You're totally ignoring the intent of the analogy. The point he was trying to make wasn't that software piracy and suicide hijackings are morally equivalent. The point was simply that the proposed legal system--where the person committing the crime can only be punished by the government of the person's current geographic location, under that government's laws--is unworkable.
Analogies are intended to illuminate some similarity between two different things. An analogy can be apt or inept, but it cannot be justly criticized the way you've done. You're claiming that because property X is shared between situations A and B, and A also has property Y, then the analogy implies that situation B also has property Y. You're right to think that situation B doesn't have property Y, but wrong to believe that the Y'ness of B was implied in the first place.
And by the way, copyright infringement is indeed a crime, even in absence of profit by the infringer. I'm unaware of these "traditional definitions" that manage to exclude laws on the books. I don't know whether it's actually an extraditable offense, and I would certainly argue that the Justice Departments of both countries must have better things to do. But the U.S. and Aussieland both have copyright laws and respect each others' copyrights.
Theoretically, there is no reason that anything done in hardware cannot be done in software as well. Worst case scenario: take the HDL (Hardware Descriptor Language) code that describes the hardware encoder, and simulate it exactly via software. Slow as hell, but the end result would be the same.
In order to make your "point" you compare a quality hardware encoder to a software encoder written by "a bunch of programmers that have a loose understanding of digital video."
Ignore AC. He really doesn't know what he's talking about. Every one of the "DSP tricks" he fails to describe could be done in software.
Yeah, open source projects have long been hampered by the fact that project leaders cannot control who puts what into their code. For example, one time in 1997 after a vicious flame war between Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman over the relative merits of the Linux kernel versus Hurd, Stallman went in and rewrote the TCP stack so that it dropped all packets from kernel.org. It took Linus months to figure out what was going on. They all had a good laugh about it.
Dude. If you don't want people messing with your project, don't give them CVS commit access, and ignore unsolicited patches. Result? Complete control over your code.
I don't know how Social Security benefits work, nor is that the issue being discussed. Is there is some point at which earning an extra penny will actually reduce the total amount (income plus SS benefits) your father received? If so, then the rules should be rewritten. If not, you're implicitly mischaracterizing the situation the same way Reteo did.
The point of my ranting was that there is no point at which the tax system makes it so that incrementally more gross income leads to less net income. So it's silly to talk of people being "trapped" in sub-40K jobs by the tax system.
Sure, each additional dollar you earn above $36,900 is less valuable to the earner than the dollars below. But that's not just because we tax those dollars at a higher rate. Even if we did away with income taxes altogether, the more money you make the less valuable each additional dollar is to you. For example, if I get $100, I might blow it over the course of five or six dates, or upgrade my hard drive. But someone below the poverty level could put it towards something that would do more to increase her quality of life, such as paying the heating bill or making rent. If someone who makes $100K a year after taxes gets the same money, it won't significantly change his quality of life. There is little the new money enables him to do that he couldn't have done already.
Now I'll put myself in the government's shoes. I think I need an additional dollar to put towards John Ashcroft's Playboy subscription. It comes in a plain brown envelope marked "TOP SECRET", but that's not a relevant detail. Now, who am I going to take that additional dollar from? The person for whom a few dollars makes the difference between having money to pay basic expenses? Or the person who will not be significantly impacted by the loss of the dollar?
The correct answer, of course, is to take the dollar from the guy who didn't already use a bunch of dollars to buy legislation to keep the government from taking his dollars. But the point stands that it's more equitable to take more from the rich than the poor.
I was aware that there once was a 90% tax rate for the super-rich. Yet somehow, people managed to carry on. I don't remember those days, but I miss them.
It seems to me that your arguments in favor of protecting the rich from "punitive" tax rates rest on the assumption that it is either unfair to the rich, or damaging to the economy as a whole. I think the principle of marginal utility would indicate that there may be very little use in additional compensation beyond the billion dollar mark (a somewhat arbitrary, but also very large and round, number).
To the second possibility, all I can say is that there is no simple service anyone can provide that entitles them to billions in compensation. There are two ways of earning money are 1) things you do, and 2) things you own. I think there are very real limits to the amount you can earn doing the former, and I don't see why anyone deserves unlimited compensation for the latter.
"Cluless [sic] fuckwit"? I must say, I admire your commitment to raising the level of intellectual political discourse.
We're not asking to "punish the rich." We're simply asking that the tax burden be shifted away from those with the least ability to pay. I recognize that business success isn't an evil, and the goal isn't to tax successful people out of existence. The goal is simply to provide the government with the money it needs to operate, without putting the hurt on the lower middle class.
