I must say, we're quite a bit different -- or maybe we just listen to different kinds of bands. I usually only buy CDs if I know the band is decent all the way through. For those kinds of bands, and I'd like to think for any self-respecting professional musican, any piece that they've put enough work into to produce & record must have some value.
I like albums where the artist has a definite theme through the album. Even though I rip all my CDs and listen to them that way, I almost always listen to entire albums anyway, rather than mixes; the layout of an album is just as much a part of the artistic work of the musician as the individual song.
Furthermore, there are lots of songs that don't have an immediate appeal, or you may not immediately understand. But after listening to it along with the rest of the album, you begin to understand and appreciate it better.
Listening to an album of a well-liked band is like hang out with an old friend. It's not necessarily this exciting wow thing, like it might be if you were on a date with some girl, nor as self-conscious and evaluating as you might be if you were with some new friend you hadn't known long; but there's a comfort and ease that just feels right.
...which means you are left over with 29K, or after all is done and said you get 2,410 USD per month.
You want to feed yourself on THAT? Come on you have got to be kidding yourself.
Huh? I'm a graduate student, and I live off $1400 per month. Granted that's only temporary, I don't have a wife and kids to support... but there are plenty of people who live off $29K per year.
The difference is, a lot of those people don't like their jobs. I'm sure any musician could get a "real" job and make a decent salary, but if I thought I was good enough to live off my music, I'd chose the life of a musician too. How much do you think the average musician makes in a year (not the most popular bands you've heard, but an average professional guitar player or violinist)?
You're right though, that $12/year is probably low... I'd charge $3 by the month (for those who just want to try it out), or $15/$20 by the year. Heck yeah, I'd pay $3 to have one-month unlimited access to a band I thought might be decent; and I'd pay $20/year for groups I think are awesome!
Speaking of which, are there any sites that group these kind of indie bands together, and have ratings on them? If this gets big, people are going to need these kinds of sites as one-stop 'filter' places (a la slashdot!)
Man, I wish I had my Tolstoy with me... there's a section at the end of Anna Karenina that talks about a woman who is married; he describes the difference between what she looked like when she was single: a fire in the eyes, slender, beautiful, accomplished in music and singing, an edge to her speech that made men really attracted to her. Now that she's married and has kids, the fire is gone; her body has softened up a bit, she lives her life for her husband and her kids, doesn't go out much or write or sing or play anymore.
But Tolstoy's take on it was that the fire and edge and all that she had when she was single was really a consequence of her desire, her longing for a family; and now that she has it, she is satisfied.
Obviously I don't put it nearly as well as Tolstoy did, but it was a neat observation. Probably the same thing applies. I don't buy the "trying to attract a mate" obligatory darwinism crap; but I do buy that energy, fire, edge, whatever can come from our lack of fulfillment, and that fulfillment has the side-effect of turning off our "genius".
Luckily, I'm still single, so I might make it big yet...
Your analogy to food doesn't, while it makes sense to some degree, doesn't mean that everyone's morality and ethics (or diets for that matter) should be the same. [snip] In Japan, for instance, honor is the driving force behind their morality. In generally Christian societies such as the U.S., Christian moral codes and ethics are the driving force.
I'm actually well aware that the analogy doesn't prove that all moralities need to be the same; that's why I chose it.:-) Confucianism, the Japanese honor system, Christianity, Islam, even Objectivism (Ayn Rand), all have very different ways of looking at the world, but the large majority if actions that they require are similar. Keeping promises, telling the truth (sometimes under certain situations), courage, faithfulness to friends and family, generosity, not stealing, not murdering, not cheating, etc. It's the actions (including actions of the heart & mind) that are effective in morality, not the theory of ethics used to come to those conclusions.
The importance of the particular theory of ethics (speaking only of morality) is when they predict different things, and cause people to do things that are morally wrong. As a Christian, I certainly believe that some of the things in Islam are wrong (multiple wives, for instance) and harmful. But the fact is, they do have a large portion of the truth, and for those like my friend Khalid who honestly try to abide by them, they work pretty effectively.
Does the fact that people have "gotten by", or even done really well, in Thailand on mediocre nutrition for thousands of years mean that we don't educate them on better nutrion (if, in fact, we have it)? Of course not.
My friend Khalid thinks that I'm wrong to believe Christianity, wrong to drink alcohol(in moderation), and wrong on a number of things. And I think he's wrong on a number of things too. But we agree on a whole lot, and one of the things that we agree on is that there is a right answer. Because of that, we can respect each other.
There are healthy attitudes in both systems of ethics, but neither are 100% perfect. [snip] Moral objectivism is wrong. Forcing your own moral beliefs and ethics upon the rest of society is wrong. It's what gave the Christians a bad name.
This is where I really don't understand postmodernists. You just said that there are "healthy attitudes" in both systems. By calling these attitudes "healthy", you mean that they are right. And by saying that neither is 100% perfect, you are saying that there are certain attitudes or ideas that are wrong. If there are attitudes that are "healthy", and also attitudes that are "unhealthy", shouldn't we be trying to find out a system of morality that is 100% "healthy"?
In one breath you say "moral objectivism is wrong", in other words, "there is no universal moral law." Then, in the next breath, you say, "Forcing your own moral beliefs on others is wrong" -- in other words, you are pronouncing a universal moral law, and judging me & other Christians for breaking it. Which is it?
