Pearl Harbor wasn't all that big of a deal. Sure there were a lot of casualties etc. but the japs missed the key targets. our carriers, the oil depot (fuel) the sub pens, the dry docks, etc, and only sunk a few ships.
The real tragedy was the Philippines. MacAurthur was told about Pearl Harbor, knew it had been attacked, was orderd to make preemptive bombing strikes, and still mannaged to let his airforce be destroyed on the ground, and made almost no real attempt to stop the japs until it was too late. Oh, yea, and the guy in charge of pearl harbor basically got canned, and we made MacAurthur into a hero.
Hmmmm.... not so sure I agree with that assertion. Only inalienable rights cannot be taken away.
Right to bear arms. Dork robs bank with a gun. We convict him, send him to jail, and take away his gun.
Personal opinion, rights you are assumed to have unless you prove otherwise, privileges you have to prove you deserve them in order to get them. By that definition, driving is a privilege, you have to take the test and prove you can drive. Not sure if it should be a right or a privelege or not though.
"i hate govt control, but i also hate stupid people and what they do. i have no idea where the balance is."
Try this, what is the worst that could happen if the government took a mostly hands off approach? Think worst case. Now what if the government decided to excersize maximum control, again think worst case. Then try to take into account the most likely (instead of worst case) for both.
I have done this, and while stupid people w/out gov control can do a lot of harm, it is pretty small compared to what the gov. could do.
IMHO the ballance should go well agianst the gov. control, and I would not even worry much about going too far.
That would mean that civil rights are inalienable rights. (as in the declaration of independance) That is the legal meaning of the term. Inalienable rights cannot be transfered to anyone else.
Anyone have any proof to the parents statement? I would like to see it.
"While I completely agree with you on everything else from your story, I disagree with this point. While it SHOULD be a right, it CURRENTLY is not, it IS a privilege, so your statement is false."
For anyone doubting the truth of this statement, look up the definition for 'licence'. it is permission to do what is otherwise illegal.
Since you do not need permission to excercise rights, if you need a licence (permission) to drive, then driving is not a right.
" I write software for a living, and I expect to get paid for it."
Wait! Full stop here. Why? Why do you expect to get paid for it?
You expect this only because it has happened in the past, for you and many others. The same logic was true for buggy-whip makers in the 19th century. Cars came along and it was no longer true. True, there are major differences in the two examples, but the fact remains, you have no right to make money writing software, and should not expect too. Although, you do have the right to try, and if you succeed, great.
"However, creating copies of performances and providing on demand playback of those performances is EXTREMELY valuable as well.
Sure is valuable. So is being able to breathe. That does not mean that it should be expensive. Recorded music is valuable. It is also very cheap to provide. (once written and recorded) It didn't use to be, but it is now. Why should the government make it more expensive than it has to be?*
"When you buy a CD your aren't buying a bucket of bits, but rather you are paying for the hard work and talent that went into producing those copies."
Errr... no, you are buying a bucket of bits. If I was paying for the hard work and talent, then I got ripped off, because all I got was a bucket of bits. Now, if what I was paying was only the cost to reproduce the bucket of bits onto the CD, then the artists would end up with nothing, and only those who make music for the fun of it would. Result: a lot less music. Copyright was supposed to give artists some extra incentive so we would have more music. 2 years for modern pop music would be enough, 5 is stretching it. Software? possibly more, but not a lot. Life + 70 years is so long that it is counterproductive. We get less music, and software, because the incentive is to make something once, somehow squeeze out the competition, and then market the hell out of it forever and never make anything else. That is the problem. (from an economic viewpoint) Is it any surprise that that is what has happened?
Free lunch? no, he is just sick of paying $15 for a lunch that any costs $0.20 or less, and all because some companies lobbied the government to give them a monopoly that they do not deserve.
*yes, the expence does need to be greater than the cost to copy the music/software once it is made, some incentive needs to be given, or nobody would do anything. Current incentives are too much. go back and finish the post if you missed that point.
I was thinking along the lines of all of the other suits that they are trying to settle on, and mabe even those that they have setteled on. Simply droping the suits would not get them out of this. I suppose that suits filed after, in which they refused to settle could go through, but by then much of the RIAA would be in jail on racketerring convivtions. They have filed 1500 suits. . .
