And in the US I could advocate any one of their policies if I saw fit to do so.
Not when it is considered an immidiate threat to a person or people.
Due to repeated incidents resulting from such speech and ideas in European history, 'hate speech' is easily considered a direct and immidiate threat to people in Europe, but there is definitely a line where it is considered as such in the USA as well (pointing out a black person and inciting peopel to stone him to name an example)
This is akin to the yelling fire in a theatre example that is often used.
That's a gray area here. If you are a private company that doesn't receive Government contracts you can discriminate in your hiring or field of membership processes. You can't fire an existing employee on the grounds of discrimination though. You can talk about it all you want though. Witness all the KKK rallies. From what I understand they would probably not be able to do that in France because of the laws against hate speech.
Where I live, freedom from discrimination on gender, race, religion, sexual orrientation, etc, is something that is guaranteed by our constitution. There is however a subtle difference between discriminating, and voicing an opinion. That is somewhat of a grey area, and can result in interesting things:
A catholic priest was arguing against homosexuals, basing himself on his religious point of view. A gay rights organisation complained about discrimination as a result. This ended up in court, and the judge found the combination of freedom of religion and freedom of speech more important then the freedom from discrimination, specifically because there was no direct threat or disadvantage resulting from the opinion of that priest.
How far this could exactly go I do not know, but as I already pointed out, if you look at Germany and/or France and think that their anti hate-speech laws are typical for Europe, they are not. Those are the exception, not the rule. This does not mean that you can just say everything you want, see above.
Somebody in the US who advocates that the terrorists were right will doubtless be shunned. Heck, look at what happened to Bill Maher's TV show and all he did was call them brave. But there is no law against advocating that the terrorists were right. I could go down to Ground Zero right now and start telling people why I think the towers deserved to come down. It probably wouldn't be a very wise idea but it wouldn't be illegal.
And in most of Europe people can argue why they believe the jews got what they deserved. Those people won't be very popular, but it is not illegal. What they cannot do is call for people to finish the job and kill those who survived.
In the USA you do run the risk of being suspected of supporting an illegal terrorist organisation.
Again, if you use the laws in Germany (where many people by now seem to realize that those laws do not work to begin with) or France and think that those apply to all of Europe or even most of EUrope, then you are mistaken. Those are 2 local laws and are the exception, not the rule. The exception is extremely specific also.
Also, don't believe that there are no political organisations that are banned in the USA. You may strongly disagree with their methods and ideas, and think that banning groups like Hamas is justified, but it doesn't change the fact that those are considered illegal 'terrorist' organisations, while many others consider them people who are trying to fight oppression and tryign to establish their own political agenda.
The point of this post as well as my previous post is to point out that there are differences between free speech in Europe and the USA, but those are details, and do not make that the USA has a lot more freedom of speech or that people in EUrope have their free speech suppressed.
I'd like to remind you of the last 2 times the USA actually managed to establish some kind of democracy somewhere in the past century..
Japan and Germany
Both cases happened some half a century ago, and in Japan it was by accident and not on purpose while in Germany it was at least in part a consequence of then then starting cold war. Neither has a very good working democratic system from what I can tell.
Since then the USA has been involved in many countries, but more democracy for the people there was not the result, less democracy more a rule then the exception.
With regards to Iraq, we don't know yet, but none of the optimistic views of the US government wrt post-war Iraq did come true so far. Sure, there were elections, which is a huge step forward, but we can still not talk about a stable country, and it does not look any better with regards to that then a year ago. Iraq may succeed (I hope it will) but giving that much more then a 50% chance is being extremely optimistic imho, not to say unrealistic.
In Iran, with all its limitations and restrictions, the situation today is still more democratic and better for the average person then it was during the times of the USA supported Sjah. You can rightfully complain about their current government and its policies, but before you judge their response to anything American, it might be wise to look a little bit at past American involvement in that country.
Do you find it strange that people just don't believe this 'spreading democracy' idea is going to work out (if they believe that this is the real goal to begin with)
It is very simple in the end, you cannot enforce freedom and democracy onto a country, but you can help create the conditions in which both can work. This happened by accident in Japan, and would be a good thing to take a closer look at.
I live in Europe, in the Netherlands to be exact. I can pretty well discuss the merrits (and failings) of nazism here as long as I do not advocate some of their more extreme policies.
An entirely different thing is that I will have a lot of explanation to do when arguing that Nazism actually had some merrits, it is very easily misunderstood for advocating all the evils that come with it, and it is not well accepted socially.
I can discuss the differences (biological, cultural) between races, no problem. I can discuss the differences between men and women, no problem. Different religions? no problem either.
What I cannot do is discriminate people based on hteir race, gender, religion or any such thing, where discrimination is defined as differentiating between those without there being a factual basis for differentiating.
What I also cannot do is publish a copy of 'Mein Kampf' without some mandatory annotation (ie, in its original form).
That is pretty much where limitations on my freedom of speech end however.
There are two places in Europe that have more strict rules with regards to nazism specifically, France and Germany. I do not know about France, but due to spending almost half of my time in Germany, I know that quite a few Germans by now don't think this is such a good idea, but fear the response of their neighbors when lifting such rules. It will happen there tho because the way it is there, it does put too much of a limitation on legitimate political speech.
While large, those 2 are the exception, and not the rule, and as said, in at least one of them this is bound to change with time.
A very interesting detail with regards to Germany is that there is no law there prohibiting the distribution or publication of Mein Kampf in its original form, yet you will not be able to obtain it anywhere legally. This has to do with the current copyright holders not permitting it and not with it being banned. That said, many things that depict nazism or its symbols in another way then just plain evil do seem to either be banned or at least extremely difficult to obtain.
p.s. Much of Europe suffered badly during the second world war. Nazism is to blame for that at least for a very large part. That people in Europe respond strongly still to someone even pondering about what the merrits of nazism might have been should become very understandable for the average American by thinking about how they feel about people looking for merrits in the beliefs of the people who attacked the world trade center. Now also keep in mind the difference in scale between that event and the second world war. You should understand that nazism in Europe is treated in a different way then about anything else, also with regards to freedom of speech.
