Of course, your position presupposes that it is not one alternative for Apple to pay them fairly and only require that they work reasonable hours, and so on. Obviously it is not an alternative from the worker's perspective, but it does not mean that Apple should escape criticism simply because it is the lesser of two evils.
So, to paraphrase your argument, if people are so utterly desperate and lacking in alternatives that they actually *want* these jobs notwithstanding that they might well be working in poor conditions, then there is no problem?
If something utterly terrible is happening to someone, and they see the chance to have something which is merely moderately terrible happen to them, then it is not surprising at all that they would jump at that chance.
Perhaps you should consider whether you think these people would rather have the jobs in question, or jobs with basic western labour standards (limited hours, safety, minimum pay, paid leave, and so on). I would also be interested to know what exactly you think stops Apple offering those conditions within China (other than greed/profit motive or "they don't have to").
...it's the best news for the development of this kind of technology imaginable.
You can't get (smart, institutional) investors on board on the promise of likely/possible breakthroughs in technology. However, if you can demonstrate that the price per kilowatt-hour will be competitive with fossil fuels in the reasonable near future then you will get the level of investment required to finally take these technologies mainstream.
I believe we are already at that point. Here in Australia we suddenly have wind farms and novel renewable energy projects appearing IRL all over the place when previously they were often announced but rarely built.
Yes, how dare someone who has invested money and effort, not to mention talent, into innovating be rewarded for that investment with exclusive rights for a limited period of time via a patent?
Of course by patenting it, the details of how it works become public and once the patent expires the technology is up for grabs for whoever wants to use it, too.
True, I was simply making the point that the customary approach if you have legal rights and want to establish/assert them is to pay a lawyer to run a proceeding for you. Sitting around bleating that people don't want to represent you in court for free is just silly.
You'll see arguments from armchair legal analysts that the iPhone developer Agreements won't stand up in court â" but those analysts certainly won't stand up in court on your behalf.
Well, maybe that's because, like most other professions, lawyers need to be paid money in exchange for work done.
Giving legal advice and running proceedings costs money and exposes the lawyer to risk (i.e. suits from the person receiving the advice if they rely on it and it turns out to be wrong).
NASA's Ikhana is the same aircraft as the Predator, except it's being used here to save lives."
The Predator's primary function is to save lives.
...the lives of people who are themselves killing others. So really, the Predator's primary function is to rebalance the distribution of loss of life in favour of more enemy deaths and fewer allied deaths, not to "save lives".
Also IIRC the Predator has been used extensively for direct strikes against human targets in Afhanistan.
That a copy loaded into RAM for use in relation to a valid license issued by Blizzard and consistent with the terms of that license would be non-infringing.
A copy loaded into RAM for use in some way which is inconsistent with the license issued by Blizzard would be infringing.
It's a silly decision, but that part of it does make logical, if not practical, sense.
How about simply having a wireless connection available even when away from home or a local base-station? That alone would make this extremely useful.
Or, how about being a passenger? On a long trip it would be fantastic to be able to kill time surfing the web.
Everyone is assuming this means you have to use said connection whilst actually driving the vehicle. But the uses when not driving (either as a passenger or when the vehicle is stopped) are many and obvious.
We suddenly seem to have an endless stream of non-stories about random events in the gaming world.
Do we really need endless stories like "So-and-so designer leaves Company A", "Company B says new game will be good", "Game you loved in 1986 possibly maybe to be remade"?
And I would be very happy to never hear about any game based on a set of Lego pieces based on a fictional franchise ever again. It has too many levels of nerdiness rolled together, even by Slashdot standards...
You've clearly never played any of the previous Crammond GP games on a PC. The level of control is far, far better than you would get with anything other than a wheel (or a Wiimote, I guess, I haven't played Mario Kart).
PS - Anthropic principle = misstatement of cause and effect
I tried rFactor - I don't have a full wheel/pedals set up, and I found it virtually unplayable with keyboard. One of the excellent things about the Geoff Crammond games is that they always did a great job of making the game playable with the keyboard.
Teleportation raises the same questions, which are similarly often overlooked.
If you are progressively destroyed while a precise copy of you is created elsewhere, you're still dead. The scary part is that to an observer you are NOT dead - just in a different place. And as you rightly say, the 'new' copy of you would fully believe itself to be the original, so no-one would ever know for sure unless they teleported themself.
For God's sake make a decent GP sim for PC. Grand Prix 5, to be precise.
Formula One lends itself to precisely the type of things that PCs are great at - high resolution graphics, precise control, and accurate physical modelling.