Take the song idea you used. What if I worte the song with the intention of enjoying it, and not making money on it? would I still be pissed off? Should I still demand compensation? (I ask this as more of a philosophical question as opposed to a legal one.) What did I lose? Nothing. I enjoyed the song, that is what I intended to do. The fact that thousands of other people also enjoyed it, and some people made money providing that service, does not change that.
So, what if I had intended to make money on it? Two points. First, all that I lost is the money that I thought I could perhaps have gotten if by chance someone had wanted to give it to me in exchange for the service that I provided them in the form of a CD that they would enjoy listening to. (I did not shorten that to 'money I could have made' on purpose.) Second, why did the Eagles make so much money off it while I did not? I was not prevented from doing so, and people were not prevented from buying from me, why? Well the Eagles must have provided a better service than I did, or I did a poor job of advertising my services. Or I charged too much, etc. Basically I did a poor job of running my business of selling music CD's.* Is there any reason that I should expect to earn money when I can't run a proper business? I do not think so.
The trouble with your whole argument is this. People have for years been able to make money, due to the priveledge that the government grants to you of being the only person that can copy something. So people have come to think that they have the right to take away owners rights, under threat of government power, to do with their property (copies of stuff in this case) whatever they deem fit, for the sole purpose of enriching themselves. This is wrong. (well, I define 'wrong' here as, things which end up with people losing their liberty)
*There can be a valid use of copyrights. If the Eagles, in this instance, owned most, if not all of the equipment for making CD's, or most if not all of the means to transport CD's, or for any other reasons had an effective monopoly on making and selling music, and won't help me, but only take my songs, then I an effectivly prevented from making money on my CD. Not because I ran a crappy business, but because I am prevented from doing so by unfair business practices. If I am trying to make money, I will not write music in this case, because I can't. (through no fault of my own) This is not good for society as a whole, because more music is better. Copyrights in this case make more music for society, by giving me some money if I write music. That is what the founders wanted.
Unfortunately, copyright law has been twisted 180 degrees, so now it is the thing that is supporting the very thing that it was meant to prevent, namely, an unatural monopoly that exploits society for its own gain. (they now exploit the buyers of music as well as the artists) I can support Copyrights in general, but not what we have now.
If there is still something wrong with this argument, I want to hear it.
Unless of course she wins. 'cause then the RIAA will have to pay all of their own legal fees, the fees of the people they sue, and they won't win any more suits. If she wins, the RIAA is the one who is screwed, not the people. I doubt that even the RIAA is dumb enough to keep suing people in that case.
" However, by copying or distributing copyrighted works you are, in effect, depriving the original author of that work income "
This is the same argument that Linus dubunked so bluntly with his comment about marriage and prostitutes. Yes, I guess you are depriving them of potential profits, but they have no right to those profits. If they did, banning marriage (and one night stands, boy/girlfriends, masterbation, etc.) because those deprive prostitutes of potential customers and profit would make sense.
Nobody has the right to profit from any activity, be it writting/performing music, selling software or making buggy-whips. True, they should have the right to try and profit from any legal activity, and the right to keep those profits. The idea that you have the right to profit is just one small step removed from communisim, where people have the right to someone elses services/property/labour etc.
" you have taken something for free, which the owner has asked payment for."
No, the 'owner' has not asked for payment. The owner of the copy of the music put it up for free download . . . Oh, wait, you meant the owner of the copyright? I did not take their copyright, they still have that, they can still copy the music, I am confu----- Oh, I get it, I took away their 'exclusive' right to copy. How did I do that? Well, how did they get the exclusive copyright in the first place? That's right, the government tried to take away my inherant right to copy my stuff, and only let the copyright holder have it. Music 'pirates' simply took that right back. Sure it is illegal, but it sure looks a lot less benign when you put it into proper perspective.
what he did was explain the motivations behind it. This allows us to better understand and hopefully prevent it from happening in the future. He gave 'understanding' to the Holocaust, not justification.
Oh, and since some people _do_ ignore morality and ethics, this approach is perfectly valid in trying to understand those people, just like there are some situations where gravity does not matter, then it is possible to throw a baseball much farther than a mile.
