Deontological reason: Because individuals own corporations, and individuals have constitutional rights.
Utilitarian reason: Society and government work better when, e.g., news media has free speech, groups of people can form contracts and seek redress, etc.
Your misunderstanding is that you see a company as some sort of Frankenstein or Golem, when in fact it is nothing more than constellations of contracts between humans with legal rights.
He didn't pay for "some entertainment," he paid for A GAME. So I have two questions for you:
-How would you feel if you bought a book and read it, but somehow could not sell it or loan it to a friend?
-What if this sort of content control had always been in place for copyrighted works? How much would the world suck if the Mona Lisa disappeared when its first owner died, or if people weren't allowed to donate old books and DVDs to libraries?
Content control is a terrible idea. If it were perfect -- i.e. if it could accomplish its goals while not restricting Fair Use and all other legal enjoyment of copyrighted works at all -- then maybe. But we're not there, and while contemporary content control does protect the publisher's rights, it does so at the expense of the people's.
Drivers' licenses are ubiquitous and necessary. They are marked with identifying data and a unique number. They have your picture. Authorities are allowed to ask for it, and in general citizens are expected to cough it up. They must be checked by private parties in certain circumstances (to prove your age, for example), and in other circumstance private parties insist on checking your drivers' license as a prerequisite to doing business with you (Blockbuster, e.g.)
Granted, each state keeps track of its own citizens' licenses, so I suppose that's one difference between the status quo and the ballyhooed National ID Card. But really, what else are we afraid of? Why don't we just bite the bullet and make citizens' identification cards necessary? The states can take care of issuing them and tracking the relevant data, and we can have laws about when authorities are not allowed to ask for identification, or when a citizen is not obligated to identify himself, just like we do with licenses. But not arbitrarily tying our ID cards to driving would be much more efficient. Why should it be harder for a blind man to identify himself at will simply because he cannot drive?
So to everyone terrified of national ID cards, wake up: that reality arrived long ago.
Yes, reverse-engineering is great. The difference is not that Apple is my sweetheart or that Real is pure corporate evil (which are both true) but that I hate DRM so damn much.
Open-source software is something else we can probably agree is a good thing, but of course we wouldn't support an application designed to operate a concentration camp. Granted that's extreme (go ahead and call godwin on me), but the point is that a good thing can be used for a VERY BAD end, and the badness of the end can outweigh the goodness of the path used.
I don't know what field you're in, but in some areas of math (for example) the typesetting is absolutely essential to getting any value out of the work.
I'm not disagreeing with you, though -- I totally agree in the vast majority of cases.
That is sheer brilliance. I wish to death I had mod points for you, but all I can offer is my absolute astonishment at your (or whoever thought of that's) insight.
Have you ever actually, like, used Wikipedia? Maybe there are a few distorted articles, but that's true of Brittannica too. Wikipedia is by and large an invaluable resource.
Human volunteers do NOT have a comparatively high chance to screw up. Both parties send observers. You couldn't get anything by them if you TRIED. Multiple people watching each ballot and the mounting count do not screw up. Saying "anything else is just as bad" when it comes to flaky e-voting is both blind and stupid. Losing significant numbers of votes is NOT ACCEPTABLE AND WE CAN DO BETTER. Period.
But he wants to ABOLISH INCOME TAX! We can't RUN this country without income tax! How the fuck are we going to have a military or police coverage? If you're evaluating candidates with respect to how evil they are, Badnarik is as bad as they come. Throwing the nation into utter chaos seems to be his platform.
It makes perfect sense. Allowing reimportation will disallow price discrimination between the US and Canada. So the price for Americans will fall as the price for Canadians rises until they meet. Sucks for Canada; great for the U.S.
Re:Nader is Nader, not a Democrat...
on
The Nader Factor
·
· Score: 2
Ha. Played by the rules? The signatures to get him on the ballot in PA were egregiously fraudulent, many written by the same hand (so say handwriting experts) and many others reading "John Kerry," "George Bush," "Mickey Mouse," and "Donald Duck." This man is a joke, as is anyone who votes for him.
