The failure mode is also something to take into account. Of the WDs I've owned that failed, they failed by click-of-death - no chance of data recovery. Maxtor has never click-of-deathed me; once the read errors and strange noises start occuring, I usually have time to back up. This last time the failure caught me by surprise and I lost probably 10% of a full 200GB disk. I'm buying Seagate for all new drives so we'll see how that goes...
How did it die? I just went through my third 200GB Maxtor (all warranty replaced). I used dd_rhelp wrapper for dd_rescue to obtain as much data as possible. I still ended up with thousands of lost+found files, but it's better than nothing.
Well no, they have to make those changes available to their customers, not necessarily their competitors. Maybe a customer may then give it to a competitor, but it'd be hard to imagine why anyone would bother unless you manage to piss them off enough to migrate. In that way, it does give the customer more leverage though.
Unfortunately for your argument, proprietary and incompatible variations of software is exactly how most commercial software firms make their money. Since the software is proprietary, they can reap the rewards of being the sole source of support. Since it is incompatible (usually one-way incompatible so you can migrate in but cannot migrate out) they've got your data and your infrastructure by the cajones. So in theory, the GPL does not prevent commercialization. But in practice, for an overwhelming percentage of software business strategies, it does. Not that those are not detestable strategies, but this is the real world...
Good business decisions are not necessarily good economics. Many business decisions are designed to interfere with the market in some certain way in order to obtain an artificial advantage. It is supposed to be vigilant consumers and government agencies that watchdog this sort of behavior.
Whatever. Genius is not as common as you seem to think it is. Art can be heavily inspired, almost to the point of copying, from other art, and in our culture it most often is, because there is a significant incentive (pseudo-eternal copyright) to doing so. This incentive can be increased or decreased to modify the ratio of originality to imitation in the culture. Our legislators have chosen that we want to maximize the level of imitation. Since the average voter has no idea how copyright works, the only feedback such legislators receive is their campaign contributions from media and publishing interests.
Thus we have a framework where artists can invest months or years into a highly derivative work and still obtain a return from it, enjoying enforcement of their copyright with your tax dollars. You like this idea. Others do not, and feel that there a better balance to be struck, one that is more in line both with how people actually behave and that encourages more original development. Others still feel that copyright protection is somehow immoral, but I've rarely encountered one of these sorts who doesn't also cherish the set of protections that the GNU license provides, enabled only by the legal framework of copyright.
Genius does not need incentive to create, only opportunity. The original copyright regime in the US provided a framework for exactly that, promoting the progress of the sciences and useful arts through providing copyright for a limited time. This provided the opportunity for someone with a creative idea to develop it and to cover the costs of doing so by disallowing others to copy it, for a reasonably limited time wherein it was assumed he would have ample opportunity to do so. Over time this foundation changed due to the Adam Smith philosophy pervading political thought. The thought arrived that the progress of the sciences and useful arts is indirectly best served by whatever mechanism allows copyright holders to profit the most. (This may have continued to be true if individuals usually retained their copyrights, but unfortunately publishers have become the significant majority of copyright interest these days.) So the copyright was extended incrementally until it reached an indefinite term, and the powers of the copyright holder have also been extended through the courts to include certain self-enforcement mechanisms.
To some extent, the importance of copyright to the individual has been restored through self-publishing on the Internet, but at the same time two more problems arrived. One is that there is so much creation going on that it is difficult to sift through it and find what you are looking for. Publishers retain the advantage here because they can afford large marketing campaigns. The other is that the Internet at the same time made it easier to publish information but also easier to copy and disseminate it without permission. Distribution of copyrighted material via the Internet is still an open problem because of the inherent lack of scarcity in any work that is in digitized form.
One fallacy surrounding the idea of reducing copyright to a level reflecting the capacity for self-publishing involves attribution of works in the public domain. Once something enters the public domain, it is said that anyone can change words or make subtle modifications to change the message of the work, and the author has no recourse against having his view misrepresented to buyers of the knockoff work. I think this is most logically addressed through trademark. You may be able to publish a knockoff legally, but you cannot legally use my trademark or any potentially confusing facsimile thereof, so buyers will be able to tell the difference.
I see no reason why life of copyright holder + 100 years, in addition to private enforcement powers, provides more incentive for original works. If anything, it reduces incentive by allowing someone to profit from a derivative work where an original work may go ignored. Why would this be the case when the buyer has a choice?
