Which piece of 'common sense' tells me that I shouldn't steal?...Whether you like it or not, if there is an absolute moral code, it doesn't come from nature or common sense.
We might look here at the teaching of Zen and of Taoism. On the surface, these systems are explicitly amoral!
The Tao Te Ching says, "Throw away morality and justice, and people will do the right thing."
The Zen poet Seng-Ts'an wrote, "If you want to get the plain truth, be not concerned with right and wrong. The conflict between right and wrong is the sickness of the mind."
And yet, the Buddhist precepts lay out ethical guidelines. Nothing fancy - the five precepts basically boil down to "Don't make trouble, and don't settle for cheap thrills".
So what's the deal?
Let's look at it from the perspective of enlightened self-interest. If you go around trying to steal people's stuff, eventually you'll get caught. Even if we imagine some society without jails, you'll probably get beat up. At the very least, you will lose people's trust and cooperation. You won't get invited to the good parties anymore.
So there's immediate negative consequences. "But I'm really good, and I won't get caught!", you say. "And I'm tough enough to take on anyone who tries to stop me!" Ok, let's pretend you're the ultimate ninja cat burglar.
Let's ask, then, why are you stealing?
Certainly in desperate situations, people steal to survive. If that's your case, a starving man taking bread, then most people would find stealing ethically excusable.
But let's assume you're already above sustenance level. You're not stealing to live. You're stealing because you believe that getting stuff will make you happy.
But will it?
"If I could just get that shiny new car," you think, "then I'd be happy." So you steal the car. And for a few days it feels good. But then it fades.
So it wasn't the car. And maybe now you think, "Oh, so what I needed to be happy wasn't the car. It was a whole big pile of cash." And so you knock over a store. And not only does that not make you happy, doesn't fill the emptyness, but you don't have time to think about anything else that might do the trick. Because now you're looking over your shoulder all the time, fearing getting caught. It turns out that everybody in town loves the shopkeeper you robbed, because he ran an honest business and treated people with kindness. And so now they've got a posse out looking for you...however good you are, one man can't stand against fifty. Plus, you think your landlord is on to you and is planning to steal the cash you've got stashed - now that you have your treasure, how will you keep it safe from robbers?
You can run around in circles getting stuff for a long time. You can never get enough of what you never really wanted in the first place.
At the start, you didn't want stuff, you wanted happiness.
What Zen and Taoism and many other wisdom paths suggest is that, after the basic level of physical needs are met, happiness comes not from outside, but from a state of mind. And that this state of mind is difficult to achieve when you're stirring up trouble, robbing and stealing and lying and raping and getting high.
Indeed, they go on to suggest, contentment comes when we are able to transcend the "small self" through the cultivation of compassion.
In other words, over the long run being nice feels better than being mean. No invisible daddy in the sky laying down rules - it's just the nature of things. And in sane cultures, it's common sense. Whether we want to use the words "right" and "wrong" to describe this is a matter of semantics and pedagogy.
No, this isn't right. The modern piano is typically tuned with a stretched octave.
I'll freely admit that piano tuning is a crazy art about which I have little clue.
No question that physical instruments (and their interactions with our ears and brains) aren't as clean as the numbers. Even when tuning my guitars, I find I sometimes have to adjust the low E and A strings a little bit from what the electronic tuner says they should be, to get it to sound right. If a dilettante like me can hear that on a moderate six-string, I can only imagine the compexities for a pro on a high-end 88-string. (Of course, we do have the issue of fretting on the guitar that doesn't apply on the piano.)
But I think my point still stands: the "official" pitches of the equal tempered scale are based on the twelth root of two. The stretched octave might mean that the twelth root of 2 + epsilon is used, but still the perfect fifth isn't in there.
Your primary argument seems to be "White is black, because I say so"
How odd, because that's exactly the opinion I was forming of your arguments, your inability to understand the concept of freedom, especially as applied to software.
You assume that there is only one dimension to development quality.
Pardon me, but you are the one who said some of your patches were of poor quality. If you do not specify that your evaluation applies only along one axis, almost any reader will take it as meaning that the code was poor in most or all respects.
Doing [patches] correctly for various subtle aspects of style (the obvious ones of formatting and naming were of course OK) would be significant extra work
And why in the world would you have to stylize your source code to the standards of the FreeBSD project before giving it to your customers? You seem to lack a fundamental undesrstanding of what the Free Software movement wants and the GPL requires.
