Most interactive audio/visual activities increase concentration.
Yes, but if you read the whole article, you see that the video games aren't actually doing any curing. "Cure your child with videogames!" was a bad way to title it. They're just using the video games as positive feedback for when the children show improvement.
Possibly, but that's one heck of a kid who can stand up to to his/her friends like that.
Yes it is, and it should be your goal as a parent to raise "one heck of a kid." If they don't stand up to their friends at first, then if they're a good kid, it should only take them a few more times waking up in jail to grow a spine. If they never do, then that's a fundamental flaw in that person.
Then again, they might wake up in jail with a hangover and think "oh, wow, what a rush...I gotta get my friends in on this."
If so, then why shouldn't they? What's so bad about hangovers and jail if they enjoy it?
However, sex/drugs/alcohol have all been around since long before our parents, and they'll be around for a long time from now. Those issues are universal to every generation.
They don't have to be though! We're not talking fundamental human experience (well, maybe with sex). Drugs and alcohol haven't always been problems, and they aren't problems everywhere. In most european countries, the drinking age is around 13, and they don't have nearly as many problems with the whole teenage alcohol culture that we've developed in America. Just as prohibition resulted in more crime, teenage alcohol restriction results in more teenage rebellion and disobedience. If drugs and alcohol were legal for everyone, then parents would to talk reasonably with their kids about it, and wouldn't rely on the law. The kids would then take that discussion and deal with it responsible. Most kids aren't genuinely self-destructive, they just exhibit self-destructive behavior out of rebellion. When you enforce things on them "for their own good," then self-destruction and rebellion become the same thing.
Maybe, but I also know what it's like to fall off my bike. It's a hop-skip-and-jump from "knowing" that pain to deducing that I'm going to die if I jump off that bridge, or at the very least get really really mangled. I can deduce from relatively small experiences of mine, or from the experiences of others. Maybe I really never know, but damn, some things are just not worth knowing. I count that jump as one of them. I also count sticking my hand in the garbage disposal while it's on as another.
Yes, exactly. You take your own experiences and deduce logical actions from them. You don't rely on "mommy told me not to jump off bridges or stick my hand in the garbage disposal." That's my whole point. If your parents didn't let you experience those non-fatal mistakes, then you wouldn't be able to deduce the fatal ones. Then they would have to warn you about everything fatal, and you would have to believe them.
Absolutely! But a little discussion around the edges never killed anyone.:) I, for one, have learned some things from you and appreciate the opportunity.
= )
Excellent post, this is this kind of thing I'm looking for in an argument.
Of course, it's clear that our views of Evil are distinct and, to some extent, incompatible. Thus it's not too surprising we have different opinions on whether corporations are (or can be) Evil.
My philosophy of arguments is that people have layers of belief, with the low level being things like "I shouldn't do evil" and "fish is gross" and the high level being things like "I shouldn't accept this new job offer because the corporation offering me the job has a reputation of doing evil things" or "I don't want to go out to dinner with this person, because they'll probably want to go to a seafood restaraunt." The point of an argument is for two (or more) people with differing "high level" beliefs to pick them apart into their component low level beliefs. Once that's done, either you revealed a flaw in someone's high level beliefs, (for example, maybe the corp has actually done more good than harm and just gets bad press, or maybe he should take the job and try to improve the corp, or maybe if he mentioned that he didn't like fish the other person would pick a different restaraunt, or maybe he could find something other than fish at the seafood restaraunt) or you've discovered that you have different low level beliefs, and that you aren't going to agree.
In this case we've done the latter, so the argument is pretty much over. Still, I thought I would respond to a couple things you said.
On the other hand, I believe that the assumption that corporations are morally neutral allows people to adopt the "not my fault, I just work here" mentality. It enables a willing suspension of morality because, hey, corporations are intrinsically non-moral entities. Thus, it's not important to evaluate the corporate culture or to do one's part to ensure that the culture is a (if you'll excuse a bit of hokey terminology) "a force for good".
The problem with this is that the people you speak of later, the "it's for their own good" people (like crusaders) are people who try to ensure that their culture is a force for good. The problem with "good" is that it is defined on a personal level. What you think is good may differ from what I think is good.
I don't think people should try to inflict their morality upon their corporation (meaning the other people working for the corporation), I think they should keep it to themselves. But they should apply it to themselves at all times. You don't separate your life into "I'm doing my own thing now, so I should be moral" and "I'm working for someone else right now, so I'll just adopt their morality." But if you accept that the institution you work for doesn't have a morality, then maybe you'll remember to use your own. The belief that since the institution you work for doesn't have its own morality, any actions you take on its behalf are somehow exempt from moral judgement, is a pretty drastic mistake.
I do not agree that self-interest is the only defining factor in Good v. Evil.
You must have misunderstood me, I'm not saying that at all, quite the opposite. I'm saying that self-interest is completely irrelevant in Good v. Evil. First off, Good vs. Evil is a question of intent. If I try to develop a genetically engineered bacterium that will cure cancer, and I unleash it into the world and it inflicts horrible disease and death upon half the world, I'm not evil. I'm stupid, but not evil. Meanwhile, if I did the exact opposite, developed a bug to inflict disease and death, because the idea brought me joy or satisfaction, and it cured cancer, that doesn't make me Good, it makes me evil.
Self-interest is neutral. I've even heard a theory that all actions are selfish. If you give $100 to charity, it was because you want to feel like you helped people, like you're a charitable person. It's this knowledge and feeling that drove you to the action. I haven't decided if I buy this theory, but it's certainly interesting. In any case, I believe that Evil is doing something harmful for its own sake, because you enjoy it.
Using a corporation for an example, say some VP decides to buy and bulldoze a low income housing area, making many people homeless, and put a parking lot or office building there. If he does this strictly because it will profit his company and thereby him, he is not evil. He's a bastard, yes. He's selfish, and by my standards, immoral. But not EVIL. If, meanwhile, he does it because he thinks its fun or because he takes some kind of satisfaction from it, then he's EVIL.
By the way, is it safe to conclude that you oppose the judicial interpretation that corporations possess rights under the Constitution like free speech and equal protection of the laws?
Nope, because now you're bringing the law into this. The law has nothing to do with morality or good and evil, and it shouldn't. The law is about keeping order. It's illegal to kill people, not because killing is immoral, (take the common example of killing Hitler before the holocaust. many people would think this is moral) but because if we were allowed to kill each other anytime, the country would be thrown into constant civil war.
The law recognizes corporations as entities, not collectives of people. In most cases, it holds corporations responsible for the actions of its employees, and with that responsibility come rights, like free speech. However, under the law, corporations have less right to free speech than people do, and less "equal protection."
I realize I'm proably preaching to the choir here, (an ironic phrase, since many choirboys aren't particularly devout, they just sing well) but I think TV is a HORRIBLE medium for news. News should be a collection of facts about what has happened. TV picks out a few of these facts and presents them to us in two ways: having them spoken by newspeople, and showing them via videocameras.
The first is utterly wasteful of bandwidth, since you could just read the text of what these people say or listen to it via radio. But instead you're looking at them, so TV stations often select their newspeople based on who is nice to look at, instead of who understands what they're saying and conveys meaning well with their voice.
The second is useful, because it's harder to bias images from the scene. I don't say impossible, not only from the recently announced realtime video editing, but because selective presentation can present a particular viewpoint by showing you only certain images. But more importantly, this also causes TV stations to select images that look cool or scary or impressive or attractive, rather than images that impartially and effectively convey the situation.
There's also the problem that it's very linear and beyond my control. If FOX or ABC or NBC or CNN does a story on Napster or DeCSS, I might be interested. But I don't want to sit there watching for 10 minutes while they explain what an mp3 is and what a DVD is and in their oversimplification they say that Napster is a website that contains copyrighted songs. I want to be able to skip right to the facts that I don't already know.
