Not so much a contradiction, but rather another case: social "civil disobediance", such as a gay couple kissing in public. This will force one of two reactions: tolerance, and intolerance. Accordingly, shame can be turned around. I believe that this is called "political correctness".
Hmmm. I'm not sure how I feel about that. Intolerance of intolerance, and people having to force things in our faces in order to retain the right privately. I think that I prefer old-fashioned liberalism.
Winning in pedantry wars isn't really all it's cracked up to be. It's pedanticism, silly, as in "If there's one thing that I cannot stand, it's pedanticism".
Is there a middle way between Intelligent Design and Neo-Darwinism?
Science isn't politics, so "middle ways" aren't the point. Either science is an inherently biased activity, and now that we're treading upon God's work, science is no longer serving us well, or else Darwinism is close to the truth.
Stephen J Gould (RIP) attempted to address Neo-Darwinism, and made some progress, but the evolution of species through natural selection remained; his concept of speciation created moments of focused "creativity", but the mechanism remained untouched. He also suggested selection upon scales larger than the gene, but this is using poetry to attck mathematics: a gene's "interest" in self-propagation includes the interests of reciprocting co-conspirators, wherever they're hosted.
There are two issues that are relevant: what is true, and what is science (these need not have the same answer). Finding a middle way is sometimes good political strategy, but isn't the way of either truth (which is singular, though unknowable), or science, which (for example) selects simpler models over more complex ones [Occam's Razor].
Making downmods cost will just result in a crappy system similar to the US justice system - those with the most mod points will always 'win' With new mod points trickling in, there should be no problem. Also, the down-modders are going to have to earn those points back (both sides lose a point). Even with a high-karma-generating sock-puppet, it'll have to generate a lot of useful posts to keep the trolls in Karma.
What would be wrong with a part of the money I spend buying a book of a play going to his family? Practically speaking, friction. Securing the rights is in itself a deterrent. Also, the price charged and/or the conditions attached will simply prevent some wealth being created. More than you imagine, because of the "long tail".
In addition, this whole attitude redefines the meaning of culture; without freedom of expression, culture is sapped to the point that works are so boring that they cannot possibly contain others' IP, for they contain no meaningful IP themselves.
Not everything is property. Consider air. Consider untreated sea water. Why? Partly because some of these are difficult to enforce, but also partly because property requires society to enforce it.
Society will only enforce something if it is in their interests to do so. Certainly rival goods such as a physical painting, a program that hasn't been distributed, or a physical copy of an artist's work are enforced as property because protecting rival goods is good for society, as well as the individual.
But with non-rival goods it's not the same. Furthermore, it's a muddy area whether it is even theft when the act of copying leaves the original. More prosaically, this "theft" can create new demand. Charging for pirated goods is theft in my opinion since this directs funds that are intended for the copyright holder towards the counterfeiter, but it is the misrepresentation that makes it theft: you are buying a forgery. Accordingly, I have always argued that punishment should be proportional to money made, rather than some projected level of damages, that according to research simply doesn't exist.
Property is a positive right; a priori, you only own yourself; less if you are a theist. The rest you have as a result of being willing to defend your property, and because society sees the common interest in preserving incentives so as to allow long-term freedom. The ability to plan, for example. The inability to create derived works is a restraint of freedom, so the reason why property is protected begins to fail with time, and more so as time moves on. Eventually, the value to culture of having a work freely available far outweighs the value of the incentive, so society stops enforcing the right.
Survival in the long term surely means reliable provision of future wealth, such as a pension. The creator needs to know that they're going to survive, rather than survive if they get lucky. Besides, to encourage serious, honest art, you need to encourage the artist to take risks that they might never be popular. Long term copyright doesn't do that.
Property is both an individual right and a social concept. There are forms of property that are not recognised because to do so would bring more harm than good. For example: patents beyond a certain period of time.
Our government needs to more clearly delineate what software can and cannot be patented in order to prevent more ridiculous patents. I'm more in the 'No Software Patents' camp, but I think there are exceptions, particularly for very specialized software in specific industries.
