Yet shared property is a feasible concept. Does it make sense to declare that fishing rod as "yours" when you spend your days working the land while your neighbour who has no farming skills can't go out and fish?
There's no particular reason why you couldn't lend your property to the other guy for that very reason while you're farming. The only difference would be that in winter, when there's no farming, there wouldn't be an argument over which of the two of you gets to fish with the one pole. Collectivists seem to think that the problem of scarcity can be solved simply by dividing everything equally. This is untrue on its face. Four men and three fish in a collectivist system is an argument. In a property rights system, it's three guys getting to eat because they went out and caught fish, and one guy who is now motivated by hunger to get off his ass and work for his next meal.
In small communities where everyone knows everyone it's doable. Think a family, a kibbuts-like concept, etc.
Kibbutzim are a poor example. First, they are organized to work as part of a free market system externally. Internally, they are simply a large extended family. A father will go out and work to support his wife and children in a traditional family, but no one calls this a "collective". Many kibbutzim now largely have their members working outside, with the kibbutz taking a percentage of their earnings. Basically, what it comes down to is that kibbutzim are not a good argument for the abolition of property rights, but rather that people have the right to choose to ceded their individual property rights to their chosen family group. This is where collectivists so often get it wrong. Collectivism has to be a choice, and it has to be backed by a strong right to property in order for the collective to lay claim to the fruits of its members' labor. Total rejection of property rights (i.e. all property is held in common across all people, everywhere) is a recipe for roving bands of loafers coming to "share" your product. In order to work, collectivism needs a means of excluding freeloaders, because the power of shaming and familial bonds is not effective at ensuring productivity beyond a certain group size. This means is property rights.
And yes, dogs understand property rights. Dogs will also do pretty much anything to get their next meal. Human beings, on the other hand, are capable(in theory anyway) to set aside their primary desires and make a choice on an intellectual level to prioritize other things.
Yes, humans can be cooperative, but 200,000 years of human existence have shown that they are only cooperative within a small familial/tribal group. We are still, at root, animals. The concept of rights is what elevates us above them. We are capable of recognizing that it is wrong to kill another human, that it is wrong to imprison/enslave another human, and that it is wrong to take the clothes off the back or the food out of the mouth of another human. All of these are the use of force to subvert the will of an individual when the individual was not harming anyone. This is a Bad Thing.
Just because the vast majority of folks don't seem able to turn of the "mine! mine!" part doesn't make it a human right by default.
Claiming the collective right to seize another man's dinner (which he spent all day procuring) is to say his freedom (and ultimately his life) are not his own, but belong to everyone else. You can't throw out one of the big three--- Life, Liberty, Property--- without essentially throwing out the other two. The operative word is choice. Cooperation is good, but it has to be by choice, not by force. You have to allow people to to willingly choose to say "ours!" The natural propensity for people to act on the "mine! mine!" impulse is precisely why property rights exist. A bunch of communist theorists sitting in a Paris cafe are not going to change the natural proclivity t
The basic natural rights of people are generally agreed to be the rights to life, liberty, and property.
Not so in Canada. You have no right to property in Canada. The government can seize your property whenever they want, for any reason they want, by passing a law to that effect, and they don't owe you a penny in compensation. Many levels of government have done exactly that. Well, technically you still retain that right--- the government just chooses to infringe it. A right need not be codified into a nations laws. Rights simply are.
By comparison, in the US, seizing property would be a "taking", and the government at least needs to compensate you for it. Yeah, they pay it a little lip service still. It's not what it used to be, though, because now the Supreme Court has ruled that the government can take your house and give the land to a corporation to build a mall. At least in Canada, the government is only taking land for itself, right?
Moderation -1
100% Overrated/I disagree with the argument and want to avoid meta-moderation because my choice to censor this post is obvious childish horseshit I see at least one socialist-leaning would-be censor has mod points.
I have no duty to the "community" other than not infringing others' rights to life, liberty, and property.
