"I'm farther to the left than 99% of the population-- have been for years and years."
Uhuh? This is Slashdot dude, you should count yourself lucky if someone reads the goddamn article linked to at the top of the page before posting, let alone check out the opinions of the pinheads he or she's responding to. FYI, I did actually have a brief scan of your website. You know what led me to deduce you were some sort of right winger? Lets see:
Your use of the phrase 'so called "left"'
Your eagerness to side with the vast and organised corporate right-wing anti-Moore flak campaign - the largest right-wing attack on one non-politician since, what, Jane Fonda? Makes you a fellow-traveller for them pesky right-wingers at the very least.
An article on your website on how you were in two minds as to whether or not poor people should be allowed to breed.
Your link to 'The Libertarian case against IP' - I didn't read it but I thought it would be unlikely that you were one of the ten Americans on the planet who actually happens to know that 'libertarian' can sometimes mean some flavour of socialist or left-anarchist so I was playing the odds here a bit.
There was some articles on Public Schools and Unions on your site, both bugbears to right-wing folks. Unfortunately the Public Schools article had a conclusion but wasn't finished because you hadn't concocted enough evidence to arrive at your conclusion, and the Unions article was wibbling on about government-sanctioned programmers guilds or some other such fanciful nonsense so I switched off since it was clearly science-fiction.
The only evidence of left-wing-ness was the articles on the anarchist Emma Goldman - and she was a very individualistic, Nietsche-worshipping species of anarchist, with a personal dislike of poor people. I reckon that if, by some magic time travel device, Ayn Rand and Emma Goldman were ever in the same room together, they'd have gotten on like a house on fire. I'll admit it looked odd, but I figured that she was just some sort of left-wing mascot of yours.
That's why I reckoned you were, and still reckon you are, right-wing. I'd have gone back to your site too to make sure I wasn't hallucinating but you seem to have removed the content and replaced it with a nice picture, which is probably for the best, all things considered. I did fish out from the google cache that you were a card-carrying Libertarian Party member, though.
You seem to be using the term 'left-wing' in a manner inconsistent with the way every other person on the planet uses it. Yes, Libertarian capitalists are considered right-wing by most speakers of the English language. (One of the less obnoxious flavours of right-wing IMO, but still right-wing) Yes, I didn't investigate you overly thoroughly but I did a reasonable job given that you're just some random/.er.
"However, if you're what passes for the "left" these days, I might consider voting for right wingers just to piss you idiots off. "
Go ahead, it's not as if I live in the same country as you so it's not likely to affect me in the slightest, even in the unlikely event that your one vote manages to affect the outcome of that election, or the unlikely event that the politician, no matter what party he or she belongs to, will do anything other than carry out orders from Wall Street anyway.
"I wasn't criticizing Michael Moore for anything of the sort. I was criticizing your comparison."
Well first-off your criticism was utterly bogus, and secondly, contradicting person A saying statement S is, in most universes, a contradiction of statement S.
Otherwise you can get away with some really heinous arguments with that reasoning. Witness:
Me: "Jeez, this road is shit" You: "You're wrong! That's bullshit!" Me: "Look, there's a pothole right there! And another one right there! If you think this road's good you drive!" You: "I didn't say this road was good, I was criticising you for saying this road su
"he's given so much credit by the so-called "left". "
Well Mike Moore isn't really the leftie's lefty. He's just the only left wing voice that most normal Americans ever hear, which is why he gets hit by rabid and disproportionate amounts of criticism by dribbling right-wing trolls much like yourself. Greg Palast and Noam Chomsky are much better, but almost nobody hears THEM and they're harder to criticise because they've got a much better command of the facts than Michael Moore. Hence you pick on the guy who gives you most bang for your dribbling troll buck, and even then, you get it wrong.
"So Mikey Moore won't send the IP "gestapo" around to me if I do copy his film? So what?"
Meaning he's a fuckload better than every single other Hollywood director that you conspicuously didn't criticise. Gnats and camels.
"As to the "open source way"... no. You've got it wrong. If Mikey Moore's movie were open source he would be releasing a decent copy of the film in some machine-readable format."
He's released a decent copy of the film. As a proper cinema film in a metal box and everything. That's the 'source' version, since everything else is just a lossy copy of that, even that nice DVD-friendly bitstream you're demanding he gives you for free. You CAN pay for that and make the digital copy you demand. Hey, someone has to make that machine-readable version, and it does involve a lot of actual work and capital expenditure, you know. Won't you get blackballed from your local society of libertarian loons if they hear you demanding that other people do work for you for free?
