I haven't travelled extensively, but I have been out of Australia - I've travelled in Indonesia a bit. So I can't really go one up on you there;-(
However, I don't think I need any particular qualifications to say that you do _not_ come across as someone who has really thought about this sort of thing - you sound rather like someone who has just accepted the things that you learnt in the first ten years of your life, and not considered moving outside that box since. You say you've questioned non-Americans that you know (presumably both the ones at your university, and when you were travelling) - have you ever really sat down and talked to the ones who _didn't_ agree with most of what you said? Did you ever ask them why, and really pursue their reasoning? Or did you just have a good old yarn with the ones that agreed with you, while ignoring the ones that disagreed? I should note that, like you, I'm not trying to be offensive here, I'm just trying to work out why you think that the rest of the world is second rate, and why you haven't considered that the rest of the world might simply be _different_. You seem to be making a value judgement in a case where they aren't either safe or, generally, warranted - how can you say that a different culture is "second-rate"? You might prefer one to another, but to say that one is better than the other is, to my mind, stupid. And that's pretty much what pisses me off about the attitude that most Americans seem to have about the world - they either think that it's just completely unimportant, or they think that the US is just fundamentally better. And my response to that kind of reasoning tends to be "Fuck You", because there's very little that anyone can say to change the opinion of someone who thinks that way (believe me, I've tried).
Oh, about ISDN - it's as much a networking technology as ethernet, ATM, X25, wavelan, or any other link-layer technology - it's a bit-pipe, basically.
I suppose you could say that the whole point of my argument is just about identical to OzJimbob's - try thinking outside the square. It would probably help if you started with the premise that the US is _not_ just fundamentally better than the rest of the world, but you never know, you might derive that result from your research . . .
And as a final point, your original post seriously fucked me off by using that phrase "America rules while everyone else drools.", which could probably go down as one of the most offensive lines I've ever heard in an alegedly serious discussion. I'd really suggest you refrain from using it again, unless you're aiming for pissed off readers.
For a number of reasons, your post is full of shit.
"The spirit of America, the spirit that overrode the Nazis and Nippon, will spill into every place and every person - whether they acknowledge it or not."
Wrong - what "overrode the Nazis and Nippon" was the fact that the US just happened to be a country with a total land mass larger than Europe, richer agriculturally and minerally, united, and very populous. It's the same reason that invading the USSR was suicidal - some countries are just too big to invade, and some countries are just too big and powerful to defeat in a conventional war. America's "spirit" had almost nothing to do with it's success in the second world war - in fact, it's entirely possible that the US wouldn't have gotten into the war if it hadn't been for Japan making the first move. So where was the American Spirit there?
"I think the important heart of the argument is this: America is the source of a substatianly large portion of all ideas over the past century - it's been the most successful of all memetic cultural beasts because of its strong support of pluralism."
Once again, you seem to be making the mistake of assuming that things caused by America's size and power are actually due to some wonderful thing fundamental to the US's nature - this is, of course, ridiculous. The US has the cultural clout it has because it can afford to produce an enormous amount of cultural product, and it is in a position where it can offer up that product to the rest of the world very easily. It's a lot harder for a popular Australian band to make it in the US than it is for an equivalently (in terms of percentages) popular American band to make it in Australia - the Australian band might sell fifty thousand albums here, where the American band might sell a million albums (the US population is about twenty times that of Australia). That size and economic power massively distorts the way that the US interacts with the rest of thw world, to the point where it can look like the US is somehow qualitatively different, as well as quantitatively.
"But we should remember that Europe, for all its strong culture, history, and intelligence, is for the most part a very, very biased society. Racial purity is not that taboo a concept beneath the surface there, and as far as cultural pluralism... well, the forces coming to a head in Austria may be being censured, but their ideas are only unpopular because they are government sponsored."
This from the home of the Ku Klux Klan? I think you're being just a tad selectively blind, here - there are stupid, bigoted people everywhere in the world, and the fact that some of them are getting considerable power in some parts of Europe doesn't mean that it's a problem unique to Europe. After all, aren't half of the Republican politicians in the US _really_ suspect in this sense? On the flipside, you can also find as much support for pluralism and so forth in Europe or elsewhere as you can find in the US, and in fact many places are much stronger in their support than the US. Australia, for one, is more multicultural than the US, and more successful (AFAICT) at having multiple cultures living together with minimal tension.
And finally: "In a sense, no matter how much it changes, America will always remain the owners of the Internet.. maybe not the physical America of the future, but this technology has managed only to spread our ideas and concepts further and more quickly than any means before."
"our" ideas? "our" concepts? I'm sorry, but you've got your head up your arse if you think that the ideas and concepts you are claiming as your own were not being circulated quite successfully without you. You didn't come up with them, and you haven't even perfected them. The only reason they sometimes appear to have originated with you is because you can make much more noise about things than anyone else can, so that you can drown out the other, quieter voices that were talking before.
America, please get your head out of your arse and take a look at the rest of the world - we've been doing all these wonderful things for ages, and yet whenever you start up, you make like it was your idea all along.
You know, that is a really broken argument. For a start, the US didn't invent everything in the world, by such a long margin that it's not even funny. The US didn't even invent all the networking technology out there - ISDN was developed (IIRC) by a European company, as an example that I can think of right now. Secondly, you seem to be looking at the world from a very US centered position, so that you end up either ignoring or literally not seeing all the stuff that _isn't_ about the US - you heard lots of American music while you were in France, but you probably didn't even listen to anything that wasn't American, or very strongly influenced by American music. Likewise with the news, and with the movies you watched, and so forth.
This is the bit that really gets on my nerves:
"I'm not oblivious to the fact that there are other people in the world. I'm just saying that America rules while everyone else drools. There are lots of things (not just the internet) that many people have. That doesn't mean that they aren't America-centric, or didn't come from America."
To paraphrase: "Yeah, I know there are other people out there, but I couldn't give a damn about them. They're not Americans, and hey, they use all this stuff that Americans came up with, and they listen to our music and watch our movies, so it doesn't make any difference, does it? America's just waaay better . . . " Do you know how stupid that makes you sound? This kind of argument is the reason why most of the world loathes the US - the US seems to think that the world exists either for them to use/abuse/whatever, or that it's too unimportant for them to worry about. That's incredibly offensive for the rest of the world. It's like there's this really big chunk of the world that has it's head so far up it's arse that it doesn't even know that anything other than shit exists - and the rest of the world, because the US just happens to be big enough and rich enough to get away with it, has got to keep on taking this shit. That's what Ozjimbob was talking about when he said you should think outside the square - he meant that you should get your head out of your arse and look around for a bit. Of course, he was much more polite about it . . .
himi I love ranting about the US - it's such a large target that you can't miss . . .
It's a bit scary discovering an American who actually has a brain attached to the fingers that do all that typing . . . It makes it so much harder for me to loath "all those bloody yanks" . . .;-)
Seriously though, is the US _really_ that insular? Or is it just that the ones with no brain are the ones that don't stop to think before saying/doing things, and hence tend to be loudest? Enquiring minds want to know . . .
