If person A writes a book and person B makes copies of that book and distributes them, person B infringes upon person A's ability to profit from that book.
If person A relies upon proceeds from that book in order to pay rent, person B has effectively cheated person A out of rent money.
In this case, person A should have some legal recourse. Person A should be able to sue for relief.
The issue of age needs to be taken into consideration. Yes, Megan Meier had choices, and she chose poorly - but she was a thirteen year-old girl, and thirteen year-olds aren't exactly famed for their decision-making skills. In fact, people of her age are legally exempted or forbidden from making binding decisions under many circumstances. So if Lori Drew engaged in this behavior with a legal adult, the actions of that adult are entirely their own responsibility, provided Drew didn't engage in coercion or run afoul of some existing law. But engaging in this behavior with a child might be a different matter. If it can be demonstrated that Drew willfully engaged in behavior that placed a child in danger, then it's less about the decisions of a child and more about the decisions of an adult.
"Hindi" means "no" in Tagalog. I know this because my mother is Filipino, and I "hindi" often. As in, no, you can't be a womanizer without me kicking your ass. When I was 12, my mother once attacked a guy in a shopping mall because of some perverted thing he said to me. My mother's sister once yanked a guy out of a cab in New York and beat him black and blue until the cops showed up and separated them (the guy didn't file charges because he was embarrassed by being beaten up by a five-foot tall Asian woman). So I'm not sure which Filipino women you've been hanging out with, but they certainly weren't in my family. The women in my family know how to say no, rarely flirt, and are about as subtle as a nine-pound hammer dropped on your foot.
I remember very competent secretaries quitting their jobs when computers were introduced into the workplace, out of fear. I also remember my mother's absolute terror at using old-school WordPerfect because she couldn't keep the shortcut and function keys straight and once lost a lengthy document. In both these examples, personal computing caused fear. IMHO, no personal computing environment should cause such a level of anxiety for people who have no real interest in computing and just want to type a letter, or play a game, or look at pr0n.
Not that my mom looks at pr0n. But you get the idea.
What about posts prior to about 1995 or so, before the existence of Dejanews? Pretty much nobody x-no-archived posts back then.
Many writers (myself included) took advantage of usenet as a place to workshop - you could post writing to a fiction or poetry group and get feedback from peers. The general sense was that usenet was ephemeral - with the exception of lone archivists, your post disappeared into the ether after X number of days. Dejanews (and later Google) changed all that - it turned usenet into a permanent, codified, searchable record. All your bad drafts come back to haunt you now, and all your good drafts lose commercial viability because they've been previously published on the internet. I don't think this constitutes copyright infringement, but I can see where the infringement alarm might go off for some.
Do you really want your perversions or personal communications potentially exposed to the public regardless of their legality?
Not to mention your potentially unpopular political opinions, your offhand jokes about the president, your sexual orientation, your intent to divorce your spouse...
There are countless reasons to use encryption. The first and foremost reason is this: maybe what you communicate is no one's business but your own and the recipient's.
WoW is less like racial mixing in a theater, and more like racial mixing on the movie screen. WoW isn't the real world; it's a game, a form of entertainment. The rules of that game may or may not reflect the political leanings of the players, but it will certainly reflect the political leanings and discomforts of its creators. This might be discrimination, or it might be good business practice, or it might be both; in any event, it certainly isn't discrimination of the same magnitude as Jim Crow.
That said, if I played WoW, I'd stop playing at this point on principle. I'm sure a good number of people will. But if statistics are to be believed, the number of lost players won't be significant enough to financially force Blizzard to change its mind.
It's much more than simply "sticks and stones." It's a regular and ceaseless confrontation with a privileged group that has refined and subtle methods by which to make you feel marginalized. Many members of that privileged group don't even realize they're marginalizing you (as an Asian-American, I tire of regularly being asked, "So what's your background?" when my white peers are rarely asked the same question). These are accepted behaviors in our society that have the effect of subtly establishing who is privileged and who isn't.