You think I don't understand economics; I think I at least grasp the relevant basics. I think you don't understand the Free Software movement; you probably think you at least grasp the relevant basics.
So, yes, further discussion at this point is probably useless. But thanks for playing, it's been fun.
The rights you have: To license it how you see fit...
"Licensing" a work mean is an ability to call on government force to prevent others from using it. That is not freedom.
Copyright (a precondition for licensing) is not a right that a person has in the same sense as a right to freedom of speech. It is an artificial creation. The state recognizes an a priori right to free speech, but a right to restrict copying is created de novo by an act of Congress. (The power to create such a thing is assigned to Congress by the Constitution, but Congress is not required to use this power.)
This creation is meant to promote scientific and artistic development. But it does not do so when applied to software. (Whether it does, or ever did, when applied to other fields, is another topic for debate.) Development in the field of software is promoted when freedom - freedom to use, share, and modify - is recognized and encouraged.
You are arguing that the author of X should not give freedom, because of the potential of an Y not giving freedom.
Not at all. X is giving freedom. Allowing Y to act authoritatively would not be giving freedom.
Telling Y "You can't take away Z's freedom" is not taking away Y's freedom, any more than telling Y "By the way, you can't shoot Z in the face with this shotgun I'm about to sell you."
The product would not have been made without the ability to have discretion in what patches to give away and which to keep....If you see any "degrading of freedom" in this, please detail.
The existence of an environment in which this is the case, in which the freedoms to use, share, and modify software are limited and discouraged, is the problem. Actions which promote and perpetuate such an environment are degrading to freedom.
If your patches were of low quality, why were you sending them out as binaries to your customers? It sounds like using the BSD license rather than the GPL resulted in low quality code.
And I don't characterize him as just another theologian but rather as someone who said a correct thing with a particular spin, not the only spin.
Paul did more to ruin the wisdom teachings of Jeshua ben Joseph than just about anyone else. He was a fanatic before his conversion; he was a fanatic afterwards. It's sad that this hallucinating misogynist came to have such an influence in early Christianity.
If you can't use birth control for religious reasons, don't have sex. It's not hard.
I'm sorry to hear that your libido is that low. You might want to consult a physician; lowered sex drive can have medical implications.
Anyway, the great number of unplanned pregnancies that occur every year, the ever-present sex scandals, the spread of STDs, and so on, show quite strongly that yes, it is in general hard for human beings to refrain from sex. It's evolution in action: your ancestors wouldn't have gotten to become ancestors if they didn't find sex rather compelling.
Now, what the article is reporting is that, people with perfect pitch, are starting to have this ability blurred due to the way orchestras inaccurately tune to a wide range of A.
Which is a bizarre question, since orchestras have always tuned to a wide range. Indeed, having a standard at all is fairly recent; A=440 is a modern invention.
And it's not as if tuning to A means that only A has variance. If you tune to A at 440 Hz and I tune to 415, our C and our G and all our other notes will be off by the same factor.
Interestingly, some other cultures that have different tuning systems allow a greater deal of laxity about what's in tune
IIRC, some of that is based on what type of instruments are primarily used in the culture. You get a different set of harmonics off of a chime than you do off of a string, for example, so consonance and dissonance come out a little bit different.
The (perfect) octave, fourth and fifth are natural harmonics.
Except that the perfect fourth and fifth are not what are used in the modern well-tempered 12 note scale.
Our scale is based on the twelth root of two. (Thus the octave, a factor of two, is broken up into twelve steps.) It's a convenience to let us have instruments that can play in many different keys without needing to be re-tuned.
If you really valued freedom, you would give away your software under a license giving away complete freedoms - that is, as public domain.
Placing a work in the public domain does not work toward freedom.
If you do not grant others the rights you yourself enjoy, and indeed instead seek to have additional power over them, that is not freedom.
But that situation is exactly what is allowed with public domain, and also with BSD style licences. It is what copyleft seeks to prevent.
Oh, you noticed that this was word games, too?
No, it's not "word games", it's simply incorrect to refer to public domain as "a license giving away complete freedoms". Public domain and BSD style licences allow for the authoritarian use of content - "I used work X freely to create my work Y, but if anyone tries to use work Y freely to create their own work Z, I will use the might of the federal government to stop them!" This not freedom. Freedom implies equality, while what the author of work Y demands here is submission.