Wrong. You have the duty of participating in a jury. You have the duty of paying taxes. You have the duty of obeying the law. You have the duty of reporting crimes that you witness. You have the duty of defending your homeland in case of attack. You have the duty of participating in the political process. There are many others. You claim I have those duties, I say I do not. I say the state enforces these obligations at gunpoint in violation of my right to liberty. I challenge you to assert some basis for the legitimacy of these "duties" other than the appeal to authority of "it's the law".
In reality, I just go ahead and pay my taxes, obey all laws but the unreasonable ones, and even show up for jury duty. Hell, I even spent six years on active duty in the Army (most of 2 of them in Afghanistan) "defending [my] homeland". I do, however, recognize that these are all duties I either a) submit to voluntarily as a member of society, or b) submit to because the government is essentially holding a gun to my head. I do, however, feel that if I wanted to live in the middle of nowhere, completely alone, scratching a living out of nature, then I have no particular duty to participate in the functions of any community.
The point I'm trying to make is that duty is something that should be taken up voluntarily, and that no person, state, or nosey extra-governmental body should be permitted to impose those duties upon you. Offer them as part of an exchange of duties for privileges? Sure. Force them at gunpoint? Absolutely not.
Life liberty and PROPERTY?!?!?! I don't think so. I can think of a few dozen, if not a few hundred rights more important than property. Nobody but the libertarians think thats a fundamental human right. Funny how you don't bother to mention any of those 36-300 rights that exceed the right to property in importance.
Property isn't just "land" or "TV sets" or "piles of gold coins" like you ANTI-libertarians always seem to think. It's the clothes on your back, the fish you caught for dinner, the fishing pole you made to catch that fish. Without property rights, the rights to life and liberty are worthless. There is no value to being alive and free to act on your own to improve your lot if others can claim the fruits of your labor. Crazy Marxists and their unnatural notions of how things "ought" to be. Property rights a social construct? Horseshit! Dogs understand property rights, in barking at anyone coming into the yard. Property rights are a natural extension of animals' territorialism. Humans have merely taken them to a higher level. Fucking collectivists...
Interestingly enough, I only now just noticed Article 27, which vaguely references copyright:
Article 27. <br> (1) Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits. <br> (2) Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.<br><br>
Paraphrasing, they first say "the fruits of our common culture belong to us all" and in the same breath say "except for those parts that various artificial monopolies in assorted countries have arbitrarily declared to be the property of their creator". Essentially, they have already weighed in on copyright. They start by stating the obvious in (1), that it is the natural right of all people to enjoy equal access to artifacts of their common culture. Then they go on to say in (2) that they actually don't have that right, that the "creator" has arbitrary ownership of the part he worked on. Typical UN bullshit. Right hand over their heart, left hand in your pocket. Just like the rest of the UDHR, they start by outlining real rights to make you feel good, then finish with a bunch of capitulatory crap that takes those rights straight back.
An academic question, but how would you feel if next year the UN and all its member countries unilaterally declared perpetual copyright to be a fundamental human right? Most people who take the notion of "fundamental rights" seriously in a philosophical sense do not think highly of the UN's opinions in this area. The basic natural rights of people are generally agreed to be the rights to life, liberty, and property. The UN's notion of basic human rights is ridiculous. When you read the UDHR, most "natural rights" folks would just nod and agree to the first 21, as they are basically just specific detailed versions of the classic Life/Liberty/Property. It's 22-30 that get increasingly bizarre and leave most of those with an understanding of the basic principle of "rights"--- i.e. if it infringes another's right to life/liberty/property, it's not a right--- scratching their heads. 25 is particularly puzzling:
"Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control."
Essentially, they're asserting that the right of the farmer, the tailor, the carpenter, the doctor, and (in fact) every taxpayer to the fruits of their labor is secondary to "right" of Bob Lazybones to have dinner, a new jacket, a free house, and however much of the doctor's time and penicillin necessary to cure him of his syphilis if he's too lazy to go to work? I call bullshit on that. There's some moral obligation to charity for the unlucky or disadvantaged, but that's not the same as it being a right. Charity is only charity if it's voluntary. Forced charity is just redistribution.
Article 29 of the UDHR is just plain insane:
"(1) Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible."
