Anyone who mocks "Intellectual Property" as "Imaginary Property" while supporting the GPL must be completely clueless.
The GPL benefits from the concept of "Intellectual Property" just as much as any other license. If you don't think that "Intellectual Property" is a valid concept, fine (although you've probably never created anything that someone else would want to put their name on), but it's inconsistent to be anti-Intellectual Property and pro-GPL.
The problem is that, in china, I don't think that either is the case. People can't very well up and move to another country easily, and because of the censorship they don't really know much about where they could move to.
This is a misconception, albeit a pretty widely-held one. People have a hard time leaving China because other countries (particularly the US) won't give them visas. China's Big Problem is that they have too many people, they're not particularly anxious to keep even MORE people than they need to.
That said, China does have a policy that restricts people from moving around inside the country. The fear is that, without it, the cities would become clogged with huge numbers of internal migrants without housing or jobs causing lots of unrest. And if there's one thing that the Chinese government fears, it's unrest in the population.
In any case, don't think that people in China don't know how things are elsewhere. China is not a closed society, and as it becomes more entwined with the world, and more people from China visit other countries (or move to other countries and visit relatives in China), word definitely gets around.
It's not internet access that's being censored, but speech. Freedom of speech is a fundamental human right, at least according to the UN.
"Freedom of Speech" standards vary wildly from country to country, with most countries having laws that would be considered terribly restrictive in the United States. The US and UK have quite different standards for what speech is considered "acceptable", and libel lawsuits are often filed in the UK for speech that is perfectly fine in the US. Sweden bans "offensive" speech (a Swedish pastor was recently jailed for "hate speech" for calling homosexuality "abnormal"), while Canada routinely bans the publishing of material, even if the material is on the public record.
The goal of internet filtering is to prevent people from engaging in some prohibited activity. To block people from looking at illegal pictures, you block pictures. To block people from discussing illegal governments, you block discussions. One is images and the other is words, so they are different in that, but the goal of each type of ban is the same.
Without democracy and a strong constitution, leadership has no legitimacy, it is simply a monopoly on violence by a clique of violent criminals.
Nonsense. According to your criteria, the United Kingdom does not have a legitimate government (due to the lack of a Constitution).
I think that the legitimacy of a government basically comes down to how well it serves the people that it governs. I think that if you ask most people in China today how things are going, they would reply that they are pleased by how much their lives are improving.
This has nothing to do with being "genetically subservient" (I find it bizarre that you say that), but everything to do with the fact that people are usually happy when their lives are getting better. And, like it or not, the authoritarian Chinese government has managed to improve the lives of the Chinese people dramatically. This outweighs any displeasure they might have at not having much government representation.
propaganda is one thing but think about the consequences: you have more than 1 child and you'll have a crippling fine.
Promoting social policy via financial incentives is nothing new. The US tax system rewards being married (in most cases), which of course means that it penalizes unmarried couples. And many countries with low birth rates give extra money to people who have children. The Chinese one-child policy is just the same thing, only in reverse, which makes sense for a country that already has an unwieldy amount of people.
Yes, there have been cases where enforcement of the policy goes way too far (forced sterilization, for example), but that doesn't mean that the policy itself is unreasonable.
China isn't the first country to "filter" the internet. Other countries, such as Singapore and even "enlightened democracies" such as Australia, Norway and Sweden also filter the Internet.
Every country has the sovereign right to make its own laws. And since I don't believe that unfettered Internet access (however nice it is) falls in the category of a "Basic Human Right", I don't think that the companies that help China with the Great Firewall are committing any great sin.
An objection could be made, I suppose, that blocking Child Porn is completely different from blocking information about Democracy, but I propose that it is merely a difference of degree. Every country has different morals, beliefs, and laws, and I think it's completely appropriate for companies to respect the local requirements. Once again, I don't think Internet access is a Basic Human Right, so I don't see any ethical issues here.
most people [...] are much more content sitting in the comfort of their low crime cookie-cutter suburb watching network television than worrying about all hte really terrible things that are happening to people all over the globe.
