If you really and truly support open access to books and information then buy these books.
This is the content industry finally hearing those of us who have protested to the industry attempting to lock down content and refuse to update their business models to embrace modern copying technology instead of fighting it.
If you don't recognize this as a pilot project to test the waters you are a fool. Everyone buy at book in this series, even if you don't really want the thing. Consider it a donation to the principle and vote with your dollars.
When the people and the aristocrats that are their representatives disagree (for instance because the representatives are being lobbied by billion dollar corporations and ignoring the fact that their first obligation is to the people) civil disobedience is a proven and valid form of protest.
If you disagree I suggest you speak to the likes of the founding fathers, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., the actors guild, THE MOVIE AND MUSIC INDUSTRIES, Gandhi, and many american heros who have used this form of protest to shape our nation and the world.
Civil disobedience doesn't work overnight but in time when no other means is available it represents a valid way for the people to make their displeasure known and effect a change in the law.
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That's a tough one to argue against. But the market they are discriminating against, is the same market that decided Vista sucked and had the influence to convince the rest of the world it sucked. Even a company like Microsoft can be bitch slapped by collective geek outrage and if geeks have enough influence to cost a company billions in sales... how much difficult to quantify purchasing power does their influence ultimately command?
The effectiveness of television advertising can't really be quantified either but its effects are real and companies spend hundreds of millions there.
Re:Where Open Source Works and where it doesn't
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But that problem is solved by the same reason many manufacturers have ignored Linux up till now. The size of the market. The Linux market by itself just really isn't all that significant, so let them keep their old stuff. Let them hack away at the hardware and if they come up with something so fantastic that someone will switch to linux to do it then all the better because they will need to buy your product to do the hack.
The linux market is not important for sales in the linxu market, its important because everyone outside the linux market is listening to the geeks who make up that market for their purchasing decisions. Even if they call up their local linux geek directly, the information and recommendations filter down from there.
Don't believe me? Find that to be difficult to track and so disregard it? Fine but look at what happened to Vista when the geeks decided it wasn't any good. The windows techs defended it and your average idiot on the street wouldn't know a slow or lousy system if you beat him to death with it. It was the linux/bsd/oss geeks here on slashdot who have to work with windows on the job all day who determined that system was garbage and a company with tens of billions of dollars in the bank and a monopoly to back them was stopped in their tracks.
That is serious influence and buying power my friend billions of dollars worth, even if they aren't the ones actually spending the money. Another example is AMD, AMD was nobody until they 'dispelled the gigahertz myth' and in so doing pleased the geeks. The t-birds they came out with thereafter were good chips but the athlon XP's that came after that were garbage. Intel had to pull ahead for a significant time period to geeks paying attention to them again. The rest of the world? They didn't know a damn thing either way. They asked their local mcse, who takes his advice from internet tech forums, whose chief gurus take command of internet havens based on merit, and who wins when credentials don't count and only merit in techs?
The old school geeks running oss.
Re:The Achilles heel of this...
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a) A is a bogus concept. A specification amounts to an interface and really doesn't reveal much of anything about the internal workings of the hardware. With or without a specification you can bet a competitor with a multi-million dollar interest in how your hardware works will acquire that information anyway. So while selling hardware to the technically elite crowd that makes the major hardware purchase recommendations on big ticket accounts might not be a significant incentive to hardware manufacturers there really is no downside.
b) You could make that arguement except that there are no shortage of manufacturers that DO make their specs available and the result is that Linux has dramatically superior driver support for that hardware than any other operating system. Take a system with 10 year old hardware and load up ubuntu on it, everything will work out of the box. The popularity issue is self solving, if something isn't popular its because not many people use it or need it. If it was once popular but is no longer popular then the driver will have stabilized while it was.
c) I fail to see the motivation NOT to release quality specifications. Again specifications are how to communicate with the hardware, not how the hardware actually works. The only reason to misrepresent a spec is because the company is doing something shady like maladjusting drivers to give gains on gaming benchmarks at the expense of overall performance and so forth. If they really want to do this they can just release specs that say those maladjusted configurations are the optimal settings for the hardware. Problem solved. Otherwise, why wouldn't you want your hardware to perform as well as it could on a given system.
