They forget that the Constitution was designed to be an evolving document interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court,...
Sorry, that's not just wrong, that's stupidly wrong.
If the Constitution was supposed to change with the times, via court interpretation, why did we need a process (two, actually) to amend it?
The Constitution was intended to be chains to bind the government, including the judiciary. The original intent was to express natural law, which never changes, by definition. Suggesting that the founding fathers intended for the meaning of the words in the constitution to change is like suggesting that Newton believed that the laws of physics would change over time. To give a more modern example, it's like quibbling over the meaning of ``is''. You can say it, but don't expect thinking people to take you seriously.
By the way, that Everson v. Board of Education of Ewing decision that you cite is an early example of judicial activists ignoring clear precedent and settled law to legislate from the bench. It's not their first big mistake, nor their most famous (I think Dred Scott wins both titles), but it's a biggie.
It's easy to ignore what he says, because he's obviously nuts....
Often, he's right about things, and this is one of them.
I'd say that he's obviously nuts, in the sense that Martin Luther King was obviously nuts: they both have a single issue that they care passionately about, to the exclusion of all other considerations.
Both were/are right. Both were personally offensive enough that some people are still unwilling to forgive them, or accept their positions.
Today, we know that, however offensive MLK and his followers may have been, the Dream in his ``I have a Dream'' speech was worthwhile. There are still way too many people who've never forgiven MLK for being unpopular, and for proving them wrong in their racism.
As time passes, it becomes more and more clear that RMS is dead on in most of his positions, and the people who say otherwise are beginning to open themselves up to comparisons with MLK's detractors, who are generally a nasty bunch.
The constitution also doesn't say "separation of church and state"....
You're right. I don't often get to say that on this forum! That phrase comes from Thomas Jefferson's
letter to the Danbury Baptist association in the state of Connecticut. The confusion between semi-private letter and constitution seems to have first become official in 1947, in the case Everson v. Board of Education, where the Supreme court followed the grand old tradition of Dred Scott and screwed things up royally.
People always tell me that business leaders make their decisions based on hard facts and money.
Business leaders want to have big reputations, because a big reputation strokes the ego and leads to more money. That's a hard fact.
They're just as driven by vanity and shiny new things as the geeks are.
That's another hard fact. So, we're in agreement: business leaders make their decisions based on hard facts and money.
The hard facts are that the officers of large public corporations can make more money and more ego-boosting notariety through malfeasance than through honestly representing the interests of the shareholders. The shareholders and employees get screwed in the process.
He is assuming that a graduate economics program would take a math student without any prior economics training (false).
Wrong. False, yourself. Econ MS and Ph.D programs do take math undergrads without prior econ training, and are delighted to do so.
Math is the gatekeeper for most graduate programs. If you can do the math, you can do the science, but if you can't do the math, you can't do the science. That includes at least some branches of linguistics, I was surprised to learn.
As for calc 3 and that econ major, well, if you go to an econ graduate program, you'll find that you'd have been better off majoring in math. A year or two of real analysis is a great starting point if you want to do theory. You'll need some experience with differential and difference equations, and game theory, if you want to do applied work. I don't care what the courses you took might have been titled, you don't have the background you'll need if you got your undergrad degree in a business school.
I've observed that math is a really great thing to study if you want a lot of options. With a small amount of training, you can do almost anything, because you have the critical thinking skills and the rigorous framework to understand it. I'm not saying that a math major could apply to a PhD in economics and necessarily get in without any additional training...
Believe me, the econ Ph.D. programs love students who majored in math instead of econ. Physics or engineering are good second choices. If you're a math major, you don't have a lot of undergrad econ to unlearn.
And how... does he acquire another $3,000 the next year, and the next?
Well, he gets a job. He can't put the money into the Roth IRA without the job, so even if he's a young Bill Gates, the job is the essential first step.
Since $3k is probably about what a 15 year old can earn in a year, actually saving all of it would require superhuman self discipline. I'm going to give my kid $1 for every $1 he puts into a Roth IRA, starting the day he gets a job (probably about 5 years off). It won't be optional for him, as long as he's living in my house. I figure that this is far more important than funding his college, and about $90k cheaper.
