Batman would have a natural upper hand on Superman, based on his background.
You'd think that, but Superman's had a history of dealing with an uber-rich mentally distrubed person, who used to be a good friend of his (Luthor).
Batman, on the other hand, doesn't have a single "foe" of Superman's caliber. The ordinary psychologial effects he relies on simply won't work against Superman...
But to address your point... Yes, the auto industry does make a mint on after-market touch-up paints. This is why they use yellow plastic on all dark cars, and black plastic on all light colored cars... So when the paint chips, it's obvious, and you have to go and drop either $30k on a new car, or at least $5 on a bottle of nail polish for your bumpers. It's quite literally, highway robbery.
the paint on a car serves a real, honest-to-goodness purpose in keeping the environment away from the metal. Since cars are predominately iron, they rust--and rusted cars lose just about everything (asthetics, looks, etc) very quickly.
'course, beasts the heck out of me why they bother with the plastic-paints... ah, well. (Oh, and you forgot the $500 to just get the whole car repainted.)
If I could buy a car that would fix itself for years to come, I would. Why buy a new one every 3-5 years as we're required to now since all the damn parts break...
Huh?
There is no "planned obsolesence" in the automotive industry. There's simply real economic choices, and maintenance fees.
Every vehicle I've seen owned by a private citizen could be serviced by said private citizen for quite some time to come. Heck, only my parents (computer geeks both) have cars that aren't older than 1998--five year old models.
Oh, and you can get cars with "monthy service fees" right now; get a leased car with a maintenance agreement.
To be quite honest, if I'm still waiting for a Photoshop render, or a level to load in RTCW, our machines aren't ready to think.
Stop. Now, picture EVERY detail of a RTCW map. The textures, the physics, and the exact (not estimated) dimensions of all of the objects.
Took you more than five seconds, right? And if I were to look at a refernence map of the same map you imagined, you'd have to "think" again to get the details I ask for--assuming that you have perfect memory.
Contrast this with the behavior of the bots in RTCW. IANAFPSD, (First Person Shooter Developer) but I suspect that the "bot code" and the "map code" reside in two different spots of the program, and talk no more than word and winamp do.
Computers will think when admining them is "idiotproof"--and when we can make an idiot-bot. I say take Clippy, teach him how Windows works, and make him an administrator!
Yes, but I'm certain that Billy gives them absolutely no creative control over anything, and balances it with hideous salaries. As a result, they stick around and work on "MS approved" projects.
"Creative Control?"
MS is a software shop, not a comic book store. Their whole business model rests on having everything work together--"creativity", as wonderful as it is, tends to butt heads with other examples of creativity.
I suspect (I won't claim to be "certain" and, unless you're an insider, I don't think you should either) that MS has a set company policy where anyone, from BillG to a mail clerk, can submit a new idea. If the idea's good enough, it'll be made into a new product, or folded into an existing product.
Besides which, getting an idea--or just "being creative"--is easy. Following through on an idea to its completion--any idea--is a harder task, which is more than enough challenge for the brightest minds in the industry.
If you doubt me, well, look at how long the HURD is taking. Great idea, but getting it to work has, apparantly, been a PITA.
MS's problems are predatory business practices and marketing-controlled engineering. The engineers and coders themselves are, by all accounts I've ever heard, very skilled and competent--they're just given a rather torrid working environment.
Depends on MS's purpose in hiring them. It may be that as long as MS can keep the best talent from working for somebody else, it doesn't matter whether they actually produce anything at all.
What?
If a corporation spends a sufficient ammount of money for someone, they're certainly going to put them to work. If they don't produce anything, they probably get fired--and if they produce something that can make MS $, they probably get some sort of bonus.
"Buy to sit on" makes sense for patents, copyrights, and trademarks--but not for people.
different people have very different ideas as to what Natural Laws should be.
Care to name an example?
I think a better way to approach the argument is to hold out what "peoples" think, not simply "people." Anyone can think differently--but if a lot of people think something, then its worth ethical consideration.
I would prefer that such laws as do exist be based on notions of common law, rather than executive law. i would prefer that law is "discovered" through a process of arbitration of juries and judge, rather than enacted by politicians (invented). I would prefer laws to be simple, and on the more dubious and arguable issues, I would prefer there to be no law at all (such as this issue, for example).
Ah, pure common law. AFAIK, even the earliest conventions of common law are based on some decrees--the right of property, the rule of the king, and the ten comandments come to mind.
Written law has one big advantage over common law, so big that it makes sense to convert common law to written law once it's agreed upon: Written law is organized. Common law is not.
(I've had a few already so I apologise for any incosistencies or stupidities in this post:)
Hmm... drinking AND posting on/. Interesting combination.
You are incorrect (sadly.) THere are plenty of people who advocate a "whatever works for you" lifestyle, bar nothing. Total moral relativism. That frightens me, when i look around at the morals (or lack thereof) of some people
Beat one of them up, perferabbly mentally, and see how they react.