Well the Internet lets me see text and images that present me with facts, and if I ever think I'm being presented with a biased image, it only takes a second or two to jump to somebody else's side of the story. Even better, the people being reported on (Napser, MPAA, RIAA, DeCSS, 2600, US Government courts and judges, etc...) actually have their own sites and I can get the story directly from them. I feel much more confident at my ability to assemble a good understanding of the story based on testimony from all the people concerned than based on a single story told by some supposedly unbiased TV journalist who is targeting his story at people who are significantly different from me.
So of course I go to the 'net for my news. I think TV news is an idiotic concept to begin with, and was just an attempt to cash in on the fact that lots of Americans want to keep up with the news, so they'll watch it on TV at night.
Ah, so we should let our 13-year-old children associate with college freshmen and just accept it when they end up in jail drunk off their asses, or at the worst end of the spectrum, dead. Yep, we told them what would happen, they didn't listen, they're dead now. Oh fricken well. We should just accept it. I think not.
That's absurd! Having been a college freshman, I can say that being a college freshman does not inherently lead to death. In jail, drunk off their asses? Maybe so. Because if you tell them "drinking is bad" and their friends tell them "drinking is cool" then they're going to want to drink. But if at 13, they drink enough to wake up in jail with a horrible hangover, then maybe at 15 or 16 when all their friends say "drinking is cool," they'll say "What are you talking about? Have you ever had any alcohol?" and their friends will say "Well, no, but my big brother is cool, and he's in a frat and drinks a lot, and besides, it's against the law, so it must be cool." and your kid will say "Well I have had alcohol, and it didn't taste very good, and I ended up in jail with a horrible headache and felt like a moron. I think it was a mistake, and if drinking is to be 'cool' or 'fun', we have to do it in moderation."
But instead, you tell them it's forbidden, and they feel all cool about doing it and they spend their freshman year rebelling by joining a frat and waking up in dumpsters every weekend.
You're wrong about not being able to learn "because mommy said so." That's how I learned. That's how I avoided countless potential catastrophes. I, unlike many of my peers, actually respected, loved, and LISTENED to my parents. I knew they understood life better that I because they had lived more of it.
I respected and loved my parents, but I'm glad I didn't always listen to them. They told me to stop spending all my time playing video games and reading and fooling around with my computer, and do my homework, because if I got bad grades I wouldn't end up in a good college and get a good job. I blew them off and only worked hard in classes that interested me. I got into a great college that I absolutely love and am confident is the perfect place for me, and I now have a very well paying computer job doing something that interests me. Yes, your parents are experienced, and that's a valuable thing. But they aren't very experienced at your life, and they don't always know what's best for you. They're also only human, and sometimes you're smarter than they are. They also have some of the stupid irrational parenting instincts that seem to get injected into them as soon as they see a baby. Like the fatherly "my little baby girl is never dating anyone, ever." So if you believe everything your parents say, you miss tons of opportunities and probably just repeat your parents' lives instead of finding your own.
Believe it or not, there are those of us who can learn that it's going to hurt when we hit bottom without having to jump off a bridge.
Not without jumping off of something. You can accept it when people tell you that it will hurt, but you never really know. You "learn" that a lot of things hurt, and most of the time they do. But there are lots of chances for amazingly intense and fulfilling experiences that you'll miss out on if you believe what people tell you about what hurts and what's safe.
You're also right that 13-year-olds can associate with 17-year-olds. It happens all the time. Your miss is that parents should accept their 13-year-olds decision to go hang out at the frat house if they so choose, despite parental cautioning. That's irresponsible parenting.
Well, I disagree with you on that particular one, but it's your call with your kids. The point is that at least you accept the responsibility of parenting the kids, and don't expect the laws and the corporations to do it for you. That's the real point I want to get across here.
Corporations raze millions of acre of rainforest. Corporations strip-mine the planet. Corporations sue to silence critics, intimidate competitiors, and distort justice. Corporations conduct unethical and uninformed experiments on people. Do none of these count as "evil" for you?
First off, no, they don't. People raze millions of acres of rainforest. They do this because they want the money that they will receive from some corporation. This corporation will give them money because some person or people in said corporation decided that it was worth some money to raze some acres of rainforest. The fault lies with the person who does the deed, and the people who approved and planned the deed. Not the corporation that they work for. Secondly, no, these actions do not count as evil to me. Doing anything to get ahead is not evil, it's neutral. Evil is doing these things because you enjoy causing harm. Good is avoiding them because you dislike causing harm. Doing things and not caring if you cause harm is not evil, it's neutral.
So all the downsizing of the 1980s
Has it ever occurred to you that companies are not morally obligated to employ people? If I decide to start a business, I'm starting it for my own reasons, not to employ people. That's not evil or even immoral. So if you realize that you're employing more people than you need to, you fire some. That's not immoral. You don't have an obligation to those people. If those people have skills that are needed somewhere, then they're welcome to go get a job with their skills. It's not up to the businessmen of the world to provide busywork for everyone out of charity.
In the actual real world, on the other hand, there are these things called multibillion-dollar multinational corporations. They have motivations of their own,
Bullshit.
they have decision processes of their own,
Yes, and these processes are implemented by the people in charge. If those people change, they can change the processes.
and they have survival unlinked to any particular employee.
Survival, yes. But if you fire all the managers in a company and replace them with "good guys," I bet that company would act very different. It would survive, but it wouldn't act with the same motivations and decision processes that you attributed to it.
In their professional lives, they backstab co-workers, abuse suppliers, cheat customers, and dedicate all to the corporate (bottom) line. Why? Because, at work, they are just cogs in a larger organism.
That's bullshit. It's like the Nazi trials. You see all your friends committing immoral acts, and you say it's okay because they're only acting as part of a larger organization. It's the organization that is at fault, not the people doing the immoral things. You can't hold a corporation morally accountable. You can walk up to the headquarters of Microsoft and talk to the building all you want, nothing will happen. Take some fucking personal responsibility for your actions, instead of blaming it on some abstract concept of Evilcorp that asks you to act immorally. If your boss asks you to do something immoral, then acknowledge that he is immoral. If you do it, acknowledge that you are acting immorally. It's exactly this "not my fault, I just work here" mentality that lets all the bad shit happen.
Doesn't this boil down to "morality==practicality"? Are you arguing that while there are no absolute moral standards, there are absolute practical standards? It seems to me that standards of practicality are subject to the same logical arguments as standards of morality.
I would definitely say that there are no absolute moral standards in life, though the US currently imposes several of them. I see things like anti-sodomy, anti-prostitution, and anti-drug laws as moral standards, not practical standards. Much like prohibition, they could be defended with some weak practicality arguments, but that's not the real reason they're there.
I won't say there are absolute practical standards either. For example, I happen to believe that a society (be it the US or even the Earth in general) without physical conflict adapts itself away from physical conflict (what do we need Defense funding for? We aren't at war.) and will be unprepared for it, should the eventuality arise. So if the country really was in a constant state of war, I bet it would advance our weapons technology and our general societal proficiency at war, and we would be better prepared to face future wars from other countries.
I'm not actually suggesting we make murder legal and start declaring war on other states; I'm merely pointing out that what may seem practical now could turn out to be a big mistake later. So there can be no absolute standard of what is practical. The government is also not there to enact anything that it finds practical. It might be practical for the population to give all money not needed for survival to the government. But that doesn't mean the gov should do it.
As for logical arguments, when has morality ever been subject to logical arguments? The whole idea of morality is that you say "this is wrong." why? "just because it is." You can take individual acts, like stabbing person X, and logically work them down to their foundation of immorality: "it is wrong to hurt people" but you have to believe that it's wrong to hurt people without a logical explanation of why. If your reason is that if you hurt people, they'll hurt you back, and pretty soon there will be chaos, then that's not a moral objection, it's a practical one.
First off, let me say I'm very impressed that you actually quoted relevant law, rather than prefacing with "IANAL, but AFAIK"
"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."
