The point I'm making is that without keeping the first purchaser from redistributing the work, why would anyone else pay the creator? If I buy your book at $5 or even $500 and I'm not bound not to reproduce and redistribute it, I can sell it 1000 times for $1 and make a profit. You'd only have to sell it 100 times at $5 to make $500, but by letting me reproduce it you'll likely lose that chance.
Screw the medium, which isn't very important these days. The intellectual and creative content has value, and the person who put that content in form deserves to be compensated. The way that's being done now sucks because of middle men, not because the original author has certain rights. A copyright of 50 years on a book or musical composition doesn't seem outrageous to me. That we go back to literal patronage -- rich people supporting artists charitably so that the artists can continue to create art -- does seem outrageous.
Under your model a band would risk getting paid just $0.50 per song they write, rehearse, and record. That's because one person would buy one copy, and then turn around and sell or give it to everyone else. An author who wrote a 700-page novel could get paid $7, since everyone else could just make their own copies. What you're talking about is the end of commercial content altogether. If that's your goal, you've found a very effective way to promote it. Don't expect everyone else to jump on that bandwagon, though.
I disagree. The ability to make and sell copies of an entire work is just as important to curb as the ability to plagiarize part of a work. That's the control of distribution that was initially intended. Making a copy for a different device or watching a recorded TV show at a different time don't hurt the original author's ability to profit from the work. Distributing copies of what they're selling does.
The terms are too long, and there are abuses like the anti-anti-DRM in the DMCA that are truly abusive. To allow people to make hundreds of thousands of copies for strangers across the Internet and take a serious chunk of the market away from the artist is just as abusive to the artist as the other extreme is to the public.
Remember that most places in the US have laws against "wreckless driving" and/or "careless and imprudent driving", which are pretty much left to the discretion of the police officers who witness your particular act of driving, including rate of acceleration. It's not as easy to get busted as by speeding, but it's not as easy to know what the exact rule at the moment is going to be, either.
I've personally seen cops drag race high school kids in their patrol cruisers up to the limit (and sometimes a little beyond) from stop lights, but I've also seen people ticketed for chirping their tires going uphill on damp pavement. It's usually going to be in town I think that you experience such things, and much less on the open highway. Different officers will consider things differently, and if you're just accelerating quickly there's much less chance of getting ticketed than if you're also spinning your wheels or fish-tailing. I think the apt car analogy here is YMMV.;-)
Minimum retail doesn't mean it's exactly $150. If the MSRP is $150, there'd be a range below that that'd be acceptable. There are also going to be people selling it for more, although not too much more because they'd lose the sale. Nice stores and good service only go so far, after all.
Also, note the word "automatically". There are lots of things that can be illegal that are not automatically illegal. It's not automatically illegal to shot someone in the face, but most of the time it's going to be a criminal act. It's also not automatically illegal to scream "fire" in a crowded theater (the classic example of the limits of the First Amendment right to free speech), but there damn well better be a fire if you do so.
If you read the second sentence of the article you cited, you'd find "The decision will give producers significantly more, though not unlimited, power to dictate retail prices and to restrict the flexibility of discounters." It goes on to say that it is no longer per se illegal, but still could be according to a "rule of reason" on a case-by-case basis. Also you might notice it's a single Federal law that they are considering, and 37 states supported the opposite view. You can bet those 37 states regulate businesses in some way within their own borders, and some of them will have their own say now that the interpretation of the Sherman Act has changed federally.
The justice that wrote the dissent said the lower courts would take years to work out good rules of reason and that eventually they'd have to be standardized. I see a fresh visit to this after the next Democrat who becomes President (whether that's Hillary, Barak, or someone in 2012) gets a justice or two on the Court.
So, are you still convinced that they can tell everyone to sell it for exactly $150 when some stores will have volume discounts at purchase?
People need to quit making knee-jerk reactions based on single sound bites. Also, since this borders on the favorite Slashdot topic of conspiracy theories, has anyone ever noticed the Mayan calendar ends in a year that coincides with a US Presidential election?
Okay, I see you're not dealing with an issue of the concept of copyright but with abuses of it. From that viewpoint, I'd agree it's being misused to do those things. I just don't think it's the tool that's damaged so much as the way it's being misused.
I seem to remember a computer seller (Tandy, I think it was) that had a jumper wire disabling half the RAM on lower-end motherboards. I can't recall if this was supposed to be the TRS-80, the CoCo, or their mostly-IBM-compatibles, but I remember it was a former Radio Shack store manager who told me about it. Cutting the wire gave you the same amount of RAM as the upper-end model and was how the upgrade worked at the authorized service centers.
The problem isn't that you might be accused when innocent. That happens, and it's sad, but there's no way to stop that without, as you say, scrapping the whole system. The problem is that if your name has ever been associated with an investigation, even if you weren't the suspect and even if it was somebody else with your same name, they start trying to keep you from traveling freely and start spreading FUD about you anywhere a government agency has a hand in operating something.