If the words "that's wrong" or "why did you do that" ever come out of their mouth, I am proven right.
In my experience, every last person who has advocated an "anything goes" lifestyle is rebelling against something--and they fail to think their philosiphy through.
How many times do I have to pay for what is essentially MY SOFTWARE since MY MONEY paid to create it ?
Do you complain if the waitress whom you tipped buys crack with your tip money? Or something else that you're offended by? After all, it was your money that paid for it....
The federal government's funds are not "your money" or "my money." They're "our money," and we elect a president, two senators and a representative to see that OUR MONEY gets spent in the way that best helps "us."
Copyright is only constitutional in the US as long as it creates an incentive to create more works. Since software written for a government contract is going to be written whether there is coyright or not, there is no new incentive created. Therefore, prosecuting someone for copying and selling software written under government contract is unconstitutional.
Hardly. Copyright creates a general state where creative works are profitable. There's no compelling reason why government-funded projects cannot create copyright; if there were, the national endowment for the arts would be unconstitional in its very idea.
Now, since as a society we seem to have collectively decided to ignore that document, maybe constitutionality has no bearing.
No, we haven't. We don't recite it every morning or study it every sunday, but we do keep it in mind as the defining element of the federal government.
But if you buy into that constitution stuff, the government can't release it under the GPL because that's a copyrighted license; they can only simply release it. However, including any part of it into a proprietary work, or making a derived work from it, may also place that work outside the scope of copyrightable material.
If a work cannot be copywritten, then any derivitive work made from that is evalutated on its owm merits.
As far as the law goes, a translation of "Dantes Inferno" might as well be an original work.
Just because your upbringing has encouraged monogamy, doesn't mean that should be enforced upon the entire population.
Spoken like a true wannabe polygamist. (And you meant "forced", not "enforced." If it was "enforced," that would imply that there was an extant applicable rule--which there is, but you don't help you argument by bringing it up.)
I do not think that the question of monogomy v. polygamy / polyamory is a moral one--the moral is that once a nuptial relationship has been agreed upon, it is Wrong to breach that arrangement.
A harem wife Should Not sneak an affair with the harem guard. A marriage is a marriage--and if you aren't up to that commitment, then don't get married in the first place.
(Side note: Can you kindly name the number of extant world powers that still endorse polygamy? I'm having a hard time thinking of even one...)
I was talking about enforcing this morality via the mechanism of the state and its laws and institutions. That's what we should be careful of, especially regarding borderline cases like this.
Quite a tricky situation. The laws of any land should be willing to flex for cultural differences (NYS allows marriage as young as age 12 with four-parent consent) while still protecting its citizens (ritual sacrafice and blood killings given no more leniance than a cold-blooded killing.)
And given that your morality is not the same as mine, and given that there is no absolute morality, we can then see that there are many problems with seeking to use the state to solve these problems.
But there is an abolute, common morality. Murder is wrong. Stealing is wrong. Infidelity is wrong. Where we run into problems is on the exceptions (when is killing a person not murder?) and the items that our common moral heritage doesn't cover (Should we go to the moon? Should we allow homosexuality?)
Our legal problems arise when people take their personal bias, call it "moral", and try and legislate it into existance--which isn't the right way to work at all.
Also, I am sorry you found my use of "Who's" offensive, but English is not quite my native language, gaelic is, and I foten make mistakes even now. I can speak it far better than I write it. I'm almost-native, I suppose. Bye:-)
I'm not offended; you did not insult me. I was simply correcting an all-too-common error. It's like if you said that Albany's north of Schenecteady, and I corrected you that it was south.
As for gaelic--coolness! My wife always wanted to learn Gaelic.
Morality is an abstract term, not a title worn by any individual or group of people--
no, wait, you meant "whose morality"!
and instead trust in common deceny and responsibility.
That's morality, Lover's Arrival, The. Mayhap you're mistaking dogma or exception for morality? Or more likely, you're confusing morality with bigotism.
Re:Is it just me...
on
Blogger Hacked
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I have to wonder what kind of life someone must lead when an attack on their favorite website is as traumatic as the events of that day.
One outside of NYC, obviously.
9/11 may have been horrible and dastardly and evil and all--but "tramatic" it was not for me or anyone within a hundred miles of where I am, exempting those few who lost relatives.
a la Monopoly, where there is a limit on the total cash involved
Not by design, and not (IIRC) in the offical rules.
Each player who gets around once gets $200, almost every time they get to "GO." It's plausible to imagine a long monopoly game where bidding gets higher and higher and higher, and the prices simply skyrocket beyond what's listed. (Doing so would require some imaginative playing, though...)
Because, before a dead body is placed in the ground we pump it full of chemicals that would be leathal if they weren't dead, and we bury folk in concrete vaults.
We have doctors with EKGs, along with diagnosis of paralysis, comas, and narcolepsy. People used to just fall over and get buried if they didn't get up; we know better now.
