easy... and then I am for founding a third party, a reform party, with the following platform:
1. The homestead act of 2004: Herebey every trailer-trash dweller is guaranteed to own the land beneath his trailer. Only request is taking homestead in a stone house, constructed with his bare hands and living in there for at least 15 years.Special mortgages at 0 percent are available to anyone who finishes the construction within one and a half years.
2. The healthcare bill of 2004: Everyone, who has successfully constructed his home on his land, has the right for lifelong health insurance federally funded and billed according to the stone-house dweller's income. In case the stone-house dwellers head of household is not finding a job, he will not loose his health insurance as long as he is willing to provide services to the School National Guard, funded by the government to help America's schools to stay free of religions, safe and academically challenging.
3. SNG-bill (School National Guard bill) for stone-house dwellers: Anyone who serves for the School National Guard is guaranteed a reduction of 75% off the tuition to the nearest State University, so that city-dwellers have equal access opportunity to educational advancements.
Viva the reborn stone-house dweller ! The American Hero of the first decade of the second millenium.
Viva the President, who doesn't sell out the American citizen to candies and lolipops, but gives him back what is rightfully his, the American land.
...sigh... I just woke up...I saw Lincoln in my dreams and got all mixed up..what a pity...such a nice dream...
Re:American Television - Killed by commerce
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15 Minutes
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hey, not only the media sold itself, let's not start ranting about the fact the educational system is too, otherwise it could crash/....
Re:American Television - Killed by commerce
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15 Minutes
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Television stations in the U.S. (except PBS) are run by the market. If not enough people watch a show in the U.S., then advertisers won't pay for it.
This is lousy if you're looking for quality programs, but it's excellent if you're looking for what will play to the most households.
I don't buy this argument. It's nowadays a chicken and egg problem. Are people watching so much junk programs, because they have nothing else they can watch, or are there so many lousy channels, because households demand to consume them ?
I think the first is the case, but then I am not an American and even after a staying here longer than I stayed in my home country, I still can't get used to the junk. I am so much desensitized that if I am back home, I suffer withdrawal symptoms: the news seem so "serious" and "boring". After a while I am just coming back to normal, always amazed what amount of news I DON'T see in the U.S. versus my home country.
I don't believe, that it's the viewing U.S. household who influences the selection of programs offered in the U.S TV media. The public can't really choose. Yes, they can choose between Latterman and Leno, so what kind of choice is that ?
The cable TV companies sell their channels "bundled". You can't buy each channel on its own. If the consumer could, I bet many niche and junk cable TV channels would die out. It's not a free market economy, by no means.
For ABC, NBC and CBS it's their junk soaps and series, which are supposedly to finance their qualtity programming, continuously loosing out, because junk offers are so plentiful that real demand is oversaturated.
We are so deeply bathing ourselves in sleaze that any aspiration to fight the scum is suffocated by the depression caused through the bad smell of a corrupt media which sold itself out to the perceived overwhelmingly darker sides of their viewing public. Ah, well, this is a scheme. Once being depressed, your demand for comic relief is overwhelming. Who could survive nowadays politicians without the "Spin Room". Wouldn't we all cry our hearts out in grief if we hadn't a chance to laugh it off ?
I don't know what to make out of it. May be, if every day life would be less of a pain in the neck and more a piece of cake here in the U.S., we actually would be able to "bear" the junk media without getting depressed.
But heck, if politics are that awful meaningless, what else can you do than artificially make it partisan and play the partisan card over and over and over and over again. It's so bad that poor Tucker Carlson and Bill Press can't surpress their
grins over their own idiotic spins most of the time. Poor boys, luckily they are allowed to poke fun and be silly...sigh...
One should add that it is interesting to see in this context that most pre-existing scripts at that time which were relevant to the one-click process ran under the name of "shopping carts".
Question is why O'Reilly's BountyQuest in its bid for the one-click patent excluded all shopping cart software packages from being allowed to prove prior art.
I think you are right. Now I only wait that one of these guys come up and admit they used a one-click ordering process on their sites doing some embellishments to pre-existing perl scripts as well. Then I would agree and admit that O'Reilly's BountyQuest site works, then only and not one day before.
but it didn't appear for a long time just because nobody thought of doing it that way.
As I understood it, that was not the case. It did appear before Sept 27th, 1997, built from open source code software.
But I think because even in the BountyQuest from O'Reilly (I do think there is conflict of interest, as Amazon.com was cofounder together with Tim O'Reilly and Charles Cella), shopping cart software was excluded from the bounty, nobody really tried to prove it. Meanwhile the six month period for the BountyQuest for the one-click patent has expired.
Now, when in 1995 the first open source shopping carts were developed and the developer and knowledgable users could customize the cart in a way that a one-click ordering system was built, the question to me is, why that should not count as prior art. It all depends on how flexible the shopping cart software package was designed in the first place, to be capable of being tweaked into representing a one-click checkout feature. Another question then would have been, if that was an obvious procedure to apply for anyone knowledgable in the trade of programming.
The last difficulty to overcome, was to find the people who had customized their sites this way and discarded it after a while, because the customers actually didn't like at in the early days. Many customers wanted to have a step by step checkout procedure and didn't trust the one-click in the beginning. It could also be that people who might have used it just don't want to reveal for what kind of sites they used it.
I still don't quite trust the BountyQuest initiative from O'Reilly, Bezos and Charles Cella, just because of that. Someone explain to me why software running under the umbrella name of "shopping carts" were excluded. Shopping cart software of those days are major content management systems today. Strikes me as "funny", the whole thing.
Well, I don't understand your comment. I have now read the first chapter of the book. It's amazing how clearly there is connection between a functioning government, who is able to enforce property laws, i.e. recording of the titles for land and the potential of the land owner to generate real capital out of dead capital. In that respect my comments fit the results of the first chapter of de Soto's book beautifully. I wished I hadn't missed to read this book before.
I am not finished reading the comments to the book on this list. So far, my impression is, that really no one has read it, before blessing this site with their esteemed comments. Noone has made comments with regards to dead capital versus live capital, a distinction which is crucial to the whole book.
There are very well, very good analogies you can draw from de Soto's findings in his books, not only to why and howe capitalism works or how capital is generated, but also why only in the U.S. and the western European countries it was successful. It is already clear to me that it explains easily why capitalism never worked to eradicate poverty for Afro-Americans in the U.S.on a large scale.
