...however, if you're someone looking to bring the F/OSS community into disrepute
Define "disrepute". Is it when some of us profess not to believe in the current "copyright/patent" feeding frenzy? Is it when we claim that greed is not our motive? Perheaps it is when we let our language slip a bit and become offensive (I am guilty of that, this fight can get tiresome). Or is it because what we say does not conform to your pre-determined view? Which is it?
Fine, never drive a car, because that car has patents
This is akin to asking someone living in Soviet Union to quit eating, wearing shoes or geting his medicine because they are all Soviet made.
The fact that Western societies are increasingly encumbered in patents and copyrights, is not of my doing, and I am already doing the best I can be reasonably expected to: I contribute to freely available software and I do attempt to warn about the ever increasing peril of the impending "Rights Based Economy". We are not yet at the junction where violent resistance is called for, but I fear after few hundred more millions die due to being unable to buy drugs invented 40 years ago because someone has managed to patent them and then extend the patent perpetually, or someone demands royalties for food they grow (DNA patents), we might see it come to that.
Till then, you are all talk.
I am glad that you are here setting these standards of what constitutes resistance to ownership of information. Without you we would be all lost and didnt know how to proceed. Why did we not think about going barefoot on a hunger strike before? My, what would we do without you?
That is the EXACT point of copyrights... It just says that the holder of the copyright is the ultimate authority in who can disseminate the works.
That authority is unnecessary if copyrights do not exist. If taking credit was all that was at stake, a different law would exist, dealing with attributions (not that it would be wise , people would claim 2 pixels in your picture were not attributed etc). Copyright is specifically designed to prevent others from selling your work and at the same time allowing you to sell it. Its only motivation is financial. It can be used in other ways as GPL is doing but thats a fringe application. If copyright did not exist, I would be equally safe from people stealing my stuff, because they would not be able to charge for it as in anyone could freely copy the stuff they made and thus the whole incentive of stealing would be gone. So copyright does not benefit me in any way, and on the other hand is a base of an entire system of restrictions, persecution and abuse perpetrated by large corporations on all of us.
I said previously that the copyright system provides a way for people to protect their ideas from others and to benefit from those ideas.
And this a very mechanism for slowing down progress. If one has to cough up money to see your "idea", he cannot base his new idea on your old one unless he has enough dough, can he? If everybody does it, noone can afford to learn beyond a few small affordable cases. Unrestricted flow of information is conductive to more people being able to learn and thus contribute. Your entire assertion seems to be that in order to create, people have to be able to make a killing at it. While indeed it is can be a motivation to many, many more people get ideas on how to improve things spontaneusly by being good at it. While the patents (since that is what is used to protect ideas, not copyrights) were difficult to obtain and relatively rare for almost all of that 300 years, their effect was minimal. Now when they became a flood of trivia generated by greedy monopolies wishing to stake their claim on the knowledge of human race, they are becoming an abomination. Copyrights, which applied for most of that time to art works and books, had a different impact but the one we are discussing (on progress) was minimal since it was defused by existence of libraries (which in effect defeat copyright because people can read for free). You probably do not realize how much work and effort and campaigning and fighting greed went into establishment of public libraries, precisely at the time of the industrial revolution, with all the copyright holders screaming bloody murder and opposing it any way they could.
plus, your shoveling coal comment made me chuckle..
It was just an ironic expression, the fact that you took it literally makes me wonder.
There are free scientific journals then as there are now.
Far and few in between and totally obscure. All the leading journals are so expensive that they constitute vast majority of many university department's expenditures. Hence the revolt going on now amongst scientists. Besides, unlike now, these journals were in libraries at the time Einstein was dabbling in his physics. Today no public library can afford them.
However, since you contributed work via the GPL, it's clear that you do like the benefits of copyright when it comes to protecting your work
as I explained several times already, I use GPL because it is the only thing available to defeat others who wish to use copyrights against me as in taking work and then copyrighting it in their proprietary, binary-only product.
Others may not be so benevolent as you, but that is their right as creator
The only thing they are entitled to is either create or not create. If they wish to abuse the common knowledge of the civilization and claim parts of it as "theirs" I'd rather see them take their "contributions" and shove it.
Self-sufficiency is quite easily attainable, actually. You simply never stop touring.
Sure, if you can do it and it pays, do it. None of us advocates of abolishment of copyrights have anything against it. I have no problem with you getting paid by concert goers for your effort. What I have a problem with is you trying to own information. As in putting legal restrictions on vibrations of air and strings of numbers because they happen to be a representation of your "music". If people like what they see and hear, you will have a lot of concert goers and you will get paid well. But that does not give you the right to mess up half of the computer users on the planet with ideas like DMCA. If you compose something and perform it, my hat off to you. If someone records it at the concert and goes to put it on the net, too bad, you should try to use it as promotion of the actual money making event rather then try to own the reproduction. That is all I ask. If you go down the path of "I own these air vibrations" it leads to madness and eventual crippling of science and estabilishment of new forms of societal abuse by giant megacorps.
first you tried to counter my argument by saying that correlation does not imply casuation argument then proceeded to use another correlation does not imply causation argument
I didnt just use a correlation. I used a cause-effect link. It should be obvious that enabling wide spread education and flow of information would increase number of people able to create while restricting the same flow would reduce the pool of creators. It is called logic. Merely putting together two things that happened at the same time, does not estabilish cause-effect link as you would seem to think. Over 90% of serial killers drink milk. 100% drink water. According to you this should be evidence that milk and water lead to serial killing.
