what is essentially a zygote into a human womb (although it would be interesting to see them try a chimpanzee womb to get rid of that whole informed consent thing). A human child inside a human womb will have to be born just like all other children, and would therefore have a birth certificate and be a regular citizen. No one, not even the clone, will necessarily know it is a clone-- except for the newspaper clippings and science papers that will be written about it.
I'm guessing that success with a human in a non-human womb is unlikely for some time as well. There are few, if any, discrimination issues with humans who resulted from artificial insemination or surrogate motherhood. The biggest problems seem to be legal, and not social.
On the other hand, there is a big difference between a straight-up clone and a genetically altered clone. Adding non-human genes or purposefully altering the human genes in the process of cloning probably will result in someone who may be evidently not quite human, and yes, I'd say this is going to take some time to solve in the social arena. But given that we'll need to perfect the straight clone methods before we get all Dr. Moreau, I'm more worried about global warming than clonism. That would seem to me to be a much more pressing issue.
What I find interesting is that this is the FBI doing this, which I've always thought was a domestic agency. Am I wrong when I suppose that international matters of this sort should be in the hands of the CIA or the military? Of course, I'm also willing to believe the whole thing was orchestrated by Microsoft to get their source code back.
And most inner cities aren't war zones now. Crime is decreasing. DECREASING.
I don't know which "majority" you're thinking of that finds the police abusive. Is that the same overwhelming majority of Republicrats that voted for Gore / Bush / More-of-the-same / We-are-not-soft-on-crime for president? In spite of this, civil liberties are improving over the last 100 years. Just look at who they let into voting booths these days! Blacks and women and the poor, oh my!
I agree, though, the war on drugs is a massive failure with huge social costs which are completely unnecessary and certainly worse than the original problem they are intended to solve. I also agree that we need to be vigilant in protecting our freedoms, many of the gains we've made could be erased. I'm just not sure we need to soft-sell the past or exaggerate the current situation to point out the injustices that still need correcting.
Two nits:
Larger cities have always had less than ideal neighborhoods. Every large city in the world seems to have a place where poor people live. Even smaller towns seem to have their trailer parks in the USA. I don't buy that the drug war itself is responsible for the conditions of the "projects". That there is a large criminal syndicate that is able to make a profit from selling illicit goods is beyond question. What isn't clear to me is that this is inexorably linked to inner city poverty and social issues. Drugs are not imported to this country by the residents of the poorest neighborhoods, nor are most of the users in those neighborhoods, nor are a great deal of the sales happening in those neighborhoods. If anything, real antisocial crime like theft and assault are at the root of the gang problem, and most of that is rooted in poverty, not the drug trade.
Second, if I ask my grandparents about criminal justice in their day, I'd probably learn that simply for being suspected of communism one could be branded for life. I'd probably find that society frowned heavily on single mothers and divorce-- and that discrimination on these grounds was legitimate. I'd find that blacks were systematically barred from decent employment-- legally. I'd find that being Japanese was a crime for four years in the US-- it certainly warranted dispossession and incarceration. Let's have none of this phony "good old days of freedom" nonsense. We've never had it so good.
I don't believe this is about ad revenues at all. AOL makes money off its subscribers. AIM is a service to those people, which if it's going to be of any value is going to need to allow non-subscribers to use it as well. The volume of non-subscribers who use AIM at any level is probably not a large consideration. I seriously doubt their ad rates add much to their revenues as far as AIM goes. Yes, they may well be discouraging the use of non-AOL OSCAR clients, but I'd guess that's for technical and/or bandwidth reasons moreso than some huge financial concern. Heck, the added developer time and other human resource costs are probably quite a bit more than any internet advertising can bring in. Actually, if they can get middle of the road MSN or Qwest or other large ISP subscribers to use their official client and see how nice it is, they may be able to more easily convince people to switch to AOL.
Have you been paying attention? The last people who are going to see any money from any new revenues generated from internet music distribution are the artists. First comes Napster, then the RIAA, then the lawyers, then the executives, then the label's agents, then marketing, then production, THEN the artist.
BS.
He does not leave his right to speak behind when he steps onto school property. If the quotes are accurate, he did not make a threat. Not even an implied one, to my mind.
Sounds to me like someone's teenager needs to learn to get a grip. But of course, why should he? They were already picking on this kid, and what better way to mess with someone in school than to get them suspended. For doing nothing more than cracking wise, no less.
My daughter recounted to me a story wherein she told on a classmate for breaking some inane, and the lad knocked her in the arm (a move for which he did not get in trouble, btw). And here's what I told her (and what I'd say to any kid), "you don't tell on kids for stuff that doesn't matter." Doesn't mean she deserved to get hit, but c'mon, when I was a kid we called this being a tattle-tale.
In the Katz story we're hearing about a kid who hadn't done a thing, hadn't indicated he was going to do a thing. The other kids were so afraid he was actually going to shoot them that they stood there and joked about it? And he's the one that gets suspended? Personally, I think it's sad the father pulled his son out of the district. I would have contacted the local ACLU reps. They've been winning cases on this "no tolerance" crap at a rather nice clip lately.
Frankly, kids tattling all the time is not a good trend. Next they'll be turning their parents in for this kind of nonsense. (Woo, a 1984 reference!)
1918? Is that possible? I thought Unix time started in 1970.
Right. The internet makes possible what would have been an unthinkable absurdity in the real world, since the only major obstacle keeping two connected computers from sharing files is bandwidth and disk space-- neither of which are difficult to obtain. Your newspaper analogy is not comparable. The newspaper company itself provides content online for free in many cases. This does not give you the right to print it out and give away free or sell versions of their newspaper on the street (again, somewhat absurd) or give you the right to make an exact duplicate of the online newspaper and serve it to the public yourself. You do retain fair use rights to the news you read, and as long as the online paper isn't in some unprintable PDF file, saving a copy (hard or soft) for your own needs is entirely possible.
I never once made a statement that internet sharing shouldn't be allowed because of a supposed drop in profits. If you read my post I said internet sharing is probably helping these companies make MORE money.
And let's get one thing straight. Most musicians have little control over their creations. This is even more true with the MPAA than with the RIAA-- but fortunately for the actors and others involved in movie production the movie industry pays its people well and the workers are often unionized in a way that prevents the outright exploitation that occurs so frequently in the music industry.