The word editor is being used in the sense of "the supervisor or conductor of a department of a newspaper, magazine, etc" not in the sense of "one who edits."
I am not saying that innovation is easy. Innovation is very often intensely difficult; there's no denying that. But just because something is hard to do does not mean that you should have absolute control over the end result. To pick some fairly arbitrary examples: Raising a child is hard, but you don't get to make them into your slaves. It can be hard to steal, but that doesn't mean you get to keep it because you put so much hard work into it. Taking all the water in the oceans out and putting it back in would be insanely difficult, but if someone managed to pull it off, I see no reason to give them control over the oceans. (Except in the sense that you might be afraid to say no to him.)
Copyright is simply a legal construct which is created to promote innovation, by making it illegal for anyone but the creator to sell their ideas, so the creator can benefit and put some food on the table. Making an exception to the law is therefore morally justified if the benefit taken from the creator is outweighed by the benefit gained by the copyright infringement. Education is, arguably, an area where the benefit is so high that ignoring copyright is something that is moral a great deal of the time. (Indeed, "educational purposes" is explicitly mentioned as something to be taken into consideration by judges.)
More generally, whenever a person infringes copyright, a benefit occurs, although not neccesarily a net benefit. It's a fun thing to do. In that sense, it may be true to say that the restrictions of copyright should be kept as limited as possible; big enough that people are willing to create creative works, but not so high that it starts to cut in unneccesarily on people's "fun." It's not selfishness (although I probably am selfish) but merely that the interests of pirates often outweighs the interests of creators.
I see no reason to believe that just because you create an idea that you should be free to put whatever restrictions on it you want. Yes, you put your blood, sweat, and tears into it, but you also put a whole lot of other ideas into it. No idea is absolutely new, so it seems unfair to give someone a absolute monopoly on an idea just because they put last pieces together.
The reason for this is simple. Professors don't look at the price. They are given free copies by the publisher. They don't have to pay for the book, so they don't care what it costs. Likewise, they dont care if a new, completely pointless edition is released, because that just means the publisher sends them a fancy new replacement book.
That's not exactly the whole story. Textbook publishers don't ship old editions of the textbook, so professors have to choose the most recent version of the book or students who buy their textbooks from the school store won't be able to get their books. And since all textbook publishers make new editions as often as they can manage it, there's not a whole lot of point switching to a new textbook just to make used versions slightly easier to find.
His point still stands, I think. High speed broadband across the United States isn't very profitable because they don't really want it. If someone doesn't want something, they won't buy it from you.
Fast, widespread and cheap broadband Internet will improve life greatly. But because there's little demand for it, the free market can't really provide for it. Of course, Internet companies will try to promote demand for it through advertising, but there's a point where it becomes more profitable to sell what you already have than it is to try to get people to buy something new.
I don't see what's wrong with it. The original phrase is stupid and confusing: the phrase "circular logic" is vastly superior. "Begs the question" derives from a peculiar archaic translation of a latin phrase. There is no reason to keep the old phrase around except mindless tradition. With words like "hacker" or "intellectual property," there are side factors. Intellectual property overstates the role of things like copyright and hack is a word with a fairly deep and meaningful background. But begs the question is just stupid.
And anyway, there is a very deep link between circular logic and the more informal sort of "begging the question." When you conduct circular logic you are, in a sense, begging for the original question to be reasked, because it was not really answered to begin with. So it's not like the evolution is completely divorced from tradition.
Actually, the FSF explicitly considers the BSD License to be a free software license.
I believe the distinction is that a free software license is merely one which does not infringe on the freedoms they list here.Actively ensuring the freedoms of the end-user is the GPL's niche to be sure, (through tricks like copyleft) but they do not consider that stuff to be neccesary in order for software to be free.
Except that if you are sick, you lose your freedoms as well. A person with cancer can't do things which a person without cancer can do, therefore he is less free.
People are people. The border between Texas and Arkansas (or Texas and Mexico, for that matter) is not comprised of any particular difference in the people themselves, but because if you are on one side of the line, you are under the jurisdiction of one government, and if you are on the other side, you are under the jursidiction of the another government. If there was no state government, there would be no state, but if you took away the people, you would still have a state, just an infinitely useless one.
