This is missing the point, isn't it? If you take open source software and do whateve with it, your derivative product is also open source, and therefore you are an open source software producer, and if the government pays you money for your product, they are supporting open source software.
If your question is, how does this activity support companies that can't create a sustainable business model for their open source software product and/or service (not suggesting this describes Apache), well... it doesn't. I don't necessarily know that I want my tax dollars heading that direction anyway.
If your asking, how does this support the open source software movement in general, well, lots of ways. Open source developers are likely to contribute to and enrich the public code base, since they use it to create their own software, even if they are creating something so specific or odd that their particular project isn't really adding to the public pool of code. I've never met anyone using open source in their professional life who wasn't an enthusiast and contributor to noncommercial open source movement, so the simple fact that an employer is putting food on the tables of open source enthusiast programmers will tend to enrich the movement. And it all gives open source legitimacy and a toehold in the government.
I prefer the slightly less ballistic CO2 powered version - Although it takes a quick and steady hand: drop a chunk of dry ice into a plastic soda bottle , add water, cap tightly, drop down the pipe (we used PVC set in concrete in a gallon ice cream bucket)quick shove down some newspaper for wadding followed by the ammo - a cylinder of ice frozen in a can. Of course, I live in Minnesota where preteens and drunken farmers roam the countryside with rifles and shotguns come hunting season, so I'm possibly more blase about this kind of thing...
He goes on to note that SBC is not a villian for doing this
I also beg to differ with this sentiment. Even if I accepted the suggestion that the mere fact that something is legal makes it okay to do, the tell-tale here is their decision to go after some little nobody to establish precedent. Hey, the economy is tough, let's find someone least able to defend themselves and try to squeeze some value out of our bogus intellectual property. "Blood-sucking" is not too strong of a term, though it may be an insult to ticks and vampire bats to put them in the same class as these parasitic scum.
Same old... Here's a couple more not very daring predictions for this worthless press release escapade: The price per song will be excessive, and the selection will be the same old ho-hum (at least what part of said ho-hum they can get their hands on, after companies that are still unable to deal with data transmission as business model or can't or won't find compatibility with their own music download business model).
"But a proliferation of free music-swapping services, among other factors, has led to a decline in CD sales." Ah, the underwater portion of the iceberg those "other factors" represent. Yeah, like them terrorists, wow they just ruined the music industry!
Absent the "pirates and terrorists" explanation, record company and retail executives might have to step up to the decades-brewing economic realities of the twenty-first century: an unsustainable percentage of economic growth, in the USA at least (I don't know about other countries) was fueled by insane consumer credit spending (people spending money they didn't have, at an interest rate exceeding the rate of increase of their income, do the math) market value growths that had no basis in legitimate profitability (such as the internet bubble and investment into companies like Worldcom and Enron that were just flat-out lying about their actual profits), and flat-out mismanagement by the insanely overpaid snake oil prophets of the high-flying executive class. Of course what we're going to hear over and over again is how it's all about pirates and terrorists. What's the alternative? Accept responsibility?
You know, I still take issue that sharing music on the net would be considered violating copyright.
Legally, this just isn't reality. It is illegal to copy or distribute a copyrighted work, regardless of whether you experience financial benefit from doing so. Fair use provisions exist (mainly in U.S. copyright laws) but they are very limited in their scope, and many of the things we take for granted as part of fair use rights have no basis in the law as written but exist as an extended interpretation of the law from judicial precedent. Mix tapes? They violate copyright laws and are illegal. The industry gets a legally mandated kickback from media manufacturers as a compensation for their alleged losses through illegal duplication of their product. Things like mix tapes are functionally decriminalized because they are too small of an issue to pursue. The scale of P2P is much, much larger, and whether it is true or not that it is having a negative impact on the music industry, they have the law behind them in their attempts to stop it.
And this, again, is my point. As long as this question gets framed as an issue of whether or file-sharing is legal (it's not) or something you have a right to do (you don't, unless the law changes) it simply gives the recording industry more justification to pursue their technological and legislative strategies, which promise to make technology less useful and the laws more restrictive. Meanwhile, the REAL issue - that the recording industry is engaged in purposely making its product less efficient and as a consequence is tremendously vulnerable to valid competition from new business models. Sharing U2 with your "community" on Gnutella ain't it.
I'm really glad people like you are posting to this discussion, but I wish it could be a different discussion. I think it's a mistake to try to put a number on the cost of producing an album and then say, oh look - it's a rip-off. On the other hand, you don't have to be a genius to figure out that mainstream published CDs at retail ARE a rip-off. Hell, I got a copy of the Matrix DVD at Target for the price of a Nelly CD at Sam Goody: obviously "production costs" are not the final word in the world of mark-ups.
We all know that the majors in the recording industry are ripping off artists, ripping off consumers, wasting tons of money, killing the potential of internet radio for the sole purpose of maintaining their lock on most of the radio dial, and trying damn hard to jettison our fair use rights to use technology to make the most of the copyrights we buy license to use. The conversation we need to be having is how can we promote and support a system where artists can afford to take the risks on a whole new paradigm of distribution.
