It fits in reasonably well with being a Hindu, since Hinduism contains both a God (the Brahma) and lesser gods. Most religions have a concept of a supreme God who has created everything, even many of the polytheistic religions.
Mahayana Buddhism, the largest branch of the religion, believe in the Cosmic Buddha, a supreme being who is the origin of everything, which IMHO is just another version of God.
True Satanists (those who aren't just atheists with a Satanist philosophy) believe in God, but you're right that they don't trust in God.
Everyone who knows their history realise that the specific expression "In God we trust" have a Christian origin, though. It may seem like a small detail, but imagine for a moment the roles were reversed. "Allah" is just the Arabic word for "God", but I don't think most Christians would be ok if the American coins had "Allah is great" imprinted on them.
*shrug* If the Jewish and Christian God are the same, so is the Muslim God. Mohammed clearly states that Allah is the God of Abraham, the Jewish patriarch. But all three religions have different ideas about what properties God has.
If you define God as "the god who is the origin of everything", then most religions have the same God. One of the few exceptions are the Latter Day Saints, who define their God as a being who has created all matter in this universe (but not all there is).
P.S. I don't think a minor donation would make much practical difference either, I'm just pointing out there's no fundamental difference between a monetary donation and an endorsement on the back of coins.
Sure, maybe it doesn't cost the taxpayers anything extra, but it does help establishing a certain religion (Christianity), as effective as a minor donation would.
I know "God" can also refer to the Jewish God, the Muslim God, the Brahmanistic God, etc, but since the law is mainly written by Christians in reverence to their Christian God, people can infer which God is meant.
Hinduism is actually a name for all the different traditional beliefs in India, not a single religion. India has traditionally been very religiously tolerant, so there haven't been a need to establish clear boundaries between religions or to unify them into a single belief. People have been able to mix and match their beliefs as they see fit. Much like New Age, actually.
One of the hinduic beliefs is Brahmanism, which is a more or less monotheistic religion for the more educated or intellectually inclined Indians. I wonder if it might be Brahmanists who have been complaining about the text books in American schools.
I'd go even further... since the phrase has been placed there by Christians, in respect to the Christian God, people can infer from context that the motto refers to the Christian God, not just a generic deistic God.
Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland and Iceland... that's all I know of.
(Sweden is predominantly Protestant on paper, but that's only because people baptise their children in church out of tradition, and it automatically makes the children members. The children later have to make an active choice to leave the church, and most don't bother, even if their beliefs are atheists.)
You may have a rosy view of atheism because you live in a place where most people are (semi-)religious, and those who are atheists have made an active choice and have likely put more thought into it than those around them.
Where I live (Sweden), atheism is the default position, and the people who go around actively calling themselves atheists are often obnoxious types who try to push their views on others. For example, they like elaborating on how stupid and irrational other beliefs are.
"Establish" and "endorse" are synonyms (that is, they don't mean exactly the same, but may be interchangeable, depending on context).
For example, in the sentence, "Henri VIII dissolved the monasteries in England, Scotland and Wales to establish the Protestant church", "establish" can be replaced with "endorse".
"with respect to the establishment of religion" means "having to do with the establishment of religion". I.e, a law doesn't have to actually establish a religion to be unconstitutional; it only needs to be related to it. I take this to mean that a law is unconstitutional if it goes some way towards establishing a religion.
That being said, the expression "In God we trust" is so vague and fits in with so many religions, it's doubtful it goes any way at all towards establishing a religion.
The "respect" found in the 1st Amendment is not "showing respect for", it is "regarding" or "with respect to". The motto "In God We Trust" does not establish a religion, so it cannot be a law "respecting the establishment of religion".
So if a law was passed that required everyone to pay a small tax to, say, the Catholic Church, that'd be constitutional because paying tax to the Catholic Church doesn't establish a religion?
I think the 1st amendment was intended to be interpreted a little wider than that, to include at least all laws which explicitly favoured one religious view over others.
Yeah, guilty to a small formal error. The NSA threw everything they could at him in retaliation for criticising them, and the only thing they could make stick was keeping a few insignificant documents he shouldn't have on his home computer (together with all the other work-related documents which he was allowed to have on it).
What exactly makes you think Drake did something wrong?
From what I've read about the case so far, it seems he pissed off some high people at the NSA by publicly criticising the Trailblazer project (or rather, its successor) for being ineffective, wasteful and unnecessarily invading people's privacy. The NSA subsequently raided his house to find work-related documents on his home computer, so they could accuse him of being careless with classified information. I.e, what the NSA indicted him for had nothing to do with what he did to piss them off. They were just trying to find something to pin on him. Drake wasn't indicted for "leaking" documents, only of keeping classified documents on his home computer.