Sort of like the DDT ban. How many people have to die from West Nile before we resume spraying with the most effective anti-mosquito agent known? Yes, it's a bioaccumulator. So we'll keep our level of use only to the point where it is directly saving lives, as opposed to spraying it all over crops. Note that any "evidence" that DDT causes harm to humans at reasonable levels has been fabricated over the years by people with an agenda. Kind of like marijuana.
You either want the 'product' to be popular and wide spread and usable or you don't.
There's a difference between saying "I think Linux should do FOO because it would help me accomplish task BAR", and saying "Linux should be written in C++ if it wants to succeed" or "Linux needs a kernel audio mixer" etc.
In the first statement, you are describing a use case (the task you wish to accomplish), and merely suggesting a technical approach towards providing that use case. Maybe there's already a way to do what you want to do, that simply needs to be more well documented.
In the latter statement, you are simply saying "Well, I would have done it this way". That's great, but maybe the way it's currently done is for a good reason? People do occasionally make design considerations before coding away.
It's not constructive to say "Linux sucks because it doesn't have feature X" or "Linux sucks because it has a userspace audio mixer". It is constructive to say "Linux sucks because I can't use it to do FOO".
There are several problems with the research supposedly showing that cannabis use causes psychosis. The most glaring is that many people appear to self-medicate with cannabis. Your friends may have been headed down that road already. Keep in mind that people also develop psychosis without the help of cannabis, and even heavy cannabis users rarely develop mental problems (in fair studies where the normal short-term effects of cannabis are not counted), so cannabis use or non-use is a very poor predictor for psychosis.
Alcohol carries the risk of permanent brain and liver damage and overdose death, which is far from "equally" as cannabis.
I'm sorry about your friend, but overdose due to tolerance and inaccurate dosage is not a phenomenon unique to MDMA. We see it every day with alcohol and prescription drugs as well as various other illegal drugs. I was not claiming that it is impossible to overdose on MDMA. I was claiming that abuse (or use) within the range of dosage required for recreational effect carries little risk of harm with it.
The brain damage that is associated with MDMA overdose occurs at levels far beyond where additional dosage would have any additional recreational effect. Perhaps if we were not so irrationally paranoid about adult drug use, he would have known that certain antidepressants can prevent any potential perma-fry in the case of an overdose - that is, if he would continue overdosing in the first place given knowledge of *that* potential harm.
To elaborate on your statement against the inevitable rebuttal, saying that it is foolish to trust the government does *NOT* mean that none of the propaganda the government puts out is true. (Some of it *is* true.) It just means that so much of it is demonstrably false that now a statement being made by the government is an extremely weak predictor of whether or not the statement is actually true. Or in other words, even a broken clock is right twice a day.
No, MDMA has never been shown to cause brain damage, only an excess of serotonin when it is abused. This excess can lead to the depression and burnout that heavy MDMA users tend to experience. The most risky aspect of MDMA is that of dehydration and irresponsible sexual behavior, and of not being able to obtain medical treatment for an overdose without the consequence of going to jail.
IMO, neither of these substances deserve attention from police besides to regulate their purity and ensure that they are not sold to persons under the age of 21.
Ever since the glory days of High Times and NORML, it is well documented that big commercial marijuana growers want legitimacy. Part of this is because prohibition only serves to annoy them; it does not drive up marijuana prices (and thus profits) because of two things: supply still far exceeds demand; and every grower who is busted is promptly replaced by a new entry since the barrier to entry is very low (no particular skill and no special precursor chemicals are necessary). The best law enforcement can do is create a local minimum or maximum; they have had no effect on the equilibrium point of the marijuana market and are unlikely to ever succeed in having such an effect.
A more likely source of political pressure is the pharmaceutical lobby that prefers everything to be in a pill and patented, and law enforcement whose jobs depend on the status quo. Don't forget the alcohol lobby; they have even published anti-marijuana material in the past. And then there are the various international agreements that mandate a certain level of drug prohibition (as well as intellectual property protections). I don't particularly like the idea of an unaccountable, unelected international treaty body wielding power over local affairs, but there it stands.
It may sound like a conspiracy theory, but the fact is that we will never see it legalized at the federal level until enormous pressure is exerted by the states to stop arresting citizens for something that is legal in the state (were it legal in the states) and cannot be objectively demonstrated to cause harm. States won't do it though. They're too dependent on federal funds to rock the boat, so they will only make a move in cases where the feds are seen by a vast majority of the population to be obvious liars, such as the medical marijuana policy.
It's kind of funny to watch - the feds overstep the Commerce Clause and General Welfare to steal money from citizens for government programs that would not exist if the Constitution was not read so liberally. The states become impoverished because of the tax burden, so the feds create programs to give them back some of the money they stole, but only if they play by the fed rules. In effect, the federal government gets to control local affairs through this scam, something that underlies almost every injustice in American politics today.