Speech for commercial purposes or that represents an immediate threat to people's lives (shouting fire in a movie theater) are not protected.
The interesting bit here is that quite a few people in Europe seem to think that racist and nazi talk poses an immediate threat to people. Right or wrong, from the history of Europe it is at least understandable to think that way.
As a consequence, many Europeans also believe that their rules regarding those things are not a limitation on 'legitimate free speech', and as a result don't think Americans make a very good argument when mentioning those for showing how they have Freedom of speech and most Europeans have not. (personally I don't think the limitations on nazi and racist speech are a good idea, but I also don't think they represent any serious threat to Freedom of speech in Europe, and as a small detail, differing from the mainstream opinion seems way more accepted in most parts of Europe then it is in the USA, or at least was when I lived there in the early 90s, so in practise you can feel more free to speak your mind without immediate social repercusions)
The bottomline is that as you point out yourself, most speech is considered 'legitimate' and other is not and when it is not it is so for a specific reason. Neither place has absolute freedom of speech, and both have a situation where for most practical purposes people are able to say exactly what they want.
Ever read this thingy? Or any of the other publications from this w3c thing? They pay a lot of attention to ensuring things keep working, and dgrade in a nice gracefull way instead of just borking.
And yes, in 2005 there are still quite a few relevant browsers that do not support JS, and which would be extremely usable with a webmail application still. This concerns virtually all browsers on handheld devices.
AIM is the only thing AOL has to offer which is even remotely useful.
AOL has a lot of subscribers, this customer base s by far the most interestign asset they have, esp. if you are planning on moving into the ISP business (which Google seems to be showing some interest in)
Got to think of the 6502 and its indirect indexed addressing modes..
Basicly, you'd store a pointer somewhere in memory page 0, and then use the x or y register as an index into whatever it pointed at (ie LDA ($a0),x would take the pointer stored in address a0 and a1, use the x register as an index, and read the contents of the resulting address into the acumulator) . Here it would be faster to manipulate the index and not the pointer.
Pointers were 16 bit (64k address space) and x and y were 8 bit registers.. so when you wanted to address beyodn the boundary of a (256 byte) memory page, you'd have to manipulate the pointer anyway.
This (ad at the bottom of the page) is where XS4ALL started. They were basicly the first public ISP in the Netherlands (tho I am not entirely sure, 'stichting Simplex' was there at around the same time from what I recall)
Demon and XS4ALL definitely have things in common, but I think that has more to do with both having started in the very early days of public internet access, and still believing that they connect computers to a big network (as opposed to the content focus that many an ISP seems to have). Both give you a fixed IP and your own hostname, allow you to run servers including smtp and http etc.
At any rate, XS4ALL grew out of a desire to provide cheap access to the 'live internet' as opposed to the then common uucp mail/news access. The people behind it had been involved in the Datanet 1 (X25 network similar to Tymnet and the like) and the BBS scene, and had been running a somewhat substantial (100+ nodes) uucp network for some time. They went for nothing less making it possible for every person with the proper equipment to become a full host on the Internet, an attitude which is still pretty much there in modern XS4ALL.
AH well.. thanks for reminding me of that time.. had fun looking up some info on it today, and reading back about the early days of Internet access overhere. Heh, to think that I have a nice 8mbit up/1 mbit down connection here that costs about 1/5th per month when compared to the initial internet connection (at a whopping 19k2) that XS4ALL used themselves to get on the net:)
I did not use XS4ALL much during those early days, mostly because I got a free account from IGN with which I had internet access with local dialin from about any major city worldwide, and I had a rather good access deal with Simplex for my home network. I can confirm your comments about the quality of XS4ALL and their generally nice attitude towards issues that concern their private customers.
For what I have seen you do not want to make prints from pictures made with a phone camera.
Not untill the optics and sensor in the typical phone camera get a lot better. Substantial distorition at the edges of the picture, noise and bad colors and such are the primary reasons why pictures with the cameras in the last geenration of phones still look crappy compared to any somewhat decent compact digital camera with the same resolution. They will however cut away the market for real low-end digicams.
For all I can tell it was a deliberate plot to finally finish off that Houssein guy that had been bugging his family for over a decade. Using the existing fears from the 9/11 attacks made it piece of cake to get a large enough part of the population behind it without thought.
A famous and very evil dictator once wrote: Make people feel so they don't think.
While I don't think the 9/11 attacks were a setup or any such nonsense, I do think they were used by the government to achieve some personal goals using the resources of the nation however.
The constitution in Europe was yet another attempt to promote something that had very few checks and balances and other democratic ideals to a European people who (to their credit) overrode their leaders and demanded elections. Even when they jury rigged the system so the most pro-EU country went first, it still went down in flames.
The Afghani constitution was a better document then the European one.
Agreed on that constitution. The point you seem to miss however is that the peopel in Europe seem to have enough of a say to not let such nonsense fly.
And these are the leaders that we are supposed to entrust the Internet too?
Those leaders? no, never trust the leaders.
You are not very well informed about European history however.
Most of Europe got their constitutions around 1848, about a century before world war 2 ended.
Some of those lasted, others did not.
If you however believe that Europe did not change a lot between the American revolution and the second world war you are very ignorant of European history.
The country I live in got its independance from the Spannish empire during the 1600s, after 80 years of struggle. For about 150 years (untill Napoleon was finally defeated) it was a republic governed by regional representatives and with as head of state someone who always happened to be a prince in some German royal family. Despite that, it did not become a monarchy till 1830. This head of state thing had a lot more to do with it being practical in the then predominantly monarchistic Europe. After Napoleon got defeated and the map of Europe got rearranged, we became a monarchy similar to other countries in Europe.
