Granted, Linux has evolved leaps and bounds from the 1.1 kernel I started with, but it hasn't dramatically changed the world like everyone hoped.
When you put down the LSD, you will realize that Linux, and for that matter Free Software, has changed the world immensely. Do you call Google a small change? Google has changed the way people think, work, do research, and in many ways the way people communicate with eachother. Google would have been impossible without Linux. The existence of Free Software and Linux have influenced government policies worldwide and made people rethink what services a government should provide its citizens. Those are just two examples of an immense sea of examples. Linux has changed the world.
So, the changes are not the ones you wanted. Get over it. It has made the lives of many people much better. No, it is not as convenient and easy as it could be, but being free of the Blue Screen of Death and constant reboots and viruses is actually nice for some people. Save your myopia for other people as narrow minded as yourself.
If freedom is a hippie issue, then you are saying that the Founding Fathers of the United States, the Authors of the United States Constitution, and the Soldiers that fought the Revolutionary War to give us a legacy of freedom from the English Crown were also hippies, right? Remember, without freedom, the United States is just another English Colony, a possession of Her Majesty. Are all people who do not believe that hippies?
As is typical with Stallman, his proposal predates the current debate by about a decade.
-- Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture
The accusation of fanaticism has been levelled at Stallman for more than two decades now, and it is still absurd. It is typical that whenever Stallman sees a new threat to freedom, one that most or nearly all other people in society do not see, he his called names and people say he is hurting Free Software. However, Free Software, and Open Source software for that matter, would have died long ago if Stallman had not been defending it. In fact, if Stallman had listened to his critics in the past, Microsoft would still be the only choice, unless it could be imagined that a broken rewrite of MacOS could have posed a serious challenge to Microsoft -- which really is hard to imagine.
I think the main reason for this freqent and unfair criticism is the outlook of those trapped in the Emerald City, those with green glasses locked to their faces forcing them to everywhere see green. They are the same ones who think the "free" in Free Software means "free of charge", which is indeed a limited view of the word free. For those who live in a world where there is only green, that seems to be the only freedom.
This could not be farther from the truth, of course. The freedom to speak freely and the freedom to think for oneself and the freedom to learn what one wants are certainly beyond pricing. There is a reason that selling oneself into slavery cannot be allowed in a Free Society. There is also a reason that the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America protects one's right to free speech. Rights are priceless. Their value is unlimited. Rights should not be curtailed based on the whinings of some crooked entertainment industry executives.
DRM directly threatens the right to free speech. It will allow third parties to control which computers communicate with which computers. It will allow authorization of all speech by third parties. It will control whether you can or cannot alter or copy any file on your computer. Hardware implementation of this will mean that the cost to free oneself of this will be the cost of fabrication of chips to alter the code for this. In fact, it would be possible to eliminate Free Software altogether with hardware DRM. This will leave 1984 style control of free speech in the hands of the likes of Microsoft, Intel, and a handful of other companies that will be able to basically control all of your communication with the outside world.
Richard Stallman has seen this future, and he understands the implications. Does it matter if Free Software is in the majority of computers and devices if we do not have the freedom to modify it? What is the difference between Linux and Microsoft when someone can tell you what you can and cannot do with your computer, with your software? If DRM wins, everybody, all six billion of us, loses.
I will leave this with another quote from a much darker book, nothing less than 1984 (Book I, Chapter IV):
Comrade Ogilvy, unimagined an hour ago, was now a fact. It struck him [Winston Smith] as curious that you could create dead men but not living ones. Comrade Ogilvy, who had never existed in the present, now existed in the past, and when once the act of forgery was forgotten, he would exist just as authentically, and upon the same evidence, as Charlemagne or Julius Caesar.
If DRM doesn't sort itself out the same way, it probably means that it's probably not all that bad for the honest folks. I know Apple's DRM has never annoyed me at all when I'm trying to do legal listening to my music. As soon as the DRM starts getting in the way of regular lawful usage, industry forces will start to push it out.
Well, that is fairly optomistic. However, what if the DRM manufacturers use their DRM control to control, say, the news. Since they can have selective control at the hardware level (the FSF was protesting at an MS hardware DRM conference), they can just have your computer refuse to show you any information they do not approve of. At the hardware level, they can also disable the use of pesky Free Software by requiring "DRM compliant" software, in other words Windows. In such a world, all of the news you would get would be able to be approved by Microsoft.
