Here in Southern California $400k will buy you a 2 bedroom condo that's ~700 sq.ft.
That's exactly what I got in Amsterdam, although prices can vary quite a lot depending on the neighbourhood you live in. The old center is prohibitively expensive, newer areas are cheaper. I think the area where I live is the sweet spot: nice neighbourhood, not far from the city center, but still somewhat affordable. For us, anyway.
$400K for a 4 bedroom house?!?! Now I might be wrong about the costs, but here in the midwest even in the larger cities, 400K will get you a huge house where a 4 bedroom house is more like $250K, new.
In Amsterdam I paid $400k for a 2 bedroom apartment. Comes down to about $15,000 per year, because of tax benefits for house owners here.
"80K/year is "barely a living wage"? If you want a 4 bedroom house with a three car garage, 2 Hummers, 3 kids, a couple of dogs, and a 2-week overseas vacation every year, maybe. Don't confuse "living wage" with "the American dream". There's a huge difference."
Two Hummers is rather extreme. There's no need to burn your money to make a point. Living in a city usually means a small car (or no car at all) is much more attractive. An SUV only makes sense if you live in a place that doesn't have paved roads.
On the other hand, 2 weeks vacation isn't a lot by European standards. I get the impression we spend more on vacation while you spend more on cars.
Rathole apartments are $50,000 a year in New York. Similar issues would exist in Tokyo.
How about working in Amsterdam then? Housing is expensive, but not anywhere close to what you're talking about. There's plenty of demand for programmers here, and co-worker with a rathole apartment dead center down town pays about $1400 a month for 40 m^2. I live within easy cycle distance of the center in a very nice 90 m^2 apartment for the same money. If you're willing to live outside the city (and a lot of people do), you can live a lot cheaper than that.
The downside is of course that starting programmers don't get paid $80,000. More like $40,000 if you're lucky.
How do you maintain a free press when free-riders can inexpensively and quickly copy and redistribute your original content?
Isn't copying and redistributing copyrighted material without permission already illegal? It seems to me that part of his proposal changes nothing (although perhaps newspaper sites might want to enforce their copyright a bit more in such cases).
What is new is his proposal to ban links without permission. That goes against the entire idea of the Web. Publishing something on the Web already implies permission to link to it, because otherwise nobody would be able to find your content. If you really don't want to be linked to, I guess a robots.txt kind of approach might be a solution. Or redirect people coming to your site from external links to your homepage rather than the page they're looking for. I think that's going to cost newspapers a lot of visitors and therefore ad revenue, however.
In any case, killing the Web in order to save an obsolete business model is a bad idea.
What the judge recommends doing is to allow news papers to survive is to bar websites from reposting the full news story (paraphrased or not) found in the newspapers.
Copying the complete story without permission is already illegal, and news papers are perfectly within their rights to sue for damages. What the judge proposes is to ban linking and paraphrasing, exactly what Slashdot does.
This would be downright silly. A link brings visitors. If you don't want people reading your content, then don't publish it on the Web. Or let visitors register or something. You lose traffic, but according to the judge, that's what newspapers want.
#1: We have rights of expression, assembly, thought, speech, and, yes, privacy enshrined in the Constitution.
Every western country has those, and past and present has shown that it doesn't mean shit. Well, it means something, but a lot of countries still infringe on those constitutional rights, especially the US.
We do, in fact, have the 2nd amendment (right to bear arms) specifically so we can unseat any tyrant who tries to take our rights away.
But do you really want to live in a country in civil war? I'd rather move to a country that protects its freedoms long before it gets to violence.
#2: As a culture, we prize freedom the way Israel prizes "never again" or Iran prizes "Islam".
That's nice, but Israel is currently oppressing another country, and a lot of Iranians really aren't as religious as their leadership. In fact, Iran has traditionally had a somewhat different (and more tolerant) form of Islam than many Arab countries, for example. Similarly, many Americans love talking about how they love freedom while censoring themselves as well as others who dare to speak their opinion freely. Freedom fries anyone?