You simply cannot change the nature of the beast. Peer review would be the only way, but that's not going to happen: it would be extremely expensive, and the system of patents helps politicans to get some kind of handle upon creativity. Just as they have difficulty with concepts such as truth (science is understood in wholly economic terms), so diffuse benefits of non-monopolised knowledge are difficult for politicos to understand. "What's good for General Motors is good for the nation" is very much their mindset. In addition, in court, demonstratable harm needs to be shown for a particular regime. Undefinable lost potential simply doesn't stand up in court.
It simply isn't enough to hypothesise an ideal system; the really hard problem is to fix the system to yield dynamics which, though they'll never be perfect, will in fact do more good than harm. The fact that acedemics don't look at this problem properly is a large part of the reason why people think of government as wasteful incompetance. Economic libertarianism would have less support in the face of competance, but politicans and acedemics don't even try. Making system dynamics work with (varied) human nature would seem to be an obvious problem to attempt to solve, but few people even realise that that is the real issue.
I don't think that that's the reason; you can have all the fancy graphics in a python client.
I suspect that brand awareness in the biggest factor, and simply that it works well enough (it doesn't crash too often). Programmers are lazy because Intel and AMD are happy to fix their "goes like a snail" bug for them!
There's a simple way to make Novell uncompetitive: release your code under the GPL version 3. What's touch and go in version 2 is clarified in version 3.
Novell, most likely, won't be licenced to use your code. You get the additional benefit of community defence against future antisocial and free-riding behaviour.
You won't, realistically, speaking know nothing about the parties standing, so take a moment to consider the parties to the best of your knowledge, and vote for one that isn't likely to get in.
The message that you send will be about as clear as your intent. In fact clearer than that of many voters who know that whatever the party programme, they're voting for someone that will exercise their judgement on the voter's behalf, sometimes in opposition to that programme.
There are more subtle reasons to vote third party:
Increasing the choice increases the degree of democracy for everyone
Your specific choice will add strength to the cause in future elections
Whoever gets in, they will have some idea how to win your vote next time around (your vote counts as a signal), so that you are likely to be more strongly represented than someone who actually voted for the candidate
You can effect that election as people intuit* the degree of support for various parties in the area
*I did some canvassing for a centrist, socially liberal party in Britain, and one strategy was to go after the vote of the less-supported "main" party, which resulted in an equal number of votes falling from the other party, now that their provisional supporters felt less threatened.
Slashdot Mirror
"Some are born posthumously" -- Nietzsche
The US will strongarm other countries into alignment with its own laws.
It's about "level playing fields" until the US has to make a change, when it becomes about sovereignty.
Thank-you.
Not so much a contradiction, but rather another case: social "civil disobediance", such as a gay couple kissing in public. This will force one of two reactions: tolerance, and intolerance. Accordingly, shame can be turned around. I believe that this is called "political correctness".
Hmmm. I'm not sure how I feel about that. Intolerance of intolerance, and people having to force things in our faces in order to retain the right privately. I think that I prefer old-fashioned liberalism.
Useful, "Karma-Whoring" replies, or petty arguments that give no information, and give no leads to discover things for yourself?
The Karma system, here, is doing its job. That some people "abuse" it by responding to incentives is, I have to say, a bizzare position.
Stephen J Gould (RIP) attempted to address Neo-Darwinism, and made some progress, but the evolution of species through natural selection remained; his concept of speciation created moments of focused "creativity", but the mechanism remained untouched. He also suggested selection upon scales larger than the gene, but this is using poetry to attck mathematics: a gene's "interest" in self-propagation includes the interests of reciprocting co-conspirators, wherever they're hosted.
There are two issues that are relevant: what is true, and what is science (these need not have the same answer). Finding a middle way is sometimes good political strategy, but isn't the way of either truth (which is singular, though unknowable), or science, which (for example) selects simpler models over more complex ones [Occam's Razor].
You could occasionally /give/ mod points for a good post (down-mods would also cost 1 karma).
:o)
Mod points would have to be added to the system to make up for down-mods, but you'd be able to put right moderation injustice yourself!
Ps. Mod parent up!
In addition, this whole attitude redefines the meaning of culture; without freedom of expression, culture is sapped to the point that works are so boring that they cannot possibly contain others' IP, for they contain no meaningful IP themselves.
Not everything is property. Consider air. Consider untreated sea water. Why? Partly because some of these are difficult to enforce, but also partly because property requires society to enforce it.