Actually since linux remains a tech heavy system, it seems to me that even hardware that is being under driven in software, perhaps to enable the sale of the same hardware at different price points would be best run at full unlocked specs in the linux driver anyway. This will give linux users a very favorable view of the hardware. While linux users may be a small percentage of the market, they are the geeks that make recommendations listened to by purchasing managers and by the early adopters who spend the real bucks.
If say, nvidia graphics cards give screaming performance on my linux box and ati cards suck and both have drivers... guess which cards I'm going to have a high opinion of and recommend to my clients?
I think it is to a point. If this were a work of fiction or even a text on how to prune a garden I might be inclined to agree. Or maybe not since those would probably target a crowd that transitions technology a bit more slowly.
But it is very frustrating to try to use the same screen to both utilize the material and read it unless you are lucky enough to have dual display or two computer setup. Which poor college students are not likely to have.
I don't know why. I zone out pretty much all the time when driving and daydream to my destination. I obey the traffic laws perfectly and never get in collisions.
On the other hand, my auto pilot does sometimes deliver me to a destination on the route other than one I meant to go to, especially if I go that route regularly to another destination.
For instance, I've been working a weekend job to supplement my income in the slow economy at the mall. There are many things near there (like other things in the mall) but I might set out for say the bookstore and next thing I know I find myself pulling into a space in front of work.
I do the same thing with typing. I rarely misspell words (except in this post because I said that lol) but I often type words that are similar instead since I more or less type on autopilot with zero though of the actual typing. I just dictate in my head and my fingers type on their own.
Re:The Achilles heel of this...
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If the manufacturers will release the damn specs the geeks write the drivers for them and those drivers get included with every distribution by default.
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I don't think its much of a problem at all here. It's a bios, the motherboard manufacturers will make sure it is able to support all the hardware they use on their boards and that is all it needs. Everything else will connect through the motherboards interfaces and as long as the OS fully supports that hardware it can allow the guest OS to access it and hand off directives from that OS to said hardware. So it is the guest OS, be it windows, linux or whatever that needs to have drivers for printers, scanners, etc not the distro on a chip that phoenix is providing.
Exactly, the market is not large enough to bear the cost of such a book.
'If society doesn't reward people for their time, they're going to stop doing it. I realize that the Wikipedia is very cool and much better than my books in many ways...'
There you have it. The authors on Wikipedia are not being rewarded financially for their time, they aren't doing for a profit and yet they continue to do it.
I understand you put a lot of time and effort into your book. And that brings its own rewards. Your lagging sales likely have little to do with piracy in honesty but there is no doubt that more people will be reading and using your text due to that piracy. If the material is good that will lead to increased royalties because in a field as small as that, many of those people will in turn end up having a say in what text is used at their university. Down the road this will also give you a piece of immortality.
Besides, this is a ten year old work on data compression. Perhaps the answer isn't to be surprised and upset about lagging sales of an old text in a technical field but to write a newer, snazzier text and use the momentum generated by the piracy and venerability of the old text to drive the new book and your reputation as an authority in this field. Your new text can be partnered with a website and require interaction with it for actual coursework. Requiring those who use it for a class to have a unique code to register and maintain. Be a good guy and preserve the use of the universities used text program by letting accounts be reset to a clean state a couple times so the code can be reused... by one person at a time.
This would also let those who aren't attending a university and just learning for love of learning utilize the work to learn so they can bring that love and the talent that ultimately manifests from it to enrich the field to which you have contributed your time and efforts for so long.
It's true. One generous soul has to destroy the binding on a copy and feed it to a scanner that auto loads the pages. Often the library will have this equipment. If a group of friends all shell out for one textbook each this saves everyone a load of cash.
Exactly. Ten years after the fact his sales are lagging. Somehow I don't think piracy is to blame. Actually, if he wrote something new, I bet the promotion would help.
How would the author know if free copies are helping his sales? All he knows is that his sales suck and he is frustrated and wants to blame piracy.
That doesn't mean the free downloads are hurting his sales or aren't responsible for them. Seriously, its a data compression textbook. Exactly how incredible do you really think his sales are going to be? If that many people really had need of his textbook or found it that useful they would buying hardbound print copies they could have open on their desk while working with the material.