People used to feel that there was a duty of the comfortable, rich societies to help those people in terrible conditions. Kipling called this The White Man's Burden. Nowadays it's more politically correct to just let people suffer under whatever situation they are in. It's called self-determination.
In other words, if terrible things are happening to people all over the globe, then it's their own damn business. Let them sort it out. It may seem harsh, but currently it's the moral position to take. Natural Phenomena (like the Tsunami in SE Asia), of course, are considered an exception.
In the early '90s, I heard that one of the supercomputers at Caltech was able to simulate the complete behavior of a single neuron. Scaling this up by 100 billion times, and then using a rough bastardization of Moore's law, and saying that computational power doubles every 18 months, this leads to a prediction of using a supercomputer (whatever that is at the time) to simulate an entire brain about 50 years after that point.
Based on this (incredibly rough and inaccurate) analysis, I would predict that this type of project will be successful around the year 2040.
There's a lot of free software with non-GPL licenses (BSD/MIT/X11/Apache licenses) [...] none of which would be affected significantly if copyrights ceased to exist.
No, in fact all those licenses rely on copyrights as well. The only difference between those licenses and the GPL is what restrictions they place on the licensee. Whereas GPL requires source code to be made available to anyone who uses the software, BSD requires a notice to be displayed, etc. Break any of these restrictions and you are in violation of the licenses, and therefore guilty of copyright infringement.
If copyrights ceased to exist then there would be no way to enforce any of the license restrictions and they would essentially become public domain software, which is obviously not what any of the licensors intended. After all, they could easily just release their code into the public domain today!
[MIT was] using a promo video that was at least 10-15 years old, that contained more than a few inuendos about parties and drinking that seemed a little bit out of place since it was a few years after Scott Kreuger's death.
The thing I liked about Caltech is that at least we were smart enough to stop drinking before we died.
this is a perfect example of the amorality of corporations.
Being rational is not the same as being amoral. There's no easy way to define morality, but I think an easy shorthand would be to define a corporation's decision as being "moral" if it made the same decision as a "moral" human being would. Your objection is that a corporation is assigning a value to a human life, and that is, somehow, amoral. But it's easy to see that "moral" people do the same thing every day:
To do this, let's take your position that a moral person would never assign a finite value to a human life. In other words, a human life would have infinite value. Therefore, any activity that had a finite probability of causing the loss of a human life would have an infinite cost. But "moral" people routinely perform and approve of activities, that have a risk of causing human life. Or, in the case of larger construction projects, a high probability of costing at least one human life. So we are now faced with the contradiction that if a "moral" person places an infinite value on human life, then this same person will willingly accept the loss of a human life in order to avoid an outcome that has a lower cost, which is a decidedly immoral position.
Since "moral" humans also act in a way that assigns a finite value to human life, then there should be no objection, on the basis of morality, to a corporation doing the same. The only difference is that a corporation will assign a definite value to that life which, while it may appear to be tasteless, is merely being practical.
I worked for 5 years at a video game company that had a peculiar kind of Revision Control. Generally, the newer you were, the less of the game you worked on, and so if you were a new hire with no experience, the tradition was that you created your own source code file named after yourself. Then you would write your code, and then ask the Lead Programmer to put hooks in the main code. This essentially kept new programmers from screwing up the rest of the game, which was important because we were almost always on a time crunch (doing 2 releases a year).
Over time, as you became more familiar with the code and the game you were given more responsibility over more of the code, until as Lead Programmer the entire project was your domain. If you left the project, though, there was usually nobody to maintain the code in your "name file", and as routines got re-written/moved/deleted, the name files would shrink in size, and then one day be deleted entirely. In this way they acted as sort of a historical record of the people who had worked on the project.
Over my five years, I had worked my way up to Lead Programmer and then moved on to different pastures. I still kept in touch with my old co-workers, and 3 years later I got an email from one who told me that they had finally removed my file, "forii.cpp" from the Makefile.
