Firstly, to clarify my original point: I don't think their natural rights were necessarily violated. HOWEVER, it is definitely *a free speech issue* that must be considered, and carefully considered. A blanket statement that free speech is never an issue in commercial media is completely unjustified.
Shows are cancelled all the time:
If they are cancelled because they do not have an audience, that is legitimate.
If they are cancelled because of pressure from advertisers, that is censorship. Thus, Don Imus was censored.
Let us start from basic principles.
You have a natural right to communicate with your fellow citizens to the limit of technological and economic feasibility, in a market of ideas. If the government artificially raises (or lowers, through subsidy) the cost of such communications, those who benefit from those restrictions or subsidies are answerable to the public interest.
The FCC officially recognizes this, although their enforcement is a pathetic joke thanks to the lobbying power of the corporate media.
This is not a socialist statement: you have the right to participate equally in the marketplace of ideas, which is a market (market market market), from those who produce content, to their audiences (market!). MARKET! If the government meddles in this market in such a way that equal participation becomes impossible, that is a violation of our natural rights. Recall that a true market must have an effectively infinite number of participants, with a low barrier of entry or new participants.
The fact that 90% of supposed free market liberals do not seem to believe this reveals the depths of cynicism to which they have sunk - to an adherent of liberal philosophy, the above statement should not be (MARKET!) controversial.
Why does XM radio exist? *Completely distinct* from the government charter of the institution itself, you have a government charter for the entire business model - they couldn't stay in business if the government didn't actively prevent other people from decoding the incoming satellite signals without paying some kind of government imposed fee.
Another basic assertion that should not be non-controversial to liberals: government licenses and privileges (including every kind of intellectual property) is *not* property, and no property rights attach to the person who owns it. If you get a government license of any sort, it is supposed to be in the public interest, and you do *not* have a *natural right* to do whatever you want with the associated government privileges.
The same is far more true for terrestrial radio, which doesn't just depend on a copyrighted (or whatever) decoding key, but on the government actively intervening to prevent ordinary citizens from setting up "pirate" radio systems, even in unlicensed spectra.
This is in *no sense* a requirement of the underlying technology - when I was a teenager in California I helped put together pirate radio stations. Everyone of us could afford one, they're very cheap. I suspect that a similar, true market would be technologically feasible with satellite broadcasting.
I think that covers all relevant responses to my original post - if not, point out where. If the thread expires I'll move it to my journal.
No. You're dead wrong. It logically impossible. Your right to communicate to your audience is incompatible with whoever is providing the means of said communications right to decide what goes on the medium and what doesn't.
You only have such a right in the absence of government support or license, let alone a government granted monopoly.
The only thing that keeps XM radio in existence is government interference - at dozens of levels and in dozens of different ways, including their preventing me from decrypting signals that XM radio is flinging through the air, but that's just a start.
If the means of communication are under monopolistic control, those who happen to control them have no more *right* to censor the content than the King has a *right* to try people.
The freedom of the press does not mean the freedom to move bits of metal around. It means, you have the right not to have the government interfere with your efforts to communicate with a wider audience. As a question of natural rights, you have the right not to have other people interfere with you either.
Having a monopoly is not a violation of anyone's natural rights. Also, XM might not be a person, but it is owned by people who do have rights, so the tool they use to express their collective will is also treated as if it had rights.
Likewise the government - does the government have rights?
In any case, while having a monopoly is not a violation of anyone's natural rights, using that monopoly to stifle communication most certainly is.
To take the printing press analogy: anyone who wishes to do so can, for a reasonable and affordable cost, buy (or put together) their own printing press. You have a natural right to do this and a natural right to print up whatever you want - Jefferson recognized this as self-evident.
Similarly, in the absence of federal intervention, anyone who wished to do so could have their own radio broadcast tower (they're extremely cheap at this point) or, for that matter, a channel on a satellite.
Why do companies like Clearchannel and XM satellite radio even *exist*? Because of government regulation and interference only.