The NSA had a hard time finding anything Drake had done wrong, so they employed some tortured logic in order to indict him, including claiming that the documents marked Declassified should have been classified and that Drake should have understood it. And now it turns out almost nothing of it held up in court.
When you "purchase" Microsoft software (and certainly once you click the "I AGREE TO THE ABOVE" box during install), you have entered into an agreement with them.
True, but that only applies to the purchaser, not to any third parties. Someone who finds, borrows or is gifted someone else's copy is not bound by the license agreement. That's why copyright has to be laid out in law - contracts are not enough to enforce it.
More to the point, if we abolished copyright, contracts wouldn't prevent anyone from downloading and using software from Pirate Bay, since there's no contract present in that situation.
Shrink-wrap agreements are only valid in the context of a purchase - they're considered part of the purchase agreement, since you have the right to return the goods for a refund within a specified time if you don't agree to the terms. Clicking on an "I agree" button is not in itself a contract - a contract requires the other party to offer something in return.
You could argue that its a shrinkwrap license, and not enforceable, but that gets a LOT less compelling when you read Slashdot and know darn well what the contract says and that it is a part of the conditions of use (and again, you have to click "i agree", or intentionally bypass that page with a hack).
And part of that agreement is that you do not retain full rights to the software.
Sure, I know roughly what the shrinkwrap agreement will say before I purchase the product, so it doesn't come as a surprise to me. But I'm only obliged to follow it if I enter into some sort of agreement with the publisher. If someone lends or gifts me a copy of, say, Microsoft Windows, it's perfectly legal for me to reverse engineer it, rent or lend the physical copy to someone, work around technical limitations in the software, and so on, since I'm not bound by the license agreement. Copyright only prevents me from making copies of or publishing the software.
Security experts often reverse-engineer other's closed-source software without permission when they look for vulnerabilities in it.
By the laws of economy that have been around from time immemorial, if you make a product and others obtain it, you have a right to compensation (both for the good itself, and for your worksmanship). Anything else has always been considered theft, and detrimental to the economy, as it discourages innovation and work.
Not true. Copyright has only existed since the 17th century (and at first only applied to books). Before then, a writer simply had to offer his manuscript to a publisher and get paid for first publication. Subsequent publications were often uncompensated.
Shakespeare worked in the absence of copyright. He rewrote other people's plays for a new audience (which would've been illegal today) and got into the theatre business to earn money from them.
There are also the business models which are based on advertising, like broadcast TV and free newspapers. The broadcaster/publisher has no right to compensation for offering free TV/newspapers, but the business model still works, because a lot of people view them. You can obtain free TV without compensating the broadcaster by making a sandwich or changing the channel during commercial breaks - does that make you a thief?
If everyone stopped reading ads and watching commercials, broadcasters of free TV and publishers of free newspapers would simply have to find another way to earn money, or accept that their time was over and get into a new business, not making it illegal to skip the ads.
Reforming the system would be better, but I'm glad people fileshare, so they'll have an incentive to vote in favour of reduced copyright.
No, it means they have an incentive not to care as they already get what they want. What do they care or know about copyright when they utterly disregard it anyways?
Second paragraph is however wrong. If the company owns the copyright on the work then they can relicense it all they want, even if it were previously open source.
I assumed the grandparent was referring to releasing the ex-employees new changes, after the fork.
It's the same perversion of language as when you call illegal copying for private use "piracy". The copyright industry chooses these terms for a reason - by using certain words, you can affect people's perception of the phenomenon they refer to.
(Another example is when you call outdated software "legacy" to give it a positive spin, although that has nothing to do with copyright.)
A) you didnt make the product, you dont set the rules. Microsoft made it, they get to set the rules, both by any sane legal standard, and by common sense.
Problem is, this collides with the only sane standard regarding physical property (I get to do what I want with my property, as long as it doesn't directly affect anyone else). So, for example, I have the right to do whatever I want with my burner and my blank disks, including making copies, since it at most has an indirect effect on someone's future sales.
Our sense of morality is often based on what we're used to - what we think is absolute, is really just a convention that's been drilled into us from such an early age it's hard to conceive it being different. Ultimately, morality has to be determined by the effects it has on people and society.
I think the world would be better off without copyright than with the ridiculously long terms we have now - but the optimal solution may be to have a short copyright term, say three or five years, and allow private non-commercial use (filesharing). This would allow more people to benefit from copyrighted goods (books, films, computer programs, etc) without significantly affecting the producers' revenues.