One misconception you seem to have is that somebody might avoid making more money for fear of being pushed into a higher tax bracket. That's not the way our current tax system works. If you make $36,900 or less, you are taxed at the lowest rate of 15%. The next higher rate is 28%, but if you make $36,901, only $1 of income is taxed at the 28% mark, with the rest being taxed at the lower rate. So at no point does anyone have to fear that an increase in earnings will lead to a reduction in actual take home pay.
I've never gotten this "disincentive to produce" thing. Who wouldn't rather have 60% of $10,000,000 a year than 85% of $30,000/year? But the way blowhards like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly talk, you would think that if the tax rate is brought back up to pre-Bush levels for the top 2% of earners, they're just going to have to close up shop and start collecting welfare checks.
If I were in charge, I would add a new tax bracket: 100% tax on every dollar over $100M. The people affected would still have plenty of money to buy Lear jets and politicians.
You need to ratchet up your pedantry even further. There is no specific group or organization charged with deciding what is or is not part of the English language. While the Oxford English Dictionary bears a great deal of prestige, and their decisions can be taken as strong evidence of the "wordiness" of google(verb), there is no single litmus test for inclusion/exclusion of a word from the English language.
Now, the French have an entire division of the government devoted to defining the French language, with expectedly hilarious results. Use your preferred search engine to google for "couriel".:)
Ummm, I would point out that no court case has shown that it is legal to amass a music library that way. In fact, all Sony vs. Betamax showed was that the manufacturers of recording devices weren't responsible for their customers' abuses.
Get it straight: The guy who wrote the software should be cleared under SvsB. The folks who abuse it, however, are protected only by their relative anonymity.
The fear, according to the article, is that people will use this system not merely for "time shifting," but to amass a huge music library. The latter doesn't fall under fair use at all.
There's a professor here at the U of U who teaches a "Digital IP Law" class, and who seems to have done a lot of the thinking behind the INDUCE Act. So I decided not to take the class, for fear of the whole thing turning into a Slashdot-esque flame war where my GPA was on the line. But one interesting point he tried to drive home in some of his online material was that Sony vs. Betamax's "substantial non-infringing use" test should be invalid, because there was no way a recording/copying device could ever fail the test.
I've been beating my head against a wall trying to come up with a counter-example. Any ideas?
Intellectual "Property" law is by its very nature very different from laws governing physical property. If you understood this, even a little, you wouldn't dare use the "taking a statue" analogy.
Explain to me how I would illegally take possession of your statue without physically removing it? If I want your statue--that is to say, if I want to take ownership of the physical embodiment of an idea--I have to go to you, negotiate a price you deem fair, and give you that money. The same goes for a CD or DVD you might own.
But let us say that I want to take possession of your "music". Not a given embodiment of it, like a page of sheet music or a CD. How do I take possession of the music itself? Does listening to it and playing it back in my head constitute "possession"? Does singing it back into a recorder constitute copying? Is it legal or illegal to make a backup copy of a legally obtained copy of your song?
If I decided to record a cover of any song on the radio, I don't need to negotiate with anybody to do it. The songwriter gets a set fee based on a percentage of my sales. The performer is cut out of the deal entirely. I'm making use of their "property" without their permission, and it's all perfectly legal.
Finally, I'm sure you understand that it is permissible to use multiple words to describe a concept, so your etymological analysis of the word "steal" is rubbish. I have a two word phrase that perfectly embodies what is actually happening here: "copyright infringement". Yes, violation of copyright is illegal. But unlike property rights, which arise naturally from the physical nature of the items being evaluated, intellectual property is a completely artificial phenomenon. We couldn't abandon physical property law without totally rewriting society, but abandoning IP laws would simply lead things back to their natural state: Copying ideas is easy.
That is why copyright infringement seems "less illegal" to many people than breaking other laws. Some laws seem absolutely necessary for the continued existence of society. Others seem pretty arbitrary. A third set of laws appear to be self-serving power grabs by special interest groups. Copyright law is slowly being pushed from the second group to the third.
I'm not saying that abandoning copyright altogether is the best plan, but I do think it would be far better than the current copyright system.
Match.com didn't work out for me. However, I had great success with OKCupid.com. If you're willing to spend a few hours answering hundreds upon hundreds of intensely personal questions, it will use the answers to find people compatible with you.
I went from zero to girlfriend in two months. Your mileage may vary.
"Advertising Terrorism" was a label created by the submitter. I think it's appropriate, given the enthusiasm with which they protect the "exclusivity" of their sponsors. If they devoted all that effort into looking for real danger, we would no doubt be calling this the most protected Olympic Advertising Festival ever.
"The Olympics" is only about the spirit of athletic competition if you're a wide-eyed idealist. Such an event/celebration would indeed cost very little to pull off.