The US no-fly list has already suffered from this. You can be fairly sure the NSA domestic spy program has done the same, since it's harder to pin them down as affecting the wrong people. Now, these governments are going to be notified overseas, so that the Anglophonic monoculture in which most Americans have been sheltered for generations provides nowhere to which you can expatriate if you decide the US is not for you because of problems like this. Even if the other countries enter into this program with honorable intent, if they're trusting data from an increasingly corrupt and heavy-handed member nation then their databases are the sentence whether or not you've committed any crime.
Both major parties in the US are in favor of this sort of thing, too. Don't imagine for a second that if the supposed small-government people in the Republican party want more government interference and more power over the people that the Democrats, who think government can solve everything, will get rid of it or clean it up. The only way to keep the government from controlling the people is if it's small enough for the people to control it.
Copyright doesn't keep you from criticizing in your own words. The jack-booted thugs have to call it "terrorism" to keep you from criticizing their masters. OF course, they do that so readily now that the word is quickly losing any meaning.
Toshiba can't actually set the street price at the store legally in the US. They can influence it with a lower price to the retailer. They can lower the suggested retail price, which many consumers expect the stores to match. They can offer rebates and coupons. They can't actually tell the stores they'll be selling it at exactly $150, because there are laws against that.
The target demographic was initially the poorest kids in the poorest countries. It has nothing to do with race. It has everything to do with this being the only computer that serves the purpose of a reliable computer for education and skills training in certain areas.
I have a problem with people who are dismissive of reason no matter their skin color. How is that racist?
You called me racist because I said the XO laptop was largely targeted at people without amenities like indoor wiring and indoor plumbing. You called me racist because I said some of the villages targeted don't have regular schools and libraries. These are facts. There's no racial element to them.
Even if I think industrialism is better than subsistence farming, which I never said, that's not racist. Racism is the favoring of one group or another based on color, national origin, or some genetic marker. There is no racial element to type of employment chosen or type of employment by necessity when there is no choice. There's one type of work and another type of work. There's nothing that makes industrial work more fit for one skin color and farming more fit for another. To say that giving people a choice between one type of work and another is racist defies reason.
Yes, you are obviously very clued in. So much so that you know of a program called OLAP doing exactly what OLPC is trying to do.
"Do the world a favour and stop condescending to people you don't know or understand."
Follow your own fucking advice. Nobody in Cambodia asked you to protect them from food, water, medicine, and education. Nobody asked you to teach me what it's like to work in a factory, since I have. Nobody asked you to label people who are just trying to help, but your political feelings shine through when you do.
"People never cease to amaze me. Instead of just admitting they are wrong, they make excuses for their belief systems. It almost seems as if everybody was born to be a politician."
So, admit you're wrong already and stop making excuses for your isolationist, anti-modern, neoluddite, romantic agrarian belief system.
I'm about as racist as a peanut butter sandwich -- you, your black friends, your white friends, your red friends, and your yellow friends can just eat me. I don't give a fuck about your childish games. Did you know there are many poorly educated white people and many well educated people of other races? By saying that bringing education to the poor is racist, you're saying there's a specific race element to being poor. How's that make me the racist, you racist?
The problem with rotation of a perennial or self-replanting annual (one where the seeds dropping onto the soil is enough for the plant to take root and grow) is that you're putting labor and energy into ripping up the self-sustaining plant and planting something else. That kind of defeats the whole purpose.
Now, if you could plant alternating rows of crops that reinforce one another and figure out how to make the harvesting equipment distinguish them, that's a winner.
The last time I checked, Nicholas Negroponte was not placing people on reservations or in gulags. He wants to give kids something that will help them enter an industrial economy or an information economy if they choose to use it. If they don't choose to use it and want to be subsistence farmers, then more power to them. The project isn't about force or coercion. It's about giving people a chance at something they had little chance at before, and they're free to turn that down.
IANAL, but I know a few things about libel. Opinion presented as opinion and not fact is not libel. Hypothetical situations are not libel. What you do to twist another's words to say something they did not say is not libel on the part of that person.
If the machines are easy to fool, then that's incompetence on the part of the people designing and implementing the machines. How could it not be? If the machines were fooled, how could the people fooling them not be crooked? If the machines just randomly malfunction and spread votes around, that's incompetence again. There's simply no way to say irregularities took place and there's nobody to blame. If there turns out to be proof of irregularities, then someone's going to be to blame. If it's all a bunch of bellyaching over losing, then that's another story.
You're so sure the entire state of Florida could be bought, and you're applying that to New Hampshire, but you're saying I'm libeling people?
BTW, the yardstick for libel or slander typically involves that it's a statement of fact and not opinion, that it's false, that the person making the statement knows it to be false, and that it has caused actual harm to the party the statement is made about. Show a court that I made a statement of fact that I knew to be false which harmed Diebold or anyone else before you start throwing around words I don't think you really understand.
