So many misconceptions in so few words. Where to begin...
You have no money "invested" in Social Security. There is no account with your name on it (nor is there any "trust fund"), and you have no legal claim to any benefits whatsoever.
Retirement investing is for the long term; the ups and downs of the stock market over a period of days or months are irrelevant. Yes, stocks are down quite a bit compared to a few years ago, but anyone who has been investing consistently for the last 40 years is still doing very well.
You don't need to invest in stocks at all to get a better return than what Social Security promises (and is under no obligation to deliver). Workers starting out today would do better with a passbook savings account. As with any pyramid scheme, the founders and early participants come out ahead, and everyone following them gets shafted.
Every plan for reforming Social Security that I've seen has been voluntary. If you don't think you have the ability to manage your own money, you would be free to continue to fling it into the current Ponzi scheme. But those of us who do understand basic concepts of math and economics shouldn't have to suffer because of your fears.
I don't think anyone is ever going to buy a Mac just to use an iPod.
How do you know that? Look at all the publicity the iPod got. While I doubt many people saw it and immediately rushed out to buy an iMac, it's entirely possible that it caused many people to consider getting a Mac when they might not have otherwise.
Apple could have rescued the company by switching from being just a computer company with a stagnant and declining market share to an intelligent device company. But it can't do that if they tie their new products to trying to save their old one.
Apple is one of the few consistently profitable computer companies in today's market; they are hardly in need of "rescuing". The entire point of their intelligent device strategy is that designing the hardware, software, and OS leads to a superior user experience. Take that integration away, and you reduce Apple to a generic peripheral manufacturer.
That's the most scary kind of dictatorship -- where everything is predicated on "we're doing it for your own good".
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated: but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
Do not forget that a strong State is the best guardian of individual rights, simply by the virtue of ruling-in and checking the power of big croporations over the people.
Please. Nearly every recent abuse by corporations is possible only because the state has overstepped its power. You can blame Adobe for having Sklyarov arrested, but they could only have their desires enforced at gunpoint because Congress shredded our rights with the DMCA. No corporation can take your life, liberty, or property without my consent, unless they are backed up by government force.
For example, if you lose your job and can get 60% of yout former salary by virtue of the State's unemployment insurance, you can bet that companies don't push their workers around, as people simply quit and take the time to look for a proper job.
Are you serious? How many people would work at all if they could get 60% of their income by sitting on their butts? Basic economics: when you subsidize something, you get more of it. This is why European nations consistently have high unemployment.
I defy anyone to refute this argument (communism not being of any relevance
I'd say it's quite relevant that attempts to put your ideas into practice led to the murder of over 100 million people in the last century.
and from computer to screen (to prevent someone from generating a phony output to your monitor that can trick you into OKing something you hadn't intended to)
<sarcasm>Yes, I'm sure that's exactly the purpose</sarcasm>. Just how stupid does Microsoft think we are? (In case anyone doesn't get it, the point of this "feature" is to ensure that you won't be able to copy or take screenshots of anything that appears on the monitor. Another nail in the coffin of fair use.)
I'm not surprised by any of this. For a while now Microsoft has been conflating the concepts of security, which increases the user's control over what happens on his system, with DRM, which removes the user's control. Because you can use fuzzy words like "secure" and "trustworthy" to describe both, they use the promise of better security to obscure their plan to remove our computing freedom.
They have other priorities, such as medical-marijuana laws and tapping the Internet.
Who came up with the Clipper Chip and wanted to ban encryption technology? Who oversaw a record number of nonviolent drug users thrown in prison? Hint: not Republicans. Democrats are no better than the GOP when it comes to civil liberties.
sometimes I feel bad for the 3rd Amendment...it just gets completely ignored
Actually I recall seeing a semi-serious argument against the SSSCA on 3rd Amendment grounds. The reasoning was that mandating a "cop chip" in all electronic devices to make sure you don't do anything unapproved is effectively quartering an agent of government in your residence. Obviously quite a stretch, but no more so than any number of acts Congress has tried to justify using the Commerce Clause.
