Monopolies are somewhat of an awkward middle ground between having open standards and having no standards at all. Although open standards would be ideal, "monopoly standards" give developers a relatively fixed target to shoot at when creating software and hardware. There are of course many disadvantages to an operating system monopoly and Microsoft has definitely shown these, but it's not all bad.
People in public have a reasonable expectation of privacy, just a weaker one. If one day someone (just a regular civilian) walked up to you and gave you a document describing everything you had done in the last couple weeks, you (or at least, I imagine most people) would probably be a bit surprised and nervous that you have a stalker all of a sudden. Generally speaking, the idea that people are tracking your every move is a bit odd. Thus, it is reasonable to expect that people aren't doing that.
Of course, IANAL so I don't know whether this is how the word reasonable is generally interpreted in the Constitution. But it seems like a decent place to draw the line.
Education has a lot of (positive) externalities, which is something the free market isn't always so great at taking into account. Not only do you benefit if you get a college degree, but you also benefit if someone else gets a college degree, since educated people are more capable of creating things that benefit everyone. Thus, more efficient results may in principle be produced if some entity steps in and subsidizes things. In principle, this could be done simply by a bunch of people on their own saying "But hey, we want engineers! We'll help foot the bill!" but governments can streamline the process somewhat.
There's no inherent reason why engineers can't make people happy. Making people happy is just another technical problem. If engineers can make devices that satisfy every other need, then there's no reason why they can't make a device which stimulates the "ultimate need" and simply make people happy. It's just that happiness is somewhat of an elusive goal.
But now that I think of it, you can take that argument in the other direction and say that most of the humanities are in their own way a kind of engineering, although a form of engineering that does not hold to the same sort of scientific rigor. When an artist or writer or whatever does their thing, he is designing an object for the intent of producing a certain response in the audience. Thus, art is basically just aesthetic engineering. And the humanities which don't fall into that analogy (philosophy and history) are arguably just sciences of one form or another.
Indeed, and that argument applies more to streaming audio than non-streaming audio because even though the analog hole always exists, with non-streaming audio it's a pain in the ass to exploit because you're forced to record at one second per second, (whereas with digital copying you can often go much faster) but with streaming audio one second per second is a constraint forced on you by the nature of the technology itself.
Public domain maximizes gross freedom, while the GPL is more concerned with net freedom, which is the more useful concept in my opinion. Freedom only has value when it is enjoyed. Although I might get a certain amount of satisfaction that I am not directly restricting anyone's freedoms, it's kind of a moot point if people's freedoms get restricted by other people.
When you release a software under the public domain, you are minimizing the restrictions that you place on the software, but there are other people in the world and they could introduce their own restrictions. When software is released in a proprietary format or on hardware which does not allow modification, restrictions are introduced.
Of course, public domain and BSD licensed software do increase net freedom somewhat, in that the original work remains basically free no matter what other people do. But to really maximize freedom, you need to not only not directly restrict people, but you need to make some effort to prevent restrictions in general from existing. This can be hard and it requires tradeoffs, since when restrictions are done by human beings, you have to restrict the restricters, and thus you have to calculate which restriction is worse. It is not a trivial matter to determine which restriction is worse, but I do think it is reasonable to suppose that the GPL-ish position of "Copies of this work may be made if and only if the distributor does not put any additional restrictions on the use, modification, or sharing of this work beyond those made in this sentence" is too unreasonable.
GNU was a project to create an operating system. "Linux" is an operating system which uses most of the GNU project along with the Linux kernel and an assload of other programs that have little to do with either GNU or Linus Torvalds. Those other programs, however, were not a project to create an operating system, so it's different. Thus, in an abstract sense, "Linux" when taken as a whole is a fork of the GNU project, and it is relatively logical to call "Linux" GNU/Linux to mark this.
Of course, it's also a really whiney thing to nitpick about, since there's really no obligation for forks to be named in such a way as to refer to its parent project and Stallman only cares about this because he feels people aren't giving his noble crusade the credit it deserves, but it's totally logical.
I agree with you in principle, but I disagree with your particular formulation. Math is universal, but our choice of axioms is not. It is not implausible that an alien civilization would not find Euclidean Geometry to be a particularly interesting system, and thus that they would not investigate it sufficiently to discover the Pythagorean theorem. Perhaps due to some peculiar quirk of their homeland they would focus on spherical geometry. (Of course, I also think it's possible that the alien civilization is simply too stupid to do math, but I don't think that's what you meant.)
In my opinion, math is logic, which is universal and objective, plus whatever artificial systems we decide to construct, which is not particularly universal. There are certain mathematical systems (such as Euclidean geometry) which are extremely useful in describing reality, perhaps even objectively useful, but not universal aspects of reality as such.