What phone are they going to use to reserve the book? With what light will they read it after the sun goes down? How are they going to travel 100 miles on foot to the "local library"?
Many of the people targeted with the XO are not living in clean rows of houses with white fences but with no computers. They're living in places where subsistence farming and odd jobs are the employment. They're happy to have clean water and vaccinations, some clothes and maybe some shoes. You don't send these people to the local school library, where there might be 5 books for the village in the one-room school. If they're going to read, a free computer and free content like Project Gutenberg is great. If they're going to write, a free computer is great since paper and pencil is a major expense for some people.
Imagine putting 30 computers in a small village that has one phone for those 30 kids and their families. Now, imagine all the computers can talk to one another, and that another, coordinating charity is putting a 256k or 512k Internet line in for the village. You're talking about not just changing the source of connectivity and reading material. You're talking about introducing those things.
Sure, some of the kids targeted have it better than this. Many don't. You should watch or read the news story on the village in Cambodia where Negroponte gave away a dozen or two regular laptops to the village school, and enrollment in first grade increased by half.
Countries targeted include those in which 50% of children live with no access to schools at all. Where do they go for their books?
The statement is most certainly not libel. The statement was made in the context that there were assumptions of something having gone wrong. I stated that had something gone wrong, it was probably not intentional on Diebold's part. How the fuck is that libelous?
You're the one who said that it'd be easy to commit wholesale bribery of election officials in the state of New Hampshire. Yet you're also the one who is both objecting to Hanlon's razor being used in a less than absolute way and calling my statement libelous. How's that for twisted logic?
Actually, it's not the opposite. The House of Representatives give equal representation to the citizens of the country. The Senate gives equal representation to each member state regardless of population. Both must approve the same wording of the same bill for it to become law. The Constitution promises that both ways are used, not just one or the other.
I'm an independent but pretty conservative guy. If anyone but Obama is the Democratic candidate, I'm definitely voting Republican. I like Ron Paul and supported Harry Browne. I like Obama, though. I might vote for him against most of the fairly lousy crop of Republicans. I think the most electable ticket out of the major candidates would be if McCain and Obama crossed the aisle and ran a McCain/Obama ticket, or maybe even the other way around. I like McCain, too, even though he's far from the most conservative Republican running.
So what's to like about Obama? I have several reasons.
He's young. Most people see that as a drawback, but he's had terms in the Illinois statehouse and has been a US Senator for a little while. He still has plenty of energy, determination, and focus.
The man's record tends to reflect his stated beliefs, even if I don't necessarily agree with many of his political beliefs.
He's well spoken and writes well. That man really does communicate with people, and he really reaches them.
He's hopeful, and he's not happy with the partisan bickering and the sorry state of affairs in Washington. We could use someone hopeful rather than cynical in the White House.
The race card has been overplayed by the media in this campaign, but it could really help both at home and abroad. Obama is a first-generation American on his father's side, and half black. Blacks in the US are largely self-disenfranchised because they don't think anyone running the country cares about their plight. I'm not a sociologist, but I grew up in a poorer mixed-race neighborhood and I've seen it. Here's a man who instead of giving in to prejudice and allowing himself to fail because certain ignorant people make life a little harder is taking advantage of all the hard work that civil rights workers of all skin colors have done, and could be President of the United States. The man shouldn't be questioned about being "too black" or "not black enough". That's just more racism. He should be now, and will be if elected, a huge role model for people of all races. He'd also be a sign to the rest of the world that the US isn't always going to be run by the rich white boys' club.
Although he doesn't have as much government experience in international affairs as many other candidates, he has more personal experience with Muslims than any of them. He went to a local Indonesian school for two years from the ages of six to eight. He then attended Catholic school in Indonesia. He grew up part of his life in another culture that our politicians need to understand. I think his life experience and mayb e even the knowledge of others about his life experience could help him reach some agreements with people in largely Islamic countries that the candidates from privileged wealthy families here in the US can't.
Charisma is a good thing not just for getting elected, but also for getting things done with Congress, with the Cabinet, and with foreign dignitaries. It's a strength valued in presidents -- especially Kennedy, Reagan, and Bill Clinton. McCain has it, Edwards has it, Huckabee has it, Giuliani has it, and Dr. Paul has it. None of them have it the way Obama has it. I don't see much of it at all from Kucinich, Clinton, or Romney.
I'd vote for Paul in the general election in a heartbeat if he got that far. I'll probably vote Republican in the general anyway, because McCain will probably be the candidate. I'd vote Huckabee, Romney, or Giuliani before any of the Democrats besides Obama. I'll be torn if it's Obama against McCain, and although I like Giuliani and Huckabee pretty well I'd probably vote for Obama over any of them.