Can you define what spam is? Other than 'I'll know it when I see it?' Do you honestly expect non-techie lawmakers-who-listen-to-lobyists to come up with and agree to a good definition of spam that does not restrict legitimate use _and_ has no loopholes? I sure don't. See the 'can-spam' law.
How do you expect law enforcement to enforce these laws? The spammers are hard enough to track down as it is, I do not expect law enforcement to be able to move anywhere near fast enough. And once (if?)a few dozen spammers have gone to jail, the problem will . . . move overseas.
Yes, it is "Simple as that". but 'that' is not simple at all. It is not even practical, and only slightly possible. I do agree with you though that any e-postage scheme will not work, except as possibly a way to kill SMTP. Then mabey we can come up with a better replacement that is not vulnerable to spamming, and have a chance of it succeding.
In general, yes. In this case, NO. Poke around in the archives. There is _far_ too much debt right now, and counting - fast. These people (and they are not alone) are convinced that a major financial crash is inevitable. Any debt, if and when this happens, is a very bad thing.
"Maintaining" ??? NO!!. It is hard to expand without going into debt in the first place, but if you are no longer trying to expand, any debt beyond very short term credit (cash flow stuff) is a bad thing and should be payed off as soon as possible. Apple did the right thing here, and it means that Apple will probably be around in 5-10 years.
According to this military spending in the US has risen 80% since then. If other nations did not increast their spending (unlikely) that means that we spend 51% or _more than everyone else combined!!_ There is absolutly no reason for anyone to be spending that much on defense. Unless we are planning on conquering the world. . . Our allies with loads of cash should defend themselvs.
On the other hand, we do waste far too much money on agriculture, and most of that is un-, if not counter-productive, and more than enough to fund space at the same level as what I mentioned. Welfare is much smaller, more like what NASA currently gets. (not that it shouldn't be cut anyway . ..)
I guess what I am saying is that we need to cut military spending a lot, whether or not we fund space, or anything else with it. BTW interest payments in the debt are almost the same as defense spending anyway, maby we should do something about that.....
I would imagine that about 5% of the global military expenditures would be plenty. According to this article
"And even in the strictest military sense of the word, is the US funding of its current defense requirements genuinely making the nation safer? No nation has the capacity to challenge the United States in any conventional military sense. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, global military spending rose to $798 billion in 2000, an increase of 3.1 per cent from the previous year, and the US accounted for 37 per cent of that total. Today, the number is closer to 40 per cent of that total. " (emphesis added)
That would be at least $40 billion/year. and at the cost of just over 1/8 of our current military spending, we can do that! Just cut out the waste and some mild spending cuts. . . . Especially since we can't be touched anyway . . .
We _have_ the money, much more than we need really, It is all a matter of priority.
Hmmm.. maby I should read more closely too. From the ZDnet article:
"Although this means that Intel could bring a 32/64-bit chip to PCs soon, Barrett said the company has no plans do so in the near future. There are a few good reasons for this, PC executives and analysts have said for some time. Very little desktop software exists for 64-bit desktops, and the amount of memory that would go into a 64-bit desktop would greatly escalate the price."
Hmmm... second half 2004 They must already have it under developement to be that close. . .
Chipsets anyone? Since intel makes their own, obviously there will be an intel one. anyone have any info on via, sis, nvidia etc?
If not, intels chipset better be good, or AMD will take a big lead when windows x86-64 finally is released. M$ waiting on it won't have done intel any good if their chipset stinks. This is the other side of your equation. Everybody is already making chipsets for AMD64, and that may turn out to be as big of an advantage to AMD as being the first.
But, buy its nature, it isn't the best. One of the key things that are required to be the 'best' is openness. (not necessarily GPL, but. ..) closed soure just doesn't cut it.
The WSIS was established by the United Nations general assembly in a resolution passed in January 2002. Building upon the goals of its earlier Millennium Declaration, the UN set up the WSIS to "harness the potential of knowledge and technology" and to "find effective and innovative ways to put this potential at the service of development for all."
Note the last part. Closed source won't work. Open can. But if OSS is used it becomes a big threat to the closed source companies. This is a threat to what the US loby sees as 'capitalism' And so, to protect capitalism OSS must be avoided. Killing it altogether is ok by them, but if it could make them more money, they will try.