Because if they had happened to be caught in their partying days, their career would be over and they'd be rotting in jail instead of living up to their potential - while at the same time, they insist to us that the 'intervention' of putting people in jail for using drugs is necessary to encourage them to live up to their potential.
The fact that so many powerful people have previously used drugs, whether or not they'd like to forget about it, is an obvious contradiction to the attractive law-and-order fallacies that either 1) anyone who uses drugs is a worthless waste by nature or 2) citizens' interests are best served by giving them a criminal record and/or jail for simple use or possession of drugs.
Furthermore, with respect particularly to the war on marijuana and marijuana users, you will find that most prohibitionist arguments begin with "Mr X., have you ever gotten high?" Presumably, if the answer is yes, the rest of the witness's statement is discredited by many people because of the reefer madness mythology that continues to pervade politics. On the other hand, the knowledge that important and powerful people have in fact gotten high, and yet we trust their judgement anyway, contradicts this line of thought nicely.
I've always found it amusing that every time a new scare comes out about the horrible health dangers and brain damage a marijuana smoker is susceptible to, the only people that are shocked and driven to action are non-smokers (and usually this action involves creating more problems for the smokers than marijuana ever caused them). Is it because marijuana smokers are too high to realize what grave danger they are in, or is it because 75 years of manufactured boogeymen and suppressed facts have guaranteed that the users themselves are the only people who know the truth about marijuana?
I hear that there are properties of 134 that are just as eco-unfriendly as the original.
Such as what? It's a HFC which has zero ozone depletion capability, and it's non-toxic except by asphyxiation. Probably the worst thing about it is that it isn't a particularly good refrigerant, so compressors designed for R-12 are usually stressed more when retrofitted.
Although I don't necessarily oppose medical marijuana, I'd feel a lot more interested in supporting it if I ever met anyone who favors it but has never used marijuana recreationally.
Unfortunately, you'll find that most credible authorities on the subject have indeed experimented with marijuana outside of a medical context. 75 years of government propaganda have ensured that the truth about the relative harms of marijuana is unavailable except by experimentation. Why should such experimentation, or support for freedom above and beyond medical use, discredit their presentation of the facts related to medical usage? Does cannabis use addle one's mind such that an independently reasonable and well-supported argument suddenly becomes unreasonable if the source is a cannabis user?
Some claim that such arguments originate in self-interest and should be discarded. Opponents claim that legal use of medical cannabis will cause legalization. But this will only happen if legalization continues to make sense, given data that will be collected as people use it in a medical context. One way or the other, medical use will bring out the truth - either cannabis is relatively harmless, or it does indeed drive the user crazy and afflict them with all sorts of disease. So if medical use causes legalization, or provides support for continued prohibition, it's because the truth came out. Why should these people be so scared of the truth that they would deny medicine to people whose lives are improved by it? Maybe the truth is something they don't want to know (or would either ruin their careers or render them redundant)?
A lot of people drive both high and drunk, and in the end the marijuana seems to always get the blame, usually for no more reason than it's illegal, and thus obviously the cause of the accident. (?)
Now driving both high and drunk is ridiculously stupid according to the studies, but if anything is to blame it's the alcohol, or perhaps the person who got behind the wheel when they knew they were impaired. Removing either of those factors would have prevented the accident. It's doubtful that removing the marijuana alone would also have prevented the accident.
1) Microsoft using open source code at the same time they are attempting to outlaw open source is hypocritical. Furthermore, they violated the terms (if not the spirit) of the BSD license by not attributing the original copyright holders in their advertisements.
2) Most people draw the line at commercial/for-profit copyright infringement, whether in the form of ripping off someone's GPL code, or in the form of copying DVDs and selling them. For my part, I draw the line at 14 years since publication.
Slashdot Mirror
A Spectrum is actually made by Isuzu like the later Storm. Isuzu cars have a very good reputation for gas mileage.
There is no requirement that I sell my product to a particular person or entity, especially one who I believe has set out to undermine my business.
The failure mode is also something to take into account. Of the WDs I've owned that failed, they failed by click-of-death - no chance of data recovery. Maxtor has never click-of-deathed me; once the read errors and strange noises start occuring, I usually have time to back up. This last time the failure caught me by surprise and I lost probably 10% of a full 200GB disk. I'm buying Seagate for all new drives so we'll see how that goes...