I am yet to play an F1 game on console that didn't feel like an arcade game.
Even if you're right, that's the price of free speech. You either protect everything, even the vile, disgusting, hateful speech you disagree with or you don't have free speech at all. You assert that as fact. But it's a philosophical or possibly semantic question, not one with an obvious and easily stated answer, i.e., can you have "some" free speech? What does "free" mean in this context?
If there is a rule that you can talk about everything except X, then you have freedom of speech with respect to (All possible topics of speech - X). So in a significant sense it would not be correct that you "don't have free speech at all". I understand, of course, that you would argue that "free speech" means "absolutely unconstrained speech".
Other questions:
1. Is speech "free" if it can be established statistically that a certain percentage of its audience will be induced to impact on another's freedom simply by hearing/reading/viewing it? Why does the chain of causation stop with the making and receiving of the speech, but not the consequences of it?
2. Is speech "not free" simply because there are criminal penalties? Or is it simply a legitimate trade off to say that if you choose to engage in the making or willing consumption of speech which the vast majority of rational people find utterly abhorrent, you also choose to take the risk that "society" will seek retribution against you, possibly in the form of violence and/or loss of liberty?
3. Does "free" speech extend to an unwilling audience, or an audience which cannot defend itself, or both? For example, is it ok to make racially derogatory sexual remarks to an audience of small children from minority backgrounds?
4. Should a person be held responsible for any consequences of their "free" speech? For example, should someone producing these types of images be regarded as an accessory to any eventual child abuse which takes place and towards which their images contibuted?
I'm playing devil's advocate to a certain extent here, because I tend to err on the side of libertarianism on such issues. But free speech advocates need to learn to work on a more complex set of assumptions than that there is no consequence whatsoever to speech, however hateful or provocative, and explain how society is to deal with those consequences with respect to the maker of the original speech.
If speech could never provoke real-world consequences, why would we speak at all?
Britain stood alone against fascism? A bastion against the Soviets? I am not surprised your government wants to keep a close eye on you. An island nation with an ego like that definitely requires close supervision. Yes. Remember that part where the Axis powers made it to the western coast of France? And America was staying neutral militarily because Japan had not yet bombed the hell out of Pearl Harbour? And London and most of the UK were subjected to the Blitz while the Axis considered the best way to invade the UK, until (in the Battle of Britain) British aircraft won a decisive air victory which led to the war gradually turning in favour of the Allies? Yeah. That whole thing.
I will admit I was thinking in terms of the anglosphere. Russia obviously took an absolute beating in WWII, although for a long time they were also neutral.
As for the Cold War, well, I didn't say they stood alone in that. But post WWII Britain and the US were the dominant allied powers, with Britain on the wane and the US on the rise.
Actually, under this proposal Mr Orwell can be reached by calling pretty much anyone, thanks to the OMNI-CALL system operated by MiniLove.
Simply dial any random number and deliver your message to whoever answers. Give it a little while and the relevant catchwords will be identified and stored in the central database for easy retrieval by unaccountable government drones. 'Correctional' officers will then be dispatched to visit you and 'correct' your views on certain matters.
Being a U.S.-centric site, a lot of vitriol gets directed towards the US government around here (and so it should in relation to many laws and policies relating to "terrorism" and "security").
But what on earth is going on in the UK? Security cameras literally everywhere, compulsory DNA databases, laws permitting detention without charge or trial for long periods of time, that insane proposal for a law to allow laws to be made and abolished by regulation (i.e. without a vote in parliament), and this obsession with centralising government control over information, particularly insofar as it relates to the movements and communications of private citizens. The list goes on and on.
Britain stood virtually alone against fascism in World War Two, and was a bastion against the totalitarian Soviet bloc during the Cold War. Before then the UK resisted the power of the Catholic church, eliminated any real power for its despotic monarchs, and even briefly pioneered the field of total republican independence from hereditory rule, later embraced by some more celebrated republics. Before any of that you managed to write the Magna Carta, perhaps the greatest document on the rights of the individual in human history.
Why did you even bother, only to willingly turn yourselves into a bureaucractic authoritarian state? Sure, you're not murdering millions of your citizens in gas chambers, but you're only a hop, skip and a jump away from East Germany under the Stasi - total state surveillance and the tyranny of a huge, opaque executive government where faceless "officials" control the lives of citizens.
IAAL and I am also quite familiar with encryption and PGP in particular. And you are quite right.