Explain to me how an organization, transmitting a file under the name of a copyrighted work with the authority of the copyright holder of that work, is scum. The reality is, this only screws up P2P in its use to violate copyrights - and the people who own those copyrights, whether they are nice people or jerks, whether they are honest or "scum," are not only well within their rights, but they display a unique hypocrisy and double standard in the P2P community. You claim the right to share the files you want to - even if it is illegal under US and many international laws to do so? Yet these people are "scum" because they share the files they want to - files which would have no impact on you if you were not specifically searching for information that was illegal to copy and distribute.
As long as the focus is on how to violate copyrights we will never be able to do the much more complicated and involved work of convincing artists to ditch the hindrance of the publishing industry and take advantage of new technologies to reach a bigger audience for a lower investment (and, given the spectacularly rotten economics the biz offers musicians, make more money to boot). Everybody wins except the recording giants. Ah, that sounds like work. Better get back to pissing and moaning that they're slipping poison pills into your free stuff.
Yeah, that was a semantic mangling... but actually the copyright is the only thing with the legal authority to enforce an open license of any type, so I could obsfucate and say, all rights reserved... INCLUDING the right to make it completely open. And no, I ain't no stinkin' lawyer.
Yeah, okay - so some people agree with me and I get to have my comment float to the top for a few hours. The question now, is - can we do any better? So here is a challenge. I challenge y'all to copy the following, change it however you want (I'll whomp up a quick open source license, ummm... okey dokey, free my mind... okay, the following text as protected by copyright (I command you to visualize a little c in a circle) copyright Jonathan Hamlow 2002 all rights reserved and so forth - is all completely open to reuse, revision, and any use whatsoever by anyone although at the point you alter it I lay no claim to it... have at it).
TO BE USED TO INNUNDATE SLASHDOT EDITORS WITH REQUESTS FOR POSTING TO ASK SLASHDOT
Why can't we accomplish anything? The Slashdot community is fair sized and to me seems more intelligent than most. So why is the biggest and best thing we can accomplish shutting down any misbegotten website that has the misfortune to put up something interesting without having industrial-strength bandwidth?
What would your top issues be if you could REALLY organize this and other online communities? A candidate for president? Maybe a mutual fund - we could work out several dozen tech stocks that we think deserve support and agree to put in money, grit our teeth, and keep it there for the longer haul - say three years? What else? How would YOU organize the support? What would the system be for input, dissent, advice, decisionmaking? Would we ever be able to agreee on a sufficiently common groung? If we really put our better than average minds to it, could we actually DO something?
Okay, so get posting. For my part, I will post this myself, and if it actually gets up there I will participate in the discussion, and participate in anything that comes of it. Go on, why not? Waste another five minutes, it's just work. Stop talking and give anarchy by collective agreement a try...
I agree. The problem here is not the Supreme COurt but Congress, and the problem with Congress is that like idiots we continue to vote for lizards to rule us - because otherwise the wrong lizard might wind up in charge.
Every year more money is spent on elections - and we all know where that money is coming from. I heard a lobbyist on public radio a few days ago say outright that their goal is to either make a representative feel beholden to them or else afraid of them. They didn't even bother to spin it at all or try to make it sound remotely democratic, that is how confident these people are, and why not?
And the supreme irony is that the majority of people seem oblivious to the reality that the partisan divide is one hundred percent in favor of this situation. The electorate in the USA has been divided and conquered. Libertarians are out there fighting for the Republican side, while the Republicans are busy fighting abortion on every available front to satisfy their Christian Right pro-life contingent. Drug law reform advocates back the Democrats, who have been responsible for some of the most draconian, insane, prison-filling mandatory minimum drug laws on the books -all so they could prop up a "tough on crime" image. Above all, everybody studiously ignores the fact that nearly every member of Congress is busy producing two products: payback legislation for their special interest funders and bullshit rhetoric to keep their apparently braindead supporters on the hook. And year after year after year after year the issue of campaign finance legislation gets floated - and then all but the most minimal provisions get shot down, and what's left gets busily sued to smithereens.
And still you can log onto slashdot every day of the week and watch the spectacle of Republicans bickering with Democrats, liberals having it out with conservatives. Well here's the news of the day, sheep: the people who can afford real influence are laughing all the way to the bank. Democracy is an experiment that's failing because an informed, committed, active voting public is not something you can build into a constitution - and without that people get exactly the government they deserve.
I've spent way too much time at this discussion but of all the exchanges here yours is the most worthwhile. I'm emailing the comment to myself - if you are genuinely interested in discussing this issue further drop me a line at visionarygumption.com - I am really very interested in this too, and I think the fact that we are coming at it from different starting points could generate some fruitful discussion. Thanks for a good exchange. Oh, and if you decide to drop it - short answer, I can maybe point to some interesting theorists in the arena of whether science would always end up with the same results - I reread your question and actually it's a deep one, I think worth further discussion - and yeah, I'm probably pushing a cheap and unwarranted expansion of the implications of Goedel's proof, mea culpa! Oh , I've done that Heisenberg thing haven't I... where the lousy journalist says "Heisenberg showed that when we observe things the process of observation actually changes them" and I go AHHH! AHHHH! and pull out my hair. For this I studied calculus, physics, and chemistry for four years?!
but there is usually a rule in religion that you can't use science. You aren't supposed to examine religion closely, it requires faith, which from a religious person basically boils down to not peeking behind the curtain to see how things run, or even trying to find out without peeking.
