...one has to wonder whether airing such a controvercial movie on the eve of an election helps or hurts the political process by influencing the vote with last-minute emotions rather than thoroughly contemplation.
It does not matter: Diebold machines do not have emotions.
While it is interesting that webcasting is only being noticed by the terrestrial broadcasters since MS has been doing it, maybe this is fortunate. MS can take the political hit while the rest of the people on the Net go on listening to better webcasters (ones that have their own song lists and do not play commercials anyway). Rebroadcasts of terrestrial radio stations in WMP have always been sort of a joke. Who really wants to listen to music at 72Kbs? Oh, right... MS users.
Here are my questions: The DMCA CARP defined royalties do not go to broadcasters whose signal has been used, do they? They are only for artists, right? If this is true, MS gets the blame and the radio stations will not have a right to anything being streamed over the Net (until they go to Congress, of course).
"The Death of the Floppy Disk" Is this some sort of joke? Floppies have been dead for a long time. I, personally, have not had a floppy drive in my computer since around 1997 or 1998. Why do people still use these things?
The Zip Drive is now obsolete, and that was, well, 69.44 times better than a floppy drive in the late 90s (and who knows how many times faster).
Floppys have not held that "same relevance in everyday life" since the first hard drive was included with a personal computer. As soon as that happened, the floppy's relavance changed. It was all downhill from there.
What does DVDs on demand mean? Especially with relation to the Tivo. It sounds like a download in the article, but that would be video on demand, not DVDs on demand. A DVD is a disk.
Or does it mean something like printing on demand where you would request a movie and they would press a disk and mail it to you? That sounds like DVDs on demand to me. However, that probably would not require a Tivo.
If you read Ricci closely, you'll see that he does not believe the Chinese method would lend itself well to European type.
Yes, he did say that. However, if you flip that around, you realize that he really meant that movable type is nearly impossible in Chinese while it is an option for phonetic scripts. This does not mean that Latin did not have the option of woodblock printing. It means that Chinese did not have the option of movable type. Given that an arguably simpler option was available to Europeans, why were their books never cheaper than Chinese books?
Granted, it would not take thousands of hours to copy a 24-page woodblock book, but those are essentially novelties -- not significant works like the Bible or Principia.
I was saying that, according to Ricci, the per page time cost was about the same, but the Chinese materials were cheaper. That applies regardless of the number of pages.
Remember, the nature of Chinese (the language) simply made books cheaper to produce, so copying wasn't an issue.
I would like to know what, in your opinion, in the "nature of Chinese (the language)" makes books cheaper to produce. I was arguing cheaper materials, but I have never seen anyone argue the script was cheaper to print. In fact, the curator at a local museum argued vehemetly that the reason that Western Chinese scholars did not include Chinese in their books was because the cost was prohibitive. That seemed odd since Chinese was printed long before any other script, but I do not doubt a few publishers used that as an excuse. So what is it in the nature of Chinese language that makes it easier to print?
The nature of Latin pretty much requires more expensive books, and thus copyright laws came about.
I have always thought this to be a cultural issue. Copyright appears to be much like a disease that originated in England and spread to the rest of the world during their subjugation of it. Maybe I am wrong, though. Whether or not I am wrong, this poses the opposite question: What is it in the nature of Latin scripts that makes them more expensive to print?
Contrast that with how the complexity of their characters made computers more expensive until bitmapped displays became ubiquitous.
This is only novel if your first supposition was correct and there is something inherent in the Chinese script that makes it cheaper to reproduce. Otherwise, it just follows the Western belief that Chinese is just more difficult than phonetic scripts. Of course, the computers were originally developed by and for people who wrote in Latin characters. That would tend to bias the whole thing in the favor of the developer's script usage.
No, I did not read your subject line. Sorry for that.
As for the woodblock printing, thousands of hours is certainly an exaggeration. According to Matteo Ricci, a Jesuit Missionary in the 16th Century, woodblocks could be carved in roughly the same amount of time it took a typesetter to set a page. Therefore, such a method would incur less expense as wood is cheaper than metal. Also, on-demand printing would be possible as the woodblocks would not have to be destroyed when a new book was to be printed.