But in reality, "The Olympics" is a bought-and-paid-for property of the International Olympic Committee, which has little to do with the love of athletic competition and everything to do with earning money and extending its own power and influence.
So it does whatever it takes to attract the best athletes in the world, and convince everyone that their event is the premier athletic competition, and that the connection to the real Olympics of ancient Greece is somehow more than trademark deep.
Of course, the fact that it does attract the best athletes would lend objectivity to its claim of preeminence, but it's still nothing more than a shared delusion.
The BSD license gives maximum freedom to the programmer.
The GPL license is written to ensure the freedom and availability of the code itself.
Which license a developer chooses depends entirely on his or her goals. For the 99% of companies who intend to simply *use* the software rather than *redistribute* it, there is no effective difference between the two licenses.
Because of that, I really don't see where the writer is coming from.
I didn't see it last week. I'm glad it came through again. Besides, it gives us the opportunity to generate karma by reposting comments from the last story.:)
I'm not sure I understand the "advantages" the writer is laying out. A BSD'ed Linux would be cut off from a lot of the improvements that come back whenever someone modifies it to suit their own needs. Doing so would also lead to an immediate fork, wherein improvements could not be exchanged between the two branches. Finally, knowing that your work can be tied up into some black box, proprietary product will be a problem to a lot of the people working on Linux right now.
All this to avoid the patent situation? 60 of the 283 patents are owned by IBM, which has said that it won't enforce them (although I would prefer to see them grant a non-revokable, free license to use each in the Linux operating system). I would guess that 90% of those which remain are owned by companies that have entered into cross-licensing agreements with IBM, so starting a patent war would be a very drastic measure for them. Those which remain, hopefully, can be worked around.
The worst case scenario is one involving some company that has a patent portfolio, a demon lawyer horde, and enough money to keep litigation going for a long while. Think SCO II. But Linux survived that with little ill effect.
I think Linux is in a pretty good position, and I don't believe the patent situation doesn't justify the sort of remedies the author suggests.
Shut up. You can't tell me that the left wing is the only one which is willing to interfere with the exchange of ideas.
The DNC set up a "free speech zone" far from the actual convention, and the RNC are happily planning to do the same. [source]
Neither side is the bastion of tolerance for dissent, and both sides seem happy to use illegal means to silence the other side.
At least the left pays lip service to the idea of free speech. The right has tried like mad to frame the debate in the form, "If you're not with Bush, you're with the terrorists."
I don't care who you put her up against, Anne Coulter can't appear sane. The woman has accused about half the country of a capital crime (treason), and said--without a trace of irony--that the proper reaction to 9/11 was to "invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity." [source] She also said that the tenets of Islam were, "kill everyone who doesn't smell bad and doesn't answer to the name Mohammed." [source]
She claims to abhor the meanspirited, unhealthy atmosphere of political debate in this country, but she has done as much to destroy honest debate as anybody I can think of. There is something seriously, psychologically wrong with this woman.
You mean aside from the death of competition in software development, billions stolen from the world at monopoly-point, the Ballmer monkey dance, widespread stagnation regarding security, stability, and features, the rise of de facto, proprietary standards at the expense of real standards, and an entire sector of the economy pretty much under the sway of a single corporation?
If you ignore those things, the pax Microsofta wasn't half bad.
Those were dark times, my friend. Dark, dark times.
While I agree that the tyranny of the majority is almost as dangerous as any other form of tyranny, the GPL and open standards make Linux about as anything can be.
If Windows wins the operating system war, competition ends. If MacOS wins, competition ends. But if Linux wins, competition can still flourish. Linus Torvalds can't simply say, "The kernel is good enough," because the moment he does, some other group will say, "Sez you!" and be immediately competitive to the extent that their understanding of operating systems will permit.
The same sort of competition will occur between various distros, various applications, various window managers. So long as anyone can take the available software and modify it to suit whatever niche he or she values, this dictatorship of which you speak is impossible.
World domination by Microsoft is a terrifying thought. World domination by Linux and Open Source is just self-depreciating humor. A world where Linux dominates is a world where nobody dominates, because everyone who thinks there is a market for something different can just take everything that's been done so far and run with it.
Marketshare is important, even to those who rightfully say that it's not an indicator of quality. It means that hardware manufacturers are more likely to write drivers, that applications are more likely to get Linux ports and interoperate with open file formats. It's all good.
Your chess argument reminds me of the arguments of religious types: Sure, a lot of things can be chalked up to coincidence, but how do you explain [insert remarkable sounding coincidence]?
Your argument is, "Well sure, environmental factors could contribute to the dominance of chess by men, but it's too blatant for environment to be the only factor." When in fact we don't know how strong a determinant it is. All you're saying is that you personally find it unlikely that such a strong effect could be completely explained by upbringing.