Indeed, like protecting the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
But society (which would ideally be the same as government if it were the same the people would never need tear down corrupt governments) is SUPPOSED to be able to justify where it takes away rights.
The right of all men to all those things which are innate and even part of our own bodies and nature and the right for life forms, both simple and complex to own themselves. The profit of a few researchers or the companies that employ them doesn't seem like much to weigh against that right.
These things these companies want to own may not possess much communicable sentience but transparent and glowing mice can be taught and learn. Plants recognize siblings and do not actively attempt to strangle and overtake them like they do foreign plants. Is it wrong for us to direct and utilize these things? I don't think so, thousands of plants live because we raised them. They mature we feed and nourish them. When their time comes they feed and nourish us.
But to claim ownership over pieces of the very code that is life simply because you stumbled onto a piece of it and made a map? What arrogance is this? I'm fairly sure that many would have laughed at columbus if he patented the route and landmarks he took to the new world.
And all three methods are mathematical truths discovered by the aforementioned individuals. They might seem like inventions but they are really just mathematical truths that required a great deal of time and effort to decipher.
There is more than one mathematical sequence that will take me from the number two to the number six but doesn't mean those sequences weren't all innately true before I set down to figure out how to solve the problem. Therefore my solution is a discovery and not an invention. Changing this problem into a more complex one with a solution that involves thousands of steps that are easy to lose oneself in and take thousands of hours to unravel wouldn't change that truth. The same principle applies no matter how much complexity you add to the issue.
The idea that something innately true becomes an invention if it is sufficiently complex is a by product of our limited minds.
I answered you elsewhere but the question you pose here isn't quite the same. In the post you replied to I said the purpose of government was to take away rights. I have the right to health and healthcare and you have the right to your own wealth or ability to provide it.
Morally yes, all else being equal you have an obligation to your fellow man to help him if he is not able to help himself. But that if you choose not to act morally the deciding factor is who has the ability to force his right to be recognized before the other.
Society is way to form a collective force that is stronger than either of you so that the group can force its collective values to decide the outcome. The supposed values of this society include protecting the citizens and the right to life and the pursuit of happiness so forcing you to meet your moral obligation to me takes precedent over your right to withhold a helping hand to your neighbor.
Of course if you were choosing to do the moral thing already it would be a moot point and society wouldn't be called upon. But you (and by you I mean the segment of society with the means, not actually you personally of course) are not meeting that obligation and not choosing to do so. If they were, then there wouldn't be an increase in cost right?
Those points aside, we are also the wealthiest nation in the world the cost of a complete private healthcare system that cuts no corners and provides the highest level of service we can provide to every citizen with no red tape, hoops, or excessive and checks and balances against 'abuse' is a tiny fraction of the cost to maintain a massive military budget that is larger than that of all European nations combined.
I don't even see a need for the wealthy to give up their faster service either. The fact is that the supply of wealth and demand of the wealthy would drive up costs if the private system had to compete with them. So instead healthcare facilities can be provided based on tax bracket. They all have the same equipment, perform the same procedures and provide the same level of care but the more exclusive your tax bracket the less crowded the facility will be.
'Why do you think that someone has the right to force someone else to provide them with health care? '
Why do you think that someone has the right to force someone else to provide them with protection from murderers, rapists, and thieves? Why do you think that someone has the right to force someone else to recognize their ownership of property or to pave roads for them?
I actually think that anyone has the right to force anyone else to do anything they are able to force them to do. We form a society so that the group becomes stronger than any individual and the society does the forcing. The entire purpose of society is to make the group as a whole strong enough to take away from those the group perceives as being too strong or having too much and redistributing that excess for the benefit and protection of the group.
Now people debate how far society should go in all that. But very few debate the need for a police force to protect citizens from criminals. Keeping the people safe from forces from which they can not protect themselves is pretty fundemental for a society. In this case the force is physical damage and disease, a force from which people clearly can not protect themselves.
There is no principle or moral arguement which when fully examined would support both the ideas that people should be protected by armed men, tanks, prisons and so forth and should not be protected with doctors, hospitals, and medical equipment.
Since there is no actual idealogical argument to support this idea (outside of anarchy, which is consistent with not wanting a society or protection for others). It stands to reason that all actual arguments come from those who don't want the system for reasons other than idealogy. For instance, people who simply don't want to pay their share of the costs or are afraid they will lose a percieved benefit, like the priority service they receive at the expense of others who can't afford health.