States are supposed to have the majority of power with the feds only working out what the states can't, not the other way around. Now go enroll in some state history at your local community college for your own good.
I'm fully aware of that, and I don't see how what I said contradicts what you said.
State governments do control "certain aspects" of governance, and those aspects are "any power not directly given to the Federal government by the Constitution." Furthermore, the states are subgovernments, both because they govern regions within the jurisdiction of the federal government and because when a state law conflicts with a federal law, the feds win. (Due to the Supremacy Clause.)
Although perhaps my choice of words gave off the impression that I was underemphasizing the power of states, that was not my intent. My point was merely that "states" are nothing more than the state governments. The people who live in those states are simply people. The only neccesary difference between a person who lives in Massachusetts and a person who lives in Texas is that one lives under the jurisdiction of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and the other lives under the jurisdiction of the State of Texas. (Statistically it is likely that there are other differences, but these differences are not neccesary.)
Except the states are not being represented in the CURRENT SYSTEM. In the current system, states don't elect presidents, people do. Gradually over history, state governments decided that they didn't really want to elect the presidents, and instead decided to pass the buck to the populations of their states. If you want the states to be represented, then you should support a movement to eradicate popular elections entirely and have the state legislatures decide directly what electors they want to send to the college.
As it currently stands, the people are electing the president, but we are treating them as if the states are the ones doing it. The power has already been voluntarily transfered from the states to the people, but the voting system does not acknowledge this in any way.
Federalism is a good idea. It is a good idea to have certain aspects of governance be adminstered by local subgovernments. But that is all states are: local subgovernments. And as it currently stands, the local subgovernments have no direct impact on which president is elected. But the system treats elections as if they did. Thus the problem.
I don't think you really understand chaos theory. Yes, the actions of a butterfly can change whether a hurricane is going to form or not, but if you want to stop a hurricane from forming, you can't just find a butterly and start flapping its wings, because the sensitivity to initial conditions of chaos theory is really sensitive. Arbitrarily similar initial conditions can lead to radically different results. Furthermore, I'm not sure if I'd agree with your macro-scale argument either, but my knowledge of chaos theory is not such that I can adequately refute you.
I agree with you that grassroots "bottom up" activism is not a bad idea and has been shown historically to work, but chaos theory does not work that way.
Freedom of expression is freedom of expression, whether or not what you are expressing is "your" idea or someone else's. The only just reason for copyright and the like is because innovation requires a certain amount of effort which people generally feel obliged to compensated for, so for practical utilitarianish reasons people's right to expression is limited somewhat so that the creator can have a temporary monopoly on the sale of the work and make some money off of it if it's good.
The tradeoff between freedom of expression and the more utilitarian desire to have creators be compensated is not complete, so there are concepts such as fair use and the like. DRM inherently restricts fair use, because it would require an intense amount of AI for a DRM mechanism to be able to figure out on its own whether a use is (for instance) a non-profit educational purpose. (Hell, it can be difficult for a judge to be able to figure it out. Fair use is a fuzzy concept.)
The Soviet Union collapsed because of extremists, not moderates. Gorbachev said "Hey, we should try some democratization" which was an extreme position. The conservatves said "Screw you," and tried to stage a coup, which was an extreme position. That coup then failed, and there was no more Soviet Union. Concurrently with all of this, there were reformers in various Communist-controlled countries such as the Solidarity movement, which was extreme. Furthermore, Reagan's position of "Let's fuck with the Russians and see what happens" was kind of extreme for its day relative to the Detente which had been the status quo for a while.
I agree with you that the glory days of the caliphate was probably caused by moderates, though. As a general thing, moderates bring stability, whereas extremists bring change. Both has value.