What do you mean by "Forcing your own moral beliefs and ethics upon the rest of society"? I'm not forcing you to do anything. I believe that something is true, and that it affects everyone, including you. I'm trying to convince you that what I believe is true by a rational discussion. I'm not judging you (even though you are judging me) -- Lord knows I've done enough bad things to lose that right a long time go. It's probable that in some areas I'm wrong(I have been before), and I'm willing talk about it. But what I do believe is that there is a right answer, even if I don't happen to have it completely (yet).
(If by "forcing your beliefs on society", you're talking about legislating laws which enforce that morality and punish those who break it, that's another discussion -- "What kin
Who are the RDA to decide what's healthy and necessary for everyone in the USA to eat? It's important to remember that food and diet are based on
culture and social norms. Each culture has its own set of raw material, its own foods, its own cooking codes ('cookbooks', if you will). Codifying what's 'healthy' is dubious at best, and applicable to only one culture or set of cultures at worst.
The fact of the matter is, the human body needs certain nutrients: it needs fat, protien, carbohydrates, vitamins, in certain quantities; an excess or a deficiency in any area causes problems. Each culture has developed their own types of dishes, but all cultures have developed a diet which satisfies those requirements, or they'd die off. Any culture which develops unhealthy eating habits will suffer the consequences.
For example, I'm from the US, and I like steak & potatoes. My friend is from Korea, and he likes galbi and rice. They look and taste qutie different. Should we therefore conclude that there is no such thing as nutrition, and that whatever you want to eat (dirt, cyanide, urine) is OK? Of course not. Steak & galbi both supply my body with protien and fat, and potatoes & rice both supply my body with needed carbohydrates.
Furthermore in the US, a lot of people eat fast food, extremely fatty food, and sugary food. What's the result? Obesity, heart attacks, diabetes.
Similarly, the human soul (whatever that means) and human society needs a certain morality in order to survive. Every culture has developed a morality which satisfies these needs, or it has died off. Any culture which develops an unhealthy set of ethics will suffer the consequences.
One of the other posters mentioned Pakistani councils distirbuting rape as a punishment. This is an unhealthy ethic, and will cause trouble for the people doing it, and the society as a whole, just as eating junk food causes trouble for people who eat it.
Another poster mentioned social darwinism; think about cultures and their ethics in that sense. There have been societies that have tried lots of things. People get the idea that being chaste until marriage, or emphasising a nuclear family, is 'old fashioned' and not really necessary anymore. The fact is, that cultures with loose morals have been tried before -- but all the ones that lasted and flourished are the ones that have discovered that there needs to be limitations on the sexual drive.
Postmodernism is wrong. Morality is objective, and ignoring it causes major problems.
Get an OSS sympathizer onto the core OS team at Microsoft.
Have him incorporate bits and pieces of Linux kernel code into Microsoft windows -- especially comments, lame jokes, and misspellings
Wait until it's distributed widely, and specific versions are relied upon in mission-critical business apps (i.e., hard to just replace w/ a newer version)
Sue Microsoft for copyright infringement, and threaten to sue anyone who continues to use that version of Windows
Seriously, in the "you might accidentally incorporate copyrighted code" situation, is there any advantage to being a closed-source, proprietary company, other than the reduced chances of getting caught?
The temporary monopoly gives the inventor the reward of profit for the new inovation, spurs inovation for those unwilling to license the technology to come up with an alternative solution, and eventually expires entering the new technology into the public.
So wait, you're saying that the real advantage of patents is that it makes people re-invent the wheel? That doesn't sound like innovation to me, it sounds like a waste of time.
I went to a conference a couple of years ago and was mystified by one of the presentations. It was some kind of a new cryptographic protocol; but it didn't do anything that existing protocols didn't already do. The only distinguishing factor, its reason for existence, was that it was unencumbered by any patents. Is this really what we need from "innovation"?
I don't really believe that GPL code has the rights to use the "Free Software" dogma. I'd have no problem if it was advertised as "Share Software" or something similar. But the analogy with a free country is not correct.
I guess when the FSF talks about "free software", they don't mean "free to you", but that the software it self is somehow "free" -- i.e., not locked up in a proprietary product. The limitations in the GPL as to what you can do to the software isn't to keep you free (you're already in a free country) but to keep the software free -- i.e., to protect it from you.
Yeah, I think this is a bit extreme ideologically. When RMS says that it's immoral to hide code & prevent people from copying it, I think he's got his priorities a bit mixed up. There are many evil things in this world, and writing proprietary code doesn't rank that high on my list. Nonetheless, I think that making a system that keeps code "in the open", not allowing it to be folded into a proprietary product, is definitely a good thing.
Most people who release BSD code have benefitted from BSD code in the past. In these cases GPL software was likely too restrictive to use.
Ok, that actually makes a lot of sense. The GPL is very restrictive -- "You can use my bat, but you have to play by my rules." In that sense, they're not giving gifts, nor did they ever claim to. They wanted to make an economy where people contributed back out of their own self-interest; they didn't want to rely on people's sense of gratitude and fair-play. But I guess I can grant that gift-giving can be a good thing, and I can see why people who've been on the receiving end are disposed to give back.
As for the inexperienced developer writing for a corporation: (unlike RMS) I have no objections to him making a decent living writing proprietary code; nor do I have any objections to him learning general coding principles from my code (tho my own code probably isn't that good to emulate). But the only reason he needs BSD code is that the company who he's writing for skimped when they hired him, or they skimped on training him; I see no reason why they should benefit from the work of an expert, even though they were unwilling to pay for an expert or train someone to become an expert; or (alternately) to make their derivative system GPL as well.