Aside from all that, the life and pursuit of happiness part life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness would require at least a good faith effort to preserve the life and the ability to pursue happiness don't you think?
Is it just me or do we seem to have too many lawyers on slashdot?
The lawyers take the same risk as if they had one client in a class action suit. Their clients are risking whatever they are entitled to for their wrongs which includes whatever millions the lawyers get. The other part of their risk is the damage itself, which the lawyers seem happy to ignore simply because it has already happened.
The lawyers in turn invest a couple letters and a few hundred dollars in filings, the rest is simply their own time which they seriously overvalue. Because they want to minimize this 'risk' they will then take a settlement that screws their client and by doing so accept payment for NOT doing their job competently in the first place.
If your client was screwed out of an $8 book and you walk away with less than $8 of actual cash for the client plus legal fees for yourself then you have done your client a disservice.
I just use an old palm or my laptop and pirate the books from usenet. Lots of books to choose from although not great if you wife reads the latest just released crime novels and such.
I, Shaitand, do henceforth pledge to care for these poor downtrodden mistresses. Send them to me I say and I will provide them with a warm bed and alleviate their need for garment.
Marijuana is an amusing substance (no pun intended). The smoke is known to contain carcinogens but studies have shown no increased risk of lung cancer among smokers (who knows why).
It is shown to impair motor function and reflexes and yet actual driving studies of smokers have shown that they show no impairment driving and some actually drive more safely (its the paranoia, you are more cautious when you smoke because you are more concerned about the risks than your non-chalant sober self would be).
Studies aside, I still don't support driving or smoking marijuana. If you want to use it then just eat it or vaporize it. That takes more marijuana but since marijuana is safer than most other herbal supplements on the shelf it should be legalized and if legal the price would drop out of the market. Marijuana should be cheaper by weight than sugar.
It's easy to grow, produces massive plants with monster yields under the sun and it enriches the soil it is grown in naturally. Grown under the sun a plant given a 3ftx3ft space will yield 2-3lbs of dried marijuana how many 3x3 spaces are there in a 43560 sqft acre. It takes about half a gram of quality marijuana to get someone high for 4hrs. You do the math.
The moral dillema here isn't really about who gets paid. It is about unnatural rights and unnatural laws. Of course people modify and improve works and distribute them freely and other download them. The people doing the improving (by removing DRM and copy protection hassles, etc) and distributing are the REAL modern day artists.
Note how they do not receive copyright on their work or pay of any kind. Yet somehow there is a thriving global network that invests time, effort, and even their own money into acquiring early releases of works or smuggling them out at risk to their own careers and prison. Then spends countless hours developing the skills and performing the work required to reverse engineer and defeat whatever copy protection mechanisms or artificial limitations have been put in place. These people take pride in their work and make every effort to make the end result as enjoyable as possible.
The pirate producers of movies will often scour sources throughout the world to find the best picture and audio they can. They spend days performing multiple pass filter crunches tryign to find that right combination that produces the best result with this particular video and audio. They will transcribe subtitles by hand into their native tongues. Then when they release their final work they stamp it with their seal be it axxo, or fxm, or one of the many others. It is handed again to a network of people who passes this work of art, again at no financial benefit (and often with incurred expense) to themselves out through a network to the world. They utilize the usenets, ftp's, webservers, bittorrent, peer to peer networks.
That is how real art works. Real artists aren't driven by profits, they are driven by the need to create art. The need to put something into the world and perhaps to have something remain after they are gone. They create because they love the art. That isn't just a romantic notion, the very network of pirate artists proves that there are no shortage of talented people in the world who will create just for the sake of creating.
Why should we make criminals out of a third of our population just to support a system of commercialized production that has degraded the quality of art?
Really that is a shame, you should call the police to help you recover this stolen work. It would be a shame for you to have deprived of it... wait, you mean you still have the work? Well if society (over 60 million downloaders in the US is enough to call "they" society or the people certainly) didn't steal the work then what did they steal?
Slashdot Mirror
If you really and truly support open access to books and information then buy these books.
