And when the RIAA sues you or grandma, or the BSA estimates it's losses, you have no grounds to complain. That is after all, what we are talking about isn't it?
Only to the extent that I don't believe you can morally justify the BSA's slanted and disingenuous loss estimations simply by pointing out that the numbers are supported by current law. If you want to have the "copyright infringement is immoral!/oh no it isn't!/oh yes it is!" argument, there are plenty other people on this board who'll be glad to oblige you. I'm interested here in the orthogonality of Law and Morality here.
I'm a pretty reasonable guy. If you had real reasons for doing anything, I would understand. I do not need to know those reasons, but at the same time, I'm not going to excuse your actions without knowing them.
I do not need your sanction for my actions to be moral. Neither yours, nor that of anyone else. That's my point.
play by the rules until something obligate you otherwise, then you have to justify your actions if you want others to support you.
Indeed. But the support of others does affect the morality of the action. As far as morality goes, whether or not something is "unconscionable" will always be a purely personal judgement.
To believe otherwise is to abdicate your responsibility for right action
And yet, when misunderstandings do occur, it always seems to be the other person's fault, doesn't it? There's never the least particle of responsibility attaches to your good self. Maybe your comunication skills are so massively above those of mortals that the difference, whilst finite, might as well be infinite for all practical purposes?
I did state on several occasions that following the rules/law was moral and that didn't make the rules moral.
Strictly speaking, you didn't. You said things like "morality means following the law". And since "means" is frequently used to mean "is the same thing as" then those of us with less than godlike communication skills might be forgiven thinking that was what you actually meant. Well, not by you, obviously. Just by normal people.
In any event, that's still dodging the issue. You can say that we have a moral obligation to follow the law (something which I don't entirely concede) but that still doesn't tell us anything about the moral nature of the action that is the subject of the legislation. Passing a law against mouth-to-mouth resuscitation would not by itself make saving lives into an immoral act.
I'm not all over the place, your just not willing to acknowledge that water flows down hill and are attempting to treat the trip upstream with the same amount of effort downstream. The problem is that they are different and will require different amounts of force. You can float on the current down stream where you need to add something to go up.
Similarly, to those of us not resident on Mount Olympus, that sounds like a completely context free paragraph with zero relevance to subject at hand.
The law is neither moral or immoral on it's own
Thank you. That, good sir, has been my point since the very beginning. I believe I've may have mentioned quite frequently. Sadly, I don't have your Olympian skills, and so I expect that your failure to notice this over the last five or six exchanges will turn out to be my fault as well. I'll try not to let it dent my self esteem too badly.
You do not need to run opinion polls or focus groups. You are the one making the decisions whether to follow the law or not. You are the one who is deciding whether to report your friend or not
Also my point since the start of this debate.
Laws are immoral all the time
I'm sorry - did someone call "half-time" and we were supposed to switch ends? You appear to arguing my points as though I was in disagreement with them.
You have to justify why the law isn't moral to yourself then to others as your actions unfold.
No, no you don't. If I have a good moral reason for not following a law, and I decline to justify my actions to you, that does not imply that
my action is immoral. It simply means I think my reasons are none of your business.
Admittedly, I wouldn't expect you to appreciate the morality of my actions under such circumstances,
but my refusal to enlighten you does not change the moral status of my actions.
If your can't read minds, then do follow what I wrote
*sigh* You try to be nice to someone, meet them half way, and what do you get? I guess my fallible mortal brain just failed to wrap itself around the majestey of your perfect communication.
I stated several times, including with the discussion of unconscionable that I mean morality includes following the law not that the law is moral.
Hold that thought...
So logically, there is no useful way to tell if a law is unconscionable that allows you to infer morality from legality
Sure there is. Sometimes it's more obvious then others, but the point is that you have to justify your actions enough that others will side with you
Hang on a sec, you just told me that
morality includes following the law not that the law is moral.
And now here you are telling me that you can go from legal -> moral.
In a more easier terms, a+b!=b+a.
Well, quite. Dude, you're all over the place on this. Are you sure you've thought this through properly?
I'm saying that you have to justify not following the laws and otherwise follow them
Still doesn't work though. Suppose you one day visit a third world dictatorship, and while you are there El Presedente passes a law requiring you to report your friend to the police for something utterly arbitrary. Bearing in mind that El Prez often makes his critics disappear without trace, do you really want to run opinion polls and focus groups before you feel you can morally ignore this latest dictat?
So I guess the question here is "justify to whom?"
Stop twisting what I said into the law is moral and take it as I mean
With all due respect, I can't read your mind, and I don't necessarily know what you mean. all I have to go on is your words. I can make guesses and assumptions, but they are frequently wrong,
doubly so when I'm posting on/. and doubly so again when talking to you, my friend. That's why I ask all these questions - to try and clarify what you do mean.
morality means following the law. They are not the same.