Intelligent design is a bit of a lower quality than String Theory. String theory is in principle testable, it's just that the tests are somewhat out of our ability at the moment. How on Earth do you test ID? An intelligent designer can do whatever the hell he wants. In order for Intelligent Design to be testable, it needs to postulate a particular designer with particular goals and particular mechanisms for effecting the genetic code of organism. More problematically, the traditional creator of "God" would not do, because a big part of the traditional definition of God is that his will is ineffable.
I'll admit that Intelligent design is not an inherently terrible idea. It's not impossible that we might find "fingerprints" of intelligent design, and that this might lead to trying to investigate the idea more closely. Furthermore, investigating how human "intelligent design" has effected the evolution of other species is certainly a worthy subject for research, and something which people do research. But as it is currently formulated, Intelligent Design is not testable enough to be anywhere near the realm of "science." At least String Theory tries.
Weapons are by definition offensive tools, not defensive. To completely pervert an old libertarian saying, "Your right to swing your first ends at my nose." Your right to use a gun ends where the bullet reaches the flesh.
It's one thing to own a gun. It might not be a good idea, but it's not hurting anyone, so whatever. I think that shooting targets seems like a perfectly harmless and reasonable way to spend your free time. Guns should be legal. But when you use guns to try to "defend yourself and your family," you are hurting people, therefore you are infringing on their rights.
Admittingly, when people use guns in self-defense, they don't neccesarily actually shoot people. Very often, people just aim them threateningly with the hope that the criminal goes away. But in order for that threat to have any weight, you have to at least be willing to consider pulling the trigger.
Admittingly, sometimes self-defense is neccesary in order to prevent an even larger injustice. But the idea that people should acquire guns with the intent to "protect" themselves is just too much premeditated malice to be a concept which I can tolerate. If you happen to have a gun and someone comes into your house, feel free to pull it out. But to buy a device with the expressed intent of pumping hot lead into a criminal that just seems rather cruel.
(Note to readers: apparently hoplophobia is the fear of weapons, a term invented derisively by people opposed to gun control.)
I'm more of a necrophobe than a hoplophobe, personally. It's not that I have anything wrong with guns on their own, but that I'm absolutely horrified by the idea that someone (criminals included) could be hurt or killed by them.
Both police and vigilantes are horribly dangerous entities, the question is which is safer. Even though examples such as this have shown that we have grown a bit lazy in keeping policemen in their place, it is much more difficult to keep "responsible citizens" in their place.
Reporting on good news is nothing more than glorified human interest bullshit. What's the point? All the viewer can do is just vaguely acknowledge it and move on. "Yeah, it sure is good that thing happened."
Furthermore, why the hell should a person care about local news? Given the choice between a story that effects a the entire world and a story which effects one percent of one percent of the world, I think it's obvious which story is more important.
Re:The only thing this shows...
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Earth Sandwich
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Gravity doesn't work that way. If you were at the center of the earth and "somehow" it wasn't lethally hot and full of solid iron, the net gravitational force on you would be zero because the mass of the earth would be evenly distributed around you. More generally, the surface of the earth is in fact the point where the force of the Earth's gravity is the strongest.
Does it occur to you that decisions such as those in the stories you linked are made by the managers of the respective stores and are probably not nationwide policy?
REALITY forced them to sign up. People only have a limited number of options in front of them at any given time, and the fact of the matter is that due to the way the system is set up (due in part to the actions of record companies) signing up with restrictive contracts is the best option available to them at the time, so that's what they do. Currently, the tide is slowly starting to change such that self-distribution is becoming a more plausible option, but for very long, artists have been under the cruel yoke of an oppressive reality.
People acting in their own interests can very often lead to extremely suboptimal results. Prisoner's dillema, local maxima, and so on.
It's both. Google ranks websites based on (among other things) how many links are to them. It is not reasonable to suppose that websites which link to websites which the Chinese government doesn't like very often contain content that the Chinese government doesn't like, and thus the rebellious websites which stay around have a deflated number of links.
Search engines aren't the only things which China censors, after all.
Eh. Technological innovation isn't just about the entrepeneur, it's about the geek. While the entepreneur innovates because he thinks he'll be able to make money off of it, the geek innovates because he just finds it fun to tinker and learn. If you ask the average scientist why they do what they do, their motivations will generally be rather geeky.