Shall I break out the dictionary definition of free? I'll give you a hint, it means having no restrictions. The GPL is very much a restriction. It is a very different philosophy than BSD and public domain code. It is in no way free as in the definition of the word.
Well, this is why RMS always says, "Think 'free' as in speech, not 'free' as in beer." It's not a perfect analogy, but it's along the right lines. When we speak of "freedom", as in "this is a free country", we definitely don't mean "no restrictions"; because that wouldn't be a free society, it would be anarchy. If you are free to live, that means I'm not free to kill you. Gangsters are not free to intimidate people, corporations are not free to lie in their annual reports.
The restrictions in the GPL are exactly the kind of restrictions we have in a free society, and for exactly the same reasons. It's to promote the availability of source code for anyone to use, and to encourage people to write code without worrying about their work being 'stolen' by corporations.
Now, obviously people who use the BSD license don't care about someone making money off their work without giving anything back. I don't really understand where they're coming from, but that's their choice.
But don't diss me because I expect someone I've helped to help me back. I like to write code, I love to have other people use it and make improvements on it; but I don't want my hard work used to make money where I'm not benefitted. If there were no such thing as the GPL, I'd be less inclined to publish my code, and I'm sure many other people would be as well, and the world would be worse off.
Why should a company be forced to include a competitors product with their own?
As I understand the situation, it has to do with the way MS did their contracts and stuff. No one make MS include Java in the first place -- they could have just ignored it and told people to d/l the JVM from Sun; they could've waited until they had C# ready before they put *any* vm on their system.
But instead they decided to do their anti-competitive, "Embrace, extend, extinguish" crap, including a JVM that was incompatible with the published Sun standard; including it on their widely-distributed platform by default guaranteed that a large percentage of people using Java would be incompatable with any non-MS implementation.
No one made them do this flagrantly illegal acts; forcing them to include Sun's JVM is a punishment for their behavior.
Asking, "Why should MS be forced to include Sun's JVM" would be like saying, "Why should I have to pay a $100 ticket for driving on the road -- other people don't." (Answer: you were driving 20 mph over the speed limit.)
Well, the normal way to deal with patents is to file as many as you can yourself; then when some other company says, "We think you may be interested in licensing patents A, B, and C from us", you can look at their stuff and answer, "Maybe we could trade you licenses D, E, and F?" So what we really need is for the FSF to start registering software patents like crazy, and GPL them.... "You can use this patent in your software, only if the rest of your software is patented..."
Isn't this the reason RedHat gives for some of its patents?
The only problem with this approach is that if they're held by some company like RedHat, and it ever goes bankrupt and has to sell their IP, the new owner might not be so reasonable...
I was actually thinking about amending it, to say, "(or, depending on how you look at it, all the absorptive colors at once [black] or none at all [white])". =)
What I think is interesting about RGB->CMYK->RGB is that the "3 colors of light" thing is completely an artifact of how human eyes happen to operate. If some alien species dropped by, and their eyes had only 2 color photoreceptors, or 4, or even 3 photoreceptors but with different wavelengths, what would our televisions look like to them? The colors would be all wierd. In fact all of our "artificial" media -- print, photos, everything -- would be completely off-base to them.
What I am trying to say is that
Justice does not equal Fairness....the legal courts are also concerned with what is Just
Oh, it's worse than that: the courts aren't concerned with what's just but with what's legal. It's the legislature's job to write laws that are just; it's your job (or your lawyer's job) to write contracts that don't let you get shafted.
I had a friend whose father worked for over 10 years at the business owned by her grandfather, thought he was the owner, and working to "pay off" his brothers and sisters (who inherited it jointly). But the lawyer who wrote up the contract for the "trust" was a naive fool, and just before they were about to make one of the last payments, one of the sisters pulled some legal crap and got the whole thing taken away from them. She said the hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments he'd made were just "loans" that she wasn't going to pay them back.
Did the courts care that he'd slaved for over 10 years, working 60- and 80-hour weeks for this company? No -- they only cared that the "trust" his father had set up allowed him to get nothing.
It's just like a computer. It doesn't care what you want it to do -- it cares what the code says to do. If some blackhat find a buffer overflow in your code that allows him to break in and 0wnz0r you, it will dutifully let them do it -- unless it violates some higher policy implementation, like StackGuard.
Similarly, if the law written by the legislature, or a contract you sign, has a "bug" in it that allows someone to screw you over, the courts will dutifully let them do it -- unless there's some higher law like the constitution or contract-fairness laws that can override it.
Even then, the judge isn't going to look for those defenses for you -- it's up to your lawyer, again, and you only get one real shot at a defense (an appeal is very limited in what it can argue about). So you'd better make it good.
Justice is about what's right and fair -- it's an external thing like mathematics; and the laws of the land are supposed to do their best to approximate that justice. But the courts aren't about what's just: they're about interpereting the laws, for good or for ill, to determine how well they approximate justice. Not just? Go fix it in the legislature. That's the way our system works.
Hitler wasn't an atheist, dumbass. At least he never claimed to be, and mentioned god in his speeches.
I haven't studied Hitler, so most of what's here is just inference from bits that I've heard. But one of his big things was the superiority of the "Ayrian" race, and the emergence of a Superman, influenced by Neitze. He was going to start by eliminating Jews as a species of sub-human contaminating the gene pool, but continue to blacks and other non-Aryans. He had programs to stop "retarded" people from reproducing -- I forget whether it was just sterilization or involved killing them.