That's not a definition I've found in any online dictionary. Being law abiding means following the law. Morality means doing what is ethical. Since it is entirely possible to draft a law that it would not be ethical to obey, it therefore follows that morality cannot mean "following the law" since that would be a contradiction.
What part of existing law is immoral and shouldn't be followed? If you can't present that, then you can't counter the point that morality means you follow the law.
Why of course I can. I just did. There's no point in getting into specific cases, because the general principle upon which your position is founded is logically inconsistent. I can understand how you might like to sidetrack the discussion into specific instances since that would allow you to avoid confronting this inconsistency.
You have evaded making that point and we are three posts into your attempting to do it.
Don't blame me - it's taken you that long to answer my question.
Your doing nothing but claiming lawful doesn't mean moral and ignoring that morality means being lawful
I'm not ignoring it, I'm disputing it.
Unconscionable rests on a personal and more importantly a community level.
Which community? Who decides what the community thinks?
Look at it logically. The matter of whether a law is unconscionable or not is ultimately either a personal judgement, or it is not.
If it is personal, then since no two people necessarily make the same judgement, you cannot then tell someone that they are behaving immorally solely because they are breaking the law. You can claim that the act they are performing is itself immoral, but you have to justify that on its own merits, and without reference to the law. The law in question may be genuinely unconscionable to the other person, something which you can never know for sure. If they do hold the law to be unconscionable then they are, by your own definition, morally entitled to disregard it.
Therefore, in this case, you cannot claim morality based on legality
If it is not a personal judgement then it needs an objective test. The only test I can imagine that holds any degree of testable objectivity would be if a court were so to rule. There are a few problems with this model, but the biggest is that it renders the civil disobedience protests of Ghandi and Martin Luther King as immoral. The founding fathers of the US as well, for that matter.
Since I doubt either of us would be comfortable with a model of morality that obliges the population to suffer tyranny gladly, I think we can dispense with this case.
If there is no objective test to unconsiconability, then it boils down to a personal judgement once again. So you can say that your the community holds a law to be conscionable or otherwise, but in the absence of a referendum, it remains a personal judgement. Which reduces to the first case, where you have no rational basis to assert morality based on legality.
So logically, there is no useful way to tell if a law is unconscionable that allows you to infer morality from legality. To suggest otherwise is to say, in effect, "the status quo is always correct, except where I say otherwise". Which itself more or less boils down to "shut up and
Your looking at the picture from only one side. While there is no automatic morality in law, there is automatic law in morality
No, I don't believe that is so. There's a moral case for being nice to your mother, but it is rarely enacted into law.
Certainly there's a degree of overlap, but neither one is a subset of the other.
You are morally obligated to be lawful until the laws become immoral
Immoral according to whom? Who decides a law is immoral? Whose decision would you accept?
If your going to arbitrarily make up definitions or use abstract meanings just to confuse the situation, then your not making a point, your attempting to hide one that's probably more valid then your own
I ask a simple and unambiguous question and I get bombast. It seems as if you are the one who wishes to evade a point.
Who is it, for you personally, who has to decide that a law is unconscionable in order that disregarding that law is no longer an immoral act? Your point hinges on unconscionablity - so how do you know when a law is unconscionable? The only abstractions in that question are ones that you introduced.
I guess I didn't see any moral arguments in the original statement. He was simply stating their claims weren't entirely incorrect in accordance with current law.
I don't have a problem with that. I don't believe the phrase "the current model" is quite a ubiquitous as sumdumass believes, however; certainly I'd never seen the term used that way, which is why I challenged it. As for the moral element, that entered the picture a little later:
Actually is would be just as fair and accurate because once the copy is made, they deserve the payment
Where we're suddenly talking about what's fair rather than what's legal, and about who deserves what as opposed to who is entitled under law to the same. So the argument morphs into a moral one.
That said, I was the one who, initially raised the question of fairness. On the other hand, if no moral judgment was implied, all he had to do was say so, and we wouldn't be having this discussion.
Is it your position that the laws and ways people abide by them is somehow immoral and should be ignored or something?
My position is that there is no automatic morality in law. Bad laws are possible, and should be changed. To do this we need to discuss
the morality of the law in question. To say "it is moral because it is legal" is both trite and unhelpful in such a context.
Maybe you should look up what unconscionable means
I knew you were going to say that, Unconscionable according to whom, then?
You apparently do no understand what morality means or you are unwilling to disclose what you think is immoral after throwing the words around
Insults already? It normally takes longer than that for you to run out of rational arguments.
And no, legality does not imply morality, but morality includes legality. I said the later nor previous.
Really?