It's difficult to understand if you aren't part of an historically marginalized group, but all the individual looks, remarks, gestures and the like accumulate into a steady wave of exclusionary sentiment, and that wave can wear nearly anyone down over time. When every guy you meet in your profession stares at your chest, calls you "hon," or acts in a subtly dismissive manner at any intelligent thing you say, you begin to consider switching professions.
I think the fact that there is a HOWTO for this speaks volumes about why there are not more women involved in IT.
The fact that typing "fortune -o" leads to misogynistic humor half the time and Linux is represented by illustrations that look like Maxim ads speaks volumes as well.
Imagine Britney Spears appearing on stage in electroluminescent garb, when suddenly some PDA-toting geek in the crowd hacks her pants and across her ass we see, "first post!"
People too far below the average intelligence can't make it far enough down the path set before them, and so turn to crime, and are caught.
Perhaps. Or it could be that a few people have better resources than most others and exploit those resources to prevent other less fortunate people from getting ahead. It could be that people in power - regardless of intelligence - amass wealth at the expense of the poor. It could have a lot more to do with money, education, access to medicine and the powers of legislation, and the dynamics of race than with intelligence.
I, for one, have a hard time believing that criminals and the impoverished - most of whom are minorities - are simply stupider than everyone else. I have an easy time, however, objecting the implicit racism of your statement.
Hmm. I run Slackware current with the 2.6 kernel and KDE 3.2 on a Pentium II 366 with a 6GB hard drive and 256MB of RAM, and it's fine. It takes a bit to start up, but once it's running, I have very few speed problems.
You're assuming there is a way out for any of us, that we're participants in a simulation and that we have bodies or forms that exist outside of all of this. It seems as likely that we're not participants, but components of the simulation. If that's the case, there are no bodies to return to, and the only way out is by way of/dev/null.
All these posts about how hard it would be to simulate the universe are full of hubris.
They're full of hubris in a number of ways. For one thing, the vast majority of discussion on this subject assumes us humans to be the focus and objective of such a simulation. It seems equally as probable that the simulation's purpose might be to investigate what kind of universe comes into being when fundamental forces are tweaked in certain ways or when constants are set to certain (possibly random) values. Maybe the simulation was designed to see what permutations of matter came into being given a simple set of rules -- a Prime Mover tosses in a handful of automata, defines their interaction, then returns periodically to analyze the data. If this latter case were true, then the existence of life -- intelligent or otherwise -- might be perceived by the simulation's administrators as a few interesting new cases of molecular development, and nothing more.
Cool as that might be, I sincerely hope that isn't where the Wachowskis are taking the Matrix. There was a pretty awful film entitled "The Thirteenth Floor" that came out the same year as The Matrix, and it had exactly that plot -- a virtual world, one of the virtual people escaping into the real world, one of the real people discovering that the real world was a virtual world as well, etc, etc. No guns, no world-dominating AI and no kung fu chicks in black leather, but a pretty close match to what you're describing plot-structure-wise.
Blogging is the antithesis of goal driven composition, and it's about time this was understood.
Depends on your goal. I used to maintain two blogs, one for posting drafts of poems and prose, and the other for brainstorming and freewriting. They afforded me a place for language play, experimentation and growth as a writer. I also found input from my peers to be invaluable; when I refined the best blog snippets into proper prose or poetry, I found the comments of my blogging community to be remarkably useful.
Of course I realize that my own use of blogs is fairly unusual -- I don't blog to discuss my life, post quiz results, share links or the like. However, just because most bloggers use them for these purposes doesn't mean that this is all blogs are good for. A blog is a tool, and the discipline to write lies with the writer.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but this article appears to be concerned not with HTML as an art form, but with computer art and websites as art form. If it was actually about HTML, there would be lots more discussion of code, table layouts, scripting and interactivity, and the like.