The only folk who have to worry about being buried alive are the undead and the TV-superheros who hunt them--both of which can happily manage to claw their way out of even the toughest graves, so no special precautions are necessary.
At work we recieved in-kind donations of services on a semi-regular basis.
We recognize the value of any donation--cash, goods, or services. Cash is cash, goods and services, if the kind of thing that we would have to pay for in our ordinary course of business, are recognized at what we would have to pay for them.
AFAIK, for tax purposes any donation you make, cash or noncash, is treated as a cash gift. I.e., they assume that you are paid for the good, and that you donate your payment back to them.
Morally, you shouldn't have to actually pay anything tax-wise for volunteering, but you shouldn't necessarily gain any tax benefits from it, either.
This situation brought itself to bear a few years ago, when I learned that a friend of mine was donating not only his time, but also hard $$$ for server space for his favorite charity. What, if anything would he be able to write-off? He uses the server for other projects, so not 100% is for the charity.
Any accountant-geeks out there?
IANAA-G, but if the server is set up to regulary handle other accounts, he could probably get by with marking the cost of a server account as a donation, as well as what someone would pay him for to do the same job for them.
Just document everything, talk to your accountant, and be honest. You're paying the bloke to save you money so as to justify their fee, so let them worry about it.
1: Having a 'shell' line in windows so a savy user can pick their own shell.
2: XP service pack 1, with its "set program access and settings" button.
the chances of MS not taking this opportunity to obfuscate data are very very slim indeed.
MS doesn't have a real good reason to take extra opportunity to "obfuscate" anything. They can just not worry about compatability when they don't need to, and the "obfuscation" will take care of itself.
Media Companies, Communications Companies, Oil Companies...they all yell about how new technologies will ruin their business models and how they need to be protected!
Media Companies: The "new technologies" aren't competting, they're by and large stealing. I have yet to hear a quote from RIAA saying "No one should be able to make their own digital music."
Communications Companies: It's a basic infrastructure, so deserving of bailouts to keep the system up. Replacement systems, by and large, have been unreliable.
Oil Companies: It can be said that we go to war to protect our fuel supply, but we have yet to go to war to keep fuel cells or efficient engines out of the market. Oil & other fossil fuels win now because of economy, not governmental fiat.
Governments exist to protect the people, not to forward corporate interests. I'm so sick and tired of companies using legal bull shit to protect their business model. Why don't we have bloody subsidies for horse shoers?
We do. They're just so rare that they aren't called "horse shoers." Look for "living history" or "farming."
'sides which, horses have become a luxury item--which means that those horse shoers which do exist in the economy can charge luxury rates for their service.
Have you seen the HTML produced by the current "Save as webpage.." options in Word? shudder. The vast majority of semantics are actually embedded in XML islands hidden inside HTML comments. I see no reason why Microsoft would change their tune now (they'll simply change the DTD from one inappropriate document model to another one IMHO).
Those are there so you can "round trip" a file from doc/xls/ppt to ms-htm and back, without losing all of your MS-only formatting.
MS has a utility, which I use on a regular basis at work to strip out the HTML for you. It's called HTML filter
XML, unlike HTML, actually can express everything that office does. MS will use it 99%, possibly adding their 1% extra back into the spec, and let their penetration and familiarity secure their market share.
Trust me--if MS can get Wordperfect 2004 to use XML to "keep up," they'll be able to beat out their last real competitor in the few markets were it's still entrenched. The biggest problem with MS Word has been roundtrips to Wordperfect; XML can solve that problem if done properly, far better than HTML can.
I'm sorry, you don't appear to have a StandardsEnhanced(tm) word processor.
--
Not going to happen. I could cut and paste some code from a MS-Office HTML file right into this slashbox, and you'd be able to read it just fine. (assuming the lameness filter doesn't get me first.)
therefore I don't see how it would be illegal to bring those copies into the country.
Assume it isn't, just for fun. Sure, you could legally have a friend print you out a dozen different books and ship them to do you in print--but that'd be more expensive than just tracking down their ISBNs and ordering them from your bookseller (or even Amazon.)
Now, let's pretend that it is illegal. Let's say that you get a scheme where you print books offshore en masse, and then bring them into the US to sell them--oops, you're a big target now, and the people who hold the copyright will take you to court.
And in court, you can either capitulate and admit that you just wanted to undercut their market--or make the claim that they weren't selling the books for no good reason, and get the judge to command you to give the copyright holder a fair royalty and for them to license out the right to sell the book.
Somehow I doubt that extranational copyright differneces are going to be that much of a problem--and I doubt that copyright is going to have a very "chilling" effect on real creativity.
Corporations do NOT have a LEGAL duty to maximize the profits of shareholders.
The CEO of a corporation--the person hired by the stockholders who in turn hires everyone else--has a fiduciary responsiblity to act in the best interest of the shareholder's, which means maximizing their investment. CEOs can be had have been sued in US civil court for making decisions that hinder the profits of stockholders.