So we have a collectivist entity created by government charter (a private corporation), and given by the government an effective monopoly over a means of communication, and you say that it does not violate my natural rights if they censor the content the broadcast?
Firstly, to say that this isn't government censorship is deeply dishonest.
Secondly, to say that it isn't a violation of my natural rights is bollocks, as with the printing press analogy. If, for technical reasons, all of the printing presses had to be operated by government-licensed centers, it would be a violation of the natural rights of everyone if those centers discriminated what they would print because *they* didn't like it.
The owners of the media have absolutely no obligation to carry what you or anyone else says.
I disagree. If there are an infinite number of media outlets (as there should be) no individual media outlet has any such obligation.
However, when the media is not a market, but some form of oligopoly (especially where government granted), the media has an obligation to provide an outlet to anyone who has an audience.
They have *no legal obligation*, under current law, it is true.
If you *have an audience*, you have a *natural right* to have what you say printed/broadcast/distributed. If no-one wants to read what you say, that's a completely different situation. These guys obviously have an audience; if no-one will carry them, their *natural rights* are being violated (not to mention the *natural rights* of their audience.)
Secondly, XM radio does not have property rights, or rights of any kind, because it is not a person. It's also a monopoly.
I'm discussing *natural rights*, so all the legal precedent is completely irrelevant - including all of the legal precedents that give legal rights to non-persons. I am making a *moral* arugment, not a *legal* one.
If your *natural right* to freedom of speech is violated, then it becomes a freedom of speech issue, regardless of whether some court has decided that this doesn't violate your *legal rights*.
We are endowed with natural rights as an intrinsic property of our human nature. The constitution may or may not *recognize* these rights, and it may or may not recognize them in the full scope to which they intrinsically apply - however, a political prisoner in China has the *same rights* as you are I, although his government may not recognize them. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_rights
If those who own the printing presses censor what the rest of us write, we do not have freedom of the press.
If those who own the medium of communication censor what we say, we do not have freedom of speech.
In the market context, freedom of the press is dependent on the existence of a large group of publishers, so that if one publisher refuses to carry what you wish to publish uncensored, you can find another that will. Essentially, this requires a true market (an effectively infinite number of players, low barriers to entry, etc.)
If the fruit flies have free will, they can choose to DO EVIL.
And they should.
They've been slacking off! We humans have used our free will to spread destruction and mayhem over the whole earth. Next time I go out for the weekend and forget half of a mango, I expect to come back to a miniature third reich on my kitchen counter. I want to see the fruit flies herding gnats into concentration camps and gassing them. I want to see them goose-stepping their way into my neighbours flat. I want to see little tiny fruitfly propoganda posters extolling the virtues of fruit fly fuhrer and fruit fly folk.
After all, what's the point of having free will if you don't use it?
Evil little bastards will probably disappoint me, though.
"whitehouse.org" is the name of the organization that owns "georgewbush.org", which is what Rove's staffers evidently confused with "georgewbush.com" which is an RNC thing.
So "whitehouse.org", which does exist but is a parody site, has the e-mails, because it runs georgewbush.org.
It seems to me that even if georgewbush.com (run by the RNC) really has deleted the e-mails, would still have logs? Which could be correlated with the headers for the e-mails which are in the posession of whitehouse.org?
This is slashdot, so we should be addressing the technical question first and foremost.
I'm a biologist who does mathematical methods stuff - so this is not my area. But what we (you) *should* be discussing is: how can we prove that the e-mails are (or are not) genuine?
Presumably, whitehouse.org has saved all of the routing information for the e-mails they kept. Can we use that information - along with whatever still lives in the logs of the intermediary routers, to at least verify that the e-mail was sent from the addresses claimed in the headers? That doesn't absolutely prove that whitehouse.org didn't mess with the content - but it'd be enough to satisfy me, at least.
Sure, the corporate sector covers things with useless LEDs - even though they are well known to kill children.
That's a serious threat - we're talking hundreds of casualties a year - I'm not trying to minimize it.
But what about terrible puns like the one he uses? Careful, oh ye hunter of monsters, lest you should become a monster!