Actually is would be just as fair and accurate because once the copy is made, they deserve the payment
It seems to me that "fair" and "deserve" are moral terms rather than legal ones. You can't justify that by invoking the "current model".
Moral authority has nothing to do with it and saying "this is the current system" does not require citation or a logical explanation. It's a statement of fact, not of moral authority.
Right. But neither does it imply that the current system is morally justified, and attempting to suggest otherwise (as the GP seemed to be doing) is a tad disingenuous.
By all means let's debate the morality of the issue. Just don't try and tell me "it's right because that's the way it is".
If you need a citation, then look up the various laws of differing nations on copyright, patents, and commerce. This isn't a secrete that you somehow missed, it's the way the world has been operating for the last 50 or more years which pretty much makes it your entire lifetime.
So then you're basically trying to justify the morality of the BSA's position by pointing out that their position is entirely legal.
Legal authority is the only moral authority needed because morally, you are bound to operate in a lawful manor unless the law is unconscionable.
Actually, I think you'll find we're legally bound, not morally. Else, we're required to blindly accept any law on the statue books as moral, however unjust it may be.
We've been around this loop before. I don't share your conviction that legality implies morality, and I doubt either of us is about to change the mind of the other this time around. I've got the clarification I was after; is there any need to discuss this further?
The current model is the distribution model used by industry and artists that is in place and supported by copyright laws as well as commerce laws around the world.
Um, Citation Needed?
Or are you using the term in a tautological sense? "This is the way things are, because this is the way things are". Logically inescapable in a trivial sort of way, but doesn't imply any of the moral authority suggested by your use of the term.
I'm surprised you had to ask.
I'm surprised you're surprised. This is a techie/geek forum, not one dedicated to law or economics.
Do you think the customer will want to argue semantics with you after you've lose their data?
If it was me, I could be tempted. Let's have a go at it...
To start with, I would have said that, technically, the cloud can't meaningfully fail at all. I suppose it could be down when you needed to access your data, but the connectivity part of the deal (which is the actual cloud) is going to come back up.
The trouble is that no one buys the "cloud". They buy services delivered over the cloud. So the question isn't about whether the cloud is reliable as such, so much as it is about whether the datacenters the cloud connects to are reliable.
So I'd say the distinction is meaningful, but not helpful, unless you're specifically discussion downtime which we aren't in this case.
Furthermore, nothing about the distinction makes cloud computing sound any more attractive to me than it did before I encountered it. Clearly some marketing type thinks they can put a bit of spin on this, and make it sound less like an indictment of the industries latest hot buzzword. If so, I don't think it's working.
This is because the current model is that the only way you get a copy is by a sale outside of fair use provisions.
Which "current model" would that be? Who uses it? What authority can it be claimed to carry?
Obviously, the current model used by the BSA is going to support the BSA's estimations, for instance. But by itself, that wouldn't make it fair or accurate or in any way reflective of reality.
Why do i have to pay for the people who cant do the same thing, or worse CHOOSE not to
Or have five heart attacks in quick succession that exhausts their health insurance and leaves them unable to work? Still, that couldn't happen you, right?
They can call me selfish
Or short-sighted. Or Stupid. Or ignorant. The possibilities are endless.
If I have to pay excessive costs for healthcare, better to pay the drug companies than some worthless middle manager. Money spend on pharmaceuticals might actually be used to create something useful.
... or just be used to add another percentage point onto the shareholders' dividend.
At least with the government, its possible to set up a health care system where the primary aim to provide universal healthcare. With the private sector the primary aim is always going to be to make money - and I would respectfully submit that turning a profit is not always the most important consideration.
Is a friendlier and/or more open MS an improvement? Seems kind of obvious to me.
Never going to happen though. There's a fundamental clash of values at work. If I thought the goal was attainable, I might agree with you, but I don't
I'm surprised at how many people confuse, "don't deride people working with MS for trying for reform", with, "have no fear, adopt everything MS comes up with because they're our friends!"
I think what they're actually hearing is "Relax, Microsoft will stop attacking you if just be nice to them". Which, to be fair, seems to be a clear subtext of your posts on this topic.
Even if Miguel is one of the latter types, that's not reason to deride his work at trying to get MS to open up more.
You keep using that word "deride". I don't think I've ever derided Mr. di Icaza's efforts as such. I will admit to being somewhat cynical about his motivations. Given a choice between upholding his Free Software principles, or mining as much of the Linux desktop as possible with MS submarine patents and then taking a hefty backhander from MS, I sadly suspect that Miguel would go for option B every time. Moonlight would seem to be a case in point.
You might call that derision. I think of it as exercising due caution about Microsoft and their friends when they come bearing gifts. Which is something you're apparently OK with, so I guess that's all right then.
It costs you nothing to keep your mouth shut if you have nothing good to say about people trying to reform MS's approach to developers and open source at large.
