How is the RIAA getting into schools? That's what I want to know. OK, I can read that they've partnered with Junior Achiement and that Junior Achievement is getting into schools, but what about the rest of the details? Is the RIAA paying Junior Achievement for this? Is Junior Achievement paying the schools to let them spend time with the captive audience? I visited the Junior Achievement site and looked at the financial report, but the answers I'm looking for didn't pop out at me.
Um, you seen MTV lately? I'm really starting to think that the youth of america DO NOT have minds of their own, they just inherit personalities from TV.
You shouldn't get your impression of what kids are like from a TV channel. Go and talk to actual kids (assuming you're an adult with minimal contact with kids, which your statement suggests).
We're probably starting from different asumptions.
Yes.
Oh, and I never much cared for what everyone else thought was the prettiest girl in the class.
Nevertheless, if you expect government to help little you, that is unrealistic. You'll get some crumbs thrown your way while the government is cutting out your liver, that's about it. I realize that a lot of people focus on the crumbs while oblivious to the liver.
What I want is a government that's both interventionist and on my side.
I don't think it's possible for the kind of laissez fair government you'd want.
I think the opposite: your desire for a government that is interventionist on your side is unrealistic. It's a pipe dream. It's like wanting the prettiest girl in the room to go out with you even though you're at the bottom of the social heap (this is purely hypothetical; I'm not saying that's where you're at).
Actually I'm what's called an anarcho-capitalist. You can look that up. Anyway, it's not a minimal-statist.
I want the government watching out for me. It's the only thing big enough to stand against corporations like the RIAA.
You already have your wish. You have interventionist government. And interventionist government gets captured by concentrated deep-pocket interests every time. You asked for it, you got it, you got screwed by it.
The only reason they couldn't stop fighting is the US public wanted a conclusive, total victory. If you accept that mental state as a given, then it's true they couldn't stop fighting.
It would have been unwise to have left that political structure intact. It would have been like leaving Hitler in power at the end of WWII.
My whole point is that the US had no military need to conquer them.
Military need is relative to ultimate goals. The ultimate goal was to truly put an end to the threat from Japan, and that required reshaping the political structure.
Any statistics to back this up because I for one don't believe it.
Fifteen thousand French died in the heat wave. Why was that? "The heat wave brought suffocating temperatures of up to 104 in the first two weeks of August in a country where air conditioning is rare." And, "The high death toll has triggered an angry debate in France over shortcomings of the health system." From Fox (this was just the most recent article grabbed via Google News)
Doesn't seem to me as though the French are so well off. Where are the air conditioners? Where was the great health care that they enjoy? Where is this fabulous standard of living? On the bright side, the families of the 15,000 dead reportedly enjoyed a nice, long vacation.
I do not have the source of my impression ready to hand, but I found something similar. I don't doubt these guys have an axe to grind, but that doesn't mean they're wrong when they say,
America's poor do not live lavishly, but few households are destitute. The average "poor" American lives in a larger house or apartment, is more likely to own a car and is more likely to have basic amenities such as an indoor toilet than the general population of Western Europe. In addition: 14
* 53 percent of poor households have air conditioning;
* 91 percent own a color TV and 29 percent own two or more color TVs;
* 64 percent own a car and 14 percent own two or more cars;
* 56 percent own a microwave oven; and
* 40 percent own their home, with 71,000 owning homes worth more than $300,000.
[me again] Granted, also, that I may have confused the poor with people on welfare, so I may need to revise my statement to "the poor are pretty well off", rather than "people on welfare are pretty well off".
I argue that if the creation of intellectual property and its protection by law can be called social engineering (and I believe it can), then so can the creation of physical property and its protection.
That depends. Generally by "social engineering" one means a conscious effort by some group of elites, like the state, to mold society. In contrast, many social phenomena are not consciously molded by any group of elites. Language is one such social phenomenon. It could be a long argument depending on your views, but briefly I think that many of the most basic laws are not engineered consciously, but rather arise out of the population in a decentralized manner, like language. For example, murder is frowned upon not merely because the President says it should be frowned on, but because people generally react badly to it, and this general reaction spontaneously, that is, in a decentralized manner, is codified into things like customary law.
While it is true that at the current moment the state enforces laws like the law against murder, that has not always been the case and so is not necessarily the case.
If they're so poor as to be living in welfare housing, why do they have a COMPUTER and INTERNET ACCESS?