Sigh. I dunno why I bother with these kinds of discussions but, okay, once more into the breach and then I'm giving up on it. I totally disagree that religion is anti-science, aside from the fact that I wasn't talking about religion in the first place, because to me religion is just a collection of practices that accumulate around particular contexts of beliefs. My whole point is that while you can find plenty of people who are blindly following dogma without introspection in the realm of religion - but you can find them just as easily in the realms of politics, sports, pickup truck preference... Look at what happened to revolutionary marxism, about as anti-religious of a ideology as you could find - totally taken over and turned toxic by dogma, cant, the narrow adherence to blind belief. I guess what irks me (and draws me into useless discussions like this is that it seems like what is to my experience a very narrow minority of people prescribing to a narrow cross section of metaphysical belief systems are held up and then a whole bunch of rational, intelligent, and compassionate people get tarred with the same brush. The idea that blindness is a fundamental dictate of faith and belief is simply false - which was the point I was trying to make in the first place.
As for morality I'm sick of people that think that their brand of metaphysical and spiritual 'discipline' provides the answer to all moral questions and that I as an atheist can not be a moral being. Morality and uncertainty go hand in hand.
Yeah, people making assumptions about you because of your holding to a particular belief system is a bear, ain't it? But I absolutely never made any correlation between atheism, or any other particular belief system, and moral capacity. I Wholly agree that "morality and uncertainty go hand in hand." I certainly did not assert that I had all the answers to moral questions. All I'm saying is that these are arenas where, right here and now, disciplines of thought I can only describe as metaphysical in nature provide the best contexts for discussion.
I suggest that you start getting into Popper, Kuhns, and read more deeply generally into the history and philosophy of science. Maybe eventually you will get over what is a common but simplistic and idealistic concept of what science is, how it works and how it is carried out. Read Goedel while you're at it and learn something about math and logic while you're at it. The idea that there is no belief involved in science is ludicrous - you could do with reading up on Einstein regarding the belief systems that are the basis of all scientific inquiry and how they impact the way we make our theories. But thanks for playing.
Read some Shermer, get to know some genuine, honest skeptics, find out what skepticism as a way of thinking means, and then come back and see if you have the same gall for your commentary that I do.
Valid point, but at the same time I have enough experience with people making nasty assumptions about what I believe, based on very flimsy evidence and a lot of baseless judgement, to stand behind what I said. I did qualify this as a particular variety of "skepticism" - a qualification that the original post I was responding to certainly did not offer the people he was attacking.
This is a fallacy known as "appeal to authority."
Yeah, I've studied logic too. But I still assert that it is worth considering the beliefs of individuals who exhibited superior intellects. The original poster is basically saying, people believe in things like God or gods because they fail to examine these beliefs. An investigation in some of the more noted believers in these or related concepts reveals that they did indeed examine their beliefs with considerable rigor. I'm not saying this proves that anything is right or wrong, just that the characterization of a particular class of beliefs as fundamentally and universally irrational is quite an indictment, and an unjustified one.
One of the things I see as important in scientific rigor is the way in which one can start with a complete ignorance of current scientific models and, through repetition of experiments and analysis of the data, arrive at current models
That's one whopper of an unsupported assumption. Bias, cultural assumption, dogma, unconscious beliefs all hold a huge role in science. It is demonstrably true that self-consistent but mutually exclusive systems of rigorously defined science and mathematics can be formulated. Ever read Goedel? A study of the history philosophy of science puts to lie the simple assumption you're asserting about the scientific method. Einstein, in a commentary about determining experimentally the speed of transmission of electrical signals, makes some very interesting arguments about whether we can create effective experiments without starting out with certain models, theories, and assumptions. Listen - I really am very much a supporter of science and I do believe it is on to something - but people who treat it as the end-all be-all of human intellect are in my opinion simultaneously giving science too much credit and whole other bodies of disciplined activities of reason too little credit. Yes, some of everything is bunk - there is tons of bad science out there too.
If you admit to how arbitrary your beliefs are, then why not just accept their arbitrary and personal nature and pick some that really, really appeal to you?
I can't get you interpret my saying that I practice the same spirit of examination and inquiry in the area of my metaphysical and spiritual beliefs as meaning I think my beliefs are "arbitrary." What I mean is quite the opposite. And why do you assume my beliefs do not appeal to me? If they did not I would not hold them. And more to the point - I never said a word about what it is, in particular, I believe. Maybe you should ask yourself why you're so eager to put me in a box.
well, since the AC gave you such a simplistic and nasty reply, I'll give you a longer one. I think both you and the response you responded to have some valid points. I think I was justified in my original response - I don't think the original post was limited to considering God or gods just because that was the example given. I was trying to draw it out to a broader view and simply recognize the fact that certain classes of beliefs tend to get painted with a very broad brush. I don't really know what the "supernatural" realm is. I know that I recognize a current state of understanding about the phenomenological physical universe, that that understanding is not complete, and that things exist within it that do not fit within the current paradigms of that understanding (free will, consciousness, perhaps certain aspects of morality although that one gets me in trouble, which is sad because it's a really interesting discussion that I can seldom have with people). I choose to say these things exist in the realmof the metaphysical: they transcend the physical as I am at this point capable of understanding it.