Defenders of this kind of terrible pun claim that they are essential in the war on gaudy light displays - but, actually, they're a *gift* to the tacky-ists, who were on the run before the forces of post-modernism before the author resorted to his horrible pun. Furthermore, puns like this have killed *twenty times* as many innocent children as have LEDs. How is that proportional?
If we're serious about eliminating blue LEDs, we know how to do it - and the first step is to eliminate horrible puns like this one.
Leaving aside the question of whether anyone should do this at all, I'm going to discuss how it should be done, if anyone were to do it.
Firstly, grants should be provided on a programmer-by-programmer basis, not a project-by-project basis. This addresses some of the issues that came up with payed Debian developers.
The patrons should establish a committee, which should evaluate the applications of individual programmers, and provide grants (similar to those already given to artists) so that those people can contribute to open source projects full time; whatever projects they wish. Once you have a grant, you need to demonstrate productivity periodically to keep it.
If we are interested in benefiting society as a whole, the applications should form a single pool, and the best developers should get money regardless of what they've been working on.
That's unfortunately unlikely - the patrons of this thing (let's be honest, presumably corporate america) care a *lot* about what people do and do not work on. So, they're going to want to provide grants for developers working in specific areas. Invariably, and as with the NIH which works the same way, this will mean that some second-rate developers get money and some competent developers do not, because the second-rate developers go to a funding section which has more money. Based on the experience of the NIH, this is not even a good way to effect your research goals - but it's just about the only form of control the patrons could exert, however ineffective it would be, so they wouldn't give it up.
Finally, at a certain point you should tenure people - it can take ten years, that's fine. Firstly, job security is a great motivator, even if it takes a while - you'll get a lot more people applying for these grants if they eventually mature into a retirement package. Secondly, someone who's been working on OSS for long enough to get a grant (probably several years at least) and then kept it for a decade, probably contributes more mentoring and otherwise guiding the entire endeavor than they do writing drivers.
I should say, I don't find this to be an odd proposition at all. Historically, the arts and sciences have flourished as a result of patronage - shouldn't be any different today.
And when I get up before my Congregation and advocate the genetic improvement of the human race, I could be hauled off and jailed for thought crime just because I don't want my grandchildren to have six fingers and a nictating membrane!
This is a clear violation of my religious freedom, as well as my freedom of conscience.
I never said that businesses could afford to ignore Google. Restaurants here in NYC can't afford to ignore what the Zagat says about them.
What I'm saying is that this should not open Google (or Zagat) to any requirement for editorial transparency. If people trust information source A, and information source A doesn't recommend you, well, that may suck, but you should not have any recourse to demand an explanation - because your *potential customers* have the right to go to any source of information they want for advice, and your *potential customers* are not forced to use google.
This may in turn force businesses to do all sorts of things, but that's capitalism for you - your business does not have a right to succeed.
Add to this: do not hire idiot consultants to raise your pagerank.
Which is not technical advice but should cover whatever fool stuff someone might try.
I have to say, I don't have a lot of sympathy for the guy. He tried to cheat, and when it backfired, he goes crying because he can't get un-blacklisted. Well, sucks to be him, but it certainly serves google's purposes (and the health of the internet as a whole) well.
Pre-emptive strike: I believe, in principle, on strong public oversight of corporate decision-making.
The *exception* is anything that might be considered an editorial decision, the dispensation of advice, etc. If it's not a tortious lie, they have a right to say (to recommend, to blacklist) whatever/whomever they want, because I have a right to choose to whom I will listen.
If you don't like what google does, you don't have to use it - but you can't force them to change what-they-say because you don't like it that other people listen to them.
Yeah, because he'd be contributing so much more to society as a bloodsucker than as a photographer.
I remember my aunt - who used to be a fashion photographer - got similarly ripped off *repeatedly* by different companies. Many of them were companies with whom she'd do business, they'd keep using the photographs after the license they'd buy had expired, that sort of thing. She eventually made a fair amount of money off the lawsuits, but it was touch and go for a while, and what with one thing and another I think she's more or less given up professional photography.
