With piracy there is no difference [between promotional and regular music].
You could not be more wrong about this. The truth is that the artist can influence the pirate scene quite effectivly by uploading their promotional material to the pirate sites. This promotional material should be closer to be the music which iscloser to one-hit-wonders anyway so its what people will pirate. Statistically this should increase the percentage of hits for the promotional material vs. total material which is what the band wants. Also, if we have a large total ammount of music we can assume that very very few people would want to pirate it all. the pirates will have their one-hit-wonders, but the real fans who the pirates turn on to the band will want more.
Now, you are correct that if artists released all their music (jams, etc) at once that would be too much for a pirate site to keep up with. But why would a pirate site want to do so? The pirate site only needs to keep the 3 or 4 (or for a really good group say 10) tracks that are actually worth listening too.
You are thinking about this from the product based mentality. Currently people only want to lissen to the best 3 or 4 songs because that is all they have the option of lissening to. Once people realise that they can have a true variety they will want to lissen to it instead. Hence the term "disposable music." It would probable be a good idea to have mp3 players for the fans which could fandom play from the fan club directories I wass proposing.
Also, It is a lot of work to figure out which of a bands songs are good without having the fan club acess I was suggessting. Remember, part of the survice of the fan club access is to see what other people think of difrent songs. This is just more work then most pirates are willing to do.
I'm talking about the difference between Pete Abrams (Sluggy) and Scott Adams (Dilbert). Scott is making a heck of a lot more money from his profession, I can assure you. Main reason, because people buy dilbert books, its the only way to get a comilation.
This is exactly what I was suggesting artists do, i.e. sell compilation CDs and fan club access. The advertising is very helpful, but not the total solution. I was never proposing that advertising or any one income source would deal with the problem.. just that when combined you could make a better living at it then the industry currently allows. You made a comment about how Pete Abrams is just scrapping by with Sluggy, but most artists are so poorly paid now that they could stand to just scrape by with a good bit less money then Pete. (Realisticaly, most artists will not be as good a buisness man as I suspect Pete is, but that is another discussion)
Ultimatly, we are both taling out of our asses and we wont know the answer untill someone like Pete ABrams to prove a system like what I am talking about is workable. It's a little more ambisious then what the current internet bands are doing, but I expect we will see it happen soon.
Clearly, you do not understand the options in the process of making, promoting, and profiting music. I will attempt to spell out a few of the problems with todays music and a few of the millions of options for a musician on the internet.
Music is not a product it is a service. Music lissening today is being degraded by the mass repitions that this product mentality implies. This creats those nasty one-hit-wonders and forces artists to force their fans to lissen to them sing the same song over and ver and over and over on CD. This is a really dumb way to sell music.
The truth is we would be better off lissening to less pollished, but more varied music. Artists *almost* produce a LOT of this less polished music in the form of practicing, jaming, goofing arround with the mixes, and live preformances. I'm talking about a whole wave of "disposable music" that could be produced allongside the more serious studio mixes.
Now, why would an artistgo to the extra work to prouce al lthis disposable music? One reason is that there will be too much of it to pirate. If people want this stuff they will need to pay for it because the pirates can not keep up (and a pirate who can keep up is big enough to sue). An even better reason is: it keeps people comming back for more!
A good way to sell all this stuff is to put some of it up for free download for a limited period of time, but allow fan club members to download any past song at anytime.. and charge like $20 for a yerly fan club membership. This is money directly into the artists pocket just for giving their true fans access to all this stuff.
The musicians don't just need to sell mp3s. Just look at the internet commics like sluggy.com. They appear to do fine by (a) making people come back to their site every day and (b) pushing merchandise on their viewers. An internet musician could do the same thing on a weakly basis. They could sell things like CDs, hats, shirts, etc. Actually, they could make a killing by selling lots of shorter production run CDs (say let people vote on the best of the disposable music) or mp3 CDs of a large amount of the disposable music.
We have all seen how crazy people get about some bands. I don't think there is any question the bands would make a killing off this shit. Especially, if they get things printed themselves.
The catch to all of this is you need to give away enough music to get people interested. There are all kinds of oppertunities for people to charge bands to upload the bands music to large numbers of pirate mp3s site as promotion.
There is one last opertunity for a band to make money by giving away music. Advertising! I would not be surprised to find equipment manufacturs giving good bands equipment just to say "mixed on a Sony BlaBla" at the end of the promotional songs.
If you really think abot the buisness oppertunities you will se that there is plenty of room for an internet savey artist to do MUCH better then an industry artist. The only real problem with the internet is that the small artists will need to know how to build a web site since web work could be very expencive. Especially, for someone who has no idea if they will make it or not. Conversly, an artist who is web savey could make themselves a big name with essentially no outlay of capitol.. just a lot of time.
note: I distinguish between promotional songs which are intended to float arround the internet and get people to visit the artists site and regular songs which are intended to be downloaded from the artists site.
I don't think it will die that easy. I suspect that most people are like me: ignored the amazon.com thing at first but then canceled our account and switched to bn.com after people made enough noise. If we keep making noise we will get mopre people to switch.
What would be really nice is to see a coalition of publishers (i.e. not just O'Rielly) were to drop amazon.com for their buisness practices. Why wold they do this? Because it would allow them to use 1-click shopping on their own sites.
Personally, I think Tim should wait a while and if amazon dose nothing he should make a little fuss about tring to get such an activity together. This would kill amazon.com's stock, which is what they really care about.
If the artist or owner gives full license to distribute (hey, free promotion.) then how is it illegal?
Yes, it is legal. If you had read my post you would have noticed that I was suggesting that pirates put in a little bit of effort to distribute the "intentional promotional material" of these artists, i.e. the songs they want to make the rounds of the pirate sites. If the artists wants songs to be downloaded from their homepage (some do some don't then you can always place a "check these guys out" link in the message file) of an FTP site.
The point I was making is that pirates need to consider what they are doing and try to make their activities hurt the music industry while helping independant artists.
I do not expect people to stop pirating and support only independant music, but I would like to "guilt trip" the pirates into helping the independant music scene by turning lots of kids who download their warez onto independant music. If dorm was wired I would have an FTP site up, but the message file would contain a lot of URLs of legitimate free music.
Doesn't piracy imply the illegal distribution of copyrighted material?
This is a compleatly diffrent issue. Technically, I think we should try to make pirate a good word. I would like to see independant musicians compeating for penetration (of their promotional material) into the pirate scene. Spreading the meme "many pirates are nice friendly people who help the underdog" would go a long way towards helping us cut the insane time durations of our current copyright laws.
Let's pick up the pace - despite all of our efforts, the RIAA is still firmly in the black.
Seriously, It would be really nice to think that we could hurt the RIAA by pirating lots of music, but the issue is a lot more complex. Piracy might have the potential to do a little harm to sales, but for the most part piracy is promotion and will only increase sales. We really do not know that piracy will hurt them in the long run. It will definitly change their buisness model and will remove the monopoly on promotion, but we would really like to hurt these companies which have abused their artists and consumers for so long.