You're one of the few people that at least put forth some reasonable thought and gave a polite response and I appreciate that. In answer, I would say, fisrt off, your assuming particular beliefs on my part. And in fact you're right, but I don't choose to name them in a discourse like this because people assume all sorts of things when you attach a particular name to it.
And yeah, sure - they are beliefs I was raised with. I think that we all start out with (and carry) beliefs that we were given (or indoctrinated with, if you want to assume a value judgement) by our parents and society. This is our starting point. But here is the thing: yes, I practice a particular faith. I think I mean a completely different thing by that than you do when you say "believe in one religion." What bothers me is the tacit assumption that my upbringing is the ONLY reason I practice this faith. Indeed, it is assumed in your question that I do NOT question the particulars of what I believe.
My personal view is that some people get a certain kind of religious upbringing, examine it and reject it later in life, and from that point on they just assume that anyone who has not rejected it must not have examined it. I can tell you why I believe what I believe - very briefly and simply - because what I have experienced in the discipline of faithful practice of my beliefs has been evidence - and it works for me alone because these were experiences within myself - that are as undeniable to me as the evidence of my senses or my intellectual perception of truth. And yes, I recognize that like these things, I cannot assume absolute accuracy. So I don't assume I've got all the answers or even some major one-up on anyone else, regardless of what they believe. But on the same token - these perceptions, both my physical, sensory perceptions and my logical, intellectual perceptions and my inward, spiritual perceptions - are all I have to go on. I can't simply reject them unless I'm given a valid reason to do so. So far, nobody has come up with one. So I choose to continue to practice within a particular context, because it provides a framework for inquiry into things that science, thus far, has provided me little insight into, things which are very important to me indeed.
Try an argument with content instead of simply asserting your opinion and calling names. My arguments are debatable but at least there is something there to debate.
Okay, I'll bite this troller's bait. This review, and probably the book (I won't actually review something I haven't read, so a caveat here that I'm just going off the reviewer's obviously biased sentiment) and certainly this comment are all typical of a particular (and if I may say so, garden variety and dime a dozen) variety of "skeptic." This smart guy has everybody figured out - they are slaves of their childhood training, not liberated minds like ol' Boomer here.
If this were true, only stupid or unreflective people would believe in and all smart people would believe the same things about stuff like UFOs and a lot of other "debatable" issues.
And the problem is that is just patently not true. The list of people far more intelligent than me and (I'll intuit from your ill-considered response) you, BoomerBuddy, who also believe in some aspect of spirituality, goes on and on. Great writers, politicians, mathematicians, logicians, and scientists can be found among the ranks of believers of various creeds.
What's more, there is tons of (sometimes very acrimonious) discord in the hallowed ranks of science over what is true and what is not true, what is possible and what is not possible. I am not slagging science here - I am a believer in, and fan of, and a former student of science - and I probably know more about it than 90% of people (and believe me, that's not pride talking because it really isn't saying a hell of a lot).
But I'm sick of people that treat science like the end-all be-all of human reason with a dogmatism that would do the least reflective religious zealot they despise proud and seem incapable of grasping that there are wider philosophical issues (like consciousness, free will and morality) that science has little or no grasp on - and which metaphysical and spiritual disciplines provide sophisticated and elegant treatments of.
So yeah, big deal, your parents dragged you to church every Sunday for fifteen years and then you went to college and "got over it" because your intellect is so superior to all the schmucks. "Sad really." Spare me, pal - I don't need your sympathy for my beliefs, which I maintain and practice with my eyes wide open, and with my intellect, doubt, skepticism, spirit of inquiry and open mind intact. It's an attitude you would do well to work on, because if the history of science is any indication, a whole bunch of the stuff you believe in is wrong.
"Google is good, most netizens seem to think, but what if it weren't?" If it weren't good the principles of free enterprise would kick in a Google would no longer be important... One of the hundred other search engines would become king of the pile.
Oh, come ON. By your argument, when my former favorite search engine, AltaVista, started going down the commercial slough-chute, I would have just trashed that link and started using Google exclusively... Oh, no, yeah, you're totally correct. Good one!
I actually agree with you all the way. I think ultimately this all leads to a good thing: forcing people serving content to ask the question, is it worth giving away? And people consuming content to ask, is it worth paying for?
The internet, it seems, has been particularly prone to a kind of thinking that is particularly endemic in America... refusing to accept that to have a thing you must pay for it (hell, the impact of credit cards on the consumer spending boom of the nineties... and the tremendously irresponsible decision of the world of economics to ignore the inevitable crash in consumer spending it would lead to... proves that this problem starts at the bottom and goes all the way up to the top). Give me 90 billion to pay off for what insurance can't cover when the terrorists bomb Baltimore, and 10 billion extra for the military to fight terrorism, and give me a database of what everyone is buying with their credit cards, and five million Homeland Security business cards, oh and a tax cut too! Doesn't work that way. I love small government. My kid's school is a travesty of education! Cut my damn property taxes!