Because most Americans are rich, even Americans on welfare are quite well off. When foreigners talk about "America's poor" and the supposed "inequality" of American supposedly heartless society they simply do not realize that our population on welfare is better off than the European middle class. We are a rich, rich society, and even our "poor" are rich.
So of course people on welfare have enough for food, shelter, air conditioning, cable, high speed internet, an automobile, a Sony PS2, etc., etc., etc., because we're just a very rich society. Why do you think people risk their lives to get into this country?
Yes, the binary is in the public domain, but nobody is compelling you to release source, which is the key provision of the GPL.
Let us look at the current major challenge to GPL, i.e., SCO. If SCO wins, you might find yourself paying $700 to SCO for your copy of Linux. But that's only because of copyright. Take away copyright and SCO can't charge you a dime whether or not they manage to trash the GPL.
So here we have the first major practical challenge to GPL, and the particular problem if GPL is successfully trashed by SCO, i.e. the tax that SCO wants from Linux users, is precisely a copyright-created problem. It's a problem that would go away if there were no copyright.
So here we have something specific, concrete, real, that GPL is defending, i.e., your ability to use Linux without paying SCO, and this very thing would not have been a problem if not for copyright.
That's easy, how about never releasing source, and only releasing binaries. It doesn't work for anything other than software, but we were talking about the GPL.
Then the binaries are in the public domain. And then decompilation of their code is no longer illegal.
I disagree, in a world without copyright, the benefits of copyleft are impossible. If my ideas could be taken without a guarantee that the resulting work would remain in the public domain, I would be far less inclined to make my work open.
Here are a few definitions of "public domain", got from Google Glossary:
1) Refers to the status of a work having no copyright protection and, therefore, belonging to the world
2) In copyright law, this is the sphere or realm that is not protected by copyright and belongs to the entire community.
3) A term of American copyright law referring to works that are not copyright protected, free for all to use without permission.
In summary, according to these definitions, then without copyright, your worries are groundless, since everything is already in the public domain. The "resulting work" will remain in the public domain.
I disagree, in a world without copyright, the benefits of copyleft are impossible. If my ideas could be taken without a guarantee that the resulting work would remain in the public domain
The problem that you are worried about is copyright. You're worried about people copyrighting the resulting work. Hello, world without copyright.
What else are you worried about? Trade secrets? What? You haven't specified what sort of mechanism people are supposedly going to use to keep something out of the public domain.
The line of reasoning: "the founding fathers rebelled against laws they disagreed with; I am rebelling against laws I disagree with; therefire, my struggle is as noble as theirs" is as absurd as "they laughed at Einstein; they laughed at me; therefore, my ideas are as important as Einstein's".
Right, it's not as if the founding fathers were rebelling against silly things like a tax on tea.
remember, without copyright law, there can be no GPL
Technically, yes, but the question is, what is the intent of GPL, and could that intent be satisfied without copyright law? I think it could, because the primary intent of GPL is to defend against copyright, in essence turning copyright against itself. As one website puts it, "The simplest way to make a program free is to put it in the public domain, uncopyrighted. But this permits proprietary modified versions, which deny others the freedom to redistribute and modify; such versions undermine the goal of giving freedon to all users. To prevent this, 'copyleft' uses copyrights in a novel manner." (found using Google Glossary.)
So without copyright there is much less need for copyleft.
You'd think the Pornographer's Industry Association of America would be concerned about the volume of copyrighted pornography being traded using Kazaa (or worse, Kazaa Lite). This must represent a serious chunk of their business, especially among their teen-aged potential customer base.
I've been downloading contents from peer to peer networks since the advent of scour.net, and have had no gross misrepresentations of content such as you imply happen
I've experienced a few. One movie claimed to be a secretly made video of Christina Aguilera with her boyfriend in her hotel room yadda yadda, but the girl never turned around so you could see her face, which was highly suspicious to me, plus the cameraman was obviously very close and moving around, so there's no way she would have noticed him. I'm sure I still have the movie around here somewhere.
Now, if he LOOKED at personal/confidential files once inside, that is a different story. But beating a system's defenses, with the only ambition of proving you can do it, then calling the responsible party and helping them fix the security flaw SHOULD NOT be punished.