By 1848 many an interlectual and many a ruler in Europe had drawn their conclusions from the French revolution, and the concept of the constitutional monarchy was introduced.
18 years after becomming a monarchy we became basicly the constitutional monarchy we are now. There have been some changes (esp. with regards to who is allowed to vote, which ended in 1917 where every citizen reaching 18 years of age got to vote. Remind me, when were the practical barriers to voting for Afro Americans removed again?)
Then, by the time the second world war had ended, those countries which had skipped on the 1848 events (Germany, which was to caught up in trying to become a single country at the time, Russia, which still employed a feodal system at the time etc) got their current constitutions (Spain had to wait a bit longer, same for Greece and Portugal)
At any rate, those who believe the end of the second world war introduced Europe to democracy are mistaken. It did restore democracy however, and in many cases fixing flaws that had been there in previous systems. Some of the pre ww2 democracies were weak and failed, others were strong and are still there today in pretty much the same form. For pre American Revolution times it depends a lot on where you look.
People on both sides of the Atlantic learned from eachother. The American founding fathers pretty closely observed the French Revolution, and people in Europe did the same with what happened in what is now the USA.
What happened in much of Europe in 1848 was a response to both events.
The constitution that was written for the USA is imho one of the most important political texts since the beginning of written history. I am not the first one to think that of course, and many took their lessons from both its successes and its failures.
Last but not least, you may think that much of what I say is anti-US rethoric, but tell me, since when is it anti-US to actually do one of those things that your constituion and your political system supposedly expect people to do: think and speak your mind independently of what any propaganda tries to tell you.
I respect the USA and its people for who they are and their accomplishments, but that does not mean I cannot point out their failures (as a country) also, and that is what I will do when I think its important.
It was written quite soem time ago, but it describes my ideas pretty well I think.
Also, see the current headline article, tho it has more to do with copyright in relation to specific media and accepting that using a specific medium puts some inherent limitations on your rights as copyright owner.
I don't understand your point. Please explain - and especially why you think it's changed.
The exclusive rights granted by copyright were intended to be limited in time and scope. The time limitation is effectively gone, hence the current practise has changed from what is written in the constitution.
This is very relevant because it demonstrates how slowly the 'means' have been turned into a goal themselves.
Te re-iterate, the goal of copyright is NOT to provide artists with an income. Providing artists with potential income is the means with which copyright law tries to achieve its goal of promoting arts for enrichment of cultural heritage. The lack of limitation on the term of copyright makes that the cultural heritage is not enriched, and as a conseuqnece, current cop[yright implementations do not work as intended by those who wrote that provision in the constitution.
Indeed, and the onus should be on those opposing these laws - which have worked for a few hundred years - to show that there's a better way to achieve this goal and that the current means are working against the stated goal in such a way as they can't be reformed.
Those are two seperate issues: 1. there may be better ways to achieve the goal 2. the current way does not work.
If 1. is the case then implement the better ways. If 2. is the case then stop using that way.
Those are 2 INDEPENDENT issues.
I have shown why 2. is the case. It is easy to fix also without disbanding copyright alltogether, just limit its term to something reasonable. You may goto my website for some more of my thoughts on that.
Despotes which also happen to be in charge of places where the USA sends prisoners to that they can't interrogate within the limits of their own laws? Despotes helped to power and kept in power by that same USA?
You desperately need to take a closer look at things yourself and use your brains. Repeating the one-sided view of a single party or group is not gonna get you anywhere.
The EU hardly has a stellar history of coordination, as they can't even seem to get a constitution passed.
If you do not know what you are talking about then maybe you should just keep your mouth shut.
Citizens in multiple countries in the EU told their politicians that the constitution that they (the politicians) had agreed upon was not to their liking.
That is a level of democracy that the USA currently can only dream about. It has nothing to do with lack of coordination, the politicians managed that part pretty much. It is a matter of politicians writing a bad constitution and then getting told by the peopel to shove it up their ass.
But nevermind, its much more fun to believe the Neocon BS about Old Europe, and turn a blind eye for the monster that the US government has become. It is at least a lot less stressfull to do that when you live in hte USA I suppose.
The UN *has* made resolutions, then failed to act on them.
Definitely. A nice few examples can be found with regards to Israel and occupied territories, and the even nicer thing here is that one can point at the USA as the party which blocked any action.
Pot, please meet kettle. May I point out that you look alike in color?
The UN *has* censured the United States for acting on those resolutions. The perfect example of this has been the Iraq war, which was a UN resolution that the UN got upset about when the US took action. Do you deny these things?
After the USA came with extremely doubtfull evidence, disproven claims and such, yes.
Tell me, where are those supposed WMDs?
Did not find them? then it is pretty clear that the primary reason for the UN resolution was missing, and the UN is right to disagree with the US/UK invasion of Iraq. There are lots of good and defendable reasons one can come up with for that invasion, but this is not one of them.
And that's something that hasn't changed. The best way to encourage people to do a job well and do good work is to pay them, whether they're making chairs or songs.
It has changed. This ',limited' part is effectively no longer there.
Also, you confuse goal and means to obtain that goal.
Providing a way for artists to make money out of their creations is a means to achieve the goal of more works of art for society. The goal was never to provide artists with an income however.
If there is a better way to achieve the stated goal then it should be used, ad if it can be shown that the current means are actually working against the stated goal they should be disbanded.
Marketing is an investment that has to be done in order to generate business. Hopw much depends on what business you are in, and what business plan you use etc, but regardless, it is part of the cost of doing business.
Of course the cost of doing business is reflected in the price a consumer pays, that is, if the business wants to make some proffit. That is true for all kinds of things, not just marketing.