Now you are claiming that the industrial revolution was in fact driven by the elites and not the "poor jerks" as you referred to them.
Your understanding of history is wanting. Although there was very high level of illiteracy in societies during the industrial revolution, one of the key societal changes at the time was that education became far more widely available even to those at the bottom of the society. If it were only the rich who had access to it. we would be still living the Dickensonian nightmare.
It is quite obvious you have never worked in a steel mill.
I see, so shoveling coal in a mill is the only way someone could come to understand inner workings of machinery. Thousands of locomotive engineers, steam machine operators, repairmen, craftsmen, tradesmen etc etc all around that time all shoveled coal with no access to the workings of the machinery and none of them improved anything. It was the copyright holders who labored in their ivory towers. Right.
Seriously, go learn a few things then come back when you are ready.
In the light of your lack of logical reasoning and jumping to conclusions from opposing evidence I find this recommendation rather amusing.
I You are VERY confused about what copyright is. The GPL is a copyright... etc etc.. if you were really against copyrights then you wouldn't go GPL, you would just release the source as is, with no license.
I am afraid it is you who misundersttood. GPL (athough it is technically a license - item related to copyrights) is a way to fight the system from within. It has to be that way because as long as copyrights exsist, releasing anything without a "license" is an invitation for people who do use copyrights to abuse you. I wish to contribute to society rather then to a bottom line of some greedy jerk with a software company whose business is controlling access to information and charging for it.
a group of scientists who discover a cure for HIV should be allowed to copyright it.
No. The cure itself is a piece of data that existed long before those scientists were born and it will exist long before they are gone. It is akin to saying that someone should be the owner of the Sun because he screamed "I saw it first!". The scientists should be rewarded and admired but owners of fundamental knowledge they are not.
And also, most people could not read at the time of the industrial revolution, so again I fail to see your point.
Err.. those were not the one in the driving seat of the revolution. Besides even an illiterate mehcanically inclined person can come up with some improvements on a machine he operates. So mere contact with science is also an accelerant. Imagine what would happen if he could not learn from the workings of a machine, reverse "engineer" it so to speak... oh wait.
Um, nice try but you didn't actually argue with my point. I said what if someone else takes credit for your work, not if someone else uses it. The GPL forbids others from taking credit for your work. So effectively, you just argued for me, and by embracing the GPL you are embracing copyrights!
No. I contribute under an alias and the only thing I care for is that someone does not mess things up and claim it was me. If they take credit, well, that just relfects badly on them not me, and I dont really care. I use GPL only because GPL is a defense against copyright loving jerks. That is, someone could take my work and then try to sell it back to me. If copyright were to be abolished, all licences, icluding GPL would be superfluous. Then noone could be trying to sell any piece of software to anyone else and the problem would go away permanently.
Herein lies your problem. I am sorry but you have been sold an unlikely if not impossible dream. I would like to make a living being a sex god, surrounded by wanting vixens, but chances of that are.. well...lets say "remote". The fact is that art (music in this case) is a form of expression and while some artists might get lucky and make some money, most wont. You could try to start a shop and see if there is enough hobbyists out there to make it worthwile but counting on it as your primary source of income might be unwise. I feel for you because a lot of young people were misled by the so called "music industry" into attempting a "career" in music while it is just a giant con game run for the benefit of media monopolies. In other words you are standing in a Vagas casino complaining to me that I am wrong when I insist that mathematical odds are not with you.
Copyrights have existed for about 300 years now, in that period more people have come out of poverty and the industrial output of the world has increased almost immeasurably
Sigh... Totally irellevant. This is a great example of people not being able to distinguish cause from effect. It is not copyright that drives progress...it is free exchange of information. Progress accelerated because unlike in previous times, vast amounts of information became easilly available through libaries and scientific yournals and near everyone could access it. When before your super-wealthy lord who happened to have science as a hobby could afford importing some obscure manuscript, now every poor jerk can go to public and free library and learn. And then to contribute. Freely accessible libraries at shools were the accellerant. So much so that these days, the excessive attempts to copyright every piece of shit out there, lead to a choking effect in science and are a cause for scientists to attempt to estabilish, alternative and free scientific yournals. If Enstein had to pay for every journal he read, he would have been stil a patent clerk when he died.
I find it crazy when people use the opportunistic effect of progress as an example of the cause of progress.
How about this... you quit your job and hit the road with a band
Bzzt, wrongo. Who made you quit your job and join the band? Why is it a belief of any retard out there that art is money making proprosition? Ever considred that a band is just a bunch of people who got together for the purpose of making a "killing" on something that is a scam in the first place? Mozart created art. Your idiot band creates derrivative noise at best. And yet it is you and your half-wit pals who dream millions, 50 foot yachts and private islands as soon as you manage to partner with some media monopoly to promote you and get teens to buy your crap. The whole attidude you represent is the best argument for abolishment of copyright.
If you were to create art, and were an actual artist as opposed to wanna be con-man, you would not care for monetary rewards and use your music as a form of expression and would be content to reach as many people as possible (and would actually like idea of P2P). So much for your argument. Get a real job and stop trying to rip us all off while fucking the entire human race so that you can make an undeserved buck.