If you're in debt because of college, it's a fool's errand to invest unless you can get a much better interest rate than the one you're paying on your loans. Otherwise you'd be better off paying off the loans.
Right now, subsidised student loan debt is running around 4% per year, and the interest is tax deductable. I'd say that there is no hurry to pay it back. As you say, ``The stock market historically returns 7%...'', and long Treasuries return at least as much as your student loan interest, so I'd say it's a fools errand not to fully fund your IRA every year.
From the fact book (Belize): ``Per capita GDP - per capita:
purchasing power parity - $4,900 (2004 est.)''. If a company would pay me half my U.S. salary, I'd happily pay my own relocation expenses.
Yeah, but: normally, the information is collected by the customs officials of the country you're entering. Usually, the airlines gives you the customs forms near the end of the ride, so you don't waste a lot of time in the airport.
What Doctorow is describing is nothing like that: it sounds as if AA had a goon dressed as a security guard trying to collect marketing information. Since they were doing it in England, and not on U.S. Customs forms, it's pretty hard to believe that U.S. regulations had anything to do with it.
A set of regulations which is more likely to apply is the EU privacy and data retention regulations. If they get that info, they'd better be ready to account for it, as Doctorow points out in his letter. It would be funny to see AA get slapped around a little for lying. In fact, since it's AA, it would be funny to see them get slapped around for nothing at all.
The economic dead weight from letting people blow their retirement savings and then looking for a free handout would be tremendous.
You seem to be implying that that economic deadweight from private failures to save is somehow different than the economic deadweight from preventing them from saving, and encouraging them to rely on social security, which is the current name for the welfare system.
The economic deadweight couldn't be worse than the current system, and is almost sure to be less.
In 1964, it would not have been possible to foresee the dot-com boom or bust,...
It wouldn't have changed a thing if it had been accurately foreseen. There is nothing new about the business cycle: it was an old story in Colonial America, it was an old story in 1964, and the dot.bomb thing was just another example of the business cycle. Kids think that the world has never seen troubles like their troubles, but they're always wrong about that.
Furthermore, the stock market boom and bust of the late '20s was still fresh on everyone's mind: it was only about 40 years behind them, and the policy-making adults in 1965 had grown up with it, and its aftermath. Big stock market crashes were uncomfortably familiar in 1964.
...
nor today's broad societal trends.
Actually, ``today's broad societal trends'' were clearly evident in 1964. The baby boom was well underway, lifespans were lengthening, and marriage and childbearing were not happening any earlier. Those clearly evident ``broad societal trends'' clearly showed that Social Security was going to go the way of all good Ponzi schemes eventually. They also showed that the politicians in power in 1964 were not going to be around to suffer the consequences of their foolishness, so there was no need to do anything.
No, it was an ordinary Magazine. The clerk had a cold. Didn't you notice that after she told you: ``$6.13 for the bagazine.'' she said: ``Hab a dice day.''?
Maybe it's the company they keep? Stalin, Lenin, Mao, Pol Pot, the worst, most evil, ruthless mass-murders in history have all been communists. The National Socialists in Germany were amateurs in comparison. Maybe it's because the only way to implement real-world communism is by deadly force?
As for brainwashing, the people of the Eastern block had about 50 years of government brainwashing conditioning them to believe that communism >> God.
Today, the most intense, strident, articulate, dedicated anticommunists you're likely to meet in the U.S. are the people who grew up in Eastern Europe under communism, and were taught that communism was everything good, and capitalism was the embodiment of evil.
Must be that good old government brainwashing, eh?
>>Gates: No, no, no. That's not true! Many people don't believe that. [They] absolutely don't believe that.
>Got to hand it to Bill, he had the interviewer backpedalling wit that one because he had a valid point -- there are too many extremists and extremist views in the Linux/OSS community.
Artists should get paid? If I come and dig a hole in your lawn, should you pay me? I think so. That's performance art, and you better cough up, buddy!
>Take for instance RMS, who says not only should software be given away for $0, but if you charge money for software, you are committing an unethical act.
That is a foolish misrepresentation of RMS's postions. He says that closing off access to software is unethical. He is strongly in favor of selling software, and has sold it himself. In fact, he sold freely redistributable software to support his GNU project during its early years. He encourages you to sell software, too. He realizes that the artificial creation of monopolies is unethical, so Gates' fortune, which is based on such an artificial monopoly, is unethical. That doesn't make selling software unethical.