I find it unlikely as well, but it's still a bit of a non sequitur.
There are real differences between men and women, and it's not just a product of socialization. But no matter what natural inclinations women in general have towards a field of study, allowing artificial social barriers to one gender's success is completely wrong.
Do you have a source for your claim about the nursing field? If so, does the difference still exist when they take into account the fact that women are more likely to spend less time in the workforce? Women are more likely to spend time away from their career to raise children or to care for aging parents, which is a source of at least some portion of the documented wage gaps. On the one hand, this smacks of unfairness, but time away from the field really does make a difference.
For the most part, though, I'm with you. Any artificial barriers keeping women out of the IT field need to be hunted down and removed. We geeks could certainly be more sensitive and less insecure, for one thing.
Make you a deal: Find me the source of those stats, and I'll promise to raise any female offspring to be as geeky as possible.
This is one of those debates that will never go away. Personally, I think that there are real, innate differences between men and women that ensure that equal opportunity will lead to an unequal outcome. However, since we don't know what the "natural ratio" is, there will always be those who say that there are barriers to the full participation of women in the field. And they may be right.
For example, the article claims that women more highly value jobs where they can accomplish some social good, and that CS isn't seen as an avenue for social change. Which is utter crap, but would getting the word out lead more women into CS programs? Maybe, and if so it would remove an artificial barrier to women.
Then there's the much-noted "fact" that the field is filled with pasty white guys with no social skills. In my limited experience, there is a correlation between antisocial tendencies and talent in the field. I don't know if that's the way things have to be, but I'm thinking it leaves women with a lack of "role models"--people they can look at and say, "Hey, I'd like to be just like that."
Our antisocial tendencies--mine are as strong as anyone's--also have a more direct effect in the classroom. Put a woman in a room full of guys who get all touchy when a girl outperforms them, or who don't recognize when jokes or comments are blatantly sexist, or who keep making inept passes at them and acting outraged when women don't respond.... It's not an environment many women would willingly subject themselves to, and it has nothing to do with actual talent for the CS field.
So the solution isn't to do everything in our power to achieve that magical 50%, but neither is it to sit on our asses and say that the way things are is the way things are meant to be. Figure out what the artificial barriers are, try to remove them, and try to determine whether doing so was effective.
The claim the grandparent post is disputing is that John Kerry called all soldiers who served in Vietnam war criminals. Presumably, since Kerry was in 'Nam, such a claim would make him a war criminal as well. Now you're changing the claim to "Kerry said some soldiers committed illegal, criminal acts, and are buttressing the claim by pointing to a quote where John Kerry says he knew of soldiers who claimed to have performed criminal acts.
My question to you: If Kerry's claim was accurate, why do you disagree with him making it?
Clinton dodged Vietnam because he didn't want to support a war he considered unjust. Kerry served in 'Nam, decided it was unjust, and then worked to end it. W had strings pulled to keep him out of the war and out of harm's way, but never offers a lick of evidence that his actions were due to moral disagreement with the war rather than mere self-preservation.
By the very definition of "public property," the graffiti "artist" has no more right to use the property being decorated than I do. If something belongs to everyone, then anyone who uses the property in a way that devalues the enjoyment of the property for others is committing an unethical act.
Graffiti can be art, in much the same way that the Mona Lisa would have been an artistic tour de force had she been tastefully tatooed onto the back of an unwilling peasant woman instead of put on canvas. Whatever merits of form, color, or composition a piece of graffiti may have, it has no bearing on the fact that the artist had no right to put it there.
The original article explains exactly why market analysts are trash-talking Google and the upcoming IPO: They don't want the Dutch auction system to cut them out of the picture.
Your claim that Linus made millions using precisely this system is incorrect. Yes, Linus was allowed to buy stock at bargain basement prices, and he earned a ton when the various Linux companies IPO'ed. The difference is, Linus was closer to an employee than to a traditional investor.
Here's the way I understand the situation, and please correct me if I'm wrong: When a company says, "We're expecting to go public at $5 a share, but we'll let Guybrush Threepwood buy a thousand of them at $1 a share," then the company is agreeing to give up $4000 of the money they could have received from the IPO. But when a stock brokerage says, "We're expecting this IPO to be worth $5/share, but we'll tell them to offer the shares for $4 so our investors will love us," they're taking 20% of the money that should have been obtained from IPO and putting it directly into investors' pockets. That's underhanded, and maybe even technically illegal. But it's what brokers do to keep their investors coming back for more.
Slashdot Mirror
You're totally ignoring the intent of the analogy. The point he was trying to make wasn't that software piracy and suicide hijackings are morally equivalent. The point was simply that the proposed legal system--where the person committing the crime can only be punished by the government of the person's current geographic location, under that government's laws--is unworkable.