I'll keep this brief, since we're mostly in agreement about where we disagree now.:-)
It's not that I think any version of the GPL will help OHL or CC directly (although it's obvious that the GPL and similar licenses inspired both in a big way). It's that I think that if free hardware and free content as well as free software are important, it's good to stand firmly in all three areas. I think The Tivo-style issues are best dealt with by having other hardware being explicitly open not because I think the goal of the GPLv3 is wrong, but because I think the freedoms lost to proprietary hardware are broader than even the GPLv3 addresses and that the GPL will never, being a software license, be able to effect changes in hardware as well as OHL.
By having the software, hardware, and content rights of the user bundled up in the GPLv3 (and not quite adequately other than the software rights) we lose both flexibility in which rights we care most about (Linus's complaint, I think) and the ability to effect the other two areas broadly and specifically enough. I think most people in favor of the GPL for freedom instead of pragmatically as you've made the distinction, should support freedom in hardware and content, too.
I'm not the absolutist that RMS is. I don't think all closed-source proprietary software is wrong. I don't think that about hardware or content, either. I do think there should be a strong way to protect the work of people willinbg to share from those who would try to undermine that, though. I think the strengths of being able to work with people interested in just free software here, just free software there, and just free content over in the corner in addition to people concerned with all three would be really nice and a good way to spread the freedom, too.
"The issue finally comes down to: if you truly believe that freedom to run, study, modify, copy, distribute, improve and release and execute software are freedoms that need to be defended (as stated by the FSF since 1986), then you should use GPLv3, GPLv2 is not effective to protect those very same freedoms."
I think this statement is at the heart of our disagreement. I feel the GPLv2 does an admirable job of protecting all of those freedoms within its scope. The GPLv3 stretches that scope, and will be the right license for many people because of that. However, there's not one of those freedoms listed that GPLv2 does not protect with some effectiveness.
To say it's as fully effective as GPLv3 for running/executing would be dishonest in the context of Tivo. However, people are still free to execute Tivo's changes along with further changes they make themselves. They just need hardware other than stock Tivo hardware to do so (another device or a hard-hacked Tivo box). If there's a more open alternative for hardware (there are several right now), then the only complaint is that Tivo sells a proprietary piece of hardware.
You don't even need to be a Tivo customer to make use of their changes, because their customers are free to redistribute the source, too. There is a bit of a slippery slope, I think, between Tivo locking their boxes down and users not having any alternatives from anywhere to run the software. In the case that we actually slide down that slope, the extra protection of GPLv3 will be necessary. Right now, I think it's trying to prevent a situation that probably won't happen anyway, or to punish Tivo specifically for sticking to the letter but not the spirit of GPLv2. Those are both fine, and the FSF and its supporters have every right to do both of those things. To try to damn Linus and ESR for not participating in that further part of the movement I think is unfair.
I also think it's unfair to go so far as to call the FSF people traitors to the cause. The GPLv3 does what v2 did and more. It's not like it's the exact opposite of v2. People can agree or disagree with the new standard the FSF is trying to set, but it's not traitorous. Stubborn and overzealous might be fair enough adjectives if people feel strongly enough about the changes, but saying they're abandoning the people happy with v2 is silly and disingenuous.
As the fSF made an open invitation to use GPLv2, I think it's silly that people should be expected to give it up for a new license that does more. I think it's equally silly of the people wanting to stick with v2 to expect the FSF to stand still. I think both sides have good arguments, but that they both take them to extremes. The best freedom for the developer is probably to be able to choose freely GPLv2, GPLv3, or either version of the GPL "or later". The best freedom overall for the end user might be the target of GPLv3, but I'm still personally in favor of OHL hardware and CC content alongside the GPLv2 as I think it will accomplish more in the long run.
"Bush Clinton Bush Clinton" is exactly what worries me.
George H. W. "No new taxes" Bush, William Jefferson "That depends on what your definition of is is" Clinton, George W. "We're going to find Osama" Bush, Hillary Diane "I am entitled to win, so I'll cry when I don't" Rodham Clinton from Illinois and Arkansas who claimed to know all about representing New York's needs, who runs as a Democrat after writing "A cycle of dependency has been created," she wrote, "which ensnares its victims into resignation and apathy." at Wellesley.
It seems we've got two dynasty families on our hands who are more than willing to pass the torch back and forth so long as nobody outside their circle gets to hold it.
Diebold's goiong to sue me for libel for saying they're more likely incompetent and being taken advantage of by crooks than crooked themselves? Goody. Where do I sign up for my winnings for harassment for being targeted with a frivolous and baseless suit?
Or perhaps you misread, since I was attributing stupidity to the majority of people involved and malice to the minority and you seem to think otherwise. That there's malice involved in fraud is part of the definition of fraud, so if there';s fraud involving Diebold's machines, Hanlon's razor would mean that Diebold is the stupid party and a small group elsewhere is the malicious party. It could just be stupidity all around, but then it wouldn't be fraud. It'd still be undesirable if it was random vote swapping rather than planned, though.