I feal that music pirates should feal morally obligated to try and hurt the music industry by (a) improving promotion for internet only bands and (b) helping people who really do not have the money to pirate get the songs for free.
We can achive (a) by giving internet only bands who let us distribut their music space on our sites (and maybe even telling people to check them out). It would als be a good idea for people to run sites specilising in promotion, i.e. pirate sites submit upload instrustions, internet bands upload their own music, and the site uploads the song (maybe with advertising attached) to lots of pirate sites. Generally it would be a relly good idea to help these bands promot themselves.
I do not really know much about (b) but I think that we should make an effort to recrute people in poor countries and high school kids into the pirate scene. People who learn to pirate because they lack the money to buy CDs *may* be less likely to switch to mindlss CD consumers in the future.
We have a moral obligation as consumers to try and fix abusive industry.
The GPL CANNOT be considered an an open and unemcumbered license
I don't think the point was for it to be an unemcumbered license just for it to encumber the people who had traditionally been encumbering the public. I just do not understand what people like you find so wrong with the idea that I might not want someone else to make a closed source product from a product I created. If you support the BSD license then you support the idea of closed source code, so what problem can you possibly have with my placing restrictions on my own code?
if applications wish to share open source code, and be placed on store shelves, GPL doesn't work.
I have the same question: what rights dose the application developer have to my code if I have no rights to his code? The GPL is about programmers protecting access to the future derivatives of their work. RMS says this in his Manifesto.. no one has an illusions about what it means. Hell, I can not wait to see software patents which can only be used in GPLed code.
Now, it is unfortunate that some projects like BSD will be prevented from using my code, but that is a price I am willing to pay to protect my access to my code in the future. I really do not feal I should give up all the rights to any code I write just to keep from offending the sencibilities of the BSD authors. Plus, it's not like it would be that much work to make a BSD only / GPL compile time switch for BSD. If there are ever GPL forcing software patents which are relevant to some driver then we will prbable see such a switch in the BSD makefile.
Again, this is irrellevent. There isn't any small packet that a client can send verifying that the client hasn't been hacked to supt auto-aim, that the user hasn't re-written the ogl lib to have translucent walls, or modified theplayer models so they have lines indicating their trajectory.
No it dose matter quite a bit. If an open source game is going to be fair then it needs to live by the slogan "The Game IS the Protocoll/Code." All those things you just mentioned should be allowed and incuraged in a good open source game! The are improvments to the interface. You must design the protocolls so that it dose not matter what someone dose to the client.. and need to know exactly what the internet protocolls will allow you to do in terms of timing the movments of data. If you can not make it work over high latency network then thats just too bad. They can go play a closed source game like Quake3 or descide that even more "cheats" are now "legal."
The idea that "The Game IS the Protocoll/Code" is exactly what will bring out the hackers to improve the game.. and it's adoption is what will make open source games better then closed source games someday. Don't call someone a nasty cheater just because they had the initiative to improve their user interface. Well you can call them a liar if they lie to you about their mods, but that is diffrent since it dose not really help the development of the game.
Why not encrypt the data that is sent, but only send the (small) decryption key when the client is allowed to use the data? Alternatively, send all the data as well as some decoy data and only send an authenticator when the data should be used. If you see someone reacting to the decoys, you know you've got a cheater.
Yes, these are good ideas that might to solve the bandwidth problem which is the biggest reason Carmak gave for not doing it himself, but you still need to account for aim-bots and "interface cheats." I still think the easyest was to account for "interface cheats" is to say they are not cheats and just provide a scripting langauge to let everyone improve their interface equally.
Question: Do we know that small packets have less trouble gettinf through a cloged network pipe then large packets? This is what we need to do the encryption thing.
Really, do you think that this makes GPL advocates more credible? There are other legit users of the same hosting service, and you'd be subjecting them to a DoS as well (that is what you're talking about).
Actually, I mean making nasty phone calls and emails to them, not a DoS. We just want to put presure on from all sides, so why not call the ISP (and maybe it's customers) up and tell them that someone is illegally distributing GPLed software without the source? We should be nice to them and convence them to be on our side.
I don't think the phrase "harass his hosting service" implies a DoS attack by anny streach of the immagination, but it dose not carry the convince them message that I just expressed to you either, so I should have tried to say it better.
No, John Carmack wins when people switch to Quake3 and pay for it. That a part of the point to releasing the source. This is part of why the GPL is so cool, it provides more commercial incentive (then Artistic or BSD) and more freedom for the consumor.
There are open source solutions to the quake1 cheating problem, but they require more bandwidth (you need to change the protocolls to give less advance information -> more bandwidth -> only dorm room kids can play). These solution also require a health redefinition of cheating from a coders perspective, i.e. the game is the protocoll. A combination of reducing the possible cheats (via protocoll adjustments) and making the less profitable but more intertaining cheats (like an aim-bot) available to everyone (via a scripting langauge) will make the game fair.
It is not unreasonable to hacve a fair open source networked game, but it is unreasonable to make just any game open source and fair, i.e. you MUST redifine what you consider to be cheating.
Actually, if I had more time I'd be tempted to write an X protocoll watcher to allow external cheats to be added to Mr. Slade's binary version of the game.. just to force people to make these games reasonable in the first place.
These people will use legal precedents like the one printed above to undermine the position of the GPL in court
This is correct and this is why Slade must be stopped. It really would not hurt to launch a slashdot style harass his hosting services and discurage people from using his stuff attack.. just to get warmed up for when someone with money tries it. It would also help increase mindshare for the GPL which brings me to your other point:
I just want to point out that this is why Libertarians are so hard line on the Second Amendment, even when people start talking about "reasonable" restrictions on guns. Because all those "reasonable" restrictions undermine the idea of legally or Constitutionally guaranteed rights.
This is almost correect. Without some reasonable restrictions on wepons (i.e. no tanks or bombs) then the general population starts to question their sanity. The real problem with the second ammendment is that too many people do not understand it, i.e. tight to own guns and be in a militia. It is intended as a check on the power of the millitary. Now, citizens owning guns is a perfectly reasonable part of this check on the power of the military, but it is not the *only* check that we should interpret the send ammendment to provide today. We also need the following checks:
1) No millitary involvment in dometic law inforcment. This means the millitary may not train cops and the NSA may not train internet cops.
2) No national paramilitary police forces. This means no DEA, no ATF, and the FBI must use local cops as firepower. This is essenial to preventing things like hiring the cops in Wisconsin and use them to shoot people in Utah.. or our current plague of unaccountable national cops.