However, there may be times when a person's own morals and maximizing profits may be in opposition. In those cases, that person is forced to make a choice between following their morals and towing the party line.
The proper method is to illustrate how moral behavior leads to higher long-term profits in the form of goodwill, community involvement, and not getting sued. If that doesn't work, look for another job if you can'd do what your contract calls upon you to do.
Often times this happens on a very small scale, and usually aren't straightforward, line in the sand kinds of things.
It's always straightforward, in the end. Some things just require you to actually understand your priorities.
Maybe you work at a chemical company whose environmental policy isn't really as sound as you would consider appropriate.
Then either convince the stockholders that a cleaner policy is in their best intrest, convince to government to force them to change, or look for a different job.
Maybe you ship products with a known problem because they've already been manufactured and the problem won't show up under most normal use.
Unless the "known problem" is dangerous, that's an acceptable choice. If my Game Boy shatters at -40 below, I make damn sure that the operating temperature is nowhere near 40 below.
In a corporate environment, document the problem and make sure that the Decision Makers are fully informed--jumping management's heads if you need to.
Maybe you work espescially long hours because that's what everyone else is doing even though you really feel that you should be at home with your family.
Then accept that you'll get paid less, and choose the family--or accept that you're sacraficing family & enjoy the money. (Or just call in the feds.)
All of these are cases where we may do something slightly less than our morals would typically demand because we feel we have to. For some of us, the decisions may be more severe, such as (dare I say it) illegally manipulating financial records.
Those who jinxed the financial records were out-and-out criminals, who violated every duty that they had to society, their employees, and their stockholders. They lied instead of telling the truth, and it came down on them hard.
What most people object to is the way that they envision DRM will be implemented for digital media. They predict that instead of empowering artists, DRM will simply further protect the profits of the entrenched media companies, to the detriment of both consumers AND artists. They don't trust the media companies and don't like the prospects of forcing people into trading a general-purpose computer for a DRM-enabled media device that is built around the whole idea that the consumer is untrustworthy.
Firstly, the current security theory IS that the consumer is untrustworthy, and twenty years of fiddling and broken trusts in the computer world have given anyone and everyone a good reason to consider consumers untrustworthy.
Secondly, I haven't heard a good explination of how a Palladium (or other DRM machine) won't be a "general purpose computer."
MS is a company that's built on backwards compatability. Despite bucking the CLI way back in 1990, I can still pull one up if needs be, and I can do anything that I could do on a 3.11 or Win95 box on a shiney new 2k or XP box. MS might be sneaky, and they might be shifty, and they might lie, close the format, and ship beta software as final--but a user with a Palladium machine will be able to do everything that they've been doing with their current machines, and then some.
Things probably aren't quite that bad, but what most people who oppose DRM would agree with are two things:
1. DRM primarily (if not exclusively) benefits existing media and software conglomerates.
2. DRM Will restrict consumer rights from the comparative freedom that we have today.
So, like many who worked to split the atom, those who oppose DRM don't morally object to the technology itself, they morally object to what it will be used to do.
Sounds like a fair and reasonalbe statement--aside from that I think some of the "rights" users think they have now should go away, just like the "right" to duel or philander or own slaves went away.
It would be like taking Ford to court because I transported a bomb in my car and committed a terrorist act using it.
A car is registered, visible, and exists in the real world.
Napster et al are not registered, have barely legal purposes, and regardless of whatever morals their proponents claim, most users use them for copyright infringement.
A better example than automobiles are VCRs. What if, rather than recording TV shows to watch them later, VCR users all used their machines to copy rented tapes and trade them without paying the people who made the movie anything.
I doubt that the courts would have ruled that the machine had "significant noninfringing uses," even if there were small movie studios who enjoyed the skewed market they now recieved.
(I tried to look at furthur.net, but it didn't connect and google came up 0 hits. Can you supply a link?)
Not to knitpick, but in this case the artists don't have a right to control who can copy their work. The copyright holders do. The copyright holders are not the artists. They're the record companies.
And the record companies only hold copyright because it was sold to them by the artists, in exchange for a royalty and not needing to worry about the business of selling music so they can focus on the art of making it. What power a label has is only because the major names in any genere support it; sort of like a lawyer having power only because some rich slob pays him.
(And artists even have federal & state protections against making bad deals--something that doesn't come up very often in other industries.)
There are plenty of reasons to feel sorry for artists given the current state of the industry. However most of them don't stem from p2p, they stem from the actions of the RIAA and the virtual distribution/promotion monopoly that is collectively held by their members.
True. And the best way to solve that is a popular, legal, opt-in system where anyone with copyright control can sell their music online.
Slashdot Mirror
Batman would have a natural upper hand on Superman, based on his background.
You'd think that, but Superman's had a history of dealing with an uber-rich mentally distrubed person, who used to be a good friend of his (Luthor).
Batman, on the other hand, doesn't have a single "foe" of Superman's caliber. The ordinary psychologial effects he relies on simply won't work against Superman...