It's a real problem with American law, especially copyright - in order for creators to actually benefit from the protection, they basically need to practice law on the side. OTOH, powerful groups with many lawyers and deep pockets can use the threat of litigation as a club even when they have no case.
If anyone else tried something like this, their hard drives would be seized and then gone over with tunneling electron microscopes to find recently switched bits.
What we need is an open censorware suite that is free for anyone to use and works well. I started to write one ("Oxymoron" I called it) but I got nowhere. Someone who knows something about browser programming, or the internet explorer plug-in API (as opposed to, say, bioinformatics and machine learning) should do this.
On the subject of librarians: a) They are technologically savvy, at least when it comes to research tools. They'll use an open alternative if one exists.
b) They are politically motivated. They absolutely despise the entire censorware industry and they will go to considerable lengths to avoid giving those bottom feeders money.
c) The organizations they work for are too cash-strapped to force the librarians to keep spending money on something they demonstrably don't need.
The upshot is that an open censorship program would not only be used, it would throttle the monetary impetus behind library censorship at the root.
If someone else has already done this, kindly point out in a reply so I can stop making a fool of myself:).
If the only stuff you read is US propoganda, you'd think that Kim Jong Il is some kind of tyrant.
What we don't know here in the west - because our massive corporate overlords don't want us to know it! - is that Kim Jong Il has long been a champion of freedom of expression and fundamnental human rights, not only in the DPRK, but on the world stage. Given his principled belief in freedom of expression (a right which, if universally protected on principle, obviously renders copyright moot in a digital era) it's no surprise that he would intervene to ensure that the Pirate Bay could stay in operation.
Just because the guy's funny looking and kinda weird, we allow this Thomas Jefferson of the far east to be demonized in all of our media. As Nerds, you'd think we could look past his obsession with campy movies, use of hair gel, and love of inter-racial threeways - after all, we're just as quirky, or we wouldn't be on slashdot. It's a real shame how we perpetrate these kinds of stereotypes against this stalwart champion of liberty.
It simply ought to be illegal for a business to store your credit card number (or bank account number.) In fact, it ought to be possible - especially on the internet - to do business without even disclosing your credit card number. The business opens a connection to Visa, and gives your browser the info it needs to complete the transaction from your end.
If people want to bill you every month - they should send *you* an account number (which they could make easy to do, as above) and you instruct your bank/lender to send them $ every month. If you want to cancel their service, you stop paying them. "Cancellation charges", which are a major pain (and a violation of basic economic principles, to boot) should be illegal.
At this rate the problem would be more or less solved. All of the security stuff (verifying the IP address where the purchase originates, for example) could be handled by the credit card companies themselves.
Obviously businesses would be wildly opposed to this, because: a) Many of them want to be able to bill you until they decide to stop. 90% of the time, they can extract an extra $50 per customer just by making cancelling their service a pain. b) They want it to be convenient for you to give them money. Among other things, they really want grandma to be able to buy things repeatedly after only entering her credit card number once. c) They want to store all of the data on you they can, on general principle.
As was discussed elsewhere, they'd require you to sign away copyright to whatever you turned in as a condition of taking the course - no-one is forcing you to enroll, thus no duress.
Yeah, *if* they required you to sign anything after enrolling, it'd count as signing under duress.
Anyone who isn't a terrorist receives some kind of permanent identification - say, on the forehead or on the hand - which would enable you to engage in these transactions without concern that the person you're dealing with is a terrorist, drug dealer, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Firstly, to clarify my original point: I don't think their natural rights were necessarily violated. HOWEVER, it is definitely *a free speech issue* that must be considered, and carefully considered. A blanket statement that free speech is never an issue in commercial media is completely unjustified.
Shows are cancelled all the time:
If they are cancelled because they do not have an audience, that is legitimate.
If they are cancelled because of pressure from advertisers, that is censorship. Thus, Don Imus was censored.
Let us start from basic principles.
You have a natural right to communicate with your fellow citizens to the limit of technological and economic feasibility, in a market of ideas. If the government artificially raises (or lowers, through subsidy) the cost of such communications, those who benefit from those restrictions or subsidies are answerable to the public interest.