This is also not about profit, because with OSS you could make profit selling tech support and hardware. This is about preserving the profitability of closed source software. Nothing else
I think that your confusing capitalism with capitalism. Or maby capitalism. See This
Capitalism is a vauge term, and as such it really does not mean much, unless in context. Are you talking about free markets? or are you talking about private ownership of capital goods?(things you need to produce stuff). The wage system definition does not seem to fit your use here, so that is probably not it.
The sense that the US UN rep is using the term is catital goods ownership, or in other words keeping a certain capital good still profitable, (closed source software, the source is arguably a capital good, just try and compile Windows without the Windows source code)
The Rep. is most certainly not using capitalism to mean free markets, because open source is no threat to free markets. Quite the contrary.
Slashdot Mirror
The real tragedy was the Philippines. MacAurthur was told about Pearl Harbor, knew it had been attacked, was orderd to make preemptive bombing strikes, and still mannaged to let his airforce be destroyed on the ground, and made almost no real attempt to stop the japs until it was too late. Oh, yea, and the guy in charge of pearl harbor basically got canned, and we made MacAurthur into a hero.
Right to bear arms. Dork robs bank with a gun. We convict him, send him to jail, and take away his gun.
Personal opinion, rights you are assumed to have unless you prove otherwise, privileges you have to prove you deserve them in order to get them. By that definition, driving is a privilege, you have to take the test and prove you can drive. Not sure if it should be a right or a privelege or not though.
IANAL.
He is just getting confused. Death occurs at about 0.4-0.5% blood content - in english about one half of one percent.
Try this, what is the worst that could happen if the government took a mostly hands off approach? Think worst case. Now what if the government decided to excersize maximum control, again think worst case. Then try to take into account the most likely (instead of worst case) for both.
I have done this, and while stupid people w/out gov control can do a lot of harm, it is pretty small compared to what the gov. could do.
IMHO the ballance should go well agianst the gov. control, and I would not even worry much about going too far.
Anyone have any proof to the parents statement? I would like to see it.
For anyone doubting the truth of this statement, look up the definition for 'licence'. it is permission to do what is otherwise illegal.
Since you do not need permission to excercise rights, if you need a licence (permission) to drive, then driving is not a right.
Wait! Full stop here. Why? Why do you expect to get paid for it?
You expect this only because it has happened in the past, for you and many others. The same logic was true for buggy-whip makers in the 19th century. Cars came along and it was no longer true. True, there are major differences in the two examples, but the fact remains, you have no right to make money writing software, and should not expect too. Although, you do have the right to try, and if you succeed, great.
"However, creating copies of performances and providing on demand playback of those performances is EXTREMELY valuable as well.
Sure is valuable. So is being able to breathe. That does not mean that it should be expensive. Recorded music is valuable. It is also very cheap to provide. (once written and recorded) It didn't use to be, but it is now. Why should the government make it more expensive than it has to be?*
"When you buy a CD your aren't buying a bucket of bits, but rather you are paying for the hard work and talent that went into producing those copies."
Errr... no, you are buying a bucket of bits. If I was paying for the hard work and talent, then I got ripped off, because all I got was a bucket of bits. Now, if what I was paying was only the cost to reproduce the bucket of bits onto the CD, then the artists would end up with nothing, and only those who make music for the fun of it would. Result: a lot less music. Copyright was supposed to give artists some extra incentive so we would have more music. 2 years for modern pop music would be enough, 5 is stretching it. Software? possibly more, but not a lot. Life + 70 years is so long that it is counterproductive. We get less music, and software, because the incentive is to make something once, somehow squeeze out the competition, and then market the hell out of it forever and never make anything else. That is the problem. (from an economic viewpoint) Is it any surprise that that is what has happened?
Free lunch? no, he is just sick of paying $15 for a lunch that any costs $0.20 or less, and all because some companies lobbied the government to give them a monopoly that they do not deserve.
