When some of the ultra-Orthodox Israelis started accusing people of being anti-Semitic for opposing their settlement program.
The settlement programme is not "the ultra-Orthodox's". The religiously ideological settlers I met while spending several weeks travelling around the West Bank were nearly always Orthodox Jews, not ultra-Orthodox.
But Israeli settlements have the same variety of views as in Israel proper. You'll find an enormous amount of atheists. There are people from the former USSR who immigrated to Israel to escape poverty on the basis of Jewish ancestry, but they feel closer in terms of faith or culture to Orthodox Christianity. For them, living in a settlement is about getting cheaper housing, not some belief that God gave them this land.
Plus, you have non-Jewish figures like the Druze MP Ayoub Kara who call for an expansion of settlements for supposed security interests.
Which in itself is a shame because being Jewish, on it's own, doesn't make one Semitic, and the Hebrew people aren't the only Semitic peoples who get hated and discriminated against.
Argument from etymology is a fallacy. Words can mean something different from what they once did, or something different from the sum of their parts. Simply because the term "anti-semitic" contains the element "semitic" does not mean it must or should refer to anyone in particular beyond what it is commonly agreed to mean.
A look at the OED entry for "anti-semitism" will show that from the very first attestations, the term "anti-semitism" referred specifically to sentiment against the Jewish people. The term never made any refer to another peoples of Semitic language, culture or ancestry, and it never made any claim about the genetics of the Jewish people to which it refers.
Science, bitches. Saussure recognized l'arbitraire du signe over a century ago. You might want to get with the times.
It seems your answer to this -- your idea for this "inevitable new economy" you speak of -- is a reversion to the patronage system, where the rich and powerful get to decide what we read and watch and hear. In such a system, there would still be movies and video games, but only as propaganda and advertising tools.
As I said, so many classic films of the 20th century were made through private patronage or state arts subsidies, success in the box office being an afterthought. You don't seem to be aware of how much widely acclaimed cinema has been created like this. Even in the US, not typically known for generous arts subsidies, filmmakers like Jim Jarmusch have received state funding (watch the credits of Down by Law for example). It's hard to see what certain auteur films are propaganda or advertising -- if they have any clear political message, it's often one challenging the institutions that funded them.
Because modern technology has given you the tools to take their work for free
No, it's because developed modern societies have provided the tools for works to be funded without relying on the vagaries of the free market and royalties from every copy made. The creators of the music I consume -- contemporary art music and European jazz -- are paid regardless of each recording sale made. And in my country, even pop music gets some degree of such funding. Things are pretty good; there's no sign of the apocalypse you speak of.
Shakespeare and Roman poetry were performance arts, that's how they made their money. Butts in seats.
While some literature was performance art, many works were intended for the private enjoyment of a few. They got made nevertheless.
And honestly I want to understand why you feel you have an intrinsic right to something I made simply because I made it on a computer?
If something ends up on someone else's computer, they ought to be able to do what they like with the bits on their system.
f I make the same game out of wood blocks do you suddenly not have an intrinsic right to it?
Games in fact cannot be copyrighted. From Copyright.gov:
Copyright does not protect the idea for a game, its name or title, or the method or methods for playing it. Nor does copyright protect any idea, system, method, device, or trademark material involved in developing, merchandising, or playing a game. Once a game has been made public, nothing in the copyright law prevents others from developing another game based on similar principles.
So even with traditional US copyright law, others do a right to copy, alter and distribute or sell the game (of course stripped of trademarks and original texts).
If piracy spreads, nobody will create anything because their work will be pirated as soon as it is finished.
I don't find the support of figures who say things like this entirely welcome. It shows a great ignorance of history. Copyright is a fairly recent concept, popping up only 500 years ago and mainly limited to the West. So much of the Western canon -- the Greek and Latin classics, Dante, Chaucer, even Shakespeare, arose in a time when content creators were not compensated for each and every copy (and non-Western traditions contain further riches).
And there was a lot of copying going on. In ancient Rome, it was common for audience members to transcribe poetry recitals, have many copies generated by amanuenses, and then sold in the marketplace with no money going back to the original author. As far as I know, the sole example of someone complaining about this was Martial in one of his epigrams, and he only had a problem with people passing off his work as their own -- so plagiarism, not "copyright infringement". Content creation flourished without copyright, and even in recent times, when copyright was in full force, so many classic films and musical compositions were produced with a boatload of private patronage or state arts subsidies, so the ability to be paid royalties for each copy made didn't really factor into their creation.
In order to quicken the rise of an inevitable new economy, it's better that people just say straight out that copyright is an untenable concept and not a moral universal. No more of this wishy-washy "Piracy should be fought, but this law goes too far."
And you miss the point. Space elevators would enable huge profits.