It has a lot to do with property rights and the way how fair the government is able to enforce them. Property rights again have a lot to do with human rights and freedom. And all I can see happening in many discussions here at/. are arguments been thrown back and forth about how freedom, property rights, human rights and the GPL is intertwined with capitalism versus socialism.
You might not be able to see the connection, but if you want to, read the book. If you can't see the relevance of the book, I can't help you.
The books is exellent and I am sure when I am finished with it, I will find quite some insight and analogies with regards to property rights of land to property rights of the GPL in connection with freedom and civil/human rights and what the influence of the GPL on capital generation really is. It even offers some insight about the U.S. insistance on the second amendment and why today the second amendment is outdated.
I'll bet you, that findings in this book might as much explain many of RMS' view points as it does Alchins'. Of course you need to do what the author said with regards to the origins of the book. He said, they closed their (economics) books, and starte to open their eyes.
Just read it and then come back and ask me a specific question I can argue about.
Seems to be a great book and can't wait to read it. Reminded me of observations in an Central African village where land ownership (of tropical rain forest land) had not yet been recorded.
Land is considered as being owned, as soon as a man is able to own a woman, who can cultivate a piece of land and provide food for survival for the man and her children.
The man, being asked if he owns land, would say yes, as long as he owns the labor provided by the woman.
The woman would say she doesn't own land, but she is paid for her labor in being allowed to eat and survive on the fruits of her labor. If she is able to produce more food than the family can eat and is able to sell or trade food for other goods then
the struggle who owns the traded goods (or the money she got from the sale) starts.
It seems mostly dependent on how much labor the man has put in to cultivate the land himself. If he did, he will claim ownership of the profit made by the woman's labor, if he didn't and the woman was able to make a profit out of her labor, she considers the profit hers, but not the land itself.
If the woman doesn't work the land anymore, the land isn't considered worth anything and no ownership of the land itself is claimed by the man, but certainly the worth of the potential labor inherent in the woman, is still being claimed to be owned by the man.
In this context it makes sense that the capital of the man is measured in how many women he owns.
The moment an international company comes to the village and discovers something precious to the
industrial world in the soil (gas, oil, uranium)
and wants to exploit the land, the land will be claimed by the native population as being owned by them. The native population will request recording of the land's ownership, without any consideration of the ownership of women's labor. Because it immediately becomes clear that the profit out of the company's labor is higher than anything the women's labor could generate.
The ownership of the land therefore seems to be defined by who owns the labor put into the land to generate a profit out of it. As soon as the profit is more than just the food to sustain survival of the native population recording ownership takes place.
When Lincoln requested in the Homestead Act that
anyone who claimed ownership of the granted acres of land must prove within five years that he "worked" the land and generates value to that land, this seems to reflect that the real capital is reflected in the labor you put in to the land to generate something of value which can be traded and not in the land per se. The native Indians never claimed to own land ( I think), but they fought wars for their tribes territories. In the terms of de Soto, they barked quite a bit.
This would basically mean you always claim ownership to what you produce with your labor. And any person will always claim that much land as his own land, as he needs to grow food to survive. We always start barking if someone tries to take that away from us and we should.
Wuff, wuff, I am off to the bookstore. Thanks for pointing this book out to us.
I don't understand you signature at all. That's confusing me a lot, because I agree with what you said in your main body of the text.
How has Lincoln NOT fought FOR human rights and by that also FOR property rights ? Humans can't survive without owning property, it's the freedom of the individual to collect property, which allows survival. The most basic human right is the property right over your own body. So where could he not be a hero for people who love freedom ?
That signature would only make sense, if your definition of freedom includes the individual freedom to take away freedom/human/property rights from another individual human being. If you define freedom like that, then your freedom becomes murderous.
That can't be the definition of freedom in any sane person's mind and I doubt very much that even the forefathers had ever that definition in mind.
That's the anarchist's definition of freedom, which is nothing but "sleazy (American?) sales trick" to cover up some unethical usage of freedom, which directly denies each human the euqal chance of survival.
If humans are all created equal, then our freedom can't include the freedom to take away another human's freedom. That would directly lead to extinction of humans. I thought that's a given definition of freedom worldwide.
May be that's the point noone in Europe can "get" when lurking to all this "Amercian Freedom Bragging" here at/.
The 2nd Amendment guarantees the right to be an armed anarchist and and armed terrorist for anyone who wants to.
If the U.S. hadn't the 2nd Amendment, then still anyone who desires had the right to choose to be an anarchist and terrorist, just it would be a little less dangerous for the usual civilian not to get shot for all the wrong reasons.
Just because someone wanna be an anarchist, doesn't mean I would want to allow my government to allow that person the access to weapons which makes anarchist's (or fascist's or racist's) ego trips a deadly play.
I am sure, if Lincoln would live today, he wouldn't support the 2nd Amendment and would fight a war to enforce it to replaced with something more intelligent or to be dropped from the Constitution altogether. But helas, find a true hero like him in these days, one who doesn't uplift the forefather's wisdom into untouchable holyness, and still uses his brain to adjust the flaws of the constitution the forefathers left behind, and would just serve truthfully for the good of the people without opening himself up to any sort of mental bribery.
So, I think it would be quite smart of the U.S. government to support it. Actually, may be the U.S. government should do it even sooner than later, because may be one day technology will be developed that makes each open source code file identifiable as a "tangible" item and copyable in a way that a price can get attached to it.
If that technology would ever get invented, it will not only be the better software than any proprietary, closed software, but also the more expensive one, because it is the software with inherently the better value.
I think it would be great if all government funded software development would be GPL or at least open source code software.
Sure, why not ? If you can build bridges between the U.S.compatriots and the European ones, go ahead. My bet is you'll fail miserably, it's not an easier task as the unification, kiss and make-up of all races into one happy global familily. Sort of stops at the local level and that's were most of us live.:-)
just because RMS has enforced zero cost on this kind of property does not mean that it has zero value to mankind as a whole or to any individual in particular.
First I don't know from where you conclude that I dismiss alternatives. I just tried to scrutinize the Lincoln quotes RMS gave to support his view points. I am also not at all taking away any freedom from you to use any method of property distribution you like. I didn't say that.
I am not saying that free software has no value to mankind as a whole or to any individual, in fact I consider it to have a higher value than any "closed source code" software. But the value is inherent and so far not expressible in monetary terms.
Of course in your "closed" mind I am already ESR's disciple or an MS software lover. Forget it.
If it were technically possible to have open source code software in a tangible manner, so that you could deliberately put onto each "copy" of the "open source software" package a collectable, monetary value, than I bet that in a free market the open source code software had a higher monetary value immediately compared to closed source MS code software.