This is the content industry finally hearing those of us who have protested to the industry attempting to lock down content and refuse to update their business models to embrace modern copying technology instead of fighting it.
If you don't recognize this as a pilot project to test the waters you are a fool. Everyone buy at book in this series, even if you don't really want the thing. Consider it a donation to the principle and vote with your dollars.
When the people and the aristocrats that are their representatives disagree (for instance because the representatives are being lobbied by billion dollar corporations and ignoring the fact that their first obligation is to the people) civil disobedience is a proven and valid form of protest.
If you disagree I suggest you speak to the likes of the founding fathers, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., the actors guild, THE MOVIE AND MUSIC INDUSTRIES, Gandhi, and many american heros who have used this form of protest to shape our nation and the world.
Civil disobedience doesn't work overnight but in time when no other means is available it represents a valid way for the people to make their displeasure known and effect a change in the law.
That's a tough one to argue against. But the market they are discriminating against, is the same market that decided Vista sucked and had the influence to convince the rest of the world it sucked. Even a company like Microsoft can be bitch slapped by collective geek outrage and if geeks have enough influence to cost a company billions in sales... how much difficult to quantify purchasing power does their influence ultimately command?
The effectiveness of television advertising can't really be quantified either but its effects are real and companies spend hundreds of millions there.
But that problem is solved by the same reason many manufacturers have ignored Linux up till now. The size of the market. The Linux market by itself just really isn't all that significant, so let them keep their old stuff. Let them hack away at the hardware and if they come up with something so fantastic that someone will switch to linux to do it then all the better because they will need to buy your product to do the hack.
The linux market is not important for sales in the linxu market, its important because everyone outside the linux market is listening to the geeks who make up that market for their purchasing decisions. Even if they call up their local linux geek directly, the information and recommendations filter down from there.
Don't believe me? Find that to be difficult to track and so disregard it? Fine but look at what happened to Vista when the geeks decided it wasn't any good. The windows techs defended it and your average idiot on the street wouldn't know a slow or lousy system if you beat him to death with it. It was the linux/bsd/oss geeks here on slashdot who have to work with windows on the job all day who determined that system was garbage and a company with tens of billions of dollars in the bank and a monopoly to back them was stopped in their tracks.
That is serious influence and buying power my friend billions of dollars worth, even if they aren't the ones actually spending the money. Another example is AMD, AMD was nobody until they 'dispelled the gigahertz myth' and in so doing pleased the geeks. The t-birds they came out with thereafter were good chips but the athlon XP's that came after that were garbage. Intel had to pull ahead for a significant time period to geeks paying attention to them again. The rest of the world? They didn't know a damn thing either way. They asked their local mcse, who takes his advice from internet tech forums, whose chief gurus take command of internet havens based on merit, and who wins when credentials don't count and only merit in techs?
The old school geeks running oss.
a) A is a bogus concept. A specification amounts to an interface and really doesn't reveal much of anything about the internal workings of the hardware. With or without a specification you can bet a competitor with a multi-million dollar interest in how your hardware works will acquire that information anyway. So while selling hardware to the technically elite crowd that makes the major hardware purchase recommendations on big ticket accounts might not be a significant incentive to hardware manufacturers there really is no downside.
b) You could make that arguement except that there are no shortage of manufacturers that DO make their specs available and the result is that Linux has dramatically superior driver support for that hardware than any other operating system. Take a system with 10 year old hardware and load up ubuntu on it, everything will work out of the box. The popularity issue is self solving, if something isn't popular its because not many people use it or need it. If it was once popular but is no longer popular then the driver will have stabilized while it was.
c) I fail to see the motivation NOT to release quality specifications. Again specifications are how to communicate with the hardware, not how the hardware actually works. The only reason to misrepresent a spec is because the company is doing something shady like maladjusting drivers to give gains on gaming benchmarks at the expense of overall performance and so forth. If they really want to do this they can just release specs that say those maladjusted configurations are the optimal settings for the hardware. Problem solved. Otherwise, why wouldn't you want your hardware to perform as well as it could on a given system.
Actually since linux remains a tech heavy system, it seems to me that even hardware that is being under driven in software, perhaps to enable the sale of the same hardware at different price points would be best run at full unlocked specs in the linux driver anyway. This will give linux users a very favorable view of the hardware. While linux users may be a small percentage of the market, they are the geeks that make recommendations listened to by purchasing managers and by the early adopters who spend the real bucks.