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The point I'm making is that without keeping the first purchaser from redistributing the work, why would anyone else pay the creator? If I buy your book at $5 or even $500 and I'm not bound not to reproduce and redistribute it, I can sell it 1000 times for $1 and make a profit. You'd only have to sell it 100 times at $5 to make $500, but by letting me reproduce it you'll likely lose that chance.
Screw the medium, which isn't very important these days. The intellectual and creative content has value, and the person who put that content in form deserves to be compensated. The way that's being done now sucks because of middle men, not because the original author has certain rights. A copyright of 50 years on a book or musical composition doesn't seem outrageous to me. That we go back to literal patronage -- rich people supporting artists charitably so that the artists can continue to create art -- does seem outrageous.
Under your model a band would risk getting paid just $0.50 per song they write, rehearse, and record. That's because one person would buy one copy, and then turn around and sell or give it to everyone else. An author who wrote a 700-page novel could get paid $7, since everyone else could just make their own copies. What you're talking about is the end of commercial content altogether. If that's your goal, you've found a very effective way to promote it. Don't expect everyone else to jump on that bandwagon, though.
I disagree. The ability to make and sell copies of an entire work is just as important to curb as the ability to plagiarize part of a work. That's the control of distribution that was initially intended. Making a copy for a different device or watching a recorded TV show at a different time don't hurt the original author's ability to profit from the work. Distributing copies of what they're selling does.
The terms are too long, and there are abuses like the anti-anti-DRM in the DMCA that are truly abusive. To allow people to make hundreds of thousands of copies for strangers across the Internet and take a serious chunk of the market away from the artist is just as abusive to the artist as the other extreme is to the public.
Remember that most places in the US have laws against "wreckless driving" and/or "careless and imprudent driving", which are pretty much left to the discretion of the police officers who witness your particular act of driving, including rate of acceleration. It's not as easy to get busted as by speeding, but it's not as easy to know what the exact rule at the moment is going to be, either.
;-)
I've personally seen cops drag race high school kids in their patrol cruisers up to the limit (and sometimes a little beyond) from stop lights, but I've also seen people ticketed for chirping their tires going uphill on damp pavement. It's usually going to be in town I think that you experience such things, and much less on the open highway. Different officers will consider things differently, and if you're just accelerating quickly there's much less chance of getting ticketed than if you're also spinning your wheels or fish-tailing. I think the apt car analogy here is YMMV.
Minimum retail doesn't mean it's exactly $150. If the MSRP is $150, there'd be a range below that that'd be acceptable. There are also going to be people selling it for more, although not too much more because they'd lose the sale. Nice stores and good service only go so far, after all.
Also, note the word "automatically". There are lots of things that can be illegal that are not automatically illegal. It's not automatically illegal to shot someone in the face, but most of the time it's going to be a criminal act. It's also not automatically illegal to scream "fire" in a crowded theater (the classic example of the limits of the First Amendment right to free speech), but there damn well better be a fire if you do so.
If you read the second sentence of the article you cited, you'd find "The decision will give producers significantly more, though not unlimited, power to dictate retail prices and to restrict the flexibility of discounters." It goes on to say that it is no longer per se illegal, but still could be according to a "rule of reason" on a case-by-case basis. Also you might notice it's a single Federal law that they are considering, and 37 states supported the opposite view. You can bet those 37 states regulate businesses in some way within their own borders, and some of them will have their own say now that the interpretation of the Sherman Act has changed federally.
The justice that wrote the dissent said the lower courts would take years to work out good rules of reason and that eventually they'd have to be standardized. I see a fresh visit to this after the next Democrat who becomes President (whether that's Hillary, Barak, or someone in 2012) gets a justice or two on the Court.
So, are you still convinced that they can tell everyone to sell it for exactly $150 when some stores will have volume discounts at purchase?
People need to quit making knee-jerk reactions based on single sound bites. Also, since this borders on the favorite Slashdot topic of conspiracy theories, has anyone ever noticed the Mayan calendar ends in a year that coincides with a US Presidential election?
Okay, I see you're not dealing with an issue of the concept of copyright but with abuses of it. From that viewpoint, I'd agree it's being misused to do those things. I just don't think it's the tool that's damaged so much as the way it's being misused.
I seem to remember a computer seller (Tandy, I think it was) that had a jumper wire disabling half the RAM on lower-end motherboards. I can't recall if this was supposed to be the TRS-80, the CoCo, or their mostly-IBM-compatibles, but I remember it was a former Radio Shack store manager who told me about it. Cutting the wire gave you the same amount of RAM as the upper-end model and was how the upgrade worked at the authorized service centers.
The problem isn't that you might be accused when innocent. That happens, and it's sad, but there's no way to stop that without, as you say, scrapping the whole system. The problem is that if your name has ever been associated with an investigation, even if you weren't the suspect and even if it was somebody else with your same name, they start trying to keep you from traveling freely and start spreading FUD about you anywhere a government agency has a hand in operating something.