If that open source software is free software with GPL, you couldn't assign a monetary value to it, even if it were technically possible. And that's a loss of one freedom.
RMS always says, to distinguish himself to ESR, that he doesn't allow free software to co-exist with proprietary software (which is, so far, always closed source code software). I understand why he wanted to have it that way as a method to break the MS monopoly, which completely overextended its rights and power "to collect monetary value", way beyond what is necessary for survival, as you mentioned above. Granted. Let's just say, that's done. The monopoly would have been already be cracked.
But as soon as that goal has been reached, the GPL of free software doesn't you allow you to collect monetary value from open source code software, even if a technological solutions would have been found and would make it possible. In that case the GPL license represents an important loss of one sort of freedom, the freedom of the free software developer to convert inherent value (in form of transparency of the code) into monetary value in attaching a price to his software.
The difference is just which freedoms of free software are of the highest value to you, the freedom to see the open source code, the freedom to change it, the freedom to get the software for free (no cost) or the freedom to redistribute in co-existance with proprietrary, closed source software, or the not to have the freedom to redistribute in co-existence with proprietary software.
I believe the true value of the free software lies in its transparency, not in the fact that you are not allowed to attach a monetary value to it (Of course, I understand, that currently that all is not possible and a hypothetical case).
But who knows, may be some genius finds a solution to leave source code open and make it copyable at the same time and therefore also proprietary. In that case, the GPL in its current format would not survive.
I just wished you finally would find a code solution to all of it. I want open source software to survive and value it much higher than any closed source software. I don't see why that value shouldn't be expressed in monetary terms, if it just were technically possible. I am getting tired. This stuff is sooo distracting.
I can only speak in non technical terms, sorry. And a nice weekend back.
I don't care if she is a troll or not, but she/he uses the name of Larry Wall's daughter.
Considering the signature line, referring to the Camel, I would find it disgusting if someone else than the real Heidi Wall would use that name for trolling.
Why don't you take the post at face value and that's it and answer politely, be it troll or not.
In the article of Dan Gillmore, the basic mechanism of the GPL is explained with these words:
In other words, if you create new software using software licensed under the GPL, the new software must also be published free of charge, with the source code available for anyone to use and modify.The cascading effect of this is to create a collection of software that cannot be owned by anyone.
I am not sure if this is the same as saying that GPL is there to ensure that free software is owned by everybody, but that is not relevant.
Scientifically, I don't think that there is anything tangible on earth which doesn't
belong to somebody. Any tangible item is property of someone and is owned. Just by the very biological nature of humans and mamals in general. We all are in a constant fight to defend and protect what we perceive as being our property, my own body is my property, what I eat is my property and what I work for and collect as the fruits of my laboer with the goal to feed myself is my property.
I do see IP and patents and trademarks just a way to convert intangible collections of thoughts and ideas in something, which has for a specific time period the qualities of property, so that profit for your labor into intangible thought processes can be collected.
Communism has proven that property as a whole given to the whole of the population doesn't mean there is no property or that property is owned by nobody. It just says that it is distributed by a party representing the whole of the population back to the whole population. It replaces the individual freedom of a person to collect property and accumulate property with distributing the collective property as the whole owned by the whole population back to them.
This process takes away one very basic freedom, one which Lincoln and the forefathers certainly would never have wanted to take away, namely the individual freedom of choosing to work with the goal to collect individual property.
If RMS cites Lincoln with:
"Whenever there is a conflict between human rights and property rights, human rights must prevail."
then I like to ask him what he thinks one of the most basic human rights is.
I happen to believe that one of the most basic human rights is equal freedom for any individual to work with the goal of collecting property to ensure his survival. Actually that's exactly what Lincoln's main goal (trying to implement what the founding fathers had put in the constitution but didn't live up to), when he fought for liberation of the slaves and requesting to give them property (land through the Homestead Act, for which he asked the owners to prove it up, i.e. to work for to own it). May be I don't use the legal definition and terminology of human and property rights according to the books, but I do think that I use them in their true meaning.
Lincoln in defense of the freedom of people just amended the (not so flawless) constitution of the forefathers to ensure that true freedom for everybody really prevails in enforcing equal property rights.
So to me the quotes from Lincoln by RMS don't support his thought process of ensuring freedom and human rights through GPL, in making sure that free software can't be owned by anyone or that free software must be owned by everybody as a collective.
RMS further says:
But defenselessness is not the American Way. In the land of the brave and the free, we defend our freedom with the GNU GPL.
May be you defend some freedoms with GPL, but you certainly don't defend the freedom to work and collect property with the GPL. One of the most basic freedoms Lincoln stood for.
As Abraham Lincoln put it, "Whenever there is a conflict between human rights and property rights, human rights must prevail."
I don't know in which context Lincoln said this, but I do believe that phrase was formed because a human being (a slave) was considered property of another human being (slaveholder). This only proves that by the very nature of our biological existence a human body is always owned by the person living in that body.
I don't know any animal which doesn't thrive, defend and fights for his property against another animal for survival. Humans do the same. No theoretical scheme of collective ownership of all tangible and intangible values will be able to
supercede that basic natural (defined in our genetic make-up) principle. That's were I see a basic contradiction to nature itself in what RMS apparently stands for.
Just my 0.02 c of non technical thoughts to RMS' thinking.
--------
Nature to be commanded, must be obeyed. -- Francis Bacon
correction: sorry for misusing the expression "open source world" with regards to dmoz, I guess I wanted to say broadly the best of transparency and openess vis a vis archiving and classification of web content by the public.
Trust is nice, but not enough. The old archives and hopefully the archives to come in the future are just too important (if handled professionally) to be left in the hands of a single commercial company.
What speaks against a cooperation between Google, the LOC and dmoz ? Anything to put it under a wider umbrella of supervision than just rely on "trust" the "good will" of google ?
Basically these three entities all want only the best for those archives to happen. No one so far has shown any signs why their good intentions couldn't be trusted, plus they are all very professional and they would represent a check and balance of each others intentions. dmoz would represent the best of the open source world, google the best of technical geekdom and LOC the best and most unbiased governmental input you could wish for. Of have you ever doubted the LOC's
committment to the first amendment ?
I can understand that concern (being not a U.S. citizen myself and knowing that LOC asks license fees for access to certain database tapes from any "customer" outside the U.S, meaning that the IP for certain subject classification data is not available at no cost in foreign countries), but is within the U.S, if I am not mistaken.