Or, in his last interview publicized on/., RMS was quoted as saying people ought to quit their jobs if it requires them to use 'un-free' software.
Leaving the ethics of the situation aside, I'll do that when possible, just to avoid the endless hassles of using unfree software. Again, forgetting about the ethics, I'd take a modest paycut to work in a proprietary-software-free office.
I'm sure that RMS realizes that starving your family for principle is unprincipled. Quitting your job rather than using Windows is the ideal to strive for, not first item on tomorrow's agenda. Look for a better job, and make working environment a big part of how you define better.
>>It shouldn't be illegal to transmit bits and bytes over a wire. It is not tantamount to theft in any way.
>disingenuity at its best!
>Look, it's illegal to photocopy books.
It's illegal to photocopy some books. I have several which can be legally photocopied. I have a great many more which cannot be legally photocopied, but I see no moral reason that should be so.
>Everybody understands why,...
My understanding is that (ignoring the history, and focusing on the current state of the U.S. law) all copyrighted material is protected indefinitely (perhaps eternally) so that a few big media outfits with big lobbying budgets can enjoy a monopoly at my and your expense.
>... and yet I'm only capturing photons with a photocopier. Right? Well, same with bytes that encode a movie.
Are you saying that illegal == wrong? Does it follow from that that legal == right? Just curious.
Getting back on topic for this thread, I agree with the GP post's assertion that copyright violations aren't theft, in any sense of the word. That's why they are not called theft in the law, and are not covered by laws which prohibit theft, and so on.
Copyright violations are the ``crime'' of violating a monopoly established by the government to benefit another at your expense.
Actually, I did this for a while, with/dev/hda smaller and faster, and/dev/hdb slightly larger and significantly cheaper (and slower). Back when CD burners cost big bucks, I lucked onto a cheap, big, slow second hard drive, and had instant backup.
The bad news is that you only have one backup copy, rather than a history of backups. If you do dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb, then remember that you want that file that you erased just before that (which you just wrote over), you're screwed.
Now, CDRs and CD burners are dirt cheap. I just burn/etc and some of the subdirectories under/~ to a CD whenever I find myself thinking: ``I'd be screwed if that hard drive died.'' Everything else is going to come back when I reinstall. Still, hard drives are cheap enough that I might go back to your method next time I build a machine. With those occasional backups to CD, too, of course.
Why spread so many developer resources for similar projects?! Do we really need twenty different IRC clients or ICQ clones?!
Those people are doing what they do because they want to. No PHBs involved. If you could tell them to work on something else, they'd probably just stop working.
These ``developer resources'' aren't a limited number of corporate code monkeys, they are folks who are volunteering to do something they want to do. Because everyone is self-assigned, ``we'' have exactly enough people to do what is being done, and not nearly enough people to follow anyone's grand scheme, even if that grand scheme took far fewer ``developer resources''.
That's the strength and weakness of libre, collaberative development. Each person does whatever he wants to, and if that means three hundred thousand people are writing a new grep or a new apt-get at any given moment, well, that's not wasted effort. It makes them happy, and that's reason enough. When someone (like maybe you) suggests that something else should be making them happy, it shows a profound misunderstanding of how ``developer resources'' get allocated outside the corporation.
My point is that if you were to try to choke off development of all those competing projects, you would not only lose the benefit of the competition, but you would find that most of the people who you thought would be working on your favorite project are instead doing something else with their free time, like surfing pr0n or seeing their girlfriends. You might even wind up with fewer ``developer resources'' working on your favorite!
Finally, the libre licensing means that a really good idea which shows up in any of the competing projects can and probably will wind up in all of them.
This suggests that some mail systems are already parsing links in emails and rejecting those which are to known spamvertisers? That's a good idea, but it must put a bit of a load on a mail server.
We need to be going after the spamvertisers, not the spammers. Legislation outlawing spamvertising, with penalties for the advertiser and the spammer, not just the spammer, would be far more effective than merely shooting all spammers. After all, spammers can hide and work from offshore, while the advertiser has to have some way to collect the cash. He can't hide nearly so well.
Yes, there would be joe-jobs, but our legal system is already familiar with the idea of ``framing'' innocent parties, and they know how to deal with it.