In other words, he was going to take better control of our own evolution, looking for the next big mutation that would set us forward. I have no doubt that he used 'god' in his speeches; for one, it would be foolish not to use people's predjudices for your own advantage; and perhaps he even believed at some level what he said about God. But his ideas and how he acted definitely stemmed from atheistic sources.
As for the others, well, they didn't murder people for specifically atheistic. Atheism is not an important part of Communism.
Nonetheless, it was atheists who did the killing, largely as a result of their ideologies, which were atheistic (else they probably would have been called 'religions').
I'm not trying to say that "atheist => murderer", I'm trying to dispel the myth that religion is directly the cause of zealous slaughter, and if we just got rid of religion, we'd live in peace and harmony; or at least we wouldn't have any more 'holy wars'. People say, "When I think of all the blood that has been shed in the name of organized religion..." I respond, "Well, no more than the blood that has been shed by organized atheism." As one person responded, "Hmm... yeah, I guess it's the organization that's the problem." Or rather, (as Christianity teaches), mankind is the problem: "There is none that is righteous, no not one."
I don't know quite what you mean by "Atheism is not an important part of communism." Marx called religion the "opiate of the masses", a way that the upper classes used to control the lower classes and keep them in subjection. And in all the communist states I'm aware of, religion is kept under the thumb of the government: they worked really hard to lobotomize it and make it sterile. Is this just a coincidence? Why do you suppose they worked so hard to root it out?
Don't be too hard on Dimont -- for one, I'm paraphrasing a quote that I read over a year ago, so I may have misquoted him quite a bit. =) For two, he wasn't trying to make a analysis of the level of mass-calculated murder over the centuries. He was talking about how the Jews in Europe were persecuted by the Inquisition throughout the middle ages, and knowing that most of his modern readers would react strongly, was putting it in perspective.
And you have to admit, killing "all the Jews in Germany" -- what was the number, 7 million that died? is an order of magnitude bigger than 20,000.
Which doesn't mean that he's a very great historian -- the way he paints it, the Jews were responsible for just about all the good things that happened in Europe for the past 1500 years. =)
...as a co-religionist, you have a better chance of enlightening those narrow-minded people in your church than any outsider has. So maybe being ashamed of them is a good thing.
Oh, well, I'm not "oh, bigotry's OK then" now. =) I was ashamed for the sake of Christianity, because they reinforce the popular culture's view of crazy fundamentalists. It's one thing to say, "I bet there are narrow-minded people of every ideology", than to say, "I KNOW there are narrow-minded people of every ideology." Now I can relax and enlighten when I can. =)
Well, like I said, I was paraphrasing someone else -- a Jewish historian, in fact, who was commenting on the Inquisition. The book was "Jews, God, and History", and the author was Max Dimont. His basic take was, yes the Inquisition was wrong and persecuted Jews; but keep it in perspective: at least the Inquisitors treated each case individually, unlike Hitler and Stalin who just slaughtered us by the thousands.
And that was my point: unrestrained abstract ideologies are what make murdering zealots, and we have as many of those in this centurty as we ever had. It's not an artifact of religion.
Similarly, I used to be kind of ashamed of some of the people in the church I grew up in: good people, but narrow-minded and a bit bigoted. Then I started reading Slashdot, and I recognized that same narrow-minded bigotry in people with
all manner of ideologies. It has nothing to do with religion at all! Thank you, Slashdot!
Of course, the reason Christians have been responsible for more butchery than any other religion is simply that Christianity has been more successful than any other religion. Islam is number two (with a bullet!).
And atheistic ideologies are responsible for more butchery than probably all world religions combined. How many people did Hitler and Stalin kill, of their own people? Pol-Pot in Cambodia?
At least during the Inquisition, the church had enough fear of God to look into each case individually. Mass execution of men by formula is an abomination reserved exclusively for the 20th century. (Quote stolen from a historian whose name I can't remember off the top of my head.)
What, don't like your brand of atheism being compared with Stalin's? Maybe I don't like my Christianity compared with the so-called "religion" of those fighting to keep slaves and murdering abortion doctors.
Are you suggesting that U.K. spammers should be beaten with a baseball bat if they send explicit material to an 18 year old in the USA, despite it being perfectly reasonable material for somebody of that age in their own country?
Well, at 18, not a baseball bat so much.
I think they should be legally culpable for breaking the laws of the US, just as someone in the US should be culpable for advertizing Nazi memorabilia across the internet to someone in France (if I remember my google / ebay precedents right). [BTB, I agree with American policy there: it may be bad to sell Nazi memorabilia, but I don't think it's the government's call.]
I'm sure that in some countries, people would suggest that USA porno merchants be beaten with a baseball bat for daring to show women naked to anybody of any age. Should this also be carried out?
Very good question, actually. I started by thinking, "Well, anyone who sends that stuff to a seven-year-old is really fsck'd in the head. They're seriously morally reprehensible and such behavior shouldn't be tolerated." I think in our culture, most people would agree with me.
But pornography for adults is reprehensible and depraved as well -- not to the same degree, but it is. Why should I tolerate one, and not the other?
Especially since pr0n spammers aren't content to sit and wait for people to come to them, but actively seek out people, who may be trying to avoid it. Porn addiction is a real thing; there are many men who struggle with it, who want to quit, but can't. I've never been much tempted in that way, but I've had friends who are. Many pornographers know this: that's why they spam and put out teasers, because they know the bait works.