The upshot of all this is the Libertarians and NRA interpret the 2nd ammendment too broadly when it somes to things like armor piercing bullets but not broadly enough when it come to the real importent issues like police conduct and control. It is this lack of an expansionist but still "politically correct" interpretation that is destroying support for the 2nd ammendment and for the NRA. (The libertarians support everything I said but they do not interpret it as following from the 2nd ammendment)
The problem is that the NSA & Ignorance has been pretty effective at preventing people from using crypto. We need a campaign to get the Linux distributions to come with this stuff preinstalled. Actually, we need a campaign to get PGP preinstalled on Windows boxes too. Debian dose some stuff to make it easyer, but we really need it to be a standard part of using a computer.
Actually, the most effective thinkg would be to get propper use of public key cryptography to be tought in every CS101 class (i.e. first class a CS student takes). Perhaps going so far as to require all their assignments to be digitally signed and encrypted for the recipiant (with GPG) when turnned in via computer. A strong case can be made for this being an essential part of a computer education.
I suppose you could also go to high schools and teach the kids how to keep their emails secret with PGP, but that takes a little more work then just convincing collage profesors to teach it.
Technically, the reason most European governments are pissed is because the U.S. uses Echelon to steal contracts from French buisnesses. I just hope that they sell it to their common people as "those evil Americans are spying on our you" because then they will have a hard time defending their own programs when they come under attack. It may be to our advantage to take these programs down one at a time so that the people in charge do not think about protecting their own program when they attack someone else's.
What we need to do is make it clear to European politicians that they can gain political power (in the internet community) by talking about how evil it is to go arround spying on people. This meme will survie and they will not think their own spy's are as importent at budget time or when scandals come up in the future. Discrediting one at a time is the way to disarm the spys.
I would like to see a concerted effort to get encryption products like IPsec installed as protest. We should get venders to distribute Linux boxes with this stuff preinstalled and we should get them preload PGP onto windows boxes. The Irish should definitly do this to protest the UK's draconian cryptography laws, but really we all should be doing it. (I'd love to see some of those "patriotic" Irish buisness men who funded the IRA start funding PGP-phone sales in Irland too. It would be a lot cheeper and win a lot more political sympathy)
What the heck's wrong with getting divisive social issues put on the ballot?
The general population tend to not know anyhting about the true state of minority rights, so social issues the ballot will tend to be targeted at removing a minority's rights.. and will play on the ignorance of the genreal population.
A worse problem is when unelected elites impose their morality upon others *without* the opportunity of putting the measure before the people for a vote.
Yes, this can be a serious problem and it should be prohibited too. Orginisations like the ACLU have done a realitivly effective job of prohibiting government officials from forcing their beliefs on their citizens.
Example: There was this preacher in some random fringe christian sect last year who wanted to get a drivers lissence, but believed that it was a sin to have his photograph taken. The DMV (unellected beurocrats) was quite happy to tell him to go fuck himself (and no christian orginisations came to help him because he was not in a main stream sect), but the ACLU sued the DMV on his behaf and won.
Example: During desert storm the Saudi's did not want American soldiers bringing bibles with them and out unelected millitary leaders were happy to comply. No christian orginisations mounted an effective defence (I guess they did not wantt o seem unpatriotic), butthe ACLU sued the millitary and won, so the millitary sent chaplans and stuff over too.
Example: The religious reich tries to get laws passed which "protect the religious freedom of teachers" to do things like post the 10 commandsments, but they ignore the fact that a teacher is a member of an unellected elite who is in a possition of athority and has the power to unethically influence her/his charges religous leanings via such activity. Clearly, this violates the rights of Moslems, Hindu's, Atheists, etc. and if it is allowed to expand it would result in attacks on some christian sects like Mormons and Catholics. The only solution is that patents have the right to teach their children whatever religion they want, but the school has no rights to teach the children anything related to religion period.
Now, you need to make an exception for scientific things which some religions object to (i.e. evolution) which influence the child's future job opertunities (it's hard to get a biology degree without understanding evolution), but parents still have the ability to object and keep their child home on those days. The reality of the situation here is that the children who's parents do not objet have a right to learn about evolution AND the school is obligated to educate them in this matter since it is a scientific idea which parents are not qualified to teach.
Obscenity is defined by local community standards.
Bullshit, obscenity is defined by parents who may or may not stick to community standard, but community standards are what would sell filtering software, so I will assume that community standards are desirable for the remainder of this post.
Filtering is clearly not ideal, and the standards it uses are likely stricter than those of any particular community. But until effective alternative forms of control are available
There is a very effective alternative, share the cache directories of the computers and set up a slide show presentation on a computer (facing a chair where a librarian sits a lot) to run through the image caches of the web browsers. Community standards enforced, no false blocking, no unblocked porn.. bingo perfect solution created with a spare computer, and a perl script.
Do you know why the AFA is not recomending this solution? The answer is they don't want to just block porn, they want to block gay rights, women's rights, etc. This is not about porn to the higher up in the AFA.. it is about the culture war.. and they do not really want to see an effective porn blocking solution like I propose.. they want parents to not trust the internet. Remember, the research suggests that 1 out of 20 blocks is a bad block (of constitutionally protected speach, i.e. not porn).
I don't mean to be an ass or anything but wouldn't they just block sites like Slashdot, etc if they started doing this?
First, the idea was that LOTS of sites would carry the blocked site of the day list, i.e. they can't block them all. Actually, you would distribute a script to create a daily graphic so that people without script access could host it. The problem is that the graphic would be blocked too, so you would need lots of people to mirror it (or use the script to generate the daily graphic) and a database of unblocked URL for the graphic. It would be impossible to impossible to block the graphic on every URL in the database since you would make it easy to obtain a few URLs from the database but very difficult to obtain a large percentage of the database.
Second, you could say that it is more importent for these people to have access to news sources like slashdot then to protest, but I do not really think that is a major concern. Having access to a list of blocked sites and ways to get arround the blocking implies learning about and having access to the blocked sites.
Re:Linux gaining momentum in South Africa
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Open Source Africa
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Question: one thing about Linux is that it is MUCH easyer to telecommute via Linux then via Windows. If South African programmers are that much cheaper then it would make sence for some cash strapped U.S. companies to hire south afircan programmers to do things for them remotly. Dose this happen now? and do you think it could be much of a selling point for Linux?
This is an interesting post. If the Chinese government wants to block someone then maybe we should work extra hard to make shure Chinese people see it. Are there any blocked site news letters so Chinese people can know what to go find on the internet?
I think we need to se up a sindicated blocked site list which sites like slashdot can included in baxes. It would list sites blocked by censorware, governements, etc. and have information for getting arrouind the block so people could get to these sites easily. Ultimatly, it would make blocking a site have the opposite effect.
Not the posting. But the fact that now we can't tell if the person who is posting this is serious or just a troll.
I assume it was a troll, but I do value the moments pause (shock) it gave me to read the post. Trolls are a form of performance art. Admitadly, most of them are crappy art, but a few like the above post are really good art (if they are intended as art). The fealing of shock I got by looking at that post was exactly the fealing I get by looking at a strange and interesting piece of art. Now, if someone dose it again it will jsut be lame, but I would like to thank the troll who posted that for posting it.