As the author of work X, I want to protect the freedoms of potential authors of work Z.
In this, the different licenses are mere tools, and the actual activity around the software - writing it, copying it, modifying it, with people doing it for love or for money or a combination, with money ultimately providing the possibility (as people have to live) - are the things to analyse.
Of course the actions are what is significant, the licenses tools. And of course people must make a living.
That doesn't mean that it is right to make a living by actions which degrade the freedoms of others.
I was in a store the other day,listening to the muzak and realized that it was stuff from my teens that I was hearing. That was actually funny to realize that the current generation most likely considers it the same way that we would have considered 20's-50's music...
Not necessarily. I see kids in clubs dancing to some of the same 80s tunes I danced to twenty years ago.
And hey, with the swing revival, some kids are dancing to 20's-50's music.
Despite TFA's claim that only California and Nevada still have this service, when I dial 410-844-1212, I still get "At the tone, the time will be....". So it persists in Maryland, at least for the time being.
It's a bit rich to deny people to keep their own changes proprietary, wouldn't you say? Except that's what the GPL tries to do.
What in the world would it mean to keep the "changes" to a GPL'd work proprietary? Keeping the diffs secret?
(Actually that's an interesting question: at what point to instructions on how to alter a work, become a dervired work?)
Anyway, you are entirely allowed to take GPL'd code, change it, and use the changed work. The GPL only restricts redistribution of the derivative work.
Including the freedom of future developers to keep their own changes private, or get paid for them.
But of course, the GPL allows you to make changes to code and keep them private, and to get paid for changing code. What you can't do it make changes to GPL'd code and make them "half-private", distributing binaries without distributing source; you have to pass on to others the same freedom that you enjoyed. The GPL requires you to preserve freedom, where BSD-style licences allow you to strip it out.
Yes, and so what? Imagine the Founding Fathers with that attitude..."for ourselves and our posterity? Eh, screw it." Knowing that I'm going to die, I'd like to leave the planet a little better than I found it.
Its customers expect service under warranty and upgrades from a single, trusted, source. They have no interest in cracking open the box, mucking with the the hardware or software.
What a strange model. When I buy a car, a house, a musical instrument, a guitar amp, a PC, or pretty much anything else, I expect to be able to have anyone I choose do repairs and upgrades on it. No, I don't have an interest in cracking open my car's transmission, mucking about with the gears; but I do expect to be able to hire the mechanic of my choice to do so for me.
It used to be this way with consumer electronics, too; once upon a time, there were actually places you could take a TV set or a radio to have it repaired - and these were independent businesses! They competed fairly with each other to provide good service.
I believe that vendor lock-in in consumer electronics is a bad thing, a temporary aberration caused by the fact that a generation of products was pretty much disposable, made as a single unit with chips that couldn't be reprogrammed or replaced. It will not stand as a business model.
circumventing the manufacturer's DRM. This is why Tivo started using signed binaries.
Though they are related, Tivoization and DRM are seperate issues.
The problem with Tivoization is that it attempts to take away my freedom to muck about with hardware by changing its firmware.
The problem with DRM is that it attempts to take away my freedom to muck about with content.
DRM may (or may not, I don't know) have been Tivo's motivation behind the orginal Tivoization.
With Tivoization out of the picture, only closed software can practically be used to foist DRM on us. As the Free Software movement grows and people are less willing to accept closed software, DRM becomes unworkable.
The fanboys forget that GPL is not end-all of software, and that it's really only practical in certain situations.
Free software advocates beleive that freedom is always practical, indeed is the only practical choice in the long run. I'm sorry if you don't value freedom.
There's not any "circumvention" going on, any more than it's circumvention that I can processes running both GPL and non-GPL applications on my PC. Just some hypervisor hype from - surprise! - a hypervisor vendor.
Do you REALLY think one party rule is going to better under Democrats?
Given the current state of the GOP? And the current crop of pro-war, anti-science GOP presidental candidates? Yes, I do think a few years of one party Democratic rule would be better than any of the Republicans seeking the White House.
(Of course, I'd like to see both the Republicans and the Democrats dissolve completely and make way for the Libertarians and the Greens.)
Besides, you still wouldn't have one-party rule - the Supreme Court has been tilted so far to the right that it would take at least decade of Democratic control of the White House and Congress to balance it.