English actually doesn't really have a written Grammar BTW
Um, not really. Read any first-year linguistics textbook - all languages are grammatical. Without grammar, you don't have a language.
The idea of a prescriptive grammar was retro-fitted by the Victorians, yes, but English had grammatical rules of its own long before nineteenth-century grammarians attempted to enforce Latinate rules upon it.
wrt the topic at hand, one way to think of human language is to call it ambiguous; another way to think of it is to call it flexible or even extensible. There's the denotative layer of a lexicon, in which words are more-or-less set in their definitions, but there's also a dynamic connotative layer in which words can shift meaning within a certain variable range (e.g., the word 'house' can take on connotative meanings that may or may not correspond with definitions of 'home'; a "house of ill repute," for example, is never referred to a "home of ill repute").
The advantage of the flexibility of human language is pretty significant. We get to do things like pun, allude, infer and imply, and most importantly, we get to extend the language on several levels, by creating new words ("meme," "slashdotted") and by creating new definitions for a word ("mouse," "root").
The downside of all this flexibility, of course, is the enormous and inherent possibility for ambiguity and poorly-formed statements. This is the case with any language, including classical languages in which grammar and syntax have been comprehensively analyzed and documented. But it's a trade-off; reduce a human language to zero ambiguity, and you compromise some of its core features.
The event that is the inevitable point of discussion here is, of course, September 11. We all remember sites like CNN that were too choked to serve, but at the same time, I'm sure many of us remember unconventional news sources -- online journals, for example, and sites like Slashdot -- that proved invaluable for their insight and even for their inconsistency and tendency toward rumor. I remember locating friends in Manhattan through Livejournal, because while the phone lines were all down, many of them had broadband and could still get online. Their accounts of what Manhattan was like at the time considerably enhanced my understanding of the event. Since there is the increasing possibility that witnesses to a major news event will also be participants in an online community of some sort, there is also the increasing possibility that internet will prove indispensible in providing multiple livetime views of what's happening.
Slashdot Mirror
If person A writes a book and person B makes copies of that book and distributes them, person B infringes upon person A's ability to profit from that book.
If person A relies upon proceeds from that book in order to pay rent, person B has effectively cheated person A out of rent money.
In this case, person A should have some legal recourse. Person A should be able to sue for relief.
The issue of age needs to be taken into consideration. Yes, Megan Meier had choices, and she chose poorly - but she was a thirteen year-old girl, and thirteen year-olds aren't exactly famed for their decision-making skills. In fact, people of her age are legally exempted or forbidden from making binding decisions under many circumstances. So if Lori Drew engaged in this behavior with a legal adult, the actions of that adult are entirely their own responsibility, provided Drew didn't engage in coercion or run afoul of some existing law. But engaging in this behavior with a child might be a different matter. If it can be demonstrated that Drew willfully engaged in behavior that placed a child in danger, then it's less about the decisions of a child and more about the decisions of an adult.
"Hindi" means "no" in Tagalog. I know this because my mother is Filipino, and I "hindi" often. As in, no, you can't be a womanizer without me kicking your ass. When I was 12, my mother once attacked a guy in a shopping mall because of some perverted thing he said to me. My mother's sister once yanked a guy out of a cab in New York and beat him black and blue until the cops showed up and separated them (the guy didn't file charges because he was embarrassed by being beaten up by a five-foot tall Asian woman). So I'm not sure which Filipino women you've been hanging out with, but they certainly weren't in my family. The women in my family know how to say no, rarely flirt, and are about as subtle as a nine-pound hammer dropped on your foot.
Wait ... was Ramon Reiser *wearing* pants at this point? Because a guy who shows up to court pantsless clearly has something to hide.
I remember very competent secretaries quitting their jobs when computers were introduced into the workplace, out of fear. I also remember my mother's absolute terror at using old-school WordPerfect because she couldn't keep the shortcut and function keys straight and once lost a lengthy document. In both these examples, personal computing caused fear. IMHO, no personal computing environment should cause such a level of anxiety for people who have no real interest in computing and just want to type a letter, or play a game, or look at pr0n.