The FCC officially recognizes this, although their enforcement is a pathetic joke thanks to the lobbying power of the corporate media.
This is not a socialist statement: you have the right to participate equally in the marketplace of ideas, which is a market (market market market), from those who produce content, to their audiences (market!). MARKET! If the government meddles in this market in such a way that equal participation becomes impossible, that is a violation of our natural rights. Recall that a true market must have an effectively infinite number of participants, with a low barrier of entry or new participants.
The fact that 90% of supposed free market liberals do not seem to believe this reveals the depths of cynicism to which they have sunk - to an adherent of liberal philosophy, the above statement should not be (MARKET!) controversial.
Why does XM radio exist? *Completely distinct* from the government charter of the institution itself, you have a government charter for the entire business model - they couldn't stay in business if the government didn't actively prevent other people from decoding the incoming satellite signals without paying some kind of government imposed fee.
Another basic assertion that should not be non-controversial to liberals: government licenses and privileges (including every kind of intellectual property) is *not* property, and no property rights attach to the person who owns it. If you get a government license of any sort, it is supposed to be in the public interest, and you do *not* have a *natural right* to do whatever you want with the associated government privileges.
The same is far more true for terrestrial radio, which doesn't just depend on a copyrighted (or whatever) decoding key, but on the government actively intervening to prevent ordinary citizens from setting up "pirate" radio systems, even in unlicensed spectra.
This is in *no sense* a requirement of the underlying technology - when I was a teenager in California I helped put together pirate radio stations. Everyone of us could afford one, they're very cheap. I suspect that a similar, true market would be technologically feasible with satellite broadcasting.
I think that covers all relevant responses to my original post - if not, point out where. If the thread expires I'll move it to my journal.
No. You're dead wrong. It logically impossible. Your right to communicate to your audience is incompatible with whoever is providing the means of said communications right to decide what goes on the medium and what doesn't.
You only have such a right in the absence of government support or license, let alone a government granted monopoly.
The only thing that keeps XM radio in existence is government interference - at dozens of levels and in dozens of different ways, including their preventing me from decrypting signals that XM radio is flinging through the air, but that's just a start.
If the means of communication are under monopolistic control, those who happen to control them have no more *right* to censor the content than the King has a *right* to try people.
I didn't say you had the right to have it printed *for free* - it's true that freedom of the press does not mean you don't have to pay for ink.
But if there is no avenue on which you can publish something that is viable from a sales standpoint, your natural rights are being violated.
Oh, really?
The freedom of the press does not mean the freedom to move bits of metal around. It means, you have the right not to have the government interfere with your efforts to communicate with a wider audience. As a question of natural rights, you have the right not to have other people interfere with you either.
Having a monopoly is not a violation of anyone's natural rights. Also, XM might not be a person, but it is owned by people who do have rights, so the tool they use to express their collective will is also treated as if it had rights.
Likewise the government - does the government have rights?
In any case, while having a monopoly is not a violation of anyone's natural rights, using that monopoly to stifle communication most certainly is.
To take the printing press analogy: anyone who wishes to do so can, for a reasonable and affordable cost, buy (or put together) their own printing press. You have a natural right to do this and a natural right to print up whatever you want - Jefferson recognized this as self-evident.
Similarly, in the absence of federal intervention, anyone who wished to do so could have their own radio broadcast tower (they're extremely cheap at this point) or, for that matter, a channel on a satellite.
Why do companies like Clearchannel and XM satellite radio even *exist*? Because of government regulation and interference only.
So we have a collectivist entity created by government charter (a private corporation), and given by the government an effective monopoly over a means of communication, and you say that it does not violate my natural rights if they censor the content the broadcast?
Firstly, to say that this isn't government censorship is deeply dishonest.
Secondly, to say that it isn't a violation of my natural rights is bollocks, as with the printing press analogy. If, for technical reasons, all of the printing presses had to be operated by government-licensed centers, it would be a violation of the natural rights of everyone if those centers discriminated what they would print because *they* didn't like it.
