Let's not dilute and weaken the term "censorship" please. It is a despicable act and Google and Yahoo choosing not to provide service to him is not even close.
If a book is censored in England, but can be read in France, it is still censored. The object of censorship is to reduce the circulation of certain material, and that is exactly what has happenned here. Yes, censorship is policy, but are you seriously suggesting that people's right not to be offended outweighs the documentation of human rights abuses? Putting these abuses up on another site means that only people who already know about such abuse will find out about it.
Private entities have the right to censor, but it remains censorship. States also have the right to censor; it doesn't stop the act from being censorship when it occurs. Nor does it prevent the act from being wrong.
I visited You Tube today to complain about the cancellation of Egyptian blogger Wael Abbas's account.
How can documenting human rights abuses be gratuitous? Your policy is against specifically gratuitous violence, after all. I would ask you and your owner (Google) to reverse this evil, and reinstate him forthwith.
There are no mod-points in "funny", and indeed a funny mod can lead to more punishment if it is followed by down-mods.
Also, the authour is anonymous; what does it matter? Without a name, it matters little what the intent is. You don't even know whether the other reply to your post is the same guy! Despite my comments about punishment above (a disguised critique of the fact that funny can't at least cancel down-mods), there's no need to punish such people. If your find it funny, mod it accordingly! If they don't, then your mod takes on an ironic quality.
It's not great for the artists. It's just too bad for the artists. It's pretty damn good for everybody else. Because it seems so counterintuitive given some popular (well fed) preconceptions, but the evidence appears to be that it is about neutral for the artists. They lose a little to students, and gain a little from older fans who get to sample their work.
The government is nothing but a representation, by and for the people. This is the ideal of democratic government, not the reality. First the government is made of a subset of the people, and secondly, the government is made not just of people, but of hierarchy. Without hierarchy, there is no government.
Maybe the people should start looking for the source of the government problems in their own behavior, rather than just pointing fingers (finger-pointing is another people's feature brilliantly represented by the government) I agree that there should be more and better personal responsibility. Also, if people were more willing to fall on their swords, the emergent form would have less power of its own. But few will refuse to go along with something that they do not entirely agree with, since they pass responsibility onto the larger form.
It is the hierarchy that makes large structures worthy of distrust. The large structure and the internal selection and promotion mechanisms subvert the character of the individual, thus larger entities require stronger accountability. That is: they need to prove themselves.
Result: all things being equal, we should trust them less.
The old rethoric argument ? That gets stale after a while you know. And as its true for both sides it only leads to an all-out war. Rubbish. People do not exist for the sake of government. The asymmetry is fundamental.
why should the government treat it's people any different from the way from the people treating the government? Because the Government exists for the people. It has no other purpose. Asymmetry follows from that.
Speed of mutation matters, but is no good if you're not in the right niche to begin with. Approaching a local optimum more rapidly can still leave that optimum vulnerable. Evolution meliorises; it doesn't optimise.
That said, there's plenty of evidence for "microevolution" over short spaces of time. There's also evidence for speciation (two groups diverge so that they can no longer produce fertile offspring with one another); these two together make for "macroevolution".
Calling evolution "random mutation evolution" is actually a misdirection, for it is selection that is the essence of evolution, in just the same way as breeders select for traits in animals; random mutation simply gives the opportunity for evolution; it is not the driving force.
Well, there are always the constitutionalists, but those who authoured the US constitution clearly buy into (specifically) Locke's theory of natural law.
Also, I agree that the state of law is for the good that it does; indeed, natural law theory is itself implicitly utilitarian, in that not working with the grain of nature is inefficient. However, explicit utilitarianism focuses upon the calculable, throwing out the role of intuition. We know when the natural flow of things is being obstructed, but if we cannot use that intuition, we will fail to find the optimum.
Professor Maskin's analysis is a utilitarian argument, which IMO works, but it seems to me to be an argument that follows common sense: the programmer's workflow is obstructed by patents, which sit there like mines.
The nature of the obstruction seems bizarre in that the space of ideas has a very different geometry than that of land (say). It's one thing to rip off another, but to have to be cautious when coding is another matter. You have to be careful whenever you use something slightly innovative (and therefore potentially could have been patented), and if you actually check up on it, you risk triple damages. Being careful not to be too clever is the opposite of the intended effect of patents.
In theory, you could trespass my land by purposely polluting my air (of course, it IS just a theory. Courts invoke "policy" to prevent that theory from being useful). Interestingly, Ron Paul buys your theory.