The way I see it, Science and useful Arts go on throughout the world, not just the US. But more importantly, if we said "foreign corps aren't protected by copyright law" then we would get into some really bad shit with the rest of the world. I'm not going to fault the government for offering copyright protection to other countries.
people who think like Ketzer need to have several kids, b/c at least we know they will have a life that is taught with some intelligence.
= )
Well thanks for the compliment, but the irony of the situation is that it's not the people like me who think "maybe I shouldn't have a kid if I'm not prepared to commit my life to raising said kid." who actually have the kids. I realize that right now my career is important to me, and if I found someone wonderful enough to commit the rest of my life to, I probably wouldn't want to have kids with her, because I'd want us to be focused on each other.
So right now, I'm not planning to have any kids. Meanwhile, it's the people thiking "ohhhh, that baby is SOOOO cute. How hard could parenting REALLY be?" who actually have the kids.
in my experience, the older i get i am able to look back, reflect upon myself, my actions, my life and realize my foibles, follies, and failures.
That's my whole point. You notice how that begins with "in my experience" instead of "my parents say that"? The point is that you are experienced because you had a chance to make your own mistakes, your foibles, follies, and failures. If you had just been told about them, you wouldn't have really learned, and you would have either done them eventually or built your current understanding of the world off "because my Mommy said so."
i think it would be morally repugnant to allow a 13 yr old to intermingle with an 18 yr old boy. how do i know? i have one of each as a sibling - 13 yr old female high school freshman, 18 yr old male college freshman.
Well that's fine, you can think it's morally repugnant. I disagree, and I don't think it should be illegal. Where do you want to draw the lines? Can 19 year olds socialize with 24 year olds? I did, and it was an amazingly open, loving, mature relationship. What about 13 year olds and 17 year olds? 15 year olds? The point is that it's ridiculous to put laws to such things, because they're matters of discretion and judgement.
No, their real goal is to make it difficult or illegal for independent record companies to compete.
Perhaps that's true. I think they genuinely are worried about piracy, whether that fear is valid or not, but you may be right about the primary goal being the continued dominance of the "big" record companies. In which case, they'll be hard pressed to find the law or technology on their side.
Help! Help! I'm being repressed!
That was the most ironic bit, because I took it as a Monty Python reference. The character in MP's Holy Grail was just some dumb asshole peasant who was crying out about repression that was all in his head. That's pretty much how I see much of the Slashdot crowd's cries of opression.
Most decisions are made by committee, and those committees are less than 12 guys in suits sitting on the top floor of some high-rise.
And people like you don't see those decisions being made. You don't hear the facts brought up or the alternatives considered. You really know next to nothing about what their motives are, but since they make lots of money, you assume that's all they care about. You feel perfectly justified in pointing fingers at entire corporations when the decisions are only made by those 12 guys, and you're just sure those 12 guys are evil because you saw a movie about it and read it on Slashdot.
There, I think I've just succinctly shredded any argument you may have had on the matter.
Hardly. But if you had, then your statements wouldn't need to be followed by that sentence, it would be evident merely by reading your arguments. But if it makes you feel better to say "I win, I win!" go right ahead.
I work for a company making the dangerous transition from a buncha folks doing things well to a Corporation, with an imminent IPO. I've also been in this situation occasionally in the past.
A damn near hard-and-fast rule: when the company's primary mission changes from "to do stuff we're good at" to "to enhance shareholder profitability", you're fucked.
All, ALL that J. Random Investor cares about is the money. If the majority of them abruptly decide that there's better money in, say, milk cows than in widget development, you'd better get used to the smell of hay.
Ah, there's another point I left out. Say you're the CEO of "NiceCorp" and you are doing great, selling, say, blankets. You do so great, that you go public. Lots of people buy your stock. The company is rich. Now a hard Winter hits, and you, being a wonderfully nice guy, decide to give away half your inventory to homeless people. Next thing you know, you're being sued by your shareholders for not doing "due dilligence" with their money. Yes, they can really do this, and yes, it really happens. And they have a point. You took their money and said "I'm investing this, I'll do my best to return a profit on it" and then you gave it all to charity. That's tantamount to theft. But on the other hand, if you went after the profits, you're a "corporate droid."
Corporations don't. Plain and simple -- a corporate droid sees nothing wrong in crushing his rivals, in destroying their ability to make a living, in suppressing free expression, or in trouncing basic human dignity.
See, that's exactly what I'm talking about. You say "droid" and we all conjure to mind some guy in a three-piece-suit with no morals hunched over a desk analyzing bottom-lines on a print out and deciding which companies to take over and who to fire. You don't actually know of people like this at Sony or Coke or Starbucks or McDonalds, but the next time they buy out a smaller company or fire some employees, you'll bring back the mental image and curse the evil one who made the call. You of course won't do any research and find out all the facts behind the buyout or the firings. They are automatically evil.
Most corporations are as fanatical and dangerous as any cult. True, they don't fixate on their warped ideas of God. Instead they fixate on profit and the bottom line, which they raise to godhood.
See, you're doing it again. Corporations aren't fanatical, because they can't be. PEOPLE are fanatical, corporations are not. Now there may be people in high positions in the corporations who think this way, and they may act on those thoughts. These people are called sociopaths, and I don't believe that there's nearly as many of them out there as you think, but even they don't do blatantly immoral things very often, because doing that can lead to bad press, which in turn is bad for the profits that they are so attached to.
My point is that you don't know these people, and you can't cite specific examples. You just anthropomorphize corporations and call them evil, because you've seen movies and read Slashdot posts that show you these "corporate droid" images all the time, so you're convinced that there's millions of them out there poised to take over the world. It's paranoid delusion, backed up by little or no evidence.
Evidence suggests that the Playstation2 isn't going to be a good product, but that Sony will leverage its oligopoly to make sure it sells anyhow.
What "evidence" is that exactly? My "evidence" shows that it will play DVDs and has extremely powerful hardware backed up by some of the best game developers in the biz (like SquareSoft)
However, I'm not expecting it to dominate the game industry the way Nintendo did. More like Atari, total monopoly and then total crash with not much of a video game industry at all for a while.
Yeah, okay. You're welcome to that prediction. We'll see in a couple years. As for Sony vs. Nintendo, I would say the Playstation (Sony's first real foray into console gaming) competed pretty evenly with N64 (the comparable product). But I would compare PS 2 with Neo Geo. It's biggest problem will likely be it's high price.
Video games are one of these things that people will only buy if they are good
And have you checked the sales figures on Playstation games recently? Check out the copies sold on, say, Final Fantasy VII. It beat most pop music albums on copies sold, and it sold for about three times the cost.
So you mean that if I write an easy to use ftp client with good search capabilities I can get the use of ftp shut down?
If you sell it, and they can prove that the reason you wrote it was just to make money off music-pirates, then maybe they'll run you out of business, not FTP.
Seriously though, its really cruddy that a big corporation can shut down a protocol because of illegal use of it.
I agree completely. Though Napster was a pretty mediocre protocol, and I wouldn't mourn it that much. However they didn't run the protocol out of business, only the company. There's several Nap servers still floating around.
If they win I can see them going after MS on the basis that IE is used to listen to illegal music on the net.
I can't. IE wasn't created for that purpose, and nobody would win that argument in court, so I don't see "them" going after MS for that anytime soon.
If I remember correctly, modern wireless communication can operate in a "frequency hopping" mode in order to avoid jamming/eavesdropping. The device doesn't use a fixed frequency but hops from one frequency to another.
Yes, but it does a lousy job of avoiding eavesdropping. If you've got anything that speaks its protocol (like, say, a PCS phone) then that device will pick up those frequency change instructions and follow them. It only prevents really easy eavesdropping via normal radios.
How about writing a file sharing application that operaties in a similar fashion by "hopping" from port to another free port in a seemingly random manner?
And what about writing a protocol based on an analogy with "spread spectrum" transmissions? Chop up the stuff, send small pieces through different ports and assemble the pieces at the destination?