The owners of the media have absolutely no obligation to carry what you or anyone else says.
I disagree. If there are an infinite number of media outlets (as there should be) no individual media outlet has any such obligation.
However, when the media is not a market, but some form of oligopoly (especially where government granted), the media has an obligation to provide an outlet to anyone who has an audience.
They have *no legal obligation*, under current law, it is true.
Refer to my sibling response.
Did you actually read what I wrote?
If you *have an audience*, you have a *natural right* to have what you say printed/broadcast/distributed. If no-one wants to read what you say, that's a completely different situation. These guys obviously have an audience; if no-one will carry them, their *natural rights* are being violated (not to mention the *natural rights* of their audience.)
Secondly, XM radio does not have property rights, or rights of any kind, because it is not a person. It's also a monopoly.
I'm discussing *natural rights*, so all the legal precedent is completely irrelevant - including all of the legal precedents that give legal rights to non-persons. I am making a *moral* arugment, not a *legal* one.
If your *natural right* to freedom of speech is violated, then it becomes a freedom of speech issue, regardless of whether some court has decided that this doesn't violate your *legal rights*.
We are endowed with natural rights as an intrinsic property of our human nature. The constitution may or may not *recognize* these rights, and it may or may not recognize them in the full scope to which they intrinsically apply - however, a political prisoner in China has the *same rights* as you are I, although his government may not recognize them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_rights
If those who own the printing presses censor what the rest of us write, we do not have freedom of the press.
If those who own the medium of communication censor what we say, we do not have freedom of speech.
In the market context, freedom of the press is dependent on the existence of a large group of publishers, so that if one publisher refuses to carry what you wish to publish uncensored, you can find another that will. Essentially, this requires a true market (an effectively infinite number of players, low barriers to entry, etc.)
Radio broadcasting is not a market.
If the fruit flies have free will, they can choose to DO EVIL.
And they should.
They've been slacking off! We humans have used our free will to spread destruction and mayhem over the whole earth. Next time I go out for the weekend and forget half of a mango, I expect to come back to a miniature third reich on my kitchen counter. I want to see the fruit flies herding gnats into concentration camps and gassing them. I want to see them goose-stepping their way into my neighbours flat. I want to see little tiny fruitfly propoganda posters extolling the virtues of fruit fly fuhrer and fruit fly folk.
After all, what's the point of having free will if you don't use it?
Evil little bastards will probably disappoint me, though.
Thanks for all the various clarification, but:
"whitehouse.org" is the name of the organization that owns "georgewbush.org", which is what Rove's staffers evidently confused with "georgewbush.com" which is an RNC thing.
So "whitehouse.org", which does exist but is a parody site, has the e-mails, because it runs georgewbush.org.
It seems to me that even if georgewbush.com (run by the RNC) really has deleted the e-mails, would still have logs? Which could be correlated with the headers for the e-mails which are in the posession of whitehouse.org?
This is slashdot, so we should be addressing the technical question first and foremost.
I'm a biologist who does mathematical methods stuff - so this is not my area. But what we (you) *should* be discussing is: how can we prove that the e-mails are (or are not) genuine?
Presumably, whitehouse.org has saved all of the routing information for the e-mails they kept. Can we use that information - along with whatever still lives in the logs of the intermediary routers, to at least verify that the e-mail was sent from the addresses claimed in the headers? That doesn't absolutely prove that whitehouse.org didn't mess with the content - but it'd be enough to satisfy me, at least.
Sure, the corporate sector covers things with useless LEDs - even though they are well known to kill children.
That's a serious threat - we're talking hundreds of casualties a year - I'm not trying to minimize it.
But what about terrible puns like the one he uses? Careful, oh ye hunter of monsters, lest you should become a monster!
Defenders of this kind of terrible pun claim that they are essential in the war on gaudy light displays - but, actually, they're a *gift* to the tacky-ists, who were on the run before the forces of post-modernism before the author resorted to his horrible pun. Furthermore, puns like this have killed *twenty times* as many innocent children as have LEDs. How is that proportional?