Could you point us towards some evidence for you claims about Australian crime rates? And if you suggest something from the NRA or their Australian equivalent, I for one will laugh in your face (or should that be fart? Something disrespectful, anyway). You might want to try the Australian Beaureau of Statistics - they tend to have that sort of information redily available.
Until you provide some evidence, I intend to keep on supporting the gun-control laws in this country, on the grounds that guns are too dangerous to be readily available - it should be difficult to get hold of a gun, for whatever reason you feel you need it. That should at least make it a little bit harder for depressed teenagers to top themselves, or for pissed off spouses to knock off their better halves, or any of the other common gun crimes. Armed robbery isn't that common, you know - possibly because we have a culture where the idea of using guns is considered a tad, shall we say, extreme . . . I rather like this culture, by the way, so telling me it's pathetic is going to go down like a lead balloon, as will telling me that it's not free, that I'm being repressed by my government (the ones that I voted against, by the way - when was the last time you voted?), or any of the other common arguments. I'm as free as you are, in pretty much the same way that any license that meets the OSD is free - past a certain point, the extras don't matter. Your freedom to bear arms is one of those extras, that just aren't important to me, so my lack of freedom in that respect doesn't count as an impingement of my freedoms, nor should it.
Well, that was going to be a nice short disposal of you rather stupid post . . . Ah well, it's always nice to rant about something like this . . .
and they're always prepared to change such assumptions.
The reality is that if the laws we come up with aren't universal, life would be so much harder for scientists that they'd get nothing done, so in the abscence of evidence otherwise, the universal nature of the laws is assumed. But, and this is the important thing, the assumption is not taken on faith - scientists are aware of the possibility that the assumption is false, and they ignore that possibility for practical reasons. And that's vastly different to building on faith . . .
I have a fairly serious problem with those people who argue that religion and science aren't incompatible. The thing is, pretty much all of those arguments basically reduce to "religion is just a way of living/code of ethics/whatever". And this is fundamentally wrong - religions contain those things, but they also have other baggage that they carry along, and which (arguably) form the core of the religion. I'm talking about things like the vengeful God of the Catholics, who'll send you to hell if you don't stop right now!, or the Jewish God who thinks eating pork is disgusting, or any of a million other almost completely stupid tenets of faith.
Religions do provide some foundations for a system of morals, by defining some things to be acceptable and some to be unacceptable, and so forth. Those morals provide a framework for thinking about ethics. But at the most fundamental level, religion actually has very little to do with ethics in the sense that people think about them now, and just about everything to do with commandments - "Thou shalt not kill!" might be a foundation for the idea that it's unethical to kill people, but the religious side of it is nothing deeper or more meaningful than your parent's telling you to take you elbows off the table.
Science doesn't do anything like that - in fact, science doesn't tell you to do anything at all. Science is simply a method for learning about and describing the world - there are no commandments of science, no morality, no tenets of faith: all you get is a method for looking at the world, and if you're lucky the results of other people's work. Now, I know that the scientific community (the people who actually do science) is less pure than this, but that community and it's culture is still very strongly informed by the scientific method and it's lack of dogma. Good scientists take considerable delight in considering the possibility that the foundations of their understanding are completely and utterly wrong - this is about as far as it's possible to get from the tenets of faith that religions wave around like banners.
Now, by those descriptions you'd think that the `let's get all cuddly with religion' people are pretty much on the ball - after all, if science is so agnostic, where's the clash? Well, you have to consider the foundations of the two things. Science is founded on questioning the workings of the world - "Does this theory really work? If not, then what kind of theory would work?". Religions, on the other hand, are founded on that faith thing - you're not supposed to question these things, because if you don't believe them on faith, you're obviously not part of this religion. See the problem?
The point where scientists tend to screw up this kind of debate is where they either don't see, or just ignore the bits of whatever religion they're looking at which are dogmatic and completely reliant on faith. It's very easy to do, particularly in the western world today, because most western religions are really watered down and seem to minimise the leaps of faith required for membership. So a scientist looking at the Anglican Church would probably think "this God stuff's not important, let's look at their ethical thinking . . . " thereby missing the bit that makes the difference between an academic discussion group and a religion - faith.
Recapping (hopefully slightly more clearly;-), the problem with linking science and religion is that religion without faith is no longer religion, and a scientific method which incorporates blind faith in anything is no longer science. It doesn't matter how much of a religion's morality is sensible and workable, the religion is still founded on something that is fundamentally antagonistic to the scientific method. Ethics and morality are orthogonal to scientific enquiry, but faith is not. Science and religion are fundamentally contradictory, and no amount of award money or `mind of god' books will ever change that.
"Probably killed just as many people as it's ever helped.
Wow... again, sounds like science! "
There's a very fundamental difference between the idea of a religion killing someone, and one of the products of science killing someone: aside from indirect influences (like people contracting HIV because contraceptives are `against God's word'), when a religion kills someone, it's by actually coming out and saying "kill this person/group of people". Aside from a _very_ small lunatic fringe, scientists _never_ say "you should kill this person because science says so". That's the difference - most religions have very little problem (though not so much these days) with condemning people to death on religious grounds, while science as a discipline says nothing about that sort of thing.
Please, don't think of science as a way of living or a code of ethics or anything like that - all that science is is a tool for learning about and describing the world. It's pretty much identical to the thing with guns - "guns don't kill people, people do". Science doesn't kill people, even though it may provide tools that allow people to. Religious leaders and their followers, on the other hand, _do_ kill in the name of their religion, and some religious sects actually require killing in some circumstances. That's what people mean when they talk about religion killing people - it's the conscious decision to take a life, rather than the indirect result someone developing a tool.
Laws exist as a function of the culture in which they are defined. If the culture and the law clashes, the law eventually gets changed to reflect the culture. You see this everywhere, from the end of prohibition in the US to the legalising of homosexuality in Tasmania. There's nothing immoral about this process, in fact fighting the process of legal and cultural change could easily be considered far more immoral. So all this argument that copying mp3s is theft and thus mindblowingly immoral and sick and so forth is fundamentally STUPID. Please stop it . . .
Since ideas are not a limited resource (at least in the sense that a particular idea can be replicated essentially infinitely), their real value isn't owning them, but using them . . . Open Source/Free Software is the quintessential example. So rather than putting a monetary value on those ideas, we should focus more on use value. Also, I don't think we really need to worry too much about "maximumally encourag[ing] the creation of new idea" - they'll come along as fast with or without any particular encouragement (I mean, has the OSS world ever suffered a dearth of ideas?). What we need most is a way to maximise the efficiency of our idea creation and development. In a sense, that's what the patent/copyright laws are intended to do - they encourage people to publish the ideas they come up with, by offering a temporary monopoly on the use of the idea's expression. This system doesn't work particularly well in the case of software, because the monopoly granted reduces the efficiency of the idea creation system enormously. It's not so bad with things like music and movies, because people get to listen to them and copy ideas (as opposed to the actual expression) without getting their arses sued to hell and back . . .