The US no-fly list has already suffered from this. You can be fairly sure the NSA domestic spy program has done the same, since it's harder to pin them down as affecting the wrong people. Now, these governments are going to be notified overseas, so that the Anglophonic monoculture in which most Americans have been sheltered for generations provides nowhere to which you can expatriate if you decide the US is not for you because of problems like this. Even if the other countries enter into this program with honorable intent, if they're trusting data from an increasingly corrupt and heavy-handed member nation then their databases are the sentence whether or not you've committed any crime.
Both major parties in the US are in favor of this sort of thing, too. Don't imagine for a second that if the supposed small-government people in the Republican party want more government interference and more power over the people that the Democrats, who think government can solve everything, will get rid of it or clean it up. The only way to keep the government from controlling the people is if it's small enough for the people to control it.
Copyright doesn't keep you from criticizing in your own words. The jack-booted thugs have to call it "terrorism" to keep you from criticizing their masters. OF course, they do that so readily now that the word is quickly losing any meaning.
Toshiba can't actually set the street price at the store legally in the US. They can influence it with a lower price to the retailer. They can lower the suggested retail price, which many consumers expect the stores to match. They can offer rebates and coupons. They can't actually tell the stores they'll be selling it at exactly $150, because there are laws against that.
My inability to read? SO now I'm illiterate? Conversation over, you juvenile little troll.
The target demographic was initially the poorest kids in the poorest countries. It has nothing to do with race. It has everything to do with this being the only computer that serves the purpose of a reliable computer for education and skills training in certain areas.
I have a problem with people who are dismissive of reason no matter their skin color. How is that racist?
You called me racist because I said the XO laptop was largely targeted at people without amenities like indoor wiring and indoor plumbing. You called me racist because I said some of the villages targeted don't have regular schools and libraries. These are facts. There's no racial element to them.
Even if I think industrialism is better than subsistence farming, which I never said, that's not racist. Racism is the favoring of one group or another based on color, national origin, or some genetic marker. There is no racial element to type of employment chosen or type of employment by necessity when there is no choice. There's one type of work and another type of work. There's nothing that makes industrial work more fit for one skin color and farming more fit for another. To say that giving people a choice between one type of work and another is racist defies reason.
Yes, you are obviously very clued in. So much so that you know of a program called OLAP doing exactly what OLPC is trying to do.
"Do the world a favour and stop condescending to people you don't know or understand."
Follow your own fucking advice. Nobody in Cambodia asked you to protect them from food, water, medicine, and education. Nobody asked you to teach me what it's like to work in a factory, since I have. Nobody asked you to label people who are just trying to help, but your political feelings shine through when you do.
"People never cease to amaze me. Instead of just admitting they are wrong, they make excuses for their belief systems. It almost seems as if everybody was born to be a politician."
So, admit you're wrong already and stop making excuses for your isolationist, anti-modern, neoluddite, romantic agrarian belief system.
I'm about as racist as a peanut butter sandwich -- you, your black friends, your white friends, your red friends, and your yellow friends can just eat me. I don't give a fuck about your childish games. Did you know there are many poorly educated white people and many well educated people of other races? By saying that bringing education to the poor is racist, you're saying there's a specific race element to being poor. How's that make me the racist, you racist?
Wait, you say I'm libeling people, and then you claim I'm attacking you? WTF? Don't you have that backwards?
The problem with rotation of a perennial or self-replanting annual (one where the seeds dropping onto the soil is enough for the plant to take root and grow) is that you're putting labor and energy into ripping up the self-sustaining plant and planting something else. That kind of defeats the whole purpose.
Now, if you could plant alternating rows of crops that reinforce one another and figure out how to make the harvesting equipment distinguish them, that's a winner.
The last time I checked, Nicholas Negroponte was not placing people on reservations or in gulags. He wants to give kids something that will help them enter an industrial economy or an information economy if they choose to use it. If they don't choose to use it and want to be subsistence farmers, then more power to them. The project isn't about force or coercion. It's about giving people a chance at something they had little chance at before, and they're free to turn that down.
IANAL, but I know a few things about libel. Opinion presented as opinion and not fact is not libel. Hypothetical situations are not libel. What you do to twist another's words to say something they did not say is not libel on the part of that person.
If the machines are easy to fool, then that's incompetence on the part of the people designing and implementing the machines. How could it not be? If the machines were fooled, how could the people fooling them not be crooked? If the machines just randomly malfunction and spread votes around, that's incompetence again. There's simply no way to say irregularities took place and there's nobody to blame. If there turns out to be proof of irregularities, then someone's going to be to blame. If it's all a bunch of bellyaching over losing, then that's another story.
You're so sure the entire state of Florida could be bought, and you're applying that to New Hampshire, but you're saying I'm libeling people?
BTW, the yardstick for libel or slander typically involves that it's a statement of fact and not opinion, that it's false, that the person making the statement knows it to be false, and that it has caused actual harm to the party the statement is made about. Show a court that I made a statement of fact that I knew to be false which harmed Diebold or anyone else before you start throwing around words I don't think you really understand.