Right, but gcc isn't integral to the OS; it's only installed if you install the developer tools (the same is true for gnutar, the base install has only the BSD tar). AFAIK there is no GPL software on a stock install of OS X, which is probably justifiable paranoia by Apple's lawyers.
That's why I'm not viscerally opposed to the BSD license or the LGPL. I think the jury's still out on whether they will have a net good effect, but I'm very confident that the GPL will have a bad effect.
Interesting, we agree in relative terms. I'm very confident the BSD and LGPL licenses are a net positive, and I'm unsure about the GPL.
I know about the broken window fallacy. It is not a perfect analogy because the programmers in this case are not doing useless work. They are merely doing useful work that others are willing to do for free.
And the window repairman isn't doing useless work either, but after breaking a window and having him repair it, there is no net increase in wealth. The economy would be better off if the window's owner could spend his money on something other than window repairs. Likewise, paying many programmers to write nearly-identical code is a much less efficient use of resources than using free software and directing those resources toward other activities (which may involve developing new software, rather than reinventing the wheel).
This is a protectionism vs. globalization argument
Sort of, except a lot of the anti-globalization arguments don't apply to free software, such as alleged mistreatment of workers and environmental damage. Without those considerations, protectionism is simply a subsidy to a favored group at the expense of the general public, and I consider that a bad thing even if I am in the group that would supposedly benefit.
If free software puts me out of work, that's too bad for me but a net gain for the economy. I can help myself and produce a larger economic gain by writing better software, or by figuring out how to add value to free software solutions.
Theft is theft, no matter how much perfume you spray around it. You are taking property from Bertelsmann
And copyright infringement isn't theft, just like trespassing isn't armed robbery, even though both are wrong.
>The founding fathers realized that to promote the arts and sciences, there must be an incentive for the producer thus protections were afforded to the creator.
They also recognized that copyrights are a limitation on freedom of speech and a government-granted monopoly, and therefore should be restricted (note "limited times", which has been routinely ignored by Congress and will hopefully be restored by Eldred vs. Reno). By placing limits on copyright, the Constitution clearly emphasizes that intellectual property is not equivalent to physical property. (I just had this debate with Bush2000 on FR, scary. Obviously you're much more reasonable.)
I agree that copyrights should be protected (although not in perpetuity), but overstating the impact of piracy plays right into the hands of those who would remove our rights for their benefit.
Property is to be respected and I surprised that someone from the Cato Institute saying otherwise.
He didn't say otherwise, nor did he say that unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material should be legal. All he said was that such activities are having little or no effect on the publisher's profits, contrary to their claims. This is an important point to make because it negates the primary argument of the MPAA and RIAA when they call for user-hostile and unconstitutional laws (DMCA, SSSCA, et al) that they are losing billions of dollars due to piracy. They're not, and their real goal is to use government power to eliminate the general purpose computer by turning it into a device that views only approved multimedia content (for a fee each time, of course). I consider their actions far more immoral than some teenager downloading MP3s.
Come on. He admitted he was wrong, is investigating the reasons for his incorrect conclusions, and all you can do is insult him? He's shown much more honesty than I've come to expect from policy analysts.
And my theory is... wait for it... that rights holders should be able to charge whatever they want, and use any DRM that they want, and the market will take care of everything.
And in the absence of one-sided laws like DMCA (which he opposes), this is true. The MPAA should be able to put whatever DRM they like on their products, but they should not be able to have you arrested for breaking it (unless you then proceed to illegally distribute copies). In this scenario, products with strong (i.e. annoying) DRM will either be cracked or will be defeated in the marketplace by competitors with more reasonable or no DRM. The **AAs know this, which is why they need the DMCA and SSSCA to make both of those alternatives illegal.
No, they can't. Nor can MPAA agents haul you away for writing a Linux DVD player. In both cases, they depended on government force to achieve their desires. This is the problem with giving government more power for "noble" purposes like regulating corporations; it is a virtual certainty that that power will not be used in the way that you want it to be.