Regardless of whatever techniques may have been subsequently invented in Europe, the fact remains that books were always more expensive in the West. Matteo Ricci commented that books in China were sold at "ridiculous prices" or something like that. And books in Chinese today are still often a fifth of the price of a comparable English book. Capitalism kept prices down in China. Monopolism kept prices up in Europe. But there was never any shortage of authors in China.
Copyright itself, is nothing more than a limited monopoly on an intangible product.
No, again. Copyright is nothing more than a limited monopoly on the act of copying and distributing information under claimed protection. The information itself is not a product. The copy is.
The anti-circumvention provisions in the DMCA have nothing to do with copyright.
You have a wonderful sense of humor. Whether or not the anti-circumvention provisions in the DMCA should have anything to do with copyright is irrelevant. They are written into Title 17. They are a part of copyright.
They have to do with preventing people from illegal copying.
This is also incorrect. They have to do with preventing unauthorized access which in many, if not most, cases does not constitute illegal copying.
So the question is not cornering the parent. In asking, "Is copyright evil?" the DMCA doesn't come into play at all.
It absolutely does. Your argument was based on the idea that the anti-circumvention provisions are not related to copyright. However, they are written into the copyright statute, so, unless you can argue that they are not in Title 17, I will just have to deny that argument outright.
As for your final argument, yes, that would be true, but no one could make you pay for the privelege to access that software. If you wanted to work on it, no one could legally keep you away from it. There would also be no recourse if your lab assistant distributed the source of your binaries to the world. In any case, the effect would probably be somewhat similar to the GPL if not exactly like the Free BSD Licence. No one would be able to tell you what you could not access.
Are you trying to say that people will not pay people to write software without copyright? Think again. Companies with new products and new ideas are always going to need new custom applications. Everything changes, and software will have to change as everything else does.
While hardware may have reached the power and speed required for most business applications, software has not even begun to reach its limits. Computers are just at the beginning of where most people are learning what is possible. Each set of realized possibilities will create another wave of possibilites not previously imagined.
If programmers run out of jobs, it will not happen during your lifetime.
No it is not. The power of Congress to create laws granting limited monopoies over information is defined in the Constitution. Here is the clause:
Section 8--1 The Congress shall have Power... 8 To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
See? The word "copyright" does not appear in the Constitution.
It grants the creator of the work thr right to control how and when the a copy of the work is created and distributed.
Every time somebody uses the word "control" relating to copyright it makes my skin crawl. Copyright is not about control. It is about giving the creator a limited and short term advantage in the marketplace before competitors jump in. It is like a head start in a race. It grants no rights about how the work is to be used by those who buy it.
This also claims that copyright is a right. This is obviously not so. Copyright is not inalienable. It is government granted. That makes it a priviledge. Rights are something that you gain because of the fact that you are human or a citizen. True rights are irrevocable and non-transferable. I cannot give you my right to free speech, and nothing you do can take it away. Copyright is nothing like this. Copyrights are granted. They have limited terms (theoretically at least). They can be taken away. They can be sold. These are not the qualities of rights.
You and many people have to stop thinking that copyright grants you rights over other people. It grants you nothing of the kind. Copyright is around to temporarily protect one vendor from other vendors; nothing more.
So, in summary, you are saying that now that the Internet exists, copyright is obsolete. Did I get that right?
You just argued yourself in a circle. Even if that whole line of logic were completely correct, the Internet, just as you said, destroys your whole argument. An author can now publish a book that only costs him the time to write it and distribute it to the whole world. If it is good, it will be advertised by fans. All free. Where is copyright necessary in your model?
Oh, and by the way, you said:
Before the printing press was invented, it was very difficult to copy a book, so it was not easy to make a living as an author.
You should have said "Before printing was invented" because Gutenberg's printing press was invented centuries after the Chinese started printing. They were not foolish enough to use metal or lithographers. They used wood. So the costs associated with printing were much less than in Europe. For centuries China printed many more books than Europe as well. This all happened in the absence of copyright which was no introduced into China until the 19th or 20th centuries.