Analogies are intended to illuminate some similarity between two different things. An analogy can be apt or inept, but it cannot be justly criticized the way you've done. You're claiming that because property X is shared between situations A and B, and A also has property Y, then the analogy implies that situation B also has property Y. You're right to think that situation B doesn't have property Y, but wrong to believe that the Y'ness of B was implied in the first place.
And by the way, copyright infringement is indeed a crime, even in absence of profit by the infringer. I'm unaware of these "traditional definitions" that manage to exclude laws on the books. I don't know whether it's actually an extraditable offense, and I would certainly argue that the Justice Departments of both countries must have better things to do. But the U.S. and Aussieland both have copyright laws and respect each others' copyrights.
Huh? C'mon, it was a rhetorical question.
Theoretically, there is no reason that anything done in hardware cannot be done in software as well. Worst case scenario: take the HDL (Hardware Descriptor Language) code that describes the hardware encoder, and simulate it exactly via software. Slow as hell, but the end result would be the same.
In order to make your "point" you compare a quality hardware encoder to a software encoder written by "a bunch of programmers that have a loose understanding of digital video."
Ignore AC. He really doesn't know what he's talking about. Every one of the "DSP tricks" he fails to describe could be done in software.
Yeah, open source projects have long been hampered by the fact that project leaders cannot control who puts what into their code. For example, one time in 1997 after a vicious flame war between Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman over the relative merits of the Linux kernel versus Hurd, Stallman went in and rewrote the TCP stack so that it dropped all packets from kernel.org. It took Linus months to figure out what was going on. They all had a good laugh about it.
Dude. If you don't want people messing with your project, don't give them CVS commit access, and ignore unsolicited patches. Result? Complete control over your code.
I don't know how Social Security benefits work, nor is that the issue being discussed. Is there is some point at which earning an extra penny will actually reduce the total amount (income plus SS benefits) your father received? If so, then the rules should be rewritten. If not, you're implicitly mischaracterizing the situation the same way Reteo did.
The point of my ranting was that there is no point at which the tax system makes it so that incrementally more gross income leads to less net income. So it's silly to talk of people being "trapped" in sub-40K jobs by the tax system.
Sure, each additional dollar you earn above $36,900 is less valuable to the earner than the dollars below. But that's not just because we tax those dollars at a higher rate. Even if we did away with income taxes altogether, the more money you make the less valuable each additional dollar is to you. For example, if I get $100, I might blow it over the course of five or six dates, or upgrade my hard drive. But someone below the poverty level could put it towards something that would do more to increase her quality of life, such as paying the heating bill or making rent. If someone who makes $100K a year after taxes gets the same money, it won't significantly change his quality of life. There is little the new money enables him to do that he couldn't have done already.
Now I'll put myself in the government's shoes. I think I need an additional dollar to put towards John Ashcroft's Playboy subscription. It comes in a plain brown envelope marked "TOP SECRET", but that's not a relevant detail. Now, who am I going to take that additional dollar from? The person for whom a few dollars makes the difference between having money to pay basic expenses? Or the person who will not be significantly impacted by the loss of the dollar?
The correct answer, of course, is to take the dollar from the guy who didn't already use a bunch of dollars to buy legislation to keep the government from taking his dollars. But the point stands that it's more equitable to take more from the rich than the poor.
Here, educate yourself.
I was aware that there once was a 90% tax rate for the super-rich. Yet somehow, people managed to carry on. I don't remember those days, but I miss them.
It seems to me that your arguments in favor of protecting the rich from "punitive" tax rates rest on the assumption that it is either unfair to the rich, or damaging to the economy as a whole. I think the principle of marginal utility would indicate that there may be very little use in additional compensation beyond the billion dollar mark (a somewhat arbitrary, but also very large and round, number).
To the second possibility, all I can say is that there is no simple service anyone can provide that entitles them to billions in compensation. There are two ways of earning money are 1) things you do, and 2) things you own. I think there are very real limits to the amount you can earn doing the former, and I don't see why anyone deserves unlimited compensation for the latter.
"Cluless [sic] fuckwit"? I must say, I admire your commitment to raising the level of intellectual political discourse.
We're not asking to "punish the rich." We're simply asking that the tax burden be shifted away from those with the least ability to pay. I recognize that business success isn't an evil, and the goal isn't to tax successful people out of existence. The goal is simply to provide the government with the money it needs to operate, without putting the hurt on the lower middle class.
t ml for confirmation.