Heuristics are just as mathematical as anything else. Heuristics cannot be mathematically proven to be the "right thing" (because by definition, they aren't) but math can still come in to quantify to what degree they are the "okay thing."
Yes, but he tried to kill the Macintosh because he was working on the Apple Lisa which was pretty much the same idea but way more expensive, and then he switched to working on the Mac later on. As the uncle threads say, Jobs is still kind of full of shit, but not in that way.
You can, but code is structurally very different from English language text. With text, you just have long streams of text arranged as paragraphs which can be squished pretty thoroughly and maintain their overall form. Code, on the other hand, uses whitespace extremely meaningfully with carriage returns and indentations arranged according to a lot of different rules. It probably wouldn't be so hard for the IDE to have a system which cooperates "okay" with the current system already use, but it would still be a change, and thus would be unpleasant for many. (And introducing a new text formatting system that some people use and some people don't introduces further problems.)
The world doesn't owe you shit. I don't know how so many conservatives and libertarians bemoan the "culture of entitlement" and then say stuff like this with a straight face. Just because you work hard to get something doesn't mean you deserve it. Lots of things are hard. You can whine all you want about how you "earned" your wealth through hard work, but at the end of the day that doesn't mean shit. You could easily lose everything tomorrow if you had a particularly bad day. There is nothing in nature which says "If you work for something, you should be able to keep it." It's merely something people made up, just as much as "If you can't work, you should be able to have some stuff anyway, even if that means taking stuff other people want."
I fail to see anything wrong with that. You really shouldn't rape dead baby corpses, but once the deed is done, no additional harm is done in letting other people see it. And I really don't see the problem with giving instructions on how to carve up grandma. Cannibalism isn't exactly rocket science.
That said, PirateBay might get in trouble if they take their "no censoring" rule that seriously.
I have no legal training at all, but that's more of a trademark issue than a copyright issue. Using another company's logo is as your own is one of the most obvious examples of trademark infringement around.
No there isn't. Of the more notable third parties, The Green Party is a bunch of dirty hippies, the Libertarians want to dismantle every fucking welfare program, and the Constitution Party is a bunch of religious nuts.
I imagine that even if it's set into the public domain, prohibitions against libel (or slander, whatever) would probably be able to cover much of that.
Perfectionism is stupid; by that sense, "authoritarianism" is inevitable. Everyone's a little bit evil, and anarchy is extremely impractical. When you vote for a third party, you're not refusing to vote for the lesser of two evils, you're just voting for the least of three evils. When you don't vote, you're just voting for whichever evil everyone else likes. All one can do is minimize the corruption.
Those filthy engineer types think that numbers are merely an approximation of reality, and thus to them precision is relevant. Whereas mathematicians don't give a shit about reality and just want to work with the numbers, and a number describes itself perfectly. And when they're forced to go into the land of finite precision for whatever reason, they generally don't feel compelled to sully their numbers with that junk, so they represent precision in different ways.
The purpose of the GPL (by which I mean RMS's purpose) is not to merely allow the original code to be used however people want, (although that's part of it) but to maximize "software freedom." (Which they define this way.) According to the philosophy of the FSF, Tivoization does not harm the original code, but it harms whoever owns a Tivo, so it must be stopped.
I don't know if I agree with the FSF's philosophy per se, but that's basically their argument.
The government's decision to mandate a switch to digital broadcasting (which I think is a good idea) will effectively break millions of people's televisions. When a person is harmed, they deserve some sort of retribution. For the government to "fix the damage that they are doing" by handing out these coupons seems like a relatively fair way to compensate them.
Yeah, the government should boost scientific research, but the way you're phrasing it is sort of a false dichotomy, especially because scientific stuff is the sort of thing that needs to funded semi-reliably on a year-by-year basis instead of just tossing researchers money when they happen to get their hands on some extra dough. Paying for converter boxes is something you only have to do once, though.
Well, there's no Essjay article on Wikipedia, so logically there is no place where he could have written down his fictitious credentials.
And as for all the other articles on Wikipedia, his edits have been audited the same way the millions of anonymous edits are audited, by whatever other editors happen to wander by. If Essjay was posting patently false information on pages, someone would have noticed, and his reputation would have gone down. Fake credentials wouldn't really help him against verifiable facts since Wikipedians are not particularly fond of credentials to begin with. And anyway, everyone lies on the Internet.
Anyone who treats Wikipedia as a "higher source of information" is retarded. Wikipedia is a "pretty good" source of information and I use it regularly, but it's not something where misinformation, bullshit, and outright lies are really that surprising.