Yes, and someone can be a pro-life Democrat. Ultimately they are all labels. However, I would argue that capitalism does not necessarily equate to free-markets, and that in practice, industry/corporations prefer to avoid free markets. There IS a free market/libertarian argument against patents. I don't agree with it. I don't think that being a pro-life democrat is a good analogy, in that opposition to software patents isn't a poor fit. In fact, I would say that a free-marketeer who favours positive law, and doesn't believe in natural law is unusual. Natural law theory is the moral basis of free-marketry; without it slanders against socialism have no moral depth. The dreadful regimes that started by breaking the market are no longer unnatural, but simply mistaken in their social policy. Hayek's critique becomes nonsense.
There is a reason why the left favours positive law: appeals to nature seem very strongly to favour the status quo. To the left, it is a clever way in which to entrench power by making it appear unassailable. The left make a mistake here, though: natural law is law that follows the grain of human nature; it is not uncritical approval of human acts.
Dude... a good lawyer is especially good at misdirections;-) All too true:o(
Beware, though; when you're caught, it can undermine trust in your whole approach. Socrates is as persuasive as he is precisely because he is arguing in good faith.
You can patent to deliberately obstruct, as well as to win yourself an incentive. Relatedly, there's little incentive to make use of the time available, and the elimination of risk changes the game entirely. Also, there's little incentive to develop as cheaply as possible, since you'll be compensated for your extra costs.
If you can't make enough money by the watershed, it might be better to let technology advance in other ways first. Naturally this is a loss, but it has to be measured against the delays induced in further innovation by being obstructed. Also, innovation in software is generally very cheap; it isn't the idea, but the execution and integration that is costly, and it might be better for the economy for the idea to be executed by more competent programmers who can implement the idea more cheaply. Since the idea is cheap, there isn't a lot of money that is spent upon research, which is the real justification for the monopoly. Development is not the same as research, since it is a matter of normal skill.
Comparing the costs of pure research (rather than R&D) with the costs of the additional patent clerks, I strongly suspect that far from being a boon, software patents are a cost to the economy. Besides, the real advantage of invention is that your workforce are ahead of the curve (I know this from talking with venture capitalists), rather than that they've got a protected monopoly. As well as being costly to administer, software patents are simply unnecessary.
Keeping the edge in innovation is a matter of using that edge. An invention and innovation-based economy is not an "IPR-based" economy; that is simply clever sophistry.
What you describe is Natural Law theory, the opposing idea is Positive law, which accepts law as a human construct that isn't based on some moral premise that needs to be discovered. In a common law system, everything and anything can and often is, property. Referring to Air: in a common law system you own the rights to the air above your land and all the dirt/rocks/lava/oil below as well. You can be done for trespass, but not for breathing. You own the space, not the air.
In other words, I don't need to prove that patents are naturally ANYTHING. I can very easily prove that they are legally property, and therefore, they ARE property. I was responding to the emotional content of your message, in particular with regards to the charge of socialism.
Socialists eat, you know. Do you eat?
My point is that someone can be a capitalist and oppose patents on software. Since you brought in a moral angle (the charge of "socialism") concerning how a society should run its economy, I thought that it was appropriate to show that there was a moral foundation that a capitalist could reasonably adhere to and oppose software patents.
Misdirections like yours here probably don't work in a courtroom if the other guy's lawyer is any good, BTW.
In respect to his argument I think that there is perhaps a viable debate to limit the scope of software patents -- but I still believe that the existence of patent rights in software is not inherently bad. Not just scope. Duration. The "20 year" magic number is poorly justified in this case.
I can believe that you're not a deliberate troll, but you give away your training in law rather than economics.
How come? Propertarian essentialism. An economist would argue in terms of costs and benefits, but you have argued in terms of the nation's "intellectual property based economy". It is clear that software patents have both costs and benefits: the benefits are the usual "incentive" benefits, but the costs are the obstruction to future innovation.
Problems that we bump up against whilst attempting to do other things often need innovative steps to be solved, so the default level of innovation is not zero in the absence of patents (assuming that copyright is still present). Accordingly it is not a priori true that patents are a boon, since there is something (potentially) to be lost, as well as gained.
That innovation is necessary for the economy is not synonymous with intellectual property of various kinds necessarily being a boon.
Also, you've not followed this economist's argument, but have dismissed it out of hand. If he is right that invention piles upon invention, it isn't only the next step that is obstructed (which might be worth the wait for the patent to expire, or the costs of licencing), but several steps (which, by his analysis, isn't).
Politicians' jargon phrases don't mean a whole lot. The software boom has led to an invention and innovation based economy; intellectual property is a means to an end. Also, governments granting temporary monopolies is not inherently capitalist.
You've first got to prove that patents are naturally property; the capitalism of intelligent free-marketeers is not that everything should be property (how to we propertise air with any precision), but rather that law should reflect natural human interaction. By this reckoning, socialism is bad because it is unnatural.