Something tells me that you would quickly change your tune if someone started taking credit for something you made, or claimed rights to your property.
Unlike you, dumbass AC, I contribute to many GPLed projects and do not give a fuck if people use my work. Actually more useful it is for them the better, I feel like I achieved something. Not everyone who creates things has selfish, thieving attitude. So much for your pet theory, idiot.
You are absolutely right. Copyright is an abomination created by filthy thieves. I mean it. All they do is thieve from the society by making small variations to the common body of knowledge and then demand perpetual payments.
From another perspective, this is a wider issue then just music. It really is about treating information, data, as "property" and thus applying capitalist principles in places where they do not belong. It leads to "commoditization" of DNA seqences, mathematical forumlaes etc etc. It just total nonsense and it has to stop before irreversible harm is done to society.
.. guess what, the people that sold the corporations that copyright willingly did so. So appearently the people who actually create this culture don't care about it. If you don't like it, then instead of copying works of others, create something yourself.
Except that none of them had any right to do so. There is no such thing as "creating" anything from scratch, all of the jerks who believe in copyrights build upon the works of others. Scientists needs thousads of workers in the field who went before them to get to the point where they can formulate their theory. Musicians rip everything off from the ones who came before and thrive on small variations on those themes. Ditto for movies. Etc etc. I dont know when people will get it through their thick skulls that in order to "create" something, one draws upon of millennia of progress of human race and efforts of countless generations who went before. Those who claim they "own" their ideas are just selfish jerks, akin to bandits who go out and take over some land and then claim it to be "owned" by them. It wasnt theirs in the first place, they just happened to wander onto it and then proceeded to shoot anyone who came near.
So we removed their support by changing the policy to re-institute slavery.By your original argument, that is the only way we could remove the support for those nut jobs.
You lost me completely. My original argument was to use policy as a tool for removing grass-root support for the nutcases. In the case of Civil Rights in the USA, that involved a loong process of coersion and of education and media campaigns, coupled with economic prosperity. And it worked only because the cause was right and easilly identifed as such. In the case of Arab/Israeli conflict, the cause of Israel is anything but easilly defensible and most likely the reverse applies, Israelis are the equivalent of the white plantation owners in your analogy and if you follow it to its logical conclusion one would have to lean on them hard while at the same time keeping a lid of the "Black Panthers"... errr.. Hamas.
..snip some weird ramblings about mind control rays etc...
One does not need mind control rays, the way politics works is that one puts a persistent, widely spread message for a very loong time and sooner or later many people will come to believe it, regardless of its validity. Thats how things work unfortunately. This is used by all sides in all kinds of political warfare. And one of the most vicious battlegrounds are schools where one can influence from a position of authority the way people will think for generations to come.
gain, I would advocate not sounding like a skinhead. This is the exact phrasing used by the modern soft-sell Holocaust denialists... Lose the juvenile histrionics. You're using the language of racism, whether you mean to or not, and you're not going to be taken seriously till you can calm down and lose the insano hyperbole.
I find this hillarious. The "rules" of the discussion are now so well defined by the protagonists of Israel that anything approaching statement of rather obvious and easilly verifiable facts is considered "close to prohibited speech" or "histrionics" or "polarizing". So you have to choose from innuendo and gentle nudges while the other side swings about a sledge hammer. Or else you are "juvenile" or "not civilized".
Crazed conspiracies? These are the sort of conspiracies as the Republican party members getting together to promote, now there is a crazed far-out conspiracy idea: tax cuts. Or a Green Party having an attempt at setting up pollution control. Some conspiracy. Osama and his crew wants a pan-arab Islamic state. He said so himself. Zionists are for estabilishment of Israel on "biblical" lands (whatever that means). That is their stated agenda and the means they use are the same as any Republican would to undermine a Democrat, a Green party member a Corporatist: media. And if media war is successful, education war follows. The two pivotal battle grounds of any politics. The whole problem is that Zionists seem to excel at it far more then other groups. So are you going to call me a crazy conspiration nut when I point that out? Deride me for using "insano hyperbole" when calling Bush's administration "large-oil company friendly"? You make me laugh. If I were to abide by these rules, I might as well not bother at all and just watch as another 50 years of certifiable maddness unfolds in the Middle East. But then again that is the whole point of making such "rules" of discussion: to prevent any.
Thanks for making my point. Blacks are still citizens yet white supremacists don't do very well. So something other than policy is at work.
Huh? This has everything to do with policy. Not so long ago the official policy was called "segregation" and those same nuts who have hard time gaining support today were considered "defenders of our way of life".
The Mossad paid me to write my post
I have no idea about your motivations, probably like many people you are under the influence of many years of dubious "newscasts" and school teachers explaining how all those "poor defenceless, homeless, Zionists" ended up just having to take more and more land from those "dirty uncivilized Arabs" who all just want to push "our friends" "into the sea". And it has nothing to do with Judaism per-se, but with politics of power and control of information. This is the same trick that Goebels tried on the Germans and the Polit Bureau on the Soviet citizenry. The only difference that neither of them was so successful nor made their campaign so refined that its victims dont even know what is happening to them.
don't think that Shock Therapy reforms can really be blamed for Balkan strife.
They are definitely a factor. It is my understanding that in Poland for example the social costs of these reforms are immense and the so called "success" you mention is merely an outside apperance, very much a veneer. The difference might be a set of fortunate cultural / geographical or historical accidents leading to why this did not end up violent in places like Poland but the strains and conditions were and still are certainly existing for violence even there.