Nope, this doesn't help. Say they block port X. You hop from A to B to C to X to wait a minute, what happened to my transmission? Port blocking doesn't occur on a minute-to-minute basis. If you can get through port A, there's no need to change ports. The concern isn't eavesdropping, and if it was, then hopping ports would do any good, because you can still sniff the packets. Ports are too far up the OSI layer. As for the spread, same deal. If you can get through port A, why bother with the others? You're just likely to clip some data when you pick ports that are blocked for your spread.
But all of that is irrelevant, because the secure situations are ones where they have ALL ports blocked except certain regonized ones, like 80 for HTTP. You can't use the same port for several applications without them getting mixed up. But in case somebody decides to give up websurfing while they Napster, many good firewalls can scan the headers of the packets to determine the protocol being used, and recognize that it's not really legitimate HTTP traffic. Gnutella is a step ahead of them, because it actually uses HTTP, so it would look fairly legit. But that's just today's situation in the war. My college actually forwards only certain HTTP commands (like GET, but not PUT) and this pretty well fucks over Gnutella. I'm sure several months from now Gnutella will find a way around that, and a month later the sysadmins will find a way to block the new technique.
I'm sick of you stupid people using your constitutional rights for such silly things. back in the 60's people used free speach to speak out againts the war in Vietnam and the killing of US troups for no apparent reason (yeah well it wasn't a good reason anyways). now we use it to steal music. a far less nobel cause, and a disgussting comment on our society.
= )
Excellent point there. Basically, the people here on Slashdot (myself included) aren't really being particularly oppressed or violated in any terribly life endangering or impressive way, so they tend to blow things out of proportion a bit. Sony suddenly becomes the flagship of the evil corporate menace, rather than a collection of people who provide a valuable service that is willingly paid for. By coming down on Napster, the government isn't punishing a mediocre company that was founded on the goal of making money off the thefts of others, they're robbing the American people of their rights to free speech.
fuck napster. people use guns to break laws, but there are responsible people who use them for law abiding activites. people who use napster only use it for the task for which it was designed, to break laws and steal music. deal with it, your all criminals.
I believe that there are people who use Napster for entirely legal purposes. Albeit maybe only three or four of them in the world, but it does have legitimate uses. Napster's problem wasn't that it should be illegal to provide a tool that aids in theft, because it should be. Napster's problem was that they willfully and flagrantly set out to aid and profit off of theft, and they got caught.
I used Napster, as well as other mp3s. I didn't cosider it theft, because when I found an album I liked, I deleted the mp3s and paid for the CD. I didn't consider this to be immoral, but I recognize that it was illegal, and I'm not going to whine about them taking away my Napster. Hell, Napster wasn't even that good. It was pretty mediocre.
MP3Board's argument, as explained in your post, is that the employer is, in that case *still legally responsible*. IOW --- if you don't keep your employees muzzled, we will punish you for it.
Well I'm not sure this is the specific argument that they're using, the article didn't say. As to the scariness, Negligence is hard to put down into law, so most of it is left up to the discretion of the jury. This is good because it allows for common sense to win over letter of the law in these cases, but you have to remember that it's the common sense of a jury, which may not be all that sensible even before they get hit by high-priced lawyers.
In any case, the point is that yes, negligence is a cause to be sued. And well it should be, as in the example I named with the biotech company. Now it's up to the judges and juries to be reasonable with it.
And I hold those people in the same regard as those who believe murder is immoral, but that it is not the job of government to legislate morality, and who have bumper stickers on their cars that say 'Against murder? Don't commit one!'.
Actually those bumper stickers sound to me like "pro-life"ers making the same argument you are. I agree that it's not the job of the government to legislate morality. Murder isn't illegal because it's immoral. I can think of several cases where I wouldn't consider murder immoral (take the classic "What if you killed Hitler before the Holocaust?") It's illegal because if it was legal, the country would be plunged into constant civil war. The law is there to preserve order, not morality.
Well at least this is getting a bit more acknowledgement. Wired has a bit more mainstream readership than Slashdot...
The whole thing just makes me sad and cynical. You ask questions like "What if they link to another site that links to DeCSS?" "Where do you draw the line?" "Can Wired be busted for linking to 2600?" or you point out how stupid Valenti's car-driving metaphor is, but nobody cares except the other complainers.
You can't ask these questions of MPAA or Kaplan and expect an answer. And the other complainers can't do anything about it.
Sigh. Maybe I'm just depressed today or something.
That sort of filtering is done by people who think it's better to overdo it than miss a naughty word, because then you're less likely to be sued.
No, it's not that simple. I work for a major school district, in the computer networking division. As part of that, I oversee the censorware. No, it's not my call how to implement it. That's determined by the politics above me. I just keep it running.
Well if you don't filter by scanning the content, then you aren't filtering much at all. If you block URLs, then people can just go to the IPs (which they can get in many different ways). If you block unresolved IPs, then they can go somewhere like babelfish.altavista, and tell it to translate a page, either from German to English (which won't have much effect on an alread English page) or pick a random language and then say display in original language.
This isn't a problem with the people being overzealous, it's a problem with the inherent inability of machines to comprehend content. It's a flaw in the very concept of censorware. A machine can't differentiate between appropriate and inappropriate material, so there's no effective way for it to censor all inappropriate material, and the act of censoring inappropriate material almost always spills over to censor appropriate material.
they WANT that family vacation to disneyland - both parents work.
It's not even as simple as money. Many (if not most) women these days would find the job of homemaker insulting. They (and by that I mean other women) fought hard for their shot at the workplace, and now that they've got sexual harassment laws, anti-discrimination laws, and they're coming up on equal pay, the suggestion that they relegate themselves to the role of house-keeper and child-raiser is horribly offensive. But it doesn't occur to them that maybe if the previous generation's (or the one before that) women focused their lives on raising their child(ren), maybe those women were accomplishing something. Maybe you can't just blow it off and say they were wasting their time and you can do the same job in 5% of the time that they did.
Now before the men chime in with "Yeah, preach it man, stick it to the uppity bitches!" stop and think about devoting YOUR life to raising kid(s) and letting your wife work. If you wouldn't be okay with this, then maybe you shouldn't be a parent. It applies to both parents.
We used to have FULL-TIME parents. This isn't just a time issue, it's about the fact that there was at least one person whose focus in life was their kid(s), and everything else was secondary. If your kid just wanted to talk with you, would you leave work? Of course not. But maybe they wanted to talk about drugs or sex or something very important. Maybe if you didn't work, you'd be around for that talk. Don't assume you can parent as well as previous generations while only putting in a tiny fraction of the time and effort they did.
And don't expect the government to put in that time and effort for you. That's not why it's there.
My personal morality has no qualms with killing people I think are stupid and worthless. I think you are stupid and worthless, so I kill you. I doubt you'd agree with me, but it's too late, you're dead. But hey, morality's relative, right? I can do whatever I want and you have to accept it.
Hmmm, blows a big ol' hole in your hypothesis, doesn't it? No matter how you feel about it, there is a standard for right and wrong. You are not the one that sets that standard. (Just because you feel like doing something doesn't make it right.) Society doesn't set that standard. (Just because "everybody's doing it" doesn't make it right.) God sets the standard. "Relative morality" is a failed concept.
No, it doesn't blow any hole in the hypothesis. What you're talking about is against the law. The reason it is against the law is because it would throw the country into disorder. If it was legal to kill people, then the country would be in a constant state of civil war. No, there is NOT an absolute standard for right and wrong. These are standards of orderly conduct, not morality. The law is the to keep order; to protect people from physical harm from others and theft from others. It's not there to enforce a standard morality.
It wouldn't be a complete post without a metaphor, so think of an email server. Most email servers have maximum size limits, so you can't send 12 gig emails. This isn't an attempt to censor emails or dictate what emails are moral, it's simply a practical concern, because the email server couldn't function if it had to send 12 gig emails.
Slashdot Mirror
Most interactive audio/visual activities increase concentration.