Actually I don't think they can (counter-sue) because the libel or slander was made as part of a legal claim (ironic).
IANAL--but everytime you're sued in a civil court, you can counter-sue.
You can only rarely "countersue" CRIMINAL cases--where you're being charged by the government, not some private corporation.
But to address your point... Yes, the auto industry does make a mint on after-market touch-up paints. This is why they use yellow plastic on all dark cars, and black plastic on all light colored cars... So when the paint chips, it's obvious, and you have to go and drop either $30k on a new car, or at least $5 on a bottle of nail polish for your bumpers. It's quite literally, highway robbery.
the paint on a car serves a real, honest-to-goodness purpose in keeping the environment away from the metal. Since cars are predominately iron, they rust--and rusted cars lose just about everything (asthetics, looks, etc) very quickly.
'course, beasts the heck out of me why they bother with the plastic-paints... ah, well. (Oh, and you forgot the $500 to just get the whole car repainted.)
If I could buy a car that would fix itself for years to come, I would. Why buy a new one every 3-5 years as we're required to now since all the damn parts break...
Huh?
There is no "planned obsolesence" in the automotive industry. There's simply real economic choices, and maintenance fees.
Every vehicle I've seen owned by a private citizen could be serviced by said private citizen for quite some time to come. Heck, only my parents (computer geeks both) have cars that aren't older than 1998--five year old models.
Oh, and you can get cars with "monthy service fees" right now; get a leased car with a maintenance agreement.
To be quite honest, if I'm still waiting for a Photoshop render, or a level to load in RTCW, our machines aren't ready to think.
Stop. Now, picture EVERY detail of a RTCW map. The textures, the physics, and the exact (not estimated) dimensions of all of the objects.
Took you more than five seconds, right? And if I were to look at a refernence map of the same map you imagined, you'd have to "think" again to get the details I ask for--assuming that you have perfect memory.
Contrast this with the behavior of the bots in RTCW. IANAFPSD, (First Person Shooter Developer) but I suspect that the "bot code" and the "map code" reside in two different spots of the program, and talk no more than word and winamp do.
Computers will think when admining them is "idiotproof"--and when we can make an idiot-bot. I say take Clippy, teach him how Windows works, and make him an administrator!
Hmm....
I have no idea...
but I don't doubt that they did. I just doubt that MS hired people away from the competition, and then didn't put them to work.
Yes, but I'm certain that Billy gives them absolutely no creative control over anything, and balances it with hideous salaries. As a result, they stick around and work on "MS approved" projects.
"Creative Control?"
MS is a software shop, not a comic book store. Their whole business model rests on having everything work together--"creativity", as wonderful as it is, tends to butt heads with other examples of creativity.
I suspect (I won't claim to be "certain" and, unless you're an insider, I don't think you should either) that MS has a set company policy where anyone, from BillG to a mail clerk, can submit a new idea. If the idea's good enough, it'll be made into a new product, or folded into an existing product.
Besides which, getting an idea--or just "being creative"--is easy. Following through on an idea to its completion--any idea--is a harder task, which is more than enough challenge for the brightest minds in the industry.
If you doubt me, well, look at how long the HURD is taking. Great idea, but getting it to work has, apparantly, been a PITA.
MS's problems are predatory business practices and marketing-controlled engineering. The engineers and coders themselves are, by all accounts I've ever heard, very skilled and competent--they're just given a rather torrid working environment.
Depends on MS's purpose in hiring them. It may be that as long as MS can keep the best talent from working for somebody else, it doesn't matter whether they actually produce anything at all.
What?
If a corporation spends a sufficient ammount of money for someone, they're certainly going to put them to work. If they don't produce anything, they probably get fired--and if they produce something that can make MS $, they probably get some sort of bonus.
"Buy to sit on" makes sense for patents, copyrights, and trademarks--but not for people.
different people have very different ideas as to what Natural Laws should be.
/. Interesting combination.
Care to name an example?
I think a better way to approach the argument is to hold out what "peoples" think, not simply "people." Anyone can think differently--but if a lot of people think something, then its worth ethical consideration.
I would prefer that such laws as do exist be based on notions of common law, rather than executive law. i would prefer that law is "discovered" through a process of arbitration of juries and judge, rather than enacted by politicians (invented). I would prefer laws to be simple, and on the more dubious and arguable issues, I would prefer there to be no law at all (such as this issue, for example).
Ah, pure common law. AFAIK, even the earliest conventions of common law are based on some decrees--the right of property, the rule of the king, and the ten comandments come to mind.
Written law has one big advantage over common law, so big that it makes sense to convert common law to written law once it's agreed upon: Written law is organized. Common law is not.
(I've had a few already so I apologise for any incosistencies or stupidities in this post:)
Hmm... drinking AND posting on
You are incorrect (sadly.) THere are plenty of people who advocate a "whatever works for you" lifestyle, bar nothing. Total moral relativism. That frightens me, when i look around at the morals (or lack thereof) of some people
Beat one of them up, perferabbly mentally, and see how they react.