You shold probable moderate this whole fucking thread up (well posts which give information about getting regionless DVD players anyway). The more people know how to get a regionless DVD player the better off we are! Actually, moderation is insufficent, we really need to post a whole slashdot feature explaining all the tricks and giving a FAQ for getting regionless DVD.
Also, if you live in Europe you are one of the people getting directly fucked over by the MPAA. One form of protest which I think would be VERY effective is to buy yourself a regionless DVD player, buy american DVDs of movies before they are released in Europe, take your DVD and Player to a local bar and watch the DVD with your friends.. and hand out fliers about how people can get their own regionless DVD player and why they should fight the MPAA. Europe has a real chance to avoid the crap like the DMCA that has happened in the U.S. so we you really need to build some political support. This sort of protest will raise awairness, screw the MPAA out of ticket sales, and be lots of fun!
Questions: Dose the DVD lissensing restriction keep independant film makers from having as much force in the market? And is there much of an argument that the MPAA is using DVD to force European film studios to be beholden to US corperations?
The whole paragraph appears to try to say that persecuting remarks against atheists are more forceful than the persecuting remarks generally made by atheists against other people. Such a statement is inherently false. It would be more appropriate to say that, in general, there are more slanderous, non-humorous remarks made against atheists, than there are slanderous, non-humorous remarks made by atheists against other religious groups.
You are correct. My argument would be stronger if I was more precise.
On a related note: I am currious at how much of the history of the "freedom from religion" for atheists has been related to helping other groups, i.e. atheists do a better job sticking up for themselves when they are sticking up for something else. The history of feminism has a lot of atheists (who rejected the "role god wants women to play"). I'm kinda curious how wide spread this phenomina is.
This is really more of a reply to your original post, but I'll put it here instead.
Funny, as a matter-of-fact both myself and my cube-mate ARE Buddhists. I don't ask people about their religion, but I'm guessing a good deal of the Asians and Indians working here ARE NOT Christians either, so I guess I'm already there.
I am a sothern white atheist and I'd just like to say that I REALLY LIKE the idea of the U.S. continuing to "import" (sorry, I can't think of a better word) well off, educated, non-christians from Asia and India. It has so much potential for breaking this stupid christian world view. I mean what kind of fool can make the argument "you should believe in god because it might be true" when there are lots of other beleifs arround. Questions:
1) Are our new non-christian friends picking up the American idea's of political orginisation, i.e. do they feal like they can stand up to the christian right? (Unfortuantly, we atheists tend to ignore thgem so they have turnned atheist into a dirty word in polotics)
2) Do these groups realise that they probable need to work together, i.e. do you see Buddists and Hindus working together to prevent things like prayer in schools?
I see, I'm not welcome in *your* America, eh?
This is exactly the kind of statments we need to make because it shows the main stream that these people really are bigots. George Bush said "I don't consider Atheists to be real Americans" so some tiems the main stream is quite happy with it's bigots.
While I think that most non-religious people aren't very "evengelical" about their views
This is correct, but every year the percentage of the popuklation going to sane churches decreases and the percentage going to evangelical churches increases. The really funny thing is when the religious right attacks catholics to prevent them from having a catholic chaplin in congress and then turns arround and seduces them into supporting the religious rights agenda.
these are the "abortion clinic bombers" of the non-religious world
No, there is a diffrence. Abortion clinic bombers kill people. Aggressive atheists just make them feal bad.
Actually, you should ask yourself who are these "millatant atheists" really going after? How many atheists have you seen doing this? I have seen plenty, but they were always making fun of streat preachers. You know the people who chase girls in short skirts calling them prostitutes.
the fanatics who give their views a bad name because they use it as an excuse to persecute, belittle and denigrate others
What exactly consitutes persicution? Dose Penn and Teller responding to the question "Do you know any religious scientis?" with "Not any good ones" persicution of christians? Do you really want to say that every clever oral quip consitutes verbal abuse? If you consider off hand remarks to be persicution then what about the following paraphrased remarks: "I don't consider Atheists to be American citizens" (George Bush) or "I don't really like Atheists" (Al Gore). Do you know what the diffrence in these remarks and Penn and Teller's remarks? These second remarks are moving towards the statment of "we should round them up and put them in concentration camps" while Penn and Teller's remark is no worse then making fun of fat people (by people whose job it is to make fun of people and who have no intention of taking it to a more agressive level).
The truth is that Atheists are ammong the most persicuted religious* groups in America. Oh, we are not persicuted in the intelectual circles where we hang out, but I can tell you all kinds of stories about people who have religious roomates who continually try to convert them or who assume they are bad people.
* I say religious groups because atheists are areligious group, but because gays, blacks, and women take a lot more shit then Atheists, Hindus, or Moslems.
Note to moderators: the above post was not the one to moderate up. There were some good posts supporting the religion possition which were ttally ignored. Instead, you moderate up the above bigoted attack on atheists?
But they would also claim that this invalidates belief in Jesus.
Only trolls or morons make this claim. Intelgenbt people claim that it invalidates the claim that organised religion has any morals. There are plenty of reasons to doubt the Jesus story without needing to resort to funky reasoning. Specifically, the fact that much of Jesus's life is identical to the story of Zarathustra which predates it by 500-1000 years (or more), i.e. Jesus was creaded by plagarism.
although they do serve to point out some of the hazards awaiting those who forget the church's purpose.
Persicution is not the purpose of some monk wandering arround on a hilside contemplating life, but it is very much the purpose of every major religion (catholics would rather see people in South Africa get AIDS then use condoms; the christian right wants to persicute gays and women). Do you know why we have the bible belt today? Lots of sothern slave owners descided christianity would allow them to justify savery to the slaves and to themselves.
The actions of misguided people abusing Jesus' name 400 years ago have nothing to do with my faith now
Actually, it has more to do with the christian faith now then what Jesus said 2000 years ago. You think they reconstructed more of "his message" in the last 400 years. I do admit it probable has nothing to do with *your* faith now, but that is because you sound like a rational human being and not like the vocal christian right book burning fools.
Personally, I think the intelegent christians need a new word for themselves today. The christian right is really making a mess of your religion in this country. You could call yourselves the christian left. This would be a rejection of the christian right and not necissarily an acceptance of the liberal leftwing.
All that having been said, the Catholic church is not as bad as many of the non-cathlic religions today. They have a tradition of intelectualism which makes them MUCH better then our American christian sects (they accept evolution). You should always point this out whenever you are discussing the past atrocities of the Catholic church. It keeps people like me from going off on religion based on what we see today's vocal christian right doing.
-1 here I come!
This is probable the best way to prevent yourself from getting a -1.
(I'm posting this without my +1 because it is getting a little off-topic; I am telling people I am posting without my +1 in the hopes that other people with a +1 will say "what a good idea" and use it more responcibly in the future, i.e. I'm sick of seeing 100 worthless posts at 2)
Slashdot Mirror
With piracy there is no difference [between promotional and regular music].