Another alternative for Mac OS X is vlc. It seems to play most DivX files unmodified, and as a bonus also plays DVDs without the screen capture restrictions that Apple was forced to build into their player.
There was a story on CNN about this yesterday, in which they showed a scene from "Felicity" with dialog as follows "Hey, I just got a new computer" "Oh, is it one of those new iMacs? Those things are so beautiful".
Ugh. That's just tacky, and I say that as an Apple shareholder. I much prefer the Mac placements in shows like Buffy and 24, where they fit right in and none of the characters give them a second thought. By not beating it over the viewer's head, it creates the impression that of *course* Willow would use an iBook for her white hat jobs, and of *course* a high-tech antiterrorist facility would have lots of Powerbooks and Cinema Displays.
if I ever build my own universe I'm going to need to use data compression of some sort, and kind of fudge the details. I mean, who cares exactly where an electron is, as long as it statistically behaves like it should?
Exactly. And I wouldn't waste effort calculating the position of every single electron at every point in time either; I'd just wait until a measurement was taken on it and then compute where it should be. And depending on the formulas I used, this could confuse the simulated scientists in my universe, who would be wondering how electrons could pass through two slits simultaneously, but only when they weren't looking. Wait a minute...
The "neutral state" isn't an EULA. It's normal copyright law
Exactly. And the rights the GPL gives you are a strict superset of your rights under normal copyright law.
Except, of course, for the right to use the software. It's part of the company agreeing to sell you a copy of their software--you agree to pay them X dollars, AND to abide by the EULA.
If I signed a contract with a representative of the software publisher agreeing to their terms before money changed hands, I'd agree. But if I pay Micro Center for a software package, I've entered into no contract with the publisher, just as when I buy a book from a bookstore I have not entered into a contract with the author. Standard copyright law should apply in both cases.
Contrast this with the GPL, where you trade your right to not use the GPL for any part of your program for the right to "use" any GPL'd lines of code at all in your program.
Again, you haven't lost anything. Under normal copyright law, you have no right to redistribute derivative works at all; the GPL grants you that right provided you fulfill certain conditions (i.e. making your code that contains it GPLed).
Having said all this, my software is released under the BSD license, because I don't believe proprietary software is fundamentally immoral and I don't lie awake at night worrying that somebody might be using my code to make money. But complaining about GPL restrictions is like getting half a pie from someone for free, and then being upset that they didn't give you the whole thing.
It is also a restriction in the sense that it does grant me the right to distribute, but it does take away a portion of that right based on usage.
I understand your point, it's really a matter of semantics. In my view, granting an additional right with restrictions on how it is exercised (as the GPL does) is still purely a benefit for the user, so I don't think it's accurate to say it "takes away" rights.
GPL says here is a license, you can use our stuff in said manner, as long as your usage follows our beliefs on usage.
Agreed, the critical difference being that the GPL doesn't try to remove any of your existing rights.
Whether you like them or not, if the other license does not break any laws, they are just as valid as the GPL and they both attempt to do the same thing.
Well, I do believe that traditional EULAs do in fact break a number of laws, lack of consideration being the most obvious (of course, IANAL).
What, it takes away my right to produce commercial software and not distribute my source along with it.
Except that redistribution is illegal under copyright law; you didn't have that right to begin with, so the GPL can't take it from you. The GPL only grants you additional rights, it doesn't remove any. This is diametrically opposed to commercial EULAs which attempt to remove rights you do have under copyright law, giving you nothing in exchange.
It's still a license, that we would all like others to follow regardless of their reasons for why they don't want to.
And it really shouldn't have an L, because it bears no relation to the odious shrink-wrap "agreements". The GPL is really a *grant*, because it takes no rights away from the user, but allows you to do things normally forbidden by copyright law. The GPL itself reaffirms this, noting that you don't have to accept its terms to use the software, only to redistribute it (which in the absence of the "license" you can't do at all).