I do still not see why I should pay upfront in order to allow others to promote their products to me. THe ultimate and absurd consequence of this would be instituting a 'marketing tax' that everyone pasy and that is used to allow businesses to promote goods to me. That I pay for it when I decide to buy something is completely fine with me, there the ones who do a good job get payed for it and those who do a lousy job don't. When I feel a company is spending too much on promotion and the quality or price of their product(s) suffer too much then I won't buy from them at all.
It's simple and lets the market do its work. We don't need consumer subsidized p[romotion channels for this really.
Let me explain. I subscribe to Napster To Go, which lets me listen to music pretty much where I want, when I want it (Microsoft's occasionally crappy software permitting:) ). I also buy CDs or downloads of stuff that I really like, usually having heard it and liked it through Napster. Yet, as well as stuff I like enough to buy, and stuff I hate, there's a third category: Stuff that I like enough to listen to occasionally, but which isn't worth buying. Example: a "20 Rock and Roll Greats". Great music, but not stuff I'll listen to often. However, prior to Napster 2.0, I would probably have bought that at some point - now, I don't need to.
I have some such CDs, and know what, many of their tracks end up in the mp3 mixes I make listenign to on the way. I have no problem buying such CDs when they contain enough tracks I like to listen to every now and then. If they don't then chances are good I will encounter another compilation CD that has the tracks I want, so no need to buy.
What is more, for as far as such compilation CDs goes, there is no need for sampling, those contain known tracks. You need an index to see if it might be good enough to buy.
So, using a service to listen to music you like to hear, but don't think good enough to actually buy, does not qualify as 'sampling'.
That said, if it works for you, all the better. For the tracks I don't have myself I use something called a radio.
Before I subscribed to Napster, I bought a LOT of music online (mostly from iTunes). Now I buy much, much less, because the more marginal stuff that I like a bit doesn't get bought. Those are lost sales to the record industry, something that's offset by the handful of dollars I pay Napster per month. At the end of the day, though, I think both myself and the record industry benefit.
Maybe both benefit, maybe not. Does society as a whole benefit? do we get better works of art (music) that become part of our cultral inheretence? As logn as we don't, this all fails to serve the primary purpose of copyright and as a whole we lose.
Just as an aside, you're really downloading but not sharing? I'd call that leeching:)
SO do I, just pointing out that the downloading action is not illegal, the uploading/sharing part is.
I don't see that copyright law isn't serving its purpose. The purpose of copyright law is to create an "economy of ideas" allowing those producing original media work to profit from their labour. That, it does - I make a living because I sell or license the copyright to my work, for example.
That is not the purpose of copyright. If you happen to live in the USA, I suggest you go read what the constitution has to say about this matter.
Copyright exists to provide artists with an incentive to create art for the public good. The income you can get due to the exclusive rights granted by copyright make it possible at times to actually earn a living, but that is purely coincidental, and arguing that this is a right in itself is silly.
Re:This sort of thing...
on
RIAA Sues a Child
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I'm not arguing that it always results in loss of income for the record company, because that's demonstrably false.
Ok, clear.
What I'm arguing is that the value for people who download comes in the fact that it costs them nothing to do so. The moment that it costs them something, it's no longer "worth the money".
For me the value is in being able to judge if you want to spend money on something. Try before you buy etc. That indeed means that the try should not cost. If it does, then you get to another model, which might be as valid, ut whiich I am totally uninterested in.
But it's completely related. The argument that you're putting forward - and it used to be one that I agreed with, totally - was that people were justified in using illegal downloads to sample music, and they then went on to purchase more music. The second half of this argument is true: people who download lots also purchase lots.
I am not arguing that people are justified in 'illegally' downloading things for trying them. I am arguing that the RIAA and the like are makign a bogus claim when saying this is costing them money.
However, there now exists services that, for a minimal fee, let you sample pretty much everything you could possibly want to - and all completely legally. This means that there's no longer any need to use illegal downloads as a method of sampling new music (and if you can't afford $5 a month, you probably can't afford to buy any music anyway). So, the argument that people have to use illegal downloads as ways of sampling new music no longer holds, unless your tastes run to obscure stuff that never shows up on legal services.
Now to clarify something here, in most countries, and definitely where I live, the downloading part is LEGAL, let me repeat it so that it is completely clear, THE DOWNLOADING IS LEGAL.
What may not be legal (and in fact is not legal in most cases) are the sources you are downloading things from.
What this means is that as long as I do not upload things, it is perfectly legal for me to sample things in this way, and indeed Yahoo is just a more expensive alternative, that might not even have everything I am looking for.
This reinforces my point, above: unless the kind of music you're downloading isn't available on the likes of Napster and Yahoo Music, the only reason that you continue to download comes down to cost, and the fact that it's "for free" - NOT because you can sample stuff before buying.
I do not see why I should have to pay so that others can promote their product in the hope that I buy it. If they want my business, that is about as silly as the 'downloading is stealing' argument. Yes, there are cases where it makes sense, but generally it does not. You want my money? then you pay for promoting your business to me, plain and simple.
That there exist people who don't mind paying for such a thing, well, that is fine of course, but I do not see why I should.
You, of course, ignore the fact that in so doing, you're breaking the law by violating another's copyright, rationalizations aside.
I do not forget that, but as a matter of fact, where I live it is completely legal to download things from P2P networks. It is illegal to distribute things without permission of the copyright holder however, but that concerns uploadign and not downloading.
In other words, the sources from which I download may not be legal, but where I live (and I actually believe the same to be true in the USA) the downloadign itself is actually completely legal.
Also, the law is there to serve a purpose. If it clearly fails to serve its purpose then it is a bad law, and following it is i,moral and wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
A broken digital clock is never right.
And yet its never wrong either.
And in the US I could advocate any one of their policies if I saw fit to do so.
Not when it is considered an immidiate threat to a person or people.
Due to repeated incidents resulting from such speech and ideas in European history, 'hate speech' is easily considered a direct and immidiate threat to people in Europe, but there is definitely a line where it is considered as such in the USA as well (pointing out a black person and inciting peopel to stone him to name an example)
This is akin to the yelling fire in a theatre example that is often used.