One misconception you seem to have is that somebody might avoid making more money for fear of being pushed into a higher tax bracket. That's not the way our current tax system works. If you make $36,900 or less, you are taxed at the lowest rate of 15%. The next higher rate is 28%, but if you make $36,901, only $1 of income is taxed at the 28% mark, with the rest being taxed at the lower rate. So at no point does anyone have to fear that an increase in earnings will lead to a reduction in actual take home pay.
See http://www.fourmilab.ch/ustax/www/t26-A-1-A-I-1.h
I've never gotten this "disincentive to produce" thing. Who wouldn't rather have 60% of $10,000,000 a year than 85% of $30,000/year? But the way blowhards like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly talk, you would think that if the tax rate is brought back up to pre-Bush levels for the top 2% of earners, they're just going to have to close up shop and start collecting welfare checks.
If I were in charge, I would add a new tax bracket: 100% tax on every dollar over $100M. The people affected would still have plenty of money to buy Lear jets and politicians.
You need to ratchet up your pedantry even further. There is no specific group or organization charged with deciding what is or is not part of the English language. While the Oxford English Dictionary bears a great deal of prestige, and their decisions can be taken as strong evidence of the "wordiness" of google(verb), there is no single litmus test for inclusion/exclusion of a word from the English language.
:)
Now, the French have an entire division of the government devoted to defining the French language, with expectedly hilarious results. Use your preferred search engine to google for "couriel".
Maybe it's best to keep English a little loose.
Ummm, I would point out that no court case has shown that it is legal to amass a music library that way. In fact, all Sony vs. Betamax showed was that the manufacturers of recording devices weren't responsible for their customers' abuses.
Get it straight: The guy who wrote the software should be cleared under SvsB. The folks who abuse it, however, are protected only by their relative anonymity.
The fear, according to the article, is that people will use this system not merely for "time shifting," but to amass a huge music library. The latter doesn't fall under fair use at all.
There's a professor here at the U of U who teaches a "Digital IP Law" class, and who seems to have done a lot of the thinking behind the INDUCE Act. So I decided not to take the class, for fear of the whole thing turning into a Slashdot-esque flame war where my GPA was on the line. But one interesting point he tried to drive home in some of his online material was that Sony vs. Betamax's "substantial non-infringing use" test should be invalid, because there was no way a recording/copying device could ever fail the test.
I've been beating my head against a wall trying to come up with a counter-example. Any ideas?
You're a bit slow. Sorry, but it has to be said.
Intellectual "Property" law is by its very nature very different from laws governing physical property. If you understood this, even a little, you wouldn't dare use the "taking a statue" analogy.
Explain to me how I would illegally take possession of your statue without physically removing it? If I want your statue--that is to say, if I want to take ownership of the physical embodiment of an idea--I have to go to you, negotiate a price you deem fair, and give you that money. The same goes for a CD or DVD you might own.
But let us say that I want to take possession of your "music". Not a given embodiment of it, like a page of sheet music or a CD. How do I take possession of the music itself? Does listening to it and playing it back in my head constitute "possession"? Does singing it back into a recorder constitute copying? Is it legal or illegal to make a backup copy of a legally obtained copy of your song?
If I decided to record a cover of any song on the radio, I don't need to negotiate with anybody to do it. The songwriter gets a set fee based on a percentage of my sales. The performer is cut out of the deal entirely. I'm making use of their "property" without their permission, and it's all perfectly legal.
Finally, I'm sure you understand that it is permissible to use multiple words to describe a concept, so your etymological analysis of the word "steal" is rubbish. I have a two word phrase that perfectly embodies what is actually happening here: "copyright infringement". Yes, violation of copyright is illegal. But unlike property rights, which arise naturally from the physical nature of the items being evaluated, intellectual property is a completely artificial phenomenon. We couldn't abandon physical property law without totally rewriting society, but abandoning IP laws would simply lead things back to their natural state: Copying ideas is easy.
That is why copyright infringement seems "less illegal" to many people than breaking other laws. Some laws seem absolutely necessary for the continued existence of society. Others seem pretty arbitrary. A third set of laws appear to be self-serving power grabs by special interest groups. Copyright law is slowly being pushed from the second group to the third.
I'm not saying that abandoning copyright altogether is the best plan, but I do think it would be far better than the current copyright system.
Match.com didn't work out for me. However, I had great success with OKCupid.com. If you're willing to spend a few hours answering hundreds upon hundreds of intensely personal questions, it will use the answers to find people compatible with you.
I went from zero to girlfriend in two months. Your mileage may vary.
"Advertising Terrorism" was a label created by the submitter. I think it's appropriate, given the enthusiasm with which they protect the "exclusivity" of their sponsors. If they devoted all that effort into looking for real danger, we would no doubt be calling this the most protected Olympic Advertising Festival ever.