So, basically, your argument is wrong with or without the Internet.
"Win this battle." Do you think copyrights are evil?
Hmmm. That is hard to say. The anti-circumvention provisions in the DMCA are evil. The CTEA is certainly evil. So, it depends on whether the parent was talking about part of copyright or all of copyright. You are attempting to corner the parent into an all or nothing argument.
The fact is, this is a fight about freedom. Online, copyrights are infinitely more powerful than they are in the real world. While the copyright owners cannot police what you say among your friends in realspace, they can in "cyberspace". The DMCA has been misused to fight against political dissent and corporate criticism. It has also been used to maintain monopolies in places where it should not (like printer cartrages). Years of film and news that would have been publicly accessible if it were not for copyright extensions is rotting away in lockers, doing society no good. These issues are a challenge to all of our freedom. This all or nothing argument just creates a barrier to anything getting resolved.
You know that copyrights are precisely what makes the GPL valid, don't you? Maybe you're just a general anarchist....
The GPL would not be necessary in the absence of copyright. Think about that. I am not advocating the total removal of copyright from the law books, but the GPL is a response to the draconian control that is a grotesque feature of modern copyright law in many countries. Laws are supposed to protect our freedom, not take it away.
Finally, the absence of copyright is not anarchy. Unless you would also argue that the absence of monopolies is anarchy, this argument is unsupportable. Government granted monopolies are anti-capitalistic relics of European feudalism. Perhaps there are justifications for limited monopolies, but every monopoly granted by any government constrains the freedom of its citizens. Asking for a reassessment of government excesses in granting monopolies is not the same as advocating anarchy.
The thing is, quietly breaking laws for personal gain is not civil disobedience. It's just lawbreaking.
That is assuming that sharing files, even copyrighted music files, is breaking the law. Unfortunately for your argument, not all of Us The People accept the *AA's version of that argument.
Most of the sharing done on P2P networks would fall under unregulated uses (NOT even fair use) in the real world. If I voluntarily gave a CD I owned to one of my friends, it would be perfectly legal. If I played it for my friend over the telephone (transmitted it), that would be legal, too. If I copied it once, that would be fair use. So, many of the elements involved in such sharing are perfectly legal.
The *AAs have claimed that many uses that are legal are not. They claim that the music or movies or whatever is their property. This is plainly not true. If someone steals a CD from a store, they have stolen property. If someone copies the music onto their harddrive, they have stolen nothing and created a legal backup. The *AAs do not own information... period.
Finally, you should think about the scope of Fair Use. Fair Use was not defined as a term in Title 17 until 1976 with the Copyright Act of that year. However, the practice of defining Fair Use by the courts has existed almost as long as copyright has existed in US law. How can this be?
Well, basically, Fair Use is what is called common law which is based on commonly accepted practices. If most people behave in such a way, the law follows the commonly accepted practice unless specifically legislated against. Fair Use was a reaction of the courts to protect people from doing obviously reasonable things with copyrighted material.
Now it is common practice to download songs. This practice has not hurt the *AAs. They have had record profits in a dismal economy. Of course they see the possibility that they could get more profits if there was some way to make people pay for all this downloading. This is called greed. So, they accuse everybody and their grandmother (literally) of "stealing" that which they do not own, and cry bloody murder about file sharing.
The truth is, the *AAs are just lying. I do not accept their version of the law. And before you choose to accept, you should consider that online all speech is governed by copyright if such arguments are accepted. Maybe you should pay a fee every time you quote someone. Imagine how much it would cost to post on Slashdot.
Just because the press says something is illegal does not make it so.
This comment by Sancho is just begging for a reply, so here goes:
Of course, the copyright system itself is the reason we have book, media, etc.
And no books existed before copyright? You are kidding, right? The Statute of Anne was passed in 1710. China managed to get along without copyright for the first 700 or so years of movable type printing (starting in about 1041) and had been producing woodblock prints, in the absence of copyright, since at least the 6th century. Are you trying to tell me there were no books before the Statute of Anne was passed?