If say, nvidia graphics cards give screaming performance on my linux box and ati cards suck and both have drivers... guess which cards I'm going to have a high opinion of and recommend to my clients?
I think it is to a point. If this were a work of fiction or even a text on how to prune a garden I might be inclined to agree. Or maybe not since those would probably target a crowd that transitions technology a bit more slowly.
But it is very frustrating to try to use the same screen to both utilize the material and read it unless you are lucky enough to have dual display or two computer setup. Which poor college students are not likely to have.
I don't know why. I zone out pretty much all the time when driving and daydream to my destination. I obey the traffic laws perfectly and never get in collisions.
On the other hand, my auto pilot does sometimes deliver me to a destination on the route other than one I meant to go to, especially if I go that route regularly to another destination.
For instance, I've been working a weekend job to supplement my income in the slow economy at the mall. There are many things near there (like other things in the mall) but I might set out for say the bookstore and next thing I know I find myself pulling into a space in front of work.
I do the same thing with typing. I rarely misspell words (except in this post because I said that lol) but I often type words that are similar instead since I more or less type on autopilot with zero though of the actual typing. I just dictate in my head and my fingers type on their own.
If the manufacturers will release the damn specs the geeks write the drivers for them and those drivers get included with every distribution by default.
I don't think its much of a problem at all here. It's a bios, the motherboard manufacturers will make sure it is able to support all the hardware they use on their boards and that is all it needs. Everything else will connect through the motherboards interfaces and as long as the OS fully supports that hardware it can allow the guest OS to access it and hand off directives from that OS to said hardware. So it is the guest OS, be it windows, linux or whatever that needs to have drivers for printers, scanners, etc not the distro on a chip that phoenix is providing.
'The size of the markets is vastly different.'
Exactly, the market is not large enough to bear the cost of such a book.
'If society doesn't reward people for their time, they're going to stop doing it. I realize that the Wikipedia is very cool and much better than my books in many ways...'
There you have it. The authors on Wikipedia are not being rewarded financially for their time, they aren't doing for a profit and yet they continue to do it.
I understand you put a lot of time and effort into your book. And that brings its own rewards. Your lagging sales likely have little to do with piracy in honesty but there is no doubt that more people will be reading and using your text due to that piracy. If the material is good that will lead to increased royalties because in a field as small as that, many of those people will in turn end up having a say in what text is used at their university. Down the road this will also give you a piece of immortality.
Besides, this is a ten year old work on data compression. Perhaps the answer isn't to be surprised and upset about lagging sales of an old text in a technical field but to write a newer, snazzier text and use the momentum generated by the piracy and venerability of the old text to drive the new book and your reputation as an authority in this field. Your new text can be partnered with a website and require interaction with it for actual coursework. Requiring those who use it for a class to have a unique code to register and maintain. Be a good guy and preserve the use of the universities used text program by letting accounts be reset to a clean state a couple times so the code can be reused... by one person at a time.
This would also let those who aren't attending a university and just learning for love of learning utilize the work to learn so they can bring that love and the talent that ultimately manifests from it to enrich the field to which you have contributed your time and efforts for so long.
It's true. One generous soul has to destroy the binding on a copy and feed it to a scanner that auto loads the pages. Often the library will have this equipment. If a group of friends all shell out for one textbook each this saves everyone a load of cash.
Exactly. Ten years after the fact his sales are lagging. Somehow I don't think piracy is to blame. Actually, if he wrote something new, I bet the promotion would help.
How would the author know if free copies are helping his sales? All he knows is that his sales suck and he is frustrated and wants to blame piracy.
That doesn't mean the free downloads are hurting his sales or aren't responsible for them. Seriously, its a data compression textbook. Exactly how incredible do you really think his sales are going to be? If that many people really had need of his textbook or found it that useful they would buying hardbound print copies they could have open on their desk while working with the material.
Indeed, like protecting the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
But society (which would ideally be the same as government if it were the same the people would never need tear down corrupt governments) is SUPPOSED to be able to justify where it takes away rights.