WTF? When did this turn into a new-age hippy commune? This isn't a right, it's a half-assed justification of violating the rights they've just outlined! An assertion of subservience to community has no place in a declaration of rights. That pretty much seals it right there. The UN reveals itself to be what it really is: a super-national busybody with a socialist agenda. "You will now enjoy your right to performing your duties to the community." Fuck you, UN! I have no duty to the "community" other than not infringing others' rights to life, liberty, and property. If I wish to reap the benefits of community participation by performing certain duties, that's fine; but don't come off trying to make it a "right".
Basically, the UDHR promises everyone the freedom to do as they please, so long as they do it within the structure of a socialist-leaning system forcing mandatory participation in "sharing" of the fruits of your labor. So sure, it wouldn't surprise me if the UN decided that perpetual copyright was a "basic human right", as they have already shown a propensity for ignoring the basic tenets of what a right is. If they did so, I'd lend it as much credence as their other absurd assertions of giveaways at the expense of others as "rights" (i.e. none at all).
In other words, just because someone says it's a right doesn't make it so--- particularly if it's the UN doing it.
The usual fallacious argument. I'm not a fan of the RIAA's *tactics*, but the fact that a whole lot of people break the law doesn't make it OK, and that seems to be the crux of your argument. The fact that something is illegal doesn't make it wrong, and that seems to be the crux of your argument.
Basically, people have found a way to get for free what they used to pay for. The fact that they have little chance of being caught have empowered people to break the law, but that's about it. You still have not substantiated your implication that what they're doing is wrong. Just because technology previously made it easy to limit distribution via an artificial monopoly doesn't make it right. You're engaging in the Bare Assertion Fallacy. Justify the state of the law.
And please don't make a lame ass 'civil disobediance' arguement next. If you feel that strongly about it, don't listen to the RIAA's tripe *at all,* pirated or not. So are you saying bad law should be obeyed because somebody makes money off it? Because there's no moral justification in civil disobedience unless it's a great injustice, like segregation? Because it's the law? You're saying the best way to fight bad law is to obey it and mount futile boycott? A debate strategy of telling other people not to bother to defend their position rather than actually presenting arguments in support of your position is intellectually bankrupt*.
Yes of course, which is why the GP is wrong in saying that for high-risk high-replacability jobs they'll insist you leave immediately. 1) You are "the GP". "GrandParent" notation is always relative to the post from which it is written. In the above case, it would be "GGP".
2) For fuck's sake, read the post you keep saying is "wrong". You have twice now posted attributing assertions to the poster that he never made. He never said anyone would insist you leave immediately. He never said cashiers are marched out upon admission of the desire to leave. Is a little reading comprehension too much to ask?
I feel that perhaps something should have been done by the editors. Ah, I think I see your error. See, the slashdot janitors who post the content are just chimps who have learned to click a button labeled POST TO FRONT PAGE. They are not actually "editors" in any substantive way, regardless of their job title. Good thing they're not being paid to do that, right?
I agree, it is very common. I think most HR consultants advise companies in competitive industries to escort fired or quitting employees to the door immediately Indeed, this is very much a symptom of the "humans are resources" mindset that you find in HR departments. HR is an area that attracts mental defectives, the 5% of people who are psychopaths* or otherwise prone towards viewing employees as interchangeable parts to be ordered from suppliers (as any temp knows). When a part announces its intention to fail, you remove it and procure a replacement immediately. You wouldn't leave a flickering bulb in a light fixture for two more weeks, hoping to get a little more lighting out of it, right? You wouldn't drive on a tire with a big cut in the sidewall for two weeks hoping it doesn't blow out and leave you stranded, right? Perfectly logical arguments, but also completely inapplicable to sentient human beings. This is not problem for HR people, as they themselves are the only truly sentient beings. Why, the term "Human Resources" itself is a big warning sign shouting "we are inhuman monsters". It would be surprising that they'd so blatantly label themselves such---- except that being the soulless freaks they are, they are incapable of seeing the insult in the name.
* between 3 and 4 percent of the male population is psychopathic. This goes a long way towards explaining why so many people act like such jerks: they have no sense of empathy for the suffering of others.