I've written a more detailed proposal specifically about software copyright on my blog.
B) Pirating software reduces the real value of the software-- when people simply take it for free, it lowers the demand and perceived value of the software. It does not directly take money from the dev's bank account; it merely skims a tiny bit off of their sales by encouraging others to pirate as well.
Which is only a problem if you assume they have a right to earn money. You could also assume it's their own responsibility to find a way to earn money on their work, or find a new business.
For example, if a company puts out free newspapers in a city and earns money on the advertising, they can't complain if people skip the ads. They don't automatically have a right to earn money just because they make a good product. If people skip the ads, the company will have to find another way to make money on their papers or stop distributing them.
If it was illegal to skip ads in a newspaper you picked up for free, I bet people would soon start believing they had a right to have their ads read, and feel moral outrage every time someone picked up their paper without reading the ads.
I don't know how it works for computer programs, but when it comes to music and films, the reduction in sales has been indistinguishable from zero. Sales of downloadable music have sky-rocketed at roughly the same pace that sales of CDs have plummeted, and both the music and film industry have continued to increase their profits steadily since 1999, when filesharing took off, excepting the year that the bank crisis started.
The main problem for the record companies is that artists now publish their music themselves on the Internet, and get a larger share of the revenue. In Sweden and Norway, music artists earn, on the average, significantly MORE today than 1999, even though the number of artists have increased.
C) Just because you want something doesnt entitle you to it, REGARDLESS of whether it hurts someone else when you take it.
The question is not if you're entitled to do something; the question is if somone is entitled to stop you.
Copyright means, for example, that the creator of a song can stop anyone else from singing it, the creator of a play can stop anyone else from performing it, and so on. What entitles him to do that?
D) And just in case you think the current system sucks and you want to stick it to the man, by simply taking what you want without reforming the actual system, you are perpetuating the system you claim is so bad-- and this ignores the fact that this sy
Slashdot Mirror
It fits in reasonably well with being a Hindu, since Hinduism contains both a God (the Brahma) and lesser gods. Most religions have a concept of a supreme God who has created everything, even many of the polytheistic religions.
Mahayana Buddhism, the largest branch of the religion, believe in the Cosmic Buddha, a supreme being who is the origin of everything, which IMHO is just another version of God.
True Satanists (those who aren't just atheists with a Satanist philosophy) believe in God, but you're right that they don't trust in God.
Everyone who knows their history realise that the specific expression "In God we trust" have a Christian origin, though. It may seem like a small detail, but imagine for a moment the roles were reversed. "Allah" is just the Arabic word for "God", but I don't think most Christians would be ok if the American coins had "Allah is great" imprinted on them.
Are the religious people in majority there?
That makes sense.
*shrug* If the Jewish and Christian God are the same, so is the Muslim God. Mohammed clearly states that Allah is the God of Abraham, the Jewish patriarch. But all three religions have different ideas about what properties God has.
If you define God as "the god who is the origin of everything", then most religions have the same God. One of the few exceptions are the Latter Day Saints, who define their God as a being who has created all matter in this universe (but not all there is).
But there have always been limits to freedom of speech. For example, slander and military secrets.
P.S. I don't think a minor donation would make much practical difference either, I'm just pointing out there's no fundamental difference between a monetary donation and an endorsement on the back of coins.
Sure, maybe it doesn't cost the taxpayers anything extra, but it does help establishing a certain religion (Christianity), as effective as a minor donation would.
I know "God" can also refer to the Jewish God, the Muslim God, the Brahmanistic God, etc, but since the law is mainly written by Christians in reverence to their Christian God, people can infer which God is meant.
Hinduism is actually a name for all the different traditional beliefs in India, not a single religion. India has traditionally been very religiously tolerant, so there haven't been a need to establish clear boundaries between religions or to unify them into a single belief. People have been able to mix and match their beliefs as they see fit. Much like New Age, actually.
One of the hinduic beliefs is Brahmanism, which is a more or less monotheistic religion for the more educated or intellectually inclined Indians. I wonder if it might be Brahmanists who have been complaining about the text books in American schools.
I'd go even further... since the phrase has been placed there by Christians, in respect to the Christian God, people can infer from context that the motto refers to the Christian God, not just a generic deistic God.
"God" in singular refers to the monotheistic God... or at least that's how it's understood in this day and age.
Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland and Iceland... that's all I know of.