But then, even a stuck clock is right twice a day.
You not read my reply. My argument had nothing to do with Apple being wealthy, but rather addressed the right to crack (not pirate) the iPhone.
Apple is attempting to defeat the law's intent, and it is moral to work around such attempts. This has nothing to do with the fact that the other party is Apple.
I made a separate point about morality not being ignorant of the other (such as when there is rational distrust), in order to address your more general point. Morality is not completely blind. I do myself believe in natural law and natural right, but these are rooted in equilibrium and human nature, and not in axiomatic rules.
If natural, rather than customary or conventional right is relevant here, it would be most likely the right to reverse engineer; law should not presume against natural curiousity and tinkering.
As for your examples, they push the approach that if right doesn't come down to simple rules, then there is no right. I believe that this position is unreasonable.
There are times when the lesser of two evils applies. A utilitarian framework would make this explicit, but there are times when rather than numerical comparison of numbers who are "happy" or whatever, a higher principle comes into play.
As an example, the iPhone could be unlocked abroad (where there is no AT&T) so that the owner can reach their insurer for payment for an essential operation.
I agree that this isn't a matter of who the other party is, but there are all sorts of times when one has cause to distrust someone, and it is reasonable to treat them differently from someone who you do trust. Do you go out of your way to help someone who has cried "wolf" too many times, when there are others who haven't?
The DMCA was recently deliberately ammended to allow phones to be cracked for the purpose of running on other networks; Apple is already running against the spirit of the law, and possibly also the letter. Cracking the phone is moral, for Apple know the laws that apply, and their intent, when they are selling the iPhone; they have no excuse to complain.
Those who have cracked their phones, or had them cracked, did so in the rational expectation that doing so would be legal, and indeed allowed. Apple's behaviour is shady, even if it is not illegal.
Slashdot Mirror
You're talking bollocks.
Private entities have the right to censor, but it remains censorship. States also have the right to censor; it doesn't stop the act from being censorship when it occurs. Nor does it prevent the act from being wrong.
I visited You Tube today to complain about the cancellation of Egyptian blogger Wael Abbas's account.
How can documenting human rights abuses be gratuitous? Your policy is against specifically gratuitous violence, after all. I would ask you and your owner (Google) to reverse this evil, and reinstate him forthwith.
I could argue semantics, that "seize" doesn't necessarily mean "take", but it would be, most likely, implausible.
GGP was funny; I was trying to explain why to the hard of modding.
The Russians have always sucked at government. One of the world's great tragedies.
Also, the authour is anonymous; what does it matter? Without a name, it matters little what the intent is. You don't even know whether the other reply to your post is the same guy! Despite my comments about punishment above (a disguised critique of the fact that funny can't at least cancel down-mods), there's no need to punish such people. If your find it funny, mod it accordingly! If they don't, then your mod takes on an ironic quality.
In chess, you seize the opponent's King.
Niether intensionalism, not consequentialism are enough to form a complete moral judgement.
Didn't Richard Stallman's outfit have something to do with it as well?
There's an old post of mine with some relevant links.
If you can still stand for election, you've probably got yourself a good deal.
It is the hierarchy that makes large structures worthy of distrust. The large structure and the internal selection and promotion mechanisms subvert the character of the individual, thus larger entities require stronger accountability. That is: they need to prove themselves.
Result: all things being equal, we should trust them less.
That said, there's plenty of evidence for "microevolution" over short spaces of time. There's also evidence for speciation (two groups diverge so that they can no longer produce fertile offspring with one another); these two together make for "macroevolution".
Calling evolution "random mutation evolution" is actually a misdirection, for it is selection that is the essence of evolution, in just the same way as breeders select for traits in animals; random mutation simply gives the opportunity for evolution; it is not the driving force.
"Macro"-evolution is micro-evolution plus speciation.
Also, I agree that the state of law is for the good that it does; indeed, natural law theory is itself implicitly utilitarian, in that not working with the grain of nature is inefficient. However, explicit utilitarianism focuses upon the calculable, throwing out the role of intuition. We know when the natural flow of things is being obstructed, but if we cannot use that intuition, we will fail to find the optimum.
Professor Maskin's analysis is a utilitarian argument, which IMO works, but it seems to me to be an argument that follows common sense: the programmer's workflow is obstructed by patents, which sit there like mines.
The nature of the obstruction seems bizarre in that the space of ideas has a very different geometry than that of land (say). It's one thing to rip off another, but to have to be cautious when coding is another matter. You have to be careful whenever you use something slightly innovative (and therefore potentially could have been patented), and if you actually check up on it, you risk triple damages. Being careful not to be too clever is the opposite of the intended effect of patents.