"The Olympics" is only about the spirit of athletic competition if you're a wide-eyed idealist. Such an event/celebration would indeed cost very little to pull off.
But in reality, "The Olympics" is a bought-and-paid-for property of the International Olympic Committee, which has little to do with the love of athletic competition and everything to do with earning money and extending its own power and influence.
So it does whatever it takes to attract the best athletes in the world, and convince everyone that their event is the premier athletic competition, and that the connection to the real Olympics of ancient Greece is somehow more than trademark deep.
Of course, the fact that it does attract the best athletes would lend objectivity to its claim of preeminence, but it's still nothing more than a shared delusion.
More free in which sense?
The BSD license gives maximum freedom to the programmer.
The GPL license is written to ensure the freedom and availability of the code itself.
Which license a developer chooses depends entirely on his or her goals. For the 99% of companies who intend to simply *use* the software rather than *redistribute* it, there is no effective difference between the two licenses.
Because of that, I really don't see where the writer is coming from.
I didn't see it last week. I'm glad it came through again. Besides, it gives us the opportunity to generate karma by reposting comments from the last story. :)
I'm not sure I understand the "advantages" the writer is laying out. A BSD'ed Linux would be cut off from a lot of the improvements that come back whenever someone modifies it to suit their own needs. Doing so would also lead to an immediate fork, wherein improvements could not be exchanged between the two branches. Finally, knowing that your work can be tied up into some black box, proprietary product will be a problem to a lot of the people working on Linux right now.
All this to avoid the patent situation? 60 of the 283 patents are owned by IBM, which has said that it won't enforce them (although I would prefer to see them grant a non-revokable, free license to use each in the Linux operating system). I would guess that 90% of those which remain are owned by companies that have entered into cross-licensing agreements with IBM, so starting a patent war would be a very drastic measure for them. Those which remain, hopefully, can be worked around.
The worst case scenario is one involving some company that has a patent portfolio, a demon lawyer horde, and enough money to keep litigation going for a long while. Think SCO II. But Linux survived that with little ill effect.
I think Linux is in a pretty good position, and I don't believe the patent situation doesn't justify the sort of remedies the author suggests.
Shut up. You can't tell me that the left wing is the only one which is willing to interfere with the exchange of ideas.
The DNC set up a "free speech zone" far from the actual convention, and the RNC are happily planning to do the same. [source]
Neither side is the bastion of tolerance for dissent, and both sides seem happy to use illegal means to silence the other side.
At least the left pays lip service to the idea of free speech. The right has tried like mad to frame the debate in the form, "If you're not with Bush, you're with the terrorists."
+5 insightful, my ass.
I don't care who you put her up against, Anne Coulter can't appear sane. The woman has accused about half the country of a capital crime (treason), and said--without a trace of irony--that the proper reaction to 9/11 was to "invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity." [source] She also said that the tenets of Islam were, "kill everyone who doesn't smell bad and doesn't answer to the name Mohammed." [source]
She claims to abhor the meanspirited, unhealthy atmosphere of political debate in this country, but she has done as much to destroy honest debate as anybody I can think of. There is something seriously, psychologically wrong with this woman.
You mean aside from the death of competition in software development, billions stolen from the world at monopoly-point, the Ballmer monkey dance, widespread stagnation regarding security, stability, and features, the rise of de facto, proprietary standards at the expense of real standards, and an entire sector of the economy pretty much under the sway of a single corporation?
If you ignore those things, the pax Microsofta wasn't half bad.
Those were dark times, my friend. Dark, dark times.
I see no similarity. None.
While I agree that the tyranny of the majority is almost as dangerous as any other form of tyranny, the GPL and open standards make Linux about as anything can be.
If Windows wins the operating system war, competition ends. If MacOS wins, competition ends. But if Linux wins, competition can still flourish. Linus Torvalds can't simply say, "The kernel is good enough," because the moment he does, some other group will say, "Sez you!" and be immediately competitive to the extent that their understanding of operating systems will permit.
The same sort of competition will occur between various distros, various applications, various window managers. So long as anyone can take the available software and modify it to suit whatever niche he or she values, this dictatorship of which you speak is impossible.
World domination by Microsoft is a terrifying thought. World domination by Linux and Open Source is just self-depreciating humor. A world where Linux dominates is a world where nobody dominates, because everyone who thinks there is a market for something different can just take everything that's been done so far and run with it.
Marketshare is important, even to those who rightfully say that it's not an indicator of quality. It means that hardware manufacturers are more likely to write drivers, that applications are more likely to get Linux ports and interoperate with open file formats. It's all good.
Your chess argument reminds me of the arguments of religious types: Sure, a lot of things can be chalked up to coincidence, but how do you explain [insert remarkable sounding coincidence]?
