Some sort of source code for the necessary kernel modules is provided with VMWare; I've never run a kernel for which a pre-compiled binary was available, but the config script compiles versions which match my kernel without a hitch (2.2.x, at least)
A cursory examination of the definition of deomcracy reveals that it includes the exercise of power by the public via elected representatives. The US is both a democracy and a republic.
Not being able to print up copies of a book is a red herring. DMCA anti-circumvention isn't about copying. Selling a book written in Esperanto, with a provision that you have to pay the publishing company's translators to read it to you (and if you can read Esperanto, you're not allowed to read it either), and having that provision be enforcable is a better analogy--and such a provision would be an insane abrogation of your property rights in the purchased book. (I'm talking about being able to read the book, not publish your own English-language translation)
When you buy software, the software companies want you to believe that you are actually buying a license to use the software.
People just seem to take their word for it.
Until UCITA passes in my state, I will continue to act under the assumption that I pay money for a box with a disc in it, and that I have a common law right to use it for its intended purpose so long as I don't break any applicable laws, such as copyright. Since I have to copy it to my hard drive, and then into memory in order to use it for the purpose for which its sold, I conclude I have the right to do so.
Beyond that, if they want to impose additional terms, they should have negotiated a contract with me before they let me buy it.
There were commercial networks before commercial traffic was allowed/popular on the internet. You could use compuserve, or delphi, or prodigy, or applelink, or (etc etc etc).
To say that government had nothing to do with the internet as we know it completely ignores the fact that it was the government-researched network which created the standards base. Without that base, you just have a bunch of balkanized, incompatable private networks. The most important feature of the internet is that it is an internetwork of *compatable* third-party networks.
You've made an argument that someone could be both pro-choice and anti-abortion. "Anti-choice" pretty well precludes the idea of supporting other peoples' rights to abort.
should I not also be able to exercise my FREEDOM to choose to sell it for money and not have my effort rewarded by people who choose to copy it
You have the FREEDOM to choose to offer it for sale. Your freedom does -not- extend to forcing other people to conform to your perception of what they should do to it; that's what their freedom is for. I don't have the "freedom" to enslave you.
I create, and I expect to benefit. No one has the right to take or benefit from my efforts, expressed as "intellectual property", without my permission and a proper exchange of value (in the world today, primarily money); this is called looting, and insults my ability to conceive and implement ideas. I don't work for insults.
I am a free human being. Intellectual freedom is just as important as physical freedom. Nobody has the right to restrict my creative output, expressed as "protection of intellectual property", without my consenting to such restrictions. This is called slavery. It ignores the fact that just about every intellectual achievement rests squarely on the back of those who have come before. I am not your slave, you own the contents of your head until you choose to express them to the world. After that, you can have no rational expectation that others will not use them as they see fit. Society has decided that, in some circumstances, it is useful to grant you a temporary monopoly on your output so that you will be willing to express your thoughts rather than keep them inside your head. This is a cost/benefit issue, not your moral right to restrict my freedom because you "thought of something first".
Amazon doesn't know what "remove me from your database" means. The most I ever got out of them was:
I've requested that the following email address be added to the
courtesy list we keep of customers who do not wish to have personal
information about them sold or rented to third parties ever:
Later on, they STILL emailed me, to "let me know their privacy policy had changed, because I was listed as someone who was concerned about such things".
Whether a culture considers murder to be a crime is totally absolute, because murder is defined as unlawful killing. Whether a culture considers a particular killing to be a murder is subjective. A particular culture (one could suppose) might never define any killing as a crime, in which case there would be no murder in that culture by their standards. A particular culture might employ a language in which the words for "killing" and "murder" are synonymous, in which case they might be less inclined to draw a distinction.
As for pencil dropping, I believe you may be confusing epistemological issues for ontological ones.
One can take the skeptical position, and assume that we can never know anything, because there is always the possibility of being incorrect. From this standpoint, since knowledge is generally takes as "justified true belief", we never know anything, because we cannot be jusitifed in claiming something is true. Similarly, although there may be facts, we can never know them as such. I'm personally fairly sympathetic to this particular notion; "consensus reality" and other self-aware agents seem likely to exist based on generalizations I make based on my perceptions, but I don't "know" they exist for a "fact".