Ultimately, I think what we need most at the moment is a better focus on the intent of IP - not the enrichment of `content creators', but the enrichment of society. If lawmakers were less interested in campaign funds and more interested in good laws, I think we would be in a much better position here. As it is . . . I don't think we should be making such a big stink about these laws being unenforceable, immoral, `anti-free-speech', evil, or whatever katzianism you want to use. Instead, we should be trying to convince the people responsible for them that there are better ways to achieve their ultimate aims. Unfortunately, that's probably really, really difficult . . .
Hmm. I'm rambling rather here, but I couldn't be bothered rewriting this . . .
This is probably a difficult concept for a lot of people to grasp (I think it has something to with the majority of people not actually being able to think . . .;-), but simply because something is prohibited by law does not mean that it is fundamentally immoral. In fact, a morality based on the laws of whatever country you happen to live in would be pretty damn warped . . .
But this isn't really a case of something being immoral (though those who are affected like to try for the high moral ground (on both sides), because it tends to make it easier for them to win arguments with people who don't think much). What this is, in reality, is a case of society changing, and redefining/refining it's thinking on morality as a result of that change.
Morality (though I'm sure lots of philosophers woulud argue with this) is not something fundamental, it's founded on what the society in question considers acceptable or good. Sex before marriage was considered immoral for a long time, but now it is entirely acceptable. Homosexuality was highly immoral by the standards of most of the world until recently - society changed, and now it's an accepted behaviour. Hell, in some societies, drinking alcohol was (and still is) considered worthy of hellfire . . . Even something as extreme as killing can sometimes be seen as morally acceptable - how many people would be prepared to kill an armed robber who was threatening their family? In the light of all this, how can you say that downloading mp3s is immoral?
What is happening with the RIAA and the MPAA and so forth is that they are attempting to drive the current redefinition of morality in a way that allows them to profit. Jon Katz is trying to redefine our moral thinking in a way that agrees with his views on the matter. The EFF is doing the same, you are, I am, everyone is. But as long as most people think they're arguing about fundamental moral imperatives they're going to keep spewing out large steaming piles of shit.
Which isn't to say that your argument is one of those piles . . . However, I do have a bit of a problem with one part of your argument (though it's probably the foundation of it):
Do you know what you'd do? You'd sue my ass. You'd prosecute me for criminal theft. Why? Because I have taken your intellectual property and distributed it without your permissions, effectively taking property that's yours and removing it from your control. That's stealing, Jon. Plain and simple, and it happens every day with MP3s.
My problem isn't just that you have no idea how Katz would react to the action you describe (he might put his money where his mouth is, you never know), but most importantly that I think you're ignoring the whole point of this discussion. You're saying, basically, that because this particular action is prohibited now, that it should be prohibited in the future. The whole point of this discussion is to think about whether that should actually be the case. The important question here should be: Do you really want to live in a world where ideas and their expressions are considered property? (and you should take into consideration the fact that most property isn't held by individuals but by corporations, which tend to screw individuals over as much as they can) Personally, I don't want that, but I'm only one person, so I can't decide the future moral direction of the world.
This is the whole point of intellectual property (at least as I understand it) - encouraging people to actually release the things that they create, in order for the _whole_ of society to benefit. This is the thing that is most often forgotten/ignored in this kind of argument - IP exists for the benefit of society as a whole, not for the benefit of specific individuals. It works by ensuring certain benefits for the individuals creating that IP, but is intended to provide benefits for everyone. Trying to change the laws so that the individual benefit outweighs the general benefit is fundamentally broken thinking.
The site linked to doesn't seem to have any documents talking about actual patent laws - it's mostly stuff that seems to be about agreeing on the beurocratic powers that national patent offices have, and standardising the minutiae of their proceedures. Important things, in this Globalised World(TM) we live in, but nothing much to do with the stuff we're so interested in/worried about here at/. . . .
I have a feeling (and IANAP[olitical]L[obbyist], so take this with a grain or two of salt) that the best approach to making changes to the areas of patent law that we're concerned about is simply to lobby our respective governments - trying to get anything done at an international treaty level is largely pointless, because the power brokers at that level are all governments, and individuals don't get a look-in . . . Unfortunately, this kind of thing isn't done IETF style, it's done UN style. So read these documents and comment as much on them as you want, but talk to your local politician/scumbag/bagman if you want something to change.
Actually, now that I think about it, having a go at something IETF-like for things like patent law might be a reasonable idea - get a bunch of volunteers together to think this thing through, discuss possible solutions, and come up with some draft laws that countries can use as a model . . . I can see that approach coming up with something much more workable and practical than the current approach (which seems to be something along the lines of `buy as many politicians as you can'). Unfortunately, governments would just ignore it . . . But hey, it might be fun to try!
himi Hey, maybe we should patent Open Source Politics . . .;-)
IANAS (in fact, I hate that branch of mathematics with a passion), but I do know enough to be able to say that this is inevitable.
They say there was a one in 37 million chance of this false match occuring - so? There's a one in multi-millions chance of someone winning the lottery, and yet it generally happens (I realise they're not equivalent cases, but it does show my point) - whenever you talk about probabilities, you have to realise that they are only relevant over a statistically significant sample size. They say nothing about individual cases - anomalies happen, the one-in-a-million chance does happen, and almost certainly will happen if you take a large enough sample.
The most important thing to understand is that this anomalous case does not invalidate DNA evidence - all it does is highlight the statistical nature of such evidence. DNA evidence (assuming the methodology of the tests is good) is exactly as useful now as it was before - that is, very useful - as long as it isn't abused. And generally speaking, the various police forces that use it are honest enough that they don't abuse it (witness the fact that they got a second opinion in this case). This is an interesting and eye-opening occurence, but it isn't the end of DNS evidence in forensics.
I think the DVD case is a different matter - this wasn't a case of `theft of trade secrets', rather one of legitimate reverse-engineering of the technology.
Which doesn't answer your question . . . ObIANAL, but it seems to me that you don't have to submit your trade secret in evidence - if you're prosecuting for theft of a trade secret, you'd have to completely stupid and incompetent to do so, actually. The court doesn't have to know _what_ was stolen, merely the fact that it was. If the defence tried to submit what was stolen as evidence, then they'd pretty much be admitting guilt - "Hey, we didn't steal anything! And here's your proof - this is what we didn't steal . . . Oh, er . . . ". And you could surely object to the tabling of the secrets - after all, the whole idea of prosecuting the theft is to retain control of your secret, and the court would have to be insane to ignore that.
No, this is a stuffup extraordinaire . . . Someone in the DVD-CCA or their legal team did _not_ think before they wrote this, and will probably be fired quite soon after the head honchos catch on. I almost feel sorry for him/her - it's probably a bored intern (or whatever they call them) who didn't even think about it before writing the document. This intern might even have been a tad sympathetic with the defendants . . . Definitely not legal material, in that case . . .
Or if they're just stupid. Probably the latter, really - their whole approach to this thing reeks of businessmen more interested in their own power than in the realities of the matter, and snake^Wlawyers who can see a nice big pile of cash coming to them whoever wins . . .