Your argument is, "Well sure, environmental factors could contribute to the dominance of chess by men, but it's too blatant for environment to be the only factor." When in fact we don't know how strong a determinant it is. All you're saying is that you personally find it unlikely that such a strong effect could be completely explained by upbringing.
I find it unlikely as well, but it's still a bit of a non sequitur.
There are real differences between men and women, and it's not just a product of socialization. But no matter what natural inclinations women in general have towards a field of study, allowing artificial social barriers to one gender's success is completely wrong.
Do you have a source for your claim about the nursing field? If so, does the difference still exist when they take into account the fact that women are more likely to spend less time in the workforce? Women are more likely to spend time away from their career to raise children or to care for aging parents, which is a source of at least some portion of the documented wage gaps. On the one hand, this smacks of unfairness, but time away from the field really does make a difference.
For the most part, though, I'm with you. Any artificial barriers keeping women out of the IT field need to be hunted down and removed. We geeks could certainly be more sensitive and less insecure, for one thing.
Make you a deal: Find me the source of those stats, and I'll promise to raise any female offspring to be as geeky as possible.
This is one of those debates that will never go away. Personally, I think that there are real, innate differences between men and women that ensure that equal opportunity will lead to an unequal outcome. However, since we don't know what the "natural ratio" is, there will always be those who say that there are barriers to the full participation of women in the field. And they may be right.
For example, the article claims that women more highly value jobs where they can accomplish some social good, and that CS isn't seen as an avenue for social change. Which is utter crap, but would getting the word out lead more women into CS programs? Maybe, and if so it would remove an artificial barrier to women.
Then there's the much-noted "fact" that the field is filled with pasty white guys with no social skills. In my limited experience, there is a correlation between antisocial tendencies and talent in the field. I don't know if that's the way things have to be, but I'm thinking it leaves women with a lack of "role models"--people they can look at and say, "Hey, I'd like to be just like that."
Our antisocial tendencies--mine are as strong as anyone's--also have a more direct effect in the classroom. Put a woman in a room full of guys who get all touchy when a girl outperforms them, or who don't recognize when jokes or comments are blatantly sexist, or who keep making inept passes at them and acting outraged when women don't respond.... It's not an environment many women would willingly subject themselves to, and it has nothing to do with actual talent for the CS field.
So the solution isn't to do everything in our power to achieve that magical 50%, but neither is it to sit on our asses and say that the way things are is the way things are meant to be. Figure out what the artificial barriers are, try to remove them, and try to determine whether doing so was effective.
The claim the grandparent post is disputing is that John Kerry called all soldiers who served in Vietnam war criminals. Presumably, since Kerry was in 'Nam, such a claim would make him a war criminal as well. Now you're changing the claim to "Kerry said some soldiers committed illegal, criminal acts, and are buttressing the claim by pointing to a quote where John Kerry says he knew of soldiers who claimed to have performed criminal acts.
My question to you: If Kerry's claim was accurate, why do you disagree with him making it?
Clinton dodged Vietnam because he didn't want to support a war he considered unjust. Kerry served in 'Nam, decided it was unjust, and then worked to end it. W had strings pulled to keep him out of the war and out of harm's way, but never offers a lick of evidence that his actions were due to moral disagreement with the war rather than mere self-preservation.
By the very definition of "public property," the graffiti "artist" has no more right to use the property being decorated than I do. If something belongs to everyone, then anyone who uses the property in a way that devalues the enjoyment of the property for others is committing an unethical act.
Graffiti can be art, in much the same way that the Mona Lisa would have been an artistic tour de force had she been tastefully tatooed onto the back of an unwilling peasant woman instead of put on canvas. Whatever merits of form, color, or composition a piece of graffiti may have, it has no bearing on the fact that the artist had no right to put it there.
The original article explains exactly why market analysts are trash-talking Google and the upcoming IPO: They don't want the Dutch auction system to cut them out of the picture.
Your claim that Linus made millions using precisely this system is incorrect. Yes, Linus was allowed to buy stock at bargain basement prices, and he earned a ton when the various Linux companies IPO'ed. The difference is, Linus was closer to an employee than to a traditional investor.
Here's the way I understand the situation, and please correct me if I'm wrong: When a company says, "We're expecting to go public at $5 a share, but we'll let Guybrush Threepwood buy a thousand of them at $1 a share," then the company is agreeing to give up $4000 of the money they could have received from the IPO. But when a stock brokerage says, "We're expecting this IPO to be worth $5/share, but we'll tell them to offer the shares for $4 so our investors will love us," they're taking 20% of the money that should have been obtained from IPO and putting it directly into investors' pockets. That's underhanded, and maybe even technically illegal. But it's what brokers do to keep their investors coming back for more.