Yes, but if you read the whole article, you see that the video games aren't actually doing any curing. "Cure your child with videogames!" was a bad way to title it. They're just using the video games as positive feedback for when the children show improvement.
Possibly, but that's one heck of a kid who can stand up to to his/her friends like that.
:) I, for one, have learned some things from you and appreciate the opportunity.
Yes it is, and it should be your goal as a parent to raise "one heck of a kid." If they don't stand up to their friends at first, then if they're a good kid, it should only take them a few more times waking up in jail to grow a spine. If they never do, then that's a fundamental flaw in that person.
Then again, they might wake up in jail with a hangover and think "oh, wow, what a rush...I gotta get my friends in on this."
If so, then why shouldn't they? What's so bad about hangovers and jail if they enjoy it?
However, sex/drugs/alcohol have all been around since long before our parents, and they'll be around for a long time from now. Those issues are universal to every generation.
They don't have to be though! We're not talking fundamental human experience (well, maybe with sex). Drugs and alcohol haven't always been problems, and they aren't problems everywhere. In most european countries, the drinking age is around 13, and they don't have nearly as many problems with the whole teenage alcohol culture that we've developed in America. Just as prohibition resulted in more crime, teenage alcohol restriction results in more teenage rebellion and disobedience. If drugs and alcohol were legal for everyone, then parents would to talk reasonably with their kids about it, and wouldn't rely on the law. The kids would then take that discussion and deal with it responsible. Most kids aren't genuinely self-destructive, they just exhibit self-destructive behavior out of rebellion. When you enforce things on them "for their own good," then self-destruction and rebellion become the same thing.
Maybe, but I also know what it's like to fall off my bike. It's a hop-skip-and-jump from "knowing" that pain to deducing that I'm going to die if I jump off that bridge, or at the very least get really really mangled. I can deduce from relatively small experiences of mine, or from the experiences of others. Maybe I really never know, but damn, some things are just not worth knowing. I count that jump as one of them. I also count sticking my hand in the garbage disposal while it's on as another.
Yes, exactly. You take your own experiences and deduce logical actions from them. You don't rely on "mommy told me not to jump off bridges or stick my hand in the garbage disposal." That's my whole point. If your parents didn't let you experience those non-fatal mistakes, then you wouldn't be able to deduce the fatal ones. Then they would have to warn you about everything fatal, and you would have to believe them.
Absolutely! But a little discussion around the edges never killed anyone.
Yes, excellent, and ditto. In that order.
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Excellent post, this is this kind of thing I'm looking for in an argument.
Of course, it's clear that our views of Evil are distinct and, to some extent, incompatible. Thus it's not too surprising we have different opinions on whether corporations are (or can be) Evil.
My philosophy of arguments is that people have layers of belief, with the low level being things like "I shouldn't do evil" and "fish is gross" and the high level being things like "I shouldn't accept this new job offer because the corporation offering me the job has a reputation of doing evil things" or "I don't want to go out to dinner with this person, because they'll probably want to go to a seafood restaraunt." The point of an argument is for two (or more) people with differing "high level" beliefs to pick them apart into their component low level beliefs. Once that's done, either you revealed a flaw in someone's high level beliefs, (for example, maybe the corp has actually done more good than harm and just gets bad press, or maybe he should take the job and try to improve the corp, or maybe if he mentioned that he didn't like fish the other person would pick a different restaraunt, or maybe he could find something other than fish at the seafood restaraunt) or you've discovered that you have different low level beliefs, and that you aren't going to agree.
In this case we've done the latter, so the argument is pretty much over. Still, I thought I would respond to a couple things you said.
On the other hand, I believe that the assumption that corporations are morally neutral allows people to adopt the "not my fault, I just work here" mentality. It enables a willing suspension of morality because, hey, corporations are intrinsically non-moral entities. Thus, it's not important to evaluate the corporate culture or to do one's part to ensure that the culture is a (if you'll excuse a bit of hokey terminology) "a force for good".
The problem with this is that the people you speak of later, the "it's for their own good" people (like crusaders) are people who try to ensure that their culture is a force for good. The problem with "good" is that it is defined on a personal level. What you think is good may differ from what I think is good.
I don't think people should try to inflict their morality upon their corporation (meaning the other people working for the corporation), I think they should keep it to themselves. But they should apply it to themselves at all times. You don't separate your life into "I'm doing my own thing now, so I should be moral" and "I'm working for someone else right now, so I'll just adopt their morality." But if you accept that the institution you work for doesn't have a morality, then maybe you'll remember to use your own. The belief that since the institution you work for doesn't have its own morality, any actions you take on its behalf are somehow exempt from moral judgement, is a pretty drastic mistake.
I do not agree that self-interest is the only defining factor in Good v. Evil.
You must have misunderstood me, I'm not saying that at all, quite the opposite. I'm saying that self-interest is completely irrelevant in Good v. Evil. First off, Good vs. Evil is a question of intent. If I try to develop a genetically engineered bacterium that will cure cancer, and I unleash it into the world and it inflicts horrible disease and death upon half the world, I'm not evil. I'm stupid, but not evil. Meanwhile, if I did the exact opposite, developed a bug to inflict disease and death, because the idea brought me joy or satisfaction, and it cured cancer, that doesn't make me Good, it makes me evil.
Self-interest is neutral. I've even heard a theory that all actions are selfish. If you give $100 to charity, it was because you want to feel like you helped people, like you're a charitable person. It's this knowledge and feeling that drove you to the action. I haven't decided if I buy this theory, but it's certainly interesting. In any case, I believe that Evil is doing something harmful for its own sake, because you enjoy it.
Using a corporation for an example, say some VP decides to buy and bulldoze a low income housing area, making many people homeless, and put a parking lot or office building there. If he does this strictly because it will profit his company and thereby him, he is not evil. He's a bastard, yes. He's selfish, and by my standards, immoral. But not EVIL. If, meanwhile, he does it because he thinks its fun or because he takes some kind of satisfaction from it, then he's EVIL.
By the way, is it safe to conclude that you oppose the judicial interpretation that corporations possess rights under the Constitution like free speech and equal protection of the laws?
Nope, because now you're bringing the law into this. The law has nothing to do with morality or good and evil, and it shouldn't. The law is about keeping order. It's illegal to kill people, not because killing is immoral, (take the common example of killing Hitler before the holocaust. many people would think this is moral) but because if we were allowed to kill each other anytime, the country would be thrown into constant civil war.
The law recognizes corporations as entities, not collectives of people. In most cases, it holds corporations responsible for the actions of its employees, and with that responsibility come rights, like free speech. However, under the law, corporations have less right to free speech than people do, and less "equal protection."
I realize I'm proably preaching to the choir here, (an ironic phrase, since many choirboys aren't particularly devout, they just sing well) but I think TV is a HORRIBLE medium for news. News should be a collection of facts about what has happened. TV picks out a few of these facts and presents them to us in two ways: having them spoken by newspeople, and showing them via videocameras.
The first is utterly wasteful of bandwidth, since you could just read the text of what these people say or listen to it via radio. But instead you're looking at them, so TV stations often select their newspeople based on who is nice to look at, instead of who understands what they're saying and conveys meaning well with their voice.
The second is useful, because it's harder to bias images from the scene. I don't say impossible, not only from the recently announced realtime video editing, but because selective presentation can present a particular viewpoint by showing you only certain images. But more importantly, this also causes TV stations to select images that look cool or scary or impressive or attractive, rather than images that impartially and effectively convey the situation.
There's also the problem that it's very linear and beyond my control. If FOX or ABC or NBC or CNN does a story on Napster or DeCSS, I might be interested. But I don't want to sit there watching for 10 minutes while they explain what an mp3 is and what a DVD is and in their oversimplification they say that Napster is a website that contains copyrighted songs. I want to be able to skip right to the facts that I don't already know.