Actually, part of the problem is almost certainly the fact that the DVD standard isn't simply American - it's international, and thus the laws governing it aren't so much confused as contradictory . . . The businessmen who are running the show aren't at all sure of how much power they actually have, so they're trying to lay claim to whatever they can possibly get. The problem is, they haven't really thought through the consequences of their approach. This is _exactly_ like the Cult of Scientology's screwup in Sweden - they didn't think through the consequences (or didn't do their research - same thing, really), and basically fucked themselves over . . . Of course, this case being tried in the US, the DVD-CCA should have had a much better idea of what would have happened - they either have incompetent lawyers, or the lawyers have no control over the situation.
Whatever the case, the DVD situation is becoming a farce. I can see these cases effectively defining copyright protections and rights (on both sides) for digital media, and I can't see it coming down on the side of the DVD-CCA. These cases are naked and incompetent grabs for power - I think even a place as politically corrupt as the US will eventually decide in favour of `reasonable' laws. At least, I hope so . . .
It's as simple as this: the US has about a quarter of the devloped world's population, and thus it makes up about a quarter of the world's economy (last time I looked at the figures - the Encyclopaedia Britannica yearbooks were very good for that sort of thing).
Also, the US's standard of living is _lower_ than probably ten or fifteen small, relatively powerless countries (like Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Switzerland) - the US might be rich, but that doesn't automatically mean that it's a nice place to live.
I think you're right about one thing, though: Americans aren't particularly dumb (in either sense of the word) - it's just that they generally have a rather insular world view that makes them see the rest of the world as either unimiportant or inferior. The British had a similar (though somewhat differently directed) problem for a long time, which probably accounts for the fact that many of them appear arrogant and so forth.
The problem is, this still leaves one company with a monopoly on OSs, one with a monopoly on office software, and so on. What's the point of replacing one monopoly with three? (or two - the OS one and the Office one) What's really needed is a breakup into three or four essentially identical companies that can actually sell and develop their stuff in competition - we need competition _within_ the windows market itself, both the OS and the major applications. If they go the breakup route (which might not be ideal - opening the APIs and standardising them, and maybe the windows source so that other companies can produce competing but compatible version, would probably be better in the long run) then they have to target the breakup at competition, not at some nice convenient points of demarkation(sp?) within the company.
To recap, the basic problem is one of replacing a broad software monopoly with several narrower ones - the monopoly isn't destroyed, it's just reconstituted.
Scorpio: "Your New Year's resolution: Stop spending money on expensive electronic gadgets."
Perhaps I should take this seriously . . . I mean, it can't be healthy saving up for a dual K7 box. They're not even out yet . . .
"What you will actually do: Buy a spare Palm VII for the bathroom."
Damn! I hadn't thought of that! Now I'll have to postpone that K7 box another month . . . at least, unless they don't come out till I've got the money together . . .
A society that needs guns to get rid of their government is not democratic. Australia is democratic, ergo your argument is crap.
Please, just because you lot in the US needed to fight a war against the British to gain your freedom doesn't mean that that's the only way to go about it. Australia didn't need a war - we just had to ask them nicely. Further, just about everyone in this country supported the new gun laws. Hmmm, majority support of a proposal . . . doesn't that sound like `Democracy' to you? And yet you find it easy to condemn it . . .
Persoanally, I'll just vote aginst the idiots who came up with this legislation at the next election.
Oh, and I hope I never meet you, because you're obviously some completely sick bastard. Anyone who laughs when they're killing someone goes down in my book as a dangerous maniac.
You know, that has got to be one of the most stupid arguments that I've ever seen.
First load of crap: the convicts sent to Australia were not "deemed too unsatisfactory to reside in English jails". The reason they were transported was because there simply wasn't enough space in those English jails. The selection process was probably almost random.
Second load of crap: The _vast_ majority of the current population of this country does not have ancestry that goes back to the convicts. For a start, something like one in seven were actually born overseas, and a vastly larger number would be second or third generation Australians. There was a massive push for immigration after the second world war, driven by the slogan "Populate or Perish" - we had a population of only about seven million at the time, and we were considered vulnerable to invasion because of that. In any case, trying to argue that because Australia started out as a penal colony it's obviously still made up of people who think like convicts is completely stupid. Hell, there were free settlers on the First Fleet! (if my memory serves me) And yes, I _can_ trace my ancestry back to a convict on the first fleet - I'm rather proud of it. It makes for a more interesting history in many respects than "My parents came out from England after the war".
Third load of crap: "it is very interesting to note that the current population accepts... almost any level of censorship or privacy invasion from their government" Australia is not the US. We do not have the same set of values as you people in the US have. One of the differences is that we are not as paranoid about our privacy as you are (though we don't accept absolutely anything). As an example of this, in Australia there were, at one point, more police wiretaps in one of our states in one year than there were in the whole of the US - in Australia we are prepared to accept things like wiretaps when they're used to protect more important freedoms, that we do care about. Freedoms like the right to not get shot. The idea that the police can listen in on our phone conversations does not frighten us. We think it's a reasonable price to pay for the much more effective policing that it enables. The case is similar with other forms of `privacy invasion'. Censorship is similar - we'll accept it if we think it's justified. As a case in point, one of those nuts who go around making a big thing out of saying that the holocaust didn't happen was refused a visa not that long ago. The vast majority of people thought this was perfectly reasonable. On the other hand, films very rarely get banned outright here, despite frequent protests by some people. For example, last year's version of Lolita wasn't banned, despite rather large outcry - it was a flop, because it wasn't a particularly good film, but it wasn't banned. It's the same with books and radio and television and so forth. Things have to be really bad, by the majority's standard, before it'll be censored. This internet censorship bill is an anomaly, one that's been allowed to continue so far largely because it doesn't affect many people yet. When it does, then people will complain, and the law will either be repealed or simply ignored (most likely the latter). The thing about this bill is that it reflects the wishes of only a small part of the population, and goes actively against the wishes of a considerably larger part (the largest group, those who don't have Internet access at the moment, probably couldn't give a damn either way). This bill's position is not tenable in this country - it lacks the majority/large minority support that is needed for something of it's nature to survive.
To recap: your post is a load of crap. The moderator who moderated it up is a moron. You are possibly even worse. You know almost nothing about Australian history, the Australian people, Australian culture, and Australian politics - please, don't inflict your idiotic ideas on us any more. And finally, please refrain from assuming that because something wouldn't be accepted in the US, it is obviously fundamentally wrong, immoral, what have you. That's the kind of thinking that makes the rest of the world utterly loath the US and it's people.
Slashdot Mirror
I haven't travelled extensively, but I have been out of Australia - I've travelled in Indonesia a bit. So I can't really go one up on you there ;-(
However, I don't think I need any particular qualifications to say that you do _not_ come across as someone who has really thought about this sort of thing - you sound rather like someone who has just accepted the things that you learnt in the first ten years of your life, and not considered moving outside that box since. You say you've questioned non-Americans that you know (presumably both the ones at your university, and when you were travelling) - have you ever really sat down and talked to the ones who _didn't_ agree with most of what you said? Did you ever ask them why, and really pursue their reasoning? Or did you just have a good old yarn with the ones that agreed with you, while ignoring the ones that disagreed?