There is a reason why the left favours positive law: appeals to nature seem very strongly to favour the status quo. To the left, it is a clever way in which to entrench power by making it appear unassailable. The left make a mistake here, though: natural law is law that follows the grain of human nature; it is not uncritical approval of human acts.
Dude... a good lawyer is especially good at misdirectionsBeware, though; when you're caught, it can undermine trust in your whole approach. Socrates is as persuasive as he is precisely because he is arguing in good faith.
You can patent to deliberately obstruct, as well as to win yourself an incentive. Relatedly, there's little incentive to make use of the time available, and the elimination of risk changes the game entirely. Also, there's little incentive to develop as cheaply as possible, since you'll be compensated for your extra costs.
If you can't make enough money by the watershed, it might be better to let technology advance in other ways first. Naturally this is a loss, but it has to be measured against the delays induced in further innovation by being obstructed. Also, innovation in software is generally very cheap; it isn't the idea, but the execution and integration that is costly, and it might be better for the economy for the idea to be executed by more competent programmers who can implement the idea more cheaply. Since the idea is cheap, there isn't a lot of money that is spent upon research, which is the real justification for the monopoly. Development is not the same as research, since it is a matter of normal skill.
Comparing the costs of pure research (rather than R&D) with the costs of the additional patent clerks, I strongly suspect that far from being a boon, software patents are a cost to the economy. Besides, the real advantage of invention is that your workforce are ahead of the curve (I know this from talking with venture capitalists), rather than that they've got a protected monopoly. As well as being costly to administer, software patents are simply unnecessary.
Keeping the edge in innovation is a matter of using that edge. An invention and innovation-based economy is not an "IPR-based" economy; that is simply clever sophistry.
Also, what if someone thinks of an (infringing) process that is much cheaper? It's as likely to cause inefficiencies as efficiencies.
Socialists eat, you know. Do you eat?
My point is that someone can be a capitalist and oppose patents on software. Since you brought in a moral angle (the charge of "socialism") concerning how a society should run its economy, I thought that it was appropriate to show that there was a moral foundation that a capitalist could reasonably adhere to and oppose software patents.
Misdirections like yours here probably don't work in a courtroom if the other guy's lawyer is any good, BTW.
Trouble is, shorter timespans are not on the table.
How come? Propertarian essentialism. An economist would argue in terms of costs and benefits, but you have argued in terms of the nation's "intellectual property based economy". It is clear that software patents have both costs and benefits: the benefits are the usual "incentive" benefits, but the costs are the obstruction to future innovation.
Problems that we bump up against whilst attempting to do other things often need innovative steps to be solved, so the default level of innovation is not zero in the absence of patents (assuming that copyright is still present). Accordingly it is not a priori true that patents are a boon, since there is something (potentially) to be lost, as well as gained.
That innovation is necessary for the economy is not synonymous with intellectual property of various kinds necessarily being a boon.
Also, you've not followed this economist's argument, but have dismissed it out of hand. If he is right that invention piles upon invention, it isn't only the next step that is obstructed (which might be worth the wait for the patent to expire, or the costs of licencing), but several steps (which, by his analysis, isn't).
Politicians' jargon phrases don't mean a whole lot. The software boom has led to an invention and innovation based economy; intellectual property is a means to an end. Also, governments granting temporary monopolies is not inherently capitalist.
But then, even a stuck clock is right twice a day.
Apple is attempting to defeat the law's intent, and it is moral to work around such attempts. This has nothing to do with the fact that the other party is Apple.
I made a separate point about morality not being ignorant of the other (such as when there is rational distrust), in order to address your more general point. Morality is not completely blind. I do myself believe in natural law and natural right, but these are rooted in equilibrium and human nature, and not in axiomatic rules.
If natural, rather than customary or conventional right is relevant here, it would be most likely the right to reverse engineer; law should not presume against natural curiousity and tinkering.
As for your examples, they push the approach that if right doesn't come down to simple rules, then there is no right. I believe that this position is unreasonable.
As an example, the iPhone could be unlocked abroad (where there is no AT&T) so that the owner can reach their insurer for payment for an essential operation.
I agree that this isn't a matter of who the other party is, but there are all sorts of times when one has cause to distrust someone, and it is reasonable to treat them differently from someone who you do trust. Do you go out of your way to help someone who has cried "wolf" too many times, when there are others who haven't?
The DMCA was recently deliberately ammended to allow phones to be cracked for the purpose of running on other networks; Apple is already running against the spirit of the law, and possibly also the letter. Cracking the phone is moral, for Apple know the laws that apply, and their intent, when they are selling the iPhone; they have no excuse to complain.
Those who have cracked their phones, or had them cracked, did so in the rational expectation that doing so would be legal, and indeed allowed. Apple's behaviour is shady, even if it is not illegal.