What phone are they going to use to reserve the book? With what light will they read it after the sun goes down? How are they going to travel 100 miles on foot to the "local library"?
Many of the people targeted with the XO are not living in clean rows of houses with white fences but with no computers. They're living in places where subsistence farming and odd jobs are the employment. They're happy to have clean water and vaccinations, some clothes and maybe some shoes. You don't send these people to the local school library, where there might be 5 books for the village in the one-room school. If they're going to read, a free computer and free content like Project Gutenberg is great. If they're going to write, a free computer is great since paper and pencil is a major expense for some people.
Imagine putting 30 computers in a small village that has one phone for those 30 kids and their families. Now, imagine all the computers can talk to one another, and that another, coordinating charity is putting a 256k or 512k Internet line in for the village. You're talking about not just changing the source of connectivity and reading material. You're talking about introducing those things.
Sure, some of the kids targeted have it better than this. Many don't. You should watch or read the news story on the village in Cambodia where Negroponte gave away a dozen or two regular laptops to the village school, and enrollment in first grade increased by half.
Countries targeted include those in which 50% of children live with no access to schools at all. Where do they go for their books?
The statement is most certainly not libel. The statement was made in the context that there were assumptions of something having gone wrong. I stated that had something gone wrong, it was probably not intentional on Diebold's part. How the fuck is that libelous?
You're the one who said that it'd be easy to commit wholesale bribery of election officials in the state of New Hampshire. Yet you're also the one who is both objecting to Hanlon's razor being used in a less than absolute way and calling my statement libelous. How's that for twisted logic?
Actually, it's not the opposite. The House of Representatives give equal representation to the citizens of the country. The Senate gives equal representation to each member state regardless of population. Both must approve the same wording of the same bill for it to become law. The Constitution promises that both ways are used, not just one or the other.
I'm an independent but pretty conservative guy. If anyone but Obama is the Democratic candidate, I'm definitely voting Republican. I like Ron Paul and supported Harry Browne. I like Obama, though. I might vote for him against most of the fairly lousy crop of Republicans. I think the most electable ticket out of the major candidates would be if McCain and Obama crossed the aisle and ran a McCain/Obama ticket, or maybe even the other way around. I like McCain, too, even though he's far from the most conservative Republican running.
So what's to like about Obama? I have several reasons.
He's young. Most people see that as a drawback, but he's had terms in the Illinois statehouse and has been a US Senator for a little while. He still has plenty of energy, determination, and focus.
The man's record tends to reflect his stated beliefs, even if I don't necessarily agree with many of his political beliefs.
He's well spoken and writes well. That man really does communicate with people, and he really reaches them.
He's hopeful, and he's not happy with the partisan bickering and the sorry state of affairs in Washington. We could use someone hopeful rather than cynical in the White House.
The race card has been overplayed by the media in this campaign, but it could really help both at home and abroad. Obama is a first-generation American on his father's side, and half black. Blacks in the US are largely self-disenfranchised because they don't think anyone running the country cares about their plight. I'm not a sociologist, but I grew up in a poorer mixed-race neighborhood and I've seen it. Here's a man who instead of giving in to prejudice and allowing himself to fail because certain ignorant people make life a little harder is taking advantage of all the hard work that civil rights workers of all skin colors have done, and could be President of the United States. The man shouldn't be questioned about being "too black" or "not black enough". That's just more racism. He should be now, and will be if elected, a huge role model for people of all races. He'd also be a sign to the rest of the world that the US isn't always going to be run by the rich white boys' club.
Although he doesn't have as much government experience in international affairs as many other candidates, he has more personal experience with Muslims than any of them. He went to a local Indonesian school for two years from the ages of six to eight. He then attended Catholic school in Indonesia. He grew up part of his life in another culture that our politicians need to understand. I think his life experience and mayb e even the knowledge of others about his life experience could help him reach some agreements with people in largely Islamic countries that the candidates from privileged wealthy families here in the US can't.
Charisma is a good thing not just for getting elected, but also for getting things done with Congress, with the Cabinet, and with foreign dignitaries. It's a strength valued in presidents -- especially Kennedy, Reagan, and Bill Clinton. McCain has it, Edwards has it, Huckabee has it, Giuliani has it, and Dr. Paul has it. None of them have it the way Obama has it. I don't see much of it at all from Kucinich, Clinton, or Romney.
I'd vote for Paul in the general election in a heartbeat if he got that far. I'll probably vote Republican in the general anyway, because McCain will probably be the candidate. I'd vote Huckabee, Romney, or Giuliani before any of the Democrats besides Obama. I'll be torn if it's Obama against McCain, and although I like Giuliani and Huckabee pretty well I'd probably vote for Obama over any of them.