Well the Internet lets me see text and images that present me with facts, and if I ever think I'm being presented with a biased image, it only takes a second or two to jump to somebody else's side of the story. Even better, the people being reported on (Napser, MPAA, RIAA, DeCSS, 2600, US Government courts and judges, etc...) actually have their own sites and I can get the story directly from them. I feel much more confident at my ability to assemble a good understanding of the story based on testimony from all the people concerned than based on a single story told by some supposedly unbiased TV journalist who is targeting his story at people who are significantly different from me.
So of course I go to the 'net for my news. I think TV news is an idiotic concept to begin with, and was just an attempt to cash in on the fact that lots of Americans want to keep up with the news, so they'll watch it on TV at night.
Ah, so we should let our 13-year-old children associate with college freshmen and just accept it when they end up in jail drunk off their asses, or at the worst end of the spectrum, dead. Yep, we told them what would happen, they didn't listen, they're dead now. Oh fricken well. We should just accept it. I think not.
That's absurd! Having been a college freshman, I can say that being a college freshman does not inherently lead to death. In jail, drunk off their asses? Maybe so. Because if you tell them "drinking is bad" and their friends tell them "drinking is cool" then they're going to want to drink. But if at 13, they drink enough to wake up in jail with a horrible hangover, then maybe at 15 or 16 when all their friends say "drinking is cool," they'll say "What are you talking about? Have you ever had any alcohol?" and their friends will say "Well, no, but my big brother is cool, and he's in a frat and drinks a lot, and besides, it's against the law, so it must be cool." and your kid will say "Well I have had alcohol, and it didn't taste very good, and I ended up in jail with a horrible headache and felt like a moron. I think it was a mistake, and if drinking is to be 'cool' or 'fun', we have to do it in moderation."
But instead, you tell them it's forbidden, and they feel all cool about doing it and they spend their freshman year rebelling by joining a frat and waking up in dumpsters every weekend.
You're wrong about not being able to learn "because mommy said so." That's how I learned. That's how I avoided countless potential catastrophes. I, unlike many of my peers, actually respected, loved, and LISTENED to my parents. I knew they understood life better that I because they had lived more of it.
I respected and loved my parents, but I'm glad I didn't always listen to them. They told me to stop spending all my time playing video games and reading and fooling around with my computer, and do my homework, because if I got bad grades I wouldn't end up in a good college and get a good job. I blew them off and only worked hard in classes that interested me. I got into a great college that I absolutely love and am confident is the perfect place for me, and I now have a very well paying computer job doing something that interests me. Yes, your parents are experienced, and that's a valuable thing. But they aren't very experienced at your life, and they don't always know what's best for you. They're also only human, and sometimes you're smarter than they are. They also have some of the stupid irrational parenting instincts that seem to get injected into them as soon as they see a baby. Like the fatherly "my little baby girl is never dating anyone, ever." So if you believe everything your parents say, you miss tons of opportunities and probably just repeat your parents' lives instead of finding your own.
Believe it or not, there are those of us who can learn that it's going to hurt when we hit bottom without having to jump off a bridge.
Not without jumping off of something. You can accept it when people tell you that it will hurt, but you never really know. You "learn" that a lot of things hurt, and most of the time they do. But there are lots of chances for amazingly intense and fulfilling experiences that you'll miss out on if you believe what people tell you about what hurts and what's safe.
You're also right that 13-year-olds can associate with 17-year-olds. It happens all the time. Your miss is that parents should accept their 13-year-olds decision to go hang out at the frat house if they so choose, despite parental cautioning. That's irresponsible parenting.
Well, I disagree with you on that particular one, but it's your call with your kids. The point is that at least you accept the responsibility of parenting the kids, and don't expect the laws and the corporations to do it for you. That's the real point I want to get across here.
Corporations raze millions of acre of rainforest. Corporations strip-mine the planet. Corporations sue to silence critics, intimidate competitiors, and distort justice. Corporations conduct unethical and uninformed experiments on people. Do none of these count as "evil" for you?
First off, no, they don't. People raze millions of acres of rainforest. They do this because they want the money that they will receive from some corporation. This corporation will give them money because some person or people in said corporation decided that it was worth some money to raze some acres of rainforest. The fault lies with the person who does the deed, and the people who approved and planned the deed. Not the corporation that they work for. Secondly, no, these actions do not count as evil to me. Doing anything to get ahead is not evil, it's neutral. Evil is doing these things because you enjoy causing harm. Good is avoiding them because you dislike causing harm. Doing things and not caring if you cause harm is not evil, it's neutral.
So all the downsizing of the 1980s
Has it ever occurred to you that companies are not morally obligated to employ people? If I decide to start a business, I'm starting it for my own reasons, not to employ people. That's not evil or even immoral. So if you realize that you're employing more people than you need to, you fire some. That's not immoral. You don't have an obligation to those people. If those people have skills that are needed somewhere, then they're welcome to go get a job with their skills. It's not up to the businessmen of the world to provide busywork for everyone out of charity.
In the actual real world, on the other hand, there are these things called multibillion-dollar multinational corporations. They have motivations of their own,
Bullshit.
they have decision processes of their own,
Yes, and these processes are implemented by the people in charge. If those people change, they can change the processes.
and they have survival unlinked to any particular employee.
Survival, yes. But if you fire all the managers in a company and replace them with "good guys," I bet that company would act very different. It would survive, but it wouldn't act with the same motivations and decision processes that you attributed to it.
In their professional lives, they backstab co-workers, abuse suppliers, cheat customers, and dedicate all to the corporate (bottom) line. Why? Because, at work, they are just cogs in a larger organism.
That's bullshit. It's like the Nazi trials. You see all your friends committing immoral acts, and you say it's okay because they're only acting as part of a larger organization. It's the organization that is at fault, not the people doing the immoral things. You can't hold a corporation morally accountable. You can walk up to the headquarters of Microsoft and talk to the building all you want, nothing will happen. Take some fucking personal responsibility for your actions, instead of blaming it on some abstract concept of Evilcorp that asks you to act immorally. If your boss asks you to do something immoral, then acknowledge that he is immoral. If you do it, acknowledge that you are acting immorally. It's exactly this "not my fault, I just work here" mentality that lets all the bad shit happen.
Doesn't this boil down to "morality==practicality"? Are you arguing that while there are no absolute moral standards, there are absolute practical standards? It seems to me that standards of practicality are subject to the same logical arguments as standards of morality.
I would definitely say that there are no absolute moral standards in life, though the US currently imposes several of them. I see things like anti-sodomy, anti-prostitution, and anti-drug laws as moral standards, not practical standards. Much like prohibition, they could be defended with some weak practicality arguments, but that's not the real reason they're there.
I won't say there are absolute practical standards either. For example, I happen to believe that a society (be it the US or even the Earth in general) without physical conflict adapts itself away from physical conflict (what do we need Defense funding for? We aren't at war.) and will be unprepared for it, should the eventuality arise. So if the country really was in a constant state of war, I bet it would advance our weapons technology and our general societal proficiency at war, and we would be better prepared to face future wars from other countries.
I'm not actually suggesting we make murder legal and start declaring war on other states; I'm merely pointing out that what may seem practical now could turn out to be a big mistake later. So there can be no absolute standard of what is practical. The government is also not there to enact anything that it finds practical. It might be practical for the population to give all money not needed for survival to the government. But that doesn't mean the gov should do it.
As for logical arguments, when has morality ever been subject to logical arguments? The whole idea of morality is that you say "this is wrong." why? "just because it is." You can take individual acts, like stabbing person X, and logically work them down to their foundation of immorality: "it is wrong to hurt people" but you have to believe that it's wrong to hurt people without a logical explanation of why. If your reason is that if you hurt people, they'll hurt you back, and pretty soon there will be chaos, then that's not a moral objection, it's a practical one.
First off, let me say I'm very impressed that you actually quoted relevant law, rather than prefacing with "IANAL, but AFAIK"
"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."