My source code file from when I had started at the company had by this time just been reduced to a single small routine and a lot of commented out code, so it wasn't a tough decision. But I still felt a tinge of sadness, as it felt a little like being written out of the history books.
I simply told him, "Stay on this train for about 4 hours, and it will reach manchester!"
What i didnt tell him, was the train in concern is the "Circle Line" which simply runs around london in a loop!!!!! {EVIL GRIN}
So rather than inform an obvious newcomer to your country of this fact, you instead took the chance to be an asshole. And your country is better...how?
Pascal was the second language I learned (BASIC being the first), and was the first language that I ever did large-size programming projects on. This was in the mid-80s, and I know that Pascal/delphi/etc. has changed/improved since then, but my thoughts of it were this:
Every programming language can be described with two lists: Ways It Makes Life Easier, and Ways It Makes Life Harder. These lists change, of course, with the actual project at hand, but generally the best project is one where both lists are about the same size.
For example, for general programming, writing in Assembly makes life EASIER because you don't have to worry so much about how the compiler is going to mangle your code, and it makes life HARDER in a whole lot of different ways. However, if you're writing on a machine that doesn't HAVE a compiler, for whatever reason, then suddenly the HARDER list for every other language suddenly gets a lot longer (generally starting with: need to write a compiler).
My point is that while Pascal brought a lot of useful points to programming, such as the emphasis on structure, it could also be TOO structured, to the point where the language started getting in the way of getting something done. Of course, Pascal isn't usable, there have been a TON of large projects done using Pascal, but in my opinion, I think that other langauges are a better balanced for most programming purposes.
I assume you're referring to my reference to contracts. The fact of the matter is that options and futures are an important part of any commodity market. In particular for farmers, they allow producers to manage their risk, in an industry where a large part of their capital is subject to the whims of the weather.
I might inherit a portion of his farm. But that's a result of money that he saved at the time. I do not collect royalties on the *work* that he did 70 years ago.
That's only because of the difference in business models. Consider if your grandfather, for instance, had traded in corn contracts that matured in 70 years (not very likely, but just for example), backed by his then-current crop production. Or rather than do that, he may have invested the returns from his crops in a bank savings account. Either way, you could now be reaping the rewards from 70 years ago.
If the dollar hasn't devalued despite being backed by a government $7,381,064,241,000 in debt, isn't that an indication that the backing of a currency doesn't appear to have much relevance?
Someone who is hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt (i.e. anyone who has gotten a mortgage for a house recently) can still be considered a good credit risk, as long as they are making their payments. Actually, as anyone who has bought a house knows, being that much in debt is actually a signal that you are a better credit risk than normal: You end up being deluged with offers to extend credit to you, usually in the form of additional mortgages.
Being in debt is fine, it's an inability to make the interest payments that is the problem.
I also did this a while ago. I made a bogus change, and let it sit, intending to go back and fix it in a couple of days. Whoops! I forgot, and came back a few months later, and sure enough, the wrong information was still there.
The problem is that the quality of a reference is not derived from the number of people working on it, but on the expertise of those people. A single person can make a better encyclopedia than a million monkeys banging on keyboards.
Just post a conservative rant and watch it be yanked down within 24 hours.
Yeah, this is one of the major problems with Indymedia. They claim to be "independent", but in reality they only promote a particular political point of view. Of course it's their site, they can do whatever they want with it, but they shouldn't try to claim that they are a democratic source of "truth".
If you criticize Indymedia, you invariably get a response of "look at free republic!", but Free Republic admits that they are promoting a particular world-view. Indymedia tries to have it both ways, claiming to be un-biased, while only presenting a particular way of thinking, and burying any dissent. In a way, it's a reminder of the scary Soviet-style propaganda, claiming to represent "the people", while working hard to ensure that "the people" were not allowed to disagree.
WiFi was never pushed. It became successful because the 802.11b standard was open and available, while other competing technologies were either proprietary, or hadn't made it to market, stuck in endless deliberation. Given the choice between an imperfect, but useful technology, and vaporware, most people went for what worked.