Someday, I want to draw a cartoon with nine Roman soldiers standing and lying one on the ground. One of the survivors can say "This decimation isn't as bad as I thought it would be."
Maybe you could work in something about this occuring in October. You know, the eighth month. And mention how it's a real tragedy, so someone should win a goat for their song.
If we do not accept that perception of reality as corroborated by those around us is valid evidence then the natural world, reality, and the scientific method are all invalid and the discussion is moot.
The fallacy of the excluded middle. You are presuming that evidence is classified as only "valid" or "invalid". But some evidence is more valid than others. Peer-reviewed results of controlled experiments are at the top of the heap, and if they conflict with eyewitness accounts of uncontrolled events, we should accept the peer-reviewed results.
If we do accept those concepts, then you might dismiss an eyewitness, you might dismiss a couple eyewitnesses, you can not dismiss millions of eyewitnesses.
And what purported "supernatural" or "paranormal" event do you suggest had millions of eyewitnesses?
The brain is an objective machine. Once we understand how a machine operates and can observe all aspects of its operation that operation IS an observation (therefore fact) and no longer a theory.
The brain is not a machine, any more than a forest is. It is a natural phenomenon that grows continously, not a designed artifact assembled from discrete pieces.
A machine is built by humans and therefore analysis can take into account knowledge of psychology in order to understand it; furthermore, a machine can be understood seperate from its environment, thououghly disassembled, and completely observed.
We will never be able to observe all aspects of the brain's operation, since in order to operate it needs to be whole and inside the head of a conscious person.
No theory on the capabilities of the brain can be sound when we lack a rudimentary understanding of how it functions.
But we do have a rudimentary understanding of how it functions.
It's far from complete, but so is our understanding of, say, meteorology. But our incomplete understanding of the weather doesn't mean that we can't make some high-confidence statements about it.
The supporting data I am referring to are credible (by any definition that does not automatically assume an ESP report is intristically not credible) eyewitness accounts.
in my mind the results won't be in until we are able to reverse engineer the brain.
No, that's completely backwards. You build a theory from observations; you don't decide which observations are credible based on your theory ("reverse engineering" the brain is producing a theory).
The big deal isn't a manual for handling of protests; it's the means outlined in the manual. Holding pens for protestors and stand-by squads of pro-administration demonstrators to shout down any who slip out, are no way to run a purported democracy.
If you read the link you pointed to, you'd see that the alleged assailants were members of a Teamster's local that supported Republicans:
Judge Meehan is the son of the man who headed the Republican Party in Philadelphia for at least the last 30 years until his death several years ago. Judge Meehan's brother now heads the party. Organized Labor has supported Meehan and the Republicans through campaign contributions and other donations and in return Meehan and the Republicans has supported organized labor. The strongest of all labor leaders in this city is, you guessed it, John Morris, President of Teamsters Local 115.
So taking their (alleged) actions as evidence that Democrats beat the crap out of people, is problematic.
But yes, there are nutjobs on all sides who have no respect for free speech.
Personally, I usually feel heartened by right-wing counterprotestors. As much as I appreciate the fact than an argument is not responsible for those who believe it, the frothing-at-the-mouth nutjobs who make up most of the turnout for pro-war counter-rallys at anti-war marches make a strong gut-check that I'm on the right side.
Democrats regularly strip off shirts and try to confiscate signs that are critical of them at their rallies.
So some Democrats suck too. That's no defense of the Bush teams' tactics.
You do realize that being anti-Bush doesn't mean being a Democrat, right? (Indeed, given Congress's track record, it would seem that being a Democrat means being mildly pro-Bush.)
one of the Muslim KKK / "Pro-Palestine"
The Ku Klux Klan accepts Muslims now? You're not making sense.
I took a sign asking Obama what he thinks of the racial supremacist views of his "church"
Nothing at the link you provide supports the charge that the church is "racial supremacist". Please, explain.
That said, if your story about your sign being taken away and destroyed is true, that is unacceptable behavior whether engaged in by Democrats or Republicans. However, we don't know whether Obama backs such actions or whether it was a single overzealous staffer; in the case of the Bush plan, it's an official policy of the White House
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We might look here at the teaching of Zen and of Taoism. On the surface, these systems are explicitly amoral!
The Tao Te Ching says, "Throw away morality and justice, and people will do the right thing."
The Zen poet Seng-Ts'an wrote, "If you want to get the plain truth, be not concerned with right and wrong. The conflict between right and wrong is the sickness of the mind."