Slashdot Mirror
The word editor is being used in the sense of "the supervisor or conductor of a department of a newspaper, magazine, etc" not in the sense of "one who edits."
I am not saying that innovation is easy. Innovation is very often intensely difficult; there's no denying that. But just because something is hard to do does not mean that you should have absolute control over the end result. To pick some fairly arbitrary examples: Raising a child is hard, but you don't get to make them into your slaves. It can be hard to steal, but that doesn't mean you get to keep it because you put so much hard work into it. Taking all the water in the oceans out and putting it back in would be insanely difficult, but if someone managed to pull it off, I see no reason to give them control over the oceans. (Except in the sense that you might be afraid to say no to him.)
Copyright is simply a legal construct which is created to promote innovation, by making it illegal for anyone but the creator to sell their ideas, so the creator can benefit and put some food on the table. Making an exception to the law is therefore morally justified if the benefit taken from the creator is outweighed by the benefit gained by the copyright infringement. Education is, arguably, an area where the benefit is so high that ignoring copyright is something that is moral a great deal of the time. (Indeed, "educational purposes" is explicitly mentioned as something to be taken into consideration by judges.)
More generally, whenever a person infringes copyright, a benefit occurs, although not neccesarily a net benefit. It's a fun thing to do. In that sense, it may be true to say that the restrictions of copyright should be kept as limited as possible; big enough that people are willing to create creative works, but not so high that it starts to cut in unneccesarily on people's "fun." It's not selfishness (although I probably am selfish) but merely that the interests of pirates often outweighs the interests of creators.
I see no reason to believe that just because you create an idea that you should be free to put whatever restrictions on it you want. Yes, you put your blood, sweat, and tears into it, but you also put a whole lot of other ideas into it. No idea is absolutely new, so it seems unfair to give someone a absolute monopoly on an idea just because they put last pieces together.
That's not exactly the whole story. Textbook publishers don't ship old editions of the textbook, so professors have to choose the most recent version of the book or students who buy their textbooks from the school store won't be able to get their books. And since all textbook publishers make new editions as often as they can manage it, there's not a whole lot of point switching to a new textbook just to make used versions slightly easier to find.
His point still stands, I think. High speed broadband across the United States isn't very profitable because they don't really want it. If someone doesn't want something, they won't buy it from you.
Fast, widespread and cheap broadband Internet will improve life greatly. But because there's little demand for it, the free market can't really provide for it. Of course, Internet companies will try to promote demand for it through advertising, but there's a point where it becomes more profitable to sell what you already have than it is to try to get people to buy something new.
I don't see what's wrong with it. The original phrase is stupid and confusing: the phrase "circular logic" is vastly superior. "Begs the question" derives from a peculiar archaic translation of a latin phrase. There is no reason to keep the old phrase around except mindless tradition. With words like "hacker" or "intellectual property," there are side factors. Intellectual property overstates the role of things like copyright and hack is a word with a fairly deep and meaningful background. But begs the question is just stupid.
And anyway, there is a very deep link between circular logic and the more informal sort of "begging the question." When you conduct circular logic you are, in a sense, begging for the original question to be reasked, because it was not really answered to begin with. So it's not like the evolution is completely divorced from tradition.
Actually, the FSF explicitly considers the BSD License to be a free software license.
I believe the distinction is that a free software license is merely one which does not infringe on the freedoms they list here. Actively ensuring the freedoms of the end-user is the GPL's niche to be sure, (through tricks like copyleft) but they do not consider that stuff to be neccesary in order for software to be free.
Except that if you are sick, you lose your freedoms as well. A person with cancer can't do things which a person without cancer can do, therefore he is less free.
The question is which freedoms to we prefer.
People are people. The border between Texas and Arkansas (or Texas and Mexico, for that matter) is not comprised of any particular difference in the people themselves, but because if you are on one side of the line, you are under the jurisdiction of one government, and if you are on the other side, you are under the jursidiction of the another government. If there was no state government, there would be no state, but if you took away the people, you would still have a state, just an infinitely useless one.