That's uncertain. The discovery of the New World led to disaster for the economy of Iberia; the market simply couldn't hand the collapse in the price of metals.
Tell me, how does Virgin Galactic fit into your little world-view?
Virgin Galactic's goal is to send the exceedingly wealthy on suborbital flights for a thrill lasting a few minutes. It is not a good example of efforts to send mankind to the stars.
Clearly you weren't on Slashdot in 2003 and 2004, when the GNAA (Gay Nigger Association of America) troll group dominated the early posts in a comment thread. A handful of scattered, rather pathetic comments like the OP is nothing to be concerned about.
Absolutely not - but it would exacerbate the problem of overpopulation, at least until we learn to terraform other planets and/or live in space.
One of the points made in Kim Stanley Robinson's trilogy beginning with Red Mars is that even with things like multiple space elevators, you'd never be able to move more people off the planet than are being born everywhere on it. The colonization of space is not a solution for population pressures.
blowing public funds on stadia and "art"... maybe we could do better on the social safety net front.
Countries with strong welfare states also heavily subsidize the arts, because the arts are considered vital for quality of life. I live in Finland, and ticket prices for orchestral concerts (and an orchestra is provided even in the smaller towns) are kept low by state subsidy so that anyone, regardless of his class, can have access to fine music. The same goes for museum entry in most Western countries.
If you cut arts subsidies, the only entertainment that the poor will have access to are vacuous things like reality television and highly formulaic pop music.
Incidentally, Tolkien himself acknowledged his limitations. See The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. Ed. Humphrey Carpenter. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981, p. 173 (#142):
Slavonic languages are for me almost in the same category [i.e., no aptitude]. I have had a go at many tongues in my time, but [...] the time I once spent on trying to learn Serbian and Russian have left me with no practical results, only a strong impression of the structure and word-aesthetic.
So again, your claim "[He] likely could learn a new language unknown to him in a day" is hyperbole.
Sure they did. There's the simple rune replacement of the Hobbit, leading to the more advanced dwarvish rune language in LotR...
You are talking about writing systems, not languages.
Tolkien was academically knowledgeable about the Old English, Middle English, Ancient Gaelic, the old Norse languages, and some ancient Germanic languages...
All of the languages you cite are Indo-European, typologically Indo-Europeanized (Finnish) or Semitic. His invented languages simply resemble these language families. As I said, Tolkien, though a great philologist, was seemingly not aware of the typological diversity among the world's languages as linguists are. He made a niche for himself and stayed in it. That's not to discount his accomplishments, which are many, but there's far too much hyperbole about Tolkien's knowledge of languages. I mean, seriously:
[He] likely could learn a new language unknown to him in a day.
And do you have any citation to back up that assertion about Sanskrit?.
Tolkien most certainly was not only an expert on how "the language" worked, he is arguably the greatest expert on how all languages work. Forget his day job, the man was really a philologist.
Philologists are not concerned with "how all languages work", but rather with working with texts in a small group of languages they specialize in. It is linguists who are concerned with language in general. And even when Tolkien was creating his own languages, one can see that they do not vary typologically to any great extent. Judging from his writings, Tolkien was unaware of "how all languages work"
By using rhyme, Tolkien is far away from the Old English tradition. And the fact that his verse employs such facile rhymes might also explain why the Nobel committee didn't find his work to have merit.
If adoption were widespread, wouldn't automatically avoiding bad neighbourhoods simply be another instance of "white flight", denying neighbourhoods economic input that leads to further poverty and more violence?
They will go for profit. It is already profitable, which is why Branson, Allen, etc are all trying to get in on the ground floor. The cost of shipping a 'thing' to orbit is astronomically high. Lower the costs and you have a guaranteed profit.
Branson is not aiming for orbit. Virgin Galactic seeks to offer sub-orbital flights for touristic purposes, which is a long way away from orbital flights for commercial purposes.
I am in no way saying it was deserved, but it also wasn't motivated by the US's wealth. Its policies in the middle east, especially the unquestioning support for Israel, are much more relevant.
Islamism's dislike specifically of the United States predates US support of Israel by a couple of decades. Qutb, whose ideas have been massively influential, based his dislike of the US mainly on domestic issues there, not international ones. American interventions abroad may have added fuel to the fire, but it was not the first or sole reason.
When many people come to the same conclusion independently, maybe there's some truth to what they're saying.
They aren't philosophers coming to the same conclusion independently. The majority of posters on Slashdot who claim that rights must be limited to a certain few, are Americans who grew up with a Lockean national mythology. They perpetuate this mythology unthinkingly, seemingly unaware of the many other schools of thought on the issue.
Tell me, is food free in your country as well? Water? Rent? Clothes? Where does the free shit end? Is it humane for little teeny tiny defenseless children do go without those things?