Society will only enforce something if it is in their interests to do so. Certainly rival goods such as a physical painting, a program that hasn't been distributed, or a physical copy of an artist's work are enforced as property because protecting rival goods is good for society, as well as the individual.
But with non-rival goods it's not the same. Furthermore, it's a muddy area whether it is even theft when the act of copying leaves the original. More prosaically, this "theft" can create new demand. Charging for pirated goods is theft in my opinion since this directs funds that are intended for the copyright holder towards the counterfeiter, but it is the misrepresentation that makes it theft: you are buying a forgery. Accordingly, I have always argued that punishment should be proportional to money made, rather than some projected level of damages, that according to research simply doesn't exist.
Property is a positive right; a priori, you only own yourself; less if you are a theist. The rest you have as a result of being willing to defend your property, and because society sees the common interest in preserving incentives so as to allow long-term freedom. The ability to plan, for example. The inability to create derived works is a restraint of freedom, so the reason why property is protected begins to fail with time, and more so as time moves on. Eventually, the value to culture of having a work freely available far outweighs the value of the incentive, so society stops enforcing the right.
Survival in the long term surely means reliable provision of future wealth, such as a pension. The creator needs to know that they're going to survive, rather than survive if they get lucky. Besides, to encourage serious, honest art, you need to encourage the artist to take risks that they might never be popular. Long term copyright doesn't do that.
Property is both an individual right and a social concept. There are forms of property that are not recognised because to do so would bring more harm than good. For example: patents beyond a certain period of time.
It simply isn't enough to hypothesise an ideal system; the really hard problem is to fix the system to yield dynamics which, though they'll never be perfect, will in fact do more good than harm. The fact that acedemics don't look at this problem properly is a large part of the reason why people think of government as wasteful incompetance. Economic libertarianism would have less support in the face of competance, but politicans and acedemics don't even try. Making system dynamics work with (varied) human nature would seem to be an obvious problem to attempt to solve, but few people even realise that that is the real issue.
You don't lose anything by clicking the referred link, and it is in fact a referrence; this is how reference points are meant to be used, surely?
I don't think that the post is a troll, although it's clearly opportunistic. Redundant, maybe?
It's useful information about the story; just tag it. Enough agreement, and the tag'll show on the front page.
People can make up their own minds if the tag is useful.
-- nt --
I don't think that that's the reason; you can have all the fancy graphics in a python client.
I suspect that brand awareness in the biggest factor, and simply that it works well enough (it doesn't crash too often). Programmers are lazy because Intel and AMD are happy to fix their "goes like a snail" bug for them!
-- nt --
There's a simple way to make Novell uncompetitive: release your code under the GPL version 3. What's touch and go in version 2 is clarified in version 3.
Novell, most likely, won't be licenced to use your code. You get the additional benefit of community defence against future antisocial and free-riding behaviour.
1. Vote to the best of your knowledge, unless you know that the bulk of your sources are biased.
Or
2. Toss a coin as to whether you should vote or not.
The latter is if you really want to record half a vote; there'll be enough uncertainty in others' reasoning to make this option entropically valid.
BTW, your site is very useful: I found my previous house (before I got a council flat) on it. You provide an extremely valuable service.
The message that you send will be about as clear as your intent. In fact clearer than that of many voters who know that whatever the party programme, they're voting for someone that will exercise their judgement on the voter's behalf, sometimes in opposition to that programme.
There are more subtle reasons to vote third party:
*I did some canvassing for a centrist, socially liberal party in Britain, and one strategy was to go after the vote of the less-supported "main" party, which resulted in an equal number of votes falling from the other party, now that their provisional supporters felt less threatened.
I tried it, but couldn't get it to work straight away.
/usr/local/bin, 32-bit, so I can use plugins normally.
In the meantime, I've upgraded to FF 2.0, which is sitting in
At last, someone using the word correctly.
After all, the root of ignorant is ignore!
Does anyone know how to override the plugin-search on Firefox?
I'm running 64 bit, and would like to be able to use the standalone Flash player, rather than the plugin.
Opera's only free as in beer.
Galeon's what I'm using. It does use Gecko, though, so you still need to install Firefox.