Richard Stallman didn't put out his early copies of emacs for free- if you got your emacs from Stallman, you had to pay him something like $150 or thereabouts. Do you expect Michael Moore to be even more of a puritan than good old RMS?
Besides, if you're going to criticise him for non 'open-source'-ness get it right. The major way he breaks that 'open source' thing is by his non-commercial restriction. Hope this helps.
So you expect, as a non-paying customer, Michael Moore to go out and waste his own money and/or time to bring you a top-quality movie rip of his film, do you? WTF?
He's already said you're more than welcome to copy it yourself, if you can. If you want a better quality rip out there, you go hire out the film and equipment and make one. That's the open source, information-is-free way - copying and distribution is handled by everyone, via the magic of the internet and all those wonderful technologies we all have these days.
Michael Moore - unlike almost every other filmmaker out there - won't send the Intellectual Property Gestapo round to your home and hit you with massive fines and penalties, if you have the temerity to use those technologies.
"Or, maybe Moore sees P2P as an advertising medium to drive sales of movie tickets?"
Even left wingers have to eat, sleep, and pay rent too. He's not forcing you to pay him in order to see his movie, but I'm sure he'd appreciate it if you did. If you paid him nothing, he owes you nothing.
I'm not even sure if the reason has anything to do with the military at all- this could be just an economic decision designed to allow them to place a partial economic blockade on, say, China, without getting taken to a WTO tribunal for imposing trade barriers.
It's happened before. In 1984 the US tried to stop British companies exporting computers to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, and restrict any British citizen who could program a computer from travelling beyond the Iron Curtain for pretty much this same excuse. The real reason was that the US wanted to export computers itself but was annoyed at having to compete with Britain.
In fact, the UK has had a law since 1981 called the 'Protection of Trading Interests act' which was designed specifically to make it harder for the US government to prevent British companies from trading with the old Soviet Bloc. (It was put in place by US sanctions on a UK company for building a Siberian oil pipeline, and the law says that the UK government can force any company under that sort of threat to ignore it)
"There is no possible way for a business that simply offers a product to abuse your freedom. If you don't like what they offer, you can always go somewhere else."
Well I differ with you on what constitutes an abusive relationship. An abusive relationship isn't one which the weaker party can't necessarily escape from, but one where one party holds far more power than the other - if you can leave the relationship, but at a grave cost, such as never being able to use a computer at all, then that's an abusive relationship.
As an analogy, people were often 'free' to be christians in the Warsaw pact countries during the cold war. However, being an active christian was likely to involve state surveillance and harassment such as being denied job promotions or whatever. By your definition of the term 'abuse', however, that wasn't abusive. People did actually have a choice. They could chose between foregoing their beliefs or being harassed. According to you, that's not abusive.
(There were, of course, worse crimes committed against christians in the eastern bloc - those are irrelevant for this particular argument)
Being told that you MUST use proprietary software, or not use a computer at all (which was the case before about 1991 or so) is an abuse of power, even though it isn't outright coercion. Being told that you must have DRM-enabled software, that you must dial up microsoft.com or whoever and be spied on every time you switch your computer on, being denied the right to look at or change the software on 'your' computer, and being made to fork out large sums of cash every 3 years or so in order for your computer to be able to talk to the rest of the world IS an abuse.
It only stops being abusive when we DO have a reasonable choice without being, in this case, ostracised, economically speaking. If free software is killed, (it won't just die a natural death, patent laws or DRM-type legislation, or the annulment of the GPL, or some sort of hardware restrictions will be needed to kill it) then we'll go back to your fairly stark, 'non-abusive' choice - either be subjected to proprietary handcuffs and surveillance, or never use a computer again, and be effectively ignored by the rest of the world.
This was the case before 1991 or so, but then, the economic consequenses of not having a computer were less severe than they are now. We're very, very, lucky to have a real and fair choice now, and it was only made possible by the creation of the GPL.
"Your arguement is irrational.
I'm not irrational, I just disagree with you on what certain words mean.
"The only abuse of freedom is that of the govt. by restricting what taxpayers can do with software they paid for."
I'm glad to see you're opposed to government funding and support of proprietary software.
Yeah but firstly, the US government aids and abets proprietary software, which is much MORE restrictive than the GPL, so whining about the GPL without complaining about them is major-league hypocritical, and secondly, the GPL doesn't stop anyone profiting from the software, including companies, it just stops people profiting with certain types of business model that abuse people's freedom.