*yes, the expence does need to be greater than the cost to copy the music/software once it is made, some incentive needs to be given, or nobody would do anything. Current incentives are too much. go back and finish the post if you missed that point.
of course, IANAL,
Take the song idea you used. What if I worte the song with the intention of enjoying it, and not making money on it? would I still be pissed off? Should I still demand compensation? (I ask this as more of a philosophical question as opposed to a legal one.) What did I lose? Nothing. I enjoyed the song, that is what I intended to do. The fact that thousands of other people also enjoyed it, and some people made money providing that service, does not change that.
So, what if I had intended to make money on it? Two points. First, all that I lost is the money that I thought I could perhaps have gotten if by chance someone had wanted to give it to me in exchange for the service that I provided them in the form of a CD that they would enjoy listening to. (I did not shorten that to 'money I could have made' on purpose.) Second, why did the Eagles make so much money off it while I did not? I was not prevented from doing so, and people were not prevented from buying from me, why? Well the Eagles must have provided a better service than I did, or I did a poor job of advertising my services. Or I charged too much, etc. Basically I did a poor job of running my business of selling music CD's.* Is there any reason that I should expect to earn money when I can't run a proper business? I do not think so.
The trouble with your whole argument is this. People have for years been able to make money, due to the priveledge that the government grants to you of being the only person that can copy something. So people have come to think that they have the right to take away owners rights, under threat of government power, to do with their property (copies of stuff in this case) whatever they deem fit, for the sole purpose of enriching themselves. This is wrong. (well, I define 'wrong' here as, things which end up with people losing their liberty)
*There can be a valid use of copyrights. If the Eagles, in this instance, owned most, if not all of the equipment for making CD's, or most if not all of the means to transport CD's, or for any other reasons had an effective monopoly on making and selling music, and won't help me, but only take my songs, then I an effectivly prevented from making money on my CD. Not because I ran a crappy business, but because I am prevented from doing so by unfair business practices. If I am trying to make money, I will not write music in this case, because I can't. (through no fault of my own) This is not good for society as a whole, because more music is better. Copyrights in this case make more music for society, by giving me some money if I write music. That is what the founders wanted.
Unfortunately, copyright law has been twisted 180 degrees, so now it is the thing that is supporting the very thing that it was meant to prevent, namely, an unatural monopoly that exploits society for its own gain. (they now exploit the buyers of music as well as the artists) I can support Copyrights in general, but not what we have now.
If there is still something wrong with this argument, I want to hear it.
Unless of course she wins. 'cause then the RIAA will have to pay all of their own legal fees, the fees of the people they sue, and they won't win any more suits. If she wins, the RIAA is the one who is screwed, not the people. I doubt that even the RIAA is dumb enough to keep suing people in that case.
This is the same argument that Linus dubunked so bluntly with his comment about marriage and prostitutes. Yes, I guess you are depriving them of potential profits, but they have no right to those profits. If they did, banning marriage (and one night stands, boy/girlfriends, masterbation, etc.) because those deprive prostitutes of potential customers and profit would make sense.
Nobody has the right to profit from any activity, be it writting/performing music, selling software or making buggy-whips. True, they should have the right to try and profit from any legal activity, and the right to keep those profits. The idea that you have the right to profit is just one small step removed from communisim, where people have the right to someone elses services/property/labour etc.
" you have taken something for free, which the owner has asked payment for."No, the 'owner' has not asked for payment. The owner of the copy of the music put it up for free download . . .
Oh, wait, you meant the owner of the copyright? I did not take their copyright, they still have that, they can still copy the music, I am confu-----
Oh, I get it, I took away their 'exclusive' right to copy. How did I do that?
Well, how did they get the exclusive copyright in the first place?
That's right, the government tried to take away my inherant right to copy my stuff, and only let the copyright holder have it. Music 'pirates' simply took that right back.
Sure it is illegal, but it sure looks a lot less benign when you put it into proper perspective.
what he did was explain the motivations behind it. This allows us to better understand and hopefully prevent it from happening in the future. He gave 'understanding' to the Holocaust, not justification.
Oh, and since some people _do_ ignore morality and ethics, this approach is perfectly valid in trying to understand those people, just like there are some situations where gravity does not matter, then it is possible to throw a baseball much farther than a mile.
How do you expect law enforcement to enforce these laws? The spammers are hard enough to track down as it is, I do not expect law enforcement to be able to move anywhere near fast enough. And once (if?)a few dozen spammers have gone to jail, the problem will . . . move overseas.