Children do get all those things free in Finland if necessary. Housing and utilities are provided to those demonstrating need. The free baby clothes and free meals go to all. The children will eventually pay back in taxes more than they received in such benefits, so making it attractive to have children -- as opposed to children seeming like a burden on the parents' finances -- is a matter of the state making investments for the future.
I still consider it a transitionary solution, useful, but only until we can grow organs and nerve tissue and basically fix people like we fix machinery:)
It's interesting you think that, as it's rather the opposite of the trend of science-fiction and posthumanist fantasizing.
For the former, Larry Niven's Known Space universe (such as the tales in Flatlander) had organ transplantation as a widely implemented medical solution (amusingly leading to the death penalty for even minor crimes), but eventually ended by alloplasty, "gadgets instead of organs".
For the latter, Ray Kurzweil and his fans hope that we'll be able to upload our brains into computers any day now. And that's understandable, since a civilization that has technology advanced enough to produce new biological parts in vitro may be on the cusp of transcending biology entirely.
This quote sums up all you need to know about religion: "Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful." â" Lucius Annaeus Seneca (Seneca the Younger).
Thats where you went wrong... there is no such thing.
All texts require interpretation. No human utterance is unambiguous. This has been understood for over a century now, since Saussure proposed l'arbitraire du signe. Science, bitches.
Slashdot Mirror
The settlement programme is not "the ultra-Orthodox's". The religiously ideological settlers I met while spending several weeks travelling around the West Bank were nearly always Orthodox Jews, not ultra-Orthodox.
But Israeli settlements have the same variety of views as in Israel proper. You'll find an enormous amount of atheists. There are people from the former USSR who immigrated to Israel to escape poverty on the basis of Jewish ancestry, but they feel closer in terms of faith or culture to Orthodox Christianity. For them, living in a settlement is about getting cheaper housing, not some belief that God gave them this land.
Plus, you have non-Jewish figures like the Druze MP Ayoub Kara who call for an expansion of settlements for supposed security interests.
Argument from etymology is a fallacy. Words can mean something different from what they once did, or something different from the sum of their parts. Simply because the term "anti-semitic" contains the element "semitic" does not mean it must or should refer to anyone in particular beyond what it is commonly agreed to mean.
A look at the OED entry for "anti-semitism" will show that from the very first attestations, the term "anti-semitism" referred specifically to sentiment against the Jewish people. The term never made any refer to another peoples of Semitic language, culture or ancestry, and it never made any claim about the genetics of the Jewish people to which it refers.
Science, bitches. Saussure recognized l'arbitraire du signe over a century ago. You might want to get with the times.
As I said, so many classic films of the 20th century were made through private patronage or state arts subsidies, success in the box office being an afterthought. You don't seem to be aware of how much widely acclaimed cinema has been created like this. Even in the US, not typically known for generous arts subsidies, filmmakers like Jim Jarmusch have received state funding (watch the credits of Down by Law for example). It's hard to see what certain auteur films are propaganda or advertising -- if they have any clear political message, it's often one challenging the institutions that funded them.
No, it's because developed modern societies have provided the tools for works to be funded without relying on the vagaries of the free market and royalties from every copy made. The creators of the music I consume -- contemporary art music and European jazz -- are paid regardless of each recording sale made. And in my country, even pop music gets some degree of such funding. Things are pretty good; there's no sign of the apocalypse you speak of.
While some literature was performance art, many works were intended for the private enjoyment of a few. They got made nevertheless.
If something ends up on someone else's computer, they ought to be able to do what they like with the bits on their system.
Games in fact cannot be copyrighted. From Copyright.gov:
So even with traditional US copyright law, others do a right to copy, alter and distribute or sell the game (of course stripped of trademarks and original texts).
I don't find the support of figures who say things like this entirely welcome. It shows a great ignorance of history. Copyright is a fairly recent concept, popping up only 500 years ago and mainly limited to the West. So much of the Western canon -- the Greek and Latin classics, Dante, Chaucer, even Shakespeare, arose in a time when content creators were not compensated for each and every copy (and non-Western traditions contain further riches).
And there was a lot of copying going on. In ancient Rome, it was common for audience members to transcribe poetry recitals, have many copies generated by amanuenses, and then sold in the marketplace with no money going back to the original author. As far as I know, the sole example of someone complaining about this was Martial in one of his epigrams, and he only had a problem with people passing off his work as their own -- so plagiarism, not "copyright infringement". Content creation flourished without copyright, and even in recent times, when copyright was in full force, so many classic films and musical compositions were produced with a boatload of private patronage or state arts subsidies, so the ability to be paid royalties for each copy made didn't really factor into their creation.