That position, however, makes the notion of "fact" rather a useless one. Some things may be facts, but we'd never know it, so why bother dealing with them? Common usage of "fact" (as well as truth) seem to take epistemology for granted and just assume that we can (somehow) "know" certain things. Even further along this direction, one listed definition for fact includes "a statement alleged as fact", which makes phrases like "the true facts of the case" not, strictly speaking, redundant.
I suppose somewhere back, I should have asked you if you believe that there are any objective facts, or if everything (other than, perhaps, your own existance from your own standpoint) is subjective.
Why wasn't the detail of natural history such that it included details of the world which the people at the time couldn't possibly have known, but which were later verifiable. Something about the nature of gravitation, or the energy at which the electroweak force shows itself as unified. That would certainly have made it a lot less likely to look like a book of fables written by people trying to explain the world in terms of what they knew.
If the natural science part is a metaphor, how do you know the christ part isn't? Just because you don't want it to be?
You are correct, however these statements take the form of assertions of the theorem-hood or non-theorem-hood of other statements within the system. I suggest you re-read Hofstadter, and pay closer attention to the discussion of the implications of considering TNT+~G instead of TNT+G. For all its "truth", the G statement can be negated and assumed as an axiom, and a similarly perfectly-self-consistent system results. Of course then there's G'...
Why are you satisified to answer the question "Why is there anything at all?" with "Because of God", and content to answer the question "Where did God come from" with "God has always been around?"
republic:
1.a. A political order whose head of state is not a monarch and in modern times is usually a president.
1.b. A nation that has such a political order.
2.a. A political order in which the supreme power lies in a body of citizens who are entitled to vote for officers and representatives responsible to them.
2.b. A nation that has such a political order.
democracy:
1. Government by the people, exercised either directly or through elected representatives. 2. A political or social unit that has such a government.
3. The common people, considered as the primary source of political power.
4. Majority rule.
5. The principles of social equality and respect for the individual within a community.
You seem to be arguing not that "murder is a crime" is subjective, but that "Milosovic commited murder" or "the abused wife comitted murder" are subjective. I agree. (Milosivic is being accused of war crimes, not murder, however.)
Unless one accepts some sort of operative definition that someone has comitted murder if and only if they are found guilty by a court of law, then "X has comitted murder" is a subjective concept. That's not a very good definition (and I point this out as an example, not because I believe you're advocating it), because it ignores the possibility of judicial error.
However, given the definitions of murder and crime, I maintain that murder is -by definition- a crime, and that this is a fact. Murder is defined to be an unlawful killing, and since it is defined to be unlawful, it is therefore a crime. Identifying a particular killing as being a murder or something else remains, of course subjective.
Why are repeatability and quantifiability necessary conditions for facthood? Suppose, in your presence, I drop a pencil once. It would certainly be a fact that I had done so, even though it had only happened once. It certainly wouldn't be necessary for me to repeat the act in order to establish the facthood of the first incident.
Just look at the DeCSS case to see an example of how "primary use" can be twisted to mean just about anything. Even in the face of clear intent by a large group of users to use it non-infringingly, the remote possibility of abuse was enough to ignore the fair use exemptions.
"Fair Use" is a doctrine created by the Supreme Court; they could conceivably rule it applies w.r.t. criminal circumvention when used to enable traditional Fair Use, but to date they have not done so.
As for "primary purpose," DeCSS has no use other than to circumvent effective access control measures. What makes the DMCA dangerous is that it makes no distinction between circumvention used to enable further infringement, and circumvention used to enable otherwise legitamate access. If you purchase a DVD and use DeCSS on it, you are circumventing CSS, even if in so doing you are not infringing on the copyright on the underlying material.
The DMCA is dangerous precisely because it makes circumvention a criminal act distinct from, and not requiring the presence of subsequent infringement.
I am going to get you started on the use of the word "Democracy" in reference to a Republic:
Republic: 1a. A political order whose head of state is not a monarch and in modern times is usually a president
1b. A nation that has such a political order.