That's a gray area here. If you are a private company that doesn't receive Government contracts you can discriminate in your hiring or field of membership processes. You can't fire an existing employee on the grounds of discrimination though. You can talk about it all you want though. Witness all the KKK rallies. From what I understand they would probably not be able to do that in France because of the laws against hate speech.
Where I live, freedom from discrimination on gender, race, religion, sexual orrientation, etc, is something that is guaranteed by our constitution. There is however a subtle difference between discriminating, and voicing an opinion. That is somewhat of a grey area, and can result in interesting things:
A catholic priest was arguing against homosexuals, basing himself on his religious point of view.
A gay rights organisation complained about discrimination as a result.
This ended up in court, and the judge found the combination of freedom of religion and freedom of speech more important then the freedom from discrimination, specifically because there was no direct threat or disadvantage resulting from the opinion of that priest.
How far this could exactly go I do not know, but as I already pointed out, if you look at Germany and/or France and think that their anti hate-speech laws are typical for Europe, they are not. Those are the exception, not the rule.
This does not mean that you can just say everything you want, see above.
Somebody in the US who advocates that the terrorists were right will doubtless be shunned. Heck, look at what happened to Bill Maher's TV show and all he did was call them brave. But there is no law against advocating that the terrorists were right. I could go down to Ground Zero right now and start telling people why I think the towers deserved to come down. It probably wouldn't be a very wise idea but it wouldn't be illegal.
And in most of Europe people can argue why they believe the jews got what they deserved. Those people won't be very popular, but it is not illegal. What they cannot do is call for people to finish the job and kill those who survived.
In the USA you do run the risk of being suspected of supporting an illegal terrorist organisation.
Again, if you use the laws in Germany (where many people by now seem to realize that those laws do not work to begin with) or France and think that those apply to all of Europe or even most of EUrope, then you are mistaken. Those are 2 local laws and are the exception, not the rule. The exception is extremely specific also.
Also, don't believe that there are no political organisations that are banned in the USA. You may strongly disagree with their methods and ideas, and think that banning groups like Hamas is justified, but it doesn't change the fact that those are considered illegal 'terrorist' organisations, while many others consider them people who are trying to fight oppression and tryign to establish their own political agenda.
The point of this post as well as my previous post is to point out that there are differences between free speech in Europe and the USA, but those are details, and do not make that the USA has a lot more freedom of speech or that people in EUrope have their free speech suppressed.
I'd like to remind you of the last 2 times the USA actually managed to establish some kind of democracy somewhere in the past century..
Japan and Germany
Both cases happened some half a century ago, and in Japan it was by accident and not on purpose while in Germany it was at least in part a consequence of then then starting cold war. Neither has a very good working democratic system from what I can tell.
Since then the USA has been involved in many countries, but more democracy for the people there was not the result, less democracy more a rule then the exception.
With regards to Iraq, we don't know yet, but none of the optimistic views of the US government wrt post-war Iraq did come true so far. Sure, there were elections, which is a huge step forward, but we can still not talk about a stable country, and it does not look any better with regards to that then a year ago. Iraq may succeed (I hope it will) but giving that much more then a 50% chance is being extremely optimistic imho, not to say unrealistic.
In Iran, with all its limitations and restrictions, the situation today is still more democratic and better for the average person then it was during the times of the USA supported Sjah. You can rightfully complain about their current government and its policies, but before you judge their response to anything American, it might be wise to look a little bit at past American involvement in that country.
Do you find it strange that people just don't believe this 'spreading democracy' idea is going to work out (if they believe that this is the real goal to begin with)
It is very simple in the end, you cannot enforce freedom and democracy onto a country, but you can help create the conditions in which both can work. This happened by accident in Japan, and would be a good thing to take a closer look at.
I live in Europe, in the Netherlands to be exact. I can pretty well discuss the merrits (and failings) of nazism here as long as I do not advocate some of their more extreme policies.
An entirely different thing is that I will have a lot of explanation to do when arguing that Nazism actually had some merrits, it is very easily misunderstood for advocating all the evils that come with it, and it is not well accepted socially.
I can discuss the differences (biological, cultural) between races, no problem. I can discuss the differences between men and women, no problem. Different religions? no problem either.
What I cannot do is discriminate people based on hteir race, gender, religion or any such thing, where discrimination is defined as differentiating between those without there being a factual basis for differentiating.
What I also cannot do is publish a copy of 'Mein Kampf' without some mandatory annotation (ie, in its original form).
That is pretty much where limitations on my freedom of speech end however.
There are two places in Europe that have more strict rules with regards to nazism specifically, France and Germany. I do not know about France, but due to spending almost half of my time in Germany, I know that quite a few Germans by now don't think this is such a good idea, but fear the response of their neighbors when lifting such rules. It will happen there tho because the way it is there, it does put too much of a limitation on legitimate political speech.
While large, those 2 are the exception, and not the rule, and as said, in at least one of them this is bound to change with time.
A very interesting detail with regards to Germany is that there is no law there prohibiting the distribution or publication of Mein Kampf in its original form, yet you will not be able to obtain it anywhere legally. This has to do with the current copyright holders not permitting it and not with it being banned. That said, many things that depict nazism or its symbols in another way then just plain evil do seem to either be banned or at least extremely difficult to obtain.
p.s. Much of Europe suffered badly during the second world war. Nazism is to blame for that at least for a very large part. That people in Europe respond strongly still to someone even pondering about what the merrits of nazism might have been should become very understandable for the average American by thinking about how they feel about people looking for merrits in the beliefs of the people who attacked the world trade center. Now also keep in mind the difference in scale between that event and the second world war. You should understand that nazism in Europe is treated in a different way then about anything else, also with regards to freedom of speech.