On the topic of spam and spammers, I think the fortune at the bottom of the page is wonderfully appropriate:
No one can have a higher opinion of him than I have, and I think he's a dirty little beast. -- W.S. Gilbert .
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Sorry, that's not just wrong, that's stupidly wrong.
If the Constitution was supposed to change with the times, via court interpretation, why did we need a process (two, actually) to amend it?
The Constitution was intended to be chains to bind the government, including the judiciary. The original intent was to express natural law, which never changes, by definition. Suggesting that the founding fathers intended for the meaning of the words in the constitution to change is like suggesting that Newton believed that the laws of physics would change over time. To give a more modern example, it's like quibbling over the meaning of ``is''. You can say it, but don't expect thinking people to take you seriously.
By the way, that Everson v. Board of Education of Ewing decision that you cite is an early example of judicial activists ignoring clear precedent and settled law to legislate from the bench. It's not their first big mistake, nor their most famous (I think Dred Scott wins both titles), but it's a biggie.
Often, he's right about things, and this is one of them.
I'd say that he's obviously nuts, in the sense that Martin Luther King was obviously nuts: they both have a single issue that they care passionately about, to the exclusion of all other considerations.
Both were/are right. Both were personally offensive enough that some people are still unwilling to forgive them, or accept their positions.
Today, we know that, however offensive MLK and his followers may have been, the Dream in his ``I have a Dream'' speech was worthwhile. There are still way too many people who've never forgiven MLK for being unpopular, and for proving them wrong in their racism.
As time passes, it becomes more and more clear that RMS is dead on in most of his positions, and the people who say otherwise are beginning to open themselves up to comparisons with MLK's detractors, who are generally a nasty bunch.
You're right. I don't often get to say that on this forum! That phrase comes from Thomas Jefferson's letter to the Danbury Baptist association in the state of Connecticut. The confusion between semi-private letter and constitution seems to have first become official in 1947, in the case Everson v. Board of Education, where the Supreme court followed the grand old tradition of Dred Scott and screwed things up royally.
That's like saying that Microsoft is no more evil than Satan, or maybe it's like saying something's no hotter than the sun. Or no colder than absolute zero
Experience tells us, and MS's court records confirm, that MS is a particularly nasty, convicted monopolist. No worse than that is faint praise indeed.
Business leaders want to have big reputations, because a big reputation strokes the ego and leads to more money. That's a hard fact.
They're just as driven by vanity and shiny new things as the geeks are.
That's another hard fact. So, we're in agreement: business leaders make their decisions based on hard facts and money.
The hard facts are that the officers of large public corporations can make more money and more ego-boosting notariety through malfeasance than through honestly representing the interests of the shareholders. The shareholders and employees get screwed in the process.
I'm sure it would. Unfortunately, that message would almost surely be: ``Hire in India, so they can't reach you when you lay them off.''
You think offshoring is popular _now_? Just wait.
Wrong. False, yourself. Econ MS and Ph.D programs do take math undergrads without prior econ training, and are delighted to do so.
Math is the gatekeeper for most graduate programs. If you can do the math, you can do the science, but if you can't do the math, you can't do the science. That includes at least some branches of linguistics, I was surprised to learn.
As for calc 3 and that econ major, well, if you go to an econ graduate program, you'll find that you'd have been better off majoring in math. A year or two of real analysis is a great starting point if you want to do theory. You'll need some experience with differential and difference equations, and game theory, if you want to do applied work. I don't care what the courses you took might have been titled, you don't have the background you'll need if you got your undergrad degree in a business school.
Believe me, the econ Ph.D. programs love students who majored in math instead of econ. Physics or engineering are good second choices. If you're a math major, you don't have a lot of undergrad econ to unlearn.
And how ... does he acquire another $3,000 the next year, and the next?
Well, he gets a job. He can't put the money into the Roth IRA without the job, so even if he's a young Bill Gates, the job is the essential first step.
Since $3k is probably about what a 15 year old can earn in a year, actually saving all of it would require superhuman self discipline. I'm going to give my kid $1 for every $1 he puts into a Roth IRA, starting the day he gets a job (probably about 5 years off). It won't be optional for him, as long as he's living in my house. I figure that this is far more important than funding his college, and about $90k cheaper.