(Sweden is predominantly Protestant on paper, but that's only because people baptise their children in church out of tradition, and it automatically makes the children members. The children later have to make an active choice to leave the church, and most don't bother, even if their beliefs are atheists.)
You may have a rosy view of atheism because you live in a place where most people are (semi-)religious, and those who are atheists have made an active choice and have likely put more thought into it than those around them.
Where I live (Sweden), atheism is the default position, and the people who go around actively calling themselves atheists are often obnoxious types who try to push their views on others. For example, they like elaborating on how stupid and irrational other beliefs are.
"Establish" and "endorse" are synonyms (that is, they don't mean exactly the same, but may be interchangeable, depending on context).
For example, in the sentence, "Henri VIII dissolved the monasteries in England, Scotland and Wales to establish the Protestant church", "establish" can be replaced with "endorse".
"with respect to the establishment of religion" means "having to do with the establishment of religion". I.e, a law doesn't have to actually establish a religion to be unconstitutional; it only needs to be related to it. I take this to mean that a law is unconstitutional if it goes some way towards establishing a religion.
That being said, the expression "In God we trust" is so vague and fits in with so many religions, it's doubtful it goes any way at all towards establishing a religion.
The "respect" found in the 1st Amendment is not "showing respect for", it is "regarding" or "with respect to". The motto "In God We Trust" does not establish a religion, so it cannot be a law "respecting the establishment of religion".
So if a law was passed that required everyone to pay a small tax to, say, the Catholic Church, that'd be constitutional because paying tax to the Catholic Church doesn't establish a religion?
I think the 1st amendment was intended to be interpreted a little wider than that, to include at least all laws which explicitly favoured one religious view over others.
Yeah, guilty to a small formal error. The NSA threw everything they could at him in retaliation for criticising them, and the only thing they could make stick was keeping a few insignificant documents he shouldn't have on his home computer (together with all the other work-related documents which he was allowed to have on it).
What exactly makes you think Drake did something wrong?
From what I've read about the case so far, it seems he pissed off some high people at the NSA by publicly criticising the Trailblazer project (or rather, its successor) for being ineffective, wasteful and unnecessarily invading people's privacy. The NSA subsequently raided his house to find work-related documents on his home computer, so they could accuse him of being careless with classified information. I.e, what the NSA indicted him for had nothing to do with what he did to piss them off. They were just trying to find something to pin on him. Drake wasn't indicted for "leaking" documents, only of keeping classified documents on his home computer.
The NSA had a hard time finding anything Drake had done wrong, so they employed some tortured logic in order to indict him, including claiming that the documents marked Declassified should have been classified and that Drake should have understood it. And now it turns out almost nothing of it held up in court.
Np, it happens a lot on Slashdot.
I assumed he meant the company releases the changes the ex-employee made after the fork. Then the company could be sued.
When you "purchase" Microsoft software (and certainly once you click the "I AGREE TO THE ABOVE" box during install), you have entered into an agreement with them.
True, but that only applies to the purchaser, not to any third parties. Someone who finds, borrows or is gifted someone else's copy is not bound by the license agreement. That's why copyright has to be laid out in law - contracts are not enough to enforce it.
More to the point, if we abolished copyright, contracts wouldn't prevent anyone from downloading and using software from Pirate Bay, since there's no contract present in that situation.
Shrink-wrap agreements are only valid in the context of a purchase - they're considered part of the purchase agreement, since you have the right to return the goods for a refund within a specified time if you don't agree to the terms. Clicking on an "I agree" button is not in itself a contract - a contract requires the other party to offer something in return.
You could argue that its a shrinkwrap license, and not enforceable, but that gets a LOT less compelling when you read Slashdot and know darn well what the contract says and that it is a part of the conditions of use (and again, you have to click "i agree", or intentionally bypass that page with a hack).
And part of that agreement is that you do not retain full rights to the software.
Sure, I know roughly what the shrinkwrap agreement will say before I purchase the product, so it doesn't come as a surprise to me. But I'm only obliged to follow it if I enter into some sort of agreement with the publisher. If someone lends or gifts me a copy of, say, Microsoft Windows, it's perfectly legal for me to reverse engineer it, rent or lend the physical copy to someone, work around technical limitations in the software, and so on, since I'm not bound by the license agreement. Copyright only prevents me from making copies of or publishing the software.
Security experts often reverse-engineer other's closed-source software without permission when they look for vulnerabilities in it.
By the laws of economy that have been around from time immemorial, if you make a product and others obtain it, you have a right to compensation (both for the good itself, and for your worksmanship). Anything else has always been considered theft, and detrimental to the economy, as it discourages innovation and work.