With MS telling you how nice DRM was for you every day and constantly sending you news about evil people who tried to "circumvent" DRM (on their own hardware), you would gradually come to believe that you lived in a utopia and that DRM was necessary to preserve the "freedom" that you have always enjoyed.
DRM cannot be sorted out by the market because it circumvents the market. It is a set of code that disables the market and allows, nay encourages, monopolies. DRM circumvents access to information, and therefore is threatening not only to free speech, but education as well.
In a hardware DRM world, MS can choose what you buy, whom you buy it from, and what price you pay. They can charge fees from any vendor that wants to sell to you.
The market cannot sort this out because "Code is law". DRM is a circumvention of government power.
Freedom comes with responsibility. A free people can only remain so if they watch their government. If one is to be free to walk the streets, one must be able to protect oneself. When one is free to learn, one must take care to educate oneself.
Therefore, freedom comes with the exercise of effort (vigilance, skill, exercise, study) and cannot be exercised without it.
If one does not watch, the power of government will increase. If one cannot defend oneself, he will be afraid to go out at night or rely on the police to protect him. If one is not educated, anyone can tell him anything, and he will believe it.
The guests will undergo strict security checks before entering Gates' lodge-style, 66,000-square-foot home
So, the company that has not been able to manage anything but security failures for the last decade or so is going to be responible for the life of President Hu Jintao.
This is interesting to say the least.
Is this going to be that same security that any twelve year old can defeat?
Or did they contract some outside firm to cover their problem?
If you can not trust M$ with your data, how can you trust them with the life of your leader?
I have been having trouble with websites regionalizing their interfaces. Rather than asking you what you want, they determine by your IP where you are.
I live in Taiwan, and I find that I am frequently blocked or forced to use a Chinese interface because of where I am. All language interfaces should be optional.
The blocking is a more serious issue. I frequently cannot read stories linked by Slashdot to various sites including USAToday. I have resorted to using Tor to get around this, but the implications for Free Speech are frightening.
Do websites have the right to categorize users based on where the login from? Is filtering the news for different audiences legal and/or moral? Is filtering a form of censorship?
I can understand the value of targeted advertising, but should we allow targeted advertising or spam filters or whatever to restrict what we see, and by extension what we know?
Many non-USians complain that the news in the US is so slanted that it seems as if the rest of the world combined is less important than the US. News agencies in different countries certainly have different viewpoints. If these are denied to people for whatever reason, will they be more ignorant of world affairs? USians are frequently accused of being ignorant and jingoistic for precisely this reason.
The ability to read news or blogs or whatever in different countries and languages cannot be a bad thing. It is probably the best thing that has happened to education and freedom in quite a long time -- maybe ever.
Finally, just because one Slashdot poster is too lazy to read sites in other languages does not mean nobody else should have the option. Even if the majority felt that way -- which they probably do -- it is not right to deny those who can because of those who cannot or will not. Every restriction of freedom should be justified. The ignorance of the majority is never a justification for imposing ignorance upon those who know more.
Anyway, for people who want to succumb to regionalism, there is always TV.
I was talking about diagnosis and not cure. Western doctors generally cannot detect non-life-threatening problems with the body during an examination.
For instance, liver cancer is supposed to be extremely lethal according to Western doctors. I cannot remember exactly, but when my friend died of it, somebody told me that people diagnosed with liver cancer die something like 80%-90% of the time. The test results that showed my friend who died had liver cancer did not come back until after he had slipped into a fatal coma. This is an obvious demonstration of the limitation of diagnosis. The cancer is not being diagnosed, generally, until it is too late for the patient to survive.
On the other hand, I have seen people visit a Chinese doctor for the first time, and the doctor says , "You have liver cancer."
You could put this down to the doctor using some psychological technique to guess what was wrong with the person. I suppose there are a lot of ways that you could rationalize this, but if you are not puking in a hospital bed, it is very unlikely that Western doctors are going to have the slightest clue that your liver has a problem, but Chinese doctors likely have a way of spotting symptoms that have eluded Western medicine.
As for the other issue you brought up, that one who is dying of the failure of some part of his body should choose Western hospitals, this proves your indoctrination. You should not be looking for someone to save you after your body is already quitting. You should be looking to prevent your body from failing in the first place.