If the words "that's wrong" or "why did you do that" ever come out of their mouth, I am proven right.
In my experience, every last person who has advocated an "anything goes" lifestyle is rebelling against something--and they fail to think their philosiphy through.
How many times do I have to pay for what is essentially MY SOFTWARE since MY MONEY paid to create it ?
Do you complain if the waitress whom you tipped buys crack with your tip money? Or something else that you're offended by? After all, it was your money that paid for it....
The federal government's funds are not "your money" or "my money." They're "our money," and we elect a president, two senators and a representative to see that OUR MONEY gets spent in the way that best helps "us."
Copyright is only constitutional in the US as long as it creates an incentive to create more works. Since software written for a government contract is going to be written whether there is coyright or not, there is no new incentive created. Therefore, prosecuting someone for copying and selling software written under government contract is unconstitutional.
Hardly. Copyright creates a general state where creative works are profitable. There's no compelling reason why government-funded projects cannot create copyright; if there were, the national endowment for the arts would be unconstitional in its very idea.
Now, since as a society we seem to have collectively decided to ignore that document, maybe constitutionality has no bearing.
No, we haven't. We don't recite it every morning or study it every sunday, but we do keep it in mind as the defining element of the federal government.
But if you buy into that constitution stuff, the government can't release it under the GPL because that's a copyrighted license; they can only simply release it. However, including any part of it into a proprietary work, or making a derived work from it, may also place that work outside the scope of copyrightable material.
If a work cannot be copywritten, then any derivitive work made from that is evalutated on its owm merits.
As far as the law goes, a translation of "Dantes Inferno" might as well be an original work.
So where do Harem's fit into this?
Harems are polygamous marriages.
Just because your upbringing has encouraged monogamy, doesn't mean that should be enforced upon the entire population.
Spoken like a true wannabe polygamist. (And you meant "forced", not "enforced." If it was "enforced," that would imply that there was an extant applicable rule--which there is, but you don't help you argument by bringing it up.)
I do not think that the question of monogomy v. polygamy / polyamory is a moral one--the moral is that once a nuptial relationship has been agreed upon, it is Wrong to breach that arrangement.
A harem wife Should Not sneak an affair with the harem guard. A marriage is a marriage--and if you aren't up to that commitment, then don't get married in the first place.
(Side note: Can you kindly name the number of extant world powers that still endorse polygamy? I'm having a hard time thinking of even one...)
I was talking about enforcing this morality via the mechanism of the state and its laws and institutions. That's what we should be careful of, especially regarding borderline cases like this.
:-)
Quite a tricky situation. The laws of any land should be willing to flex for cultural differences (NYS allows marriage as young as age 12 with four-parent consent) while still protecting its citizens (ritual sacrafice and blood killings given no more leniance than a cold-blooded killing.)
And given that your morality is not the same as mine, and given that there is no absolute morality, we can then see that there are many problems with seeking to use the state to solve these problems.
But there is an abolute, common morality. Murder is wrong. Stealing is wrong. Infidelity is wrong. Where we run into problems is on the exceptions (when is killing a person not murder?) and the items that our common moral heritage doesn't cover (Should we go to the moon? Should we allow homosexuality?)
Our legal problems arise when people take their personal bias, call it "moral", and try and legislate it into existance--which isn't the right way to work at all.
Also, I am sorry you found my use of "Who's" offensive, but English is not quite my native language, gaelic is, and I foten make mistakes even now. I can speak it far better than I write it. I'm almost-native, I suppose. Bye
I'm not offended; you did not insult me. I was simply correcting an all-too-common error. It's like if you said that Albany's north of Schenecteady, and I corrected you that it was south.
As for gaelic--coolness! My wife always wanted to learn Gaelic.
"Who's Morality?".
Morality is an abstract term, not a title worn by any individual or group of people--
no, wait, you meant "whose morality"!
and instead trust in common deceny and responsibility.
That's morality, Lover's Arrival, The. Mayhap you're mistaking dogma or exception for morality? Or more likely, you're confusing morality with bigotism.
I have to wonder what kind of life someone must lead when an attack on their favorite website is as traumatic as the events of that day.
One outside of NYC, obviously.
9/11 may have been horrible and dastardly and evil and all--but "tramatic" it was not for me or anyone within a hundred miles of where I am, exempting those few who lost relatives.
a la Monopoly, where there is a limit on the total cash involved
Not by design, and not (IIRC) in the offical rules.
Each player who gets around once gets $200, almost every time they get to "GO." It's plausible to imagine a long monopoly game where bidding gets higher and higher and higher, and the prices simply skyrocket beyond what's listed. (Doing so would require some imaginative playing, though...)
Why is this a bad idea now?
Because, before a dead body is placed in the ground we pump it full of chemicals that would be leathal if they weren't dead, and we bury folk in concrete vaults.
We have doctors with EKGs, along with diagnosis of paralysis, comas, and narcolepsy. People used to just fall over and get buried if they didn't get up; we know better now.