Add to that the fact that electronic communication is virtually useless for legal work. If it's important, it's still on a physical piece of paper in a modern law firm. Email and phone calls are regarded as less significant forms of communication and are generally less useful as evidence, should that be required at a later date.
I won't even start to talk about how moronic the suggestion of talking to a client accused of a serious criminal offence by email or other electronic methods is. There is no substitute for face to face contact.
This article is obnoxious and is basically flamebait (or would be if there were more lawyers here).
I haven't read TFA, but assuming the summary is accurate, this system warns ships away from whales. This, of course, relies on the fact that ships WANT to get away from whales - but couldn't a whaling ship use this to home in on its prey?
A far more interesting system would be one which warns *whales* away from *ships*. If someone could come up with a cheap system which, upon detection of a largish ship, transmits the whalian equivalent of "Japanese/Norweigan ship approaching!!! Dive! Dive!", then instead of ridiculous chases across the Southern Ocean environmental activists could simply charter a plane and drop thousands of the things around known whale migratory zones. Make the whole thing solar powered and super-long-lasting, too.
This would be a nice, passive way to fight whaling. I particularly like the idea that we could give whales some technology to fight back against the huge, fast, explosive harpoon-armed whaling technology presently employed by Japan.
There have been half a dozen or so such incidents in Australia in the last few months, including one which involved coordinated beams from multiple locations directed at the same plane.
As an Australian who flies quite a lot, I'm extremely happy for them to ban these things if it stops morons from blinding my pilot on final approach. The fact that there have been coordinated attacks is also evidence that it is more than an incidental problem.
So you do work creating IP for people and then refuse to give them the rights to the IP that you create? Let me know how that works out for you.
I think you will find that the majority of companies who get design work done by independent contractors would have watertight agreements transferring all of the relevant intellectual property to them, for obvious reasons, i.e., that people like you can't then attempt to weasel around their rights with dubious contractual terms and thereby hold them hostage.
Honestly, I am generally all in favour of limiting the IP rights of companies, but when you do work for a business creating IP and then try to suggest that it's somehow reasonable and equitable that you retain the rights to all of the "original art work" that goes into it then you are being borderline dishonest. Certainly it's reasonable for you to retain IP you create which is not specific to that job; but it would be entirely unreasonable to refuse to relinquish the rights to the 99% finished "work in progress" version of a website, for instance.
The Windows example is silly, because Windows is not uniquely crafted to each user's requirements (if only), it is a generic piece of IP that is licensed and relicensed.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, your position presupposes that it is not one alternative for Apple to pay them fairly and only require that they work reasonable hours, and so on. Obviously it is not an alternative from the worker's perspective, but it does not mean that Apple should escape criticism simply because it is the lesser of two evils.
So, to paraphrase your argument, if people are so utterly desperate and lacking in alternatives that they actually *want* these jobs notwithstanding that they might well be working in poor conditions, then there is no problem?
If something utterly terrible is happening to someone, and they see the chance to have something which is merely moderately terrible happen to them, then it is not surprising at all that they would jump at that chance.
Perhaps you should consider whether you think these people would rather have the jobs in question, or jobs with basic western labour standards (limited hours, safety, minimum pay, paid leave, and so on). I would also be interested to know what exactly you think stops Apple offering those conditions within China (other than greed/profit motive or "they don't have to").
And let's not forget the business plan, which is also no attributable to 'unions':
1. Build massive, petrol-hungry cars with ridiculously bad fuel efficiency during an entirely predictable and never-ending rise in oil prices.
2. ???
3. Profit!
...it's the best news for the development of this kind of technology imaginable.
You can't get (smart, institutional) investors on board on the promise of likely/possible breakthroughs in technology. However, if you can demonstrate that the price per kilowatt-hour will be competitive with fossil fuels in the reasonable near future then you will get the level of investment required to finally take these technologies mainstream.
I believe we are already at that point. Here in Australia we suddenly have wind farms and novel renewable energy projects appearing IRL all over the place when previously they were often announced but rarely built.
Yes, how dare someone who has invested money and effort, not to mention talent, into innovating be rewarded for that investment with exclusive rights for a limited period of time via a patent?
Of course by patenting it, the details of how it works become public and once the patent expires the technology is up for grabs for whoever wants to use it, too.
True, I was simply making the point that the customary approach if you have legal rights and want to establish/assert them is to pay a lawyer to run a proceeding for you. Sitting around bleating that people don't want to represent you in court for free is just silly.
Well, maybe that's because, like most other professions, lawyers need to be paid money in exchange for work done.
