While law is something we can all more or less agree upon, pointing to the relevant documents even if we want the laws overturned, morality is not defined so conveniently. I think you'll find a pretty large amount of Slashdotters believe that filesharing is not immoral.
I agree. I regularly use the N900 for SSH sessions with several servers. It runs Debian, so there's no much of a learning curve. There's a physical keyboard that you can easily remap for your own purposes.
I recall this idea from Kim Stanley Robinson's trilogy beginning with Red Mars, but was it already a stock concept of science fiction before Robinson?
The terraforming idea in that trilogy that I think is even cooler is using a massive solar sail to block sunlight from hitting Venus until the atmosphere freezes, and then start work on the surface.
Passports had existed before, often within countries. In Hugo's Les Miserables Valjean had problems getting around France because his passport showed he was an ex-con. Moving from one region of pre-revolutionary Russia to another often required a passport, a system designed to keep serfs in their place.
The Eurostar requires showing a passport because you are going from a non-Schengen country to a Schengen country. The UK has always been the odd man out in choosing not to join Schengen. For all other European Union countries (and Norway) except for Romania and Bulgaria, you no longer need to show a passport or EU identity card when going from one to the other.
While the US didn't become one of the world's only two superpowers until after World War II, the US had already become a major economic player by the end of the 19th century. European literature of the time is filled with angst that those uncouth ex-colonials were buying up everything and signalling the demise of Europe.
Funnily enough, the Chinese military has been accused of running facilities for massive duplication of the bootleg CDs and DVDs you find all over China. If they'd kill this guy, it could only be because they don't like competition.
Taking millions of slashdotters, rolling them into one ponderous abstraction and then putting words in their mouth... that just never grows old for you, does it?
Slashdot provides the stories its audience wants. The site does survive on ad revenue, after all; you want to keep telling people what they hear. The continual stream of positive stories about filesharing that Slashdot has posted over my decade on the site suggest that a large enough percentage of readers enjoy trading music, films and ebooks that a generalization like "You Slashdotters..." is understandable.
Whatever your opinion on copyright law, you've got to admit that copying another person's work and SELLING IT without them getting a cut is a dick move and shouldn't be tolerated.
It is a dick move only because Western European society in the early modern era starting seeing it as a dick move. In Ancient Rome, an audience member would transcribe a poet's recital, have dozens of copies made by amanuenses, and then sold in the marketplace with no money going back to the poet. There's not a single instance of anyone complaining. Martial lampooned a guy who would put his own name on these copies, but plagiarism is distinct from mere copying. There continue to be cultures all over the world to this day where people don't understand copyright at all. Try explaining it to them, and they'll think you're a lunatic. If successive generations see increasingly less value in copyright, we're only returning to a state before what would see a freakish aberration of several hundred years.
Yes, various cultures have also believed it was noble to own slaves or perform human sacrifice. But I think that the nature of this issue, whether respecting copyright is objectively moral or a mere government fiat with the hope of encouraging production*, ought to be carefully examined instead of simply assuming without question that copyright must exist.
(This, incidentally, was the view of the American Founding Fathers. They had an acute sense of natural rights -- endowed by the Creator and only recognized by the government -- but did not consider copyright among them.)
If you want students to share something with their peers, why not just encourage them to start publishing early? That way the vast community outside of your lecture hall can see it too. In any event, courses where the lecturer wanta to hear what his students have to say always risk devolving into inane chitchat in my experience.
How is that actually enforced? Does the university give reports to the immigration police? The only requirement to maintain my student visa in Finland was that I gain a certain number of credits annually, which I could get just as much from taking book exams every few months as taking lecture-based courses.
"But then a thought struck me, if I skip all classes in school, why am I still attending it and paying the tuition fees? Just for the degree?"
And the library, and the right to free interlibrary loan from other universities, and the right to put a fancy institution's name on your paper if you want to contribute to a conference or journal...
I spent my undergraduate years at an American university and then moved to Europe for the remainder of my academic years. Imagine how happy I was to find that here lectures are not obligatory -- the exams are rigorous, the expectations clearly laid out in a syllabus, and you're welcome to study on your own and show up on the last day of the course and show your knowledge. While some fields may actually impart useful knowledge through lectures, in so many fields one can get the same information from books.
So why not just make lectures optional? The students who are likely to simply surf the net can be absent, while those who come will probably want to be there.
Script reform lost steam about the same time Maoism did. By the early 1970s, a respect for China's antiquity and maintenance of some traditions had reasserted itself.
I assure you that the few strokes the Chinese have to learn also create a simple context - very often, a graph is a word. As a native English speaker, I found it quite easy to learn to associate Chinese graphs with their meaning -- it's not nearly as difficult as it looks. It's considerably more difficult to learn to speak the language(s), but reading isn't too bad at all.
Unfortunately a great deal of research disagrees with you. The Chinese writing system arguably holds Chinese children back from becoming literate as quickly as in countries that use a relatively phonemic alphabet, by several years. See John Defrancis' The Chinese Languages: Fact and Fantasy (University of Hawaii Press, 1984) which chronicles the desire of both Chinese and foreign scholars to transition the Chinese language to an alphabetic script, a task that failed because of the crushing weight of tradition.