The only folk who have to worry about being buried alive are the undead and the TV-superheros who hunt them--both of which can happily manage to claw their way out of even the toughest graves, so no special precautions are necessary.
I have the funny idea that the US should care of their own business and let those countries alone..
We put Saddam Hussain there. He is our business.
At work we recieved in-kind donations of services on a semi-regular basis.
We recognize the value of any donation--cash, goods, or services. Cash is cash, goods and services, if the kind of thing that we would have to pay for in our ordinary course of business, are recognized at what we would have to pay for them.
AFAIK, for tax purposes any donation you make, cash or noncash, is treated as a cash gift. I.e., they assume that you are paid for the good, and that you donate your payment back to them.
Morally, you shouldn't have to actually pay anything tax-wise for volunteering, but you shouldn't necessarily gain any tax benefits from it, either.
This situation brought itself to bear a few years ago, when I learned that a friend of mine was donating not only his time, but also hard $$$ for server space for his favorite charity. What, if anything would he be able to write-off? He uses the server for other projects, so not 100% is for the charity.
Any accountant-geeks out there?
IANAA-G, but if the server is set up to regulary handle other accounts, he could probably get by with marking the cost of a server account as a donation, as well as what someone would pay him for to do the same job for them.
Just document everything, talk to your accountant, and be honest. You're paying the bloke to save you money so as to justify their fee, so let them worry about it.
One example, anyone?
How about two?
1: Having a 'shell' line in windows so a savy user can pick their own shell.
2: XP service pack 1, with its "set program access and settings" button.
the chances of MS not taking this opportunity to obfuscate data are very very slim indeed.
MS doesn't have a real good reason to take extra opportunity to "obfuscate" anything. They can just not worry about compatability when they don't need to, and the "obfuscation" will take care of itself.
Media Companies, Communications Companies, Oil Companies...they all yell about how new technologies will ruin their business models and how they need to be protected!
Media Companies: The "new technologies" aren't competting, they're by and large stealing. I have yet to hear a quote from RIAA saying "No one should be able to make their own digital music."
Communications Companies: It's a basic infrastructure, so deserving of bailouts to keep the system up. Replacement systems, by and large, have been unreliable.
Oil Companies: It can be said that we go to war to protect our fuel supply, but we have yet to go to war to keep fuel cells or efficient engines out of the market. Oil & other fossil fuels win now because of economy, not governmental fiat.
Governments exist to protect the people, not to forward corporate interests. I'm so sick and tired of companies using legal bull shit to protect their business model. Why don't we have bloody subsidies for horse shoers?
We do. They're just so rare that they aren't called "horse shoers." Look for "living history" or "farming."
'sides which, horses have become a luxury item--which means that those horse shoers which do exist in the economy can charge luxury rates for their service.
Have you seen the HTML produced by the current "Save as webpage .." options in Word? shudder. The vast majority of semantics are actually embedded in XML islands hidden inside HTML comments. I see no reason why Microsoft would change their tune now (they'll simply change the DTD from one inappropriate document model to another one IMHO).
Those are there so you can "round trip" a file from doc/xls/ppt to ms-htm and back, without losing all of your MS-only formatting.
MS has a utility, which I use on a regular basis at work to strip out the HTML for you. It's called HTML filter
(Go to http://www.mvps.org/word/ for more useful bits about word.)
XML, unlike HTML, actually can express everything that office does. MS will use it 99%, possibly adding their 1% extra back into the spec, and let their penetration and familiarity secure their market share.
Trust me--if MS can get Wordperfect 2004 to use XML to "keep up," they'll be able to beat out their last real competitor in the few markets were it's still entrenched. The biggest problem with MS Word has been roundtrips to Wordperfect; XML can solve that problem if done properly, far better than HTML can.
I'm sorry, you don't appear to have a StandardsEnhanced(tm) word processor.
--
Not going to happen. I could cut and paste some code from a MS-Office HTML file right into this slashbox, and you'd be able to read it just fine. (assuming the lameness filter doesn't get me first.)
therefore I don't see how it would be illegal to bring those copies into the country.
Assume it isn't, just for fun. Sure, you could legally have a friend print you out a dozen different books and ship them to do you in print--but that'd be more expensive than just tracking down their ISBNs and ordering them from your bookseller (or even Amazon.)
Now, let's pretend that it is illegal. Let's say that you get a scheme where you print books offshore en masse, and then bring them into the US to sell them--oops, you're a big target now, and the people who hold the copyright will take you to court.
And in court, you can either capitulate and admit that you just wanted to undercut their market--or make the claim that they weren't selling the books for no good reason, and get the judge to command you to give the copyright holder a fair royalty and for them to license out the right to sell the book.
Somehow I doubt that extranational copyright differneces are going to be that much of a problem--and I doubt that copyright is going to have a very "chilling" effect on real creativity.
Corporations do NOT have a LEGAL duty to maximize the profits of shareholders.