People in this case being Miguel, I assume. Or did you want to bring some other names into the discussion?
I only mention this because if you do mean Miguel, then a lot of people have serious reservations regarding his intentions, and I think you're taking a whole lot for granted in characterising him as a idealistic reformer. So let's discuss Miguel, or else say who you mean instead.
but opening your mouth could end up costing us quite a lot.
Cost us precisely? And how?
They would actually go after anyone they believe infringes on their patents instead of merely rattling sabres.
You mean like offloading targeted IP onto patent trolls who could do their dirty work for them? Or working directly and suing companies like TomTom?
All I can say is "bring it on". A lot of MS patents could stand to have a little close scrutiny, and the subject of software patent reform might get some wider support if MS start picking on hobbyists and amateurs. There is no terror in your threats, I'm afraid.
argument by analogy is weak and ultimately futile
And you're being deliberately obtuse. My point was that if a person or group has a well-established history of victimising others (as is well documented in Microsoft's case) then it is foolish in the extreme to suddenly trust them based on scanty, recent and ambiguous evidence. I think you are perfectly well aware of this.
But this is neither here nor there; ultimately, MS was a ruthlessly proprietary and aggressive company, and deriding the efforts of people trying to reform such a company from the inside out is not helpful
Once again, which people? It's not sensible to leave all Microsoft apologists unchallenged, since many of them don't care about anything
by Microsoft. I suspect that goes for the majority of the subscribers on Slashdot. If you'd care to make the case for a specific individual, then do so and we'll discuss specifics.
But why judge MS's benign or beneficial actions equally harshly? Why ridicule the people trying to make those positive changes? That's just irrational prejudice, and it serves no one.
Because when Microsoft aligns itself with something, it's usually to better plant a knife in their back The corporation has a well documented track record of betraying their partners at almost every opportunity. They may be trying to win "hearts and minds" in the free software world right now, but to infer from that a change of heart on Microsoft's part - that would be truly irrational.
As for ridiculing the people trying to make positive changes, I've always found Miguel di Icaza's motivation to be suspect, his arguments facile and self-serving, and his willingness to do things like promote an open soruce Microsoft technology in which he concedes there are MS patents deeply disturbing. If you meant someone other than Miguel, name names and we'll discuss specifics.
I agree. Corporate culture will change to the extent that their open source efforts bear fruit, and their heavy-handed totalitarian approach breeds ill-will.
First of all, I don't think Microsoft have ever cared much about breeding ill-will. Maybe if it affects sales, but so long as they have the sort of market penetration and vendor lock in that they currently possess, I doubt they'll lose much sleep over being disliked.
Secondly, there is no way that any open source initiative at Microsoft is ever going to generate revenue on the scale of Windows and MS Office. So any open source efforts are going to subordinate to MS major cash cows, and will be manipulated to serve the interests of those products. In short, I can't see MS' flirtations with open source ever bringing in enough cash to make an impact on corporate culture.
But they will not bear fruit if people create a hostile atmosphere to every olive branch the people working MS from the inside manage to extend.
I'm sorry but if Microsoft were suddenly (perish the thought) become hostile towards free software, how would we distinguish this from their current behavior?
Even if MS suddenly aborts every positive effort made toward the open source community, it was still worth the try. Is that really so hard to understand?
Yes. Yes, it really, really is. I mean I can see the benefit: I could see the benefit in rehabilitating a serial pedophile rapist. I just wouldn't think it is was "worth the try" to welcome him into the local junior school just because he'd been sounding really upbeat lately.
Look: Microsoft's entire business is founded to the core on maintaining an artificial software scarcity and inflating prices accordingly. Free software on the other hand, left to itself will inevitably destroy that carefully cultivated. The board at MS are not stupid. They realise this. That's why we get such inflammatory rhetoric, likening Linux to a cancer, for instance; from Microsoft's viewpoint that's exactly what it is. Cancer of the business model.
I'll grant you this much: the day will likely come when MS has to embrace free software or go under. And before that happens, MS will try and make the shift to some sort of FOSS friendly business model. But they'll do it of their own accord and for their own benefit, and the process is unlikely to be accelerated by the Miguels of this world.
But Microsoft is not a "someone", it is an aggregate of "someones", and treating MS like an individual that has already shown its true colours is a mistake, because that is not the nature of the beast
I don't think it follows that because Microsoft is not a single human being, it never displays human behavior.
In particular, I don't think it's safe to assume that Microsoft will suddenly start playing nice with the rest
of the world, if the open source community just stops saying mean things about it.
merely by inserting open source advocates into MS you can alter its aggregate behaviour to a more open source friendly stance
If you'll excuse my saying so, that's one hell of a "merely". Corporate culture tends to be self perpetuating, and corporate policy is set from the top down.