The problem with that reasoning is that when an organization knows that its systems have been entered by an unauthorized person, they do not know what he has done, and so they reasonably feel they have no choice but to act as though it has been tampered with. That involves a great deal of expense and effort on their part. That is money going down the tubes, a significant amount of money. That money is lost as surely as if their building had been broken into and office equipment stolen.
So it doesn't matter that, in the privacy of his own thoughts, the person who entered without permission knows he saw nothing and did nothing to harm them. His victim cannot know that; they cannot reach into his mind to see that he did nothing while on their computers. They very reasonably feel they have no choice but to treat their systems as truly compromised, which involves significant expense, and this expense is his fault. In economic effect, it amounts to vandalism.
If they're going to use a computer to judge the content, than I'm not going to hesitate to use a computer to write my essay.
Well, yeah. I run spellcheck on the important documents I write. Why shouldn't I run a grammar check, structure check, etc., supposing they're good?
Also, I'm really surprised at the educational slant of the topic and most of the responses - clearly, if the technology actually works, it can be used for general business (and other) document writing, not just for school essays. To listen to all these replies, one would think there is no life after school, or no writing after school.
And for the student, this is a great tool (assuming it works). If he has access to the system, he can submit his paper multiple times and have a really interactive learning experience, without necessarily being graded every single damn time he passes something to be reviewed. Computers have a hell of a lot more patience than humans; they will review a paper hundreds or thousands of times without getting bored. There is a fundamental time and tolerance limitation on the amount of help a writing teacher can give a student trying to hone his writing skills; the computer can potentially break through this limitation, because of its speed and infinite patience.
Finally, anything that makes it cheaper to teach, also brings education to a larger number of people. Computer automation, if it makes it cheaper to teach, can expand the reach of education. This reminds me of MIT's opencourseware program. What MIT's program lacks is an actual teacher. Here we have an actual teacher.
Slashdot Mirror
How is the RIAA getting into schools? That's what I want to know. OK, I can read that they've partnered with Junior Achiement and that Junior Achievement is getting into schools, but what about the rest of the details? Is the RIAA paying Junior Achievement for this? Is Junior Achievement paying the schools to let them spend time with the captive audience? I visited the Junior Achievement site and looked at the financial report, but the answers I'm looking for didn't pop out at me.
Answers? Anyone?
Now instead of getting that one bit of exercise required to find the remote, you can just s hift your weight a little.
That's how I find the remote.
Odor
what you last ate, when you last bathed, how long since your last change of pants
Motion
what you're watching (what it's rated, anyway)
Temperature
whether it should call the doctor or the coroner
I'm the opposite: often I have so much to say, I find the pen really slows me down. I need a keyboard.
Of course I don't have a lot to say on this occasion, which is why I wrote this on paper and posted it using Pigeon IP.
Doesn't every generation see the following one in a negative light?
:-)
Sure, but this time it's true!
Um, you seen MTV lately? I'm really starting to think that the youth of america DO NOT have minds of their own, they just inherit personalities from TV.
You shouldn't get your impression of what kids are like from a TV channel. Go and talk to actual kids (assuming you're an adult with minimal contact with kids, which your statement suggests).
Near as I can tell, your suggesting I join the corps and be one of the guys that cuts out livers instead.
If that's as near as you can tell, then you're not listening.
We're probably starting from different asumptions.
Yes.
Oh, and I never much cared for what everyone else thought was the prettiest girl in the class.
Nevertheless, if you expect government to help little you, that is unrealistic. You'll get some crumbs thrown your way while the government is cutting out your liver, that's about it. I realize that a lot of people focus on the crumbs while oblivious to the liver.
What I want is a government that's both interventionist and on my side.
I don't think it's possible for the kind of laissez fair government you'd want.
I think the opposite: your desire for a government that is interventionist on your side is unrealistic. It's a pipe dream. It's like wanting the prettiest girl in the room to go out with you even though you're at the bottom of the social heap (this is purely hypothetical; I'm not saying that's where you're at).
Actually I'm what's called an anarcho-capitalist. You can look that up. Anyway, it's not a minimal-statist.
I want the government watching out for me. It's the only thing big enough to stand against corporations like the RIAA.
You already have your wish. You have interventionist government. And interventionist government gets captured by concentrated deep-pocket interests every time. You asked for it, you got it, you got screwed by it.
The only reason they couldn't stop fighting is the US public wanted a conclusive, total victory. If you accept that mental state as a given, then it's true they couldn't stop fighting.