I should note that, like you, I'm not trying to be offensive here, I'm just trying to work out why you think that the rest of the world is second rate, and why you haven't considered that the rest of the world might simply be _different_. You seem to be making a value judgement in a case where they aren't either safe or, generally, warranted - how can you say that a different culture is "second-rate"? You might prefer one to another, but to say that one is better than the other is, to my mind, stupid.
And that's pretty much what pisses me off about the attitude that most Americans seem to have about the world - they either think that it's just completely unimportant, or they think that the US is just fundamentally better. And my response to that kind of reasoning tends to be "Fuck You", because there's very little that anyone can say to change the opinion of someone who thinks that way (believe me, I've tried).
Oh, about ISDN - it's as much a networking technology as ethernet, ATM, X25, wavelan, or any other link-layer technology - it's a bit-pipe, basically.
I suppose you could say that the whole point of my argument is just about identical to OzJimbob's - try thinking outside the square. It would probably help if you started with the premise that the US is _not_ just fundamentally better than the rest of the world, but you never know, you might derive that result from your research . . .
And as a final point, your original post seriously fucked me off by using that phrase "America rules while everyone else drools.", which could probably go down as one of the most offensive lines I've ever heard in an alegedly serious discussion. I'd really suggest you refrain from using it again, unless you're aiming for pissed off readers.
himi
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For a number of reasons, your post is full of shit.
"The spirit of America, the spirit that overrode the Nazis and Nippon, will spill into every place and every person - whether they acknowledge it or not."
Wrong - what "overrode the Nazis and Nippon" was the fact that the US just happened to be a country with a total land mass larger than Europe, richer agriculturally and minerally, united, and very populous. It's the same reason that invading the USSR was suicidal - some countries are just too big to invade, and some countries are just too big and powerful to defeat in a conventional war. America's "spirit" had almost nothing to do with it's success in the second world war - in fact, it's entirely possible that the US wouldn't have gotten into the war if it hadn't been for Japan making the first move. So where was the American Spirit there?
"I think the important heart of the argument is this: America is the source of a substatianly large portion of all ideas over the past century - it's been the most successful of all memetic cultural beasts because of its strong support of pluralism."
Once again, you seem to be making the mistake of assuming that things caused by America's size and power are actually due to some wonderful thing fundamental to the US's nature - this is, of course, ridiculous. The US has the cultural clout it has because it can afford to produce an enormous amount of cultural product, and it is in a position where it can offer up that product to the rest of the world very easily. It's a lot harder for a popular Australian band to make it in the US than it is for an equivalently (in terms of percentages) popular American band to make it in Australia - the Australian band might sell fifty thousand albums here, where the American band might sell a million albums (the US population is about twenty times that of Australia). That size and economic power massively distorts the way that the US interacts with the rest of thw world, to the point where it can look like the US is somehow qualitatively different, as well as quantitatively.
"But we should remember that Europe, for all its strong culture, history, and intelligence, is for the most part a very, very biased society. Racial purity is not that taboo a concept beneath the surface there, and as far as cultural pluralism... well, the forces coming to a head in Austria may be being censured, but their ideas are only unpopular because they are government sponsored."
This from the home of the Ku Klux Klan? I think you're being just a tad selectively blind, here - there are stupid, bigoted people everywhere in the world, and the fact that some of them are getting considerable power in some parts of Europe doesn't mean that it's a problem unique to Europe. After all, aren't half of the Republican politicians in the US _really_ suspect in this sense?
On the flipside, you can also find as much support for pluralism and so forth in Europe or elsewhere as you can find in the US, and in fact many places are much stronger in their support than the US. Australia, for one, is more multicultural than the US, and more successful (AFAICT) at having multiple cultures living together with minimal tension.
And finally:
"In a sense, no matter how much it changes, America will always remain the owners of the Internet.. maybe not the physical America of the future, but this technology has managed only to spread our ideas and concepts further and more quickly than any means before."
"our" ideas? "our" concepts? I'm sorry, but you've got your head up your arse if you think that the ideas and concepts you are claiming as your own were not being circulated quite successfully without you. You didn't come up with them, and you haven't even perfected them. The only reason they sometimes appear to have originated with you is because you can make much more noise about things than anyone else can, so that you can drown out the other, quieter voices that were talking before.
America, please get your head out of your arse and take a look at the rest of the world - we've been doing all these wonderful things for ages, and yet whenever you start up, you make like it was your idea all along.
himi
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You know, that is a really broken argument. For a start, the US didn't invent everything in the world, by such a long margin that it's not even funny. The US didn't even invent all the networking technology out there - ISDN was developed (IIRC) by a European company, as an example that I can think of right now.
Secondly, you seem to be looking at the world from a very US centered position, so that you end up either ignoring or literally not seeing all the stuff that _isn't_ about the US - you heard lots of American music while you were in France, but you probably didn't even listen to anything that wasn't American, or very strongly influenced by American music. Likewise with the news, and with the movies you watched, and so forth.
This is the bit that really gets on my nerves:
"I'm not oblivious to the fact that there are other people in the world. I'm just saying that America rules while everyone else drools. There are lots of things (not just the internet) that many people have. That doesn't mean that they aren't America-centric, or didn't come from America."
To paraphrase: "Yeah, I know there are other people out there, but I couldn't give a damn about them. They're not Americans, and hey, they use all this stuff that Americans came up with, and they listen to our music and watch our movies, so it doesn't make any difference, does it? America's just waaay better . . . "
Do you know how stupid that makes you sound? This kind of argument is the reason why most of the world loathes the US - the US seems to think that the world exists either for them to use/abuse/whatever, or that it's too unimportant for them to worry about. That's incredibly offensive for the rest of the world. It's like there's this really big chunk of the world that has it's head so far up it's arse that it doesn't even know that anything other than shit exists - and the rest of the world, because the US just happens to be big enough and rich enough to get away with it, has got to keep on taking this shit. That's what Ozjimbob was talking about when he said you should think outside the square - he meant that you should get your head out of your arse and look around for a bit.
Of course, he was much more polite about it . . .
himi
I love ranting about the US - it's such a large target that you can't miss . . .
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"i refuse to waste time on you 'peans."
You don't seem to know the difference between Australia and Europe . . . That is a real achievement, as far as stupidity/ignorance goes . . .
Have you ever wondered why the rest of the world thinks the US is full of dumb fucks? Try reading your own post . . .
himi
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It's a bit scary discovering an American who actually has a brain attached to the fingers that do all that typing . . . It makes it so much harder for me to loath "all those bloody yanks" . . . ;-)
Seriously though, is the US _really_ that insular? Or is it just that the ones with no brain are the ones that don't stop to think before saying/doing things, and hence tend to be loudest? Enquiring minds want to know . . .
himi
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Could you point us towards some evidence for you claims about Australian crime rates? And if you suggest something from the NRA or their Australian equivalent, I for one will laugh in your face (or should that be fart? Something disrespectful, anyway). You might want to try the Australian Beaureau of Statistics - they tend to have that sort of information redily available.