Giving legal advice and running proceedings costs money and exposes the lawyer to risk (i.e. suits from the person receiving the advice if they rely on it and it turns out to be wrong).
The Predator's primary function is to save lives.
...the lives of people who are themselves killing others. So really, the Predator's primary function is to rebalance the distribution of loss of life in favour of more enemy deaths and fewer allied deaths, not to "save lives".
Also IIRC the Predator has been used extensively for direct strikes against human targets in Afhanistan.
That a copy loaded into RAM for use in relation to a valid license issued by Blizzard and consistent with the terms of that license would be non-infringing.
A copy loaded into RAM for use in some way which is inconsistent with the license issued by Blizzard would be infringing.
It's a silly decision, but that part of it does make logical, if not practical, sense.
Would this system not capture a large amount of radiant heat which would otherwise be reflected back into space (genuine question)?
Agree.
How about simply having a wireless connection available even when away from home or a local base-station? That alone would make this extremely useful.
Or, how about being a passenger? On a long trip it would be fantastic to be able to kill time surfing the web.
Everyone is assuming this means you have to use said connection whilst actually driving the vehicle. But the uses when not driving (either as a passenger or when the vehicle is stopped) are many and obvious.
Why is it any better than 4 or 6?
It's an arbitrary number, and if commuting is creating major social problems then it is realistic to re-evaluate it.
Oil prices aside, I think most people would probably be happy to trade some money for (comparatively) a lot more free time.
We suddenly seem to have an endless stream of non-stories about random events in the gaming world.
Do we really need endless stories like "So-and-so designer leaves Company A", "Company B says new game will be good", "Game you loved in 1986 possibly maybe to be remade"?
And I would be very happy to never hear about any game based on a set of Lego pieces based on a fictional franchise ever again. It has too many levels of nerdiness rolled together, even by Slashdot standards...
You've clearly never played any of the previous Crammond GP games on a PC. The level of control is far, far better than you would get with anything other than a wheel (or a Wiimote, I guess, I haven't played Mario Kart).
PS - Anthropic principle = misstatement of cause and effect
I tried rFactor - I don't have a full wheel/pedals set up, and I found it virtually unplayable with keyboard. One of the excellent things about the Geoff Crammond games is that they always did a great job of making the game playable with the keyboard.
Teleportation raises the same questions, which are similarly often overlooked.
If you are progressively destroyed while a precise copy of you is created elsewhere, you're still dead. The scary part is that to an observer you are NOT dead - just in a different place. And as you rightly say, the 'new' copy of you would fully believe itself to be the original, so no-one would ever know for sure unless they teleported themself.
For God's sake make a decent GP sim for PC. Grand Prix 5, to be precise.
Formula One lends itself to precisely the type of things that PCs are great at - high resolution graphics, precise control, and accurate physical modelling.
I am yet to play an F1 game on console that didn't feel like an arcade game.
If there is a rule that you can talk about everything except X, then you have freedom of speech with respect to (All possible topics of speech - X). So in a significant sense it would not be correct that you "don't have free speech at all". I understand, of course, that you would argue that "free speech" means "absolutely unconstrained speech".
Other questions:
1. Is speech "free" if it can be established statistically that a certain percentage of its audience will be induced to impact on another's freedom simply by hearing/reading/viewing it? Why does the chain of causation stop with the making and receiving of the speech, but not the consequences of it?
2. Is speech "not free" simply because there are criminal penalties? Or is it simply a legitimate trade off to say that if you choose to engage in the making or willing consumption of speech which the vast majority of rational people find utterly abhorrent, you also choose to take the risk that "society" will seek retribution against you, possibly in the form of violence and/or loss of liberty?
3. Does "free" speech extend to an unwilling audience, or an audience which cannot defend itself, or both? For example, is it ok to make racially derogatory sexual remarks to an audience of small children from minority backgrounds?
4. Should a person be held responsible for any consequences of their "free" speech? For example, should someone producing these types of images be regarded as an accessory to any eventual child abuse which takes place and towards which their images contibuted?
I'm playing devil's advocate to a certain extent here, because I tend to err on the side of libertarianism on such issues. But free speech advocates need to learn to work on a more complex set of assumptions than that there is no consequence whatsoever to speech, however hateful or provocative, and explain how society is to deal with those consequences with respect to the maker of the original speech.
If speech could never provoke real-world consequences, why would we speak at all?
I will admit I was thinking in terms of the anglosphere. Russia obviously took an absolute beating in WWII, although for a long time they were also neutral.