It's easy to forget now that WiFi was by no means a "sure thing". I was working at a wireless networking company (that's still going strong today) in early 2001 that used 802.11b, and we made sure that our technology was independent of the hardware, because nobody knew at the time if 802.11 would become dominant.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone who mocks "Intellectual Property" as "Imaginary Property" while supporting the GPL must be completely clueless.
The GPL benefits from the concept of "Intellectual Property" just as much as any other license. If you don't think that "Intellectual Property" is a valid concept, fine (although you've probably never created anything that someone else would want to put their name on), but it's inconsistent to be anti-Intellectual Property and pro-GPL.
Because Zed's dead, baby, Zed's dead.
The problem is that, in china, I don't think that either is the case. People can't very well up and move to another country easily, and because of the censorship they don't really know much about where they could move to.
This is a misconception, albeit a pretty widely-held one. People have a hard time leaving China because other countries (particularly the US) won't give them visas. China's Big Problem is that they have too many people, they're not particularly anxious to keep even MORE people than they need to.
That said, China does have a policy that restricts people from moving around inside the country. The fear is that, without it, the cities would become clogged with huge numbers of internal migrants without housing or jobs causing lots of unrest. And if there's one thing that the Chinese government fears, it's unrest in the population.
In any case, don't think that people in China don't know how things are elsewhere. China is not a closed society, and as it becomes more entwined with the world, and more people from China visit other countries (or move to other countries and visit relatives in China), word definitely gets around.
It's not internet access that's being censored, but speech. Freedom of speech is a fundamental human right, at least according to the UN.
"Freedom of Speech" standards vary wildly from country to country, with most countries having laws that would be considered terribly restrictive in the United States. The US and UK have quite different standards for what speech is considered "acceptable", and libel lawsuits are often filed in the UK for speech that is perfectly fine in the US. Sweden bans "offensive" speech (a Swedish pastor was recently jailed for "hate speech" for calling homosexuality "abnormal"), while Canada routinely bans the publishing of material, even if the material is on the public record.
The goal of internet filtering is to prevent people from engaging in some prohibited activity. To block people from looking at illegal pictures, you block pictures. To block people from discussing illegal governments, you block discussions. One is images and the other is words, so they are different in that, but the goal of each type of ban is the same.
Without democracy and a strong constitution, leadership has no legitimacy, it is simply a monopoly on violence by a clique of violent criminals.
Nonsense. According to your criteria, the United Kingdom does not have a legitimate government (due to the lack of a Constitution).
I think that the legitimacy of a government basically comes down to how well it serves the people that it governs. I think that if you ask most people in China today how things are going, they would reply that they are pleased by how much their lives are improving.
This has nothing to do with being "genetically subservient" (I find it bizarre that you say that), but everything to do with the fact that people are usually happy when their lives are getting better. And, like it or not, the authoritarian Chinese government has managed to improve the lives of the Chinese people dramatically. This outweighs any displeasure they might have at not having much government representation.
propaganda is one thing but think about the consequences: you have more than 1 child and you'll have a crippling fine.
Promoting social policy via financial incentives is nothing new. The US tax system rewards being married (in most cases), which of course means that it penalizes unmarried couples. And many countries with low birth rates give extra money to people who have children. The Chinese one-child policy is just the same thing, only in reverse, which makes sense for a country that already has an unwieldy amount of people.
Yes, there have been cases where enforcement of the policy goes way too far (forced sterilization, for example), but that doesn't mean that the policy itself is unreasonable.
China isn't the first country to "filter" the internet. Other countries, such as Singapore and even "enlightened democracies" such as Australia, Norway and Sweden also filter the Internet.
Every country has the sovereign right to make its own laws. And since I don't believe that unfettered Internet access (however nice it is) falls in the category of a "Basic Human Right", I don't think that the companies that help China with the Great Firewall are committing any great sin.