If I were in pieces on the side of the road after a horrendous accident, would I choose a Western surgeon? Of course I would.
Would I allow myself to become so unhealthy that I needed a liver transplant? I never would if it were in my power to prevent it, and it is.
Finally, I would be very careful classing dicoveries in China or India as "unscientific". A great deal of their knowledge was arrived at through the same techniques you currently call science. Whether you are aware or not, China was the most technologically advanced country on Earth for at least a millenium, and it was Chinese technology that made the European exploration (exploitation?) and conquest of the world possible. Few countries can make such claims.
You should remember that when Matteo Ricci, the famous missionary/scholar, inhabited China, he was still under the Greek assumption that the heavens consisted of nine ceilings.
When Chinese scholars claimed that space was empty (something we all take for granted today), he laughed at them and claimed that they had no scientific basis for what they believed.
I find this sort of censorship talk rather ironic coming from USAToday.com which blocks access from ISPs in Taiwan. I had to use a proxy to read the article.
So, what is the difference between corporate censorship and government censorship? Either way, I am prevented from reading what I choose to read.
This is text book Chinese medicine. Looking for signs of these things in the face and eyes has a history of about 1500 to 2000 years. I guess it is good that Western medicine has finally come around, but this is far from amazing.
You probably mean the rightful manufacturer of the product. We're speaking about hardware here, so the owner would be the buyer, not the maker.
Well put. This argument does not only apply to hardware. It really applies to information, too. Copyright holders are not the "owners" of the information they hold the rights to. The buyer is the owner of the information the buyer purchases. If you purchase a CD, you own the CD and all the information on it.
Jokes about hardened criminals stealing viagra aside, if the fake drug is manufactured badly then the dose could be wrong, or the drug contaminated in some way, or worse, not have any active chemical agent in it and lead to the death of the person buying it.
And can you prove that the medicine you use is not acting in one or more of these ways? Can you prove that when your aunt goes for chemotherapy that it has any effect on cancer? Do you have the knowledge to discern what effects the medicine is actually having on your body? Maybe it is all snake oil. Prove it is not.
It would be in the manufacturer's interest to harm you over the long term. You would need more medicine in the future, would you not?
Your comments are even more ridiculous applied to music/movies. To say that a pirate has lower production costs is a rather large understatement. Producing a movie requires all sorts of expenses from paying actors, directors, stagehands, etc, to marketing. Pirating a movie requires the movie, a computer, and an internet connection. No mystery on how the pirate can "make" the movie so cheaply. Independent low budget producers/labels are a better example of how movies/music can be made more cheaply.
Yes, we have all heard that argument. However, the vast majority of these movies pay for themselves at the box office, so the per unit cost of producing DVDs should be about the same for pirates and MPAA affiliates. The only real difference is probably the fat cat managers taking their large salaries in the MPAA approved firms.
So, I suppose the question is: Do you enjoy feeding the families of Harvard grads?
The Greeks invented this puzzle and seemed to think it was impossible -- in Greek. I do not see how solving it in English would count for anything.
If one could use any language, why not use Hawaiian or some other Polynesian language. With few vowels and consonants, it should be relatively easy construct one of these things.
I am, of course, not a lawyer, but I know a bit about copyright law.
Unfortunately, I replied to a previous post before getting to yours, so I will have to repeat myself somewhat. On the other hand, since you are a lawyer, it will be easier to summarise my point as you are already familiar with the issues involved.
First, let me say that although I agree with your legal assessment, I disagree with your moral assessment. Whether or not Google is going to profit by its actions is irrelevant. The fact that they are going to digitize so many books should be applauded. What they have already done would take publicly funded programs decades or centuries (if it were to happen at all). If you do not believe me, just take a look at Project Gutenberg. It took them from 1970 to 2001 or 2002 to scan a mere 10,000 books. The public library systems of the world have scanned zero or close to zero (considering the number of works in the public domain, you should be asking yourself if the public libraries are doing their job at all). Google is going to manage millions in a few years. This is a good thing, whether or not you like Google personally.
Now, on to the legal issues. Technically, Google is in massive violation of copyright. Of that, there can be no question. The question is the relevancy and enforcability of those provisions in copyright law.