The term for an international language is Lingua Franca - guess who coined the term - and yet despite the language that sparked the term being kept very pure indeed, it is hardly spoken today
You seem to think erroneously that the term "lingua franca" originally referred to France. It didn't, it was a Mediterranean pidgin that had no ambition to purity at all, "a mixed language composed mostly (80%) of Italian with a broad vocabulary drawn from Turkish, French, Spanish, Greek and Arabic".
My understanding of libertarianism is minimal government with services being provided by free and voluntary associations of like-minded individuals instead of involuntary taxes. The only role of government is to ensure the freedom of people to establish those associations. This political philosophy does not accord at all with Sweden. Now, if I've misunderstood libertarianism, I'm open to correction.
The more I read about Assange's political and societal beliefs, the more I wonder why he flirted with establishing residency in Sweden. He describes himself as a Libertarian when support for a welfare state at some level is practically universal among Swedes, and now he finds the country a hornets nest of wacko feminists.
Social Text is a little-known journal of postmodernism that didn't even have a peer review system in place. Most people never heard of it until the Sokal affair. The major journals of philosophy such as Philosopy or Philosophical Review have submission processes not too different from Science or Nature.
due to the lack of engines and the resulting need to do backbreaking labour 16 hours a day.
While agriculture requires backbreaking labour, hunter-gatherer societies only worked a couple of days a week. Not that I advocate a return to it, but backbreaking labour all the livelong day was not universal in ancient society.
As far as I can tell, most of them chose their field because it doesn't punish sloppy work.
Philosophical journals have the same rigorous standards for papers as journals for the various sciences. Your view of philosophy is about as valid as a grizzled mountain man who mutters about hard science being all book-learnin' and mumbo-jumbo.
Philosophy means you accept the human condition. Technorcacy means you try to do something about it.
Even that is a statement of philosophy. Furthermore, you seem unaware that many calls for improving human lives came from works of philosophy: More's Utopia, Kirkegaard's questions of metaethics, even what is often called the beginning of the Western tradition, when Socrates hung out in the agora and asked passersby "What if what you comfortably believe is wrong?"
The reality is more people die each year on the road outside my window (the A14, in the UK) than due to all the after-effects of Chernobyl put together.
The effects of Chernobyl are not limited to higher cancer rates for people. They also encompassed destruction of agricultural land, even Saami reindeer herds, by winds blowing north on that fateful April day. Some car accidents on your local motorway doesn't destroy thousands of people's livelihoods over a fairly broad swath of northern Europe.
FWIW, I support nuclear power and always point out to Greens that this particular accident was due to human error and faulty design, a level of risk that modern reactors don't run. But let's not pretend Chernobyl was inconsequential.
Slashdot Mirror
While law is something we can all more or less agree upon, pointing to the relevant documents even if we want the laws overturned, morality is not defined so conveniently. I think you'll find a pretty large amount of Slashdotters believe that filesharing is not immoral.
I agree. I regularly use the N900 for SSH sessions with several servers. It runs Debian, so there's no much of a learning curve. There's a physical keyboard that you can easily remap for your own purposes.
I recall this idea from Kim Stanley Robinson's trilogy beginning with Red Mars , but was it already a stock concept of science fiction before Robinson?
The terraforming idea in that trilogy that I think is even cooler is using a massive solar sail to block sunlight from hitting Venus until the atmosphere freezes, and then start work on the surface.
Passports had existed before, often within countries. In Hugo's Les Miserables Valjean had problems getting around France because his passport showed he was an ex-con. Moving from one region of pre-revolutionary Russia to another often required a passport, a system designed to keep serfs in their place.
The Eurostar requires showing a passport because you are going from a non-Schengen country to a Schengen country. The UK has always been the odd man out in choosing not to join Schengen. For all other European Union countries (and Norway) except for Romania and Bulgaria, you no longer need to show a passport or EU identity card when going from one to the other.
While the US didn't become one of the world's only two superpowers until after World War II, the US had already become a major economic player by the end of the 19th century. European literature of the time is filled with angst that those uncouth ex-colonials were buying up everything and signalling the demise of Europe.
Funnily enough, the Chinese military has been accused of running facilities for massive duplication of the bootleg CDs and DVDs you find all over China. If they'd kill this guy, it could only be because they don't like competition.
Slashdot provides the stories its audience wants. The site does survive on ad revenue, after all; you want to keep telling people what they hear. The continual stream of positive stories about filesharing that Slashdot has posted over my decade on the site suggest that a large enough percentage of readers enjoy trading music, films and ebooks that a generalization like "You Slashdotters..." is understandable.
It is a dick move only because Western European society in the early modern era starting seeing it as a dick move. In Ancient Rome, an audience member would transcribe a poet's recital, have dozens of copies made by amanuenses, and then sold in the marketplace with no money going back to the poet. There's not a single instance of anyone complaining. Martial lampooned a guy who would put his own name on these copies, but plagiarism is distinct from mere copying. There continue to be cultures all over the world to this day where people don't understand copyright at all. Try explaining it to them, and they'll think you're a lunatic. If successive generations see increasingly less value in copyright, we're only returning to a state before what would see a freakish aberration of several hundred years.