The right of all men to all those things which are innate and even part of our own bodies and nature and the right for life forms, both simple and complex to own themselves. The profit of a few researchers or the companies that employ them doesn't seem like much to weigh against that right.
These things these companies want to own may not possess much communicable sentience but transparent and glowing mice can be taught and learn. Plants recognize siblings and do not actively attempt to strangle and overtake them like they do foreign plants. Is it wrong for us to direct and utilize these things? I don't think so, thousands of plants live because we raised them. They mature we feed and nourish them. When their time comes they feed and nourish us.
But to claim ownership over pieces of the very code that is life simply because you stumbled onto a piece of it and made a map? What arrogance is this? I'm fairly sure that many would have laughed at columbus if he patented the route and landmarks he took to the new world.
And all three methods are mathematical truths discovered by the aforementioned individuals. They might seem like inventions but they are really just mathematical truths that required a great deal of time and effort to decipher.
There is more than one mathematical sequence that will take me from the number two to the number six but doesn't mean those sequences weren't all innately true before I set down to figure out how to solve the problem. Therefore my solution is a discovery and not an invention. Changing this problem into a more complex one with a solution that involves thousands of steps that are easy to lose oneself in and take thousands of hours to unravel wouldn't change that truth. The same principle applies no matter how much complexity you add to the issue.
The idea that something innately true becomes an invention if it is sufficiently complex is a by product of our limited minds.
I answered you elsewhere but the question you pose here isn't quite the same. In the post you replied to I said the purpose of government was to take away rights. I have the right to health and healthcare and you have the right to your own wealth or ability to provide it.
Morally yes, all else being equal you have an obligation to your fellow man to help him if he is not able to help himself. But that if you choose not to act morally the deciding factor is who has the ability to force his right to be recognized before the other.
Society is way to form a collective force that is stronger than either of you so that the group can force its collective values to decide the outcome. The supposed values of this society include protecting the citizens and the right to life and the pursuit of happiness so forcing you to meet your moral obligation to me takes precedent over your right to withhold a helping hand to your neighbor.
Of course if you were choosing to do the moral thing already it would be a moot point and society wouldn't be called upon. But you (and by you I mean the segment of society with the means, not actually you personally of course) are not meeting that obligation and not choosing to do so. If they were, then there wouldn't be an increase in cost right?
Those points aside, we are also the wealthiest nation in the world the cost of a complete private healthcare system that cuts no corners and provides the highest level of service we can provide to every citizen with no red tape, hoops, or excessive and checks and balances against 'abuse' is a tiny fraction of the cost to maintain a massive military budget that is larger than that of all European nations combined.
I don't even see a need for the wealthy to give up their faster service either. The fact is that the supply of wealth and demand of the wealthy would drive up costs if the private system had to compete with them. So instead healthcare facilities can be provided based on tax bracket. They all have the same equipment, perform the same procedures and provide the same level of care but the more exclusive your tax bracket the less crowded the facility will be.
'Why do you think that someone has the right to force someone else to provide them with health care? '
Why do you think that someone has the right to force someone else to provide them with protection from murderers, rapists, and thieves? Why do you think that someone has the right to force someone else to recognize their ownership of property or to pave roads for them?
I actually think that anyone has the right to force anyone else to do anything they are able to force them to do. We form a society so that the group becomes stronger than any individual and the society does the forcing. The entire purpose of society is to make the group as a whole strong enough to take away from those the group perceives as being too strong or having too much and redistributing that excess for the benefit and protection of the group.
Now people debate how far society should go in all that. But very few debate the need for a police force to protect citizens from criminals. Keeping the people safe from forces from which they can not protect themselves is pretty fundemental for a society. In this case the force is physical damage and disease, a force from which people clearly can not protect themselves.
There is no principle or moral arguement which when fully examined would support both the ideas that people should be protected by armed men, tanks, prisons and so forth and should not be protected with doctors, hospitals, and medical equipment.
Since there is no actual idealogical argument to support this idea (outside of anarchy, which is consistent with not wanting a society or protection for others). It stands to reason that all actual arguments come from those who don't want the system for reasons other than idealogy. For instance, people who simply don't want to pay their share of the costs or are afraid they will lose a percieved benefit, like the priority service they receive at the expense of others who can't afford health.