You could not be more wrong about this. The truth is that the artist can influence the pirate scene quite effectivly by uploading their promotional material to the pirate sites. This promotional material should be closer to be the music which iscloser to one-hit-wonders anyway so its what people will pirate. Statistically this should increase the percentage of hits for the promotional material vs. total material which is what the band wants. Also, if we have a large total ammount of music we can assume that very very few people would want to pirate it all. the pirates will have their one-hit-wonders, but the real fans who the pirates turn on to the band will want more.
Now, you are correct that if artists released all their music (jams, etc) at once that would be too much for a pirate site to keep up with. But why would a pirate site want to do so? The pirate site only needs to keep the 3 or 4 (or for a really good group say 10) tracks that are actually worth listening too.
You are thinking about this from the product based mentality. Currently people only want to lissen to the best 3 or 4 songs because that is all they have the option of lissening to. Once people realise that they can have a true variety they will want to lissen to it instead. Hence the term "disposable music." It would probable be a good idea to have mp3 players for the fans which could fandom play from the fan club directories I wass proposing.
Also, It is a lot of work to figure out which of a bands songs are good without having the fan club acess I was suggessting. Remember, part of the survice of the fan club access is to see what other people think of difrent songs. This is just more work then most pirates are willing to do.
I'm talking about the difference between Pete Abrams (Sluggy) and Scott Adams (Dilbert). Scott is making a heck of a lot more money from his profession, I can assure you. Main reason, because people buy dilbert books, its the only way to get a comilation.
This is exactly what I was suggesting artists do, i.e. sell compilation CDs and fan club access. The advertising is very helpful, but not the total solution. I was never proposing that advertising or any one income source would deal with the problem.. just that when combined you could make a better living at it then the industry currently allows. You made a comment about how Pete Abrams is just scrapping by with Sluggy, but most artists are so poorly paid now that they could stand to just scrape by with a good bit less money then Pete. (Realisticaly, most artists will not be as good a buisness man as I suspect Pete is, but that is another discussion)
Ultimatly, we are both taling out of our asses and we wont know the answer untill someone like Pete ABrams to prove a system like what I am talking about is workable. It's a little more ambisious then what the current internet bands are doing, but I expect we will see it happen soon.
Clearly, you do not understand the options in the process of making, promoting, and profiting music. I will attempt to spell out a few of the problems with todays music and a few of the millions of options for a musician on the internet.
Music is not a product it is a service. Music lissening today is being degraded by the mass repitions that this product mentality implies. This creats those nasty one-hit-wonders and forces artists to force their fans to lissen to them sing the same song over and ver and over and over on CD. This is a really dumb way to sell music.
The truth is we would be better off lissening to less pollished, but more varied music. Artists *almost* produce a LOT of this less polished music in the form of practicing, jaming, goofing arround with the mixes, and live preformances. I'm talking about a whole wave of "disposable music" that could be produced allongside the more serious studio mixes.
Now, why would an artistgo to the extra work to prouce al lthis disposable music? One reason is that there will be too much of it to pirate. If people want this stuff they will need to pay for it because the pirates can not keep up (and a pirate who can keep up is big enough to sue). An even better reason is: it keeps people comming back for more!
A good way to sell all this stuff is to put some of it up for free download for a limited period of time, but allow fan club members to download any past song at anytime.. and charge like $20 for a yerly fan club membership. This is money directly into the artists pocket just for giving their true fans access to all this stuff.
The musicians don't just need to sell mp3s. Just look at the internet commics like sluggy.com. They appear to do fine by (a) making people come back to their site every day and (b) pushing merchandise on their viewers. An internet musician could do the same thing on a weakly basis. They could sell things like CDs, hats, shirts, etc. Actually, they could make a killing by selling lots of shorter production run CDs (say let people vote on the best of the disposable music) or mp3 CDs of a large amount of the disposable music.
We have all seen how crazy people get about some bands. I don't think there is any question the bands would make a killing off this shit. Especially, if they get things printed themselves.
The catch to all of this is you need to give away enough music to get people interested. There are all kinds of oppertunities for people to charge bands to upload the bands music to large numbers of pirate mp3s site as promotion.
There is one last opertunity for a band to make money by giving away music. Advertising! I would not be surprised to find equipment manufacturs giving good bands equipment just to say "mixed on a Sony BlaBla" at the end of the promotional songs.
If you really think abot the buisness oppertunities you will se that there is plenty of room for an internet savey artist to do MUCH better then an industry artist. The only real problem with the internet is that the small artists will need to know how to build a web site since web work could be very expencive. Especially, for someone who has no idea if they will make it or not. Conversly, an artist who is web savey could make themselves a big name with essentially no outlay of capitol.. just a lot of time.
note: I distinguish between promotional songs which are intended to float arround the internet and get people to visit the artists site and regular songs which are intended to be downloaded from the artists site.
I don't think it will die that easy. I suspect that most people are like me: ignored the amazon.com thing at first but then canceled our account and switched to bn.com after people made enough noise. If we keep making noise we will get mopre people to switch.
What would be really nice is to see a coalition of publishers (i.e. not just O'Rielly) were to drop amazon.com for their buisness practices. Why wold they do this? Because it would allow them to use 1-click shopping on their own sites.
Personally, I think Tim should wait a while and if amazon dose nothing he should make a little fuss about tring to get such an activity together. This would kill amazon.com's stock, which is what they really care about.
If the artist or owner gives full license to distribute (hey, free promotion.) then how is it illegal?
Yes, it is legal. If you had read my post you would have noticed that I was suggesting that pirates put in a little bit of effort to distribute the "intentional promotional material" of these artists, i.e. the songs they want to make the rounds of the pirate sites. If the artists wants songs to be downloaded from their homepage (some do some don't then you can always place a "check these guys out" link in the message file) of an FTP site.
The point I was making is that pirates need to consider what they are doing and try to make their activities hurt the music industry while helping independant artists.
I do not expect people to stop pirating and support only independant music, but I would like to "guilt trip" the pirates into helping the independant music scene by turning lots of kids who download their warez onto independant music. If dorm was wired I would have an FTP site up, but the message file would contain a lot of URLs of legitimate free music.
Doesn't piracy imply the illegal distribution of copyrighted material?
This is a compleatly diffrent issue. Technically, I think we should try to make pirate a good word. I would like to see independant musicians compeating for penetration (of their promotional material) into the pirate scene. Spreading the meme "many pirates are nice friendly people who help the underdog" would go a long way towards helping us cut the insane time durations of our current copyright laws.
Let's pick up the pace - despite all of our efforts, the RIAA is still firmly in the black.
Seriously, It would be really nice to think that we could hurt the RIAA by pirating lots of music, but the issue is a lot more complex. Piracy might have the potential to do a little harm to sales, but for the most part piracy is promotion and will only increase sales. We really do not know that piracy will hurt them in the long run. It will definitly change their buisness model and will remove the monopoly on promotion, but we would really like to hurt these companies which have abused their artists and consumers for so long.