Yes, various cultures have also believed it was noble to own slaves or perform human sacrifice. But I think that the nature of this issue, whether respecting copyright is objectively moral or a mere government fiat with the hope of encouraging production*, ought to be carefully examined instead of simply assuming without question that copyright must exist.
(This, incidentally, was the view of the American Founding Fathers. They had an acute sense of natural rights -- endowed by the Creator and only recognized by the government -- but did not consider copyright among them.)
Why in the world would materials on language pedogogy be classified? (Unless you were teaching at DLI, I suppose).
If you want students to share something with their peers, why not just encourage them to start publishing early? That way the vast community outside of your lecture hall can see it too. In any event, courses where the lecturer wanta to hear what his students have to say always risk devolving into inane chitchat in my experience.
How is that actually enforced? Does the university give reports to the immigration police? The only requirement to maintain my student visa in Finland was that I gain a certain number of credits annually, which I could get just as much from taking book exams every few months as taking lecture-based courses.
"But then a thought struck me, if I skip all classes in school, why am I still attending it and paying the tuition fees? Just for the degree?" And the library, and the right to free interlibrary loan from other universities, and the right to put a fancy institution's name on your paper if you want to contribute to a conference or journal...
I spent my undergraduate years at an American university and then moved to Europe for the remainder of my academic years. Imagine how happy I was to find that here lectures are not obligatory -- the exams are rigorous, the expectations clearly laid out in a syllabus, and you're welcome to study on your own and show up on the last day of the course and show your knowledge. While some fields may actually impart useful knowledge through lectures, in so many fields one can get the same information from books.
So why not just make lectures optional? The students who are likely to simply surf the net can be absent, while those who come will probably want to be there.
When a country drives many thousands of refugees into surrounding countries, then it's no longer a purely internal matter.
Script reform lost steam about the same time Maoism did. By the early 1970s, a respect for China's antiquity and maintenance of some traditions had reasserted itself.
Unfortunately a great deal of research disagrees with you. The Chinese writing system arguably holds Chinese children back from becoming literate as quickly as in countries that use a relatively phonemic alphabet, by several years. See John Defrancis' The Chinese Languages: Fact and Fantasy (University of Hawaii Press, 1984) which chronicles the desire of both Chinese and foreign scholars to transition the Chinese language to an alphabetic script, a task that failed because of the crushing weight of tradition.
You seem to think erroneously that the term "lingua franca" originally referred to France. It didn't, it was a Mediterranean pidgin that had no ambition to purity at all, "a mixed language composed mostly (80%) of Italian with a broad vocabulary drawn from Turkish, French, Spanish, Greek and Arabic".
My understanding of libertarianism is minimal government with services being provided by free and voluntary associations of like-minded individuals instead of involuntary taxes. The only role of government is to ensure the freedom of people to establish those associations. This political philosophy does not accord at all with Sweden. Now, if I've misunderstood libertarianism, I'm open to correction.
As a linguist, I'd say that the side arguing for no marking of the plural in "euro" is just as guilty of prescriptivism as the side arguing against.
The more I read about Assange's political and societal beliefs, the more I wonder why he flirted with establishing residency in Sweden. He describes himself as a Libertarian when support for a welfare state at some level is practically universal among Swedes, and now he finds the country a hornets nest of wacko feminists.
Social Text is a little-known journal of postmodernism that didn't even have a peer review system in place. Most people never heard of it until the Sokal affair. The major journals of philosophy such as Philosopy or Philosophical Review have submission processes not too different from Science or Nature.
While agriculture requires backbreaking labour, hunter-gatherer societies only worked a couple of days a week. Not that I advocate a return to it, but backbreaking labour all the livelong day was not universal in ancient society.
Philosophical journals have the same rigorous standards for papers as journals for the various sciences. Your view of philosophy is about as valid as a grizzled mountain man who mutters about hard science being all book-learnin' and mumbo-jumbo.
Even that is a statement of philosophy. Furthermore, you seem unaware that many calls for improving human lives came from works of philosophy: More's Utopia, Kirkegaard's questions of metaethics, even what is often called the beginning of the Western tradition, when Socrates hung out in the agora and asked passersby "What if what you comfortably believe is wrong?"
I didn't say they are utterly and completely safe, I said they didn't run the same level of risk as Chernobyl.
The effects of Chernobyl are not limited to higher cancer rates for people. They also encompassed destruction of agricultural land, even Saami reindeer herds, by winds blowing north on that fateful April day. Some car accidents on your local motorway doesn't destroy thousands of people's livelihoods over a fairly broad swath of northern Europe.
FWIW, I support nuclear power and always point out to Greens that this particular accident was due to human error and faulty design, a level of risk that modern reactors don't run. But let's not pretend Chernobyl was inconsequential.