Aside from all that, the life and pursuit of happiness part life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness would require at least a good faith effort to preserve the life and the ability to pursue happiness don't you think?
Where does it say that the books rights holder can retroactively make it unavailable?
Is it just me or do we seem to have too many lawyers on slashdot?
The lawyers take the same risk as if they had one client in a class action suit. Their clients are risking whatever they are entitled to for their wrongs which includes whatever millions the lawyers get. The other part of their risk is the damage itself, which the lawyers seem happy to ignore simply because it has already happened.
The lawyers in turn invest a couple letters and a few hundred dollars in filings, the rest is simply their own time which they seriously overvalue. Because they want to minimize this 'risk' they will then take a settlement that screws their client and by doing so accept payment for NOT doing their job competently in the first place.
If your client was screwed out of an $8 book and you walk away with less than $8 of actual cash for the client plus legal fees for yourself then you have done your client a disservice.
I just use an old palm or my laptop and pirate the books from usenet. Lots of books to choose from although not great if you wife reads the latest just released crime novels and such.
I, Shaitand, do henceforth pledge to care for these poor downtrodden mistresses. Send them to me I say and I will provide them with a warm bed and alleviate their need for garment.
Marijuana is an amusing substance (no pun intended). The smoke is known to contain carcinogens but studies have shown no increased risk of lung cancer among smokers (who knows why).
It is shown to impair motor function and reflexes and yet actual driving studies of smokers have shown that they show no impairment driving and some actually drive more safely (its the paranoia, you are more cautious when you smoke because you are more concerned about the risks than your non-chalant sober self would be).
Studies aside, I still don't support driving or smoking marijuana. If you want to use it then just eat it or vaporize it. That takes more marijuana but since marijuana is safer than most other herbal supplements on the shelf it should be legalized and if legal the price would drop out of the market. Marijuana should be cheaper by weight than sugar.
It's easy to grow, produces massive plants with monster yields under the sun and it enriches the soil it is grown in naturally. Grown under the sun a plant given a 3ftx3ft space will yield 2-3lbs of dried marijuana how many 3x3 spaces are there in a 43560 sqft acre. It takes about half a gram of quality marijuana to get someone high for 4hrs. You do the math.
The moral dillema here isn't really about who gets paid. It is about unnatural rights and unnatural laws. Of course people modify and improve works and distribute them freely and other download them. The people doing the improving (by removing DRM and copy protection hassles, etc) and distributing are the REAL modern day artists.
Note how they do not receive copyright on their work or pay of any kind. Yet somehow there is a thriving global network that invests time, effort, and even their own money into acquiring early releases of works or smuggling them out at risk to their own careers and prison. Then spends countless hours developing the skills and performing the work required to reverse engineer and defeat whatever copy protection mechanisms or artificial limitations have been put in place. These people take pride in their work and make every effort to make the end result as enjoyable as possible.
The pirate producers of movies will often scour sources throughout the world to find the best picture and audio they can. They spend days performing multiple pass filter crunches tryign to find that right combination that produces the best result with this particular video and audio. They will transcribe subtitles by hand into their native tongues. Then when they release their final work they stamp it with their seal be it axxo, or fxm, or one of the many others. It is handed again to a network of people who passes this work of art, again at no financial benefit (and often with incurred expense) to themselves out through a network to the world. They utilize the usenets, ftp's, webservers, bittorrent, peer to peer networks.
That is how real art works. Real artists aren't driven by profits, they are driven by the need to create art. The need to put something into the world and perhaps to have something remain after they are gone. They create because they love the art. That isn't just a romantic notion, the very network of pirate artists proves that there are no shortage of talented people in the world who will create just for the sake of creating.
Why should we make criminals out of a third of our population just to support a system of commercialized production that has degraded the quality of art?
I fail to see the flamebait here. Wait is this it, "nor does belittling a cantankerous post you a wiseman make."
Is the flamebait mod because the yoda speak might incite the trekies? Damn SW vs Trek wars!
Really that is a shame, you should call the police to help you recover this stolen work. It would be a shame for you to have deprived of it... wait, you mean you still have the work? Well if society (over 60 million downloaders in the US is enough to call "they" society or the people certainly) didn't steal the work then what did they steal?