I'm not saying that the US is worse is those respects than most western countries. A lot of them hurt freedom in similar or different ways. I'd like to know if there's a country out there that doesn't.
"I just want to be left alone" is the only argument you'll need to get any American on your side.
Really? How's that been working out for other countries that wanted to be left alone?
#3: America is currently in the beginings of its post-Bush era. We do reactions VERY well in this country -- and that means the principle sin of the Bush, era, "sacraficing liberty for security", is likely not to be repeated in the next 10-20 years. If ever.
This is an interesting point, and I hope you're right. I do believe the 10 years, but not the "ever". Considering US history, I bet it's going to mess up within 40 years.
I admit it's a more honest attitude than claiming you're all about freedom when you're really not, like so many western countries nowadays.
Still, when a government feels the need to claim it cares about freedom, perhaps it's because somewhere deep down the people really care about it, which leaves an opening for someday revoking all those stupid repressive laws. I don't see that happening with Singapore any time soon.
That's not because of military spending, though. The US can quite easily kick the ass of any military in the world. The problem is that their army is a fighting army, not a rebuilding or peacekeeping army. They can defeat anyone they want, but they can't win the hearts and minds of the people they conquered, and that's what you need to rebuild a country.
The US military has the wrong approach, the wrong mindset and the wrong training for that. You need to open yourself up, befriend the locals rather than threatening them. Compare to the Dutch approach in Iraq and Afghanistan: soft hats, guns pointing to the ground, talking to the locals, and helping them to fix problems that really matter to them. But that goes straight against the training and mindset of many US soldiers: they imagine themselves a handful of threatened good guys surrounded by subhuman enemies. They rather shoot someone than trust someone, because he might be carrying a bomb. That lack of trust doesn't gain you any friends, and friends is what you need when you want people to stop trying to kill you.
I know I'm being a bit unfair, and that the mere existence of Iran doesn't excuse any violations into your privacy that you feel exist, but considering what is going on in the world this post seems ill-timed at best.
Why is it ill timed? Should you wait to demand freedom until it's abundant? Seems to me the best time to demand it is when it's being threatened.
I don't understand either why anyone would consider Singapore when worrying about freedom. It's one of the most totalitarian states in the world. I'd rather move to China.
How about Sweden/Finnland/Norway et al? While they seem to be getting worse, at least their citizens still seem to be able to get worked up about that sort of thing.
That is perhaps the most important aspect about a country: citizens who care, who fight back when the government limits freedom instead of asking for even more restrictions. If the people are okay, the country will eventually become okay too.
(This is also why I'm still hopeful about Iran, although they're taking an awfully long time.)
That's bullshit, you won't find any high tech job in France if you don't speak English. You won't even graduate from any engineering school without a decent English.
Reading or speaking? My limited experience is that while French programmers have no problem reading and writing in English, holding a spoken conversation is quite a lot harder for them.
In those countries (France and French-speaking excepted), it is necessary to have some level of English
Not true. Let me preface that by saying that I worked and lived 4 years in the US, 6 years in Italy, 3 years in Antarctica and spent many months in several others before coming back to France. Tech jobs in France require english just like anywhere else.
My French co-worker's English isn't great though, despite him working outside France for quite some time now.
Much worse, to my surprise, were Belgians. Wallonians, to be specific. They worked in Brussels, bilingual (Dutch/French) capital of the EU, they were programmers, yet they could only speak French. Not Dutch (which is a disgrace if you're living in a bilingual country), and maybe one or two of them spoke English. Communication was hard. I didn't last long.
The netherlands has legalized soft drugs and hookers, if that's your idea of freedom.
It's good for tourism, at least (although it's also the tourists that cause most of our drug problems).
If you're interested in freedom, Netherland used to be a pretty good choice until about 10-15 years ago. Privacy, tolerance to different lifestyles, all of that stuff used to be pretty big here. Nowadays, you're required to carry ID everywhere (or at least if you commit a crime or misdemeanor), and in some areas the police is allowed to search you for no reason at all. We've got the most phone taps anywhere in the world, and nobody really cares that privacy is dead. (They should know better; lack of privacy was the reason why so many Dutch Jews were killed in WW2 compared to other European countries.) Meanwhile there's a lot more hatred between people of different cultures, religions, lifestyles and sexual orientations.