If we're serious about eliminating blue LEDs, we know how to do it - and the first step is to eliminate horrible puns like this one.
Piers Anthony is the Hitler of the 21st century.
Leaving aside the question of whether anyone should do this at all, I'm going to discuss how it should be done, if anyone were to do it.
Firstly, grants should be provided on a programmer-by-programmer basis, not a project-by-project basis. This addresses some of the issues that came up with payed Debian developers.
The patrons should establish a committee, which should evaluate the applications of individual programmers, and provide grants (similar to those already given to artists) so that those people can contribute to open source projects full time; whatever projects they wish. Once you have a grant, you need to demonstrate productivity periodically to keep it.
If we are interested in benefiting society as a whole, the applications should form a single pool, and the best developers should get money regardless of what they've been working on.
That's unfortunately unlikely - the patrons of this thing (let's be honest, presumably corporate america) care a *lot* about what people do and do not work on. So, they're going to want to provide grants for developers working in specific areas. Invariably, and as with the NIH which works the same way, this will mean that some second-rate developers get money and some competent developers do not, because the second-rate developers go to a funding section which has more money. Based on the experience of the NIH, this is not even a good way to effect your research goals - but it's just about the only form of control the patrons could exert, however ineffective it would be, so they wouldn't give it up.
Finally, at a certain point you should tenure people - it can take ten years, that's fine. Firstly, job security is a great motivator, even if it takes a while - you'll get a lot more people applying for these grants if they eventually mature into a retirement package. Secondly, someone who's been working on OSS for long enough to get a grant (probably several years at least) and then kept it for a decade, probably contributes more mentoring and otherwise guiding the entire endeavor than they do writing drivers.
I should say, I don't find this to be an odd proposition at all. Historically, the arts and sciences have flourished as a result of patronage - shouldn't be any different today.
And when I get up before my Congregation and advocate the genetic improvement of the human race, I could be hauled off and jailed for thought crime just because I don't want my grandchildren to have six fingers and a nictating membrane!
This is a clear violation of my religious freedom, as well as my freedom of conscience.
(In case my ham-fisted irony is somehow lost on you: http://www.bloggernews.net/16539)
That's not the only party of IRC seeking academic legitimacy. Expect the following in the near future:
- Proceedings of the National Association for the Advancement of Kiddie Porn
- Transactions in Piracy
- Nigerian Finance Quarterly
- Kawaii! Anime of journal from translate poorly, for sure yes or else!
- Trends in Russian Credit Card Management
- Journal of Interactive Marketing
Oh, wait, this already exists.
54 68 65 20 52 49 41 41 20 69 73 20 67 61 79 21
works better.
I never said that businesses could afford to ignore Google. Restaurants here in NYC can't afford to ignore what the Zagat says about them.
What I'm saying is that this should not open Google (or Zagat) to any requirement for editorial transparency. If people trust information source A, and information source A doesn't recommend you, well, that may suck, but you should not have any recourse to demand an explanation - because your *potential customers* have the right to go to any source of information they want for advice, and your *potential customers* are not forced to use google.
This may in turn force businesses to do all sorts of things, but that's capitalism for you - your business does not have a right to succeed.
Add to this:
do not hire idiot consultants to raise your pagerank.
Which is not technical advice but should cover whatever fool stuff someone might try.
I have to say, I don't have a lot of sympathy for the guy. He tried to cheat, and when it backfired, he goes crying because he can't get un-blacklisted. Well, sucks to be him, but it certainly serves google's purposes (and the health of the internet as a whole) well.
Pre-emptive strike: I believe, in principle, on strong public oversight of corporate decision-making.
The *exception* is anything that might be considered an editorial decision, the dispensation of advice, etc. If it's not a tortious lie, they have a right to say (to recommend, to blacklist) whatever/whomever they want, because I have a right to choose to whom I will listen.
If you don't like what google does, you don't have to use it - but you can't force them to change what-they-say because you don't like it that other people listen to them.