As for the Cold War, well, I didn't say they stood alone in that. But post WWII Britain and the US were the dominant allied powers, with Britain on the wane and the US on the rise.
Actually, under this proposal Mr Orwell can be reached by calling pretty much anyone, thanks to the OMNI-CALL system operated by MiniLove.
Simply dial any random number and deliver your message to whoever answers. Give it a little while and the relevant catchwords will be identified and stored in the central database for easy retrieval by unaccountable government drones. 'Correctional' officers will then be dispatched to visit you and 'correct' your views on certain matters.
Being a U.S.-centric site, a lot of vitriol gets directed towards the US government around here (and so it should in relation to many laws and policies relating to "terrorism" and "security").
But what on earth is going on in the UK? Security cameras literally everywhere, compulsory DNA databases, laws permitting detention without charge or trial for long periods of time, that insane proposal for a law to allow laws to be made and abolished by regulation (i.e. without a vote in parliament), and this obsession with centralising government control over information, particularly insofar as it relates to the movements and communications of private citizens. The list goes on and on.
Britain stood virtually alone against fascism in World War Two, and was a bastion against the totalitarian Soviet bloc during the Cold War. Before then the UK resisted the power of the Catholic church, eliminated any real power for its despotic monarchs, and even briefly pioneered the field of total republican independence from hereditory rule, later embraced by some more celebrated republics. Before any of that you managed to write the Magna Carta, perhaps the greatest document on the rights of the individual in human history.
Why did you even bother, only to willingly turn yourselves into a bureaucractic authoritarian state? Sure, you're not murdering millions of your citizens in gas chambers, but you're only a hop, skip and a jump away from East Germany under the Stasi - total state surveillance and the tyranny of a huge, opaque executive government where faceless "officials" control the lives of citizens.
Wake up, before it's too late.
IAAL and I am also quite familiar with encryption and PGP in particular. And you are quite right.
Add to that the fact that electronic communication is virtually useless for legal work. If it's important, it's still on a physical piece of paper in a modern law firm. Email and phone calls are regarded as less significant forms of communication and are generally less useful as evidence, should that be required at a later date.
I won't even start to talk about how moronic the suggestion of talking to a client accused of a serious criminal offence by email or other electronic methods is. There is no substitute for face to face contact.
This article is obnoxious and is basically flamebait (or would be if there were more lawyers here).
I haven't read TFA, but assuming the summary is accurate, this system warns ships away from whales. This, of course, relies on the fact that ships WANT to get away from whales - but couldn't a whaling ship use this to home in on its prey?
A far more interesting system would be one which warns *whales* away from *ships*. If someone could come up with a cheap system which, upon detection of a largish ship, transmits the whalian equivalent of "Japanese/Norweigan ship approaching!!! Dive! Dive!", then instead of ridiculous chases across the Southern Ocean environmental activists could simply charter a plane and drop thousands of the things around known whale migratory zones. Make the whole thing solar powered and super-long-lasting, too.
This would be a nice, passive way to fight whaling. I particularly like the idea that we could give whales some technology to fight back against the huge, fast, explosive harpoon-armed whaling technology presently employed by Japan.
There have been half a dozen or so such incidents in Australia in the last few months, including one which involved coordinated beams from multiple locations directed at the same plane.
E.g.:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/04/08/2211257.htm
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/04/11/2214689.htm
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/03/29/2202704.htm
As an Australian who flies quite a lot, I'm extremely happy for them to ban these things if it stops morons from blinding my pilot on final approach. The fact that there have been coordinated attacks is also evidence that it is more than an incidental problem.
So you do work creating IP for people and then refuse to give them the rights to the IP that you create? Let me know how that works out for you.
I think you will find that the majority of companies who get design work done by independent contractors would have watertight agreements transferring all of the relevant intellectual property to them, for obvious reasons, i.e., that people like you can't then attempt to weasel around their rights with dubious contractual terms and thereby hold them hostage.
Honestly, I am generally all in favour of limiting the IP rights of companies, but when you do work for a business creating IP and then try to suggest that it's somehow reasonable and equitable that you retain the rights to all of the "original art work" that goes into it then you are being borderline dishonest. Certainly it's reasonable for you to retain IP you create which is not specific to that job; but it would be entirely unreasonable to refuse to relinquish the rights to the 99% finished "work in progress" version of a website, for instance.
The Windows example is silly, because Windows is not uniquely crafted to each user's requirements (if only), it is a generic piece of IP that is licensed and relicensed.