States are legal constructs, nothing more.
States are supposed to have the majority of power with the feds only working out what the states can't, not the other way around. Now go enroll in some state history at your local community college for your own good.
I'm fully aware of that, and I don't see how what I said contradicts what you said.
State governments do control "certain aspects" of governance, and those aspects are "any power not directly given to the Federal government by the Constitution." Furthermore, the states are subgovernments, both because they govern regions within the jurisdiction of the federal government and because when a state law conflicts with a federal law, the feds win. (Due to the Supremacy Clause.)
Although perhaps my choice of words gave off the impression that I was underemphasizing the power of states, that was not my intent. My point was merely that "states" are nothing more than the state governments. The people who live in those states are simply people. The only neccesary difference between a person who lives in Massachusetts and a person who lives in Texas is that one lives under the jurisdiction of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and the other lives under the jurisdiction of the State of Texas. (Statistically it is likely that there are other differences, but these differences are not neccesary.)
Except the states are not being represented in the CURRENT SYSTEM. In the current system, states don't elect presidents, people do. Gradually over history, state governments decided that they didn't really want to elect the presidents, and instead decided to pass the buck to the populations of their states. If you want the states to be represented, then you should support a movement to eradicate popular elections entirely and have the state legislatures decide directly what electors they want to send to the college.
As it currently stands, the people are electing the president, but we are treating them as if the states are the ones doing it. The power has already been voluntarily transfered from the states to the people, but the voting system does not acknowledge this in any way.
Federalism is a good idea. It is a good idea to have certain aspects of governance be adminstered by local subgovernments. But that is all states are: local subgovernments. And as it currently stands, the local subgovernments have no direct impact on which president is elected. But the system treats elections as if they did. Thus the problem.
We build a machine which allows us to live in blissful virtual realities and keeps us alive indefinitely. Duh.
I don't think you really understand chaos theory. Yes, the actions of a butterfly can change whether a hurricane is going to form or not, but if you want to stop a hurricane from forming, you can't just find a butterly and start flapping its wings, because the sensitivity to initial conditions of chaos theory is really sensitive. Arbitrarily similar initial conditions can lead to radically different results. Furthermore, I'm not sure if I'd agree with your macro-scale argument either, but my knowledge of chaos theory is not such that I can adequately refute you.
I agree with you that grassroots "bottom up" activism is not a bad idea and has been shown historically to work, but chaos theory does not work that way.
Freedom of expression is freedom of expression, whether or not what you are expressing is "your" idea or someone else's. The only just reason for copyright and the like is because innovation requires a certain amount of effort which people generally feel obliged to compensated for, so for practical utilitarianish reasons people's right to expression is limited somewhat so that the creator can have a temporary monopoly on the sale of the work and make some money off of it if it's good.
The tradeoff between freedom of expression and the more utilitarian desire to have creators be compensated is not complete, so there are concepts such as fair use and the like. DRM inherently restricts fair use, because it would require an intense amount of AI for a DRM mechanism to be able to figure out on its own whether a use is (for instance) a non-profit educational purpose. (Hell, it can be difficult for a judge to be able to figure it out. Fair use is a fuzzy concept.)
The Soviet Union collapsed because of extremists, not moderates. Gorbachev said "Hey, we should try some democratization" which was an extreme position. The conservatves said "Screw you," and tried to stage a coup, which was an extreme position. That coup then failed, and there was no more Soviet Union. Concurrently with all of this, there were reformers in various Communist-controlled countries such as the Solidarity movement, which was extreme. Furthermore, Reagan's position of "Let's fuck with the Russians and see what happens" was kind of extreme for its day relative to the Detente which had been the status quo for a while.
I agree with you that the glory days of the caliphate was probably caused by moderates, though. As a general thing, moderates bring stability, whereas extremists bring change. Both has value.
Intelligent design is a bit of a lower quality than String Theory. String theory is in principle testable, it's just that the tests are somewhat out of our ability at the moment. How on Earth do you test ID? An intelligent designer can do whatever the hell he wants. In order for Intelligent Design to be testable, it needs to postulate a particular designer with particular goals and particular mechanisms for effecting the genetic code of organism. More problematically, the traditional creator of "God" would not do, because a big part of the traditional definition of God is that his will is ineffable.