How did it die? I just went through my third 200GB Maxtor (all warranty replaced). I used dd_rhelp wrapper for dd_rescue to obtain as much data as possible. I still ended up with thousands of lost+found files, but it's better than nothing.
Well no, they have to make those changes available to their customers, not necessarily their competitors. Maybe a customer may then give it to a competitor, but it'd be hard to imagine why anyone would bother unless you manage to piss them off enough to migrate. In that way, it does give the customer more leverage though.
Unfortunately for your argument, proprietary and incompatible variations of software is exactly how most commercial software firms make their money. Since the software is proprietary, they can reap the rewards of being the sole source of support. Since it is incompatible (usually one-way incompatible so you can migrate in but cannot migrate out) they've got your data and your infrastructure by the cajones. So in theory, the GPL does not prevent commercialization. But in practice, for an overwhelming percentage of software business strategies, it does. Not that those are not detestable strategies, but this is the real world...
Good business decisions are not necessarily good economics. Many business decisions are designed to interfere with the market in some certain way in order to obtain an artificial advantage. It is supposed to be vigilant consumers and government agencies that watchdog this sort of behavior.
Thus we have a framework where artists can invest months or years into a highly derivative work and still obtain a return from it, enjoying enforcement of their copyright with your tax dollars. You like this idea. Others do not, and feel that there a better balance to be struck, one that is more in line both with how people actually behave and that encourages more original development. Others still feel that copyright protection is somehow immoral, but I've rarely encountered one of these sorts who doesn't also cherish the set of protections that the GNU license provides, enabled only by the legal framework of copyright.
Genius does not need incentive to create, only opportunity. The original copyright regime in the US provided a framework for exactly that, promoting the progress of the sciences and useful arts through providing copyright for a limited time. This provided the opportunity for someone with a creative idea to develop it and to cover the costs of doing so by disallowing others to copy it, for a reasonably limited time wherein it was assumed he would have ample opportunity to do so. Over time this foundation changed due to the Adam Smith philosophy pervading political thought. The thought arrived that the progress of the sciences and useful arts is indirectly best served by whatever mechanism allows copyright holders to profit the most. (This may have continued to be true if individuals usually retained their copyrights, but unfortunately publishers have become the significant majority of copyright interest these days.) So the copyright was extended incrementally until it reached an indefinite term, and the powers of the copyright holder have also been extended through the courts to include certain self-enforcement mechanisms.
To some extent, the importance of copyright to the individual has been restored through self-publishing on the Internet, but at the same time two more problems arrived. One is that there is so much creation going on that it is difficult to sift through it and find what you are looking for. Publishers retain the advantage here because they can afford large marketing campaigns. The other is that the Internet at the same time made it easier to publish information but also easier to copy and disseminate it without permission. Distribution of copyrighted material via the Internet is still an open problem because of the inherent lack of scarcity in any work that is in digitized form.
One fallacy surrounding the idea of reducing copyright to a level reflecting the capacity for self-publishing involves attribution of works in the public domain. Once something enters the public domain, it is said that anyone can change words or make subtle modifications to change the message of the work, and the author has no recourse against having his view misrepresented to buyers of the knockoff work. I think this is most logically addressed through trademark. You may be able to publish a knockoff legally, but you cannot legally use my trademark or any potentially confusing facsimile thereof, so buyers will be able to tell the difference.
I see no reason why life of copyright holder + 100 years, in addition to private enforcement powers, provides more incentive for original works. If anything, it reduces incentive by allowing someone to profit from a derivative work where an original work may go ignored. Why would this be the case when the buyer has a choice?
Yes, the "free as in being forced to preserve the freedoms of the software user" type of freedom.
Sort of like the DDT ban. How many people have to die from West Nile before we resume spraying with the most effective anti-mosquito agent known? Yes, it's a bioaccumulator. So we'll keep our level of use only to the point where it is directly saving lives, as opposed to spraying it all over crops. Note that any "evidence" that DDT causes harm to humans at reasonable levels has been fabricated over the years by people with an agenda. Kind of like marijuana.
In the first statement, you are describing a use case (the task you wish to accomplish), and merely suggesting a technical approach towards providing that use case. Maybe there's already a way to do what you want to do, that simply needs to be more well documented.
In the latter statement, you are simply saying "Well, I would have done it this way". That's great, but maybe the way it's currently done is for a good reason? People do occasionally make design considerations before coding away.
It's not constructive to say "Linux sucks because it doesn't have feature X" or "Linux sucks because it has a userspace audio mixer". It is constructive to say "Linux sucks because I can't use it to do FOO".
Alcohol carries the risk of permanent brain and liver damage and overdose death, which is far from "equally" as cannabis.