Until you provide some evidence, I intend to keep on supporting the gun-control laws in this country, on the grounds that guns are too dangerous to be readily available - it should be difficult to get hold of a gun, for whatever reason you feel you need it. That should at least make it a little bit harder for depressed teenagers to top themselves, or for pissed off spouses to knock off their better halves, or any of the other common gun crimes. Armed robbery isn't that common, you know - possibly because we have a culture where the idea of using guns is considered a tad, shall we say, extreme . . . I rather like this culture, by the way, so telling me it's pathetic is going to go down like a lead balloon, as will telling me that it's not free, that I'm being repressed by my government (the ones that I voted against, by the way - when was the last time you voted?), or any of the other common arguments. I'm as free as you are, in pretty much the same way that any license that meets the OSD is free - past a certain point, the extras don't matter. Your freedom to bear arms is one of those extras, that just aren't important to me, so my lack of freedom in that respect doesn't count as an impingement of my freedoms, nor should it.
Well, that was going to be a nice short disposal of you rather stupid post . . . Ah well, it's always nice to rant about something like this . . .
himi
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and they're always prepared to change such assumptions.
The reality is that if the laws we come up with aren't universal, life would be so much harder for scientists that they'd get nothing done, so in the abscence of evidence otherwise, the universal nature of the laws is assumed. But, and this is the important thing, the assumption is not taken on faith - scientists are aware of the possibility that the assumption is false, and they ignore that possibility for practical reasons.
And that's vastly different to building on faith . . .
himi
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I have a fairly serious problem with those people who argue that religion and science aren't incompatible. The thing is, pretty much all of those arguments basically reduce to "religion is just a way of living/code of ethics/whatever". And this is fundamentally wrong - religions contain those things, but they also have other baggage that they carry along, and which (arguably) form the core of the religion. I'm talking about things like the vengeful God of the Catholics, who'll send you to hell if you don't stop right now!, or the Jewish God who thinks eating pork is disgusting, or any of a million other almost completely stupid tenets of faith.
;-), the problem with linking science and religion is that religion without faith is no longer religion, and a scientific method which incorporates blind faith in anything is no longer science. It doesn't matter how much of a religion's morality is sensible and workable, the religion is still founded on something that is fundamentally antagonistic to the scientific method. Ethics and morality are orthogonal to scientific enquiry, but faith is not. Science and religion are fundamentally contradictory, and no amount of award money or `mind of god' books will ever change that.
Religions do provide some foundations for a system of morals, by defining some things to be acceptable and some to be unacceptable, and so forth. Those morals provide a framework for thinking about ethics. But at the most fundamental level, religion actually has very little to do with ethics in the sense that people think about them now, and just about everything to do with commandments - "Thou shalt not kill!" might be a foundation for the idea that it's unethical to kill people, but the religious side of it is nothing deeper or more meaningful than your parent's telling you to take you elbows off the table.
Science doesn't do anything like that - in fact, science doesn't tell you to do anything at all. Science is simply a method for learning about and describing the world - there are no commandments of science, no morality, no tenets of faith: all you get is a method for looking at the world, and if you're lucky the results of other people's work. Now, I know that the scientific community (the people who actually do science) is less pure than this, but that community and it's culture is still very strongly informed by the scientific method and it's lack of dogma. Good scientists take considerable delight in considering the possibility that the foundations of their understanding are completely and utterly wrong - this is about as far as it's possible to get from the tenets of faith that religions wave around like banners.
Now, by those descriptions you'd think that the `let's get all cuddly with religion' people are pretty much on the ball - after all, if science is so agnostic, where's the clash? Well, you have to consider the foundations of the two things. Science is founded on questioning the workings of the world - "Does this theory really work? If not, then what kind of theory would work?". Religions, on the other hand, are founded on that faith thing - you're not supposed to question these things, because if you don't believe them on faith, you're obviously not part of this religion. See the problem?
The point where scientists tend to screw up this kind of debate is where they either don't see, or just ignore the bits of whatever religion they're looking at which are dogmatic and completely reliant on faith. It's very easy to do, particularly in the western world today, because most western religions are really watered down and seem to minimise the leaps of faith required for membership. So a scientist looking at the Anglican Church would probably think "this God stuff's not important, let's look at their ethical thinking . . . " thereby missing the bit that makes the difference between an academic discussion group and a religion - faith.
Recapping (hopefully slightly more clearly
/rant
himi
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"Probably killed just as many people as it's ever helped.
Wow... again, sounds like science! "
There's a very fundamental difference between the idea of a religion killing someone, and one of the products of science killing someone: aside from indirect influences (like people contracting HIV because contraceptives are `against God's word'), when a religion kills someone, it's by actually coming out and saying "kill this person/group of people". Aside from a _very_ small lunatic fringe, scientists _never_ say "you should kill this person because science says so". That's the difference - most religions have very little problem (though not so much these days) with condemning people to death on religious grounds, while science as a discipline says nothing about that sort of thing.
Please, don't think of science as a way of living or a code of ethics or anything like that - all that science is is a tool for learning about and describing the world. It's pretty much identical to the thing with guns - "guns don't kill people, people do". Science doesn't kill people, even though it may provide tools that allow people to. Religious leaders and their followers, on the other hand, _do_ kill in the name of their religion, and some religious sects actually require killing in some circumstances. That's what people mean when they talk about religion killing people - it's the conscious decision to take a life, rather than the indirect result someone developing a tool.
himi
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Laws exist as a function of the culture in which they are defined. If the culture and the law clashes, the law eventually gets changed to reflect the culture. You see this everywhere, from the end of prohibition in the US to the legalising of homosexuality in Tasmania. There's nothing immoral about this process, in fact fighting the process of legal and cultural change could easily be considered far more immoral. So all this argument that copying mp3s is theft and thus mindblowingly immoral and sick and so forth is fundamentally STUPID. Please stop it . . .
himi
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Since ideas are not a limited resource (at least in the sense that a particular idea can be replicated essentially infinitely), their real value isn't owning them, but using them . . . Open Source/Free Software is the quintessential example. So rather than putting a monetary value on those ideas, we should focus more on use value.
Also, I don't think we really need to worry too much about "maximumally encourag[ing] the creation of new idea" - they'll come along as fast with or without any particular encouragement (I mean, has the OSS world ever suffered a dearth of ideas?). What we need most is a way to maximise the efficiency of our idea creation and development. In a sense, that's what the patent/copyright laws are intended to do - they encourage people to publish the ideas they come up with, by offering a temporary monopoly on the use of the idea's expression. This system doesn't work particularly well in the case of software, because the monopoly granted reduces the efficiency of the idea creation system enormously. It's not so bad with things like music and movies, because people get to listen to them and copy ideas (as opposed to the actual expression) without getting their arses sued to hell and back . . .