Technically, by the fact that you are viewing this comment, you are violating my copyrights. I have written this comment. It is stored in a fixed and tangible form. You have copied it into your computer's memory (Mai v. Peak) to view it. I have not given you written permission to view it (which, legally, is the only kind of permission that matters). In the mean time, you have also created infringers of all of the intermediary ISPs between yourself and Slashdot, so you are also liable for contributory infringement. I could sue you and win.
Why does this not happen every day? It does not happen because society has already accepted that these forms of copying are acceptable. Call them fair use. Call them your right to access the materials. Call these forms of copying whatever you want. No matter how you look at it, the Internet itself is responsible for massive (technical) copyright infringement. In fact, if copyight were enforced as the lawmakers wrote it, you could not even use the web without calling every admin and asking for a written contract before you accessed that given site.
So, the question, as I just put it is:
Are the copying portions of copyright law still enforceable in the age of the Internet? (Or is copyright now limited to distribution only?)
As I pointed out in my earlier post, the RIAA, the current, undisputed king of copyright lawsuits does not even sue for copying. They sue for distribution. If they really wanted to, they could sue anybody with MP3s of any music over which their sponsors had rights. In fact, they could even sue anybody using a CD player because the player has to load the data into memory and convert it into an analog signal before a given person can listen to it. From the standpoint of copyright law, then, it is impossible to even listen to music without violating copyright.
In such an age, how can Google be taken to task for violating copyright in the same way that everyone does?
Can Google copy whole books onto their storage systems legally?
It would appear that they cannot. However, nowadays most copyright infingement claims have to do with distribution and not copying. On the Internet, this is especially true since copies are required for transmission and display. Every website you view, for instance, is copied by several ISPs as it gets to you. Also, the RIAA does not seem to sue people for having songs on their hard drive. They tend to sue people for allowing other people to access those songs on their hard drives.
Given all that, I think the real question is:
Are the copying portions of copyright law still enforceable in the age of the Internet? (Or is copyright now limited to distribution only?)
If the answer is yes, Google will lose. If the answer is no, everybody will win.
In the old days, stealing used to be difficult: You had to be quiet and stealthy or very tough. Nowadays, with the convenience of MasterCard(tm), you can steal from just about anybody as they pass down the street with just the simple press of a button. From across the street or from your living room, MasterCard(tm) allows you acquire credit card numbers with no access to the physical card. Truly, it has never been a better time to be a thief.
Or, as my friend put it:
rfid credit cards, $2, scanner for rfid chips, $1, easy theft, priceless
Is this really as stupid as it sounds? Or is it yet another plot to make biometrics appear more "safe"?
"As long as the copy-protection does not prevent lending, I don't think most people will have a problem."
What about keeping the book on multiple devices? If you had, say, a cellphone, a laptop, and a desktop computer and you wanted to read at any of them, what would you do then? DRM restricts your ability to use YOUR information where YOU want it. I frequently read the same book on my desktop and phone. Since I only read non-DRMed books in HTML, I am sure I am not what the publishers had in mind, but never the less, I should be able to read MY books wherever I want.
And whatever you do, please do not give me that BS argument that somehow the publisher or author "owns" the information. When you buy a book, you own it and everything in it -- not the publisher, not the author, not the rights holder. Any information on my computer is MY possession (as I possess it).
The parent was talking about a device that was with him all the time. The Developer Works article had a header entitled "Huge in Japan: When will it come to the West?"
The correlation between these two things is a device that is still too far from common in the US: the cell phone. Yes, many more people have cell phones than a few years ago, but the universality of cell phones in Asia will not be achieved in the US in the near future.
In Japan, read e-books on their cell phones because they do EVERYTHING on their cellphones. In Japan, cellphones are almost like a link to society. Japanese people use cell phones for so many things. In Tokyo, it would be hard to live without a cellphone. Therefore, the problem of getting a reader to everyone is solved. EVERYONE has a reader. The only problem is to make getting the books easy.
Nowadays, I almost exclusively read off of my A780 (no, I do not live in Japan). It is convenient, and more importantly, I can read any time I have 5 or 10 minutes free on a train or on the bus or in a cab (which is usually too dark to read a book at night).
So, the question "When are e-books going to become mainstream?" will probably be answered when the question "When will every individual have a cellphone with a large screen?" is answered -- per given society.