Yeah, because he'd be contributing so much more to society as a bloodsucker than as a photographer.
I remember my aunt - who used to be a fashion photographer - got similarly ripped off *repeatedly* by different companies. Many of them were companies with whom she'd do business, they'd keep using the photographs after the license they'd buy had expired, that sort of thing. She eventually made a fair amount of money off the lawsuits, but it was touch and go for a while, and what with one thing and another I think she's more or less given up professional photography.
It's a real problem with American law, especially copyright - in order for creators to actually benefit from the protection, they basically need to practice law on the side. OTOH, powerful groups with many lawyers and deep pockets can use the threat of litigation as a club even when they have no case.
4445 is cute and all, but 3472? Definite MILF.
If anyone else tried something like this, their hard drives would be seized and then gone over with tunneling electron microscopes to find recently switched bits.
So, that's what Congress should do.
What we need is an open censorware suite that is free for anyone to use and works well. I started to write one ("Oxymoron" I called it) but I got nowhere. Someone who knows something about browser programming, or the internet explorer plug-in API (as opposed to, say, bioinformatics and machine learning) should do this.
:).
On the subject of librarians:
a) They are technologically savvy, at least when it comes to research tools. They'll use an open alternative if one exists.
b) They are politically motivated. They absolutely despise the entire censorware industry and they will go to considerable lengths to avoid giving those bottom feeders money.
c) The organizations they work for are too cash-strapped to force the librarians to keep spending money on something they demonstrably don't need.
The upshot is that an open censorship program would not only be used, it would throttle the monetary impetus behind library censorship at the root.
If someone else has already done this, kindly point out in a reply so I can stop making a fool of myself
If the only stuff you read is US propoganda, you'd think that Kim Jong Il is some kind of tyrant.
What we don't know here in the west - because our massive corporate overlords don't want us to know it! - is that Kim Jong Il has long been a champion of freedom of expression and fundamnental human rights, not only in the DPRK, but on the world stage. Given his principled belief in freedom of expression (a right which, if universally protected on principle, obviously renders copyright moot in a digital era) it's no surprise that he would intervene to ensure that the Pirate Bay could stay in operation.
Just because the guy's funny looking and kinda weird, we allow this Thomas Jefferson of the far east to be demonized in all of our media. As Nerds, you'd think we could look past his obsession with campy movies, use of hair gel, and love of inter-racial threeways - after all, we're just as quirky, or we wouldn't be on slashdot. It's a real shame how we perpetrate these kinds of stereotypes against this stalwart champion of liberty.
It simply ought to be illegal for a business to store your credit card number (or bank account number.) In fact, it ought to be possible - especially on the internet - to do business without even disclosing your credit card number. The business opens a connection to Visa, and gives your browser the info it needs to complete the transaction from your end.
If people want to bill you every month - they should send *you* an account number (which they could make easy to do, as above) and you instruct your bank/lender to send them $ every month. If you want to cancel their service, you stop paying them. "Cancellation charges", which are a major pain (and a violation of basic economic principles, to boot) should be illegal.
At this rate the problem would be more or less solved. All of the security stuff (verifying the IP address where the purchase originates, for example) could be handled by the credit card companies themselves.
Obviously businesses would be wildly opposed to this, because:
a) Many of them want to be able to bill you until they decide to stop. 90% of the time, they can extract an extra $50 per customer just by making cancelling their service a pain.
b) They want it to be convenient for you to give them money. Among other things, they really want grandma to be able to buy things repeatedly after only entering her credit card number once.
c) They want to store all of the data on you they can, on general principle.
As was discussed elsewhere, they'd require you to sign away copyright to whatever you turned in as a condition of taking the course - no-one is forcing you to enroll, thus no duress.
Yeah, *if* they required you to sign anything after enrolling, it'd count as signing under duress.
Instead of going opt-out, we go opt-in.
Anyone who isn't a terrorist receives some kind of permanent identification - say, on the forehead or on the hand - which would enable you to engage in these transactions without concern that the person you're dealing with is a terrorist, drug dealer, etc.