So, yes, getting real about how and why money is spent is indeed a good thing... But I still suspect that in more cases than not the Dubya Bee will find that it would rather keep it's big meaty profile, at the cost of serving a page or two (billion) than restrict itself the the AOL crowd.
I don't know if you can sell it as blackmail... but it's certainly nothing like a legal transaction... I think they could, depending on the vagaries of Danish law, be countersued for mail fraud, which is exactly what I'd do, if I was a vile P2P using copyright violator, which I'm not...
If I were one of these people, I would be saying "thanks for the warning!" Since a screenshot of a list of titles is legally meaningless, it's time to delete illegal files from your hard drive, get together with all those other recipients of bills, and sue the living daylights out of Das Gruppen for attempting to extort money under false pretences.
Unfortunately these yogurt heads are probably too disorganized to get it together (despite being capable of tracking down a copy of Titanic in Danish on KaZaa...
I don't think there is any reason you should get flamed to death - but it is a good example of why (whichever side you happen to agree with)we used to attempt to impose a wall between those who generated content and those who delivered content. The idea was that mass-media forms of communication are so powerful that you want to avoid too much of that power being concentrated in a single, self-interested entity. I'm worried that we're getting to the point when the up-and-coming media-consuming audience doesn't even realize that this was ever the case.
Of course, what you usually worry about in that equation is what is going to get forced down your throat rather than what you will be excluded from seeing... and you raise a good point, I mean, nobody is complaining that they can't pull down HBO on network Teevee, so more than an issue of rights, it's just a matter of whether it's smart. There is no content on the Internet that would induce me to become an AOL user, because AOL is stoopid access for people who are either too inept or too lazy to spend the fifteen minutes figuring out how to DIY with a browser and an ISP. I suspect there are plenty like me out there. My prediction is they will watch their hits drop precipitously for a while and start backpedaling.
Slashdot Mirror
If your question is, how does this activity support companies that can't create a sustainable business model for their open source software product and/or service (not suggesting this describes Apache), well... it doesn't. I don't necessarily know that I want my tax dollars heading that direction anyway.
If your asking, how does this support the open source software movement in general, well, lots of ways. Open source developers are likely to contribute to and enrich the public code base, since they use it to create their own software, even if they are creating something so specific or odd that their particular project isn't really adding to the public pool of code. I've never met anyone using open source in their professional life who wasn't an enthusiast and contributor to noncommercial open source movement, so the simple fact that an employer is putting food on the tables of open source enthusiast programmers will tend to enrich the movement. And it all gives open source legitimacy and a toehold in the government.
I prefer the slightly less ballistic CO2 powered version - Although it takes a quick and steady hand: drop a chunk of dry ice into a plastic soda bottle , add water, cap tightly, drop down the pipe (we used PVC set in concrete in a gallon ice cream bucket)quick shove down some newspaper for wadding followed by the ammo - a cylinder of ice frozen in a can. Of course, I live in Minnesota where preteens and drunken farmers roam the countryside with rifles and shotguns come hunting season, so I'm possibly more blase about this kind of thing...
I also beg to differ with this sentiment. Even if I accepted the suggestion that the mere fact that something is legal makes it okay to do, the tell-tale here is their decision to go after some little nobody to establish precedent. Hey, the economy is tough, let's find someone least able to defend themselves and try to squeeze some value out of our bogus intellectual property. "Blood-sucking" is not too strong of a term, though it may be an insult to ticks and vampire bats to put them in the same class as these parasitic scum.
"But a proliferation of free music-swapping services, among other factors, has led to a decline in CD sales." Ah, the underwater portion of the iceberg those "other factors" represent. Yeah, like them terrorists, wow they just ruined the music industry!
Absent the "pirates and terrorists" explanation, record company and retail executives might have to step up to the decades-brewing economic realities of the twenty-first century: an unsustainable percentage of economic growth, in the USA at least (I don't know about other countries) was fueled by insane consumer credit spending (people spending money they didn't have, at an interest rate exceeding the rate of increase of their income, do the math) market value growths that had no basis in legitimate profitability (such as the internet bubble and investment into companies like Worldcom and Enron that were just flat-out lying about their actual profits), and flat-out mismanagement by the insanely overpaid snake oil prophets of the high-flying executive class. Of course what we're going to hear over and over again is how it's all about pirates and terrorists. What's the alternative? Accept responsibility?
Legally, this just isn't reality. It is illegal to copy or distribute a copyrighted work, regardless of whether you experience financial benefit from doing so. Fair use provisions exist (mainly in U.S. copyright laws) but they are very limited in their scope, and many of the things we take for granted as part of fair use rights have no basis in the law as written but exist as an extended interpretation of the law from judicial precedent. Mix tapes? They violate copyright laws and are illegal. The industry gets a legally mandated kickback from media manufacturers as a compensation for their alleged losses through illegal duplication of their product. Things like mix tapes are functionally decriminalized because they are too small of an issue to pursue. The scale of P2P is much, much larger, and whether it is true or not that it is having a negative impact on the music industry, they have the law behind them in their attempts to stop it.