It would have been unwise to have left that political structure intact. It would have been like leaving Hitler in power at the end of WWII.
My whole point is that the US had no military need to conquer them.
Military need is relative to ultimate goals. The ultimate goal was to truly put an end to the threat from Japan, and that required reshaping the political structure.
Any statistics to back this up because I for one don't believe it.
Fifteen thousand French died in the heat wave. Why was that? "The heat wave brought suffocating temperatures of up to 104 in the first two weeks of August in a country where air conditioning is rare." And, "The high death toll has triggered an angry debate in France over shortcomings of the health system." From Fox (this was just the most recent article grabbed via Google News)
Doesn't seem to me as though the French are so well off. Where are the air conditioners? Where was the great health care that they enjoy? Where is this fabulous standard of living? On the bright side, the families of the 15,000 dead reportedly enjoyed a nice, long vacation.
I do not have the source of my impression ready to hand, but I found something similar. I don't doubt these guys have an axe to grind, but that doesn't mean they're wrong when they say,
America's poor do not live lavishly, but few households are destitute. The average "poor" American lives in a larger house or apartment, is more likely to own a car and is more likely to have basic amenities such as an indoor toilet than the general population of Western Europe. In addition: 14
* 53 percent of poor households have air conditioning;
* 91 percent own a color TV and 29 percent own two or more color TVs;
* 64 percent own a car and 14 percent own two or more cars;
* 56 percent own a microwave oven; and
* 40 percent own their home, with 71,000 owning homes worth more than $300,000.
[me again]
Granted, also, that I may have confused the poor with people on welfare, so I may need to revise my statement to "the poor are pretty well off", rather than "people on welfare are pretty well off".
I argue that if the creation of intellectual property and its protection by law can be called social engineering (and I believe it can), then so can the creation of physical property and its protection.
That depends. Generally by "social engineering" one means a conscious effort by some group of elites, like the state, to mold society. In contrast, many social phenomena are not consciously molded by any group of elites. Language is one such social phenomenon. It could be a long argument depending on your views, but briefly I think that many of the most basic laws are not engineered consciously, but rather arise out of the population in a decentralized manner, like language. For example, murder is frowned upon not merely because the President says it should be frowned on, but because people generally react badly to it, and this general reaction spontaneously, that is, in a decentralized manner, is codified into things like customary law.
While it is true that at the current moment the state enforces laws like the law against murder, that has not always been the case and so is not necessarily the case.
If they're so poor as to be living in welfare housing, why do they have a COMPUTER and INTERNET ACCESS?
Because most Americans are rich, even Americans on welfare are quite well off. When foreigners talk about "America's poor" and the supposed "inequality" of American supposedly heartless society they simply do not realize that our population on welfare is better off than the European middle class. We are a rich, rich society, and even our "poor" are rich.
So of course people on welfare have enough for food, shelter, air conditioning, cable, high speed internet, an automobile, a Sony PS2, etc., etc., etc., because we're just a very rich society. Why do you think people risk their lives to get into this country?
Today many are happy to pay 6-8% tax on almost everything we buy? We sure showed the British!
Not to mention the income tax. Time for another party?
Yes, the binary is in the public domain, but nobody is compelling you to release source, which is the key provision of the GPL.
Let us look at the current major challenge to GPL, i.e., SCO. If SCO wins, you might find yourself paying $700 to SCO for your copy of Linux. But that's only because of copyright. Take away copyright and SCO can't charge you a dime whether or not they manage to trash the GPL.
So here we have the first major practical challenge to GPL, and the particular problem if GPL is successfully trashed by SCO, i.e. the tax that SCO wants from Linux users, is precisely a copyright-created problem. It's a problem that would go away if there were no copyright.
So here we have something specific, concrete, real, that GPL is defending, i.e., your ability to use Linux without paying SCO, and this very thing would not have been a problem if not for copyright.
That's easy, how about never releasing source, and only releasing binaries. It doesn't work for anything other than software, but we were talking about the GPL.
Then the binaries are in the public domain. And then decompilation of their code is no longer illegal.
I disagree, in a world without copyright, the benefits of copyleft are impossible. If my ideas could be taken without a guarantee that the resulting work would remain in the public domain, I would be far less inclined to make my work open.
Here are a few definitions of "public domain", got from Google Glossary:
1) Refers to the status of a work having no copyright protection and, therefore, belonging to the world
2) In copyright law, this is the sphere or realm that is not protected by copyright and belongs to the entire community.