I have been meaning to say this for a long time: People write books for other reasons than profit. The claim might even be made that works for hire are not art at all since profit is not a motivation for true art. Whether or not that is true, people write books for lots of reasons. Some people, on occasion (like thousands of Slashdotters, for instance) might actually have something to say to the world.
The system allows for the (supposedly limited) monopoly on ideas so that artists could make a living and produce their content.
Once again, you are kidding, right? If the RIAA was paying artists well, they would not be working at your local cafe. Starbucks employs more rockstars than the affiliates of the RIAA. Without copyright, they would be doing the same jobs. We just would not have to pay for Britany Spears' breast enlargements. Let's face it, utopia is life without Eminem.
Without such laws in the first place, it's unlikely that we'd have the variety and multitude of movies, books, television shows, etc. that are out there.
This is totally incorrect (see preceding response). It is entirely likely that there would be more variety in sources of information. Imagine if there were five versions of Star Wars, and potential audience members could choose the version of the story that best suited their tastes. George Lucas made a kids version of Star Wars, which in many people's opinion (11,124 out of 36,362 to be exact) ruined the story. Maybe somebody else could make an adult version with darker characters and no JarJarBinks. Would that be variety?
Some say it's a bad thing, some say it's a good thing, but in a free society that should be all about choice, it's pretty definitive of our ideals. Lots to choose from.
The question is: Whose choice are we talking about here? The vendor's choice or the buyer's choice? It appears these days that the record industry wants to decide beforehand what the buyers should buy and feed it to them. This is totally backwards. In a free market, the vendor is subject to the whim of the buyer. The vendor is basically a beggar asking for the privilege of exchanging something for the buyer's valuable money. The buyer chooses whether or not to purchase goods or services, not the vendor. This is unless of course you advocate laws that force purchases on ordinary people to support the economy. Do you?
I have bought a few pocket computers in the last few years and become addicted to having one at least one on me at all times. What I look for are the following:
Standards compliant webbrowser.
I used to just look for a webbrowser, but now my device usually has to have a browser that supports CSS (read:
NOT pocket IE).
Ogg supported media player.
I have a sizable collection of oggs. I lose access to about half my music with a player that does not support ogg playback.
CF memory card.
Let's face it. CF is waaayyyy better than SD. CF is fast and it works most of the time in most OSs. It is possible to boot from CF cards. There is no DRM system to corrupt files. From experience, they appear to be faster than SD or MMC.
I was just looking at the Liberated Games, and the games I looked at (Aliens v. Predator and Homeworld) both require a purchased version installed in Windows or Wine to function. Further, the "source code" is not the source for the games, it is the source for an addon that allows the game to play in Linux. Being that such addons are not written by the game developers but some third party Linux enthusiast, it is not surpising these bits of code are free, but the games themselves remain proprietary and completely closed source.
So exactly what is "liberated" about this? Are these games "liberated" because you only have to install them in Windows and not play them in Windows? Or is the mere fact that one can play games in Linux a liberating experience in and of itself?
I expected some restrictions, like licencing or some similar unpalatable requirements, but I did not expect this "liberated" software to still be closed source. I am disappointed.
Perhaps the site should create a rating system for types of "liberated" if it is going to define "liberated" so liberally.
I agree. In cases like you mentioned, there is no place for that in any school. And if MIT has a documented history of treatment like that, then "historically gender-biased" is a good label.
Maybe this will piss some people off, but I just cannot see how an engineering school can be categorized as a "historically gender-biased institution". Now, before the "liberal" Witch Hunt for me starts, I would like to explain myself...
I would like nothing better than to spend the rest of my life in a relationship with a female engineer. However, I doubt that will ever happen. Why will this not happen? It probably will not happen because most women do not want to be engineers. They are not interested. They are usually interested in other subjects (very unfortunately).
If 0.01% of all the girls I met in college were engineers, well, that would be a liberal overestimate at best. Women were quite interested in many subjects. One primatology class I took had 18 girls and 3 guys. So, it is not science. It is only engineering. When I was in high school, I cannot think of a single girl that was interested in engineering. My high school was one of the largest in the city.