I nevertheless think it would be the best solution, as only the LOC has the archiving and classification power to handle those archives professionally. I would suggest that governments other than the U.S. come into a cooperating agreements and support (financially) worldwide mirroring and access at no cost for anybody.
I don't see any difference in the amount of harm
a commercial group, a government agency or the combined group of hacker gods and priests could do to the common people.
There is no upfront proof that a commercial group will abuse its power more than the government or vice versa and no proof that hacker gods as a whole are any more saints than any other group of human beings, be it in form of a government agency or a commercial entity. What counts is which group is legally the most regulated body to serve the
people's will, reflected in a democratically elected, representative government.
So, the only question really to solve is, who and how should abuse from ANY group be prevented. The only answer to me is a democratically elected government agency, who has to obey the people's vote. There is unfortunately nothing better. And
if your legal system or constitution stinks and is basically not serving the common people's human and civil rights properly, then it's a political
question to be solved by the people and not by a group of geeks, business men or misguided government agents.
This always ends up as a triangle war between
governmental, commercial and technology entities.
I just wonder why you think ethical and moral issues can't be abused by each of the three equally badly or in other words, why anyone of these groups is better suited to protect the people from its own technological, obviously almost uncontrollable innovations.
Posting anonymously for the obvious reasons (Taco, please don't give up my IP on a court order!)...
This is an interesting post to me with regards to another story discussed on/., namely the future
of usenet's archives, owned by google and possibly coming under control of the Library of Congress.
I imagine the author would have posted this on a usenent newsgroup and the LOC would be the future owner of the usenet archives and of usenet's servers.
How important and necessary do you judge the content of this post for archiving purposes and what do you think is more important to protect
with regards to the poster's rights and the public's rights (privacy, equal access, freedom of speech, IP)
a. the posting's content in itself
b. the anonymity of the poster
c. the importance of the poster's right for
x-no-archives request
d. the importance of the poster's right for nuking
his post out of the archives.
All these questions I have, under the assumption that the post would have been made to a public forum owned by the public (i.e. LOC) versus posting the same content in the same manner on usenet, whose archives would be owned by a commercial company. It would be easily imaginable that the archives could be sold, for example, to the company in question (Shunhawk.com) in this article.
If they'd delete as much as a single article, it would seriously diminish the value of the archive for historic and sociological research
I agree with you on the "washed" version. What is there now, should be kept "as is". That is a historical documentation of what really happened.
But I do think that a thorough "brainstorming" session is needed to decide how usenet is handled in the future. As for sociological research, I believe, the whole research is already on its way to be useless, because thousands of people just post to incite responds in order to see "how the
society is reacting". It's already an experiment in the hands of sociologist and nothing much natural anymore about it. You just might find enough willing posters who are aware of it and NEVERTHELESS play the game with you together, because it's just fun. The guinea pigs are aware what's being tested in them and their reaction is already "tailored" and therefore the results "skewed".
In general I am not that ambivalent about the need for x-no-archives requests to be respected, especially not, if I know that any little company can open up a forum and deny posters x-no-archives and nuking requests, but are happily making the archives available for any person to search and misuse.
But if all the newsservers would really be owned by the public and not by companies, I could possibly agree to wave my x-no-archive rights, hoping that a regulation about it would be decision upon a democratic vote of the public.
At the moment I feel that the traces a poster has left in the archives can too easily haunt someone. It encourages "profiling" of a poster and can be abused. Privacy of posters was not at all protected backwards for years and years. I do feel that many people were not aware when they posted for what purposes these archives could be used in the future. I think that it is even more important to realize that, considering that the archives are owned by commercial companies. I don't know if newsservers owned and maintained by LOC would respect privacy and allow AC posts.
I could imagine that the government would hesitate to allow AC posts, but I don't know. The whole thing seems to be a war between two mutual exclusive desires, the protection of your privacy in longterm archives (achieved through AC posts) and the fact that you are using a public forum for which you could argue that privacy rights are given away as soon as you post.
I don't know which rights are more important and which ones should supercede the other.
If usenet would be under the protection of something like LOC, I believe more people would realize (and actually for that reason be more conscious about what the say and how they same something) that "you are really posting for the public and for the archives". Can't help that thinking this post, would it be archived for the next ten years or so at LOCs servers, makes me at least a bit more respectful for the work of the archivers and think twice, if I should continue with mumbling my opinions straight out of the blue.
Just the contrary, that's exactly what I hoped would be accomplished, if LOC would get involved.
Everybody says usenet is a public forum, but the medium on which the forum were uphold and their public speech recorded, was never public. Not all the newsservers and connections were government owned and paid by people's tax dollars.
The usenet archives collected by deja news, the data, are owned by a commercial company. They can decide whatever they want to do with them, the IP value of the posts is neglible, but the monetary value of a complete set of data of all archived posts is high. The fact that deja-nes.com originally treated the data from usenet groups the way oldtime usenet users were expecting them to be handled, doesn't mean that they couldn't have done differently.
I used to use deja-news.com since early 1997. At that time deja-news.com was still ok, but usenet itself was a pretty mess. Many technical worthy groups were complaining about serious flamewars and thousands of useless posts. Old usenet users were whining and crying out for the good ol' times, when men were real hackers and did their business "among themselves". Deja-news.com was respecting poster's right for nuking their posts out of the archives, something which I consider a right, which needs to be protected, as well as posters x-no-archive requests.
Later, when deja-news.com turned into deja.com, the whole thing became more commercial. Now, as they can't make a profit, it's sold. The new owner can do whatever they want with the archives. Who guarantees you that they don't go down the drain in a year from now and sell the archives to the... chinese government:-). To me it would seem to be the best thing which could happen, if LOC could be asked to become owner of those archives. This is in order to protect those archives and the posting rights of the posters from any biased group. This is also to make them available at no cost to the public, and protect them from being distroyed or misused.
If usenet is supposedly to be a public forum, then the public should own the archives of this forum and LOC should get involved and protect those archives for the public. At least then for the first time the archives of a "quasi public forum" would also be owned by the public and the regulations about how to handle the archives is under democratic rules determined by the tax payer and voters.
Why you conclude that a commercial company is more prone to respect those rights to nuke, x-no-archive etc than LOC, who is funded by tax payer's money, I don't understand. The public is posting, so the public can demand that LOC respects those rights.
Contrary, any commercial company would want to archive EVERYTHING against the will of the posters to collect larger archives.
LOC's involvement could be very well the best which could happen, because they would be the most unbiased and most professional archivers.