3) A term of American copyright law referring to works that are not copyright protected, free for all to use without permission.
In summary, according to these definitions, then without copyright, your worries are groundless, since everything is already in the public domain. The "resulting work" will remain in the public domain.
I disagree, in a world without copyright, the benefits of copyleft are impossible. If my ideas could be taken without a guarantee that the resulting work would remain in the public domain
The problem that you are worried about is copyright. You're worried about people copyrighting the resulting work. Hello, world without copyright.
What else are you worried about? Trade secrets? What? You haven't specified what sort of mechanism people are supposedly going to use to keep something out of the public domain.
The line of reasoning: "the founding fathers rebelled against laws they disagreed with; I am rebelling against laws I disagree with; therefire, my struggle is as noble as theirs" is as absurd as "they laughed at Einstein; they laughed at me; therefore, my ideas are as important as Einstein's".
Right, it's not as if the founding fathers were rebelling against silly things like a tax on tea.
remember, without copyright law, there can be no GPL
Technically, yes, but the question is, what is the intent of GPL, and could that intent be satisfied without copyright law? I think it could, because the primary intent of GPL is to defend against copyright, in essence turning copyright against itself. As one website puts it, "The simplest way to make a program free is to put it in the public domain, uncopyrighted. But this permits proprietary modified versions, which deny others the freedom to redistribute and modify; such versions undermine the goal of giving freedon to all users. To prevent this, 'copyleft' uses copyrights in a novel manner." (found using Google Glossary.)
So without copyright there is much less need for copyleft.
You'd think the Pornographer's Industry Association of America would be concerned about the volume of copyrighted pornography being traded using Kazaa (or worse, Kazaa Lite). This must represent a serious chunk of their business, especially among their teen-aged potential customer base.
I've been downloading contents from peer to peer networks since the advent of scour.net, and have had no gross misrepresentations of content such as you imply happen
I've experienced a few. One movie claimed to be a secretly made video of Christina Aguilera with her boyfriend in her hotel room yadda yadda, but the girl never turned around so you could see her face, which was highly suspicious to me, plus the cameraman was obviously very close and moving around, so there's no way she would have noticed him. I'm sure I still have the movie around here somewhere.
Now, if he LOOKED at personal/confidential files once inside, that is a different story. But beating a system's defenses, with the only ambition of proving you can do it, then calling the responsible party and helping them fix the security flaw SHOULD NOT be punished.
The problem with that reasoning is that when an organization knows that its systems have been entered by an unauthorized person, they do not know what he has done, and so they reasonably feel they have no choice but to act as though it has been tampered with. That involves a great deal of expense and effort on their part. That is money going down the tubes, a significant amount of money. That money is lost as surely as if their building had been broken into and office equipment stolen.
So it doesn't matter that, in the privacy of his own thoughts, the person who entered without permission knows he saw nothing and did nothing to harm them. His victim cannot know that; they cannot reach into his mind to see that he did nothing while on their computers. They very reasonably feel they have no choice but to treat their systems as truly compromised, which involves significant expense, and this expense is his fault. In economic effect, it amounts to vandalism.
If they're going to use a computer to judge the content, than I'm not going to hesitate to use a computer to write my essay.
Well, yeah. I run spellcheck on the important documents I write. Why shouldn't I run a grammar check, structure check, etc., supposing they're good?
Also, I'm really surprised at the educational slant of the topic and most of the responses - clearly, if the technology actually works, it can be used for general business (and other) document writing, not just for school essays. To listen to all these replies, one would think there is no life after school, or no writing after school.
And for the student, this is a great tool (assuming it works). If he has access to the system, he can submit his paper multiple times and have a really interactive learning experience, without necessarily being graded every single damn time he passes something to be reviewed. Computers have a hell of a lot more patience than humans; they will review a paper hundreds or thousands of times without getting bored. There is a fundamental time and tolerance limitation on the amount of help a writing teacher can give a student trying to hone his writing skills; the computer can potentially break through this limitation, because of its speed and infinite patience.
Finally, anything that makes it cheaper to teach, also brings education to a larger number of people. Computer automation, if it makes it cheaper to teach, can expand the reach of education. This reminds me of MIT's opencourseware program. What MIT's program lacks is an actual teacher. Here we have an actual teacher.