The brain damage that is associated with MDMA overdose occurs at levels far beyond where additional dosage would have any additional recreational effect. Perhaps if we were not so irrationally paranoid about adult drug use, he would have known that certain antidepressants can prevent any potential perma-fry in the case of an overdose - that is, if he would continue overdosing in the first place given knowledge of *that* potential harm.
To elaborate on your statement against the inevitable rebuttal, saying that it is foolish to trust the government does *NOT* mean that none of the propaganda the government puts out is true. (Some of it *is* true.) It just means that so much of it is demonstrably false that now a statement being made by the government is an extremely weak predictor of whether or not the statement is actually true. Or in other words, even a broken clock is right twice a day.
IMO, neither of these substances deserve attention from police besides to regulate their purity and ensure that they are not sold to persons under the age of 21.
A more likely source of political pressure is the pharmaceutical lobby that prefers everything to be in a pill and patented, and law enforcement whose jobs depend on the status quo. Don't forget the alcohol lobby; they have even published anti-marijuana material in the past. And then there are the various international agreements that mandate a certain level of drug prohibition (as well as intellectual property protections). I don't particularly like the idea of an unaccountable, unelected international treaty body wielding power over local affairs, but there it stands.
It may sound like a conspiracy theory, but the fact is that we will never see it legalized at the federal level until enormous pressure is exerted by the states to stop arresting citizens for something that is legal in the state (were it legal in the states) and cannot be objectively demonstrated to cause harm. States won't do it though. They're too dependent on federal funds to rock the boat, so they will only make a move in cases where the feds are seen by a vast majority of the population to be obvious liars, such as the medical marijuana policy.
It's kind of funny to watch - the feds overstep the Commerce Clause and General Welfare to steal money from citizens for government programs that would not exist if the Constitution was not read so liberally. The states become impoverished because of the tax burden, so the feds create programs to give them back some of the money they stole, but only if they play by the fed rules. In effect, the federal government gets to control local affairs through this scam, something that underlies almost every injustice in American politics today.
What about cash equivalents, like money orders and cashiers' checks?
The fact that so many powerful people have previously used drugs, whether or not they'd like to forget about it, is an obvious contradiction to the attractive law-and-order fallacies that either 1) anyone who uses drugs is a worthless waste by nature or 2) citizens' interests are best served by giving them a criminal record and/or jail for simple use or possession of drugs.
Furthermore, with respect particularly to the war on marijuana and marijuana users, you will find that most prohibitionist arguments begin with "Mr X., have you ever gotten high?" Presumably, if the answer is yes, the rest of the witness's statement is discredited by many people because of the reefer madness mythology that continues to pervade politics. On the other hand, the knowledge that important and powerful people have in fact gotten high, and yet we trust their judgement anyway, contradicts this line of thought nicely.
I've always found it amusing that every time a new scare comes out about the horrible health dangers and brain damage a marijuana smoker is susceptible to, the only people that are shocked and driven to action are non-smokers (and usually this action involves creating more problems for the smokers than marijuana ever caused them). Is it because marijuana smokers are too high to realize what grave danger they are in, or is it because 75 years of manufactured boogeymen and suppressed facts have guaranteed that the users themselves are the only people who know the truth about marijuana?
Some claim that such arguments originate in self-interest and should be discarded. Opponents claim that legal use of medical cannabis will cause legalization. But this will only happen if legalization continues to make sense, given data that will be collected as people use it in a medical context. One way or the other, medical use will bring out the truth - either cannabis is relatively harmless, or it does indeed drive the user crazy and afflict them with all sorts of disease. So if medical use causes legalization, or provides support for continued prohibition, it's because the truth came out. Why should these people be so scared of the truth that they would deny medicine to people whose lives are improved by it? Maybe the truth is something they don't want to know (or would either ruin their careers or render them redundant)?
Now driving both high and drunk is ridiculously stupid according to the studies, but if anything is to blame it's the alcohol, or perhaps the person who got behind the wheel when they knew they were impaired. Removing either of those factors would have prevented the accident. It's doubtful that removing the marijuana alone would also have prevented the accident.
1) Microsoft using open source code at the same time they are attempting to outlaw open source is hypocritical. Furthermore, they violated the terms (if not the spirit) of the BSD license by not attributing the original copyright holders in their advertisements.
2) Most people draw the line at commercial/for-profit copyright infringement, whether in the form of ripping off someone's GPL code, or in the form of copying DVDs and selling them. For my part, I draw the line at 14 years since publication.
Try 'MoSlo' instead.