And yet, the Buddhist precepts lay out ethical guidelines. Nothing fancy - the five precepts basically boil down to "Don't make trouble, and don't settle for cheap thrills".
So what's the deal?
Let's look at it from the perspective of enlightened self-interest. If you go around trying to steal people's stuff, eventually you'll get caught. Even if we imagine some society without jails, you'll probably get beat up. At the very least, you will lose people's trust and cooperation. You won't get invited to the good parties anymore.
So there's immediate negative consequences. "But I'm really good, and I won't get caught!", you say. "And I'm tough enough to take on anyone who tries to stop me!" Ok, let's pretend you're the ultimate ninja cat burglar.
Let's ask, then, why are you stealing?
Certainly in desperate situations, people steal to survive. If that's your case, a starving man taking bread, then most people would find stealing ethically excusable.
But let's assume you're already above sustenance level. You're not stealing to live. You're stealing because you believe that getting stuff will make you happy.
But will it?
"If I could just get that shiny new car," you think, "then I'd be happy." So you steal the car. And for a few days it feels good. But then it fades.
So it wasn't the car. And maybe now you think, "Oh, so what I needed to be happy wasn't the car. It was a whole big pile of cash." And so you knock over a store. And not only does that not make you happy, doesn't fill the emptyness, but you don't have time to think about anything else that might do the trick. Because now you're looking over your shoulder all the time, fearing getting caught. It turns out that everybody in town loves the shopkeeper you robbed, because he ran an honest business and treated people with kindness. And so now they've got a posse out looking for you...however good you are, one man can't stand against fifty. Plus, you think your landlord is on to you and is planning to steal the cash you've got stashed - now that you have your treasure, how will you keep it safe from robbers?
You can run around in circles getting stuff for a long time. You can never get enough of what you never really wanted in the first place.
At the start, you didn't want stuff, you wanted happiness.
What Zen and Taoism and many other wisdom paths suggest is that, after the basic level of physical needs are met, happiness comes not from outside, but from a state of mind. And that this state of mind is difficult to achieve when you're stirring up trouble, robbing and stealing and lying and raping and getting high.
Indeed, they go on to suggest, contentment comes when we are able to transcend the "small self" through the cultivation of compassion.
In other words, over the long run being nice feels better than being mean. No invisible daddy in the sky laying down rules - it's just the nature of things. And in sane cultures, it's common sense. Whether we want to use the words "right" and "wrong" to describe this is a matter of semantics and pedagogy.
I'll freely admit that piano tuning is a crazy art about which I have little clue.
No question that physical instruments (and their interactions with our ears and brains) aren't as clean as the numbers. Even when tuning my guitars, I find I sometimes have to adjust the low E and A strings a little bit from what the electronic tuner says they should be, to get it to sound right. If a dilettante like me can hear that on a moderate six-string, I can only imagine the compexities for a pro on a high-end 88-string. (Of course, we do have the issue of fretting on the guitar that doesn't apply on the piano.)
But I think my point still stands: the "official" pitches of the equal tempered scale are based on the twelth root of two. The stretched octave might mean that the twelth root of 2 + epsilon is used, but still the perfect fifth isn't in there.
How odd, because that's exactly the opinion I was forming of your arguments, your inability to understand the concept of freedom, especially as applied to software.
Pardon me, but you are the one who said some of your patches were of poor quality. If you do not specify that your evaluation applies only along one axis, almost any reader will take it as meaning that the code was poor in most or all respects.
And why in the world would you have to stylize your source code to the standards of the FreeBSD project before giving it to your customers? You seem to lack a fundamental undesrstanding of what the Free Software movement wants and the GPL requires.
You think I don't understand economics; I think I at least grasp the relevant basics. I think you don't understand the Free Software movement; you probably think you at least grasp the relevant basics.
So, yes, further discussion at this point is probably useless. But thanks for playing, it's been fun.
Well, the text involved is a little too long to put in a .sig file or on a t-shirt. But it's still available on the net. Google OT III.
"Licensing" a work mean is an ability to call on government force to prevent others from using it. That is not freedom.
Copyright (a precondition for licensing) is not a right that a person has in the same sense as a right to freedom of speech. It is an artificial creation. The state recognizes an a priori right to free speech, but a right to restrict copying is created de novo by an act of Congress. (The power to create such a thing is assigned to Congress by the Constitution, but Congress is not required to use this power.)