We don't have the US PATRIOT Act yet, not the UK level of surveillance, but we're not all that far behind. And the only party that is really dedicated to changing all that, has a lot of trouble getting their message across.
I'm not sure where I'd go, though. Sweden occasionally sounds promising. Or else maybe Canada or New Zealand or something.
Dutch winters aren't nearly as bad as that, but we do often get frost and snow in January and February, yet white christmasses are very uncommon. Although recently our winters have gotten milder and we're getting less frost, which puts quite a damper on our national sport.
The whole "...there's no such thing as writer's block, there's only bad writers." is just a cop-out. It gives people an excuse to give up, and serves as a minefield for people who are easily discouraged. There's people that say things like that in every field.. they usually aren't at the top;)
Terry Pratchett is, though.
Admittedly he made the comment as a joke in response to the question what he thought about The Wheel Of Time, so it may not be intended as generally as I'm taking it.
That would make it very unattractive to publish new performances of old classical music. Suppose Deutsche Grammophon hires a quality orchestra to perform a piece from Bach, and records and mixes it with expensive equipment and sound experts, and then publishes the CD. Then Sony copies that CD and releases it under their own label for half the price.
Would you say that the way in which DGG records it and the quality of the musicians don't add anything of value? Would an amateur orchestra performing the same piece for free be just as good?
What's important though is that the original sheet music remains availlable and in public domain. It wouldn't do anyone any good if those amateur orchestras had to pay DGG to perform pieces from Bach.
I will never understand Slashdot's position as a whole.
And do you honestly not understand why that is? Slashdot is not a single entity. It's a community with very diverse opinions. That's why we get such big discussions here: people disagree.
The GPL is a copyright license complete with usage restrictions under threat of law for copyright infringement. It's even stated on the FSF website that the GPL assures copyright over a piece of software so that it isn't freely usable by anyone as public domain code.
You may have noticed that people here can violently disagree on whether GPL offers the most freedom or is actually quite restrictive compared to BSD. GPL guarantees freedom to users of derrivative works, whereas BSD-style licenses guarantee freedom for developers of derrivative works.
However, if there's any position that you can pin on many (but not nearly all) slashdotters, then it's a desire for freedom. Monopolies severely restrict that freedom, which is why monopolists tend not to be very popular around here.
GPL, while very strong on copyright, doesn't monopolise anything. BSD, which is about as close to public domain as possible while still being a license, doesn't monopolise either, although it allows derrivative works to be monopolised.
This also explains why content providers who restrict and monopolise access to content are generally not too popular around here. And this particular story is about how people abuse government-sanctioned monopolies in order to monopolise content that used to be free.
And that's why the "theft" metaphor, while still technically wrong, is probably slightly more applicable to this case than to copyright infringement: you take something away from people: free access to existing content.
If we're suddenly in support of the public domain today and against copyrighting of non-copyrighted works, why can't I use GPL code any way I want?
You can, actually. As long as you don't restrict how others use it.
We need to pick a position on copyright law and stick with it.
No we don't. We need to discuss it and keep discuss it. The moment we stop doing that, we might as well replace the slashdot discussions with a simple manifesto.
So people should do that with these "stolen" works: scan them in and submit them to Project Gutenberg. I'd be very interested in what the copyright claimer would do about that.
(But my fear is that it's going to be determined by who can afford the most lawyers.)
Teacher sees dope deal go down, pulls both students in. Weed/speed/whatever is "missing" and no sign it was dropped... now you get in the territory of _maybe_ getting to a more intimate search.
No, you have the authority to call the cops and hold the kids until the cops come. Teachers aren't cops and shouldn't pretend they are.
Slashdot Mirror
Here in Southern California $400k will buy you a 2 bedroom condo that's ~700 sq.ft.