I was not and am not trying to "twist" your point or deny the facts behind your post. When I asked whether you were "upset with" Walmart, perhaps I should have asked whether you "had a quarrel with" them instead. You think they did SOMETHING that hurts the working class, and that's what I was trying to isolate. I'm not trying to "prove[] you wrong," I'm trying to assess, for my own peace of mind, whether or not you are wrong. This really isn't meant to be a flame war; I'm just genuinely curious.
My understanding of basic economics (I, too, am an alum of 100-level economics courses) is that a competitive market will force profits exactly as low as the market will bear. In theory, that means no profit at all; in practice, it's a little bit higher.
Even if we stipulate that Walmart is a monopoly (which I don't really accept -- I never shop there, and I could name several chains that are in direct competition), all it has done is force profit margins down. How has it done that? By playing one manufacturer off another.
With goods in competitive markets -- lawn-chairs, for example -- any store could do the same. Find the lawn-chairs that are the cheapest and stock them. If the cheapest is too expensive, make do without lawn-chairs in your store. Each lawn-chair manufacturer will want to be the one that you stock, so each will engage in price wars with the others. Adding a huge chain like Walmart to the mix does add something of a jump to the otherwise continuous demand curve, but in general the same principles apply. The lower profit limit that the market is willing to bear shouldn't change regardless of Walmart's presence.
So it seems to me that whatever moral or pragmatic effect you see pursuant to Walmart's heftiness would come from a competitive market as well.
You're upset at Walmart because they force prices down? Isn't that the purpose of a competitive market? It sounds like your objection is with capitalism in general.
The original PD would make for a terrible competition because the best strategy is already well known: Defect. You have to iterate to make things at all interesting.
They earn less money because of 1. supply and demand, and 2. the minimum wage. If Walmart suddenly started earning fat profit margins, do you REALLY THINK those margins would line their paid-by-the-hour employee's pockets? Fuck no.
All it takes to determine Walmart's offered salary for sales associates is:
1. The number of people who want the job; 2. The number of people Walmart wants to employ; 3. The minimum wage they are legally allowed to offer.
Hell, it's not like Walmart can't AFFORD to pay them more as it stands; they just (rationally) choose not to. 'Twould be the same if Walmart's prices doubled.
People who steal from Bungie are not true Halo fans.
It's a GAME, dude, not a religious icon. People who steal from Bungie may not be true BUNGIE fans, but they can certainly be true Halo fans. What is more fanlike than wanting to see the game as early as possible?
How would you like to see something you've worked on for 50+ hours a week for months on end being freely copied around?
I'd love it. It wouldn't affect the pay I received (which was salaried or by the hour -- never commissioned) and it would show me that a lot of people like my game. In fact, the only people who should be upset are your corporate overlords -- in this case, Microsoft. Let us all cry for poor Microsoft.
If you want the music industry's garbage, give them their asking price. If you suspect illegal cartel behavior, file a lawsuit. Stealing is not an option.
No, you're wrong. Obviously copyright infringement (not stealing, you propagandist) is an option: millions of people do it regularly.
I agree that it isn't civil disobedience in the Ghandi sense, but participating in widespread breaking of the law historically can change the law. Prohibition is the poster-child example of this phenomenon. If we put enough strain on copyright law, something will have to give. I suspect that eventually one of two things will happen:
1. The RIAA will offer general amnesty to everyone who infringes on their copyrights for personal non-profit purposes, or
2. Congress will vastly scale back copyright terms and liability.
Because as platitudinous as the metaphor has become, the genie is out of the bottle. Too many people expect to get music for free, and there's no legal or technological way to stop them. Scaring people with litigation will only chase the trading underground -- it will not appreciably affect its scope. The RIAA is terminally ill, and all it can do is play a desperate waiting game. Like it or not, that's reality.
But Badnarik doesn't even have a 5% chance of winning. He doesn't even have a 0.01% chance. Maybe he has 5% of the vote, or, more likely, 0.01% of the vote, but those percentages do not equate with chance to win.
Slashdot Mirror
Deontological reason:
Because individuals own corporations, and individuals have constitutional rights.