It'd be like a drug dealer, not willing to simply let people come to him, sending out "free samples" of heroin or coke in the mail, that when you opened it automatically injected you with something. It's preying on the weak-willed, just like casinos, and even credit-card companies (Are you paying off your bill every month? Let's raise your limit, so you're tempted to spend 'till you can't! I have like a $13,000 limit on one of my cards due to this effect.)
Or perhaps more apropos, like a liqour company sending out airline-size samples of their warez to random people, not caring, probably even knowing that some of the recipients were recovering alcoholics.
But getting back to your question: I live in a culture that takes a laissez-faire attitudes towards adults. If you want to pollute your body & your mind, we'll let you do so; it's your responsibility (once you're old enough), not ours. One advantage of that kind of a society is that when you do reject that crap, it actually means something: you're doing it because you want to, not because you must. And I think that makes the choice more valuable.
So no, I don't intend to attack the pr0n industry with baseball bats. Still, if you send pr0n to someone in Saudi Arabia, you should be legally culpable. =)
I don't see the problem in them seeing these materials.
No comment...
I'd be the first in line with a baseball bat to teach the spammer a little "cause and effect", but I'm not going to pretend it's because my kid saw a naked body.
But I consider an offense against my kids as an order of magnitude bigger than an offense against me. If you slap me, I may get upset, but I'm man enough to let it slide. If you slap one of my kids, you'd better watch yourself.
The problem being there is no way to tell how old the person who checks the email address is.
Well, sometimes it's hard to tell if the person across the counter is 17 (too young for cigarettes) or 18 (old enough for cigs but too young for pr0n & b33r), or 25 (old enough for all of them). That's why the law requires checking IDs before selling it.
I don't have any kids (yet), but if/when my kid gets explicit e-mail, you can bet I'm going to hunt down the dirtbag down. If a lawsuit doesn't work, maybe a baseball bat will...
Well, I worked on a sheep farm one summer: sheep are really dumb too, but they still run away from you. =)
Re:The articles your boss is reading...
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You know, the logic they used in the article relating to open source could just as well apply to closed source, sometimes even more so.
OpenSSH server was hacked & replaced with a trojan. What's to stop any closed-source corporation's servers from getting hacked and having trojans put in them? What's to stop someone from writing a virus whose hidden agenda is to get into company X and add trojan code into their CVS? If done right, it may never be found out.
All it takes is one person "flying under the radar" to "taint" the code, and millions of business could be liable. Well, this same thing could happen with closed source -- in fact, it DID happen with AT&T. The coders at AT&T took code that was available, mainly BSD code, and illegally put it into the AT&T codebase without proper attribution. If someone at Microsoft copied some code out of Gaim to put into MSN IM, it's the same situation.
Unfortunately, though, you're right: articles like this how that logic doesn't always hold sway.
Communism happens, and works, on a small scale. A perfect example is a (non-dysfunctional) family. "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs."
Ask my mom about "Redistribution of wealth" to pay for my schooling. =)
Anyone who owns the copyright to any part of the Linux kernel. Linus, Alan, Ingo, Andre... any of the big names on the LKML. Maybe someone could start a class-action lawsuit against SCO.
People don't normally think about it, but most of the Linux kernel IS copyrighted -- just grep for "(C)" in the kernel source sometime. It's just that the owners of the copyrights have agreed to grant anyone a license to copy & redistribute, under certain very generous conditions.
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I like albums where the artist has a definite theme through the album. Even though I rip all my CDs and listen to them that way, I almost always listen to entire albums anyway, rather than mixes; the layout of an album is just as much a part of the artistic work of the musician as the individual song.
Furthermore, there are lots of songs that don't have an immediate appeal, or you may not immediately understand. But after listening to it along with the rest of the album, you begin to understand and appreciate it better.
Listening to an album of a well-liked band is like hang out with an old friend. It's not necessarily this exciting wow thing, like it might be if you were on a date with some girl, nor as self-conscious and evaluating as you might be if you were with some new friend you hadn't known long; but there's a comfort and ease that just feels right.
Huh? I'm a graduate student, and I live off $1400 per month. Granted that's only temporary, I don't have a wife and kids to support... but there are plenty of people who live off $29K per year.
The difference is, a lot of those people don't like their jobs. I'm sure any musician could get a "real" job and make a decent salary, but if I thought I was good enough to live off my music, I'd chose the life of a musician too. How much do you think the average musician makes in a year (not the most popular bands you've heard, but an average professional guitar player or violinist)?
You're right though, that $12/year is probably low... I'd charge $3 by the month (for those who just want to try it out), or $15/$20 by the year. Heck yeah, I'd pay $3 to have one-month unlimited access to a band I thought might be decent; and I'd pay $20/year for groups I think are awesome!
Speaking of which, are there any sites that group these kind of indie bands together, and have ratings on them? If this gets big, people are going to need these kinds of sites as one-stop 'filter' places (a la slashdot!)
But Tolstoy's take on it was that the fire and edge and all that she had when she was single was really a consequence of her desire, her longing for a family; and now that she has it, she is satisfied.
Obviously I don't put it nearly as well as Tolstoy did, but it was a neat observation. Probably the same thing applies. I don't buy the "trying to attract a mate" obligatory darwinism crap; but I do buy that energy, fire, edge, whatever can come from our lack of fulfillment, and that fulfillment has the side-effect of turning off our "genius".
Luckily, I'm still single, so I might make it big yet...