Ultimately, I think what we need most at the moment is a better focus on the intent of IP - not the enrichment of `content creators', but the enrichment of society. If lawmakers were less interested in campaign funds and more interested in good laws, I think we would be in a much better position here. As it is . . .
I don't think we should be making such a big stink about these laws being unenforceable, immoral, `anti-free-speech', evil, or whatever katzianism you want to use. Instead, we should be trying to convince the people responsible for them that there are better ways to achieve their ultimate aims. Unfortunately, that's probably really, really difficult . . .
Hmm. I'm rambling rather here, but I couldn't be bothered rewriting this . . .
himi
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This is probably a difficult concept for a lot of people to grasp (I think it has something to with the majority of people not actually being able to think . . . ;-), but simply because something is prohibited by law does not mean that it is fundamentally immoral. In fact, a morality based on the laws of whatever country you happen to live in would be pretty damn warped . . .
But this isn't really a case of something being immoral (though those who are affected like to try for the high moral ground (on both sides), because it tends to make it easier for them to win arguments with people who don't think much). What this is, in reality, is a case of society changing, and redefining/refining it's thinking on morality as a result of that change.
Morality (though I'm sure lots of philosophers woulud argue with this) is not something fundamental, it's founded on what the society in question considers acceptable or good. Sex before marriage was considered immoral for a long time, but now it is entirely acceptable. Homosexuality was highly immoral by the standards of most of the world until recently - society changed, and now it's an accepted behaviour. Hell, in some societies, drinking alcohol was (and still is) considered worthy of hellfire . . . Even something as extreme as killing can sometimes be seen as morally acceptable - how many people would be prepared to kill an armed robber who was threatening their family?
In the light of all this, how can you say that downloading mp3s is immoral?
What is happening with the RIAA and the MPAA and so forth is that they are attempting to drive the current redefinition of morality in a way that allows them to profit. Jon Katz is trying to redefine our moral thinking in a way that agrees with his views on the matter. The EFF is doing the same, you are, I am, everyone is. But as long as most people think they're arguing about fundamental moral imperatives they're going to keep spewing out large steaming piles of shit.
Which isn't to say that your argument is one of those piles . . .
However, I do have a bit of a problem with one part of your argument (though it's probably the foundation of it):
Do you know what you'd do? You'd sue my ass. You'd prosecute me for criminal theft. Why? Because I have taken your intellectual property and distributed it without your permissions, effectively taking property that's yours and removing it from your control. That's stealing, Jon. Plain and simple, and it happens every day with MP3s.
My problem isn't just that you have no idea how Katz would react to the action you describe (he might put his money where his mouth is, you never know), but most importantly that I think you're ignoring the whole point of this discussion. You're saying, basically, that because this particular action is prohibited now, that it should be prohibited in the future. The whole point of this discussion is to think about whether that should actually be the case.
The important question here should be: Do you really want to live in a world where ideas and their expressions are considered property? (and you should take into consideration the fact that most property isn't held by individuals but by corporations, which tend to screw individuals over as much as they can) Personally, I don't want that, but I'm only one person, so I can't decide the future moral direction of the world.
himi
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This is the whole point of intellectual property (at least as I understand it) - encouraging people to actually release the things that they create, in order for the _whole_ of society to benefit. This is the thing that is most often forgotten/ignored in this kind of argument - IP exists for the benefit of society as a whole, not for the benefit of specific individuals. It works by ensuring certain benefits for the individuals creating that IP, but is intended to provide benefits for everyone. Trying to change the laws so that the individual benefit outweighs the general benefit is fundamentally broken thinking.
himi
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The site linked to doesn't seem to have any documents talking about actual patent laws - it's mostly stuff that seems to be about agreeing on the beurocratic powers that national patent offices have, and standardising the minutiae of their proceedures. Important things, in this Globalised World(TM) we live in, but nothing much to do with the stuff we're so interested in/worried about here at /. . . .
;-)
I have a feeling (and IANAP[olitical]L[obbyist], so take this with a grain or two of salt) that the best approach to making changes to the areas of patent law that we're concerned about is simply to lobby our respective governments - trying to get anything done at an international treaty level is largely pointless, because the power brokers at that level are all governments, and individuals don't get a look-in . . . Unfortunately, this kind of thing isn't done IETF style, it's done UN style. So read these documents and comment as much on them as you want, but talk to your local politician/scumbag/bagman if you want something to change.
Actually, now that I think about it, having a go at something IETF-like for things like patent law might be a reasonable idea - get a bunch of volunteers together to think this thing through, discuss possible solutions, and come up with some draft laws that countries can use as a model . . . I can see that approach coming up with something much more workable and practical than the current approach (which seems to be something along the lines of `buy as many politicians as you can'). Unfortunately, governments would just ignore it . . . But hey, it might be fun to try!
himi
Hey, maybe we should patent Open Source Politics . . .
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Too many RFCs . . .
Thanks for the laugh!
himi
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IANAS (in fact, I hate that branch of mathematics with a passion), but I do know enough to be able to say that this is inevitable .
They say there was a one in 37 million chance of this false match occuring - so? There's a one in multi-millions chance of someone winning the lottery, and yet it generally happens (I realise they're not equivalent cases, but it does show my point) - whenever you talk about probabilities, you have to realise that they are only relevant over a statistically significant sample size. They say nothing about individual cases - anomalies happen, the one-in-a-million chance does happen, and almost certainly will happen if you take a large enough sample.
The most important thing to understand is that this anomalous case does not invalidate DNA evidence - all it does is highlight the statistical nature of such evidence. DNA evidence (assuming the methodology of the tests is good) is exactly as useful now as it was before - that is, very useful - as long as it isn't abused. And generally speaking, the various police forces that use it are honest enough that they don't abuse it (witness the fact that they got a second opinion in this case).
This is an interesting and eye-opening occurence, but it isn't the end of DNS evidence in forensics.
himi
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These are some of the best posts on this subject I've seen - I they really do deserve more than just 5 point.
Good work, werdna!
himi
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I think the DVD case is a different matter - this wasn't a case of `theft of trade secrets', rather one of legitimate reverse-engineering of the technology.
Which doesn't answer your question . . .
ObIANAL, but it seems to me that you don't have to submit your trade secret in evidence - if you're prosecuting for theft of a trade secret, you'd have to completely stupid and incompetent to do so, actually. The court doesn't have to know _what_ was stolen, merely the fact that it was. If the defence tried to submit what was stolen as evidence, then they'd pretty much be admitting guilt - "Hey, we didn't steal anything! And here's your proof - this is what we didn't steal . . . Oh, er . . . ". And you could surely object to the tabling of the secrets - after all, the whole idea of prosecuting the theft is to retain control of your secret, and the court would have to be insane to ignore that.
No, this is a stuffup extraordinaire . . . Someone in the DVD-CCA or their legal team did _not_ think before they wrote this, and will probably be fired quite soon after the head honchos catch on. I almost feel sorry for him/her - it's probably a bored intern (or whatever they call them) who didn't even think about it before writing the document. This intern might even have been a tad sympathetic with the defendants . . . Definitely not legal material, in that case . . .
himi
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Or if they're just stupid.