My question is: When women choose not to be engineers, through lack of interest or whatever (which from what I have seen appears to be the case), how can a school be blamed for having more guys than girls? How can the school be labelled "gender-biased"? Is this fair?
I have seen lots of places in society where I would freely use the term gender-bias. It just seems absurd applied to an engineering school. No engineering school can attract women who are not interested in engineering.
Slashdot Mirror
This article is a total duplicate of this article.
I really do. I cannot think of anything better than MS being broken up.
While it is interesting that webcasting is only being noticed by the terrestrial broadcasters since MS has been doing it, maybe this is fortunate. MS can take the political hit while the rest of the people on the Net go on listening to better webcasters (ones that have their own song lists and do not play commercials anyway). Rebroadcasts of terrestrial radio stations in WMP have always been sort of a joke. Who really wants to listen to music at 72Kbs? Oh, right... MS users.
Here are my questions: The DMCA CARP defined royalties do not go to broadcasters whose signal has been used, do they? They are only for artists, right? If this is true, MS gets the blame and the radio stations will not have a right to anything being streamed over the Net (until they go to Congress, of course).
"The Death of the Floppy Disk" Is this some sort of joke? Floppies have been dead for a long time. I, personally, have not had a floppy drive in my computer since around 1997 or 1998. Why do people still use these things?
The Zip Drive is now obsolete, and that was, well, 69.44 times better than a floppy drive in the late 90s (and who knows how many times faster).
Floppys have not held that "same relevance in everyday life" since the first hard drive was included with a personal computer. As soon as that happened, the floppy's relavance changed. It was all downhill from there.
Floppies suck. Period.
What does DVDs on demand mean? Especially with relation to the Tivo. It sounds like a download in the article, but that would be video on demand, not DVDs on demand. A DVD is a disk.
Or does it mean something like printing on demand where you would request a movie and they would press a disk and mail it to you? That sounds like DVDs on demand to me. However, that probably would not require a Tivo.
It is about time. All publicly funded research should be available to the public. Period.
No, I did not read your subject line. Sorry for that.
As for the woodblock printing, thousands of hours is certainly an exaggeration. According to Matteo Ricci, a Jesuit Missionary in the 16th Century, woodblocks could be carved in roughly the same amount of time it took a typesetter to set a page. Therefore, such a method would incur less expense as wood is cheaper than metal. Also, on-demand printing would be possible as the woodblocks would not have to be destroyed when a new book was to be printed.
Regardless of whatever techniques may have been subsequently invented in Europe, the fact remains that books were always more expensive in the West. Matteo Ricci commented that books in China were sold at "ridiculous prices" or something like that. And books in Chinese today are still often a fifth of the price of a comparable English book. Capitalism kept prices down in China. Monopolism kept prices up in Europe. But there was never any shortage of authors in China.
As for your final argument, yes, that would be true, but no one could make you pay for the privelege to access that software. If you wanted to work on it, no one could legally keep you away from it. There would also be no recourse if your lab assistant distributed the source of your binaries to the world. In any case, the effect would probably be somewhat similar to the GPL if not exactly like the Free BSD Licence. No one would be able to tell you what you could not access.
Are you trying to say that people will not pay people to write software without copyright? Think again. Companies with new products and new ideas are always going to need new custom applications. Everything changes, and software will have to change as everything else does.
While hardware may have reached the power and speed required for most business applications, software has not even begun to reach its limits. Computers are just at the beginning of where most people are learning what is possible. Each set of realized possibilities will create another wave of possibilites not previously imagined.
If programmers run out of jobs, it will not happen during your lifetime.
This also claims that copyright is a right. This is obviously not so. Copyright is not inalienable. It is government granted. That makes it a priviledge. Rights are something that you gain because of the fact that you are human or a citizen. True rights are irrevocable and non-transferable. I cannot give you my right to free speech, and nothing you do can take it away. Copyright is nothing like this. Copyrights are granted. They have limited terms (theoretically at least). They can be taken away. They can be sold. These are not the qualities of rights.