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Monopolies are somewhat of an awkward middle ground between having open standards and having no standards at all. Although open standards would be ideal, "monopoly standards" give developers a relatively fixed target to shoot at when creating software and hardware. There are of course many disadvantages to an operating system monopoly and Microsoft has definitely shown these, but it's not all bad.
It's pronounced ping though, which is fairly pleasing to my ears.
People in public have a reasonable expectation of privacy, just a weaker one. If one day someone (just a regular civilian) walked up to you and gave you a document describing everything you had done in the last couple weeks, you (or at least, I imagine most people) would probably be a bit surprised and nervous that you have a stalker all of a sudden. Generally speaking, the idea that people are tracking your every move is a bit odd. Thus, it is reasonable to expect that people aren't doing that.
Of course, IANAL so I don't know whether this is how the word reasonable is generally interpreted in the Constitution. But it seems like a decent place to draw the line.
Education has a lot of (positive) externalities, which is something the free market isn't always so great at taking into account. Not only do you benefit if you get a college degree, but you also benefit if someone else gets a college degree, since educated people are more capable of creating things that benefit everyone. Thus, more efficient results may in principle be produced if some entity steps in and subsidizes things. In principle, this could be done simply by a bunch of people on their own saying "But hey, we want engineers! We'll help foot the bill!" but governments can streamline the process somewhat.
There's no inherent reason why engineers can't make people happy. Making people happy is just another technical problem. If engineers can make devices that satisfy every other need, then there's no reason why they can't make a device which stimulates the "ultimate need" and simply make people happy. It's just that happiness is somewhat of an elusive goal.
But now that I think of it, you can take that argument in the other direction and say that most of the humanities are in their own way a kind of engineering, although a form of engineering that does not hold to the same sort of scientific rigor. When an artist or writer or whatever does their thing, he is designing an object for the intent of producing a certain response in the audience. Thus, art is basically just aesthetic engineering. And the humanities which don't fall into that analogy (philosophy and history) are arguably just sciences of one form or another.
Of course.
Indeed, and that argument applies more to streaming audio than non-streaming audio because even though the analog hole always exists, with non-streaming audio it's a pain in the ass to exploit because you're forced to record at one second per second, (whereas with digital copying you can often go much faster) but with streaming audio one second per second is a constraint forced on you by the nature of the technology itself.
Public domain maximizes gross freedom, while the GPL is more concerned with net freedom, which is the more useful concept in my opinion. Freedom only has value when it is enjoyed. Although I might get a certain amount of satisfaction that I am not directly restricting anyone's freedoms, it's kind of a moot point if people's freedoms get restricted by other people.
When you release a software under the public domain, you are minimizing the restrictions that you place on the software, but there are other people in the world and they could introduce their own restrictions. When software is released in a proprietary format or on hardware which does not allow modification, restrictions are introduced.
Of course, public domain and BSD licensed software do increase net freedom somewhat, in that the original work remains basically free no matter what other people do. But to really maximize freedom, you need to not only not directly restrict people, but you need to make some effort to prevent restrictions in general from existing. This can be hard and it requires tradeoffs, since when restrictions are done by human beings, you have to restrict the restricters, and thus you have to calculate which restriction is worse. It is not a trivial matter to determine which restriction is worse, but I do think it is reasonable to suppose that the GPL-ish position of "Copies of this work may be made if and only if the distributor does not put any additional restrictions on the use, modification, or sharing of this work beyond those made in this sentence" is too unreasonable.
GNU was a project to create an operating system. "Linux" is an operating system which uses most of the GNU project along with the Linux kernel and an assload of other programs that have little to do with either GNU or Linus Torvalds. Those other programs, however, were not a project to create an operating system, so it's different. Thus, in an abstract sense, "Linux" when taken as a whole is a fork of the GNU project, and it is relatively logical to call "Linux" GNU/Linux to mark this.
Of course, it's also a really whiney thing to nitpick about, since there's really no obligation for forks to be named in such a way as to refer to its parent project and Stallman only cares about this because he feels people aren't giving his noble crusade the credit it deserves, but it's totally logical.
I agree with you in principle, but I disagree with your particular formulation. Math is universal, but our choice of axioms is not. It is not implausible that an alien civilization would not find Euclidean Geometry to be a particularly interesting system, and thus that they would not investigate it sufficiently to discover the Pythagorean theorem. Perhaps due to some peculiar quirk of their homeland they would focus on spherical geometry. (Of course, I also think it's possible that the alien civilization is simply too stupid to do math, but I don't think that's what you meant.)
In my opinion, math is logic, which is universal and objective, plus whatever artificial systems we decide to construct, which is not particularly universal. There are certain mathematical systems (such as Euclidean geometry) which are extremely useful in describing reality, perhaps even objectively useful, but not universal aspects of reality as such.