If you're in debt because of college, it's a fool's errand to invest unless you can get a much better interest rate than the one you're paying on your loans. Otherwise you'd be better off paying off the loans.
Right now, subsidised student loan debt is running around 4% per year, and the interest is tax deductable. I'd say that there is no hurry to pay it back. As you say, ``The stock market historically returns 7% ...'', and long Treasuries return at least as much as your student loan interest, so I'd say it's a fools errand not to fully fund your IRA every year.
They speak English in Belize, while in Costa Rica, Spanish is the official language.
From the fact book (Belize): ``Per capita GDP - per capita: purchasing power parity - $4,900 (2004 est.)''. If a company would pay me half my U.S. salary, I'd happily pay my own relocation expenses.
Yeah, but: normally, the information is collected by the customs officials of the country you're entering. Usually, the airlines gives you the customs forms near the end of the ride, so you don't waste a lot of time in the airport.
What Doctorow is describing is nothing like that: it sounds as if AA had a goon dressed as a security guard trying to collect marketing information. Since they were doing it in England, and not on U.S. Customs forms, it's pretty hard to believe that U.S. regulations had anything to do with it.
A set of regulations which is more likely to apply is the EU privacy and data retention regulations. If they get that info, they'd better be ready to account for it, as Doctorow points out in his letter. It would be funny to see AA get slapped around a little for lying. In fact, since it's AA, it would be funny to see them get slapped around for nothing at all.
Did they really think he was visiting cannibals? On purpose?
This sort of crap is taken almost seriously, and people complain about (mymethod record).
My point is that the old folks on SS are already on welfare, which is what the GP said that privatising would do.
You seem to be implying that that economic deadweight from private failures to save is somehow different than the economic deadweight from preventing them from saving, and encouraging them to rely on social security, which is the current name for the welfare system.
The economic deadweight couldn't be worse than the current system, and is almost sure to be less.
Soylent green? Because in Korea, only old people are nutritious.
It wouldn't have changed a thing if it had been accurately foreseen. There is nothing new about the business cycle: it was an old story in Colonial America, it was an old story in 1964, and the dot.bomb thing was just another example of the business cycle. Kids think that the world has never seen troubles like their troubles, but they're always wrong about that.
Furthermore, the stock market boom and bust of the late '20s was still fresh on everyone's mind: it was only about 40 years behind them, and the policy-making adults in 1965 had grown up with it, and its aftermath. Big stock market crashes were uncomfortably familiar in 1964.
Actually, ``today's broad societal trends'' were clearly evident in 1964. The baby boom was well underway, lifespans were lengthening, and marriage and childbearing were not happening any earlier. Those clearly evident ``broad societal trends'' clearly showed that Social Security was going to go the way of all good Ponzi schemes eventually. They also showed that the politicians in power in 1964 were not going to be around to suffer the consequences of their foolishness, so there was no need to do anything.
No, it was an ordinary Magazine. The clerk had a cold. Didn't you notice that after she told you: ``$6.13 for the bagazine.'' she said: ``Hab a dice day.''?
As for brainwashing, the people of the Eastern block had about 50 years of government brainwashing conditioning them to believe that communism >> God.
Today, the most intense, strident, articulate, dedicated anticommunists you're likely to meet in the U.S. are the people who grew up in Eastern Europe under communism, and were taught that communism was everything good, and capitalism was the embodiment of evil.
Must be that good old government brainwashing, eh?
>Got to hand it to Bill, he had the interviewer backpedalling wit that one because he had a valid point -- there are too many extremists and extremist views in the Linux/OSS community.
Artists should get paid? If I come and dig a hole in your lawn, should you pay me? I think so. That's performance art, and you better cough up, buddy!
>Take for instance RMS, who says not only should software be given away for $0, but if you charge money for software, you are committing an unethical act.
That is a foolish misrepresentation of RMS's postions. He says that closing off access to software is unethical. He is strongly in favor of selling software, and has sold it himself. In fact, he sold freely redistributable software to support his GNU project during its early years. He encourages you to sell software, too. He realizes that the artificial creation of monopolies is unethical, so Gates' fortune, which is based on such an artificial monopoly, is unethical. That doesn't make selling software unethical.