I'll keep this brief, since we're mostly in agreement about where we disagree now. :-)
It's not that I think any version of the GPL will help OHL or CC directly (although it's obvious that the GPL and similar licenses inspired both in a big way). It's that I think that if free hardware and free content as well as free software are important, it's good to stand firmly in all three areas. I think The Tivo-style issues are best dealt with by having other hardware being explicitly open not because I think the goal of the GPLv3 is wrong, but because I think the freedoms lost to proprietary hardware are broader than even the GPLv3 addresses and that the GPL will never, being a software license, be able to effect changes in hardware as well as OHL.
By having the software, hardware, and content rights of the user bundled up in the GPLv3 (and not quite adequately other than the software rights) we lose both flexibility in which rights we care most about (Linus's complaint, I think) and the ability to effect the other two areas broadly and specifically enough. I think most people in favor of the GPL for freedom instead of pragmatically as you've made the distinction, should support freedom in hardware and content, too.
I'm not the absolutist that RMS is. I don't think all closed-source proprietary software is wrong. I don't think that about hardware or content, either. I do think there should be a strong way to protect the work of people willinbg to share from those who would try to undermine that, though. I think the strengths of being able to work with people interested in just free software here, just free software there, and just free content over in the corner in addition to people concerned with all three would be really nice and a good way to spread the freedom, too.
"The issue finally comes down to: if you truly believe that freedom to run, study, modify, copy, distribute, improve and release and execute software are freedoms that need to be defended (as stated by the FSF since 1986), then you should use GPLv3, GPLv2 is not effective to protect those very same freedoms."
I think this statement is at the heart of our disagreement. I feel the GPLv2 does an admirable job of protecting all of those freedoms within its scope. The GPLv3 stretches that scope, and will be the right license for many people because of that. However, there's not one of those freedoms listed that GPLv2 does not protect with some effectiveness.
To say it's as fully effective as GPLv3 for running/executing would be dishonest in the context of Tivo. However, people are still free to execute Tivo's changes along with further changes they make themselves. They just need hardware other than stock Tivo hardware to do so (another device or a hard-hacked Tivo box). If there's a more open alternative for hardware (there are several right now), then the only complaint is that Tivo sells a proprietary piece of hardware.
You don't even need to be a Tivo customer to make use of their changes, because their customers are free to redistribute the source, too. There is a bit of a slippery slope, I think, between Tivo locking their boxes down and users not having any alternatives from anywhere to run the software. In the case that we actually slide down that slope, the extra protection of GPLv3 will be necessary. Right now, I think it's trying to prevent a situation that probably won't happen anyway, or to punish Tivo specifically for sticking to the letter but not the spirit of GPLv2. Those are both fine, and the FSF and its supporters have every right to do both of those things. To try to damn Linus and ESR for not participating in that further part of the movement I think is unfair.
I also think it's unfair to go so far as to call the FSF people traitors to the cause. The GPLv3 does what v2 did and more. It's not like it's the exact opposite of v2. People can agree or disagree with the new standard the FSF is trying to set, but it's not traitorous. Stubborn and overzealous might be fair enough adjectives if people feel strongly enough about the changes, but saying they're abandoning the people happy with v2 is silly and disingenuous.
As the fSF made an open invitation to use GPLv2, I think it's silly that people should be expected to give it up for a new license that does more. I think it's equally silly of the people wanting to stick with v2 to expect the FSF to stand still. I think both sides have good arguments, but that they both take them to extremes. The best freedom for the developer is probably to be able to choose freely GPLv2, GPLv3, or either version of the GPL "or later". The best freedom overall for the end user might be the target of GPLv3, but I'm still personally in favor of OHL hardware and CC content alongside the GPLv2 as I think it will accomplish more in the long run.
"Bush Clinton Bush Clinton" is exactly what worries me.
George H. W. "No new taxes" Bush, William Jefferson "That depends on what your definition of is is" Clinton, George W. "We're going to find Osama" Bush, Hillary Diane "I am entitled to win, so I'll cry when I don't" Rodham Clinton from Illinois and Arkansas who claimed to know all about representing New York's needs, who runs as a Democrat after writing "A cycle of dependency has been created," she wrote, "which ensnares its victims into resignation and apathy." at Wellesley.
It seems we've got two dynasty families on our hands who are more than willing to pass the torch back and forth so long as nobody outside their circle gets to hold it.
Diebold's goiong to sue me for libel for saying they're more likely incompetent and being taken advantage of by crooks than crooked themselves? Goody. Where do I sign up for my winnings for harassment for being targeted with a frivolous and baseless suit?
Or perhaps you misread, since I was attributing stupidity to the majority of people involved and malice to the minority and you seem to think otherwise. That there's malice involved in fraud is part of the definition of fraud, so if there';s fraud involving Diebold's machines, Hanlon's razor would mean that Diebold is the stupid party and a small group elsewhere is the malicious party. It could just be stupidity all around, but then it wouldn't be fraud. It'd still be undesirable if it was random vote swapping rather than planned, though.