I would understand if you would say LOC might be the toughest cataloger, because contrary to any open/free source zealots, they are possibly courageous enough to classify and discriminate content while cataloging. That's what librarians usually use their brain for, but of course, I hear already thousands of kids screaming "no, I want my 0.02 cents worth of flamewar/porn archived til the next millenium". If you could fear something from the LOC than it might be their professional scrutiny towards what they consider content worth archiving. I doubt that they would trash anything which is worth to keep, certainly not all the historically important archives of the beginning eighties and the like.
Slashdot Mirror
easy... and then I am for founding a third party, a reform party, with the following platform:
..what a pity...such a nice dream...
1. The homestead act of 2004: Herebey every trailer-trash dweller is guaranteed to own the land beneath his trailer. Only request is taking homestead in a stone house, constructed with his bare hands and living in there for at least 15 years.Special mortgages at 0 percent are available to anyone who finishes the construction within one and a half years.
2. The healthcare bill of 2004: Everyone, who has successfully constructed his home on his land, has the right for lifelong health insurance federally funded and billed according to the stone-house dweller's income. In case the stone-house dwellers head of household is not finding a job, he will not loose his health insurance as long as he is willing to provide services to the School National Guard, funded by the government to help America's schools to stay free of religions, safe and academically challenging.
3. SNG-bill (School National Guard bill) for stone-house dwellers: Anyone who serves for the School National Guard is guaranteed a reduction of 75% off the tuition to the nearest State University, so that city-dwellers have equal access opportunity to educational advancements.
Viva the reborn stone-house dweller ! The American Hero of the first decade of the second millenium.
Viva the President, who doesn't sell out the American citizen to candies and lolipops, but gives him back what is rightfully his, the American land.
...sigh... I just woke up...I saw Lincoln in my dreams and got all mixed up
hey, not only the media sold itself, let's not start ranting about the fact the educational system is too, otherwise it could crash /....
This is lousy if you're looking for quality programs, but it's excellent if you're looking for what will play to the most households.
I don't buy this argument. It's nowadays a chicken and egg problem. Are people watching so much junk programs, because they have nothing else they can watch, or are there so many lousy channels, because households demand to consume them ? I think the first is the case, but then I am not an American and even after a staying here longer than I stayed in my home country, I still can't get used to the junk. I am so much desensitized that if I am back home, I suffer withdrawal symptoms: the news seem so "serious" and "boring". After a while I am just coming back to normal, always amazed what amount of news I DON'T see in the U.S. versus my home country.
I don't believe, that it's the viewing U.S. household who influences the selection of programs offered in the U.S TV media. The public can't really choose. Yes, they can choose between Latterman and Leno, so what kind of choice is that ?
The cable TV companies sell their channels "bundled". You can't buy each channel on its own. If the consumer could, I bet many niche and junk cable TV channels would die out. It's not a free market economy, by no means.
For ABC, NBC and CBS it's their junk soaps and series, which are supposedly to finance their qualtity programming, continuously loosing out, because junk offers are so plentiful that real demand is oversaturated.
We are so deeply bathing ourselves in sleaze that any aspiration to fight the scum is suffocated by the depression caused through the bad smell of a corrupt media which sold itself out to the perceived overwhelmingly darker sides of their viewing public. Ah, well, this is a scheme. Once being depressed, your demand for comic relief is overwhelming. Who could survive nowadays politicians without the "Spin Room". Wouldn't we all cry our hearts out in grief if we hadn't a chance to laugh it off ?
I don't know what to make out of it. May be, if every day life would be less of a pain in the neck and more a piece of cake here in the U.S., we actually would be able to "bear" the junk media without getting depressed.
But heck, if politics are that awful meaningless, what else can you do than artificially make it partisan and play the partisan card over and over and over and over again. It's so bad that poor Tucker Carlson and Bill Press can't surpress their grins over their own idiotic spins most of the time. Poor boys, luckily they are allowed to poke fun and be silly...sigh...
One should add that it is interesting to see in this context that most pre-existing scripts at that time which were relevant to the one-click process ran under the name of "shopping carts".
Question is why O'Reilly's BountyQuest in its bid for the one-click patent excluded all shopping cart software packages from being allowed to prove prior art.
I think you are right. Now I only wait that one of these guys come up and admit they used a one-click ordering process on their sites doing some embellishments to pre-existing perl scripts as well. Then I would agree and admit that O'Reilly's BountyQuest site works, then only and not one day before.
What has being for or against commerce on the net to do with it all. Either there is prior art or there is not.
And I don't believe that it has been seriously searched for. Also not with the BountyQuest.
but it didn't appear for a long time just because nobody thought of doing it that way.
As I understood it, that was not the case. It did appear before Sept 27th, 1997, built from open source code software.
But I think because even in the BountyQuest from O'Reilly (I do think there is conflict of interest, as Amazon.com was cofounder together with Tim O'Reilly and Charles Cella), shopping cart software was excluded from the bounty, nobody really tried to prove it. Meanwhile the six month period for the BountyQuest for the one-click patent has expired.
Now, when in 1995 the first open source shopping carts were developed and the developer and knowledgable users could customize the cart in a way that a one-click ordering system was built, the question to me is, why that should not count as prior art. It all depends on how flexible the shopping cart software package was designed in the first place, to be capable of being tweaked into representing a one-click checkout feature. Another question then would have been, if that was an obvious procedure to apply for anyone knowledgable in the trade of programming.
The last difficulty to overcome, was to find the people who had customized their sites this way and discarded it after a while, because the customers actually didn't like at in the early days. Many customers wanted to have a step by step checkout procedure and didn't trust the one-click in the beginning. It could also be that people who might have used it just don't want to reveal for what kind of sites they used it.
I still don't quite trust the BountyQuest initiative from O'Reilly, Bezos and Charles Cella, just because of that. Someone explain to me why software running under the umbrella name of "shopping carts" were excluded. Shopping cart software of those days are major content management systems today. Strikes me as "funny", the whole thing.
A lot of it deals with "cultural relativism"
Did you read the book ? I think that's completely wrong. Quote pages from the text of the book to back up your arguments.
Well, I don't understand your comment. I have now read the first chapter of the book. It's amazing how clearly there is connection between a functioning government, who is able to enforce property laws, i.e. recording of the titles for land and the potential of the land owner to generate real capital out of dead capital. In that respect my comments fit the results of the first chapter of de Soto's book beautifully. I wished I hadn't missed to read this book before.
/. are arguments been thrown back and forth about how freedom, property rights, human rights and the GPL is intertwined with capitalism versus socialism.