And this, again, is my point. As long as this question gets framed as an issue of whether or file-sharing is legal (it's not) or something you have a right to do (you don't, unless the law changes) it simply gives the recording industry more justification to pursue their technological and legislative strategies, which promise to make technology less useful and the laws more restrictive. Meanwhile, the REAL issue - that the recording industry is engaged in purposely making its product less efficient and as a consequence is tremendously vulnerable to valid competition from new business models. Sharing U2 with your "community" on Gnutella ain't it.
We all know that the majors in the recording industry are ripping off artists, ripping off consumers, wasting tons of money, killing the potential of internet radio for the sole purpose of maintaining their lock on most of the radio dial, and trying damn hard to jettison our fair use rights to use technology to make the most of the copyrights we buy license to use. The conversation we need to be having is how can we promote and support a system where artists can afford to take the risks on a whole new paradigm of distribution.
As long as the focus is on how to violate copyrights we will never be able to do the much more complicated and involved work of convincing artists to ditch the hindrance of the publishing industry and take advantage of new technologies to reach a bigger audience for a lower investment (and, given the spectacularly rotten economics the biz offers musicians, make more money to boot). Everybody wins except the recording giants. Ah, that sounds like work. Better get back to pissing and moaning that they're slipping poison pills into your free stuff.
Yeah, that was a semantic mangling... but actually the copyright is the only thing with the legal authority to enforce an open license of any type, so I could obsfucate and say, all rights reserved... INCLUDING the right to make it completely open. And no, I ain't no stinkin' lawyer.
What would a Slashdot posting be without typos?
TO BE USED TO INNUNDATE SLASHDOT EDITORS WITH REQUESTS FOR POSTING TO ASK SLASHDOT
Why can't we accomplish anything? The Slashdot community is fair sized and to me seems more intelligent than most. So why is the biggest and best thing we can accomplish shutting down any misbegotten website that has the misfortune to put up something interesting without having industrial-strength bandwidth?
What would your top issues be if you could REALLY organize this and other online communities? A candidate for president? Maybe a mutual fund - we could work out several dozen tech stocks that we think deserve support and agree to put in money, grit our teeth, and keep it there for the longer haul - say three years? What else? How would YOU organize the support? What would the system be for input, dissent, advice, decisionmaking? Would we ever be able to agreee on a sufficiently common groung? If we really put our better than average minds to it, could we actually DO something?
Okay, so get posting. For my part, I will post this myself, and if it actually gets up there I will participate in the discussion, and participate in anything that comes of it. Go on, why not? Waste another five minutes, it's just work. Stop talking and give anarchy by collective agreement a try...
Every year more money is spent on elections - and we all know where that money is coming from. I heard a lobbyist on public radio a few days ago say outright that their goal is to either make a representative feel beholden to them or else afraid of them. They didn't even bother to spin it at all or try to make it sound remotely democratic, that is how confident these people are, and why not?
And the supreme irony is that the majority of people seem oblivious to the reality that the partisan divide is one hundred percent in favor of this situation. The electorate in the USA has been divided and conquered. Libertarians are out there fighting for the Republican side, while the Republicans are busy fighting abortion on every available front to satisfy their Christian Right pro-life contingent. Drug law reform advocates back the Democrats, who have been responsible for some of the most draconian, insane, prison-filling mandatory minimum drug laws on the books -all so they could prop up a "tough on crime" image. Above all, everybody studiously ignores the fact that nearly every member of Congress is busy producing two products: payback legislation for their special interest funders and bullshit rhetoric to keep their apparently braindead supporters on the hook. And year after year after year after year the issue of campaign finance legislation gets floated - and then all but the most minimal provisions get shot down, and what's left gets busily sued to smithereens.
And still you can log onto slashdot every day of the week and watch the spectacle of Republicans bickering with Democrats, liberals having it out with conservatives. Well here's the news of the day, sheep: the people who can afford real influence are laughing all the way to the bank. Democracy is an experiment that's failing because an informed, committed, active voting public is not something you can build into a constitution - and without that people get exactly the government they deserve.
that should be visionary AT SYMBOL gumption DOT com - and I would genuinely like to exchange thoughts about these issues.
I've spent way too much time at this discussion but of all the exchanges here yours is the most worthwhile. I'm emailing the comment to myself - if you are genuinely interested in discussing this issue further drop me a line at visionarygumption.com - I am really very interested in this too, and I think the fact that we are coming at it from different starting points could generate some fruitful discussion. Thanks for a good exchange. Oh, and if you decide to drop it - short answer, I can maybe point to some interesting theorists in the arena of whether science would always end up with the same results - I reread your question and actually it's a deep one, I think worth further discussion - and yeah, I'm probably pushing a cheap and unwarranted expansion of the implications of Goedel's proof, mea culpa! Oh , I've done that Heisenberg thing haven't I... where the lousy journalist says "Heisenberg showed that when we observe things the process of observation actually changes them" and I go AHHH! AHHHH! and pull out my hair. For this I studied calculus, physics, and chemistry for four years?!