The way I see it, Science and useful Arts go on throughout the world, not just the US. But more importantly, if we said "foreign corps aren't protected by copyright law" then we would get into some really bad shit with the rest of the world. I'm not going to fault the government for offering copyright protection to other countries.
people who think like Ketzer need to have several kids, b/c at least we know they will have a life that is taught with some intelligence.
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Well thanks for the compliment, but the irony of the situation is that it's not the people like me who think "maybe I shouldn't have a kid if I'm not prepared to commit my life to raising said kid." who actually have the kids. I realize that right now my career is important to me, and if I found someone wonderful enough to commit the rest of my life to, I probably wouldn't want to have kids with her, because I'd want us to be focused on each other.
So right now, I'm not planning to have any kids. Meanwhile, it's the people thiking "ohhhh, that baby is SOOOO cute. How hard could parenting REALLY be?" who actually have the kids.
in my experience, the older i get i am able to look back, reflect upon myself, my actions, my life and realize my foibles, follies, and failures.
That's my whole point. You notice how that begins with "in my experience" instead of "my parents say that"? The point is that you are experienced because you had a chance to make your own mistakes, your foibles, follies, and failures. If you had just been told about them, you wouldn't have really learned, and you would have either done them eventually or built your current understanding of the world off "because my Mommy said so."
i think it would be morally repugnant to allow a 13 yr old to intermingle with an 18 yr old boy. how do i know? i have one of each as a sibling - 13 yr old female high school freshman, 18 yr old male college freshman.
Well that's fine, you can think it's morally repugnant. I disagree, and I don't think it should be illegal. Where do you want to draw the lines? Can 19 year olds socialize with 24 year olds? I did, and it was an amazingly open, loving, mature relationship. What about 13 year olds and 17 year olds? 15 year olds? The point is that it's ridiculous to put laws to such things, because they're matters of discretion and judgement.
No, their real goal is to make it difficult or illegal for independent record companies to compete.
Perhaps that's true. I think they genuinely are worried about piracy, whether that fear is valid or not, but you may be right about the primary goal being the continued dominance of the "big" record companies. In which case, they'll be hard pressed to find the law or technology on their side.
Help! Help! I'm being repressed!
That was the most ironic bit, because I took it as a Monty Python reference. The character in MP's Holy Grail was just some dumb asshole peasant who was crying out about repression that was all in his head. That's pretty much how I see much of the Slashdot crowd's cries of opression.
Most decisions are made by committee, and those committees are less than 12 guys in suits sitting on the top floor of some high-rise.
And people like you don't see those decisions being made. You don't hear the facts brought up or the alternatives considered. You really know next to nothing about what their motives are, but since they make lots of money, you assume that's all they care about. You feel perfectly justified in pointing fingers at entire corporations when the decisions are only made by those 12 guys, and you're just sure those 12 guys are evil because you saw a movie about it and read it on Slashdot.
There, I think I've just succinctly shredded any argument you may have had on the matter.
Hardly. But if you had, then your statements wouldn't need to be followed by that sentence, it would be evident merely by reading your arguments. But if it makes you feel better to say "I win, I win!" go right ahead.
I work for a company making the dangerous transition from a buncha folks doing things well to a Corporation, with an imminent IPO. I've also been in this situation occasionally in the past.
A damn near hard-and-fast rule: when the company's primary mission changes from "to do stuff we're good at" to "to enhance shareholder profitability", you're fucked.
All, ALL that J. Random Investor cares about is the money. If the majority of them abruptly decide that there's better money in, say, milk cows than in widget development, you'd better get used to the smell of hay.
Ah, there's another point I left out. Say you're the CEO of "NiceCorp" and you are doing great, selling, say, blankets. You do so great, that you go public. Lots of people buy your stock. The company is rich. Now a hard Winter hits, and you, being a wonderfully nice guy, decide to give away half your inventory to homeless people. Next thing you know, you're being sued by your shareholders for not doing "due dilligence" with their money. Yes, they can really do this, and yes, it really happens. And they have a point. You took their money and said "I'm investing this, I'll do my best to return a profit on it" and then you gave it all to charity. That's tantamount to theft. But on the other hand, if you went after the profits, you're a "corporate droid."
Corporations don't. Plain and simple -- a corporate droid sees nothing wrong in crushing his rivals, in destroying their ability to make a living, in suppressing free expression, or in trouncing basic human dignity.
See, that's exactly what I'm talking about. You say "droid" and we all conjure to mind some guy in a three-piece-suit with no morals hunched over a desk analyzing bottom-lines on a print out and deciding which companies to take over and who to fire. You don't actually know of people like this at Sony or Coke or Starbucks or McDonalds, but the next time they buy out a smaller company or fire some employees, you'll bring back the mental image and curse the evil one who made the call. You of course won't do any research and find out all the facts behind the buyout or the firings. They are automatically evil.
Most corporations are as fanatical and dangerous as any cult. True, they don't fixate on their warped ideas of God. Instead they fixate on profit and the bottom line, which they raise to godhood.
See, you're doing it again. Corporations aren't fanatical, because they can't be. PEOPLE are fanatical, corporations are not. Now there may be people in high positions in the corporations who think this way, and they may act on those thoughts. These people are called sociopaths, and I don't believe that there's nearly as many of them out there as you think, but even they don't do blatantly immoral things very often, because doing that can lead to bad press, which in turn is bad for the profits that they are so attached to.
My point is that you don't know these people, and you can't cite specific examples. You just anthropomorphize corporations and call them evil, because you've seen movies and read Slashdot posts that show you these "corporate droid" images all the time, so you're convinced that there's millions of them out there poised to take over the world. It's paranoid delusion, backed up by little or no evidence.
Evidence suggests that the Playstation2 isn't going to be a good product, but that Sony will leverage its oligopoly to make sure it sells anyhow.
What "evidence" is that exactly? My "evidence" shows that it will play DVDs and has extremely powerful hardware backed up by some of the best game developers in the biz (like SquareSoft)
However, I'm not expecting it to dominate the game industry the way Nintendo did. More like Atari, total monopoly and then total crash with not much of a video game industry at all for a while.
Yeah, okay. You're welcome to that prediction. We'll see in a couple years. As for Sony vs. Nintendo, I would say the Playstation (Sony's first real foray into console gaming) competed pretty evenly with N64 (the comparable product). But I would compare PS 2 with Neo Geo. It's biggest problem will likely be it's high price.
Video games are one of these things that people will only buy if they are good
And have you checked the sales figures on Playstation games recently? Check out the copies sold on, say, Final Fantasy VII. It beat most pop music albums on copies sold, and it sold for about three times the cost.
So you mean that if I write an easy to use ftp client with good search capabilities I can get the use of ftp shut down?
If you sell it, and they can prove that the reason you wrote it was just to make money off music-pirates, then maybe they'll run you out of business, not FTP.
Seriously though, its really cruddy that a big corporation can shut down a protocol because of illegal use of it.
I agree completely. Though Napster was a pretty mediocre protocol, and I wouldn't mourn it that much. However they didn't run the protocol out of business, only the company. There's several Nap servers still floating around.
If they win I can see them going after MS on the basis that IE is used to listen to illegal music on the net.
I can't. IE wasn't created for that purpose, and nobody would win that argument in court, so I don't see "them" going after MS for that anytime soon.
If I remember correctly, modern wireless communication can operate in a "frequency hopping" mode in order to avoid jamming/eavesdropping. The device doesn't use a fixed frequency but hops from one frequency to another.
Yes, but it does a lousy job of avoiding eavesdropping. If you've got anything that speaks its protocol (like, say, a PCS phone) then that device will pick up those frequency change instructions and follow them. It only prevents really easy eavesdropping via normal radios.
How about writing a file sharing application that operaties in a similar fashion by "hopping" from port to another free port in a seemingly random manner?
And what about writing a protocol based on an analogy with "spread spectrum" transmissions? Chop up the stuff, send small pieces through different ports and assemble the pieces at the destination?