I am not finished reading the comments to the book on this list. So far, my impression is, that really no one has read it, before blessing this site with their esteemed comments. Noone has made comments with regards to dead capital versus live capital, a distinction which is crucial to the whole book.
There are very well, very good analogies you can draw from de Soto's findings in his books, not only to why and howe capitalism works or how capital is generated, but also why only in the U.S. and the western European countries it was successful. It is already clear to me that it explains easily why capitalism never worked to eradicate poverty for Afro-Americans in the U.S.on a large scale.
It has a lot to do with property rights and the way how fair the government is able to enforce them. Property rights again have a lot to do with human rights and freedom. And all I can see happening in many discussions here at
You might not be able to see the connection, but if you want to, read the book. If you can't see the relevance of the book, I can't help you.
The books is exellent and I am sure when I am finished with it, I will find quite some insight and analogies with regards to property rights of land to property rights of the GPL in connection with freedom and civil/human rights and what the influence of the GPL on capital generation really is. It even offers some insight about the U.S. insistance on the second amendment and why today the second amendment is outdated.
I'll bet you, that findings in this book might as much explain many of RMS' view points as it does Alchins'. Of course you need to do what the author said with regards to the origins of the book. He said, they closed their (economics) books, and starte to open their eyes.
Just read it and then come back and ask me a specific question I can argue about.
Land is considered as being owned, as soon as a man is able to own a woman, who can cultivate a piece of land and provide food for survival for the man and her children.
The man, being asked if he owns land, would say yes, as long as he owns the labor provided by the woman.
The woman would say she doesn't own land, but she is paid for her labor in being allowed to eat and survive on the fruits of her labor. If she is able to produce more food than the family can eat and is able to sell or trade food for other goods then the struggle who owns the traded goods (or the money she got from the sale) starts.
It seems mostly dependent on how much labor the man has put in to cultivate the land himself. If he did, he will claim ownership of the profit made by the woman's labor, if he didn't and the woman was able to make a profit out of her labor, she considers the profit hers, but not the land itself.
If the woman doesn't work the land anymore, the land isn't considered worth anything and no ownership of the land itself is claimed by the man, but certainly the worth of the potential labor inherent in the woman, is still being claimed to be owned by the man.
In this context it makes sense that the capital of the man is measured in how many women he owns.
The moment an international company comes to the village and discovers something precious to the industrial world in the soil (gas, oil, uranium) and wants to exploit the land, the land will be claimed by the native population as being owned by them. The native population will request recording of the land's ownership, without any consideration of the ownership of women's labor. Because it immediately becomes clear that the profit out of the company's labor is higher than anything the women's labor could generate.
The ownership of the land therefore seems to be defined by who owns the labor put into the land to generate a profit out of it. As soon as the profit is more than just the food to sustain survival of the native population recording ownership takes place.
When Lincoln requested in the Homestead Act that anyone who claimed ownership of the granted acres of land must prove within five years that he "worked" the land and generates value to that land, this seems to reflect that the real capital is reflected in the labor you put in to the land to generate something of value which can be traded and not in the land per se. The native Indians never claimed to own land ( I think), but they fought wars for their tribes territories. In the terms of de Soto, they barked quite a bit.
This would basically mean you always claim ownership to what you produce with your labor. And any person will always claim that much land as his own land, as he needs to grow food to survive. We always start barking if someone tries to take that away from us and we should.
Wuff, wuff, I am off to the bookstore. Thanks for pointing this book out to us.
How has Lincoln NOT fought FOR human rights and by that also FOR property rights ? Humans can't survive without owning property, it's the freedom of the individual to collect property, which allows survival. The most basic human right is the property right over your own body. So where could he not be a hero for people who love freedom ?
That signature would only make sense, if your definition of freedom includes the individual freedom to take away freedom/human/property rights from another individual human being. If you define freedom like that, then your freedom becomes murderous.
That can't be the definition of freedom in any sane person's mind and I doubt very much that even the forefathers had ever that definition in mind. That's the anarchist's definition of freedom, which is nothing but "sleazy (American?) sales trick" to cover up some unethical usage of freedom, which directly denies each human the euqal chance of survival.
If humans are all created equal, then our freedom can't include the freedom to take away another human's freedom. That would directly lead to extinction of humans. I thought that's a given definition of freedom worldwide.
May be that's the point noone in Europe can "get" when lurking to all this "Amercian Freedom Bragging" here at /.
If the U.S. hadn't the 2nd Amendment, then still anyone who desires had the right to choose to be an anarchist and terrorist, just it would be a little less dangerous for the usual civilian not to get shot for all the wrong reasons.
Just because someone wanna be an anarchist, doesn't mean I would want to allow my government to allow that person the access to weapons which makes anarchist's (or fascist's or racist's) ego trips a deadly play.
I am sure, if Lincoln would live today, he wouldn't support the 2nd Amendment and would fight a war to enforce it to replaced with something more intelligent or to be dropped from the Constitution altogether. But helas, find a true hero like him in these days, one who doesn't uplift the forefather's wisdom into untouchable holyness, and still uses his brain to adjust the flaws of the constitution the forefathers left behind, and would just serve truthfully for the good of the people without opening himself up to any sort of mental bribery.
If that technology would ever get invented, it will not only be the better software than any proprietary, closed software, but also the more expensive one, because it is the software with inherently the better value.
I think it would be great if all government funded software development would be GPL or at least open source code software.
I bet I missed the point again.
Sure, why not ? If you can build bridges between the U.S.compatriots and the European ones, go ahead. My bet is you'll fail miserably, it's not an easier task as the unification, kiss and make-up of all races into one happy global familily. Sort of stops at the local level and that's were most of us live. :-)
just because RMS has enforced zero cost on this kind of property does not mean that it has zero value to mankind as a whole or to any individual in particular.
First I don't know from where you conclude that I dismiss alternatives. I just tried to scrutinize the Lincoln quotes RMS gave to support his view points. I am also not at all taking away any freedom from you to use any method of property distribution you like. I didn't say that.
I am not saying that free software has no value to mankind as a whole or to any individual, in fact I consider it to have a higher value than any "closed source code" software. But the value is inherent and so far not expressible in monetary terms.
Of course in your "closed" mind I am already ESR's disciple or an MS software lover. Forget it.
If it were technically possible to have open source code software in a tangible manner, so that you could deliberately put onto each "copy" of the "open source software" package a collectable, monetary value, than I bet that in a free market the open source code software had a higher monetary value immediately compared to closed source MS code software.