This creation is meant to promote scientific and artistic development. But it does not do so when applied to software. (Whether it does, or ever did, when applied to other fields, is another topic for debate.) Development in the field of software is promoted when freedom - freedom to use, share, and modify - is recognized and encouraged.
Not at all. X is giving freedom. Allowing Y to act authoritatively would not be giving freedom.
Telling Y "You can't take away Z's freedom" is not taking away Y's freedom, any more than telling Y "By the way, you can't shoot Z in the face with this shotgun I'm about to sell you."
The existence of an environment in which this is the case, in which the freedoms to use, share, and modify software are limited and discouraged, is the problem. Actions which promote and perpetuate such an environment are degrading to freedom.
If your patches were of low quality, why were you sending them out as binaries to your customers? It sounds like using the BSD license rather than the GPL resulted in low quality code.
Paul did more to ruin the wisdom teachings of Jeshua ben Joseph than just about anyone else. He was a fanatic before his conversion; he was a fanatic afterwards. It's sad that this hallucinating misogynist came to have such an influence in early Christianity.
I'm sorry to hear that your libido is that low. You might want to consult a physician; lowered sex drive can have medical implications.
Anyway, the great number of unplanned pregnancies that occur every year, the ever-present sex scandals, the spread of STDs, and so on, show quite strongly that yes, it is in general hard for human beings to refrain from sex. It's evolution in action: your ancestors wouldn't have gotten to become ancestors if they didn't find sex rather compelling.
Which is a bizarre question, since orchestras have always tuned to a wide range. Indeed, having a standard at all is fairly recent; A=440 is a modern invention.
And it's not as if tuning to A means that only A has variance. If you tune to A at 440 Hz and I tune to 415, our C and our G and all our other notes will be off by the same factor.
Except that the perfect fourth and fifth are not what are used in the modern well-tempered 12 note scale.
Our scale is based on the twelth root of two. (Thus the octave, a factor of two, is broken up into twelve steps.) It's a convenience to let us have instruments that can play in many different keys without needing to be re-tuned.
Placing a work in the public domain does not work toward freedom.
If you do not grant others the rights you yourself enjoy, and indeed instead seek to have additional power over them, that is not freedom.
But that situation is exactly what is allowed with public domain, and also with BSD style licences. It is what copyleft seeks to prevent.
No, it's not "word games", it's simply incorrect to refer to public domain as "a license giving away complete freedoms". Public domain and BSD style licences allow for the authoritarian use of content - "I used work X freely to create my work Y, but if anyone tries to use work Y freely to create their own work Z, I will use the might of the federal government to stop them!" This not freedom. Freedom implies equality, while what the author of work Y demands here is submission.
As the author of work X, I want to protect the freedoms of potential authors of work Z .
Of course the actions are what is significant, the licenses tools. And of course people must make a living.
That doesn't mean that it is right to make a living by actions which degrade the freedoms of others.
Not necessarily. I see kids in clubs dancing to some of the same 80s tunes I danced to twenty years ago.
And hey, with the swing revival, some kids are dancing to 20's-50's music.
Despite TFA's claim that only California and Nevada still have this service, when I dial 410-844-1212, I still get "At the tone, the time will be....". So it persists in Maryland, at least for the time being.
What in the world would it mean to keep the "changes" to a GPL'd work proprietary? Keeping the diffs secret?
(Actually that's an interesting question: at what point to instructions on how to alter a work, become a dervired work?)
Anyway, you are entirely allowed to take GPL'd code, change it, and use the changed work. The GPL only restricts redistribution of the derivative work.
But of course, the GPL allows you to make changes to code and keep them private, and to get paid for changing code. What you can't do it make changes to GPL'd code and make them "half-private", distributing binaries without distributing source; you have to pass on to others the same freedom that you enjoyed. The GPL requires you to preserve freedom, where BSD-style licences allow you to strip it out.
Yes, and so what? Imagine the Founding Fathers with that attitude..."for ourselves and our posterity? Eh, screw it." Knowing that I'm going to die, I'd like to leave the planet a little better than I found it.
What a strange model. When I buy a car, a house, a musical instrument, a guitar amp, a PC, or pretty much anything else, I expect to be able to have anyone I choose do repairs and upgrades on it. No, I don't have an interest in cracking open my car's transmission, mucking about with the gears; but I do expect to be able to hire the mechanic of my choice to do so for me.