I feal that music pirates should feal morally obligated to try and hurt the music industry by (a) improving promotion for internet only bands and (b) helping people who really do not have the money to pirate get the songs for free.
We can achive (a) by giving internet only bands who let us distribut their music space on our sites (and maybe even telling people to check them out). It would als be a good idea for people to run sites specilising in promotion, i.e. pirate sites submit upload instrustions, internet bands upload their own music, and the site uploads the song (maybe with advertising attached) to lots of pirate sites. Generally it would be a relly good idea to help these bands promot themselves.
I do not really know much about (b) but I think that we should make an effort to recrute people in poor countries and high school kids into the pirate scene. People who learn to pirate because they lack the money to buy CDs *may* be less likely to switch to mindlss CD consumers in the future.
We have a moral obligation as consumers to try and fix abusive industry.
The GPL CANNOT be considered an an open and unemcumbered license
I don't think the point was for it to be an unemcumbered license just for it to encumber the people who had traditionally been encumbering the public. I just do not understand what people like you find so wrong with the idea that I might not want someone else to make a closed source product from a product I created. If you support the BSD license then you support the idea of closed source code, so what problem can you possibly have with my placing restrictions on my own code?
if applications wish to share open source code, and be placed on store shelves, GPL doesn't work.
I have the same question: what rights dose the application developer have to my code if I have no rights to his code? The GPL is about programmers protecting access to the future derivatives of their work. RMS says this in his Manifesto.. no one has an illusions about what it means. Hell, I can not wait to see software patents which can only be used in GPLed code.
Now, it is unfortunate that some projects like BSD will be prevented from using my code, but that is a price I am willing to pay to protect my access to my code in the future. I really do not feal I should give up all the rights to any code I write just to keep from offending the sencibilities of the BSD authors. Plus, it's not like it would be that much work to make a BSD only / GPL compile time switch for BSD. If there are ever GPL forcing software patents which are relevant to some driver then we will prbable see such a switch in the BSD makefile.
Again, this is irrellevent. There isn't any small packet that a client can send verifying that the client hasn't been hacked to supt auto-aim, that the user hasn't re-written the ogl lib to have translucent walls, or modified theplayer models so they have lines indicating their trajectory.
No it dose matter quite a bit. If an open source game is going to be fair then it needs to live by the slogan "The Game IS the Protocoll/Code." All those things you just mentioned should be allowed and incuraged in a good open source game! The are improvments to the interface. You must design the protocolls so that it dose not matter what someone dose to the client.. and need to know exactly what the internet protocolls will allow you to do in terms of timing the movments of data. If you can not make it work over high latency network then thats just too bad. They can go play a closed source game like Quake3 or descide that even more "cheats" are now "legal."
The idea that "The Game IS the Protocoll/Code" is exactly what will bring out the hackers to improve the game.. and it's adoption is what will make open source games better then closed source games someday. Don't call someone a nasty cheater just because they had the initiative to improve their user interface. Well you can call them a liar if they lie to you about their mods, but that is diffrent since it dose not really help the development of the game.
Why not encrypt the data that is sent, but only send the (small) decryption key when the client is allowed to use the data? Alternatively, send all the data as well as some decoy data and only send an authenticator when the data should be used. If you see someone reacting to the decoys, you know you've got a cheater.
Yes, these are good ideas that might to solve the bandwidth problem which is the biggest reason Carmak gave for not doing it himself, but you still need to account for aim-bots and "interface cheats." I still think the easyest was to account for "interface cheats" is to say they are not cheats and just provide a scripting langauge to let everyone improve their interface equally.
Question: Do we know that small packets have less trouble gettinf through a cloged network pipe then large packets? This is what we need to do the encryption thing.
Really, do you think that this makes GPL advocates more credible? There are other legit users of the same hosting service, and you'd be subjecting them to a DoS as well (that is what you're talking about).
Actually, I mean making nasty phone calls and emails to them, not a DoS. We just want to put presure on from all sides, so why not call the ISP (and maybe it's customers) up and tell them that someone is illegally distributing GPLed software without the source? We should be nice to them and convence them to be on our side.
I don't think the phrase "harass his hosting service" implies a DoS attack by anny streach of the immagination, but it dose not carry the convince them message that I just expressed to you either, so I should have tried to say it better.
This is a situation in which NOBODY won.
No, John Carmack wins when people switch to Quake3 and pay for it. That a part of the point to releasing the source. This is part of why the GPL is so cool, it provides more commercial incentive (then Artistic or BSD) and more freedom for the consumor.
There are open source solutions to the quake1 cheating problem, but they require more bandwidth (you need to change the protocolls to give less advance information -> more bandwidth -> only dorm room kids can play). These solution also require a health redefinition of cheating from a coders perspective, i.e. the game is the protocoll. A combination of reducing the possible cheats (via protocoll adjustments) and making the less profitable but more intertaining cheats (like an aim-bot) available to everyone (via a scripting langauge) will make the game fair.
It is not unreasonable to hacve a fair open source networked game, but it is unreasonable to make just any game open source and fair, i.e. you MUST redifine what you consider to be cheating.
Actually, if I had more time I'd be tempted to write an X protocoll watcher to allow external cheats to be added to Mr. Slade's binary version of the game.. just to force people to make these games reasonable in the first place.
These people will use legal precedents like the one printed above to undermine the position of the GPL in court
This is correct and this is why Slade must be stopped. It really would not hurt to launch a slashdot style harass his hosting services and discurage people from using his stuff attack.. just to get warmed up for when someone with money tries it. It would also help increase mindshare for the GPL which brings me to your other point:
I just want to point out that this is why Libertarians are so hard line on the Second Amendment, even when people start talking about "reasonable" restrictions on guns. Because all those "reasonable" restrictions undermine the idea of legally or Constitutionally guaranteed rights.
This is almost correect. Without some reasonable restrictions on wepons (i.e. no tanks or bombs) then the general population starts to question their sanity. The real problem with the second ammendment is that too many people do not understand it, i.e. tight to own guns and be in a militia. It is intended as a check on the power of the millitary. Now, citizens owning guns is a perfectly reasonable part of this check on the power of the military, but it is not the *only* check that we should interpret the send ammendment to provide today. We also need the following checks:
1) No millitary involvment in dometic law inforcment. This means the millitary may not train cops and the NSA may not train internet cops.
2) No national paramilitary police forces. This means no DEA, no ATF, and the FBI must use local cops as firepower. This is essenial to preventing things like hiring the cops in Wisconsin and use them to shoot people in Utah.. or our current plague of unaccountable national cops.