That's exactly what I got in Amsterdam, although prices can vary quite a lot depending on the neighbourhood you live in. The old center is prohibitively expensive, newer areas are cheaper. I think the area where I live is the sweet spot: nice neighbourhood, not far from the city center, but still somewhat affordable. For us, anyway.
$400K for a 4 bedroom house?!?! Now I might be wrong about the costs, but here in the midwest even in the larger cities, 400K will get you a huge house where a 4 bedroom house is more like $250K, new.
In Amsterdam I paid $400k for a 2 bedroom apartment. Comes down to about $15,000 per year, because of tax benefits for house owners here.
"80K/year is "barely a living wage"? If you want a 4 bedroom house with a three car garage, 2 Hummers, 3 kids, a couple of dogs, and a 2-week overseas vacation every year, maybe. Don't confuse "living wage" with "the American dream". There's a huge difference."
Two Hummers is rather extreme. There's no need to burn your money to make a point. Living in a city usually means a small car (or no car at all) is much more attractive. An SUV only makes sense if you live in a place that doesn't have paved roads.
On the other hand, 2 weeks vacation isn't a lot by European standards. I get the impression we spend more on vacation while you spend more on cars.
Rathole apartments are $50,000 a year in New York. Similar issues would exist in Tokyo.
How about working in Amsterdam then? Housing is expensive, but not anywhere close to what you're talking about. There's plenty of demand for programmers here, and co-worker with a rathole apartment dead center down town pays about $1400 a month for 40 m^2. I live within easy cycle distance of the center in a very nice 90 m^2 apartment for the same money. If you're willing to live outside the city (and a lot of people do), you can live a lot cheaper than that.
The downside is of course that starting programmers don't get paid $80,000. More like $40,000 if you're lucky.
Timesinks are stupid. Period. I don't play a game for awfully boring timesinks.
Then WoW is clearly not for you.
How do you maintain a free press when free-riders can inexpensively and quickly copy and redistribute your original content?
Isn't copying and redistributing copyrighted material without permission already illegal? It seems to me that part of his proposal changes nothing (although perhaps newspaper sites might want to enforce their copyright a bit more in such cases).
What is new is his proposal to ban links without permission. That goes against the entire idea of the Web. Publishing something on the Web already implies permission to link to it, because otherwise nobody would be able to find your content. If you really don't want to be linked to, I guess a robots.txt kind of approach might be a solution. Or redirect people coming to your site from external links to your homepage rather than the page they're looking for. I think that's going to cost newspapers a lot of visitors and therefore ad revenue, however.
In any case, killing the Web in order to save an obsolete business model is a bad idea.
What the judge recommends doing is to allow news papers to survive is to bar websites from reposting the full news story (paraphrased or not) found in the newspapers.
Copying the complete story without permission is already illegal, and news papers are perfectly within their rights to sue for damages. What the judge proposes is to ban linking and paraphrasing, exactly what Slashdot does.
This would be downright silly. A link brings visitors. If you don't want people reading your content, then don't publish it on the Web. Or let visitors register or something. You lose traffic, but according to the judge, that's what newspapers want.
The only thing you might miss, is the ocean. For that you have to drive to Italy. (Right below it. At Venice for example.)
Venice is not by the ocean, it's by the Mediteranean. To see the ocean, you'd have to go through France.
#1: We have rights of expression, assembly, thought, speech, and, yes, privacy enshrined in the Constitution.
Every western country has those, and past and present has shown that it doesn't mean shit. Well, it means something, but a lot of countries still infringe on those constitutional rights, especially the US.
We do, in fact, have the 2nd amendment (right to bear arms) specifically so we can unseat any tyrant who tries to take our rights away.
But do you really want to live in a country in civil war? I'd rather move to a country that protects its freedoms long before it gets to violence.
#2: As a culture, we prize freedom the way Israel prizes "never again" or Iran prizes "Islam".
That's nice, but Israel is currently oppressing another country, and a lot of Iranians really aren't as religious as their leadership. In fact, Iran has traditionally had a somewhat different (and more tolerant) form of Islam than many Arab countries, for example. Similarly, many Americans love talking about how they love freedom while censoring themselves as well as others who dare to speak their opinion freely. Freedom fries anyone?