.. advocating genocide..
You know I get real sick and tired of this knee-jerk response pattern: "Think Israel needs to be brought to account? Oh you mean you are anti-semite and advocate genocide?". How did so many, otherwise smart people get their brain cells fried by a group of manipulative jerks who aim to use everyone else like tools and still come out at the end looking like victims? Let me spell it out for you: Israel, the country, could be run by little-green men who worship the great God of Tuna Fish as far as I am concerned. It is not who they are, but how they behave that is the problem. And the fact that those people created a massive generation-spanning propaganda campaign, casting themselves as victims of the universe (their ancestor's place as one of many much larger groups of victims in WWII events nothwithstanding), should put everyone on guard against further con-artistry more, not less.
too many Americans see Jews as 'not-other', and have mostly shed our anti-semitism, but we still see Muslims as 'other' and so there's less empathy for their plight.
It is really hard to tell. I read various contradictory accounts as to the proportions of religious nuts waiting for Rupture versus "our pals against the other dudes". Whatever the core reason, Israel enjoyed uncritical (or near uncritical) support from all of the admistrations since the end of WWII. Bush senior's "tough" stance was laughable in comparison to what actually would have to be done to stop Israel's crimes permanently. A president who wished to do so would have to treat Israel as a band of terrorists precisely equal to that of PLO and Hamas and put the entire merry crew of murderers from both sides on ice. As in massive military/economic embargo kept up until annexed lands are either returned or properly paid for, workable borders estabilished and all bus bombing maniacs brought to justce. And I wont even get started on the WMD hyporicy. But to do so, he would have to win elections despite that support of Israel-lovers from Robertson-sheep on one end to brainwashed do-gooders on the other. And I see that as near impossible since USA is the only country on the planet where that propaganda campaign had such great and long lasting effect. I would venture to guess that if Israel were to commit genocide on 1/2 of the Arabs in the Middle East via a nuclear strike tommorrow, most citizens of USA would cheer. So much for the "leaders of free world" bullshit.
A relatively small number of them live under US sponsored repressive regimes. The rest are under homegrown despots. There are also a couple of French-sponsored regimes.
The home-grown despots are either propped up by the US or on the other hand created as a response to the previous US-propped up ones (Iran for example). French? You mean Algier probably. That makes one. And most people in there probably consider France as an instrument of the US (as amusing as that is).
but I contend he would have found an excuse even if Israel didn't exist.
I dont disagree with you on this, he is a religious nut and yes he wants Islam to rule the world. Very much so as the Fundamentalist Christians and Neocons in the US who are blabberring about World Dominion etc.
My entire argument goes towards the fact that if it were not for the US/Israeli attitude for the last 50 years in the Middle East, Osama, no matter how nutty, would be reduced to a weirdo, far-out zealot status amongst his people, and thus unable to recruit followers and obtain resources for his terror campaigns abroad and consequently rendered harmless.
No. Simply both sides are utterly wrong. One for being an empire refusing to redress the wrongs it did and the other for being a bunch of terrorists (as opposed to Geneva convention obeying freedom fighters).
My objection was against a 3rd party taking sides in this mess which only leads to more havoc and more wide-spread bloodshed.
As to converting the west, they are apparently much closer than you realize.... (Skip the extended statistics on how Muslim will take over from ~7% average population to 50% in a jiffy and the world will come to an end)... considerable amount of the current spate of anti-Semitism in Europe can be traced back to its Muslims.
This assumes that the trends will continue unabated for a very looong time (100 years or more despite your alarmist dates pulled off the ceiling by a known Zionist, Thomas Libscomb). Additionaly the anti-semitism and radicalism is equally likely a response to the continuing, seemlesly endless stream of beligernt and arrogant anti-arab actions by both Israel and the US. Untill that stops, noone can tell if this is a part of a violent grand world takover scheme or merely a response to being taunted and degraded. Additionally you forgot to mention that the said Muslim populations are typically North African in origin and desperately poor and mostly unemployed. I bet their extemism has much more to do with that then Millitant Islam (which merely provides a framework on which to hang your social disappointments and setbacks).
While technically true, the contention is that Israel was a major factor in starting the said war and funded/operated many Christian militias responsible for starting it and also for most of the massacres that followed. Hence my "in its name" phrase that I used to refer to Israel.
To be fair, PLO and others wasted no time to jump into the fray on the opposing end.
They recruit from videos filled with quotes from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, wild stories about how the Americans, led by their Jewish masters, are behind every evil to befall the region, etc. etc.
So do white supremacists in the ole good US of A and in Germany, Russia and you name it. The difference is that they have no base to stand on with the exception of a few nuts like themselves.
Foreign policy is the key. If Arab nations do not suffer under opressive US-sponsored regimes and are humiliated daily by Israeli beligerence (not to mention taught that "might is always right") and live in a world where education is accessible and young people have a future, the religious nuts will have only the bottom of the barrel to scrape for nutcases and malcontents to recruit. That is the whole point. Balkans are in the same boat, impoverished, brutalized by two-bit lordlings (aka the leaders of radical "free market", "shock therapy" reforms) and utterly humiliated by everyone. I am actually suprised that Serbs havent blown something up in NATO countries for the treatment they got. They were villified, bombed, humilliated and abused so that US could show who's the boss. Their war crimes (although were indeed commited) are but a fraction of the deaths in Iraq by US hands. And all of their "victims" were no less murderous. I wonder indeed.