Well you're wrong about cashiers.. I was a cashier in America for the past 2 summers. A few thousand in cash in the drawer and probably millions in credit on the credit-card stubs, and they let me work straight through the day I quit He's not wrong. He never said that's how cashiers are invariably treated, but that the "boiler plate advice" of walking people out under guard immediately "[applies] to supermaket till-girls at best". Read, people, READ!
But Richard Dawkins is a cretin. Look at his shrill whining when he spots something that doesn't fit in with his particular flavour of crazy religious freakery. Wow, outstanding rebuttal! A complete reasoned refutation of Dawkins' theories, it is. Dawkins is a shrill whiner. My only regret is that now the creationists will use that argument to discredit him. Woe, all is now lost on the side of scientific reason!
I'd love to see NASA actually hire (not contract) the best and brightest to create the next generation flight vehicle. Build it all in house, and contract out nothing. Ehhhhh.....that wouldn't work. At all. As others have noted, NASA is a management body with some small research and launch facilities. All the actual building has always been done by outside contractors. You know, people who already have factories. Full of tools. And workers who know how to use them. It's not just a matter of "[hiring] the best and brightest". Do that, and you just have a bunch of eggheads sitting in an office building, who still have to hand off their design to a contractor to manufacture it. On top of that, you end up with a design without any thought towards process engineering, with parts and assemblies that require exorbitant expenditures on time and equipment that could have been saved had the designers worked with the capabilities of the manufacturer in mind instead of just in an isolated environment.
See, the problem is that you don't seem to understand how the government gets fancy new technology into real world applications. They don't draw up a blueprint and hand it to Boeing and say "build us this". They draw up a list of requirements, and contractors come back with designs that essentially say "this is how we would do that, given the current (or projected) state of our manufacturing capabilities". Separating design from manufacturing doesn't work beyond a certain point, and NASA's area of responsibility lies well beyond that point.
NASA proponents argue it makes more sense to give money to talented, productive people in exchange for scientific knowledge, than spend in on unproductive people in the form of straight welfare
It's the usual nonsense. Propaganda masquerading as journalism. It's a rather transparent ploy, usually the work of rank amateurs. Say, for example, Department X is doing scientific research on a vaccine for [disease] that involves testing on rabbits. In order to make them look as bad as possible you say the following:
"Dept X kills baby bunnies!"
Then, in order to give the appearance of fairness, you find (or just fabricate) some kooks who generally support the works of Dept X who will assert something fun, like the following:
"Supporters of Dept X argue that killing baby bunnies is often quite pleasurable, especially if it is done slowly."
See? Both sides have been presented, and it's obvious that Dept X is the spawn of Satan. Surely you're not on THEIR side, right?
Really? Multitouch UI? No cursor? Gestures? Scaleable UI?
I can't think of a single device that had a scaleable multitouch UI before the iPhone. Pray tell which one you know of. The Northrop-Grumman TouchTable. The article was on Slashdot only two months ago, man, and the subject was beaten to death. I saw the TouchTable at a DoD "trade show" in 2004, and the UI was nothing new then, either.
It throws away old paradigms of input, and has invented a few others (pinch to zoom, anyone?). Ill-informed Apple fanboy. Apple did not invent the "pinch to zoom" feature. It's a well-documented touch interface technique. The Northrop Grumman TouchTable implemented it in a shipping product years ago, when the iPhone was still a gleam in Steve Jobs' stinkeye.
Apple didn't invent the touchscreen," explains Lev Grossman (Time), but "Apple knew what to do with it," creating a "whole new kind of interface, a tactile one that gives users the illusion of actually physically manipulating data with their hands..." Note to Lev Grossman and all the other idiots misapplying the word: Look up definition of "tactile". Despite the repeated misuse of the word, it does not apply to a touch sensitive screen, rather it applies to things that stimulate the user's sense of touch. The interfaces of Apple's personal electronics line are, in fact, notably lacking in tactile feedback.
The sibling posters has a really good point... The GP made a really good point. You, on the other hand:
1) Took a small slice of his argument out of context. The context was a list of (supposedly) comparable items. Attacking one or more items in their entirety out of the list individually is not taking them out of context.