I'll grant you that there are plenty of folk at Microsoft who are decent people, and I always try and draw a line between the corporation and it's employees.
But just because you get a couple of dozen free software fans working at Microsoft Research, that's not going to stop Ballmer and the rest funding attacks on
free software.
Nor is it going to persuade a great many who work there that free software isn't a long term threat to their livelihood.
The evidence is already there: MS has already become more open than they used to be, with shared source licenses and CodePlex being the highest profile examples.
I think that evidence is open to other interpretations, however. Microsoft tend to see the free software movement as a clever trick by IBM to make the general public do a lot of unpaid coding for them. That's what MS would like to get out of free software. The rest of it, they'd shut down tomorrow were it only in their power.
There's also the converse point to consider. In Footfall (I think) Niven and Pournelle make the point (a little self indulgently, maybe) that if politicians are not supposed to plan beyond their term of office, then the only people making serious long term contingency plans are SF writers. I think there's a grain of truth in there; who else has the time and inclination to consider potential scientific breakthroughs, and then explore their social as well as well as technological implications.
I don't think I'd recommend Footfall: It's a long book and there are going to be limits on how much you can expect your students to read. Still, Niven's Flash Crowd is a fine example of this type of story, considering the ways in which a cheap public teleportation system would change society.
It'd be nice to have a symmetrical recommendation for fantasy, but I don't think it really lends itself to that sort of exploration. Fantasy, I sometimes think is best when it looks backwards and inwards into the landscape of myth and the collective unconscious. Robert Holdstock's Mythago Wood would probably be the best example of that, but again it's probably a lot of book to cover. Something from Gaiman's Sandman comics might work - A Dream Of A Thousand Cats, for example.
I'm by no means a total fan of everything that Microsoft does, but a sizeable number of complaints from people are just growing pains.
I can see where you're coming from, I suppose. And to be fair, the little I've used Vista, it seemed more or less OK. Of course, byt the time I finished disabling the unnecessary eye-candy, it looked and behaved more or less my XP partition - or like Win98 with confusing licensing and lots of added DRM. It was the licence issues and the DRM that were my main issues with Vista, to be srictly honest.
That said... there are always people who complain about any change. And on the whole, they're the same people. The proportion stays more or less constant and you can factor them out. And I think people are quite good at doing that, on the whole. So when you get an abnormally high number of complaints, (as seems to have been the case with Vista) then you have to wonder if there isn't more happening than people going "Oh my god... they... they've changed things!"
I certainly don't think it's fair to dismiss them all as people who "didn't know how to use their damned computers".
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Only to the extent that I don't believe you can morally justify the BSA's slanted and disingenuous loss estimations simply by pointing out that the numbers are supported by current law. If you want to have the "copyright infringement is immoral!/oh no it isn't!/oh yes it is!" argument, there are plenty other people on this board who'll be glad to oblige you. I'm interested here in the orthogonality of Law and Morality here.
I do not need your sanction for my actions to be moral. Neither yours, nor that of anyone else. That's my point.
Indeed. But the support of others does affect the morality of the action. As far as morality goes, whether or not something is "unconscionable" will always be a purely personal judgement. To believe otherwise is to abdicate your responsibility for right action
And yet, when misunderstandings do occur, it always seems to be the other person's fault, doesn't it? There's never the least particle of responsibility attaches to your good self. Maybe your comunication skills are so massively above those of mortals that the difference, whilst finite, might as well be infinite for all practical purposes?
Strictly speaking, you didn't. You said things like "morality means following the law". And since "means" is frequently used to mean "is the same thing as" then those of us with less than godlike communication skills might be forgiven thinking that was what you actually meant. Well, not by you, obviously. Just by normal people.
In any event, that's still dodging the issue. You can say that we have a moral obligation to follow the law (something which I don't entirely concede) but that still doesn't tell us anything about the moral nature of the action that is the subject of the legislation. Passing a law against mouth-to-mouth resuscitation would not by itself make saving lives into an immoral act.
Similarly, to those of us not resident on Mount Olympus, that sounds like a completely context free paragraph with zero relevance to subject at hand.
Thank you. That, good sir, has been my point since the very beginning. I believe I've may have mentioned quite frequently. Sadly, I don't have your Olympian skills, and so I expect that your failure to notice this over the last five or six exchanges will turn out to be my fault as well. I'll try not to let it dent my self esteem too badly.
Also my point since the start of this debate.
I'm sorry - did someone call "half-time" and we were supposed to switch ends? You appear to arguing my points as though I was in disagreement with them.
No, no you don't. If I have a good moral reason for not following a law, and I decline to justify my actions to you, that does not imply that my action is immoral. It simply means I think my reasons are none of your business.