You and many people have to stop thinking that copyright grants you rights over other people. It grants you nothing of the kind. Copyright is around to temporarily protect one vendor from other vendors; nothing more.
So, in summary, you are saying that now that the Internet exists, copyright is obsolete. Did I get that right?
You just argued yourself in a circle. Even if that whole line of logic were completely correct, the Internet, just as you said, destroys your whole argument. An author can now publish a book that only costs him the time to write it and distribute it to the whole world. If it is good, it will be advertised by fans. All free. Where is copyright necessary in your model?
Oh, and by the way, you said:
You should have said "Before printing was invented" because Gutenberg's printing press was invented centuries after the Chinese started printing. They were not foolish enough to use metal or lithographers. They used wood. So the costs associated with printing were much less than in Europe. For centuries China printed many more books than Europe as well. This all happened in the absence of copyright which was no introduced into China until the 19th or 20th centuries.So, basically, your argument is wrong with or without the Internet.
The fact is, this is a fight about freedom. Online, copyrights are infinitely more powerful than they are in the real world. While the copyright owners cannot police what you say among your friends in realspace, they can in "cyberspace". The DMCA has been misused to fight against political dissent and corporate criticism. It has also been used to maintain monopolies in places where it should not (like printer cartrages). Years of film and news that would have been publicly accessible if it were not for copyright extensions is rotting away in lockers, doing society no good. These issues are a challenge to all of our freedom. This all or nothing argument just creates a barrier to anything getting resolved.
The GPL would not be necessary in the absence of copyright. Think about that. I am not advocating the total removal of copyright from the law books, but the GPL is a response to the draconian control that is a grotesque feature of modern copyright law in many countries. Laws are supposed to protect our freedom, not take it away.Finally, the absence of copyright is not anarchy. Unless you would also argue that the absence of monopolies is anarchy, this argument is unsupportable. Government granted monopolies are anti-capitalistic relics of European feudalism. Perhaps there are justifications for limited monopolies, but every monopoly granted by any government constrains the freedom of its citizens. Asking for a reassessment of government excesses in granting monopolies is not the same as advocating anarchy.
Most of the sharing done on P2P networks would fall under unregulated uses (NOT even fair use) in the real world. If I voluntarily gave a CD I owned to one of my friends, it would be perfectly legal. If I played it for my friend over the telephone (transmitted it), that would be legal, too. If I copied it once, that would be fair use. So, many of the elements involved in such sharing are perfectly legal.
The *AAs have claimed that many uses that are legal are not. They claim that the music or movies or whatever is their property. This is plainly not true. If someone steals a CD from a store, they have stolen property. If someone copies the music onto their harddrive, they have stolen nothing and created a legal backup. The *AAs do not own information... period.
Finally, you should think about the scope of Fair Use. Fair Use was not defined as a term in Title 17 until 1976 with the Copyright Act of that year. However, the practice of defining Fair Use by the courts has existed almost as long as copyright has existed in US law. How can this be?
Well, basically, Fair Use is what is called common law which is based on commonly accepted practices. If most people behave in such a way, the law follows the commonly accepted practice unless specifically legislated against. Fair Use was a reaction of the courts to protect people from doing obviously reasonable things with copyrighted material.
Now it is common practice to download songs. This practice has not hurt the *AAs. They have had record profits in a dismal economy. Of course they see the possibility that they could get more profits if there was some way to make people pay for all this downloading. This is called greed. So, they accuse everybody and their grandmother (literally) of "stealing" that which they do not own, and cry bloody murder about file sharing.
The truth is, the *AAs are just lying. I do not accept their version of the law. And before you choose to accept, you should consider that online all speech is governed by copyright if such arguments are accepted. Maybe you should pay a fee every time you quote someone. Imagine how much it would cost to post on Slashdot.
Just because the press says something is illegal does not make it so.