In order to quicken the rise of an inevitable new economy, it's better that people just say straight out that copyright is an untenable concept and not a moral universal. No more of this wishy-washy "Piracy should be fought, but this law goes too far."
Rand Paul != Ron Paul.
The point is that the longterm benefits of a technology might not suffice to attract investment if the shorter term looks more grim.
That's uncertain. The discovery of the New World led to disaster for the economy of Iberia; the market simply couldn't hand the collapse in the price of metals.
Virgin Galactic's goal is to send the exceedingly wealthy on suborbital flights for a thrill lasting a few minutes. It is not a good example of efforts to send mankind to the stars.
Clearly you weren't on Slashdot in 2003 and 2004, when the GNAA (Gay Nigger Association of America) troll group dominated the early posts in a comment thread. A handful of scattered, rather pathetic comments like the OP is nothing to be concerned about.
One of the points made in Kim Stanley Robinson's trilogy beginning with Red Mars is that even with things like multiple space elevators, you'd never be able to move more people off the planet than are being born everywhere on it. The colonization of space is not a solution for population pressures.
Countries with strong welfare states also heavily subsidize the arts, because the arts are considered vital for quality of life. I live in Finland, and ticket prices for orchestral concerts (and an orchestra is provided even in the smaller towns) are kept low by state subsidy so that anyone, regardless of his class, can have access to fine music. The same goes for museum entry in most Western countries.
If you cut arts subsidies, the only entertainment that the poor will have access to are vacuous things like reality television and highly formulaic pop music.
Incidentally, Tolkien himself acknowledged his limitations. See The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. Ed. Humphrey Carpenter. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981, p. 173 (#142):
So again, your claim "[He] likely could learn a new language unknown to him in a day" is hyperbole.
You are talking about writing systems, not languages.
All of the languages you cite are Indo-European, typologically Indo-Europeanized (Finnish) or Semitic. His invented languages simply resemble these language families. As I said, Tolkien, though a great philologist, was seemingly not aware of the typological diversity among the world's languages as linguists are. He made a niche for himself and stayed in it. That's not to discount his accomplishments, which are many, but there's far too much hyperbole about Tolkien's knowledge of languages. I mean, seriously:
And do you have any citation to back up that assertion about Sanskrit?.
Philologists are not concerned with "how all languages work", but rather with working with texts in a small group of languages they specialize in. It is linguists who are concerned with language in general. And even when Tolkien was creating his own languages, one can see that they do not vary typologically to any great extent. Judging from his writings, Tolkien was unaware of "how all languages work"
By using rhyme, Tolkien is far away from the Old English tradition. And the fact that his verse employs such facile rhymes might also explain why the Nobel committee didn't find his work to have merit.
If adoption were widespread, wouldn't automatically avoiding bad neighbourhoods simply be another instance of "white flight", denying neighbourhoods economic input that leads to further poverty and more violence?
What a daft comment. Obligatory xkcd.
Branson is not aiming for orbit. Virgin Galactic seeks to offer sub-orbital flights for touristic purposes, which is a long way away from orbital flights for commercial purposes.
Islamism's dislike specifically of the United States predates US support of Israel by a couple of decades. Qutb, whose ideas have been massively influential, based his dislike of the US mainly on domestic issues there, not international ones. American interventions abroad may have added fuel to the fire, but it was not the first or sole reason .
They aren't philosophers coming to the same conclusion independently. The majority of posters on Slashdot who claim that rights must be limited to a certain few, are Americans who grew up with a Lockean national mythology. They perpetuate this mythology unthinkingly, seemingly unaware of the many other schools of thought on the issue.
Children do get all those things free in Finland if necessary. Housing and utilities are provided to those demonstrating need. The free baby clothes and free meals go to all. The children will eventually pay back in taxes more than they received in such benefits, so making it attractive to have children -- as opposed to children seeming like a burden on the parents' finances -- is a matter of the state making investments for the future.
It's interesting you think that, as it's rather the opposite of the trend of science-fiction and posthumanist fantasizing.
For the former, Larry Niven's Known Space universe (such as the tales in Flatlander ) had organ transplantation as a widely implemented medical solution (amusingly leading to the death penalty for even minor crimes), but eventually ended by alloplasty, "gadgets instead of organs".
For the latter, Ray Kurzweil and his fans hope that we'll be able to upload our brains into computers any day now. And that's understandable, since a civilization that has technology advanced enough to produce new biological parts in vitro may be on the cusp of transcending biology entirely.
Creative Commons isn't the public domain. The term "licencing" is enough to make it clear copyright applies, though CC tries to be generous.
That quotation is spurious.
All texts require interpretation. No human utterance is unambiguous. This has been understood for over a century now, since Saussure proposed l'arbitraire du signe. Science, bitches.