There is no short term solution.
True but one has to start moving in the right direction at some point.
..even if Kerry is elected and hangs Israel out to dry as a sacrificial goat..
Well now, as far as I am concerned Kerry and Bush are quarrelling over who will serve their corporate masters better. As far as foreign policy is concerned I am not sure which of them is more clueless and will cause more damage. Kerry is a great and totally un-critical supporter of Israel. Or at least the Israeli citizens with US voting rights as well as a significantly vocal and extremely wealthy Jewish voting segment. Not to mention all of those media outlets and TV personalities who are Jewish. As to Israel being sacrificial goat. That sounds like they dont deserve it. I would wish that most Americans woke up and saw that they are being strung up by that bunch of conmen for 50 years now, to your great expense in trillions of dollars and thousands of lives by now. All the while they expand their colonies and confiscate more land and abuse the Palestinians more, who in return reign terror on the Israelis: fun all around. The groups now in charge in Israel are for the most part no different then the Skinheads running around Berlin. They consider themselves superior, God-chosen nation and everyone else their serfs or tools. USA included. There is some weird, unhealthy interaction between Israeli greed and lust for power and American religious right. Makes my skin crawl.
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Define "disrepute". Is it when some of us profess not to believe in the current "copyright/patent" feeding frenzy? Is it when we claim that greed is not our motive? Perheaps it is when we let our language slip a bit and become offensive (I am guilty of that, this fight can get tiresome). Or is it because what we say does not conform to your pre-determined view? Which is it?
This is akin to asking someone living in Soviet Union to quit eating, wearing shoes or geting his medicine because they are all Soviet made.
The fact that Western societies are increasingly encumbered in patents and copyrights, is not of my doing, and I am already doing the best I can be reasonably expected to: I contribute to freely available software and I do attempt to warn about the ever increasing peril of the impending "Rights Based Economy". We are not yet at the junction where violent resistance is called for, but I fear after few hundred more millions die due to being unable to buy drugs invented 40 years ago because someone has managed to patent them and then extend the patent perpetually, or someone demands royalties for food they grow (DNA patents), we might see it come to that.
Till then, you are all talk.
I am glad that you are here setting these standards of what constitutes resistance to ownership of information. Without you we would be all lost and didnt know how to proceed. Why did we not think about going barefoot on a hunger strike before? My, what would we do without you?
That authority is unnecessary if copyrights do not exist. If taking credit was all that was at stake, a different law would exist, dealing with attributions (not that it would be wise , people would claim 2 pixels in your picture were not attributed etc). Copyright is specifically designed to prevent others from selling your work and at the same time allowing you to sell it. Its only motivation is financial. It can be used in other ways as GPL is doing but thats a fringe application. If copyright did not exist, I would be equally safe from people stealing my stuff, because they would not be able to charge for it as in anyone could freely copy the stuff they made and thus the whole incentive of stealing would be gone. So copyright does not benefit me in any way, and on the other hand is a base of an entire system of restrictions, persecution and abuse perpetrated by large corporations on all of us.
And this a very mechanism for slowing down progress. If one has to cough up money to see your "idea", he cannot base his new idea on your old one unless he has enough dough, can he? If everybody does it, noone can afford to learn beyond a few small affordable cases. Unrestricted flow of information is conductive to more people being able to learn and thus contribute. Your entire assertion seems to be that in order to create, people have to be able to make a killing at it. While indeed it is can be a motivation to many, many more people get ideas on how to improve things spontaneusly by being good at it. While the patents (since that is what is used to protect ideas, not copyrights) were difficult to obtain and relatively rare for almost all of that 300 years, their effect was minimal. Now when they became a flood of trivia generated by greedy monopolies wishing to stake their claim on the knowledge of human race, they are becoming an abomination. Copyrights, which applied for most of that time to art works and books, had a different impact but the one we are discussing (on progress) was minimal since it was defused by existence of libraries (which in effect defeat copyright because people can read for free). You probably do not realize how much work and effort and campaigning and fighting greed went into establishment of public libraries, precisely at the time of the industrial revolution, with all the copyright holders screaming bloody murder and opposing it any way they could.
plus, your shoveling coal comment made me chuckle..
It was just an ironic expression, the fact that you took it literally makes me wonder.
There are free scientific journals then as there are now.
Far and few in between and totally obscure. All the leading journals are so expensive that they constitute vast majority of many university department's expenditures. Hence the revolt going on now amongst scientists. Besides, unlike now, these journals were in libraries at the time Einstein was dabbling in his physics. Today no public library can afford them.
However, since you contributed work via the GPL, it's clear that you do like the benefits of copyright when it comes to protecting your work
as I explained several times already, I use GPL because it is the only thing available to defeat others who wish to use copyrights against me as in taking work and then copyrighting it in their proprietary, binary-only product.
Others may not be so benevolent as you, but that is their right as creator
The only thing they are entitled to is either create or not create. If they wish to abuse the common knowledge of the civilization and claim parts of it as "theirs" I'd rather see them take their "contributions" and shove it.