Admittedly, I wouldn't expect you to appreciate the morality of my actions under such circumstances, but my refusal to enlighten you does not change the moral status of my actions.
*sigh* You try to be nice to someone, meet them half way, and what do you get? I guess my fallible mortal brain just failed to wrap itself around the majestey of your perfect communication.
Hold that thought...
Hang on a sec, you just told me that
And now here you are telling me that you can go from legal -> moral.
Well, quite. Dude, you're all over the place on this. Are you sure you've thought this through properly?
Still doesn't work though. Suppose you one day visit a third world dictatorship, and while you are there El Presedente passes a law requiring you to report your friend to the police for something utterly arbitrary. Bearing in mind that El Prez often makes his critics disappear without trace, do you really want to run opinion polls and focus groups before you feel you can morally ignore this latest dictat?
So I guess the question here is "justify to whom?"
With all due respect, I can't read your mind, and I don't necessarily know what you mean. all I have to go on is your words. I can make guesses and assumptions, but they are frequently wrong, doubly so when I'm posting on /. and doubly so again when talking to you, my friend. That's why I ask all these questions - to try and clarify what you do mean.
That's not a definition I've found in any online dictionary. Being law abiding means following the law. Morality means doing what is ethical. Since it is entirely possible to draft a law that it would not be ethical to obey, it therefore follows that morality cannot mean "following the law" since that would be a contradiction.
Why of course I can. I just did. There's no point in getting into specific cases, because the general principle upon which your position is founded is logically inconsistent. I can understand how you might like to sidetrack the discussion into specific instances since that would allow you to avoid confronting this inconsistency.
Don't blame me - it's taken you that long to answer my question.
I'm not ignoring it, I'm disputing it.
Which community? Who decides what the community thinks?
Look at it logically. The matter of whether a law is unconscionable or not is ultimately either a personal judgement, or it is not.
If it is personal, then since no two people necessarily make the same judgement, you cannot then tell someone that they are behaving immorally solely because they are breaking the law. You can claim that the act they are performing is itself immoral, but you have to justify that on its own merits, and without reference to the law. The law in question may be genuinely unconscionable to the other person, something which you can never know for sure. If they do hold the law to be unconscionable then they are, by your own definition, morally entitled to disregard it. Therefore, in this case, you cannot claim morality based on legality
If it is not a personal judgement then it needs an objective test. The only test I can imagine that holds any degree of testable objectivity would be if a court were so to rule. There are a few problems with this model, but the biggest is that it renders the civil disobedience protests of Ghandi and Martin Luther King as immoral. The founding fathers of the US as well, for that matter. Since I doubt either of us would be comfortable with a model of morality that obliges the population to suffer tyranny gladly, I think we can dispense with this case.
If there is no objective test to unconsiconability, then it boils down to a personal judgement once again. So you can say that your the community holds a law to be conscionable or otherwise, but in the absence of a referendum, it remains a personal judgement. Which reduces to the first case, where you have no rational basis to assert morality based on legality.
So logically, there is no useful way to tell if a law is unconscionable that allows you to infer morality from legality. To suggest otherwise is to say, in effect, "the status quo is always correct, except where I say otherwise". Which itself more or less boils down to "shut up and
No, I don't believe that is so. There's a moral case for being nice to your mother, but it is rarely enacted into law.
Certainly there's a degree of overlap, but neither one is a subset of the other.
Immoral according to whom? Who decides a law is immoral? Whose decision would you accept?
I ask a simple and unambiguous question and I get bombast. It seems as if you are the one who wishes to evade a point.
Who is it, for you personally, who has to decide that a law is unconscionable in order that disregarding that law is no longer an immoral act? Your point hinges on unconscionablity - so how do you know when a law is unconscionable? The only abstractions in that question are ones that you introduced.
I don't have a problem with that. I don't believe the phrase "the current model" is quite a ubiquitous as sumdumass believes, however; certainly I'd never seen the term used that way, which is why I challenged it. As for the moral element, that entered the picture a little later:
Where we're suddenly talking about what's fair rather than what's legal, and about who deserves what as opposed to who is entitled under law to the same. So the argument morphs into a moral one.
That said, I was the one who, initially raised the question of fairness. On the other hand, if no moral judgment was implied, all he had to do was say so, and we wouldn't be having this discussion.
My position is that there is no automatic morality in law. Bad laws are possible, and should be changed. To do this we need to discuss the morality of the law in question. To say "it is moral because it is legal" is both trite and unhelpful in such a context.
I knew you were going to say that, Unconscionable according to whom, then?
Insults already? It normally takes longer than that for you to run out of rational arguments.
Really?
It seems to me that "fair" and "deserve" are moral terms rather than legal ones. You can't justify that by invoking the "current model".
Right. But neither does it imply that the current system is morally justified, and attempting to suggest otherwise (as the GP seemed to be doing) is a tad disingenuous.