It used to be this way with consumer electronics, too; once upon a time, there were actually places you could take a TV set or a radio to have it repaired - and these were independent businesses! They competed fairly with each other to provide good service.
I believe that vendor lock-in in consumer electronics is a bad thing, a temporary aberration caused by the fact that a generation of products was pretty much disposable, made as a single unit with chips that couldn't be reprogrammed or replaced. It will not stand as a business model.
Though they are related, Tivoization and DRM are seperate issues.
The problem with Tivoization is that it attempts to take away my freedom to muck about with hardware by changing its firmware.
The problem with DRM is that it attempts to take away my freedom to muck about with content.
DRM may (or may not, I don't know) have been Tivo's motivation behind the orginal Tivoization.
With Tivoization out of the picture, only closed software can practically be used to foist DRM on us. As the Free Software movement grows and people are less willing to accept closed software, DRM becomes unworkable.
Free software advocates beleive that freedom is always practical, indeed is the only practical choice in the long run. I'm sorry if you don't value freedom.
There's not any "circumvention" going on, any more than it's circumvention that I can processes running both GPL and non-GPL applications on my PC. Just some hypervisor hype from - surprise! - a hypervisor vendor.
Given the current state of the GOP? And the current crop of pro-war, anti-science GOP presidental candidates? Yes, I do think a few years of one party Democratic rule would be better than any of the Republicans seeking the White House.
(Of course, I'd like to see both the Republicans and the Democrats dissolve completely and make way for the Libertarians and the Greens.)
Besides, you still wouldn't have one-party rule - the Supreme Court has been tilted so far to the right that it would take at least decade of Democratic control of the White House and Congress to balance it.
Software is speech, and freedom of speech is an essential liberty.
The fallacy of the excluded middle. You are presuming that evidence is classified as only "valid" or "invalid". But some evidence is more valid than others. Peer-reviewed results of controlled experiments are at the top of the heap, and if they conflict with eyewitness accounts of uncontrolled events, we should accept the peer-reviewed results.
And what purported "supernatural" or "paranormal" event do you suggest had millions of eyewitnesses?
The brain is not a machine, any more than a forest is. It is a natural phenomenon that grows continously, not a designed artifact assembled from discrete pieces.
A machine is built by humans and therefore analysis can take into account knowledge of psychology in order to understand it; furthermore, a machine can be understood seperate from its environment, thououghly disassembled, and completely observed.
We will never be able to observe all aspects of the brain's operation, since in order to operate it needs to be whole and inside the head of a conscious person.
But we do have a rudimentary understanding of how it functions.
It's far from complete, but so is our understanding of, say, meteorology. But our incomplete understanding of the weather doesn't mean that we can't make some high-confidence statements about it.
The problem is, eyewitness accounts aren't very credible, as the "gorilla experiment" dramatically showed.
No, that's completely backwards. You build a theory from observations; you don't decide which observations are credible based on your theory ("reverse engineering" the brain is producing a theory).
The big deal isn't a manual for handling of protests; it's the means outlined in the manual. Holding pens for protestors and stand-by squads of pro-administration demonstrators to shout down any who slip out, are no way to run a purported democracy.
If you read the link you pointed to, you'd see that the alleged assailants were members of a Teamster's local that supported Republicans:
So taking their (alleged) actions as evidence that Democrats beat the crap out of people, is problematic.
But yes, there are nutjobs on all sides who have no respect for free speech.
Personally, I usually feel heartened by right-wing counterprotestors. As much as I appreciate the fact than an argument is not responsible for those who believe it, the frothing-at-the-mouth nutjobs who make up most of the turnout for pro-war counter-rallys at anti-war marches make a strong gut-check that I'm on the right side.
So some Democrats suck too. That's no defense of the Bush teams' tactics.
You do realize that being anti-Bush doesn't mean being a Democrat, right? (Indeed, given Congress's track record, it would seem that being a Democrat means being mildly pro-Bush.)
The Ku Klux Klan accepts Muslims now? You're not making sense.
Nothing at the link you provide supports the charge that the church is "racial supremacist". Please, explain.
That said, if your story about your sign being taken away and destroyed is true, that is unacceptable behavior whether engaged in by Democrats or Republicans. However, we don't know whether Obama backs such actions or whether it was a single overzealous staffer; in the case of the Bush plan, it's an official policy of the White House