Lucie Guibault, an assistant professor of intellectual-property law at the Institute for Information Law in Amsterdam, said at the Holland Open Software Conference in Amsterdam, that the GPL should clarify who is the author of the software to ensure that open source software distributed under this licence receives legal protection.
Yeah, right. If that were true, then the RIAA and MPAA would have to list the people they represent every time they went to court. Imagine the RIAA's thousands of lawsuits if they had to first verify that they truly represented each and every artist they claimed to represent. The fact is: copyright has more than enough provisions for works done by groups to handle this situation. It was designed this way. This design of opening everybody to potential litigation is one of its flaws.
Yeah, those were just personal examples. They were in no way intended to cover the spectrum of freedoms that Free Software provides or the spectrum of disadvantages that proprietary software imposes.
So, yes, the copyright is part of the authorship right, so what ?
Read my post again:
Copyright is a limited privilege. Authorship is perpetual. The author of a document will always be its author, but that author will not always have a monopoly over it. This gives authors the misguided idea that they should have a perpetual monopoly as well.
Tell me you still do not see the problem. Currently, in the USA and Germany (and soon in Australia), the term of copyright will be the life of the author plus 70 years. That is a long stretch for a "limited" monopoly. When it affects my Free Speech and my ability to create and learn, there is a HUGE problem. What is the point of people creating information if it cannot be used? If access is beyond the means of most or all, what is the point of even having authors?
But as soon as there is money to make, there will be people abusing the system. (Dont get me started on patent laws...)
Well, then let us apply your copyright argument to patent law:
Well, at least in Switzerland (and probably the reset of Europe - dont know for the rest of the world), you dont have to register anything or hand a [description] of your [invention] or anything. As soon as you have a created a new [invention], it is [patent]ed. That's the good point about [patent] : you dont have to actually do anything, or pay anything. [Patent] is an "automatic protection". It really should stay that way !
Do you still support that view about automatic copyright being a good thing? Would you support legislation that let you patent anything you could draw?
A large part of it is freedom, too. This vendor agnostic issue is really about freedom. If you can buy services from 10 companies, you will get better prices than if you can buy from one (read: MS). Also, it protects you from your vendor going out of business. It is also freedom because you can pay someone to maintain your systems instead of going to a vendor. Whether or not these freedoms are what you and I had in mind, businesses do have these freedoms in mind, and therefore, freedom is an issue for them as well.
Freedom to make money is why revolutions were fought against European monarchies in the first place.
I think the article was talking about why people use certain software as opposed to why they write it. Obviously, not paying you helps their bottom line immensely. However, that is also obviously not their primary concern. Also, being vendor agnostic helps protect one's bottom line as well (Licensing 6, anyone?).
Slashdot Mirror
When you put down the LSD, you will realize that Linux, and for that matter Free Software, has changed the world immensely. Do you call Google a small change? Google has changed the way people think, work, do research, and in many ways the way people communicate with eachother. Google would have been impossible without Linux. The existence of Free Software and Linux have influenced government policies worldwide and made people rethink what services a government should provide its citizens. Those are just two examples of an immense sea of examples. Linux has changed the world.
So, the changes are not the ones you wanted. Get over it. It has made the lives of many people much better. No, it is not as convenient and easy as it could be, but being free of the Blue Screen of Death and constant reboots and viruses is actually nice for some people. Save your myopia for other people as narrow minded as yourself.
If freedom is a hippie issue, then you are saying that the Founding Fathers of the United States, the Authors of the United States Constitution, and the Soldiers that fought the Revolutionary War to give us a legacy of freedom from the English Crown were also hippies, right? Remember, without freedom, the United States is just another English Colony, a possession of Her Majesty. Are all people who do not believe that hippies?
The accusation of fanaticism has been levelled at Stallman for more than two decades now, and it is still absurd. It is typical that whenever Stallman sees a new threat to freedom, one that most or nearly all other people in society do not see, he his called names and people say he is hurting Free Software. However, Free Software, and Open Source software for that matter, would have died long ago if Stallman had not been defending it. In fact, if Stallman had listened to his critics in the past, Microsoft would still be the only choice, unless it could be imagined that a broken rewrite of MacOS could have posed a serious challenge to Microsoft -- which really is hard to imagine.