Sure, if you can do it and it pays, do it. None of us advocates of abolishment of copyrights have anything against it. I have no problem with you getting paid by concert goers for your effort. What I have a problem with is you trying to own information. As in putting legal restrictions on vibrations of air and strings of numbers because they happen to be a representation of your "music". If people like what they see and hear, you will have a lot of concert goers and you will get paid well. But that does not give you the right to mess up half of the computer users on the planet with ideas like DMCA. If you compose something and perform it, my hat off to you. If someone records it at the concert and goes to put it on the net, too bad, you should try to use it as promotion of the actual money making event rather then try to own the reproduction. That is all I ask. If you go down the path of "I own these air vibrations" it leads to madness and eventual crippling of science and estabilishment of new forms of societal abuse by giant megacorps.
I didnt just use a correlation. I used a cause-effect link. It should be obvious that enabling wide spread education and flow of information would increase number of people able to create while restricting the same flow would reduce the pool of creators. It is called logic. Merely putting together two things that happened at the same time, does not estabilish cause-effect link as you would seem to think. Over 90% of serial killers drink milk. 100% drink water. According to you this should be evidence that milk and water lead to serial killing.
Now you are claiming that the industrial revolution was in fact driven by the elites and not the "poor jerks" as you referred to them.
Your understanding of history is wanting. Although there was very high level of illiteracy in societies during the industrial revolution, one of the key societal changes at the time was that education became far more widely available even to those at the bottom of the society. If it were only the rich who had access to it. we would be still living the Dickensonian nightmare.
It is quite obvious you have never worked in a steel mill.
I see, so shoveling coal in a mill is the only way someone could come to understand inner workings of machinery. Thousands of locomotive engineers, steam machine operators, repairmen, craftsmen, tradesmen etc etc all around that time all shoveled coal with no access to the workings of the machinery and none of them improved anything. It was the copyright holders who labored in their ivory towers. Right.
Seriously, go learn a few things then come back when you are ready.
In the light of your lack of logical reasoning and jumping to conclusions from opposing evidence I find this recommendation rather amusing.
Err.. that was supposed to read: "will exist long after they are gone"
I am afraid it is you who misundersttood. GPL (athough it is technically a license - item related to copyrights) is a way to fight the system from within. It has to be that way because as long as copyrights exsist, releasing anything without a "license" is an invitation for people who do use copyrights to abuse you. I wish to contribute to society rather then to a bottom line of some greedy jerk with a software company whose business is controlling access to information and charging for it.
a group of scientists who discover a cure for HIV should be allowed to copyright it.
No. The cure itself is a piece of data that existed long before those scientists were born and it will exist long before they are gone. It is akin to saying that someone should be the owner of the Sun because he screamed "I saw it first!". The scientists should be rewarded and admired but owners of fundamental knowledge they are not.
Err.. those were not the one in the driving seat of the revolution. Besides even an illiterate mehcanically inclined person can come up with some improvements on a machine he operates. So mere contact with science is also an accelerant. Imagine what would happen if he could not learn from the workings of a machine, reverse "engineer" it so to speak... oh wait.
No. I contribute under an alias and the only thing I care for is that someone does not mess things up and claim it was me. If they take credit, well, that just relfects badly on them not me, and I dont really care. I use GPL only because GPL is a defense against copyright loving jerks. That is, someone could take my work and then try to sell it back to me. If copyright were to be abolished, all licences, icluding GPL would be superfluous. Then noone could be trying to sell any piece of software to anyone else and the problem would go away permanently.
Herein lies your problem. I am sorry but you have been sold an unlikely if not impossible dream. I would like to make a living being a sex god, surrounded by wanting vixens, but chances of that are.. well ...lets say "remote". The fact is that art (music in this case) is a form of expression and while some artists might get lucky and make some money, most wont. You could try to start a shop and see if there is enough hobbyists out there to make it worthwile but counting on it as your primary source of income might be unwise. I feel for you because a lot of young people were misled by the so called "music industry" into attempting a "career" in music while it is just a giant con game run for the benefit of media monopolies. In other words you are standing in a Vagas casino complaining to me that I am wrong when I insist that mathematical odds are not with you.
Sigh... Totally irellevant. This is a great example of people not being able to distinguish cause from effect. It is not copyright that drives progress...it is free exchange of information. Progress accelerated because unlike in previous times, vast amounts of information became easilly available through libaries and scientific yournals and near everyone could access it. When before your super-wealthy lord who happened to have science as a hobby could afford importing some obscure manuscript, now every poor jerk can go to public and free library and learn. And then to contribute. Freely accessible libraries at shools were the accellerant. So much so that these days, the excessive attempts to copyright every piece of shit out there, lead to a choking effect in science and are a cause for scientists to attempt to estabilish, alternative and free scientific yournals. If Enstein had to pay for every journal he read, he would have been stil a patent clerk when he died.
I find it crazy when people use the opportunistic effect of progress as an example of the cause of progress.
Bzzt, wrongo. Who made you quit your job and join the band? Why is it a belief of any retard out there that art is money making proprosition? Ever considred that a band is just a bunch of people who got together for the purpose of making a "killing" on something that is a scam in the first place? Mozart created art. Your idiot band creates derrivative noise at best. And yet it is you and your half-wit pals who dream millions, 50 foot yachts and private islands as soon as you manage to partner with some media monopoly to promote you and get teens to buy your crap. The whole attidude you represent is the best argument for abolishment of copyright.