By all means let's debate the morality of the issue. Just don't try and tell me "it's right because that's the way it is".
So then you're basically trying to justify the morality of the BSA's position by pointing out that their position is entirely legal.
Actually, I think you'll find we're legally bound, not morally. Else, we're required to blindly accept any law on the statue books as moral, however unjust it may be.
We've been around this loop before. I don't share your conviction that legality implies morality, and I doubt either of us is about to change the mind of the other this time around. I've got the clarification I was after; is there any need to discuss this further?
Um, Citation Needed?
Or are you using the term in a tautological sense? "This is the way things are, because this is the way things are". Logically inescapable in a trivial sort of way, but doesn't imply any of the moral authority suggested by your use of the term.
I'm surprised you're surprised. This is a techie/geek forum, not one dedicated to law or economics.
If it was me, I could be tempted. Let's have a go at it...
To start with, I would have said that, technically, the cloud can't meaningfully fail at all. I suppose it could be down when you needed to access your data, but the connectivity part of the deal (which is the actual cloud) is going to come back up.
The trouble is that no one buys the "cloud". They buy services delivered over the cloud. So the question isn't about whether the cloud is reliable as such, so much as it is about whether the datacenters the cloud connects to are reliable.
So I'd say the distinction is meaningful, but not helpful, unless you're specifically discussion downtime which we aren't in this case.
Furthermore, nothing about the distinction makes cloud computing sound any more attractive to me than it did before I encountered it. Clearly some marketing type thinks they can put a bit of spin on this, and make it sound less like an indictment of the industries latest hot buzzword. If so, I don't think it's working.
Which "current model" would that be? Who uses it? What authority can it be claimed to carry?
Obviously, the current model used by the BSA is going to support the BSA's estimations, for instance. But by itself, that wouldn't make it fair or accurate or in any way reflective of reality.
That much I can tell. But your selfishness and foolhardy optimism doesn't mean that the idea is bad. It just means that you're selfish and foolhardy.
Or have five heart attacks in quick succession that exhausts their health insurance and leaves them unable to work? Still, that couldn't happen you, right?
Or short-sighted. Or Stupid. Or ignorant. The possibilities are endless.
At least with the government, its possible to set up a health care system where the primary aim to provide universal healthcare. With the private sector the primary aim is always going to be to make money - and I would respectfully submit that turning a profit is not always the most important consideration.
Alas, I doubt they'll let you minimise the advertisement pane.
Either that, or MS are even resorting to guerilla marketing for their vaporware, now.
I guess which seems more likely is going to depend on what you think of Microsoft.
Never going to happen though. There's a fundamental clash of values at work. If I thought the goal was attainable, I might agree with you, but I don't
I think what they're actually hearing is "Relax, Microsoft will stop attacking you if just be nice to them". Which, to be fair, seems to be a clear subtext of your posts on this topic.
You keep using that word "deride". I don't think I've ever derided Mr. di Icaza's efforts as such. I will admit to being somewhat cynical about his motivations. Given a choice between upholding his Free Software principles, or mining as much of the Linux desktop as possible with MS submarine patents and then taking a hefty backhander from MS, I sadly suspect that Miguel would go for option B every time. Moonlight would seem to be a case in point.
You might call that derision. I think of it as exercising due caution about Microsoft and their friends when they come bearing gifts. Which is something you're apparently OK with, so I guess that's all right then.
I agree entirely. However, I can understand how the guys and gals in Redmond might not see it that way.
People in this case being Miguel, I assume. Or did you want to bring some other names into the discussion?
I only mention this because if you do mean Miguel, then a lot of people have serious reservations regarding his intentions, and I think you're taking a whole lot for granted in characterising him as a idealistic reformer. So let's discuss Miguel, or else say who you mean instead.
Cost us precisely? And how?
You mean like offloading targeted IP onto patent trolls who could do their dirty work for them? Or working directly and suing companies like TomTom?
All I can say is "bring it on". A lot of MS patents could stand to have a little close scrutiny, and the subject of software patent reform might get some wider support if MS start picking on hobbyists and amateurs. There is no terror in your threats, I'm afraid.
And you're being deliberately obtuse. My point was that if a person or group has a well-established history of victimising others (as is well documented in Microsoft's case) then it is foolish in the extreme to suddenly trust them based on scanty, recent and ambiguous evidence. I think you are perfectly well aware of this.
Once again, which people? It's not sensible to leave all Microsoft apologists unchallenged, since many of them don't care about anything by Microsoft. I suspect that goes for the majority of the subscribers on Slashdot. If you'd care to make the case for a specific individual, then do so and we'll discuss specifics.