If I thought the idea of GPL was bogus and was going to destroy software as we know it, doesn't give me a moral (not to mention legal) leg to stand on if I decide to ignore the GPL.
You're perfectly free to ignore the GPL, in which case you have to use the software in accordance with standard copyright law.
Is that so? Aren't they, by willfully developing technology to -prevent- the exercise of fair use rights, doing something much akin to preventing me from exercising my right to vote?
Not really. As I understand it, fair use isn't a "fundamental" right like free speech or voting, it's just a defense against claims of copyright infringement. I don't have a problem with the **AAs releasing crippled products; you always have the option to not buy them (Of course, this is assuming that the limitations are clearly indicated. If you buy something that is marketed as an audio CD and it fries your computer when you try to play it, you should rightly sue the manufacturer). The problem comes when the government uses its guns to support their flawed business models, because this necessarily requires criminalizing acts that do not violate copyright (DeCSS et al).
IMHO, ALL income should be taxed to support the social security system.
Ah, but that would expose Social Security as a (horribly inefficient) welfare program instead of an "investment" which both parties have convinced the general public that it is. Personally, I'd eliminate FICA and means-test Social Security benefits. Actually, this is similar to your plan, since regular taxes would have to be raised to make up the difference. Of course the entire mess of income, capital gains, and corporate taxes should be replaced with a national sales tax, but that's another rant.
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Every plan for reforming Social Security that I've seen has been voluntary. If you don't think you have the ability to manage your own money, you would be free to continue to fling it into the current Ponzi scheme. But those of us who do understand basic concepts of math and economics shouldn't have to suffer because of your fears.
How do you know that? Look at all the publicity the iPod got. While I doubt many people saw it and immediately rushed out to buy an iMac, it's entirely possible that it caused many people to consider getting a Mac when they might not have otherwise.
Apple could have rescued the company by switching from being just a computer company with a stagnant and declining market share to an intelligent device company. But it can't do that if they tie their new products to trying to save their old one.
Apple is one of the few consistently profitable computer companies in today's market; they are hardly in need of "rescuing". The entire point of their intelligent device strategy is that designing the hardware, software, and OS leads to a superior user experience. Take that integration away, and you reduce Apple to a generic peripheral manufacturer.
Please. Nearly every recent abuse by corporations is possible only because the state has overstepped its power. You can blame Adobe for having Sklyarov arrested, but they could only have their desires enforced at gunpoint because Congress shredded our rights with the DMCA. No corporation can take your life, liberty, or property without my consent, unless they are backed up by government force.
For example, if you lose your job and can get 60% of yout former salary by virtue of the State's unemployment insurance, you can bet that companies don't push their workers around, as people simply quit and take the time to look for a proper job.
Are you serious? How many people would work at all if they could get 60% of their income by sitting on their butts? Basic economics: when you subsidize something, you get more of it. This is why European nations consistently have high unemployment.
I defy anyone to refute this argument (communism not being of any relevance
I'd say it's quite relevant that attempts to put your ideas into practice led to the murder of over 100 million people in the last century.
<sarcasm>Yes, I'm sure that's exactly the purpose</sarcasm>. Just how stupid does Microsoft think we are? (In case anyone doesn't get it, the point of this "feature" is to ensure that you won't be able to copy or take screenshots of anything that appears on the monitor. Another nail in the coffin of fair use.)
I'm not surprised by any of this. For a while now Microsoft has been conflating the concepts of security, which increases the user's control over what happens on his system, with DRM, which removes the user's control. Because you can use fuzzy words like "secure" and "trustworthy" to describe both, they use the promise of better security to obscure their plan to remove our computing freedom.
Who came up with the Clipper Chip and wanted to ban encryption technology? Who oversaw a record number of nonviolent drug users thrown in prison? Hint: not Republicans. Democrats are no better than the GOP when it comes to civil liberties.
Actually I recall seeing a semi-serious argument against the SSSCA on 3rd Amendment grounds. The reasoning was that mandating a "cop chip" in all electronic devices to make sure you don't do anything unapproved is effectively quartering an agent of government in your residence. Obviously quite a stretch, but no more so than any number of acts Congress has tried to justify using the Commerce Clause.