I'm actually well aware that the analogy doesn't prove that all moralities need to be the same; that's why I chose it. :-) Confucianism, the Japanese honor system, Christianity, Islam, even Objectivism (Ayn Rand), all have very different ways of looking at the world, but the large majority if actions that they require are similar. Keeping promises, telling the truth (sometimes under certain situations), courage, faithfulness to friends and family, generosity, not stealing, not murdering, not cheating, etc. It's the actions (including actions of the heart & mind) that are effective in morality, not the theory of ethics used to come to those conclusions.
The importance of the particular theory of ethics (speaking only of morality) is when they predict different things, and cause people to do things that are morally wrong. As a Christian, I certainly believe that some of the things in Islam are wrong (multiple wives, for instance) and harmful. But the fact is, they do have a large portion of the truth, and for those like my friend Khalid who honestly try to abide by them, they work pretty effectively.
Does the fact that people have "gotten by", or even done really well, in Thailand on mediocre nutrition for thousands of years mean that we don't educate them on better nutrion (if, in fact, we have it)? Of course not.
My friend Khalid thinks that I'm wrong to believe Christianity, wrong to drink alcohol(in moderation), and wrong on a number of things. And I think he's wrong on a number of things too. But we agree on a whole lot, and one of the things that we agree on is that there is a right answer. Because of that, we can respect each other.
This is where I really don't understand postmodernists. You just said that there are "healthy attitudes" in both systems. By calling these attitudes "healthy", you mean that they are right. And by saying that neither is 100% perfect, you are saying that there are certain attitudes or ideas that are wrong. If there are attitudes that are "healthy", and also attitudes that are "unhealthy", shouldn't we be trying to find out a system of morality that is 100% "healthy"?
In one breath you say "moral objectivism is wrong", in other words, "there is no universal moral law." Then, in the next breath, you say, "Forcing your own moral beliefs on others is wrong" -- in other words, you are pronouncing a universal moral law, and judging me & other Christians for breaking it. Which is it?
What do you mean by "Forcing your own moral beliefs and ethics upon the rest of society"? I'm not forcing you to do anything. I believe that something is true, and that it affects everyone, including you. I'm trying to convince you that what I believe is true by a rational discussion. I'm not judging you (even though you are judging me) -- Lord knows I've done enough bad things to lose that right a long time go. It's probable that in some areas I'm wrong(I have been before), and I'm willing talk about it. But what I do believe is that there is a right answer, even if I don't happen to have it completely (yet).
(If by "forcing your beliefs on society", you're talking about legislating laws which enforce that morality and punish those who break it, that's another discussion -- "What kin
Try it this way:
The fact of the matter is, the human body needs certain nutrients: it needs fat, protien, carbohydrates, vitamins, in certain quantities; an excess or a deficiency in any area causes problems. Each culture has developed their own types of dishes, but all cultures have developed a diet which satisfies those requirements, or they'd die off. Any culture which develops unhealthy eating habits will suffer the consequences.
For example, I'm from the US, and I like steak & potatoes. My friend is from Korea, and he likes galbi and rice. They look and taste qutie different. Should we therefore conclude that there is no such thing as nutrition, and that whatever you want to eat (dirt, cyanide, urine) is OK? Of course not. Steak & galbi both supply my body with protien and fat, and potatoes & rice both supply my body with needed carbohydrates.
Furthermore in the US, a lot of people eat fast food, extremely fatty food, and sugary food. What's the result? Obesity, heart attacks, diabetes.
Similarly, the human soul (whatever that means) and human society needs a certain morality in order to survive. Every culture has developed a morality which satisfies these needs, or it has died off. Any culture which develops an unhealthy set of ethics will suffer the consequences.
One of the other posters mentioned Pakistani councils distirbuting rape as a punishment. This is an unhealthy ethic, and will cause trouble for the people doing it, and the society as a whole, just as eating junk food causes trouble for people who eat it.
Another poster mentioned social darwinism; think about cultures and their ethics in that sense. There have been societies that have tried lots of things. People get the idea that being chaste until marriage, or emphasising a nuclear family, is 'old fashioned' and not really necessary anymore. The fact is, that cultures with loose morals have been tried before -- but all the ones that lasted and flourished are the ones that have discovered that there needs to be limitations on the sexual drive.
Postmodernism is wrong. Morality is objective, and ignoring it causes major problems.
Seriously, in the "you might accidentally incorporate copyrighted code" situation, is there any advantage to being a closed-source, proprietary company, other than the reduced chances of getting caught?
So wait, you're saying that the real advantage of patents is that it makes people re-invent the wheel? That doesn't sound like innovation to me, it sounds like a waste of time.
I went to a conference a couple of years ago and was mystified by one of the presentations. It was some kind of a new cryptographic protocol; but it didn't do anything that existing protocols didn't already do. The only distinguishing factor, its reason for existence, was that it was unencumbered by any patents. Is this really what we need from "innovation"?
I guess when the FSF talks about "free software", they don't mean "free to you", but that the software it self is somehow "free" -- i.e., not locked up in a proprietary product. The limitations in the GPL as to what you can do to the software isn't to keep you free (you're already in a free country) but to keep the software free -- i.e., to protect it from you.
Yeah, I think this is a bit extreme ideologically. When RMS says that it's immoral to hide code & prevent people from copying it, I think he's got his priorities a bit mixed up. There are many evil things in this world, and writing proprietary code doesn't rank that high on my list. Nonetheless, I think that making a system that keeps code "in the open", not allowing it to be folded into a proprietary product, is definitely a good thing.
Ok, that actually makes a lot of sense. The GPL is very restrictive -- "You can use my bat, but you have to play by my rules." In that sense, they're not giving gifts, nor did they ever claim to. They wanted to make an economy where people contributed back out of their own self-interest; they didn't want to rely on people's sense of gratitude and fair-play. But I guess I can grant that gift-giving can be a good thing, and I can see why people who've been on the receiving end are disposed to give back.