Speech for commercial purposes or that represents an immediate threat to people's lives (shouting fire in a movie theater) are not protected.
The interesting bit here is that quite a few people in Europe seem to think that racist and nazi talk poses an immediate threat to people. Right or wrong, from the history of Europe it is at least understandable to think that way.
As a consequence, many Europeans also believe that their rules regarding those things are not a limitation on 'legitimate free speech', and as a result don't think Americans make a very good argument when mentioning those for showing how they have Freedom of speech and most Europeans have not. (personally I don't think the limitations on nazi and racist speech are a good idea, but I also don't think they represent any serious threat to Freedom of speech in Europe, and as a small detail, differing from the mainstream opinion seems way more accepted in most parts of Europe then it is in the USA, or at least was when I lived there in the early 90s, so in practise you can feel more free to speak your mind without immediate social repercusions)
The bottomline is that as you point out yourself, most speech is considered 'legitimate' and other is not and when it is not it is so for a specific reason. Neither place has absolute freedom of speech, and both have a situation where for most practical purposes people are able to say exactly what they want.
Ever read this thingy? Or any of the other publications from this w3c thing?
They pay a lot of attention to ensuring things keep working, and dgrade in a nice gracefull way instead of just borking.
And yes, in 2005 there are still quite a few relevant browsers that do not support JS, and which would be extremely usable with a webmail application still. This concerns virtually all browsers on handheld devices.
AIM is the only thing AOL has to offer which is even remotely useful.
AOL has a lot of subscribers, this customer base s by far the most interestign asset they have, esp. if you are planning on moving into the ISP business (which Google seems to be showing some interest in)
Got to think of the 6502 and its indirect indexed addressing modes..
Basicly, you'd store a pointer somewhere in memory page 0, and then use the x or y register as an index into whatever it pointed at (ie LDA ($a0),x would take the pointer stored in address a0 and a1, use the x register as an index, and read the contents of the resulting address into the acumulator) . Here it would be faster to manipulate the index and not the pointer.
Pointers were 16 bit (64k address space) and x and y were 8 bit registers.. so when you wanted to address beyodn the boundary of a (256 byte) memory page, you'd have to manipulate the pointer anyway.
Phones with an internal battery that is not user replacable do exist. Tho a bit old, here is one example of such a phone.
Hmm, not entirely accurate I believe..
:)
This (ad at the bottom of the page) is where XS4ALL started. They were basicly the first public ISP in the Netherlands (tho I am not entirely sure, 'stichting Simplex' was there at around the same time from what I recall)
Demon and XS4ALL definitely have things in common, but I think that has more to do with both having started in the very early days of public internet access, and still believing that they connect computers to a big network (as opposed to the content focus that many an ISP seems to have). Both give you a fixed IP and your own hostname, allow you to run servers including smtp and http etc.
At any rate, XS4ALL grew out of a desire to provide cheap access to the 'live internet' as opposed to the then common uucp mail/news access. The people behind it had been involved in the Datanet 1 (X25 network similar to Tymnet and the like) and the BBS scene, and had been running a somewhat substantial (100+ nodes) uucp network for some time. They went for nothing less making it possible for every person with the proper equipment to become a full host on the Internet, an attitude which is still pretty much there in modern XS4ALL.
AH well.. thanks for reminding me of that time.. had fun looking up some info on it today, and reading back about the early days of Internet access overhere. Heh, to think that I have a nice 8mbit up/1 mbit down connection here that costs about 1/5th per month when compared to the initial internet connection (at a whopping 19k2) that XS4ALL used themselves to get on the net
I did not use XS4ALL much during those early days, mostly because I got a free account from IGN with which I had internet access with local dialin from about any major city worldwide, and I had a rather good access deal with Simplex for my home network. I can confirm your comments about the quality of XS4ALL and their generally nice attitude towards issues that concern their private customers.
Welcome to this new age where you have memory cards that can be used by devices from more then one brand...
For what I have seen you do not want to make prints from pictures made with a phone camera.
Not untill the optics and sensor in the typical phone camera get a lot better. Substantial distorition at the edges of the picture, noise and bad colors and such are the primary reasons why pictures with the cameras in the last geenration of phones still look crappy compared to any somewhat decent compact digital camera with the same resolution. They will however cut away the market for real low-end digicams.
*chuckle*
For all I can tell it was a deliberate plot to finally finish off that Houssein guy that had been bugging his family for over a decade. Using the existing fears from the 9/11 attacks made it piece of cake to get a large enough part of the population behind it without thought.
A famous and very evil dictator once wrote: Make people feel so they don't think.
While I don't think the 9/11 attacks were a setup or any such nonsense, I do think they were used by the government to achieve some personal goals using the resources of the nation however.
The constitution in Europe was yet another attempt to promote something that had very few checks and balances and other democratic ideals to a European people who (to their credit) overrode their leaders and demanded elections. Even when they jury rigged the system so the most pro-EU country went first, it still went down in flames.
The Afghani constitution was a better document then the European one.
Agreed on that constitution. The point you seem to miss however is that the peopel in Europe seem to have enough of a say to not let such nonsense fly.
And these are the leaders that we are supposed to entrust the Internet too?
Those leaders? no, never trust the leaders.
You are not very well informed about European history however.
Most of Europe got their constitutions around 1848, about a century before world war 2 ended.
Some of those lasted, others did not.
If you however believe that Europe did not change a lot between the American revolution and the second world war you are very ignorant of European history.
The country I live in got its independance from the Spannish empire during the 1600s, after 80 years of struggle.
For about 150 years (untill Napoleon was finally defeated) it was a republic governed by regional representatives and with as head of state someone who always happened to be a prince in some German royal family. Despite that, it did not become a monarchy till 1830. This head of state thing had a lot more to do with it being practical in the then predominantly monarchistic Europe. After Napoleon got defeated and the map of Europe got rearranged, we became a monarchy similar to other countries in Europe.