I think the main reason for this freqent and unfair criticism is the outlook of those trapped in the Emerald City, those with green glasses locked to their faces forcing them to everywhere see green. They are the same ones who think the "free" in Free Software means "free of charge", which is indeed a limited view of the word free. For those who live in a world where there is only green, that seems to be the only freedom.
This could not be farther from the truth, of course. The freedom to speak freely and the freedom to think for oneself and the freedom to learn what one wants are certainly beyond pricing. There is a reason that selling oneself into slavery cannot be allowed in a Free Society. There is also a reason that the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America protects one's right to free speech. Rights are priceless. Their value is unlimited. Rights should not be curtailed based on the whinings of some crooked entertainment industry executives.
DRM directly threatens the right to free speech. It will allow third parties to control which computers communicate with which computers. It will allow authorization of all speech by third parties. It will control whether you can or cannot alter or copy any file on your computer. Hardware implementation of this will mean that the cost to free oneself of this will be the cost of fabrication of chips to alter the code for this. In fact, it would be possible to eliminate Free Software altogether with hardware DRM. This will leave 1984 style control of free speech in the hands of the likes of Microsoft, Intel, and a handful of other companies that will be able to basically control all of your communication with the outside world.
Richard Stallman has seen this future, and he understands the implications. Does it matter if Free Software is in the majority of computers and devices if we do not have the freedom to modify it? What is the difference between Linux and Microsoft when someone can tell you what you can and cannot do with your computer, with your software? If DRM wins, everybody, all six billion of us, loses.
I will leave this with another quote from a much darker book, nothing less than 1984 (Book I, Chapter IV):
DRM makes Winston Smith's job convenient.
With MS telling you how nice DRM was for you every day and constantly sending you news about evil people who tried to "circumvent" DRM (on their own hardware), you would gradually come to believe that you lived in a utopia and that DRM was necessary to preserve the "freedom" that you have always enjoyed.
DRM cannot be sorted out by the market because it circumvents the market. It is a set of code that disables the market and allows, nay encourages, monopolies. DRM circumvents access to information, and therefore is threatening not only to free speech, but education as well.
In a hardware DRM world, MS can choose what you buy, whom you buy it from, and what price you pay. They can charge fees from any vendor that wants to sell to you.
The market cannot sort this out because "Code is law". DRM is a circumvention of government power.
Freedom comes with responsibility. A free people can only remain so if they watch their government. If one is to be free to walk the streets, one must be able to protect oneself. When one is free to learn, one must take care to educate oneself.
Therefore, freedom comes with the exercise of effort (vigilance, skill, exercise, study) and cannot be exercised without it.
If one does not watch, the power of government will increase. If one cannot defend oneself, he will be afraid to go out at night or rely on the police to protect him. If one is not educated, anyone can tell him anything, and he will believe it.
Convenience is not a "freedom".
This is interesting to say the least.
Is this going to be that same security that any twelve year old can defeat?
Or did they contract some outside firm to cover their problem?
If you can not trust M$ with your data, how can you trust them with the life of your leader?
I have been having trouble with websites regionalizing their interfaces. Rather than asking you what you want, they determine by your IP where you are.
I live in Taiwan, and I find that I am frequently blocked or forced to use a Chinese interface because of where I am. All language interfaces should be optional.
The blocking is a more serious issue. I frequently cannot read stories linked by Slashdot to various sites including USAToday. I have resorted to using Tor to get around this, but the implications for Free Speech are frightening.
Do websites have the right to categorize users based on where the login from? Is filtering the news for different audiences legal and/or moral? Is filtering a form of censorship?
I can understand the value of targeted advertising, but should we allow targeted advertising or spam filters or whatever to restrict what we see, and by extension what we know?
Many non-USians complain that the news in the US is so slanted that it seems as if the rest of the world combined is less important than the US. News agencies in different countries certainly have different viewpoints. If these are denied to people for whatever reason, will they be more ignorant of world affairs? USians are frequently accused of being ignorant and jingoistic for precisely this reason.
The ability to read news or blogs or whatever in different countries and languages cannot be a bad thing. It is probably the best thing that has happened to education and freedom in quite a long time -- maybe ever.