The upshot of all this is the Libertarians and NRA interpret the 2nd ammendment too broadly when it somes to things like armor piercing bullets but not broadly enough when it come to the real importent issues like police conduct and control. It is this lack of an expansionist but still "politically correct" interpretation that is destroying support for the 2nd ammendment and for the NRA. (The libertarians support everything I said but they do not interpret it as following from the 2nd ammendment)
The problem is that the NSA & Ignorance has been pretty effective at preventing people from using crypto. We need a campaign to get the Linux distributions to come with this stuff preinstalled. Actually, we need a campaign to get PGP preinstalled on Windows boxes too. Debian dose some stuff to make it easyer, but we really need it to be a standard part of using a computer.
Actually, the most effective thinkg would be to get propper use of public key cryptography to be tought in every CS101 class (i.e. first class a CS student takes). Perhaps going so far as to require all their assignments to be digitally signed and encrypted for the recipiant (with GPG) when turnned in via computer. A strong case can be made for this being an essential part of a computer education.
I suppose you could also go to high schools and teach the kids how to keep their emails secret with PGP, but that takes a little more work then just convincing collage profesors to teach it.
Technically, the reason most European governments are pissed is because the U.S. uses Echelon to steal contracts from French buisnesses. I just hope that they sell it to their common people as "those evil Americans are spying on our you" because then they will have a hard time defending their own programs when they come under attack. It may be to our advantage to take these programs down one at a time so that the people in charge do not think about protecting their own program when they attack someone else's.
What we need to do is make it clear to European politicians that they can gain political power (in the internet community) by talking about how evil it is to go arround spying on people. This meme will survie and they will not think their own spy's are as importent at budget time or when scandals come up in the future. Discrediting one at a time is the way to disarm the spys.
I would like to see a concerted effort to get encryption products like IPsec installed as protest. We should get venders to distribute Linux boxes with this stuff preinstalled and we should get them preload PGP onto windows boxes. The Irish should definitly do this to protest the UK's draconian cryptography laws, but really we all should be doing it. (I'd love to see some of those "patriotic" Irish buisness men who funded the IRA start funding PGP-phone sales in Irland too. It would be a lot cheeper and win a lot more political sympathy)
What the heck's wrong with getting divisive social issues put on the ballot?
The general population tend to not know anyhting about the true state of minority rights, so social issues the ballot will tend to be targeted at removing a minority's rights.. and will play on the ignorance of the genreal population.
A worse problem is when unelected elites impose their morality upon others *without* the opportunity of putting the measure before the people for a vote.
Yes, this can be a serious problem and it should be prohibited too. Orginisations like the ACLU have done a realitivly effective job of prohibiting government officials from forcing their beliefs on their citizens.
Example: There was this preacher in some random fringe christian sect last year who wanted to get a drivers lissence, but believed that it was a sin to have his photograph taken. The DMV (unellected beurocrats) was quite happy to tell him to go fuck himself (and no christian orginisations came to help him because he was not in a main stream sect), but the ACLU sued the DMV on his behaf and won.
Example: During desert storm the Saudi's did not want American soldiers bringing bibles with them and out unelected millitary leaders were happy to comply. No christian orginisations mounted an effective defence (I guess they did not wantt o seem unpatriotic), butthe ACLU sued the millitary and won, so the millitary sent chaplans and stuff over too.
Example: The religious reich tries to get laws passed which "protect the religious freedom of teachers" to do things like post the 10 commandsments, but they ignore the fact that a teacher is a member of an unellected elite who is in a possition of athority and has the power to unethically influence her/his charges religous leanings via such activity. Clearly, this violates the rights of Moslems, Hindu's, Atheists, etc. and if it is allowed to expand it would result in attacks on some christian sects like Mormons and Catholics. The only solution is that patents have the right to teach their children whatever religion they want, but the school has no rights to teach the children anything related to religion period.
Now, you need to make an exception for scientific things which some religions object to (i.e. evolution) which influence the child's future job opertunities (it's hard to get a biology degree without understanding evolution), but parents still have the ability to object and keep their child home on those days. The reality of the situation here is that the children who's parents do not objet have a right to learn about evolution AND the school is obligated to educate them in this matter since it is a scientific idea which parents are not qualified to teach.
Obscenity is defined by local community standards.
Bullshit, obscenity is defined by parents who may or may not stick to community standard, but community standards are what would sell filtering software, so I will assume that community standards are desirable for the remainder of this post.
Filtering is clearly not ideal, and the standards it uses are likely stricter than those of any particular community. But until effective alternative forms of control are available
There is a very effective alternative, share the cache directories of the computers and set up a slide show presentation on a computer (facing a chair where a librarian sits a lot) to run through the image caches of the web browsers. Community standards enforced, no false blocking, no unblocked porn.. bingo perfect solution created with a spare computer, and a perl script.
Do you know why the AFA is not recomending this solution? The answer is they don't want to just block porn, they want to block gay rights, women's rights, etc. This is not about porn to the higher up in the AFA.. it is about the culture war.. and they do not really want to see an effective porn blocking solution like I propose.. they want parents to not trust the internet. Remember, the research suggests that 1 out of 20 blocks is a bad block (of constitutionally protected speach, i.e. not porn).
We are having a discussion of a Technological solution to this problem at kuro5hin.org.
I don't mean to be an ass or anything but wouldn't they just block sites like Slashdot, etc if they started doing this?
First, the idea was that LOTS of sites would carry the blocked site of the day list, i.e. they can't block them all. Actually, you would distribute a script to create a daily graphic so that people without script access could host it. The problem is that the graphic would be blocked too, so you would need lots of people to mirror it (or use the script to generate the daily graphic) and a database of unblocked URL for the graphic. It would be impossible to impossible to block the graphic on every URL in the database since you would make it easy to obtain a few URLs from the database but very difficult to obtain a large percentage of the database.
Second, you could say that it is more importent for these people to have access to news sources like slashdot then to protest, but I do not really think that is a major concern. Having access to a list of blocked sites and ways to get arround the blocking implies learning about and having access to the blocked sites.
We are discussing this at kuro5hin.org.
Question: one thing about Linux is that it is MUCH easyer to telecommute via Linux then via Windows. If South African programmers are that much cheaper then it would make sence for some cash strapped U.S. companies to hire south afircan programmers to do things for them remotly. Dose this happen now? and do you think it could be much of a selling point for Linux?
This is an interesting post. If the Chinese government wants to block someone then maybe we should work extra hard to make shure Chinese people see it. Are there any blocked site news letters so Chinese people can know what to go find on the internet?
I think we need to se up a sindicated blocked site list which sites like slashdot can included in baxes. It would list sites blocked by censorware, governements, etc. and have information for getting arrouind the block so people could get to these sites easily. Ultimatly, it would make blocking a site have the opposite effect.
Not the posting. But the fact that now we can't tell if the person who is posting this is serious or just a troll.
I assume it was a troll, but I do value the moments pause (shock) it gave me to read the post. Trolls are a form of performance art. Admitadly, most of them are crappy art, but a few like the above post are really good art (if they are intended as art). The fealing of shock I got by looking at that post was exactly the fealing I get by looking at a strange and interesting piece of art. Now, if someone dose it again it will jsut be lame, but I would like to thank the troll who posted that for posting it.