As for the inexperienced developer writing for a corporation: (unlike RMS) I have no objections to him making a decent living writing proprietary code; nor do I have any objections to him learning general coding principles from my code (tho my own code probably isn't that good to emulate). But the only reason he needs BSD code is that the company who he's writing for skimped when they hired him, or they skimped on training him; I see no reason why they should benefit from the work of an expert, even though they were unwilling to pay for an expert or train someone to become an expert; or (alternately) to make their derivative system GPL as well.
Well, this is why RMS always says, "Think 'free' as in speech, not 'free' as in beer." It's not a perfect analogy, but it's along the right lines. When we speak of "freedom", as in "this is a free country", we definitely don't mean "no restrictions"; because that wouldn't be a free society, it would be anarchy. If you are free to live, that means I'm not free to kill you. Gangsters are not free to intimidate people, corporations are not free to lie in their annual reports.
The restrictions in the GPL are exactly the kind of restrictions we have in a free society, and for exactly the same reasons. It's to promote the availability of source code for anyone to use, and to encourage people to write code without worrying about their work being 'stolen' by corporations.
Now, obviously people who use the BSD license don't care about someone making money off their work without giving anything back. I don't really understand where they're coming from, but that's their choice.
But don't diss me because I expect someone I've helped to help me back. I like to write code, I love to have other people use it and make improvements on it; but I don't want my hard work used to make money where I'm not benefitted. If there were no such thing as the GPL, I'd be less inclined to publish my code, and I'm sure many other people would be as well, and the world would be worse off.
As I understand the situation, it has to do with the way MS did their contracts and stuff. No one make MS include Java in the first place -- they could have just ignored it and told people to d/l the JVM from Sun; they could've waited until they had C# ready before they put *any* vm on their system.
But instead they decided to do their anti-competitive, "Embrace, extend, extinguish" crap, including a JVM that was incompatible with the published Sun standard; including it on their widely-distributed platform by default guaranteed that a large percentage of people using Java would be incompatable with any non-MS implementation.
No one made them do this flagrantly illegal acts; forcing them to include Sun's JVM is a punishment for their behavior.
Asking, "Why should MS be forced to include Sun's JVM" would be like saying, "Why should I have to pay a $100 ticket for driving on the road -- other people don't." (Answer: you were driving 20 mph over the speed limit.)
Isn't this the reason RedHat gives for some of its patents?
The only problem with this approach is that if they're held by some company like RedHat, and it ever goes bankrupt and has to sell their IP, the new owner might not be so reasonable...
What I think is interesting about RGB->CMYK->RGB is that the "3 colors of light" thing is completely an artifact of how human eyes happen to operate. If some alien species dropped by, and their eyes had only 2 color photoreceptors, or 4, or even 3 photoreceptors but with different wavelengths, what would our televisions look like to them? The colors would be all wierd. In fact all of our "artificial" media -- print, photos, everything -- would be completely off-base to them.
I had a friend whose father worked for over 10 years at the business owned by her grandfather, thought he was the owner, and working to "pay off" his brothers and sisters (who inherited it jointly). But the lawyer who wrote up the contract for the "trust" was a naive fool, and just before they were about to make one of the last payments, one of the sisters pulled some legal crap and got the whole thing taken away from them. She said the hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments he'd made were just "loans" that she wasn't going to pay them back.
Did the courts care that he'd slaved for over 10 years, working 60- and 80-hour weeks for this company? No -- they only cared that the "trust" his father had set up allowed him to get nothing.
It's just like a computer. It doesn't care what you want it to do -- it cares what the code says to do. If some blackhat find a buffer overflow in your code that allows him to break in and 0wnz0r you, it will dutifully let them do it -- unless it violates some higher policy implementation, like StackGuard.
Similarly, if the law written by the legislature, or a contract you sign, has a "bug" in it that allows someone to screw you over, the courts will dutifully let them do it -- unless there's some higher law like the constitution or contract-fairness laws that can override it.
Even then, the judge isn't going to look for those defenses for you -- it's up to your lawyer, again, and you only get one real shot at a defense (an appeal is very limited in what it can argue about). So you'd better make it good.
Justice is about what's right and fair -- it's an external thing like mathematics; and the laws of the land are supposed to do their best to approximate that justice. But the courts aren't about what's just: they're about interpereting the laws, for good or for ill, to determine how well they approximate justice. Not just? Go fix it in the legislature. That's the way our system works.
Sure, they're color -- it's just that you get either all the colors at once (white) or none of them at all (black.)
Sounds like the old quote about Ford's Model-T -- "You can have it any color you want, as long as it's black."
I haven't studied Hitler, so most of what's here is just inference from bits that I've heard. But one of his big things was the superiority of the "Ayrian" race, and the emergence of a Superman, influenced by Neitze. He was going to start by eliminating Jews as a species of sub-human contaminating the gene pool, but continue to blacks and other non-Aryans. He had programs to stop "retarded" people from reproducing -- I forget whether it was just sterilization or involved killing them.
In other words, he was going to take better control of our own evolution, looking for the next big mutation that would set us forward. I have no doubt that he used 'god' in his speeches; for one, it would be foolish not to use people's predjudices for your own advantage; and perhaps he even believed at some level what he said about God. But his ideas and how he acted definitely stemmed from atheistic sources.