An objection could be made, I suppose, that blocking Child Porn is completely different from blocking information about Democracy, but I propose that it is merely a difference of degree. Every country has different morals, beliefs, and laws, and I think it's completely appropriate for companies to respect the local requirements. Once again, I don't think Internet access is a Basic Human Right, so I don't see any ethical issues here.
most people [...] are much more content sitting in the comfort of their low crime cookie-cutter suburb watching network television than worrying about all hte really terrible things that are happening to people all over the globe.
People used to feel that there was a duty of the comfortable, rich societies to help those people in terrible conditions. Kipling called this The White Man's Burden. Nowadays it's more politically correct to just let people suffer under whatever situation they are in. It's called self-determination.
In other words, if terrible things are happening to people all over the globe, then it's their own damn business. Let them sort it out. It may seem harsh, but currently it's the moral position to take. Natural Phenomena (like the Tsunami in SE Asia), of course, are considered an exception.
In the early '90s, I heard that one of the supercomputers at Caltech was able to simulate the complete behavior of a single neuron. Scaling this up by 100 billion times, and then using a rough bastardization of Moore's law, and saying that computational power doubles every 18 months, this leads to a prediction of using a supercomputer (whatever that is at the time) to simulate an entire brain about 50 years after that point.
Based on this (incredibly rough and inaccurate) analysis, I would predict that this type of project will be successful around the year 2040.
No, in fact all those licenses rely on copyrights as well. The only difference between those licenses and the GPL is what restrictions they place on the licensee. Whereas GPL requires source code to be made available to anyone who uses the software, BSD requires a notice to be displayed, etc. Break any of these restrictions and you are in violation of the licenses, and therefore guilty of copyright infringement.
If copyrights ceased to exist then there would be no way to enforce any of the license restrictions and they would essentially become public domain software, which is obviously not what any of the licensors intended. After all, they could easily just release their code into the public domain today!
Obviously, in this Eurocentric world of ours, a thing is discovered if and only if it is known to Americans.
You fail at geography.
Laugh and mock all you want, but remember that the only thing giving the GPL and other open-source licenses any credibility at all is Copyright law.
Microsoft and Open Source advocates are on the same side on this issue.
The thing I liked about Caltech is that at least we were smart enough to stop drinking before we died.
gdbg
Being rational is not the same as being amoral. There's no easy way to define morality, but I think an easy shorthand would be to define a corporation's decision as being "moral" if it made the same decision as a "moral" human being would. Your objection is that a corporation is assigning a value to a human life, and that is, somehow, amoral. But it's easy to see that "moral" people do the same thing every day:
To do this, let's take your position that a moral person would never assign a finite value to a human life. In other words, a human life would have infinite value. Therefore, any activity that had a finite probability of causing the loss of a human life would have an infinite cost. But "moral" people routinely perform and approve of activities, that have a risk of causing human life. Or, in the case of larger construction projects, a high probability of costing at least one human life. So we are now faced with the contradiction that if a "moral" person places an infinite value on human life, then this same person will willingly accept the loss of a human life in order to avoid an outcome that has a lower cost, which is a decidedly immoral position.
Since "moral" humans also act in a way that assigns a finite value to human life, then there should be no objection, on the basis of morality, to a corporation doing the same. The only difference is that a corporation will assign a definite value to that life which, while it may appear to be tasteless, is merely being practical.
I worked for 5 years at a video game company that had a peculiar kind of Revision Control. Generally, the newer you were, the less of the game you worked on, and so if you were a new hire with no experience, the tradition was that you created your own source code file named after yourself. Then you would write your code, and then ask the Lead Programmer to put hooks in the main code. This essentially kept new programmers from screwing up the rest of the game, which was important because we were almost always on a time crunch (doing 2 releases a year).
Over time, as you became more familiar with the code and the game you were given more responsibility over more of the code, until as Lead Programmer the entire project was your domain. If you left the project, though, there was usually nobody to maintain the code in your "name file", and as routines got re-written/moved/deleted, the name files would shrink in size, and then one day be deleted entirely. In this way they acted as sort of a historical record of the people who had worked on the project.