If that open source software is free software with GPL, you couldn't assign a monetary value to it, even if it were technically possible. And that's a loss of one freedom.
RMS always says, to distinguish himself to ESR, that he doesn't allow free software to co-exist with proprietary software (which is, so far, always closed source code software). I understand why he wanted to have it that way as a method to break the MS monopoly, which completely overextended its rights and power "to collect monetary value", way beyond what is necessary for survival, as you mentioned above. Granted. Let's just say, that's done. The monopoly would have been already be cracked.
But as soon as that goal has been reached, the GPL of free software doesn't you allow you to collect monetary value from open source code software, even if a technological solutions would have been found and would make it possible. In that case the GPL license represents an important loss of one sort of freedom, the freedom of the free software developer to convert inherent value (in form of transparency of the code) into monetary value in attaching a price to his software.
The difference is just which freedoms of free software are of the highest value to you, the freedom to see the open source code, the freedom to change it, the freedom to get the software for free (no cost) or the freedom to redistribute in co-existance with proprietrary, closed source software, or the not to have the freedom to redistribute in co-existence with proprietary software.
I believe the true value of the free software lies in its transparency, not in the fact that you are not allowed to attach a monetary value to it (Of course, I understand, that currently that all is not possible and a hypothetical case).
But who knows, may be some genius finds a solution to leave source code open and make it copyable at the same time and therefore also proprietary. In that case, the GPL in its current format would not survive.
I just wished you finally would find a code solution to all of it. I want open source software to survive and value it much higher than any closed source software. I don't see why that value shouldn't be expressed in monetary terms, if it just were technically possible. I am getting tired. This stuff is sooo distracting.
I can only speak in non technical terms, sorry. And a nice weekend back.
I don't care if she is a troll or not, but she/he uses the name of Larry Wall's daughter.
Considering the signature line, referring to the Camel, I would find it disgusting if someone else than the real Heidi Wall would use that name for trolling.
Why don't you take the post at face value and that's it and answer politely, be it troll or not.
In other words, if you create new software using software licensed under the GPL, the new software must also be published free of charge, with the source code available for anyone to use and modify.The cascading effect of this is to create a collection of software that cannot be owned by anyone.
I am not sure if this is the same as saying that GPL is there to ensure that free software is owned by everybody, but that is not relevant.
Scientifically, I don't think that there is anything tangible on earth which doesn't belong to somebody. Any tangible item is property of someone and is owned. Just by the very biological nature of humans and mamals in general. We all are in a constant fight to defend and protect what we perceive as being our property, my own body is my property, what I eat is my property and what I work for and collect as the fruits of my laboer with the goal to feed myself is my property.
I do see IP and patents and trademarks just a way to convert intangible collections of thoughts and ideas in something, which has for a specific time period the qualities of property, so that profit for your labor into intangible thought processes can be collected.
Communism has proven that property as a whole given to the whole of the population doesn't mean there is no property or that property is owned by nobody. It just says that it is distributed by a party representing the whole of the population back to the whole population. It replaces the individual freedom of a person to collect property and accumulate property with distributing the collective property as the whole owned by the whole population back to them.
This process takes away one very basic freedom, one which Lincoln and the forefathers certainly would never have wanted to take away, namely the individual freedom of choosing to work with the goal to collect individual property.
If RMS cites Lincoln with: "Whenever there is a conflict between human rights and property rights, human rights must prevail." then I like to ask him what he thinks one of the most basic human rights is.
I happen to believe that one of the most basic human rights is equal freedom for any individual to work with the goal of collecting property to ensure his survival. Actually that's exactly what Lincoln's main goal (trying to implement what the founding fathers had put in the constitution but didn't live up to), when he fought for liberation of the slaves and requesting to give them property (land through the Homestead Act, for which he asked the owners to prove it up, i.e. to work for to own it). May be I don't use the legal definition and terminology of human and property rights according to the books, but I do think that I use them in their true meaning.
Lincoln in defense of the freedom of people just amended the (not so flawless) constitution of the forefathers to ensure that true freedom for everybody really prevails in enforcing equal property rights.
So to me the quotes from Lincoln by RMS don't support his thought process of ensuring freedom and human rights through GPL, in making sure that free software can't be owned by anyone or that free software must be owned by everybody as a collective.
RMS further says:
But defenselessness is not the American Way. In the land of the brave and the free, we defend our freedom with the GNU GPL.
May be you defend some freedoms with GPL, but you certainly don't defend the freedom to work and collect property with the GPL. One of the most basic freedoms Lincoln stood for.
As Abraham Lincoln put it, "Whenever there is a conflict between human rights and property rights, human rights must prevail."
I don't know in which context Lincoln said this, but I do believe that phrase was formed because a human being (a slave) was considered property of another human being (slaveholder). This only proves that by the very nature of our biological existence a human body is always owned by the person living in that body.
I don't know any animal which doesn't thrive, defend and fights for his property against another animal for survival. Humans do the same. No theoretical scheme of collective ownership of all tangible and intangible values will be able to supercede that basic natural (defined in our genetic make-up) principle. That's were I see a basic contradiction to nature itself in what RMS apparently stands for.
Just my 0.02 c of non technical thoughts to RMS' thinking.
-------- Nature to be commanded, must be obeyed. -- Francis Bacon
correction: sorry for misusing the expression "open source world" with regards to dmoz, I guess I wanted to say broadly the best of transparency and openess vis a vis archiving and classification of web content by the public.
What speaks against a cooperation between Google, the LOC and dmoz ? Anything to put it under a wider umbrella of supervision than just rely on "trust" the "good will" of google ?
Basically these three entities all want only the best for those archives to happen. No one so far has shown any signs why their good intentions couldn't be trusted, plus they are all very professional and they would represent a check and balance of each others intentions. dmoz would represent the best of the open source world, google the best of technical geekdom and LOC the best and most unbiased governmental input you could wish for. Of have you ever doubted the LOC's committment to the first amendment ?
I can understand that concern (being not a U.S. citizen myself and knowing that LOC asks license fees for access to certain database tapes from any "customer" outside the U.S, meaning that the IP for certain subject classification data is not available at no cost in foreign countries), but is within the U.S, if I am not mistaken.
I nevertheless think it would be the best solution, as only the LOC has the archiving and classification power to handle those archives professionally. I would suggest that governments other than the U.S. come into a cooperating agreements and support (financially) worldwide mirroring and access at no cost for anybody.