Right, but gcc isn't integral to the OS; it's only installed if you install the developer tools (the same is true for gnutar, the base install has only the BSD tar). AFAIK there is no GPL software on a stock install of OS X, which is probably justifiable paranoia by Apple's lawyers.
Interesting, we agree in relative terms. I'm very confident the BSD and LGPL licenses are a net positive, and I'm unsure about the GPL.
And the window repairman isn't doing useless work either, but after breaking a window and having him repair it, there is no net increase in wealth. The economy would be better off if the window's owner could spend his money on something other than window repairs. Likewise, paying many programmers to write nearly-identical code is a much less efficient use of resources than using free software and directing those resources toward other activities (which may involve developing new software, rather than reinventing the wheel).
This is a protectionism vs. globalization argument
Sort of, except a lot of the anti-globalization arguments don't apply to free software, such as alleged mistreatment of workers and environmental damage. Without those considerations, protectionism is simply a subsidy to a favored group at the expense of the general public, and I consider that a bad thing even if I am in the group that would supposedly benefit.
If free software puts me out of work, that's too bad for me but a net gain for the economy. I can help myself and produce a larger economic gain by writing better software, or by figuring out how to add value to free software solutions.
If you really believe this, please consult a decent economics book immediately, preferably one which discusses the broken window fallacy.
And copyright infringement isn't theft, just like trespassing isn't armed robbery, even though both are wrong.
>The founding fathers realized that to promote the arts and sciences, there must be an incentive for the producer thus protections were afforded to the creator.
They also recognized that copyrights are a limitation on freedom of speech and a government-granted monopoly, and therefore should be restricted (note "limited times", which has been routinely ignored by Congress and will hopefully be restored by Eldred vs. Reno). By placing limits on copyright, the Constitution clearly emphasizes that intellectual property is not equivalent to physical property. (I just had this debate with Bush2000 on FR, scary. Obviously you're much more reasonable.)
I agree that copyrights should be protected (although not in perpetuity), but overstating the impact of piracy plays right into the hands of those who would remove our rights for their benefit.
He didn't say otherwise, nor did he say that unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material should be legal. All he said was that such activities are having little or no effect on the publisher's profits, contrary to their claims. This is an important point to make because it negates the primary argument of the MPAA and RIAA when they call for user-hostile and unconstitutional laws (DMCA, SSSCA, et al) that they are losing billions of dollars due to piracy. They're not, and their real goal is to use government power to eliminate the general purpose computer by turning it into a device that views only approved multimedia content (for a fee each time, of course). I consider their actions far more immoral than some teenager downloading MP3s.
And my theory is... wait for it... that rights holders should be able to charge whatever they want, and use any DRM that they want, and the market will take care of everything.
And in the absence of one-sided laws like DMCA (which he opposes), this is true. The MPAA should be able to put whatever DRM they like on their products, but they should not be able to have you arrested for breaking it (unless you then proceed to illegally distribute copies). In this scenario, products with strong (i.e. annoying) DRM will either be cracked or will be defeated in the marketplace by competitors with more reasonable or no DRM. The **AAs know this, which is why they need the DMCA and SSSCA to make both of those alternatives illegal.
I'd say a guaranteed monopoly on delivering first-class mail is a pretty decent subsidy...
No, they can't. Nor can MPAA agents haul you away for writing a Linux DVD player. In both cases, they depended on government force to achieve their desires. This is the problem with giving government more power for "noble" purposes like regulating corporations; it is a virtual certainty that that power will not be used in the way that you want it to be.
Another alternative for Mac OS X is vlc. It seems to play most DivX files unmodified, and as a bonus also plays DVDs without the screen capture restrictions that Apple was forced to build into their player.
Ugh. That's just tacky, and I say that as an Apple shareholder. I much prefer the Mac placements in shows like Buffy and 24, where they fit right in and none of the characters give them a second thought. By not beating it over the viewer's head, it creates the impression that of *course* Willow would use an iBook for her white hat jobs, and of *course* a high-tech antiterrorist facility would have lots of Powerbooks and Cinema Displays.