Or, in his last interview publicized on /., RMS was quoted as saying people ought to quit their jobs if it requires them to use 'un-free' software.
Leaving the ethics of the situation aside, I'll do that when possible, just to avoid the endless hassles of using unfree software. Again, forgetting about the ethics, I'd take a modest paycut to work in a proprietary-software-free office.
I'm sure that RMS realizes that starving your family for principle is unprincipled. Quitting your job rather than using Windows is the ideal to strive for, not first item on tomorrow's agenda. Look for a better job, and make working environment a big part of how you define better.
He's a fine one to talk about property rights, since his software empire had its foundation in ignoring Harvard's property rights.
What do you want to be when you grow up? How about a whiny little twit. The world really rewards them.
>disingenuity at its best!
>Look, it's illegal to photocopy books.
It's illegal to photocopy some books. I have several which can be legally photocopied. I have a great many more which cannot be legally photocopied, but I see no moral reason that should be so.
>Everybody understands why, ...
My understanding is that (ignoring the history, and focusing on the current state of the U.S. law) all copyrighted material is protected indefinitely (perhaps eternally) so that a few big media outfits with big lobbying budgets can enjoy a monopoly at my and your expense.
> ... and yet I'm only capturing photons with a photocopier. Right? Well, same with bytes that encode a movie.
Are you saying that illegal == wrong? Does it follow from that that legal == right? Just curious.
Getting back on topic for this thread, I agree with the GP post's assertion that copyright violations aren't theft, in any sense of the word. That's why they are not called theft in the law, and are not covered by laws which prohibit theft, and so on.
Copyright violations are the ``crime'' of violating a monopoly established by the government to benefit another at your expense.
Actually, I did this for a while, with /dev/hda smaller and faster, and /dev/hdb slightly larger and significantly cheaper (and slower). Back when CD burners cost big bucks, I lucked onto a cheap, big, slow second hard drive, and had instant backup.
The bad news is that you only have one backup copy, rather than a history of backups. If you do dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb, then remember that you want that file that you erased just before that (which you just wrote over), you're screwed.
Now, CDRs and CD burners are dirt cheap. I just burn /etc and some of the subdirectories under /~ to a CD whenever I find myself thinking: ``I'd be screwed if that hard drive died.'' Everything else is going to come back when I reinstall. Still, hard drives are cheap enough that I might go back to your method next time I build a machine. With those occasional backups to CD, too, of course.
Those people are doing what they do because they want to. No PHBs involved. If you could tell them to work on something else, they'd probably just stop working.
These ``developer resources'' aren't a limited number of corporate code monkeys, they are folks who are volunteering to do something they want to do. Because everyone is self-assigned, ``we'' have exactly enough people to do what is being done, and not nearly enough people to follow anyone's grand scheme, even if that grand scheme took far fewer ``developer resources''.
That's the strength and weakness of libre, collaberative development. Each person does whatever he wants to, and if that means three hundred thousand people are writing a new grep or a new apt-get at any given moment, well, that's not wasted effort. It makes them happy, and that's reason enough. When someone (like maybe you) suggests that something else should be making them happy, it shows a profound misunderstanding of how ``developer resources'' get allocated outside the corporation.
My point is that if you were to try to choke off development of all those competing projects, you would not only lose the benefit of the competition, but you would find that most of the people who you thought would be working on your favorite project are instead doing something else with their free time, like surfing pr0n or seeing their girlfriends. You might even wind up with fewer ``developer resources'' working on your favorite!
Finally, the libre licensing means that a really good idea which shows up in any of the competing projects can and probably will wind up in all of them.
We need to be going after the spamvertisers, not the spammers. Legislation outlawing spamvertising, with penalties for the advertiser and the spammer, not just the spammer, would be far more effective than merely shooting all spammers. After all, spammers can hide and work from offshore, while the advertiser has to have some way to collect the cash. He can't hide nearly so well.
Yes, there would be joe-jobs, but our legal system is already familiar with the idea of ``framing'' innocent parties, and they know how to deal with it.
On the topic of spam and spammers, I think the fortune at the bottom of the page is wonderfully appropriate:
No one can have a higher opinion of him than I have, and I think he's a dirty little beast. -- W.S. Gilbert .