The CEO of a corporation--the person hired by the stockholders who in turn hires everyone else--has a fiduciary responsiblity to act in the best interest of the shareholder's, which means maximizing their investment. CEOs can be had have been sued in US civil court for making decisions that hinder the profits of stockholders.
However, there may be times when a person's own morals and maximizing profits may be in opposition. In those cases, that person is forced to make a choice between following their morals and towing the party line.
The proper method is to illustrate how moral behavior leads to higher long-term profits in the form of goodwill, community involvement, and not getting sued. If that doesn't work, look for another job if you can'd do what your contract calls upon you to do.
Often times this happens on a very small scale, and usually aren't straightforward, line in the sand kinds of things.
It's always straightforward, in the end. Some things just require you to actually understand your priorities.
Maybe you work at a chemical company whose environmental policy isn't really as sound as you would consider appropriate.
Then either convince the stockholders that a cleaner policy is in their best intrest, convince to government to force them to change, or look for a different job.
Maybe you ship products with a known problem because they've already been manufactured and the problem won't show up under most normal use.
Unless the "known problem" is dangerous, that's an acceptable choice. If my Game Boy shatters at -40 below, I make damn sure that the operating temperature is nowhere near 40 below.
In a corporate environment, document the problem and make sure that the Decision Makers are fully informed--jumping management's heads if you need to.
Maybe you work espescially long hours because that's what everyone else is doing even though you really feel that you should be at home with your family.
Then accept that you'll get paid less, and choose the family--or accept that you're sacraficing family & enjoy the money. (Or just call in the feds.)
All of these are cases where we may do something slightly less than our morals would typically demand because we feel we have to. For some of us, the decisions may be more severe, such as (dare I say it) illegally manipulating financial records.
Those who jinxed the financial records were out-and-out criminals, who violated every duty that they had to society, their employees, and their stockholders. They lied instead of telling the truth, and it came down on them hard.
What most people object to is the way that they envision DRM will be implemented for digital media. They predict that instead of empowering artists, DRM will simply further protect the profits of the entrenched media companies, to the detriment of both consumers AND artists. They don't trust the media companies and don't like the prospects of forcing people into trading a general-purpose computer for a DRM-enabled media device that is built around the whole idea that the consumer is untrustworthy.
Firstly, the current security theory IS that the consumer is untrustworthy, and twenty years of fiddling and broken trusts in the computer world have given anyone and everyone a good reason to consider consumers untrustworthy.
Secondly, I haven't heard a good explination of how a Palladium (or other DRM machine) won't be a "general purpose computer."
MS is a company that's built on backwards compatability. Despite bucking the CLI way back in 1990, I can still pull one up if needs be, and I can do anything that I could do on a 3.11 or Win95 box on a shiney new 2k or XP box. MS might be sneaky, and they might be shifty, and they might lie, close the format, and ship beta software as final--but a user with a Palladium machine will be able to do everything that they've been doing with their current machines, and then some.
Things probably aren't quite that bad, but what most people who oppose DRM would agree with are two things:
1. DRM primarily (if not exclusively) benefits existing media and software conglomerates.
2. DRM Will restrict consumer rights from the comparative freedom that we have today.
So, like many who worked to split the atom, those who oppose DRM don't morally object to the technology itself, they morally object to what it will be used to do.
Sounds like a fair and reasonalbe statement--aside from that I think some of the "rights" users think they have now should go away, just like the "right" to duel or philander or own slaves went away.
It would be like taking Ford to court because I transported a bomb in my car and committed a terrorist act using it.
A car is registered, visible, and exists in the real world.
Napster et al are not registered, have barely legal purposes, and regardless of whatever morals their proponents claim, most users use them for copyright infringement.
A better example than automobiles are VCRs. What if, rather than recording TV shows to watch them later, VCR users all used their machines to copy rented tapes and trade them without paying the people who made the movie anything.
I doubt that the courts would have ruled that the machine had "significant noninfringing uses," even if there were small movie studios who enjoyed the skewed market they now recieved.
(I tried to look at furthur.net, but it didn't connect and google came up 0 hits. Can you supply a link?)
Not to knitpick, but in this case the artists don't have a right to control who can copy their work. The copyright holders do. The copyright holders are not the artists. They're the record companies.
And the record companies only hold copyright because it was sold to them by the artists, in exchange for a royalty and not needing to worry about the business of selling music so they can focus on the art of making it. What power a label has is only because the major names in any genere support it; sort of like a lawyer having power only because some rich slob pays him.
(And artists even have federal & state protections against making bad deals--something that doesn't come up very often in other industries.)
There are plenty of reasons to feel sorry for artists given the current state of the industry. However most of them don't stem from p2p, they stem from the actions of the RIAA and the virtual distribution/promotion monopoly that is collectively held by their members.
True. And the best way to solve that is a popular, legal, opt-in system where anyone with copyright control can sell their music online.
Which, oddly enough, gets us back to DRM...