Utilitarian reason:
Society and government work better when, e.g., news media has free speech, groups of people can form contracts and seek redress, etc.
Your misunderstanding is that you see a company as some sort of Frankenstein or Golem, when in fact it is nothing more than constellations of contracts between humans with legal rights.
He didn't pay for "some entertainment," he paid for A GAME. So I have two questions for you:
-How would you feel if you bought a book and read it, but somehow could not sell it or loan it to a friend?
-What if this sort of content control had always been in place for copyrighted works? How much would the world suck if the Mona Lisa disappeared when its first owner died, or if people weren't allowed to donate old books and DVDs to libraries?
Content control is a terrible idea. If it were perfect -- i.e. if it could accomplish its goals while not restricting Fair Use and all other legal enjoyment of copyrighted works at all -- then maybe. But we're not there, and while contemporary content control does protect the publisher's rights, it does so at the expense of the people's.
Drivers' licenses are ubiquitous and necessary. They are marked with identifying data and a unique number. They have your picture. Authorities are allowed to ask for it, and in general citizens are expected to cough it up. They must be checked by private parties in certain circumstances (to prove your age, for example), and in other circumstance private parties insist on checking your drivers' license as a prerequisite to doing business with you (Blockbuster, e.g.)
Granted, each state keeps track of its own citizens' licenses, so I suppose that's one difference between the status quo and the ballyhooed National ID Card. But really, what else are we afraid of? Why don't we just bite the bullet and make citizens' identification cards necessary? The states can take care of issuing them and tracking the relevant data, and we can have laws about when authorities are not allowed to ask for identification, or when a citizen is not obligated to identify himself, just like we do with licenses. But not arbitrarily tying our ID cards to driving would be much more efficient. Why should it be harder for a blind man to identify himself at will simply because he cannot drive?
So to everyone terrified of national ID cards, wake up: that reality arrived long ago.
It would be better if everyone who was willing to participate in free (as in "freedom") signed onto the GPL.
License compatibility.
Yes, reverse-engineering is great. The difference is not that Apple is my sweetheart or that Real is pure corporate evil (which are both true) but that I hate DRM so damn much.
Open-source software is something else we can probably agree is a good thing, but of course we wouldn't support an application designed to operate a concentration camp. Granted that's extreme (go ahead and call godwin on me), but the point is that a good thing can be used for a VERY BAD end, and the badness of the end can outweigh the goodness of the path used.
I don't know what field you're in, but in some areas of math (for example) the typesetting is absolutely essential to getting any value out of the work. I'm not disagreeing with you, though -- I totally agree in the vast majority of cases.
That is sheer brilliance. I wish to death I had mod points for you, but all I can offer is my absolute astonishment at your (or whoever thought of that's) insight.
Have you ever actually, like, used Wikipedia? Maybe there are a few distorted articles, but that's true of Brittannica too. Wikipedia is by and large an invaluable resource.
Human volunteers do NOT have a comparatively high chance to screw up. Both parties send observers. You couldn't get anything by them if you TRIED. Multiple people watching each ballot and the mounting count do not screw up. Saying "anything else is just as bad" when it comes to flaky e-voting is both blind and stupid. Losing significant numbers of votes is NOT ACCEPTABLE AND WE CAN DO BETTER. Period.
It's fucking brilliant. It's a perfect satire that lays bare the logical flaw in the original question.
But he wants to ABOLISH INCOME TAX! We can't RUN this country without income tax! How the fuck are we going to have a military or police coverage? If you're evaluating candidates with respect to how evil they are, Badnarik is as bad as they come. Throwing the nation into utter chaos seems to be his platform.
It makes perfect sense. Allowing reimportation will disallow price discrimination between the US and Canada. So the price for Americans will fall as the price for Canadians rises until they meet. Sucks for Canada; great for the U.S.
Ha. Played by the rules? The signatures to get him on the ballot in PA were egregiously fraudulent, many written by the same hand (so say handwriting experts) and many others reading "John Kerry," "George Bush," "Mickey Mouse," and "Donald Duck." This man is a joke, as is anyone who votes for him.