If you were to create art, and were an actual artist as opposed to wanna be con-man, you would not care for monetary rewards and use your music as a form of expression and would be content to reach as many people as possible (and would actually like idea of P2P). So much for your argument. Get a real job and stop trying to rip us all off while fucking the entire human race so that you can make an undeserved buck.
Unlike you, dumbass AC, I contribute to many GPLed projects and do not give a fuck if people use my work. Actually more useful it is for them the better, I feel like I achieved something. Not everyone who creates things has selfish, thieving attitude. So much for your pet theory, idiot.
From another perspective, this is a wider issue then just music. It really is about treating information, data, as "property" and thus applying capitalist principles in places where they do not belong. It leads to "commoditization" of DNA seqences, mathematical forumlaes etc etc. It just total nonsense and it has to stop before irreversible harm is done to society.
Except that none of them had any right to do so. There is no such thing as "creating" anything from scratch, all of the jerks who believe in copyrights build upon the works of others. Scientists needs thousads of workers in the field who went before them to get to the point where they can formulate their theory. Musicians rip everything off from the ones who came before and thrive on small variations on those themes. Ditto for movies. Etc etc. I dont know when people will get it through their thick skulls that in order to "create" something, one draws upon of millennia of progress of human race and efforts of countless generations who went before. Those who claim they "own" their ideas are just selfish jerks, akin to bandits who go out and take over some land and then claim it to be "owned" by them. It wasnt theirs in the first place, they just happened to wander onto it and then proceeded to shoot anyone who came near.
You lost me completely. My original argument was to use policy as a tool for removing grass-root support for the nutcases. In the case of Civil Rights in the USA, that involved a loong process of coersion and of education and media campaigns, coupled with economic prosperity. And it worked only because the cause was right and easilly identifed as such. In the case of Arab/Israeli conflict, the cause of Israel is anything but easilly defensible and most likely the reverse applies, Israelis are the equivalent of the white plantation owners in your analogy and if you follow it to its logical conclusion one would have to lean on them hard while at the same time keeping a lid of the "Black Panthers" ... errr.. Hamas.
One does not need mind control rays, the way politics works is that one puts a persistent, widely spread message for a very loong time and sooner or later many people will come to believe it, regardless of its validity. Thats how things work unfortunately. This is used by all sides in all kinds of political warfare. And one of the most vicious battlegrounds are schools where one can influence from a position of authority the way people will think for generations to come.
I find this hillarious. The "rules" of the discussion are now so well defined by the protagonists of Israel that anything approaching statement of rather obvious and easilly verifiable facts is considered "close to prohibited speech" or "histrionics" or "polarizing". So you have to choose from innuendo and gentle nudges while the other side swings about a sledge hammer. Or else you are "juvenile" or "not civilized".
Crazed conspiracies? These are the sort of conspiracies as the Republican party members getting together to promote, now there is a crazed far-out conspiracy idea: tax cuts. Or a Green Party having an attempt at setting up pollution control. Some conspiracy. Osama and his crew wants a pan-arab Islamic state. He said so himself. Zionists are for estabilishment of Israel on "biblical" lands (whatever that means). That is their stated agenda and the means they use are the same as any Republican would to undermine a Democrat, a Green party member a Corporatist: media. And if media war is successful, education war follows. The two pivotal battle grounds of any politics. The whole problem is that Zionists seem to excel at it far more then other groups. So are you going to call me a crazy conspiration nut when I point that out? Deride me for using "insano hyperbole" when calling Bush's administration "large-oil company friendly"? You make me laugh. If I were to abide by these rules, I might as well not bother at all and just watch as another 50 years of certifiable maddness unfolds in the Middle East. But then again that is the whole point of making such "rules" of discussion: to prevent any.
Huh? This has everything to do with policy. Not so long ago the official policy was called "segregation" and those same nuts who have hard time gaining support today were considered "defenders of our way of life".
The Mossad paid me to write my post
I have no idea about your motivations, probably like many people you are under the influence of many years of dubious "newscasts" and school teachers explaining how all those "poor defenceless, homeless, Zionists" ended up just having to take more and more land from those "dirty uncivilized Arabs" who all just want to push "our friends" "into the sea". And it has nothing to do with Judaism per-se, but with politics of power and control of information. This is the same trick that Goebels tried on the Germans and the Polit Bureau on the Soviet citizenry. The only difference that neither of them was so successful nor made their campaign so refined that its victims dont even know what is happening to them.
They are definitely a factor. It is my understanding that in Poland for example the social costs of these reforms are immense and the so called "success" you mention is merely an outside apperance, very much a veneer. The difference might be a set of fortunate cultural / geographical or historical accidents leading to why this did not end up violent in places like Poland but the strains and conditions were and still are certainly existing for violence even there.
You know I get real sick and tired of this knee-jerk response pattern: "Think Israel needs to be brought to account? Oh you mean you are anti-semite and advocate genocide?". How did so many, otherwise smart people get their brain cells fried by a group of manipulative jerks who aim to use everyone else like tools and still come out at the end looking like victims? Let me spell it out for you: Israel, the country, could be run by little-green men who worship the great God of Tuna Fish as far as I am concerned. It is not who they are, but how they behave that is the problem. And the fact that those people created a massive generation-spanning propaganda campaign, casting themselves as victims of the universe (their ancestor's place as one of many much larger groups of victims in WWII events nothwithstanding), should put everyone on guard against further con-artistry more, not less.
too many Americans see Jews as 'not-other', and have mostly shed our anti-semitism, but we still see Muslims as 'other' and so there's less empathy for their plight.