Yes, it is "Simple as that". but 'that' is not simple at all. It is not even practical, and only slightly possible. I do agree with you though that any e-postage scheme will not work, except as possibly a way to kill SMTP. Then mabey we can come up with a better replacement that is not vulnerable to spamming, and have a chance of it succeding.
In general, yes. In this case, NO. Poke around in the archives. There is _far_ too much debt right now, and counting - fast. These people (and they are not alone) are convinced that a major financial crash is inevitable. Any debt, if and when this happens, is a very bad thing.
"Maintaining" ??? NO!!. It is hard to expand without going into debt in the first place, but if you are no longer trying to expand, any debt beyond very short term credit (cash flow stuff) is a bad thing and should be payed off as soon as possible. Apple did the right thing here, and it means that Apple will probably be around in 5-10 years.
On the other hand, we do waste far too much money on agriculture, and most of that is un-, if not counter-productive, and more than enough to fund space at the same level as what I mentioned. Welfare is much smaller, more like what NASA currently gets. (not that it shouldn't be cut anyway . . .)
I guess what I am saying is that we need to cut military spending a lot, whether or not we fund space, or anything else with it. BTW interest payments in the debt are almost the same as defense spending anyway, maby we should do something about that.....
"And even in the strictest military sense of the word, is the US funding of its current defense requirements genuinely making the nation safer? No nation has the capacity to challenge the United States in any conventional military sense. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, global military spending rose to $798 billion in 2000, an increase of 3.1 per cent from the previous year, and the US accounted for 37 per cent of that total. Today, the number is closer to 40 per cent of that total. " (emphesis added)
That would be at least $40 billion/year. and at the cost of just over 1/8 of our current military spending, we can do that! Just cut out the waste and some mild spending cuts. . . . Especially since we can't be touched anyway . . .
We _have_ the money, much more than we need really, It is all a matter of priority.
(any sarcasim in this post was intended BTW)
maby so, but I bet he was not the first, and certainly not the last to try it!!
People tend to be stupid enough that sometimes it works, more is the pitty.
Yea, but usually the idea is for everyone else to start beliving it before you do!
"Although this means that Intel could bring a 32/64-bit chip to PCs soon, Barrett said the company has no plans do so in the near future. There are a few good reasons for this, PC executives and analysts have said for some time. Very little desktop software exists for 64-bit desktops, and the amount of memory that would go into a 64-bit desktop would greatly escalate the price."
Yea, AMD & Transmeta still have some time here.Hmmm... second half 2004 They must already have it under developement to be that close. . .
Chipsets anyone? Since intel makes their own, obviously there will be an intel one. anyone have any info on via, sis, nvidia etc?
If not, intels chipset better be good, or AMD will take a big lead when windows x86-64 finally is released. M$ waiting on it won't have done intel any good if their chipset stinks. This is the other side of your equation. Everybody is already making chipsets for AMD64, and that may turn out to be as big of an advantage to AMD as being the first.
The WSIS was established by the United Nations general assembly in a resolution passed in January 2002. Building upon the goals of its earlier Millennium Declaration, the UN set up the WSIS to "harness the potential of knowledge and technology" and to "find effective and innovative ways to put this potential at the service of development for all."
Note the last part. Closed source won't work. Open can. But if OSS is used it becomes a big threat to the closed source companies. This is a threat to what the US loby sees as 'capitalism' And so, to protect capitalism OSS must be avoided. Killing it altogether is ok by them, but if it could make them more money, they will try.
This is also not about profit, because with OSS you could make profit selling tech support and hardware. This is about preserving the profitability of closed source software. Nothing else
I think that your confusing capitalism with capitalism. Or maby capitalism. See This
Capitalism is a vauge term, and as such it really does not mean much, unless in context. Are you talking about free markets? or are you talking about private ownership of capital goods?(things you need to produce stuff). The wage system definition does not seem to fit your use here, so that is probably not it.
The sense that the US UN rep is using the term is catital goods ownership, or in other words keeping a certain capital good still profitable, (closed source software, the source is arguably a capital good, just try and compile Windows without the Windows source code) The Rep. is most certainly not using capitalism to mean free markets, because open source is no threat to free markets. Quite the contrary.