Not that my mom looks at pr0n. But you get the idea.
What about posts prior to about 1995 or so, before the existence of Dejanews? Pretty much nobody x-no-archived posts back then.
Many writers (myself included) took advantage of usenet as a place to workshop - you could post writing to a fiction or poetry group and get feedback from peers. The general sense was that usenet was ephemeral - with the exception of lone archivists, your post disappeared into the ether after X number of days. Dejanews (and later Google) changed all that - it turned usenet into a permanent, codified, searchable record. All your bad drafts come back to haunt you now, and all your good drafts lose commercial viability because they've been previously published on the internet. I don't think this constitutes copyright infringement, but I can see where the infringement alarm might go off for some.
Do you really want your perversions or personal communications potentially exposed to the public regardless of their legality?
...
Not to mention your potentially unpopular political opinions, your offhand jokes about the president, your sexual orientation, your intent to divorce your spouse
There are countless reasons to use encryption. The first and foremost reason is this: maybe what you communicate is no one's business but your own and the recipient's.
WoW is less like racial mixing in a theater, and more like racial mixing on the movie screen. WoW isn't the real world; it's a game, a form of entertainment. The rules of that game may or may not reflect the political leanings of the players, but it will certainly reflect the political leanings and discomforts of its creators. This might be discrimination, or it might be good business practice, or it might be both; in any event, it certainly isn't discrimination of the same magnitude as Jim Crow.
That said, if I played WoW, I'd stop playing at this point on principle. I'm sure a good number of people will. But if statistics are to be believed, the number of lost players won't be significant enough to financially force Blizzard to change its mind.
It's much more than simply "sticks and stones." It's a regular and ceaseless confrontation with a privileged group that has refined and subtle methods by which to make you feel marginalized. Many members of that privileged group don't even realize they're marginalizing you (as an Asian-American, I tire of regularly being asked, "So what's your background?" when my white peers are rarely asked the same question). These are accepted behaviors in our society that have the effect of subtly establishing who is privileged and who isn't.
It's difficult to understand if you aren't part of an historically marginalized group, but all the individual looks, remarks, gestures and the like accumulate into a steady wave of exclusionary sentiment, and that wave can wear nearly anyone down over time. When every guy you meet in your profession stares at your chest, calls you "hon," or acts in a subtly dismissive manner at any intelligent thing you say, you begin to consider switching professions.
The fact that typing "fortune -o" leads to misogynistic humor half the time and Linux is represented by illustrations that look like Maxim ads speaks volumes as well.
Imagine Britney Spears appearing on stage in electroluminescent garb, when suddenly some PDA-toting geek in the crowd hacks her pants and across her ass we see, "first post!"
People too far below the average intelligence can't make it far enough down the path set before them, and so turn to crime, and are caught.
Perhaps. Or it could be that a few people have better resources than most others and exploit those resources to prevent other less fortunate people from getting ahead. It could be that people in power - regardless of intelligence - amass wealth at the expense of the poor. It could have a lot more to do with money, education, access to medicine and the powers of legislation, and the dynamics of race than with intelligence.
I, for one, have a hard time believing that criminals and the impoverished - most of whom are minorities - are simply stupider than everyone else. I have an easy time, however, objecting the implicit racism of your statement.
Hmm. I run Slackware current with the 2.6 kernel and KDE 3.2 on a Pentium II 366 with a 6GB hard drive and 256MB of RAM, and it's fine. It takes a bit to start up, but once it's running, I have very few speed problems.
It's my understanding that kernel 2.6 has much better parking meter support.
You're assuming there is a way out for any of us, that we're participants in a simulation and that we have bodies or forms that exist outside of all of this. It seems as likely that we're not participants, but components of the simulation. If that's the case, there are no bodies to return to, and the only way out is by way of /dev/null.