2a. A political order in which the supreme power lies in a body of citizens who are entitled to vote for officers and representatives responsible to them
2b. A nation that has such a political order
Democracy: 1. Government by the people, exercised either directly or through elected representatives. 2. A political or social unit that has such a government.
Thus, the United States is both a Republic and a Democracy.
You have to lapse pretty far toward pure skepticism, (i.e. pretty much accept that there are only opinions and no facts) in order for "Murder is a crime" to be anything other than a fact, given the defitions of murder: "The unlawful killing of one human being by another" and crime: "An act committed or omitted in violation of a law forbidding or commanding it and for which punishment is imposed upon conviction." You might have wiggle room re: "punishment imposed", but perhaps you were instead trying to convey the idea that "murder is morally wrong" is an opinion rather than a fact?
Be wary of such a thing occuring, although I hardly see it as being much of a disaster; if ever the majority of people accept such output as art, then you will be the one with the problem, not them.
But why does this particular story trouble you, when it bears little resemblance to that scenario other than the trivial aspect that it happens to involve a computer? There was still an artist controlling the computer, and deciding when the output matched his desires.
I didn't say we were the only tool-users, merely that it is one defining property of humanity. Furthermore, multiple innovations occur within the lifetimes of members of our species, rather than over the course of millenia.
Why is it soulless to use a computer to create art, yet not so to use a paintbrush? Surely, we humans are more than shepherds of pigment and hair which move according to the dictates of physics.
The art lies not in the specifics of the implementation, but in the expression by the artist, whatever the medium.
If there comes a day when a machine, without human intervention beyond its initial programming, creates works which are accepted as art, then perhaps you'll have reason to worry.
One defining quality of humanity is that we are tool-users, and the computer is one of the best examples of a general-purpose tool, which can be used for art, among other things.
If you were alive in Gutenberg's time, would you have mourned the soul-less nature of the printing press, allowing the mass-production of written material, thus "replacing" the author?
No, it isn't a topological problem, it's a geometric problem. Topologically, it's trivial: every non-self-intersecting polygon is ALREADY untanlged from a topological standpoint, sheesh. Like many people, you've been confused by the zooms in the animation.
Slashdot Mirror
Our supreme court also decided a while back that "obscenity" isn't protected by the 1st Ammendment for some reason.
I wonder if George Dubya's "Strict Constructionists" will revisit THAT one. Heh.
Some sort of source code for the necessary kernel modules is provided with VMWare; I've never run a kernel for which a pre-compiled binary was available, but the config script compiles versions which match my kernel without a hitch (2.2.x, at least)
What you mean is that you value information differently from the majority, and you seek to impose your value judgements on the rest of the world.
A cursory examination of the definition of deomcracy reveals that it includes the exercise of power by the public via elected representatives. The US is both a democracy and a republic.
Not being able to print up copies of a book is a red herring. DMCA anti-circumvention isn't about copying. Selling a book written in Esperanto, with a provision that you have to pay the publishing company's translators to read it to you (and if you can read Esperanto, you're not allowed to read it either), and having that provision be enforcable is a better analogy--and such a provision would be an insane abrogation of your property rights in the purchased book. (I'm talking about being able to read the book, not publish your own English-language translation)
When you buy software, the software companies want you to believe that you are actually buying a license to use the software.
People just seem to take their word for it.
Until UCITA passes in my state, I will continue to act under the assumption that I pay money for a box with a disc in it, and that I have a common law right to use it for its intended purpose so long as I don't break any applicable laws, such as copyright. Since I have to copy it to my hard drive, and then into memory in order to use it for the purpose for which its sold, I conclude I have the right to do so.
Beyond that, if they want to impose additional terms, they should have negotiated a contract with me before they let me buy it.
There were commercial networks before commercial traffic was allowed/popular on the internet. You could use compuserve, or delphi, or prodigy, or applelink, or (etc etc etc).
To say that government had nothing to do with the internet as we know it completely ignores the fact that it was the government-researched network which created the standards base. Without that base, you just have a bunch of balkanized, incompatable private networks. The most important feature of the internet is that it is an internetwork of *compatable* third-party networks.