Over my five years, I had worked my way up to Lead Programmer and then moved on to different pastures. I still kept in touch with my old co-workers, and 3 years later I got an email from one who told me that they had finally removed my file, "forii.cpp" from the Makefile.
My source code file from when I had started at the company had by this time just been reduced to a single small routine and a lot of commented out code, so it wasn't a tough decision. But I still felt a tinge of sadness, as it felt a little like being written out of the history books.
I simply told him, "Stay on this train for about 4 hours, and it will reach manchester!"
What i didnt tell him, was the train in concern is the "Circle Line" which simply runs around london in a loop!!!!! {EVIL GRIN}
So rather than inform an obvious newcomer to your country of this fact, you instead took the chance to be an asshole. And your country is better...how?
Every programming language can be described with two lists: Ways It Makes Life Easier, and Ways It Makes Life Harder. These lists change, of course, with the actual project at hand, but generally the best project is one where both lists are about the same size.
For example, for general programming, writing in Assembly makes life EASIER because you don't have to worry so much about how the compiler is going to mangle your code, and it makes life HARDER in a whole lot of different ways. However, if you're writing on a machine that doesn't HAVE a compiler, for whatever reason, then suddenly the HARDER list for every other language suddenly gets a lot longer (generally starting with: need to write a compiler).
My point is that while Pascal brought a lot of useful points to programming, such as the emphasis on structure, it could also be TOO structured, to the point where the language started getting in the way of getting something done. Of course, Pascal isn't usable, there have been a TON of large projects done using Pascal, but in my opinion, I think that other langauges are a better balanced for most programming purposes.
Gambling is no way to run an economy.
I assume you're referring to my reference to contracts. The fact of the matter is that options and futures are an important part of any commodity market. In particular for farmers, they allow producers to manage their risk, in an industry where a large part of their capital is subject to the whims of the weather.
I might inherit a portion of his farm. But that's a result of money that he saved at the time. I do not collect royalties on the *work* that he did 70 years ago.
That's only because of the difference in business models. Consider if your grandfather, for instance, had traded in corn contracts that matured in 70 years (not very likely, but just for example), backed by his then-current crop production. Or rather than do that, he may have invested the returns from his crops in a bank savings account. Either way, you could now be reaping the rewards from 70 years ago.
Someone who is hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt (i.e. anyone who has gotten a mortgage for a house recently) can still be considered a good credit risk, as long as they are making their payments. Actually, as anyone who has bought a house knows, being that much in debt is actually a signal that you are a better credit risk than normal: You end up being deluged with offers to extend credit to you, usually in the form of additional mortgages.
Being in debt is fine, it's an inability to make the interest payments that is the problem.
We need more GREED in europe.. :/
You have plenty... it's just concentrated in your government(s).
I also did this a while ago. I made a bogus change, and let it sit, intending to go back and fix it in a couple of days. Whoops! I forgot, and came back a few months later, and sure enough, the wrong information was still there.
The problem is that the quality of a reference is not derived from the number of people working on it, but on the expertise of those people. A single person can make a better encyclopedia than a million monkeys banging on keyboards.
Just post a conservative rant and watch it be yanked down within 24 hours.
Yeah, this is one of the major problems with Indymedia. They claim to be "independent", but in reality they only promote a particular political point of view. Of course it's their site, they can do whatever they want with it, but they shouldn't try to claim that they are a democratic source of "truth".
If you criticize Indymedia, you invariably get a response of "look at free republic!", but Free Republic admits that they are promoting a particular world-view. Indymedia tries to have it both ways, claiming to be un-biased, while only presenting a particular way of thinking, and burying any dissent. In a way, it's a reminder of the scary Soviet-style propaganda, claiming to represent "the people", while working hard to ensure that "the people" were not allowed to disagree.
It's easy to forget now that WiFi was by no means a "sure thing". I was working at a wireless networking company (that's still going strong today) in early 2001 that used 802.11b, and we made sure that our technology was independent of the hardware, because nobody knew at the time if 802.11 would become dominant.