This comment by Sancho is just begging for a reply, so here goes:
And no books existed before copyright? You are kidding, right? The Statute of Anne was passed in 1710. China managed to get along without copyright for the first 700 or so years of movable type printing (starting in about 1041) and had been producing woodblock prints, in the absence of copyright, since at least the 6th century. Are you trying to tell me there were no books before the Statute of Anne was passed?I have been meaning to say this for a long time: People write books for other reasons than profit. The claim might even be made that works for hire are not art at all since profit is not a motivation for true art. Whether or not that is true, people write books for lots of reasons. Some people, on occasion (like thousands of Slashdotters, for instance) might actually have something to say to the world.
Once again, you are kidding, right? If the RIAA was paying artists well, they would not be working at your local cafe. Starbucks employs more rockstars than the affiliates of the RIAA. Without copyright, they would be doing the same jobs. We just would not have to pay for Britany Spears' breast enlargements. Let's face it, utopia is life without Eminem. This is totally incorrect (see preceding response). It is entirely likely that there would be more variety in sources of information. Imagine if there were five versions of Star Wars, and potential audience members could choose the version of the story that best suited their tastes. George Lucas made a kids version of Star Wars, which in many people's opinion (11,124 out of 36,362 to be exact) ruined the story. Maybe somebody else could make an adult version with darker characters and no Jar Jar Binks. Would that be variety? The question is: Whose choice are we talking about here? The vendor's choice or the buyer's choice? It appears these days that the record industry wants to decide beforehand what the buyers should buy and feed it to them. This is totally backwards. In a free market, the vendor is subject to the whim of the buyer. The vendor is basically a beggar asking for the privilege of exchanging something for the buyer's valuable money. The buyer chooses whether or not to purchase goods or services, not the vendor. This is unless of course you advocate laws that force purchases on ordinary people to support the economy. Do you?This site is much better. It has really been a long time. This show is older than most of the girls I meet these days.
What about the Starwars Holiday Special?
I have bought a few pocket computers in the last few years and become addicted to having one at least one on me at all times. What I look for are the following:
I was just looking at the Liberated Games, and the games I looked at (Aliens v. Predator and Homeworld) both require a purchased version installed in Windows or Wine to function. Further, the "source code" is not the source for the games, it is the source for an addon that allows the game to play in Linux. Being that such addons are not written by the game developers but some third party Linux enthusiast, it is not surpising these bits of code are free, but the games themselves remain proprietary and completely closed source.
So exactly what is "liberated" about this? Are these games "liberated" because you only have to install them in Windows and not play them in Windows? Or is the mere fact that one can play games in Linux a liberating experience in and of itself?
I expected some restrictions, like licencing or some similar unpalatable requirements, but I did not expect this "liberated" software to still be closed source. I am disappointed.
Perhaps the site should create a rating system for types of "liberated" if it is going to define "liberated" so liberally.
Danger, Will Robinson!
I agree. In cases like you mentioned, there is no place for that in any school. And if MIT has a documented history of treatment like that, then "historically gender-biased" is a good label.
Maybe this will piss some people off, but I just cannot see how an engineering school can be categorized as a "historically gender-biased institution". Now, before the "liberal" Witch Hunt for me starts, I would like to explain myself...
I would like nothing better than to spend the rest of my life in a relationship with a female engineer. However, I doubt that will ever happen. Why will this not happen? It probably will not happen because most women do not want to be engineers. They are not interested. They are usually interested in other subjects (very unfortunately).
If 0.01% of all the girls I met in college were engineers, well, that would be a liberal overestimate at best. Women were quite interested in many subjects. One primatology class I took had 18 girls and 3 guys. So, it is not science. It is only engineering. When I was in high school, I cannot think of a single girl that was interested in engineering. My high school was one of the largest in the city.
My question is: When women choose not to be engineers, through lack of interest or whatever (which from what I have seen appears to be the case), how can a school be blamed for having more guys than girls? How can the school be labelled "gender-biased"? Is this fair?
I have seen lots of places in society where I would freely use the term gender-bias. It just seems absurd applied to an engineering school. No engineering school can attract women who are not interested in engineering.
File swappers -- even if guilty of infingement -- are NOT stealing. Period.