"It was an odd admission considering that the Winamp player doesn't distinguish between playing legal and illegal MP3s either."
Funny, neither does my walkman.
You've made an argument that someone could be both pro-choice and anti-abortion. "Anti-choice" pretty well precludes the idea of supporting other peoples' rights to abort.
You have the FREEDOM to choose to offer it for sale. Your freedom does -not- extend to forcing other people to conform to your perception of what they should do to it; that's what their freedom is for. I don't have the "freedom" to enslave you.
I am a free human being. Intellectual freedom is just as important as physical freedom. Nobody has the right to restrict my creative output, expressed as "protection of intellectual property", without my consenting to such restrictions. This is called slavery. It ignores the fact that just about every intellectual achievement rests squarely on the back of those who have come before. I am not your slave, you own the contents of your head until you choose to express them to the world. After that, you can have no rational expectation that others will not use them as they see fit. Society has decided that, in some circumstances, it is useful to grant you a temporary monopoly on your output so that you will be willing to express your thoughts rather than keep them inside your head. This is a cost/benefit issue, not your moral right to restrict my freedom because you "thought of something first".
Later on, they STILL emailed me, to "let me know their privacy policy had changed, because I was listed as someone who was concerned about such things".
Whether a culture considers murder to be a crime is totally absolute, because murder is defined as unlawful killing. Whether a culture considers a particular killing to be a murder is subjective. A particular culture (one could suppose) might never define any killing as a crime, in which case there would be no murder in that culture by their standards. A particular culture might employ a language in which the words for "killing" and "murder" are synonymous, in which case they might be less inclined to draw a distinction.
As for pencil dropping, I believe you may be confusing epistemological issues for ontological ones.
One can take the skeptical position, and assume that we can never know anything, because there is always the possibility of being incorrect. From this standpoint, since knowledge is generally takes as "justified true belief", we never know anything, because we cannot be jusitifed in claiming something is true. Similarly, although there may be facts, we can never know them as such. I'm personally fairly sympathetic to this particular notion; "consensus reality" and other self-aware agents seem likely to exist based on generalizations I make based on my perceptions, but I don't "know" they exist for a "fact".
That position, however, makes the notion of "fact" rather a useless one. Some things may be facts, but we'd never know it, so why bother dealing with them? Common usage of "fact" (as well as truth) seem to take epistemology for granted and just assume that we can (somehow) "know" certain things. Even further along this direction, one listed definition for fact includes "a statement alleged as fact", which makes phrases like "the true facts of the case" not, strictly speaking, redundant.
I suppose somewhere back, I should have asked you if you believe that there are any objective facts, or if everything (other than, perhaps, your own existance from your own standpoint) is subjective.
Why wasn't the detail of natural history such that it included details of the world which the people at the time couldn't possibly have known, but which were later verifiable. Something about the nature of gravitation, or the energy at which the electroweak force shows itself as unified. That would certainly have made it a lot less likely to look like a book of fables written by people trying to explain the world in terms of what they knew.
If the natural science part is a metaphor, how do you know the christ part isn't? Just because you don't want it to be?
You are correct, however these statements take the form of assertions of the theorem-hood or non-theorem-hood of other statements within the system. I suggest you re-read Hofstadter, and pay closer attention to the discussion of the implications of considering TNT+~G instead of TNT+G. For all its "truth", the G statement can be negated and assumed as an axiom, and a similarly perfectly-self-consistent system results. Of course then there's G'...
Why are you satisified to answer the question "Why is there anything at all?" with "Because of God", and content to answer the question "Where did God come from" with "God has always been around?"
This has always seemed inconsistent to me.
The United States, a republic AND a deomcracy:
republic:
1.a. A political order whose head of state is not a monarch and in modern times is usually a president.
1.b. A nation that has such a political order.
2.a. A political order in which the supreme power lies in a body of citizens who are entitled to vote for officers and representatives responsible to them.