Finally, just because one Slashdot poster is too lazy to read sites in other languages does not mean nobody else should have the option. Even if the majority felt that way -- which they probably do -- it is not right to deny those who can because of those who cannot or will not. Every restriction of freedom should be justified. The ignorance of the majority is never a justification for imposing ignorance upon those who know more.
Anyway, for people who want to succumb to regionalism, there is always TV.
I was talking about diagnosis and not cure. Western doctors generally cannot detect non-life-threatening problems with the body during an examination.
For instance, liver cancer is supposed to be extremely lethal according to Western doctors. I cannot remember exactly, but when my friend died of it, somebody told me that people diagnosed with liver cancer die something like 80%-90% of the time. The test results that showed my friend who died had liver cancer did not come back until after he had slipped into a fatal coma. This is an obvious demonstration of the limitation of diagnosis. The cancer is not being diagnosed, generally, until it is too late for the patient to survive.
On the other hand, I have seen people visit a Chinese doctor for the first time, and the doctor says , "You have liver cancer."
You could put this down to the doctor using some psychological technique to guess what was wrong with the person. I suppose there are a lot of ways that you could rationalize this, but if you are not puking in a hospital bed, it is very unlikely that Western doctors are going to have the slightest clue that your liver has a problem, but Chinese doctors likely have a way of spotting symptoms that have eluded Western medicine.
As for the other issue you brought up, that one who is dying of the failure of some part of his body should choose Western hospitals, this proves your indoctrination. You should not be looking for someone to save you after your body is already quitting. You should be looking to prevent your body from failing in the first place.
If I were in pieces on the side of the road after a horrendous accident, would I choose a Western surgeon? Of course I would.
Would I allow myself to become so unhealthy that I needed a liver transplant? I never would if it were in my power to prevent it, and it is.
Finally, I would be very careful classing dicoveries in China or India as "unscientific". A great deal of their knowledge was arrived at through the same techniques you currently call science. Whether you are aware or not, China was the most technologically advanced country on Earth for at least a millenium, and it was Chinese technology that made the European exploration (exploitation?) and conquest of the world possible. Few countries can make such claims.
You should remember that when Matteo Ricci, the famous missionary/scholar, inhabited China, he was still under the Greek assumption that the heavens consisted of nine ceilings.
When Chinese scholars claimed that space was empty (something we all take for granted today), he laughed at them and claimed that they had no scientific basis for what they believed.
Cultural arrogance enforces ignorance.
I find this sort of censorship talk rather ironic coming from USAToday.com which blocks access from ISPs in Taiwan. I had to use a proxy to read the article.
So, what is the difference between corporate censorship and government censorship? Either way, I am prevented from reading what I choose to read.
This is text book Chinese medicine. Looking for signs of these things in the face and eyes has a history of about 1500 to 2000 years. I guess it is good that Western medicine has finally come around, but this is far from amazing.
ArsenneLupin's Axiom:
Do not let anyone tell you different.
It would be in the manufacturer's interest to harm you over the long term. You would need more medicine in the future, would you not?
So, I suppose the question is: Do you enjoy feeding the families of Harvard grads?
I certainly do not.
The Greeks invented this puzzle and seemed to think it was impossible -- in Greek. I do not see how solving it in English would count for anything.
If one could use any language, why not use Hawaiian or some other Polynesian language. With few vowels and consonants, it should be relatively easy construct one of these things.
Non-Greek solutions should be invalid.
I will play the devil's advocate, too:
What about "rights" to "derivative works"? Do they not trump fair use?
I am, of course, not a lawyer, but I know a bit about copyright law.
Unfortunately, I replied to a previous post before getting to yours, so I will have to repeat myself somewhat. On the other hand, since you are a lawyer, it will be easier to summarise my point as you are already familiar with the issues involved.
First, let me say that although I agree with your legal assessment, I disagree with your moral assessment. Whether or not Google is going to profit by its actions is irrelevant. The fact that they are going to digitize so many books should be applauded. What they have already done would take publicly funded programs decades or centuries (if it were to happen at all). If you do not believe me, just take a look at Project Gutenberg. It took them from 1970 to 2001 or 2002 to scan a mere 10,000 books. The public library systems of the world have scanned zero or close to zero (considering the number of works in the public domain, you should be asking yourself if the public libraries are doing their job at all). Google is going to manage millions in a few years. This is a good thing, whether or not you like Google personally.