Nonetheless, it was atheists who did the killing, largely as a result of their ideologies, which were atheistic (else they probably would have been called 'religions').
I'm not trying to say that "atheist => murderer", I'm trying to dispel the myth that religion is directly the cause of zealous slaughter, and if we just got rid of religion, we'd live in peace and harmony; or at least we wouldn't have any more 'holy wars'. People say, "When I think of all the blood that has been shed in the name of organized religion..." I respond, "Well, no more than the blood that has been shed by organized atheism." As one person responded, "Hmm... yeah, I guess it's the organization that's the problem." Or rather, (as Christianity teaches), mankind is the problem: "There is none that is righteous, no not one."
I don't know quite what you mean by "Atheism is not an important part of communism." Marx called religion the "opiate of the masses", a way that the upper classes used to control the lower classes and keep them in subjection. And in all the communist states I'm aware of, religion is kept under the thumb of the government: they worked really hard to lobotomize it and make it sterile. Is this just a coincidence? Why do you suppose they worked so hard to root it out?
And you have to admit, killing "all the Jews in Germany" -- what was the number, 7 million that died? is an order of magnitude bigger than 20,000.
Which doesn't mean that he's a very great historian -- the way he paints it, the Jews were responsible for just about all the good things that happened in Europe for the past 1500 years. =)
Oh, well, I'm not "oh, bigotry's OK then" now. =) I was ashamed for the sake of Christianity, because they reinforce the popular culture's view of crazy fundamentalists. It's one thing to say, "I bet there are narrow-minded people of every ideology", than to say, "I KNOW there are narrow-minded people of every ideology." Now I can relax and enlighten when I can. =)Peace, -martyros
And that was my point: unrestrained abstract ideologies are what make murdering zealots, and we have as many of those in this centurty as we ever had. It's not an artifact of religion.
Similarly, I used to be kind of ashamed of some of the people in the church I grew up in: good people, but narrow-minded and a bit bigoted. Then I started reading Slashdot, and I recognized that same narrow-minded bigotry in people with all manner of ideologies. It has nothing to do with religion at all! Thank you, Slashdot!
And atheistic ideologies are responsible for more butchery than probably all world religions combined. How many people did Hitler and Stalin kill, of their own people? Pol-Pot in Cambodia? At least during the Inquisition, the church had enough fear of God to look into each case individually. Mass execution of men by formula is an abomination reserved exclusively for the 20th century. (Quote stolen from a historian whose name I can't remember off the top of my head.)
What, don't like your brand of atheism being compared with Stalin's? Maybe I don't like my Christianity compared with the so-called "religion" of those fighting to keep slaves and murdering abortion doctors.
Well, at 18, not a baseball bat so much. I think they should be legally culpable for breaking the laws of the US, just as someone in the US should be culpable for advertizing Nazi memorabilia across the internet to someone in France (if I remember my google / ebay precedents right). [BTB, I agree with American policy there: it may be bad to sell Nazi memorabilia, but I don't think it's the government's call.]
Very good question, actually. I started by thinking, "Well, anyone who sends that stuff to a seven-year-old is really fsck'd in the head. They're seriously morally reprehensible and such behavior shouldn't be tolerated." I think in our culture, most people would agree with me.
But pornography for adults is reprehensible and depraved as well -- not to the same degree, but it is. Why should I tolerate one, and not the other?
Especially since pr0n spammers aren't content to sit and wait for people to come to them, but actively seek out people, who may be trying to avoid it. Porn addiction is a real thing; there are many men who struggle with it, who want to quit, but can't. I've never been much tempted in that way, but I've had friends who are. Many pornographers know this: that's why they spam and put out teasers, because they know the bait works.
It'd be like a drug dealer, not willing to simply let people come to him, sending out "free samples" of heroin or coke in the mail, that when you opened it automatically injected you with something. It's preying on the weak-willed, just like casinos, and even credit-card companies (Are you paying off your bill every month? Let's raise your limit, so you're tempted to spend 'till you can't! I have like a $13,000 limit on one of my cards due to this effect.)
Or perhaps more apropos, like a liqour company sending out airline-size samples of their warez to random people, not caring, probably even knowing that some of the recipients were recovering alcoholics.
But getting back to your question: I live in a culture that takes a laissez-faire attitudes towards adults. If you want to pollute your body & your mind, we'll let you do so; it's your responsibility (once you're old enough), not ours. One advantage of that kind of a society is that when you do reject that crap, it actually means something: you're doing it because you want to, not because you must. And I think that makes the choice more valuable.
So no, I don't intend to attack the pr0n industry with baseball bats. Still, if you send pr0n to someone in Saudi Arabia, you should be legally culpable. =)
No comment...
But I consider an offense against my kids as an order of magnitude bigger than an offense against me. If you slap me, I may get upset, but I'm man enough to let it slide. If you slap one of my kids, you'd better watch yourself.
I don't have any kids (yet), but if/when my kid gets explicit e-mail, you can bet I'm going to hunt down the dirtbag down. If a lawsuit doesn't work, maybe a baseball bat will...
Well, I worked on a sheep farm one summer: sheep are really dumb too, but they still run away from you. =)
Unfortunately, though, you're right: articles like this how that logic doesn't always hold sway.
Ask my mom about "Redistribution of wealth" to pay for my schooling. =)
People don't normally think about it, but most of the Linux kernel IS copyrighted -- just grep for "(C)" in the kernel source sometime. It's just that the owners of the copyrights have agreed to grant anyone a license to copy & redistribute, under certain very generous conditions.