Sigh. I dunno why I bother with these kinds of discussions but, okay, once more into the breach and then I'm giving up on it. I totally disagree that religion is anti-science, aside from the fact that I wasn't talking about religion in the first place, because to me religion is just a collection of practices that accumulate around particular contexts of beliefs. My whole point is that while you can find plenty of people who are blindly following dogma without introspection in the realm of religion - but you can find them just as easily in the realms of politics, sports, pickup truck preference... Look at what happened to revolutionary marxism, about as anti-religious of a ideology as you could find - totally taken over and turned toxic by dogma, cant, the narrow adherence to blind belief. I guess what irks me (and draws me into useless discussions like this is that it seems like what is to my experience a very narrow minority of people prescribing to a narrow cross section of metaphysical belief systems are held up and then a whole bunch of rational, intelligent, and compassionate people get tarred with the same brush. The idea that blindness is a fundamental dictate of faith and belief is simply false - which was the point I was trying to make in the first place.
Yeah, people making assumptions about you because of your holding to a particular belief system is a bear, ain't it? But I absolutely never made any correlation between atheism, or any other particular belief system, and moral capacity. I Wholly agree that "morality and uncertainty go hand in hand." I certainly did not assert that I had all the answers to moral questions. All I'm saying is that these are arenas where, right here and now, disciplines of thought I can only describe as metaphysical in nature provide the best contexts for discussion.
I suggest that you start getting into Popper, Kuhns, and read more deeply generally into the history and philosophy of science. Maybe eventually you will get over what is a common but simplistic and idealistic concept of what science is, how it works and how it is carried out. Read Goedel while you're at it and learn something about math and logic while you're at it. The idea that there is no belief involved in science is ludicrous - you could do with reading up on Einstein regarding the belief systems that are the basis of all scientific inquiry and how they impact the way we make our theories. But thanks for playing.
Valid point, but at the same time I have enough experience with people making nasty assumptions about what I believe, based on very flimsy evidence and a lot of baseless judgement, to stand behind what I said. I did qualify this as a particular variety of "skepticism" - a qualification that the original post I was responding to certainly did not offer the people he was attacking.
This is a fallacy known as "appeal to authority."
Yeah, I've studied logic too. But I still assert that it is worth considering the beliefs of individuals who exhibited superior intellects. The original poster is basically saying, people believe in things like God or gods because they fail to examine these beliefs. An investigation in some of the more noted believers in these or related concepts reveals that they did indeed examine their beliefs with considerable rigor. I'm not saying this proves that anything is right or wrong, just that the characterization of a particular class of beliefs as fundamentally and universally irrational is quite an indictment, and an unjustified one.
One of the things I see as important in scientific rigor is the way in which one can start with a complete ignorance of current scientific models and, through repetition of experiments and analysis of the data, arrive at current models
That's one whopper of an unsupported assumption. Bias, cultural assumption, dogma, unconscious beliefs all hold a huge role in science. It is demonstrably true that self-consistent but mutually exclusive systems of rigorously defined science and mathematics can be formulated. Ever read Goedel? A study of the history philosophy of science puts to lie the simple assumption you're asserting about the scientific method. Einstein, in a commentary about determining experimentally the speed of transmission of electrical signals, makes some very interesting arguments about whether we can create effective experiments without starting out with certain models, theories, and assumptions. Listen - I really am very much a supporter of science and I do believe it is on to something - but people who treat it as the end-all be-all of human intellect are in my opinion simultaneously giving science too much credit and whole other bodies of disciplined activities of reason too little credit. Yes, some of everything is bunk - there is tons of bad science out there too.
If you admit to how arbitrary your beliefs are, then why not just accept their arbitrary and personal nature and pick some that really, really appeal to you?
I can't get you interpret my saying that I practice the same spirit of examination and inquiry in the area of my metaphysical and spiritual beliefs as meaning I think my beliefs are "arbitrary." What I mean is quite the opposite. And why do you assume my beliefs do not appeal to me? If they did not I would not hold them. And more to the point - I never said a word about what it is, in particular, I believe. Maybe you should ask yourself why you're so eager to put me in a box.
well, since the AC gave you such a simplistic and nasty reply, I'll give you a longer one. I think both you and the response you responded to have some valid points. I think I was justified in my original response - I don't think the original post was limited to considering God or gods just because that was the example given. I was trying to draw it out to a broader view and simply recognize the fact that certain classes of beliefs tend to get painted with a very broad brush. I don't really know what the "supernatural" realm is. I know that I recognize a current state of understanding about the phenomenological physical universe, that that understanding is not complete, and that things exist within it that do not fit within the current paradigms of that understanding (free will, consciousness, perhaps certain aspects of morality although that one gets me in trouble, which is sad because it's a really interesting discussion that I can seldom have with people). I choose to say these things exist in the realmof the metaphysical: they transcend the physical as I am at this point capable of understanding it.