It is really hard to tell. I read various contradictory accounts as to the proportions of religious nuts waiting for Rupture versus "our pals against the other dudes". Whatever the core reason, Israel enjoyed uncritical (or near uncritical) support from all of the admistrations since the end of WWII. Bush senior's "tough" stance was laughable in comparison to what actually would have to be done to stop Israel's crimes permanently. A president who wished to do so would have to treat Israel as a band of terrorists precisely equal to that of PLO and Hamas and put the entire merry crew of murderers from both sides on ice. As in massive military/economic embargo kept up until annexed lands are either returned or properly paid for, workable borders estabilished and all bus bombing maniacs brought to justce. And I wont even get started on the WMD hyporicy. But to do so, he would have to win elections despite that support of Israel-lovers from Robertson-sheep on one end to brainwashed do-gooders on the other. And I see that as near impossible since USA is the only country on the planet where that propaganda campaign had such great and long lasting effect. I would venture to guess that if Israel were to commit genocide on 1/2 of the Arabs in the Middle East via a nuclear strike tommorrow, most citizens of USA would cheer. So much for the "leaders of free world" bullshit.
A relatively small number of them live under US sponsored repressive regimes. The rest are under homegrown despots. There are also a couple of French-sponsored regimes.
The home-grown despots are either propped up by the US or on the other hand created as a response to the previous US-propped up ones (Iran for example). French? You mean Algier probably. That makes one. And most people in there probably consider France as an instrument of the US (as amusing as that is).
I dont disagree with you on this, he is a religious nut and yes he wants Islam to rule the world. Very much so as the Fundamentalist Christians and Neocons in the US who are blabberring about World Dominion etc.
My entire argument goes towards the fact that if it were not for the US/Israeli attitude for the last 50 years in the Middle East, Osama, no matter how nutty, would be reduced to a weirdo, far-out zealot status amongst his people, and thus unable to recruit followers and obtain resources for his terror campaigns abroad and consequently rendered harmless.
No. Simply both sides are utterly wrong. One for being an empire refusing to redress the wrongs it did and the other for being a bunch of terrorists (as opposed to Geneva convention obeying freedom fighters).
My objection was against a 3rd party taking sides in this mess which only leads to more havoc and more wide-spread bloodshed.
This assumes that the trends will continue unabated for a very looong time (100 years or more despite your alarmist dates pulled off the ceiling by a known Zionist, Thomas Libscomb). Additionaly the anti-semitism and radicalism is equally likely a response to the continuing, seemlesly endless stream of beligernt and arrogant anti-arab actions by both Israel and the US. Untill that stops, noone can tell if this is a part of a violent grand world takover scheme or merely a response to being taunted and degraded. Additionally you forgot to mention that the said Muslim populations are typically North African in origin and desperately poor and mostly unemployed. I bet their extemism has much more to do with that then Millitant Islam (which merely provides a framework on which to hang your social disappointments and setbacks).
While technically true, the contention is that Israel was a major factor in starting the said war and funded/operated many Christian militias responsible for starting it and also for most of the massacres that followed. Hence my "in its name" phrase that I used to refer to Israel.
To be fair, PLO and others wasted no time to jump into the fray on the opposing end.
So do white supremacists in the ole good US of A and in Germany, Russia and you name it. The difference is that they have no base to stand on with the exception of a few nuts like themselves.
Foreign policy is the key. If Arab nations do not suffer under opressive US-sponsored regimes and are humiliated daily by Israeli beligerence (not to mention taught that "might is always right") and live in a world where education is accessible and young people have a future, the religious nuts will have only the bottom of the barrel to scrape for nutcases and malcontents to recruit. That is the whole point. Balkans are in the same boat, impoverished, brutalized by two-bit lordlings (aka the leaders of radical "free market", "shock therapy" reforms) and utterly humiliated by everyone. I am actually suprised that Serbs havent blown something up in NATO countries for the treatment they got. They were villified, bombed, humilliated and abused so that US could show who's the boss. Their war crimes (although were indeed commited) are but a fraction of the deaths in Iraq by US hands. And all of their "victims" were no less murderous. I wonder indeed.
There is no short term solution.
True but one has to start moving in the right direction at some point.
Well now, as far as I am concerned Kerry and Bush are quarrelling over who will serve their corporate masters better. As far as foreign policy is concerned I am not sure which of them is more clueless and will cause more damage. Kerry is a great and totally un-critical supporter of Israel. Or at least the Israeli citizens with US voting rights as well as a significantly vocal and extremely wealthy Jewish voting segment. Not to mention all of those media outlets and TV personalities who are Jewish. As to Israel being sacrificial goat. That sounds like they dont deserve it. I would wish that most Americans woke up and saw that they are being strung up by that bunch of conmen for 50 years now, to your great expense in trillions of dollars and thousands of lives by now. All the while they expand their colonies and confiscate more land and abuse the Palestinians more, who in return reign terror on the Israelis: fun all around. The groups now in charge in Israel are for the most part no different then the Skinheads running around Berlin. They consider themselves superior, God-chosen nation and everyone else their serfs or tools. USA included. There is some weird, unhealthy interaction between Israeli greed and lust for power and American religious right. Makes my skin crawl.