2) Implied a meaning into the out-of-context statements that was a weak, silly meaning. The implied meaning of the list is that the individual items are comparable to the original assertion. In that context, they are weak and silly.
3) Successfully pointed out that the weak, silly argument that *you* crafted, yourself, is silly and weak. Incorrect, as it is the GP poster who created the list of comparable items. If the items were not intended to be comparable, then they are off topic and irrelevant.
That's a great example of a really disingenuous debating technique called the 'straw man', It's not. The GP poster made a list of invaluable (and a few trivial) technological advances in the saving of lives. Cell phones are simply not in the same class. Cell phones are largely a convenience. They are not reliable enough for emergency response personnel (who still use pagers when it's critical that they be reachable), and are inferior to a landline in summoning help as they do not adequately report location for 911. With the narrow exception of unpopulated areas that still have cell coverage (where there'd certainly be no jamming), they're superfluous.
It's funny that he's being accused of blatantly copying the show's premise, yet nobody seems to agree who he's ripping off: Yeah, people don't seem to realize that all good art "borrows" heavily from other art. I can't tell you how many dopes I've met who say they want to be [TV/Movie/Book] writers, but don't [Watch TV/watch movies/read books]. This is where so much of the bad crap comes from. All those hack writers, most of them nephews/sons/friends of entertainment executives (cough)JJ Abrams(/cough), half-wits and dolts the lot of them, and they largely don't have the brains to realize what makes a good product.
Patents are probably more important to small business than to big business. Without patents an inventor or small company has no protection from imitators. Without patents a small company can come up with the next great thing and a multinational conglomerate can merely copy it, manufacture at a cheaper price due to economies of scale, reach a larger audience due to vast sums of money available for advertising, etc. Without some sort of exclusivity to allow an inventor to market an invention himself, or to license the invention to others, there would be little reward for invention. Without the financial reward few would be inventors would bother. Gee, thanks for the eighth-grade civics class definition of a patent. Now we know how it should work, but doesn't. Complex technology has too much cross dependency. When you build anything more complicated than a "better mousetrap", it goes differently. In reality, the "small business" hasn't the resources to successfully challenge a large behemoth corporation for patent infringement when they decide to infringe anyway. Furthermore, the large behemoth corporations hold such large, far-reaching portfolios that the small inventor with a patent or two will likely run up the wrong side of one ofthem, leaving him open to the traditional cross-licensing strategy. Your happy fairyland where Joe Inventor patents the Flux Demodulator he built in his garage and become rich selling a million of them is a fantasy. It doesn't work that way.
Look at countries with little effective intellectual property protection. They are frequently characterized by few inventions and businesses compete based upon being the lowest cost provider, in other words sweatshops. You're mistaking the symptom for the cause. All that's not for lack of IP protection, but rather because those tend to be marginal third world countries with uneducated populations. Their industry benefits more from being able to crank out cheap knockoff Chanel bags that it would protecting the inventions of it's two dozen college-educated citizens.
You can't control everyone else when we all have equal votes. You can try to make noise about it, raise awareness, etc., but in the end, if everyone else makes the wrong choice, you're stuck with it.
A lot of Slashdotters really don't seem to understand this concept, judging by the responses to my post here. Idealists. They can be exasperating. For the most part, their notions of the ideal world we should be working towards are prefaced with "If only everyone would...". Well, the problem with idealists is that they don;t realize that everyone NEVER will.
Maybe they're just deluded and self-absorbed. Feel free to take it for what it's worth (nil), but how many times have you read quotes from decision-makers at media companies and they've come off as clueless narcissistic monsters that clearly parted ways with the 99%+ of the population that doesn't snort cocaine off the stomach of hookers long ago? Is it hard to imagine that they think to themselves, "I can do whatever I want. I'm in charge." That's precisely how they think. The entertainment industry is populated almost entirely of nephews and sons. When you get to about the third or fourth generation of nepotism, with each previous generation "watering down" the genuine intelligence of the first generation by marrying vacuous bimbos to sire their children, you have little but empty suits with no brains who have grown up in an atmosphere of entitlement. Really, it's very much like the old days of hereditary royalty. The first guy got to be in charge by leading an army and hacking his way to the top with a sword, but his great grandson sits on the same throne eating himself stupid and surrounding himself with yes-men who tell him he's brilliant.