And yeah, sure - they are beliefs I was raised with. I think that we all start out with (and carry) beliefs that we were given (or indoctrinated with, if you want to assume a value judgement) by our parents and society. This is our starting point. But here is the thing: yes, I practice a particular faith. I think I mean a completely different thing by that than you do when you say "believe in one religion." What bothers me is the tacit assumption that my upbringing is the ONLY reason I practice this faith. Indeed, it is assumed in your question that I do NOT question the particulars of what I believe.
My personal view is that some people get a certain kind of religious upbringing, examine it and reject it later in life, and from that point on they just assume that anyone who has not rejected it must not have examined it. I can tell you why I believe what I believe - very briefly and simply - because what I have experienced in the discipline of faithful practice of my beliefs has been evidence - and it works for me alone because these were experiences within myself - that are as undeniable to me as the evidence of my senses or my intellectual perception of truth. And yes, I recognize that like these things, I cannot assume absolute accuracy. So I don't assume I've got all the answers or even some major one-up on anyone else, regardless of what they believe. But on the same token - these perceptions, both my physical, sensory perceptions and my logical, intellectual perceptions and my inward, spiritual perceptions - are all I have to go on. I can't simply reject them unless I'm given a valid reason to do so. So far, nobody has come up with one. So I choose to continue to practice within a particular context, because it provides a framework for inquiry into things that science, thus far, has provided me little insight into, things which are very important to me indeed.
What
Try an argument with content instead of simply asserting your opinion and calling names. My arguments are debatable but at least there is something there to debate.
If this were true, only stupid or unreflective people would believe in and all smart people would believe the same things about stuff like UFOs and a lot of other "debatable" issues.
And the problem is that is just patently not true. The list of people far more intelligent than me and (I'll intuit from your ill-considered response) you, BoomerBuddy, who also believe in some aspect of spirituality, goes on and on. Great writers, politicians, mathematicians, logicians, and scientists can be found among the ranks of believers of various creeds.
What's more, there is tons of (sometimes very acrimonious) discord in the hallowed ranks of science over what is true and what is not true, what is possible and what is not possible. I am not slagging science here - I am a believer in, and fan of, and a former student of science - and I probably know more about it than 90% of people (and believe me, that's not pride talking because it really isn't saying a hell of a lot).
But I'm sick of people that treat science like the end-all be-all of human reason with a dogmatism that would do the least reflective religious zealot they despise proud and seem incapable of grasping that there are wider philosophical issues (like consciousness, free will and morality) that science has little or no grasp on - and which metaphysical and spiritual disciplines provide sophisticated and elegant treatments of.
So yeah, big deal, your parents dragged you to church every Sunday for fifteen years and then you went to college and "got over it" because your intellect is so superior to all the schmucks. "Sad really." Spare me, pal - I don't need your sympathy for my beliefs, which I maintain and practice with my eyes wide open, and with my intellect, doubt, skepticism, spirit of inquiry and open mind intact. It's an attitude you would do well to work on, because if the history of science is any indication, a whole bunch of the stuff you believe in is wrong.
Oh, come ON. By your argument, when my former favorite search engine, AltaVista, started going down the commercial slough-chute, I would have just trashed that link and started using Google exclusively... Oh, no, yeah, you're totally correct. Good one!
The internet, it seems, has been particularly prone to a kind of thinking that is particularly endemic in America... refusing to accept that to have a thing you must pay for it (hell, the impact of credit cards on the consumer spending boom of the nineties... and the tremendously irresponsible decision of the world of economics to ignore the inevitable crash in consumer spending it would lead to... proves that this problem starts at the bottom and goes all the way up to the top). Give me 90 billion to pay off for what insurance can't cover when the terrorists bomb Baltimore, and 10 billion extra for the military to fight terrorism, and give me a database of what everyone is buying with their credit cards, and five million Homeland Security business cards, oh and a tax cut too! Doesn't work that way. I love small government. My kid's school is a travesty of education! Cut my damn property taxes!
So, yes, getting real about how and why money is spent is indeed a good thing... But I still suspect that in more cases than not the Dubya Bee will find that it would rather keep it's big meaty profile, at the cost of serving a page or two (billion) than restrict itself the the AOL crowd.
If I were one of these people, I would be saying "thanks for the warning!" Since a screenshot of a list of titles is legally meaningless, it's time to delete illegal files from your hard drive, get together with all those other recipients of bills, and sue the living daylights out of Das Gruppen for attempting to extort money under false pretences.
Unfortunately these yogurt heads are probably too disorganized to get it together (despite being capable of tracking down a copy of Titanic in Danish on KaZaa...
Of course, what you usually worry about in that equation is what is going to get forced down your throat rather than what you will be excluded from seeing... and you raise a good point, I mean, nobody is complaining that they can't pull down HBO on network Teevee, so more than an issue of rights, it's just a matter of whether it's smart. There is no content on the Internet that would induce me to become an AOL user, because AOL is stoopid access for people who are either too inept or too lazy to spend the fifteen minutes figuring out how to DIY with a browser and an ISP. I suspect there are plenty like me out there. My prediction is they will watch their hits drop precipitously for a while and start backpedaling.