2.b. A nation that has such a political order.
democracy:
1. Government by the people, exercised either directly or through elected representatives.
2. A political or social unit that has such a government.
3. The common people, considered as the primary source of political power.
4. Majority rule.
5. The principles of social equality and respect for the individual within a community.
You seem to be arguing not that "murder is a crime" is subjective, but that "Milosovic commited murder" or "the abused wife comitted murder" are subjective. I agree. (Milosivic is being accused of war crimes, not murder, however.)
Unless one accepts some sort of operative definition that someone has comitted murder if and only if they are found guilty by a court of law, then "X has comitted murder" is a subjective concept. That's not a very good definition (and I point this out as an example, not because I believe you're advocating it), because it ignores the possibility of judicial error.
However, given the definitions of murder and crime, I maintain that murder is -by definition- a crime, and that this is a fact. Murder is defined to be an unlawful killing, and since it is defined to be unlawful, it is therefore a crime. Identifying a particular killing as being a murder or something else remains, of course subjective.
Why are repeatability and quantifiability necessary conditions for facthood? Suppose, in your presence, I drop a pencil once. It would certainly be a fact that I had done so, even though it had only happened once. It certainly wouldn't be necessary for me to repeat the act in order to establish the facthood of the first incident.
"Fair Use" is a doctrine created by the Supreme Court; they could conceivably rule it applies w.r.t. criminal circumvention when used to enable traditional Fair Use, but to date they have not done so.
As for "primary purpose," DeCSS has no use other than to circumvent effective access control measures. What makes the DMCA dangerous is that it makes no distinction between circumvention used to enable further infringement, and circumvention used to enable otherwise legitamate access. If you purchase a DVD and use DeCSS on it, you are circumventing CSS, even if in so doing you are not infringing on the copyright on the underlying material.
The DMCA is dangerous precisely because it makes circumvention a criminal act distinct from, and not requiring the presence of subsequent infringement.
I am going to get you started on the use of the word "Democracy" in reference to a Republic:
Republic: 1a. A political order whose head of state is not a monarch and in modern times is usually a president
1b. A nation that has such a political order.
2a. A political order in which the supreme power lies in a body of citizens who are entitled to vote for officers and representatives responsible to them
2b. A nation that has such a political order
Democracy: 1. Government by the people, exercised either directly or through elected representatives.
2. A political or social unit that has such a government.
Thus, the United States is both a Republic and a Democracy.
"Murder is a crime"
You have to lapse pretty far toward pure skepticism, (i.e. pretty much accept that there are only opinions and no facts) in order for "Murder is a crime" to be anything other than a fact, given the defitions of murder: "The unlawful killing of one human being by another" and crime: "An act committed or omitted in violation of a law forbidding or commanding it and for which punishment is imposed upon conviction." You might have wiggle room re: "punishment imposed", but perhaps you were instead trying to convey the idea that "murder is morally wrong" is an opinion rather than a fact?
Be wary of such a thing occuring, although I hardly see it as being much of a disaster; if ever the majority of people accept such output as art, then you will be the one with the problem, not them.
But why does this particular story trouble you, when it bears little resemblance to that scenario other than the trivial aspect that it happens to involve a computer? There was still an artist controlling the computer, and deciding when the output matched his desires.
I didn't say we were the only tool-users, merely that it is one defining property of humanity. Furthermore, multiple innovations occur within the lifetimes of members of our species, rather than over the course of millenia.
Why is it soulless to use a computer to create art, yet not so to use a paintbrush? Surely, we humans are more than shepherds of pigment and hair which move according to the dictates of physics.
The art lies not in the specifics of the implementation, but in the expression by the artist, whatever the medium.
If there comes a day when a machine, without human intervention beyond its initial programming, creates works which are accepted as art, then perhaps you'll have reason to worry.
One defining quality of humanity is that we are tool-users, and the computer is one of the best examples of a general-purpose tool, which can be used for art, among other things.
If you were alive in Gutenberg's time, would you have mourned the soul-less nature of the printing press, allowing the mass-production of written material, thus "replacing" the author?
No, it isn't a topological problem, it's a geometric problem. Topologically, it's trivial: every non-self-intersecting polygon is ALREADY untanlged from a topological standpoint, sheesh. Like many people, you've been confused by the zooms in the animation.