Nope, this doesn't help. Say they block port X. You hop from A to B to C to X to wait a minute, what happened to my transmission? Port blocking doesn't occur on a minute-to-minute basis. If you can get through port A, there's no need to change ports. The concern isn't eavesdropping, and if it was, then hopping ports would do any good, because you can still sniff the packets. Ports are too far up the OSI layer. As for the spread, same deal. If you can get through port A, why bother with the others? You're just likely to clip some data when you pick ports that are blocked for your spread.
But all of that is irrelevant, because the secure situations are ones where they have ALL ports blocked except certain regonized ones, like 80 for HTTP. You can't use the same port for several applications without them getting mixed up. But in case somebody decides to give up websurfing while they Napster, many good firewalls can scan the headers of the packets to determine the protocol being used, and recognize that it's not really legitimate HTTP traffic. Gnutella is a step ahead of them, because it actually uses HTTP, so it would look fairly legit. But that's just today's situation in the war. My college actually forwards only certain HTTP commands (like GET, but not PUT) and this pretty well fucks over Gnutella. I'm sure several months from now Gnutella will find a way around that, and a month later the sysadmins will find a way to block the new technique.
I'm sick of you stupid people using your constitutional rights for such silly things. back in the 60's people used free speach to speak out againts the war in Vietnam and the killing of US troups for no apparent reason (yeah well it wasn't a good reason anyways). now we use it to steal music. a far less nobel cause, and a disgussting comment on our society.
= ) Excellent point there. Basically, the people here on Slashdot (myself included) aren't really being particularly oppressed or violated in any terribly life endangering or impressive way, so they tend to blow things out of proportion a bit. Sony suddenly becomes the flagship of the evil corporate menace, rather than a collection of people who provide a valuable service that is willingly paid for. By coming down on Napster, the government isn't punishing a mediocre company that was founded on the goal of making money off the thefts of others, they're robbing the American people of their rights to free speech.
fuck napster. people use guns to break laws, but there are responsible people who use them for law abiding activites. people who use napster only use it for the task for which it was designed, to break laws and steal music. deal with it, your all criminals.
I believe that there are people who use Napster for entirely legal purposes. Albeit maybe only three or four of them in the world, but it does have legitimate uses. Napster's problem wasn't that it should be illegal to provide a tool that aids in theft, because it should be. Napster's problem was that they willfully and flagrantly set out to aid and profit off of theft, and they got caught.
I used Napster, as well as other mp3s. I didn't cosider it theft, because when I found an album I liked, I deleted the mp3s and paid for the CD. I didn't consider this to be immoral, but I recognize that it was illegal, and I'm not going to whine about them taking away my Napster. Hell, Napster wasn't even that good. It was pretty mediocre.
MP3Board's argument, as explained in your post, is that the employer is, in that case *still legally responsible*. IOW --- if you don't keep your employees muzzled, we will punish you for it.
Well I'm not sure this is the specific argument that they're using, the article didn't say. As to the scariness, Negligence is hard to put down into law, so most of it is left up to the discretion of the jury. This is good because it allows for common sense to win over letter of the law in these cases, but you have to remember that it's the common sense of a jury, which may not be all that sensible even before they get hit by high-priced lawyers.
In any case, the point is that yes, negligence is a cause to be sued. And well it should be, as in the example I named with the biotech company. Now it's up to the judges and juries to be reasonable with it.
And I hold those people in the same regard as those who believe murder is immoral, but that it is not the job of government to legislate morality, and who have bumper stickers on their cars that say 'Against murder? Don't commit one!'.
Actually those bumper stickers sound to me like "pro-life"ers making the same argument you are. I agree that it's not the job of the government to legislate morality. Murder isn't illegal because it's immoral. I can think of several cases where I wouldn't consider murder immoral (take the classic "What if you killed Hitler before the Holocaust?") It's illegal because if it was legal, the country would be plunged into constant civil war. The law is there to preserve order, not morality.
Well at least this is getting a bit more acknowledgement. Wired has a bit more mainstream readership than Slashdot...
The whole thing just makes me sad and cynical. You ask questions like "What if they link to another site that links to DeCSS?" "Where do you draw the line?" "Can Wired be busted for linking to 2600?" or you point out how stupid Valenti's car-driving metaphor is, but nobody cares except the other complainers.
You can't ask these questions of MPAA or Kaplan and expect an answer. And the other complainers can't do anything about it.
Sigh. Maybe I'm just depressed today or something.
That sort of filtering is done by people who think it's better to overdo it than miss a naughty word, because then you're less likely to be sued.
No, it's not that simple. I work for a major school district, in the computer networking division. As part of that, I oversee the censorware. No, it's not my call how to implement it. That's determined by the politics above me. I just keep it running.
Well if you don't filter by scanning the content, then you aren't filtering much at all. If you block URLs, then people can just go to the IPs (which they can get in many different ways). If you block unresolved IPs, then they can go somewhere like babelfish.altavista, and tell it to translate a page, either from German to English (which won't have much effect on an alread English page) or pick a random language and then say display in original language.
This isn't a problem with the people being overzealous, it's a problem with the inherent inability of machines to comprehend content. It's a flaw in the very concept of censorware. A machine can't differentiate between appropriate and inappropriate material, so there's no effective way for it to censor all inappropriate material, and the act of censoring inappropriate material almost always spills over to censor appropriate material.
they WANT that family vacation to disneyland - both parents work.
It's not even as simple as money. Many (if not most) women these days would find the job of homemaker insulting. They (and by that I mean other women) fought hard for their shot at the workplace, and now that they've got sexual harassment laws, anti-discrimination laws, and they're coming up on equal pay, the suggestion that they relegate themselves to the role of house-keeper and child-raiser is horribly offensive. But it doesn't occur to them that maybe if the previous generation's (or the one before that) women focused their lives on raising their child(ren), maybe those women were accomplishing something. Maybe you can't just blow it off and say they were wasting their time and you can do the same job in 5% of the time that they did.
Now before the men chime in with "Yeah, preach it man, stick it to the uppity bitches!" stop and think about devoting YOUR life to raising kid(s) and letting your wife work. If you wouldn't be okay with this, then maybe you shouldn't be a parent. It applies to both parents. We used to have FULL-TIME parents. This isn't just a time issue, it's about the fact that there was at least one person whose focus in life was their kid(s), and everything else was secondary. If your kid just wanted to talk with you, would you leave work? Of course not. But maybe they wanted to talk about drugs or sex or something very important. Maybe if you didn't work, you'd be around for that talk. Don't assume you can parent as well as previous generations while only putting in a tiny fraction of the time and effort they did.
And don't expect the government to put in that time and effort for you. That's not why it's there.
My personal morality has no qualms with killing people I think are stupid and worthless. I think you are stupid and worthless, so I kill you. I doubt you'd agree with me, but it's too late, you're dead. But hey, morality's relative, right? I can do whatever I want and you have to accept it.
Hmmm, blows a big ol' hole in your hypothesis, doesn't it? No matter how you feel about it, there is a standard for right and wrong. You are not the one that sets that standard. (Just because you feel like doing something doesn't make it right.) Society doesn't set that standard. (Just because "everybody's doing it" doesn't make it right.) God sets the standard. "Relative morality" is a failed concept.
No, it doesn't blow any hole in the hypothesis. What you're talking about is against the law. The reason it is against the law is because it would throw the country into disorder. If it was legal to kill people, then the country would be in a constant state of civil war. No, there is NOT an absolute standard for right and wrong. These are standards of orderly conduct, not morality. The law is the to keep order; to protect people from physical harm from others and theft from others. It's not there to enforce a standard morality.
It wouldn't be a complete post without a metaphor, so think of an email server. Most email servers have maximum size limits, so you can't send 12 gig emails. This isn't an attempt to censor emails or dictate what emails are moral, it's simply a practical concern, because the email server couldn't function if it had to send 12 gig emails.
A little pornography fueled sexual fantasy never hurt anyone.
I wouldn't go so far as to say it never hurt anyone, but I certainly don't think there should be laws to prevent it.