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Yet shared property is a feasible concept. Does it make sense to declare that fishing rod as "yours" when you spend your days working the land while your neighbour who has no farming skills can't go out and fish?
There's no particular reason why you couldn't lend your property to the other guy for that very reason while you're farming. The only difference would be that in winter, when there's no farming, there wouldn't be an argument over which of the two of you gets to fish with the one pole. Collectivists seem to think that the problem of scarcity can be solved simply by dividing everything equally. This is untrue on its face. Four men and three fish in a collectivist system is an argument. In a property rights system, it's three guys getting to eat because they went out and caught fish, and one guy who is now motivated by hunger to get off his ass and work for his next meal.
In small communities where everyone knows everyone it's doable. Think a family, a kibbuts-like concept, etc.
Kibbutzim are a poor example. First, they are organized to work as part of a free market system externally. Internally, they are simply a large extended family. A father will go out and work to support his wife and children in a traditional family, but no one calls this a "collective". Many kibbutzim now largely have their members working outside, with the kibbutz taking a percentage of their earnings. Basically, what it comes down to is that kibbutzim are not a good argument for the abolition of property rights, but rather that people have the right to choose to ceded their individual property rights to their chosen family group. This is where collectivists so often get it wrong. Collectivism has to be a choice, and it has to be backed by a strong right to property in order for the collective to lay claim to the fruits of its members' labor. Total rejection of property rights (i.e. all property is held in common across all people, everywhere) is a recipe for roving bands of loafers coming to "share" your product. In order to work, collectivism needs a means of excluding freeloaders, because the power of shaming and familial bonds is not effective at ensuring productivity beyond a certain group size. This means is property rights.
And yes, dogs understand property rights. Dogs will also do pretty much anything to get their next meal. Human beings, on the other hand, are capable(in theory anyway) to set aside their primary desires and make a choice on an intellectual level to prioritize other things.
Yes, humans can be cooperative, but 200,000 years of human existence have shown that they are only cooperative within a small familial/tribal group. We are still, at root, animals. The concept of rights is what elevates us above them. We are capable of recognizing that it is wrong to kill another human, that it is wrong to imprison/enslave another human, and that it is wrong to take the clothes off the back or the food out of the mouth of another human. All of these are the use of force to subvert the will of an individual when the individual was not harming anyone. This is a Bad Thing.
Just because the vast majority of folks don't seem able to turn of the "mine! mine!" part doesn't make it a human right by default.
Claiming the collective right to seize another man's dinner (which he spent all day procuring) is to say his freedom (and ultimately his life) are not his own, but belong to everyone else. You can't throw out one of the big three--- Life, Liberty, Property--- without essentially throwing out the other two. The operative word is choice. Cooperation is good, but it has to be by choice, not by force. You have to allow people to to willingly choose to say "ours!" The natural propensity for people to act on the "mine! mine!" impulse is precisely why property rights exist. A bunch of communist theorists sitting in a Paris cafe are not going to change the natural proclivity t
Not so in Canada. You have no right to property in Canada. The government can seize your property whenever they want, for any reason they want, by passing a law to that effect, and they don't owe you a penny in compensation. Many levels of government have done exactly that. Well, technically you still retain that right--- the government just chooses to infringe it. A right need not be codified into a nations laws. Rights simply are.
By comparison, in the US, seizing property would be a "taking", and the government at least needs to compensate you for it. Yeah, they pay it a little lip service still. It's not what it used to be, though, because now the Supreme Court has ruled that the government can take your house and give the land to a corporation to build a mall. At least in Canada, the government is only taking land for itself, right?
100% Overrated/I disagree with the argument and want to avoid meta-moderation because my choice to censor this post is obvious childish horseshit I see at least one socialist-leaning would-be censor has mod points.