Now, on to the legal issues. Technically, Google is in massive violation of copyright. Of that, there can be no question. The question is the relevancy and enforcability of those provisions in copyright law.
Technically, by the fact that you are viewing this comment, you are violating my copyrights. I have written this comment. It is stored in a fixed and tangible form. You have copied it into your computer's memory (Mai v. Peak) to view it. I have not given you written permission to view it (which, legally, is the only kind of permission that matters). In the mean time, you have also created infringers of all of the intermediary ISPs between yourself and Slashdot, so you are also liable for contributory infringement. I could sue you and win.
Why does this not happen every day? It does not happen because society has already accepted that these forms of copying are acceptable. Call them fair use. Call them your right to access the materials. Call these forms of copying whatever you want. No matter how you look at it, the Internet itself is responsible for massive (technical) copyright infringement. In fact, if copyight were enforced as the lawmakers wrote it, you could not even use the web without calling every admin and asking for a written contract before you accessed that given site.
So, the question, as I just put it is:
As I pointed out in my earlier post, the RIAA, the current, undisputed king of copyright lawsuits does not even sue for copying. They sue for distribution. If they really wanted to, they could sue anybody with MP3s of any music over which their sponsors had rights. In fact, they could even sue anybody using a CD player because the player has to load the data into memory and convert it into an analog signal before a given person can listen to it. From the standpoint of copyright law, then, it is impossible to even listen to music without violating copyright.
In such an age, how can Google be taken to task for violating copyright in the same way that everyone does?
Here is the question I cannot get around:
It would appear that they cannot. However, nowadays most copyright infingement claims have to do with distribution and not copying. On the Internet, this is especially true since copies are required for transmission and display. Every website you view, for instance, is copied by several ISPs as it gets to you. Also, the RIAA does not seem to sue people for having songs on their hard drive. They tend to sue people for allowing other people to access those songs on their hard drives.
Given all that, I think the real question is:
If the answer is yes, Google will lose. If the answer is no, everybody will win.
I can just see the commercial now:
Or, as my friend put it: Is this really as stupid as it sounds? Or is it yet another plot to make biometrics appear more "safe"?And whatever you do, please do not give me that BS argument that somehow the publisher or author "owns" the information. When you buy a book, you own it and everything in it -- not the publisher, not the author, not the rights holder. Any information on my computer is MY possession (as I possess it).
The parent was talking about a device that was with him all the time. The Developer Works article had a header entitled "Huge in Japan: When will it come to the West?"
The correlation between these two things is a device that is still too far from common in the US: the cell phone. Yes, many more people have cell phones than a few years ago, but the universality of cell phones in Asia will not be achieved in the US in the near future.
In Japan, read e-books on their cell phones because they do EVERYTHING on their cellphones. In Japan, cellphones are almost like a link to society. Japanese people use cell phones for so many things. In Tokyo, it would be hard to live without a cellphone. Therefore, the problem of getting a reader to everyone is solved. EVERYONE has a reader. The only problem is to make getting the books easy.
Nowadays, I almost exclusively read off of my A780 (no, I do not live in Japan). It is convenient, and more importantly, I can read any time I have 5 or 10 minutes free on a train or on the bus or in a cab (which is usually too dark to read a book at night).
So, the question "When are e-books going to become mainstream?" will probably be answered when the question "When will every individual have a cellphone with a large screen?" is answered -- per given society.
Yeah, those were just personal examples. They were in no way intended to cover the spectrum of freedoms that Free Software provides or the spectrum of disadvantages that proprietary software imposes.
A large part of it is freedom, too. This vendor agnostic issue is really about freedom. If you can buy services from 10 companies, you will get better prices than if you can buy from one (read: MS). Also, it protects you from your vendor going out of business. It is also freedom because you can pay someone to maintain your systems instead of going to a vendor. Whether or not these freedoms are what you and I had in mind, businesses do have these freedoms in mind, and therefore, freedom is an issue for them as well.
Freedom to make money is why revolutions were fought against European monarchies in the first place.
I think the article was talking about why people use certain software as opposed to why they write it. Obviously, not paying you helps their bottom line immensely. However, that is also obviously not their primary concern. Also, being vendor agnostic helps protect one's bottom line as well (Licensing 6, anyone?).