By 1848 many an interlectual and many a ruler in Europe had drawn their conclusions from the French revolution, and the concept of the constitutional monarchy was introduced.
18 years after becomming a monarchy we became basicly the constitutional monarchy we are now. There have been some changes (esp. with regards to who is allowed to vote, which ended in 1917 where every citizen reaching 18 years of age got to vote. Remind me, when were the practical barriers to voting for Afro Americans removed again?)
Then, by the time the second world war had ended, those countries which had skipped on the 1848 events (Germany, which was to caught up in trying to become a single country at the time, Russia, which still employed a feodal system at the time etc) got their current constitutions (Spain had to wait a bit longer, same for Greece and Portugal)
At any rate, those who believe the end of the second world war introduced Europe to democracy are mistaken. It did restore democracy however, and in many cases fixing flaws that had been there in previous systems. Some of the pre ww2 democracies were weak and failed, others were strong and are still there today in pretty much the same form. For pre American Revolution times it depends a lot on where you look.
People on both sides of the Atlantic learned from eachother. The American founding fathers pretty closely observed the French Revolution, and people in Europe did the same with what happened in what is now the USA.
What happened in much of Europe in 1848 was a response to both events.
The constitution that was written for the USA is imho one of the most important political texts since the beginning of written history. I am not the first one to think that of course, and many took their lessons from both its successes and its failures.
Last but not least, you may think that much of what I say is anti-US rethoric, but tell me, since when is it anti-US to actually do one of those things that your constituion and your political system supposedly expect people to do: think and speak your mind independently of what any propaganda tries to tell you.
I respect the USA and its people for who they are and their accomplishments, but that does not mean I cannot point out their failures (as a country) also, and that is what I will do when I think its important.
Specifically, check http://soapbox.bartsplace.net/article.php/20040605 084457375
It was written quite soem time ago, but it describes my ideas pretty well I think.
Also, see the current headline article, tho it has more to do with copyright in relation to specific media and accepting that using a specific medium puts some inherent limitations on your rights as copyright owner.
I don't understand your point. Please explain - and especially why you think it's changed.
:)
The exclusive rights granted by copyright were intended to be limited in time and scope. The time limitation is effectively gone, hence the current practise has changed from what is written in the constitution.
This is very relevant because it demonstrates how slowly the 'means' have been turned into a goal themselves.
Te re-iterate, the goal of copyright is NOT to provide artists with an income. Providing artists with potential income is the means with which copyright law tries to achieve its goal of promoting arts for enrichment of cultural heritage. The lack of limitation on the term of copyright makes that the cultural heritage is not enriched, and as a conseuqnece, current cop[yright implementations do not work as intended by those who wrote that provision in the constitution.
Indeed, and the onus should be on those opposing these laws - which have worked for a few hundred years - to show that there's a better way to achieve this goal and that the current means are working against the stated goal in such a way as they can't be reformed.
Those are two seperate issues:
1. there may be better ways to achieve the goal
2. the current way does not work.
If 1. is the case then implement the better ways. If 2. is the case then stop using that way.
Those are 2 INDEPENDENT issues.
I have shown why 2. is the case. It is easy to fix also without disbanding copyright alltogether, just limit its term to something reasonable. You may goto my website for some more of my thoughts on that.
If there are better means, probably there are.
Care to take up the baton?
Despotes which also happen to be in charge of places where the USA sends prisoners to that they can't interrogate within the limits of their own laws? Despotes helped to power and kept in power by that same USA?
You desperately need to take a closer look at things yourself and use your brains. Repeating the one-sided view of a single party or group is not gonna get you anywhere.
The EU hardly has a stellar history of coordination, as they can't even seem to get a constitution passed.
If you do not know what you are talking about then maybe you should just keep your mouth shut.
Citizens in multiple countries in the EU told their politicians that the constitution that they (the politicians) had agreed upon was not to their liking.
That is a level of democracy that the USA currently can only dream about.
It has nothing to do with lack of coordination, the politicians managed that part pretty much. It is a matter of politicians writing a bad constitution and then getting told by the peopel to shove it up their ass.
But nevermind, its much more fun to believe the Neocon BS about Old Europe, and turn a blind eye for the monster that the US government has become. It is at least a lot less stressfull to do that when you live in hte USA I suppose.
The UN *has* made resolutions, then failed to act on them.
Definitely. A nice few examples can be found with regards to Israel and occupied territories, and the even nicer thing here is that one can point at the USA as the party which blocked any action.
Pot, please meet kettle. May I point out that you look alike in color?
The UN *has* censured the United States for acting on those resolutions. The perfect example of this has been the Iraq war, which was a UN resolution that the UN got upset about when the US took action. Do you deny these things?
After the USA came with extremely doubtfull evidence, disproven claims and such, yes.
Tell me, where are those supposed WMDs?
Did not find them? then it is pretty clear that the primary reason for the UN resolution was missing, and the UN is right to disagree with the US/UK invasion of Iraq. There are lots of good and defendable reasons one can come up with for that invasion, but this is not one of them.
1. Why do you care?
Some people don't like being assholes maybe?
2. Why take their word over your own trust in your own county?
I have a better suggestion for you..
Provided that there is anything in that thing you consider to be your head, try using it.
You should listen to both and decide for yourself. Listening to one side of a story is going to make you a fool by definition.
And that's something that hasn't changed. The best way to encourage people to do a job well and do good work is to pay them, whether they're making chairs or songs.
It has changed. This ',limited' part is effectively no longer there.
Also, you confuse goal and means to obtain that goal.
Providing a way for artists to make money out of their creations is a means to achieve the goal of more works of art for society. The goal was never to provide artists with an income however.
If there is a better way to achieve the stated goal then it should be used, ad if it can be shown that the current means are actually working against the stated goal they should be disbanded.