I'm not saying that the US is worse is those respects than most western countries. A lot of them hurt freedom in similar or different ways. I'd like to know if there's a country out there that doesn't.
"I just want to be left alone" is the only argument you'll need to get any American on your side.
Really? How's that been working out for other countries that wanted to be left alone?
#3: America is currently in the beginings of its post-Bush era. We do reactions VERY well in this country -- and that means the principle sin of the Bush, era, "sacraficing liberty for security", is likely not to be repeated in the next 10-20 years. If ever.
This is an interesting point, and I hope you're right. I do believe the 10 years, but not the "ever". Considering US history, I bet it's going to mess up within 40 years.
I admit it's a more honest attitude than claiming you're all about freedom when you're really not, like so many western countries nowadays.
Still, when a government feels the need to claim it cares about freedom, perhaps it's because somewhere deep down the people really care about it, which leaves an opening for someday revoking all those stupid repressive laws. I don't see that happening with Singapore any time soon.
a level 4 biohazard lab,
Is that supposed to win me over?
That's not because of military spending, though. The US can quite easily kick the ass of any military in the world. The problem is that their army is a fighting army, not a rebuilding or peacekeeping army. They can defeat anyone they want, but they can't win the hearts and minds of the people they conquered, and that's what you need to rebuild a country.
The US military has the wrong approach, the wrong mindset and the wrong training for that. You need to open yourself up, befriend the locals rather than threatening them. Compare to the Dutch approach in Iraq and Afghanistan: soft hats, guns pointing to the ground, talking to the locals, and helping them to fix problems that really matter to them. But that goes straight against the training and mindset of many US soldiers: they imagine themselves a handful of threatened good guys surrounded by subhuman enemies. They rather shoot someone than trust someone, because he might be carrying a bomb. That lack of trust doesn't gain you any friends, and friends is what you need when you want people to stop trying to kill you.
I know I'm being a bit unfair, and that the mere existence of Iran doesn't excuse any violations into your privacy that you feel exist, but considering what is going on in the world this post seems ill-timed at best.
Why is it ill timed? Should you wait to demand freedom until it's abundant? Seems to me the best time to demand it is when it's being threatened.
I don't understand either why anyone would consider Singapore when worrying about freedom. It's one of the most totalitarian states in the world. I'd rather move to China.
How about Sweden/Finnland/Norway et al? While they seem to be getting worse, at least their citizens still seem to be able to get worked up about that sort of thing.
That is perhaps the most important aspect about a country: citizens who care, who fight back when the government limits freedom instead of asking for even more restrictions. If the people are okay, the country will eventually become okay too.
(This is also why I'm still hopeful about Iran, although they're taking an awfully long time.)
That's bullshit, you won't find any high tech job in France if you don't speak English. You won't even graduate from any engineering school without a decent English.
Reading or speaking? My limited experience is that while French programmers have no problem reading and writing in English, holding a spoken conversation is quite a lot harder for them.
In those countries (France and French-speaking excepted), it is necessary to have some level of English
Not true. Let me preface that by saying that I worked and lived 4 years in the US, 6 years in Italy, 3 years in Antarctica and spent many months in several others before coming back to France. Tech jobs in France require english just like anywhere else.
My French co-worker's English isn't great though, despite him working outside France for quite some time now.
Much worse, to my surprise, were Belgians. Wallonians, to be specific. They worked in Brussels, bilingual (Dutch/French) capital of the EU, they were programmers, yet they could only speak French. Not Dutch (which is a disgrace if you're living in a bilingual country), and maybe one or two of them spoke English. Communication was hard. I didn't last long.
The netherlands has legalized soft drugs and hookers, if that's your idea of freedom.
It's good for tourism, at least (although it's also the tourists that cause most of our drug problems).