You shold probable moderate this whole fucking thread up (well posts which give information about getting regionless DVD players anyway). The more people know how to get a regionless DVD player the better off we are! Actually, moderation is insufficent, we really need to post a whole slashdot feature explaining all the tricks and giving a FAQ for getting regionless DVD.
Also, if you live in Europe you are one of the people getting directly fucked over by the MPAA. One form of protest which I think would be VERY effective is to buy yourself a regionless DVD player, buy american DVDs of movies before they are released in Europe, take your DVD and Player to a local bar and watch the DVD with your friends.. and hand out fliers about how people can get their own regionless DVD player and why they should fight the MPAA. Europe has a real chance to avoid the crap like the DMCA that has happened in the U.S. so we you really need to build some political support. This sort of protest will raise awairness, screw the MPAA out of ticket sales, and be lots of fun!
Questions: Dose the DVD lissensing restriction keep independant film makers from having as much force in the market? And is there much of an argument that the MPAA is using DVD to force European film studios to be beholden to US corperations?
The whole paragraph appears to try to say that persecuting remarks against atheists are more forceful than the persecuting remarks generally made by atheists against other people. Such a statement is inherently false. It would be more appropriate to say that, in general, there are more slanderous, non-humorous remarks made against atheists, than there are slanderous, non-humorous remarks made by atheists against other religious groups.
You are correct. My argument would be stronger if I was more precise.
On a related note: I am currious at how much of the history of the "freedom from religion" for atheists has been related to helping other groups, i.e. atheists do a better job sticking up for themselves when they are sticking up for something else. The history of feminism has a lot of atheists (who rejected the "role god wants women to play"). I'm kinda curious how wide spread this phenomina is.
This is really more of a reply to your original post, but I'll put it here instead.
Funny, as a matter-of-fact both myself and my cube-mate ARE Buddhists. I don't ask people about their religion, but I'm guessing a good deal of the Asians and Indians working here ARE NOT Christians either, so I guess I'm already there.
I am a sothern white atheist and I'd just like to say that I REALLY LIKE the idea of the U.S. continuing to "import" (sorry, I can't think of a better word) well off, educated, non-christians from Asia and India. It has so much potential for breaking this stupid christian world view. I mean what kind of fool can make the argument "you should believe in god because it might be true" when there are lots of other beleifs arround. Questions:
1) Are our new non-christian friends picking up the American idea's of political orginisation, i.e. do they feal like they can stand up to the christian right? (Unfortuantly, we atheists tend to ignore thgem so they have turnned atheist into a dirty word in polotics)
2) Do these groups realise that they probable need to work together, i.e. do you see Buddists and Hindus working together to prevent things like prayer in schools?
I see, I'm not welcome in *your* America, eh?
This is exactly the kind of statments we need to make because it shows the main stream that these people really are bigots. George Bush said "I don't consider Atheists to be real Americans" so some tiems the main stream is quite happy with it's bigots.
While I think that most non-religious people aren't very "evengelical" about their views
This is correct, but every year the percentage of the popuklation going to sane churches decreases and the percentage going to evangelical churches increases. The really funny thing is when the religious right attacks catholics to prevent them from having a catholic chaplin in congress and then turns arround and seduces them into supporting the religious rights agenda.
these are the "abortion clinic bombers" of the non-religious world
No, there is a diffrence. Abortion clinic bombers kill people. Aggressive atheists just make them feal bad.
Actually, you should ask yourself who are these "millatant atheists" really going after? How many atheists have you seen doing this? I have seen plenty, but they were always making fun of streat preachers. You know the people who chase girls in short skirts calling them prostitutes.
the fanatics who give their views a bad name because they use it as an excuse to persecute, belittle and denigrate others
What exactly consitutes persicution? Dose Penn and Teller responding to the question "Do you know any religious scientis?" with "Not any good ones" persicution of christians? Do you really want to say that every clever oral quip consitutes verbal abuse? If you consider off hand remarks to be persicution then what about the following paraphrased remarks: "I don't consider Atheists to be American citizens" (George Bush) or "I don't really like Atheists" (Al Gore). Do you know what the diffrence in these remarks and Penn and Teller's remarks? These second remarks are moving towards the statment of "we should round them up and put them in concentration camps" while Penn and Teller's remark is no worse then making fun of fat people (by people whose job it is to make fun of people and who have no intention of taking it to a more agressive level).
The truth is that Atheists are ammong the most persicuted religious* groups in America. Oh, we are not persicuted in the intelectual circles where we hang out, but I can tell you all kinds of stories about people who have religious roomates who continually try to convert them or who assume they are bad people.
* I say religious groups because atheists are areligious group, but because gays, blacks, and women take a lot more shit then Atheists, Hindus, or Moslems.
Note to moderators: the above post was not the one to moderate up. There were some good posts supporting the religion possition which were ttally ignored. Instead, you moderate up the above bigoted attack on atheists?
But they would also claim that this invalidates belief in Jesus.
Only trolls or morons make this claim. Intelgenbt people claim that it invalidates the claim that organised religion has any morals. There are plenty of reasons to doubt the Jesus story without needing to resort to funky reasoning. Specifically, the fact that much of Jesus's life is identical to the story of Zarathustra which predates it by 500-1000 years (or more), i.e. Jesus was creaded by plagarism.
although they do serve to point out some of the hazards awaiting those who forget the church's purpose.
Persicution is not the purpose of some monk wandering arround on a hilside contemplating life, but it is very much the purpose of every major religion (catholics would rather see people in South Africa get AIDS then use condoms; the christian right wants to persicute gays and women). Do you know why we have the bible belt today? Lots of sothern slave owners descided christianity would allow them to justify savery to the slaves and to themselves.
The actions of misguided people abusing Jesus' name 400 years ago have nothing to do with my faith now
Actually, it has more to do with the christian faith now then what Jesus said 2000 years ago. You think they reconstructed more of "his message" in the last 400 years. I do admit it probable has nothing to do with *your* faith now, but that is because you sound like a rational human being and not like the vocal christian right book burning fools.
Personally, I think the intelegent christians need a new word for themselves today. The christian right is really making a mess of your religion in this country. You could call yourselves the christian left. This would be a rejection of the christian right and not necissarily an acceptance of the liberal leftwing.
All that having been said, the Catholic church is not as bad as many of the non-cathlic religions today. They have a tradition of intelectualism which makes them MUCH better then our American christian sects (they accept evolution). You should always point this out whenever you are discussing the past atrocities of the Catholic church. It keeps people like me from going off on religion based on what we see today's vocal christian right doing.
-1 here I come!
This is probable the best way to prevent yourself from getting a -1.
(I'm posting this without my +1 because it is getting a little off-topic; I am telling people I am posting without my +1 in the hopes that other people with a +1 will say "what a good idea" and use it more responcibly in the future, i.e. I'm sick of seeing 100 worthless posts at 2)