Exactly. And I wouldn't waste effort calculating the position of every single electron at every point in time either; I'd just wait until a measurement was taken on it and then compute where it should be. And depending on the formulas I used, this could confuse the simulated scientists in my universe, who would be wondering how electrons could pass through two slits simultaneously, but only when they weren't looking. Wait a minute...
Exactly. And the rights the GPL gives you are a strict superset of your rights under normal copyright law.
Except, of course, for the right to use the software. It's part of the company agreeing to sell you a copy of their software--you agree to pay them X dollars, AND to abide by the EULA.
If I signed a contract with a representative of the software publisher agreeing to their terms before money changed hands, I'd agree. But if I pay Micro Center for a software package, I've entered into no contract with the publisher, just as when I buy a book from a bookstore I have not entered into a contract with the author. Standard copyright law should apply in both cases.
Contrast this with the GPL, where you trade your right to not use the GPL for any part of your program for the right to "use" any GPL'd lines of code at all in your program.
Again, you haven't lost anything. Under normal copyright law, you have no right to redistribute derivative works at all; the GPL grants you that right provided you fulfill certain conditions (i.e. making your code that contains it GPLed).
Having said all this, my software is released under the BSD license, because I don't believe proprietary software is fundamentally immoral and I don't lie awake at night worrying that somebody might be using my code to make money. But complaining about GPL restrictions is like getting half a pie from someone for free, and then being upset that they didn't give you the whole thing.
I understand your point, it's really a matter of semantics. In my view, granting an additional right with restrictions on how it is exercised (as the GPL does) is still purely a benefit for the user, so I don't think it's accurate to say it "takes away" rights.
GPL says here is a license, you can use our stuff in said manner, as long as your usage follows our beliefs on usage.
Agreed, the critical difference being that the GPL doesn't try to remove any of your existing rights.
Whether you like them or not, if the other license does not break any laws, they are just as valid as the GPL and they both attempt to do the same thing.
Well, I do believe that traditional EULAs do in fact break a number of laws, lack of consideration being the most obvious (of course, IANAL).
Except that redistribution is illegal under copyright law; you didn't have that right to begin with, so the GPL can't take it from you. The GPL only grants you additional rights, it doesn't remove any. This is diametrically opposed to commercial EULAs which attempt to remove rights you do have under copyright law, giving you nothing in exchange.
And it really shouldn't have an L, because it bears no relation to the odious shrink-wrap "agreements". The GPL is really a *grant*, because it takes no rights away from the user, but allows you to do things normally forbidden by copyright law. The GPL itself reaffirms this, noting that you don't have to accept its terms to use the software, only to redistribute it (which in the absence of the "license" you can't do at all).
If I thought the idea of GPL was bogus and was going to destroy software as we know it, doesn't give me a moral (not to mention legal) leg to stand on if I decide to ignore the GPL.
You're perfectly free to ignore the GPL, in which case you have to use the software in accordance with standard copyright law.
Not really. As I understand it, fair use isn't a "fundamental" right like free speech or voting, it's just a defense against claims of copyright infringement. I don't have a problem with the **AAs releasing crippled products; you always have the option to not buy them (Of course, this is assuming that the limitations are clearly indicated. If you buy something that is marketed as an audio CD and it fries your computer when you try to play it, you should rightly sue the manufacturer). The problem comes when the government uses its guns to support their flawed business models, because this necessarily requires criminalizing acts that do not violate copyright (DeCSS et al).
Ah, but that would expose Social Security as a (horribly inefficient) welfare program instead of an "investment" which both parties have convinced the general public that it is. Personally, I'd eliminate FICA and means-test Social Security benefits. Actually, this is similar to your plan, since regular taxes would have to be raised to make up the difference. Of course the entire mess of income, capital gains, and corporate taxes should be replaced with a national sales tax, but that's another rant.