Because when Microsoft aligns itself with something, it's usually to better plant a knife in their back The corporation has a well documented track record of betraying their partners at almost every opportunity. They may be trying to win "hearts and minds" in the free software world right now, but to infer from that a change of heart on Microsoft's part - that would be truly irrational.
As for ridiculing the people trying to make positive changes, I've always found Miguel di Icaza's motivation to be suspect, his arguments facile and self-serving, and his willingness to do things like promote an open soruce Microsoft technology in which he concedes there are MS patents deeply disturbing. If you meant someone other than Miguel, name names and we'll discuss specifics.
First of all, I don't think Microsoft have ever cared much about breeding ill-will. Maybe if it affects sales, but so long as they have the sort of market penetration and vendor lock in that they currently possess, I doubt they'll lose much sleep over being disliked.
Secondly, there is no way that any open source initiative at Microsoft is ever going to generate revenue on the scale of Windows and MS Office. So any open source efforts are going to subordinate to MS major cash cows, and will be manipulated to serve the interests of those products. In short, I can't see MS' flirtations with open source ever bringing in enough cash to make an impact on corporate culture.
I'm sorry but if Microsoft were suddenly (perish the thought) become hostile towards free software, how would we distinguish this from their current behavior?
Yes. Yes, it really, really is. I mean I can see the benefit: I could see the benefit in rehabilitating a serial pedophile rapist. I just wouldn't think it is was "worth the try" to welcome him into the local junior school just because he'd been sounding really upbeat lately.
Look: Microsoft's entire business is founded to the core on maintaining an artificial software scarcity and inflating prices accordingly. Free software on the other hand, left to itself will inevitably destroy that carefully cultivated. The board at MS are not stupid. They realise this. That's why we get such inflammatory rhetoric, likening Linux to a cancer, for instance; from Microsoft's viewpoint that's exactly what it is. Cancer of the business model.
I'll grant you this much: the day will likely come when MS has to embrace free software or go under. And before that happens, MS will try and make the shift to some sort of FOSS friendly business model. But they'll do it of their own accord and for their own benefit, and the process is unlikely to be accelerated by the Miguels of this world.
I don't think it follows that because Microsoft is not a single human being, it never displays human behavior. In particular, I don't think it's safe to assume that Microsoft will suddenly start playing nice with the rest of the world, if the open source community just stops saying mean things about it.
If you'll excuse my saying so, that's one hell of a "merely". Corporate culture tends to be self perpetuating, and corporate policy is set from the top down. I'll grant you that there are plenty of folk at Microsoft who are decent people, and I always try and draw a line between the corporation and it's employees. But just because you get a couple of dozen free software fans working at Microsoft Research, that's not going to stop Ballmer and the rest funding attacks on free software.
Nor is it going to persuade a great many who work there that free software isn't a long term threat to their livelihood.
I think that evidence is open to other interpretations, however. Microsoft tend to see the free software movement as a clever trick by IBM to make the general public do a lot of unpaid coding for them. That's what MS would like to get out of free software. The rest of it, they'd shut down tomorrow were it only in their power.
There's also the converse point to consider. In Footfall (I think) Niven and Pournelle make the point (a little self indulgently, maybe) that if politicians are not supposed to plan beyond their term of office, then the only people making serious long term contingency plans are SF writers. I think there's a grain of truth in there; who else has the time and inclination to consider potential scientific breakthroughs, and then explore their social as well as well as technological implications.
I don't think I'd recommend Footfall: It's a long book and there are going to be limits on how much you can expect your students to read. Still, Niven's Flash Crowd is a fine example of this type of story, considering the ways in which a cheap public teleportation system would change society.
It'd be nice to have a symmetrical recommendation for fantasy, but I don't think it really lends itself to that sort of exploration. Fantasy, I sometimes think is best when it looks backwards and inwards into the landscape of myth and the collective unconscious. Robert Holdstock's Mythago Wood would probably be the best example of that, but again it's probably a lot of book to cover. Something from Gaiman's Sandman comics might work - A Dream Of A Thousand Cats, for example.
Just some thoughts.
I can see where you're coming from, I suppose. And to be fair, the little I've used Vista, it seemed more or less OK. Of course, byt the time I finished disabling the unnecessary eye-candy, it looked and behaved more or less my XP partition - or like Win98 with confusing licensing and lots of added DRM. It was the licence issues and the DRM that were my main issues with Vista, to be srictly honest.
That said ... there are always people who complain about any change. And on the whole, they're the same people. The proportion stays more or less constant and you can factor them out. And I think people are quite good at doing that, on the whole. So when you get an abnormally high number of complaints, (as seems to have been the case with Vista) then you have to wonder if there isn't more happening than people going "Oh my god ... they ... they've changed things!"
I certainly don't think it's fair to dismiss them all as people who "didn't know how to use their damned computers".
Yes. That's exactly my point.