Wrong. You have the duty of participating in a jury. You have the duty of paying taxes. You have the duty of obeying the law. You have the duty of reporting crimes that you witness. You have the duty of defending your homeland in case of attack. You have the duty of participating in the political process. There are many others. You claim I have those duties, I say I do not. I say the state enforces these obligations at gunpoint in violation of my right to liberty. I challenge you to assert some basis for the legitimacy of these "duties" other than the appeal to authority of "it's the law".
In reality, I just go ahead and pay my taxes, obey all laws but the unreasonable ones, and even show up for jury duty. Hell, I even spent six years on active duty in the Army (most of 2 of them in Afghanistan) "defending [my] homeland". I do, however, recognize that these are all duties I either a) submit to voluntarily as a member of society, or b) submit to because the government is essentially holding a gun to my head. I do, however, feel that if I wanted to live in the middle of nowhere, completely alone, scratching a living out of nature, then I have no particular duty to participate in the functions of any community.
The point I'm trying to make is that duty is something that should be taken up voluntarily, and that no person, state, or nosey extra-governmental body should be permitted to impose those duties upon you. Offer them as part of an exchange of duties for privileges? Sure. Force them at gunpoint? Absolutely not.
Property isn't just "land" or "TV sets" or "piles of gold coins" like you ANTI-libertarians always seem to think. It's the clothes on your back, the fish you caught for dinner, the fishing pole you made to catch that fish. Without property rights, the rights to life and liberty are worthless. There is no value to being alive and free to act on your own to improve your lot if others can claim the fruits of your labor. Crazy Marxists and their unnatural notions of how things "ought" to be. Property rights a social construct? Horseshit! Dogs understand property rights, in barking at anyone coming into the yard. Property rights are a natural extension of animals' territorialism. Humans have merely taken them to a higher level. Fucking collectivists...
Paraphrasing, they first say "the fruits of our common culture belong to us all" and in the same breath say "except for those parts that various artificial monopolies in assorted countries have arbitrarily declared to be the property of their creator". Essentially, they have already weighed in on copyright. They start by stating the obvious in (1), that it is the natural right of all people to enjoy equal access to artifacts of their common culture. Then they go on to say in (2) that they actually don't have that right, that the "creator" has arbitrary ownership of the part he worked on. Typical UN bullshit. Right hand over their heart, left hand in your pocket. Just like the rest of the UDHR, they start by outlining real rights to make you feel good, then finish with a bunch of capitulatory crap that takes those rights straight back.
Essentially, they're asserting that the right of the farmer, the tailor, the carpenter, the doctor, and (in fact) every taxpayer to the fruits of their labor is secondary to "right" of Bob Lazybones to have dinner, a new jacket, a free house, and however much of the doctor's time and penicillin necessary to cure him of his syphilis if he's too lazy to go to work? I call bullshit on that. There's some moral obligation to charity for the unlucky or disadvantaged, but that's not the same as it being a right. Charity is only charity if it's voluntary. Forced charity is just redistribution.
Article 29 of the UDHR is just plain insane:
WTF? When did this turn into a new-age hippy commune? This isn't a right, it's a half-assed justification of violating the rights they've just outlined! An assertion of subservience to community has no place in a declaration of rights. That pretty much seals it right there. The UN reveals itself to be what it really is: a super-national busybody with a socialist agenda. "You will now enjoy your right to performing your duties to the community." Fuck you, UN! I have no duty to the "community" other than not infringing others' rights to life, liberty, and property. If I wish to reap the benefits of community participation by performing certain duties, that's fine; but don't come off trying to make it a "right".
Basically, the UDHR promises everyone the freedom to do as they please, so long as they do it within the structure of a socialist-leaning system forcing mandatory participation in "sharing" of the fruits of your labor. So sure, it wouldn't surprise me if the UN decided that perpetual copyright was a "basic human right", as they have already shown a propensity for ignoring the basic tenets of what a right is. If they did so, I'd lend it as much credence as their other absurd assertions of giveaways at the expense of others as "rights" (i.e. none at all).
In other words, just because someone says it's a right doesn't make it so--- particularly if it's the UN doing it.
Basically, people have found a way to get for free what they used to pay for. The fact that they have little chance of being caught have empowered people to break the law, but that's about it. You still have not substantiated your implication that what they're doing is wrong. Just because technology previously made it easy to limit distribution via an artificial monopoly doesn't make it right. You're engaging in the Bare Assertion Fallacy. Justify the state of the law.