Not true. Copyright has only existed since the 17th century (and at first only applied to books). Before then, a writer simply had to offer his manuscript to a publisher and get paid for first publication. Subsequent publications were often uncompensated.
Shakespeare worked in the absence of copyright. He rewrote other people's plays for a new audience (which would've been illegal today) and got into the theatre business to earn money from them.
There are also the business models which are based on advertising, like broadcast TV and free newspapers. The broadcaster/publisher has no right to compensation for offering free TV/newspapers, but the business model still works, because a lot of people view them. You can obtain free TV without compensating the broadcaster by making a sandwich or changing the channel during commercial breaks - does that make you a thief?
If everyone stopped reading ads and watching commercials, broadcasters of free TV and publishers of free newspapers would simply have to find another way to earn money, or accept that their time was over and get into a new business, not making it illegal to skip the ads.
Reforming the system would be better, but I'm glad people fileshare, so they'll have an incentive to vote in favour of reduced copyright.
No, it means they have an incentive not to care as they already get what they want. What do they care or know about copyright when they utterly disregard it anyways?
Filesharing gets them used to see
Second paragraph is however wrong. If the company owns the copyright on the work then they can relicense it all they want, even if it were previously open source.
I assumed the grandparent was referring to releasing the ex-employees new changes, after the fork.
It's the same perversion of language as when you call illegal copying for private use "piracy". The copyright industry chooses these terms for a reason - by using certain words, you can affect people's perception of the phenomenon they refer to.
(Another example is when you call outdated software "legacy" to give it a positive spin, although that has nothing to do with copyright.)
A) you didnt make the product, you dont set the rules. Microsoft made it, they get to set the rules, both by any sane legal standard, and by common sense.
Problem is, this collides with the only sane standard regarding physical property (I get to do what I want with my property, as long as it doesn't directly affect anyone else). So, for example, I have the right to do whatever I want with my burner and my blank disks, including making copies, since it at most has an indirect effect on someone's future sales.
Our sense of morality is often based on what we're used to - what we think is absolute, is really just a convention that's been drilled into us from such an early age it's hard to conceive it being different. Ultimately, morality has to be determined by the effects it has on people and society.
I think the world would be better off without copyright than with the ridiculously long terms we have now - but the optimal solution may be to have a short copyright term, say three or five years, and allow private non-commercial use (filesharing). This would allow more people to benefit from copyrighted goods (books, films, computer programs, etc) without significantly affecting the producers' revenues.
I've written a more detailed proposal specifically about software copyright on my blog.
B) Pirating software reduces the real value of the software-- when people simply take it for free, it lowers the demand and perceived value of the software. It does not directly take money from the dev's bank account; it merely skims a tiny bit off of their sales by encouraging others to pirate as well.
Which is only a problem if you assume they have a right to earn money. You could also assume it's their own responsibility to find a way to earn money on their work, or find a new business.
For example, if a company puts out free newspapers in a city and earns money on the advertising, they can't complain if people skip the ads. They don't automatically have a right to earn money just because they make a good product. If people skip the ads, the company will have to find another way to make money on their papers or stop distributing them.
If it was illegal to skip ads in a newspaper you picked up for free, I bet people would soon start believing they had a right to have their ads read, and feel moral outrage every time someone picked up their paper without reading the ads.
I don't know how it works for computer programs, but when it comes to music and films, the reduction in sales has been indistinguishable from zero. Sales of downloadable music have sky-rocketed at roughly the same pace that sales of CDs have plummeted, and both the music and film industry have continued to increase their profits steadily since 1999, when filesharing took off, excepting the year that the bank crisis started.
The main problem for the record companies is that artists now publish their music themselves on the Internet, and get a larger share of the revenue. In Sweden and Norway, music artists earn, on the average, significantly MORE today than 1999, even though the number of artists have increased.
C) Just because you want something doesnt entitle you to it, REGARDLESS of whether it hurts someone else when you take it.
The question is not if you're entitled to do something; the question is if somone is entitled to stop you.
Copyright means, for example, that the creator of a song can stop anyone else from singing it, the creator of a play can stop anyone else from performing it, and so on. What entitles him to do that?
D) And just in case you think the current system sucks and you want to stick it to the man, by simply taking what you want without reforming the actual system, you are perpetuating the system you claim is so bad-- and this ignores the fact that this sy
I've had my current install of windows for like four years. Nobody with Windows 7 can say that about their OS.
Um... because Windows 7 was released two years ago?
It's the tensors, man! Those goddamned tensors are screwing with your mind!
Cool.