I'll admit that Intelligent design is not an inherently terrible idea. It's not impossible that we might find "fingerprints" of intelligent design, and that this might lead to trying to investigate the idea more closely. Furthermore, investigating how human "intelligent design" has effected the evolution of other species is certainly a worthy subject for research, and something which people do research. But as it is currently formulated, Intelligent Design is not testable enough to be anywhere near the realm of "science." At least String Theory tries.
Weapons are by definition offensive tools, not defensive. To completely pervert an old libertarian saying, "Your right to swing your first ends at my nose." Your right to use a gun ends where the bullet reaches the flesh.
It's one thing to own a gun. It might not be a good idea, but it's not hurting anyone, so whatever. I think that shooting targets seems like a perfectly harmless and reasonable way to spend your free time. Guns should be legal. But when you use guns to try to "defend yourself and your family," you are hurting people, therefore you are infringing on their rights.
Admittingly, when people use guns in self-defense, they don't neccesarily actually shoot people. Very often, people just aim them threateningly with the hope that the criminal goes away. But in order for that threat to have any weight, you have to at least be willing to consider pulling the trigger.
Admittingly, sometimes self-defense is neccesary in order to prevent an even larger injustice. But the idea that people should acquire guns with the intent to "protect" themselves is just too much premeditated malice to be a concept which I can tolerate. If you happen to have a gun and someone comes into your house, feel free to pull it out. But to buy a device with the expressed intent of pumping hot lead into a criminal that just seems rather cruel.
(Note to readers: apparently hoplophobia is the fear of weapons, a term invented derisively by people opposed to gun control.)
I'm more of a necrophobe than a hoplophobe, personally. It's not that I have anything wrong with guns on their own, but that I'm absolutely horrified by the idea that someone (criminals included) could be hurt or killed by them.
Both police and vigilantes are horribly dangerous entities, the question is which is safer. Even though examples such as this have shown that we have grown a bit lazy in keeping policemen in their place, it is much more difficult to keep "responsible citizens" in their place.
Reporting on good news is nothing more than glorified human interest bullshit. What's the point? All the viewer can do is just vaguely acknowledge it and move on. "Yeah, it sure is good that thing happened."
Furthermore, why the hell should a person care about local news? Given the choice between a story that effects a the entire world and a story which effects one percent of one percent of the world, I think it's obvious which story is more important.
But it wasn't on the Web.
Gravity doesn't work that way. If you were at the center of the earth and "somehow" it wasn't lethally hot and full of solid iron, the net gravitational force on you would be zero because the mass of the earth would be evenly distributed around you. More generally, the surface of the earth is in fact the point where the force of the Earth's gravity is the strongest.
Does it occur to you that decisions such as those in the stories you linked are made by the managers of the respective stores and are probably not nationwide policy?
REALITY forced them to sign up. People only have a limited number of options in front of them at any given time, and the fact of the matter is that due to the way the system is set up (due in part to the actions of record companies) signing up with restrictive contracts is the best option available to them at the time, so that's what they do. Currently, the tide is slowly starting to change such that self-distribution is becoming a more plausible option, but for very long, artists have been under the cruel yoke of an oppressive reality.
People acting in their own interests can very often lead to extremely suboptimal results. Prisoner's dillema, local maxima, and so on.
It's both. Google ranks websites based on (among other things) how many links are to them. It is not reasonable to suppose that websites which link to websites which the Chinese government doesn't like very often contain content that the Chinese government doesn't like, and thus the rebellious websites which stay around have a deflated number of links.
Search engines aren't the only things which China censors, after all.
Eh. Technological innovation isn't just about the entrepeneur, it's about the geek. While the entepreneur innovates because he thinks he'll be able to make money off of it, the geek innovates because he just finds it fun to tinker and learn. If you ask the average scientist why they do what they do, their motivations will generally be rather geeky.