And please don't make a lame ass 'civil disobediance' arguement next. If you feel that strongly about it, don't listen to the RIAA's tripe *at all,* pirated or not. So are you saying bad law should be obeyed because somebody makes money off it? Because there's no moral justification in civil disobedience unless it's a great injustice, like segregation? Because it's the law? You're saying the best way to fight bad law is to obey it and mount futile boycott? A debate strategy of telling other people not to bother to defend their position rather than actually presenting arguments in support of your position is intellectually bankrupt*.
* that means "you're a fucking idiot"
2) For fuck's sake, read the post you keep saying is "wrong". You have twice now posted attributing assertions to the poster that he never made. He never said anyone would insist you leave immediately. He never said cashiers are marched out upon admission of the desire to leave. Is a little reading comprehension too much to ask?
* between 3 and 4 percent of the male population is psychopathic. This goes a long way towards explaining why so many people act like such jerks: they have no sense of empathy for the suffering of others.
See, the problem is that you don't seem to understand how the government gets fancy new technology into real world applications. They don't draw up a blueprint and hand it to Boeing and say "build us this". They draw up a list of requirements, and contractors come back with designs that essentially say "this is how we would do that, given the current (or projected) state of our manufacturing capabilities". Separating design from manufacturing doesn't work beyond a certain point, and NASA's area of responsibility lies well beyond that point.
It's the usual nonsense. Propaganda masquerading as journalism. It's a rather transparent ploy, usually the work of rank amateurs. Say, for example, Department X is doing scientific research on a vaccine for [disease] that involves testing on rabbits. In order to make them look as bad as possible you say the following:
"Dept X kills baby bunnies!"
Then, in order to give the appearance of fairness, you find (or just fabricate) some kooks who generally support the works of Dept X who will assert something fun, like the following:
"Supporters of Dept X argue that killing baby bunnies is often quite pleasurable, especially if it is done slowly."
See? Both sides have been presented, and it's obvious that Dept X is the spawn of Satan. Surely you're not on THEIR side, right?
I can't think of a single device that had a scaleable multitouch UI before the iPhone. Pray tell which one you know of. The Northrop-Grumman TouchTable. The article was on Slashdot only two months ago, man, and the subject was beaten to death. I saw the TouchTable at a DoD "trade show" in 2004, and the UI was nothing new then, either.
1) Took a small slice of his argument out of context.
The context was a list of (supposedly) comparable items. Attacking one or more items in their entirety out of the list individually is not taking them out of context.
2) Implied a meaning into the out-of-context statements that was a weak, silly meaning. The implied meaning of the list is that the individual items are comparable to the original assertion. In that context, they are weak and silly.
3) Successfully pointed out that the weak, silly argument that *you* crafted, yourself, is silly and weak. Incorrect, as it is the GP poster who created the list of comparable items. If the items were not intended to be comparable, then they are off topic and irrelevant.
That's a great example of a really disingenuous debating technique called the 'straw man', It's not. The GP poster made a list of invaluable (and a few trivial) technological advances in the saving of lives. Cell phones are simply not in the same class. Cell phones are largely a convenience. They are not reliable enough for emergency response personnel (who still use pagers when it's critical that they be reachable), and are inferior to a landline in summoning help as they do not adequately report location for 911. With the narrow exception of unpopulated areas that still have cell coverage (where there'd certainly be no jamming), they're superfluous.
Speaking of missing the point... he wasn't comparing cell phones to CT scans. Yes he was:
"How did you manage when there was no CT scans and you had a pretty [bad] fucking car accident?"
I don't really know what to say about Family Guy, I have no idea why they cancelled that
Because it's the same five unfunny jokes over, and over, and over again., though they did bring it back Unfortunately.
A lot of Slashdotters really don't seem to understand this concept, judging by the responses to my post here.
Idealists. They can be exasperating. For the most part, their notions of the ideal world we should be working towards are prefaced with "If only everyone would...". Well, the problem with idealists is that they don;t realize that everyone NEVER will.