If you're interested in freedom, Netherland used to be a pretty good choice until about 10-15 years ago. Privacy, tolerance to different lifestyles, all of that stuff used to be pretty big here. Nowadays, you're required to carry ID everywhere (or at least if you commit a crime or misdemeanor), and in some areas the police is allowed to search you for no reason at all. We've got the most phone taps anywhere in the world, and nobody really cares that privacy is dead. (They should know better; lack of privacy was the reason why so many Dutch Jews were killed in WW2 compared to other European countries.) Meanwhile there's a lot more hatred between people of different cultures, religions, lifestyles and sexual orientations.
We don't have the US PATRIOT Act yet, not the UK level of surveillance, but we're not all that far behind. And the only party that is really dedicated to changing all that, has a lot of trouble getting their message across.
I'm not sure where I'd go, though. Sweden occasionally sounds promising. Or else maybe Canada or New Zealand or something.
Dutch winters aren't nearly as bad as that, but we do often get frost and snow in January and February, yet white christmasses are very uncommon. Although recently our winters have gotten milder and we're getting less frost, which puts quite a damper on our national sport.
The whole "...there's no such thing as writer's block, there's only bad writers." is just a cop-out. It gives people an excuse to give up, and serves as a minefield for people who are easily discouraged. There's people that say things like that in every field .. they usually aren't at the top ;)
Terry Pratchett is, though.
Admittedly he made the comment as a joke in response to the question what he thought about The Wheel Of Time, so it may not be intended as generally as I'm taking it.
That would make it very unattractive to publish new performances of old classical music. Suppose Deutsche Grammophon hires a quality orchestra to perform a piece from Bach, and records and mixes it with expensive equipment and sound experts, and then publishes the CD. Then Sony copies that CD and releases it under their own label for half the price.
Would you say that the way in which DGG records it and the quality of the musicians don't add anything of value? Would an amateur orchestra performing the same piece for free be just as good?
What's important though is that the original sheet music remains availlable and in public domain. It wouldn't do anyone any good if those amateur orchestras had to pay DGG to perform pieces from Bach.
I will never understand Slashdot's position as a whole.
And do you honestly not understand why that is? Slashdot is not a single entity. It's a community with very diverse opinions. That's why we get such big discussions here: people disagree.
The GPL is a copyright license complete with usage restrictions under threat of law for copyright infringement. It's even stated on the FSF website that the GPL assures copyright over a piece of software so that it isn't freely usable by anyone as public domain code.
You may have noticed that people here can violently disagree on whether GPL offers the most freedom or is actually quite restrictive compared to BSD. GPL guarantees freedom to users of derrivative works, whereas BSD-style licenses guarantee freedom for developers of derrivative works.
However, if there's any position that you can pin on many (but not nearly all) slashdotters, then it's a desire for freedom. Monopolies severely restrict that freedom, which is why monopolists tend not to be very popular around here.
GPL, while very strong on copyright, doesn't monopolise anything. BSD, which is about as close to public domain as possible while still being a license, doesn't monopolise either, although it allows derrivative works to be monopolised.
This also explains why content providers who restrict and monopolise access to content are generally not too popular around here. And this particular story is about how people abuse government-sanctioned monopolies in order to monopolise content that used to be free.
And that's why the "theft" metaphor, while still technically wrong, is probably slightly more applicable to this case than to copyright infringement: you take something away from people: free access to existing content.
If we're suddenly in support of the public domain today and against copyrighting of non-copyrighted works, why can't I use GPL code any way I want?
You can, actually. As long as you don't restrict how others use it.
We need to pick a position on copyright law and stick with it.
No we don't. We need to discuss it and keep discuss it. The moment we stop doing that, we might as well replace the slashdot discussions with a simple manifesto.
So people should do that with these "stolen" works: scan them in and submit them to Project Gutenberg. I'd be very interested in what the copyright claimer would do about that.
(But my fear is that it's going to be determined by who can afford the most lawyers.)
This is the first time I find myself agreeing with Ayn Rand.
Teacher sees dope deal go down, pulls both students in. Weed/speed/whatever is "missing" and no sign it was dropped...
now you get in the territory of _maybe_ getting to a more intimate search.
No, you have the authority to call the cops and hold the kids until the cops come. Teachers aren't cops and shouldn't pretend they are.
I agree with everything else you said.