There is no upfront proof that a commercial group will abuse its power more than the government or vice versa and no proof that hacker gods as a whole are any more saints than any other group of human beings, be it in form of a government agency or a commercial entity. What counts is which group is legally the most regulated body to serve the people's will, reflected in a democratically elected, representative government.
So, the only question really to solve is, who and how should abuse from ANY group be prevented. The only answer to me is a democratically elected government agency, who has to obey the people's vote. There is unfortunately nothing better. And if your legal system or constitution stinks and is basically not serving the common people's human and civil rights properly, then it's a political question to be solved by the people and not by a group of geeks, business men or misguided government agents.
This always ends up as a triangle war between governmental, commercial and technology entities. I just wonder why you think ethical and moral issues can't be abused by each of the three equally badly or in other words, why anyone of these groups is better suited to protect the people from its own technological, obviously almost uncontrollable innovations.
This is an interesting post to me with regards to another story discussed on /., namely the future
of usenet's archives, owned by google and possibly coming under control of the Library of Congress.
I imagine the author would have posted this on a usenent newsgroup and the LOC would be the future owner of the usenet archives and of usenet's servers.
How important and necessary do you judge the content of this post for archiving purposes and what do you think is more important to protect with regards to the poster's rights and the public's rights (privacy, equal access, freedom of speech, IP)
a. the posting's content in itself
b. the anonymity of the poster
c. the importance of the poster's right for x-no-archives request
d. the importance of the poster's right for nuking his post out of the archives.
All these questions I have, under the assumption that the post would have been made to a public forum owned by the public (i.e. LOC) versus posting the same content in the same manner on usenet, whose archives would be owned by a commercial company. It would be easily imaginable that the archives could be sold, for example, to the company in question (Shunhawk.com) in this article.
I agree with you on the "washed" version. What is there now, should be kept "as is". That is a historical documentation of what really happened.
But I do think that a thorough "brainstorming" session is needed to decide how usenet is handled in the future. As for sociological research, I believe, the whole research is already on its way to be useless, because thousands of people just post to incite responds in order to see "how the society is reacting". It's already an experiment in the hands of sociologist and nothing much natural anymore about it. You just might find enough willing posters who are aware of it and NEVERTHELESS play the game with you together, because it's just fun. The guinea pigs are aware what's being tested in them and their reaction is already "tailored" and therefore the results "skewed".
In general I am not that ambivalent about the need for x-no-archives requests to be respected, especially not, if I know that any little company can open up a forum and deny posters x-no-archives and nuking requests, but are happily making the archives available for any person to search and misuse.
But if all the newsservers would really be owned by the public and not by companies, I could possibly agree to wave my x-no-archive rights, hoping that a regulation about it would be decision upon a democratic vote of the public.
At the moment I feel that the traces a poster has left in the archives can too easily haunt someone. It encourages "profiling" of a poster and can be abused. Privacy of posters was not at all protected backwards for years and years. I do feel that many people were not aware when they posted for what purposes these archives could be used in the future. I think that it is even more important to realize that, considering that the archives are owned by commercial companies. I don't know if newsservers owned and maintained by LOC would respect privacy and allow AC posts.
I could imagine that the government would hesitate to allow AC posts, but I don't know. The whole thing seems to be a war between two mutual exclusive desires, the protection of your privacy in longterm archives (achieved through AC posts) and the fact that you are using a public forum for which you could argue that privacy rights are given away as soon as you post.
I don't know which rights are more important and which ones should supercede the other. If usenet would be under the protection of something like LOC, I believe more people would realize (and actually for that reason be more conscious about what the say and how they same something) that "you are really posting for the public and for the archives". Can't help that thinking this post, would it be archived for the next ten years or so at LOCs servers, makes me at least a bit more respectful for the work of the archivers and think twice, if I should continue with mumbling my opinions straight out of the blue.
sorry for the many spelling and grammar mistakes of my previous post.
Just the contrary, that's exactly what I hoped would be accomplished, if LOC would get involved.
... chinese government:-). To me it would seem to be the best thing which could happen, if LOC could be asked to become owner of those archives. This is in order to protect those archives and the posting rights of the posters from any biased group. This is also to make them available at no cost to the public, and protect them from being distroyed or misused.
Everybody says usenet is a public forum, but the medium on which the forum were uphold and their public speech recorded, was never public. Not all the newsservers and connections were government owned and paid by people's tax dollars.
The usenet archives collected by deja news, the data, are owned by a commercial company. They can decide whatever they want to do with them, the IP value of the posts is neglible, but the monetary value of a complete set of data of all archived posts is high. The fact that deja-nes.com originally treated the data from usenet groups the way oldtime usenet users were expecting them to be handled, doesn't mean that they couldn't have done differently.
I used to use deja-news.com since early 1997. At that time deja-news.com was still ok, but usenet itself was a pretty mess. Many technical worthy groups were complaining about serious flamewars and thousands of useless posts. Old usenet users were whining and crying out for the good ol' times, when men were real hackers and did their business "among themselves". Deja-news.com was respecting poster's right for nuking their posts out of the archives, something which I consider a right, which needs to be protected, as well as posters x-no-archive requests.
Later, when deja-news.com turned into deja.com, the whole thing became more commercial. Now, as they can't make a profit, it's sold. The new owner can do whatever they want with the archives. Who guarantees you that they don't go down the drain in a year from now and sell the archives to the
If usenet is supposedly to be a public forum, then the public should own the archives of this forum and LOC should get involved and protect those archives for the public. At least then for the first time the archives of a "quasi public forum" would also be owned by the public and the regulations about how to handle the archives is under democratic rules determined by the tax payer and voters.
Why you conclude that a commercial company is more prone to respect those rights to nuke, x-no-archive etc than LOC, who is funded by tax payer's money, I don't understand. The public is posting, so the public can demand that LOC respects those rights.
Contrary, any commercial company would want to archive EVERYTHING against the will of the posters to collect larger archives.
LOC's involvement could be very well the best which could happen, because they would be the most unbiased and most professional archivers.
I would understand if you would say LOC might be the toughest cataloger, because contrary to any open/free source zealots, they are possibly courageous enough to classify and discriminate content while cataloging. That's what librarians usually use their brain for, but of course, I hear already thousands of kids screaming "no, I want my 0.02 cents worth of flamewar/porn archived til the next millenium". If you could fear something from the LOC than it might be their professional scrutiny towards what they consider content worth archiving. I doubt that they would trash anything which is worth to keep, certainly not all the historically important archives of the beginning eighties and the like.