I was not and am not trying to "twist" your point or deny the facts behind your post. When I asked whether you were "upset with" Walmart, perhaps I should have asked whether you "had a quarrel with" them instead. You think they did SOMETHING that hurts the working class, and that's what I was trying to isolate. I'm not trying to "prove[] you wrong," I'm trying to assess, for my own peace of mind, whether or not you are wrong. This really isn't meant to be a flame war; I'm just genuinely curious.
My understanding of basic economics (I, too, am an alum of 100-level economics courses) is that a competitive market will force profits exactly as low as the market will bear. In theory, that means no profit at all; in practice, it's a little bit higher.
Even if we stipulate that Walmart is a monopoly (which I don't really accept -- I never shop there, and I could name several chains that are in direct competition), all it has done is force profit margins down. How has it done that? By playing one manufacturer off another.
With goods in competitive markets -- lawn-chairs, for example -- any store could do the same. Find the lawn-chairs that are the cheapest and stock them. If the cheapest is too expensive, make do without lawn-chairs in your store. Each lawn-chair manufacturer will want to be the one that you stock, so each will engage in price wars with the others. Adding a huge chain like Walmart to the mix does add something of a jump to the otherwise continuous demand curve, but in general the same principles apply. The lower profit limit that the market is willing to bear shouldn't change regardless of Walmart's presence.
So it seems to me that whatever moral or pragmatic effect you see pursuant to Walmart's heftiness would come from a competitive market as well.
Sorry; I think I did miss your point.
You're upset at Walmart because they force prices down? Isn't that the purpose of a competitive market? It sounds like your objection is with capitalism in general.
Your submissions are all trolls, and badly written to boot. Thank God we've got editors.
The original PD would make for a terrible competition because the best strategy is already well known: Defect. You have to iterate to make things at all interesting.
They earn less money because of 1. supply and demand, and 2. the minimum wage. If Walmart suddenly started earning fat profit margins, do you REALLY THINK those margins would line their paid-by-the-hour employee's pockets? Fuck no.
All it takes to determine Walmart's offered salary for sales associates is:
1. The number of people who want the job;
2. The number of people Walmart wants to employ;
3. The minimum wage they are legally allowed to offer.
Hell, it's not like Walmart can't AFFORD to pay them more as it stands; they just (rationally) choose not to. 'Twould be the same if Walmart's prices doubled.
It's a GAME, dude, not a religious icon. People who steal from Bungie may not be true BUNGIE fans, but they can certainly be true Halo fans. What is more fanlike than wanting to see the game as early as possible?
I'd love it. It wouldn't affect the pay I received (which was salaried or by the hour -- never commissioned) and it would show me that a lot of people like my game. In fact, the only people who should be upset are your corporate overlords -- in this case, Microsoft. Let us all cry for poor Microsoft.
No, you're wrong. Obviously copyright infringement (not stealing, you propagandist) is an option: millions of people do it regularly.
I agree that it isn't civil disobedience in the Ghandi sense, but participating in widespread breaking of the law historically can change the law. Prohibition is the poster-child example of this phenomenon. If we put enough strain on copyright law, something will have to give. I suspect that eventually one of two things will happen:
1. The RIAA will offer general amnesty to everyone who infringes on their copyrights for personal non-profit purposes, or
2. Congress will vastly scale back copyright terms and liability.
Because as platitudinous as the metaphor has become, the genie is out of the bottle. Too many people expect to get music for free, and there's no legal or technological way to stop them. Scaring people with litigation will only chase the trading underground -- it will not appreciably affect its scope. The RIAA is terminally ill, and all it can do is play a desperate waiting game. Like it or not, that's reality.
But Badnarik doesn't even have a 5% chance of winning. He doesn't even have a 0.01% chance. Maybe he has 5% of the vote, or, more likely, 0.01% of the vote, but those percentages do not equate with chance to win.
You can't help corporations without helping people, since corporations are owned by people. Bad argument.
Yeah right. As long as we're richer and more powerful than the rest of the world, we'll never lack for people who want to kill us.