All these posts about how hard it would be to simulate the universe are full of hubris.
They're full of hubris in a number of ways. For one thing, the vast majority of discussion on this subject assumes us humans to be the focus and objective of such a simulation. It seems equally as probable that the simulation's purpose might be to investigate what kind of universe comes into being when fundamental forces are tweaked in certain ways or when constants are set to certain (possibly random) values. Maybe the simulation was designed to see what permutations of matter came into being given a simple set of rules -- a Prime Mover tosses in a handful of automata, defines their interaction, then returns periodically to analyze the data. If this latter case were true, then the existence of life -- intelligent or otherwise -- might be perceived by the simulation's administrators as a few interesting new cases of molecular development, and nothing more.
Cool as that might be, I sincerely hope that isn't where the Wachowskis are taking the Matrix. There was a pretty awful film entitled "The Thirteenth Floor" that came out the same year as The Matrix, and it had exactly that plot -- a virtual world, one of the virtual people escaping into the real world, one of the real people discovering that the real world was a virtual world as well, etc, etc. No guns, no world-dominating AI and no kung fu chicks in black leather, but a pretty close match to what you're describing plot-structure-wise.
Depends on your goal. I used to maintain two blogs, one for posting drafts of poems and prose, and the other for brainstorming and freewriting. They afforded me a place for language play, experimentation and growth as a writer. I also found input from my peers to be invaluable; when I refined the best blog snippets into proper prose or poetry, I found the comments of my blogging community to be remarkably useful.
Of course I realize that my own use of blogs is fairly unusual -- I don't blog to discuss my life, post quiz results, share links or the like. However, just because most bloggers use them for these purposes doesn't mean that this is all blogs are good for. A blog is a tool, and the discipline to write lies with the writer.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but this article appears to be concerned not with HTML as an art form, but with computer art and websites as art form. If it was actually about HTML, there would be lots more discussion of code, table layouts, scripting and interactivity, and the like.
English actually doesn't really have a written Grammar BTW
Um, not really. Read any first-year linguistics textbook - all languages are grammatical. Without grammar, you don't have a language.
The idea of a prescriptive grammar was retro-fitted by the Victorians, yes, but English had grammatical rules of its own long before nineteenth-century grammarians attempted to enforce Latinate rules upon it. wrt the topic at hand, one way to think of human language is to call it ambiguous; another way to think of it is to call it flexible or even extensible. There's the denotative layer of a lexicon, in which words are more-or-less set in their definitions, but there's also a dynamic connotative layer in which words can shift meaning within a certain variable range (e.g., the word 'house' can take on connotative meanings that may or may not correspond with definitions of 'home'; a "house of ill repute," for example, is never referred to a "home of ill repute").
The advantage of the flexibility of human language is pretty significant. We get to do things like pun, allude, infer and imply, and most importantly, we get to extend the language on several levels, by creating new words ("meme," "slashdotted") and by creating new definitions for a word ("mouse," "root").
The downside of all this flexibility, of course, is the enormous and inherent possibility for ambiguity and poorly-formed statements. This is the case with any language, including classical languages in which grammar and syntax have been comprehensively analyzed and documented. But it's a trade-off; reduce a human language to zero ambiguity, and you compromise some of its core features.
The event that is the inevitable point of discussion here is, of course, September 11. We all remember sites like CNN that were too choked to serve, but at the same time, I'm sure many of us remember unconventional news sources -- online journals, for example, and sites like Slashdot -- that proved invaluable for their insight and even for their inconsistency and tendency toward rumor. I remember locating friends in Manhattan through Livejournal, because while the phone lines were all down, many of them had broadband and could still get online. Their accounts of what Manhattan was like at the time considerably enhanced my understanding of the event. Since there is the increasing possibility that witnesses to a major news event will also be participants in an online community of some sort, there is also the increasing possibility that internet will prove indispensible in providing multiple livetime views of what's happening.