Heuristics are just as mathematical as anything else. Heuristics cannot be mathematically proven to be the "right thing" (because by definition, they aren't) but math can still come in to quantify to what degree they are the "okay thing."
Yes, but he tried to kill the Macintosh because he was working on the Apple Lisa which was pretty much the same idea but way more expensive, and then he switched to working on the Mac later on. As the uncle threads say, Jobs is still kind of full of shit, but not in that way.
You can, but code is structurally very different from English language text. With text, you just have long streams of text arranged as paragraphs which can be squished pretty thoroughly and maintain their overall form. Code, on the other hand, uses whitespace extremely meaningfully with carriage returns and indentations arranged according to a lot of different rules. It probably wouldn't be so hard for the IDE to have a system which cooperates "okay" with the current system already use, but it would still be a change, and thus would be unpleasant for many. (And introducing a new text formatting system that some people use and some people don't introduces further problems.)
The world doesn't owe you shit. I don't know how so many conservatives and libertarians bemoan the "culture of entitlement" and then say stuff like this with a straight face. Just because you work hard to get something doesn't mean you deserve it. Lots of things are hard. You can whine all you want about how you "earned" your wealth through hard work, but at the end of the day that doesn't mean shit. You could easily lose everything tomorrow if you had a particularly bad day. There is nothing in nature which says "If you work for something, you should be able to keep it." It's merely something people made up, just as much as "If you can't work, you should be able to have some stuff anyway, even if that means taking stuff other people want."
I fail to see anything wrong with that. You really shouldn't rape dead baby corpses, but once the deed is done, no additional harm is done in letting other people see it. And I really don't see the problem with giving instructions on how to carve up grandma. Cannibalism isn't exactly rocket science.
That said, PirateBay might get in trouble if they take their "no censoring" rule that seriously.
I have no legal training at all, but that's more of a trademark issue than a copyright issue. Using another company's logo is as your own is one of the most obvious examples of trademark infringement around.
No there isn't. Of the more notable third parties, The Green Party is a bunch of dirty hippies, the Libertarians want to dismantle every fucking welfare program, and the Constitution Party is a bunch of religious nuts.
I imagine that even if it's set into the public domain, prohibitions against libel (or slander, whatever) would probably be able to cover much of that.
Perfectionism is stupid; by that sense, "authoritarianism" is inevitable. Everyone's a little bit evil, and anarchy is extremely impractical. When you vote for a third party, you're not refusing to vote for the lesser of two evils, you're just voting for the least of three evils. When you don't vote, you're just voting for whichever evil everyone else likes. All one can do is minimize the corruption.
Those filthy engineer types think that numbers are merely an approximation of reality, and thus to them precision is relevant. Whereas mathematicians don't give a shit about reality and just want to work with the numbers, and a number describes itself perfectly. And when they're forced to go into the land of finite precision for whatever reason, they generally don't feel compelled to sully their numbers with that junk, so they represent precision in different ways.
The purpose of the GPL (by which I mean RMS's purpose) is not to merely allow the original code to be used however people want, (although that's part of it) but to maximize "software freedom." (Which they define this way.) According to the philosophy of the FSF, Tivoization does not harm the original code, but it harms whoever owns a Tivo, so it must be stopped.
I don't know if I agree with the FSF's philosophy per se, but that's basically their argument.
The government's decision to mandate a switch to digital broadcasting (which I think is a good idea) will effectively break millions of people's televisions. When a person is harmed, they deserve some sort of retribution. For the government to "fix the damage that they are doing" by handing out these coupons seems like a relatively fair way to compensate them.
Yeah, the government should boost scientific research, but the way you're phrasing it is sort of a false dichotomy, especially because scientific stuff is the sort of thing that needs to funded semi-reliably on a year-by-year basis instead of just tossing researchers money when they happen to get their hands on some extra dough. Paying for converter boxes is something you only have to do once, though.
Your liberty to not be shot does not trump THEIR liberty to not be shot. Liberty is pointless if some people have more liberty than others.
Well, there's no Essjay article on Wikipedia, so logically there is no place where he could have written down his fictitious credentials.
And as for all the other articles on Wikipedia, his edits have been audited the same way the millions of anonymous edits are audited, by whatever other editors happen to wander by. If Essjay was posting patently false information on pages, someone would have noticed, and his reputation would have gone down. Fake credentials wouldn't really help him against verifiable facts since Wikipedians are not particularly fond of credentials to begin with. And anyway, everyone lies on the Internet.
Anyone who treats Wikipedia as a "higher source of information" is retarded. Wikipedia is a "pretty good" source of information and I use it regularly, but it's not something where misinformation, bullshit, and outright lies are really that surprising.