Probably the latter, really - their whole approach to this thing reeks of businessmen more interested in their own power than in the realities of the matter, and snake^Wlawyers who can see a nice big pile of cash coming to them whoever wins . . .
Actually, part of the problem is almost certainly the fact that the DVD standard isn't simply American - it's international, and thus the laws governing it aren't so much confused as contradictory . . . The businessmen who are running the show aren't at all sure of how much power they actually have, so they're trying to lay claim to whatever they can possibly get. The problem is, they haven't really thought through the consequences of their approach. This is _exactly_ like the Cult of Scientology's screwup in Sweden - they didn't think through the consequences (or didn't do their research - same thing, really), and basically fucked themselves over . . .
Of course, this case being tried in the US, the DVD-CCA should have had a much better idea of what would have happened - they either have incompetent lawyers, or the lawyers have no control over the situation.
Whatever the case, the DVD situation is becoming a farce. I can see these cases effectively defining copyright protections and rights (on both sides) for digital media, and I can't see it coming down on the side of the DVD-CCA. These cases are naked and incompetent grabs for power - I think even a place as politically corrupt as the US will eventually decide in favour of `reasonable' laws. At least, I hope so . . .
himi
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It's as simple as this: the US has about a quarter of the devloped world's population, and thus it makes up about a quarter of the world's economy (last time I looked at the figures - the Encyclopaedia Britannica yearbooks were very good for that sort of thing).
Also, the US's standard of living is _lower_ than probably ten or fifteen small, relatively powerless countries (like Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Switzerland) - the US might be rich, but that doesn't automatically mean that it's a nice place to live.
I think you're right about one thing, though: Americans aren't particularly dumb (in either sense of the word) - it's just that they generally have a rather insular world view that makes them see the rest of the world as either unimiportant or inferior. The British had a similar (though somewhat differently directed) problem for a long time, which probably accounts for the fact that many of them appear arrogant and so forth.
himi
Aside from which, your comment is total crap.
himi
The problem is, this still leaves one company with a monopoly on OSs, one with a monopoly on office software, and so on. What's the point of replacing one monopoly with three? (or two - the OS one and the Office one)
What's really needed is a breakup into three or four essentially identical companies that can actually sell and develop their stuff in competition - we need competition _within_ the windows market itself, both the OS and the major applications. If they go the breakup route (which might not be ideal - opening the APIs and standardising them, and maybe the windows source so that other companies can produce competing but compatible version, would probably be better in the long run) then they have to target the breakup at competition, not at some nice convenient points of demarkation(sp?) within the company.
To recap, the basic problem is one of replacing a broad software monopoly with several narrower ones - the monopoly isn't destroyed, it's just reconstituted.
himi
. . . and yet strangely compelling . . .
Scorpio: "Your New Year's resolution: Stop spending money on expensive electronic gadgets."
Perhaps I should take this seriously . . . I mean, it can't be healthy saving up for a dual K7 box. They're not even out yet . . .
"What you will actually do: Buy a spare Palm VII for the bathroom."
Damn! I hadn't thought of that! Now I'll have to postpone that K7 box another month . . . at least, unless they don't come out till I've got the money together . . .
himi
Addicted? Me? Well, yes . . .
A society that needs guns to get rid of their government is not democratic. Australia is democratic, ergo your argument is crap.
Please, just because you lot in the US needed to fight a war against the British to gain your freedom doesn't mean that that's the only way to go about it. Australia didn't need a war - we just had to ask them nicely.
Further, just about everyone in this country supported the new gun laws. Hmmm, majority support of a proposal . . . doesn't that sound like `Democracy' to you? And yet you find it easy to condemn it . . .
Persoanally, I'll just vote aginst the idiots who came up with this legislation at the next election.
Oh, and I hope I never meet you, because you're obviously some completely sick bastard. Anyone who laughs when they're killing someone goes down in my book as a dangerous maniac.
himi
You know, that has got to be one of the most stupid arguments that I've ever seen.
... almost any level of censorship or privacy invasion from their government"
First load of crap: the convicts sent to Australia were not "deemed too unsatisfactory to reside in English jails". The reason they were transported was because there simply wasn't enough space in those English jails. The selection process was probably almost random.
Second load of crap: The _vast_ majority of the current population of this country does not have ancestry that goes back to the convicts. For a start, something like one in seven were actually born overseas, and a vastly larger number would be second or third generation Australians. There was a massive push for immigration after the second world war, driven by the slogan "Populate or Perish" - we had a population of only about seven million at the time, and we were considered vulnerable to invasion because of that.
In any case, trying to argue that because Australia started out as a penal colony it's obviously still made up of people who think like convicts is completely stupid. Hell, there were free settlers on the First Fleet! (if my memory serves me)
And yes, I _can_ trace my ancestry back to a convict on the first fleet - I'm rather proud of it. It makes for a more interesting history in many respects than "My parents came out from England after the war".
Third load of crap: "it is very interesting to note that the current population accepts
Australia is not the US. We do not have the same set of values as you people in the US have. One of the differences is that we are not as paranoid about our privacy as you are (though we don't accept absolutely anything). As an example of this, in Australia there were, at one point, more police wiretaps in one of our states in one year than there were in the whole of the US - in Australia we are prepared to accept things like wiretaps when they're used to protect more important freedoms, that we do care about. Freedoms like the right to not get shot.
The idea that the police can listen in on our phone conversations does not frighten us. We think it's a reasonable price to pay for the much more effective policing that it enables. The case is similar with other forms of `privacy invasion'.
Censorship is similar - we'll accept it if we think it's justified. As a case in point, one of those nuts who go around making a big thing out of saying that the holocaust didn't happen was refused a visa not that long ago. The vast majority of people thought this was perfectly reasonable.
On the other hand, films very rarely get banned outright here, despite frequent protests by some people. For example, last year's version of Lolita wasn't banned, despite rather large outcry - it was a flop, because it wasn't a particularly good film, but it wasn't banned.
It's the same with books and radio and television and so forth. Things have to be really bad, by the majority's standard, before it'll be censored.
This internet censorship bill is an anomaly, one that's been allowed to continue so far largely because it doesn't affect many people yet. When it does, then people will complain, and the law will either be repealed or simply ignored (most likely the latter). The thing about this bill is that it reflects the wishes of only a small part of the population, and goes actively against the wishes of a considerably larger part (the largest group, those who don't have Internet access at the moment, probably couldn't give a damn either way). This bill's position is not tenable in this country - it lacks the majority/large minority support that is needed for something of it's nature to survive.
To recap: your post is a load of crap. The moderator who moderated it up is a moron. You are possibly even worse. You know almost nothing about Australian history, the Australian people, Australian culture, and Australian politics - please, don't inflict your idiotic ideas on us any more.
And finally, please refrain from assuming that because something wouldn't be accepted in the US, it is obviously fundamentally wrong, immoral, what have you. That's the kind of thinking that makes the rest of the world utterly loath the US and it's people.
himi