Marketing is an investment that has to be done in order to generate business. Hopw much depends on what business you are in, and what business plan you use etc, but regardless, it is part of the cost of doing business.
:) ). I also buy CDs or downloads of stuff that I really like, usually having heard it and liked it through Napster. Yet, as well as stuff I like enough to buy, and stuff I hate, there's a third category: Stuff that I like enough to listen to occasionally, but which isn't worth buying. Example: a "20 Rock and Roll Greats". Great music, but not stuff I'll listen to often. However, prior to Napster 2.0, I would probably have bought that at some point - now, I don't need to.
Of course the cost of doing business is reflected in the price a consumer pays, that is, if the business wants to make some proffit. That is true for all kinds of things, not just marketing.
I do still not see why I should pay upfront in order to allow others to promote their products to me. THe ultimate and absurd consequence of this would be instituting a 'marketing tax' that everyone pasy and that is used to allow businesses to promote goods to me. That I pay for it when I decide to buy something is completely fine with me, there the ones who do a good job get payed for it and those who do a lousy job don't. When I feel a company is spending too much on promotion and the quality or price of their product(s) suffer too much then I won't buy from them at all.
It's simple and lets the market do its work. We don't need consumer subsidized p[romotion channels for this really.
Let me explain. I subscribe to Napster To Go, which lets me listen to music pretty much where I want, when I want it (Microsoft's occasionally crappy software permitting
I have some such CDs, and know what, many of their tracks end up in the mp3 mixes I make listenign to on the way. I have no problem buying such CDs when they contain enough tracks I like to listen to every now and then. If they don't then chances are good I will encounter another compilation CD that has the tracks I want, so no need to buy.
What is more, for as far as such compilation CDs goes, there is no need for sampling, those contain known tracks. You need an index to see if it might be good enough to buy.
So, using a service to listen to music you like to hear, but don't think good enough to actually buy, does not qualify as 'sampling'.
That said, if it works for you, all the better. For the tracks I don't have myself I use something called a radio.
Before I subscribed to Napster, I bought a LOT of music online (mostly from iTunes). Now I buy much, much less, because the more marginal stuff that I like a bit doesn't get bought. Those are lost sales to the record industry, something that's offset by the handful of dollars I pay Napster per month. At the end of the day, though, I think both myself and the record industry benefit.
Maybe both benefit, maybe not. Does society as a whole benefit? do we get better works of art (music) that become part of our cultral inheretence? As logn as we don't, this all fails to serve the primary purpose of copyright and as a whole we lose.
Just as an aside, you're really downloading but not sharing? I'd call that leeching :)
SO do I, just pointing out that the downloading action is not illegal, the uploading/sharing part is.
I don't see that copyright law isn't serving its purpose. The purpose of copyright law is to create an "economy of ideas" allowing those producing original media work to profit from their labour. That, it does - I make a living because I sell or license the copyright to my work, for example.
That is not the purpose of copyright. If you happen to live in the USA, I suggest you go read what the constitution has to say about this matter.
Copyright exists to provide artists with an incentive to create art for the public good.
The income you can get due to the exclusive rights granted by copyright make it possible at times to actually earn a living, but that is purely coincidental, and arguing that this is a right in itself is silly.
I'm not arguing that it always results in loss of income for the record company, because that's demonstrably false.
Ok, clear.
What I'm arguing is that the value for people who download comes in the fact that it costs them nothing to do so. The moment that it costs them something, it's no longer "worth the money".
For me the value is in being able to judge if you want to spend money on something. Try before you buy etc. That indeed means that the try should not cost. If it does, then you get to another model, which might be as valid, ut whiich I am totally uninterested in.
But it's completely related. The argument that you're putting forward - and it used to be one that I agreed with, totally - was that people were justified in using illegal downloads to sample music, and they then went on to purchase more music. The second half of this argument is true: people who download lots also purchase lots.
I am not arguing that people are justified in 'illegally' downloading things for trying them. I am arguing that the RIAA and the like are makign a bogus claim when saying this is costing them money.
However, there now exists services that, for a minimal fee, let you sample pretty much everything you could possibly want to - and all completely legally. This means that there's no longer any need to use illegal downloads as a method of sampling new music (and if you can't afford $5 a month, you probably can't afford to buy any music anyway). So, the argument that people have to use illegal downloads as ways of sampling new music no longer holds, unless your tastes run to obscure stuff that never shows up on legal services.
Now to clarify something here, in most countries, and definitely where I live, the downloading part is LEGAL, let me repeat it so that it is completely clear, THE DOWNLOADING IS LEGAL.
What may not be legal (and in fact is not legal in most cases) are the sources you are downloading things from.
What this means is that as long as I do not upload things, it is perfectly legal for me to sample things in this way, and indeed Yahoo is just a more expensive alternative, that might not even have everything I am looking for.
This reinforces my point, above: unless the kind of music you're downloading isn't available on the likes of Napster and Yahoo Music, the only reason that you continue to download comes down to cost, and the fact that it's "for free" - NOT because you can sample stuff before buying.
I do not see why I should have to pay so that others can promote their product in the hope that I buy it. If they want my business, that is about as silly as the 'downloading is stealing' argument. Yes, there are cases where it makes sense, but generally it does not. You want my money? then you pay for promoting your business to me, plain and simple.
That there exist people who don't mind paying for such a thing, well, that is fine of course, but I do not see why I should.
You, of course, ignore the fact that in so doing, you're breaking the law by violating another's copyright, rationalizations aside.
I do not forget that, but as a matter of fact, where I live it is completely legal to download things from P2P networks. It is illegal to distribute things without permission of the copyright holder however, but that concerns uploadign and not downloading.
In other words, the sources from which I download may not be legal, but where I live (and I actually believe the same to be true in the USA) the downloadign itself is actually completely legal.
Also, the law is there to serve a purpose. If it clearly fails to serve its purpose then it is a bad law, and following it is i,moral and wrong.