I have it on good authority that Strategic Air Command received an email from one Richard M Stallman telling them that the most ethical and easiest way to deal with their passwords was to hit enter at the 'change password' prompt...
"Noam likes to make wild claims while assuming you'll take his word for it...Moore at least cites his sources."
Huh? What??? Are you on crack? Almost every book of Chomsky's I've ever read has been choc-a-block with footnotes and citations. Picking the first Chomsky book at random off my shelf (Year 501: The Conquest continues) I find that there's 20 dense pages of footnotes at the end, followed by 6 pages of bibliography. That's a fairly lightweight set of citations, by Noam's standards.
I suppose some of Chomsky's books are collections of interviews with people like David Barsamian, and aren't intended as formal scholarship, which might be the ones you're thinking of.
Either that or you've never actually picked up a book by Chomsky, which appears to be the case with at least half of Chomsky's critics.
Well you could try swapping away jurors who are perceived to be neutral, but it'd be foolish. Being the first person to swap a jury member puts you at a slight disadvantage, since the bad guys now have one more swap than you. And you probably don't have any control over the replacement juror either.
If they were inclined to ennumerate the potential biasedness of a juror, I imagine game theorists would say the opposite to what you're saying - the litigants would generally only weed out the ones who appear most biased, since knocking out a 'neutral' would a) invite retaliation and b) has a 50-50 chance of making the jury worse.
Insofar as it goes, it seems a reasonable system, though it's probably broken somewhere, if those liberal horror stories about all-white Southern juries sending innocent black guys to death row are to be believed.
Well both sides in an American jury have the same rights to alternate jurors so it's hardly unfair. If the defence swaps a juror, the prosecution can swap another one and vice versa, up to a limit - it's the same for both sides and the effect is hopefully to get a jury that both prosecution and defence agree on..
Linus' innovation isn't in some technical doohickery in Linux itself, but in the way he used the internet and the open source methodology to perform the gargantuan effort of actually producing a mainstream working operating system, for a whole bunch of different architectures. This was a student, ffs, finding a means of securing and managing resources that would normally only be under the control of a government or a multinational corporation.
He hasn't changed the way that software is made and sold (yet), but if it wasn't for him, there wouldn't be an alternative to proprietary software at all. Surely that has to be worth something?
Well the good news is anyone can cite "Madonna - American Life.mp3" as prior art and nullify the patent, so it should end up as one less patent in the world....
It's not copyright law, if any, that does it - it's the DMCA, or the counterpart in whatever country you happen to be in:
" `(a) VIOLATIONS REGARDING CIRCUMVENTION OF TECHNOLOGICAL MEASURES- (1)(A) No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title. The prohibition contained in the preceding sentence shall take effect at the end of the 2-year period beginning on the date of the enactment of this chapter."
If they put copy protection on it, then cracking the protection is now illegal.
Re:Only in sweden (and maybe a couple others)
on
Swedish Pirate Demo
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· Score: 1
"How many free software authors manage to support themselves on donations or support fees versus having a day job (where they probably code software for a commercial company)?"
And so? Either way, that software gets made in their free time, without the restrictions of copyright and license fees.
"The money to finance his lifestyle and allow him to compose didn't materialize out of thin air or come from donation buckets."
Bad choice, I know. I should have rooted around for a great composer who spent his life starving in a garret. But there's millions of unemployed musicians with day jobs kicking around. There's buskers in the streets. There's guys who play in bars. Are you seriously trying to say that there'd be no music if there was no copyright law?
"In fact, I'm sure GTA3 or Morrowind could easily have been coded in the spare time of some teenage hackers and given away for free."
Well fine. So we do without GTA3 or Morrowind or the Lord of the Rings film. We won't have huge hundred-million-dollar budget movies. We won't have massive stadium-rock extravaganzas. Bye bye U2. Bye Bye Francis Ford Coppola. That doesn't mean we won't have software, or music, or films, far from it - just not the massive capital-intensive spectaculars that us fat complacent westerners been fed by Hollywood and Electronic Arts and the RIAA*. Isn't that, really, a small price to pay for a world in which all information (some of the most important products of our economy) is free, and where no-one is excluded from them on the basis of poverty?
*Well maybe not. Linux is probably the largest computer software project that has ever existed, and there's no proprietary software manufacturer out there that could dream of making a piece of software that does half of the things that comes bundled with every linux distro. Hell in some ways, humble old nethack kicks the pants out of every commercial rpg out there, or at least it did last time I bought a commercial role-playing game.
Re:Only in sweden (and maybe a couple others)
on
Swedish Pirate Demo
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· Score: 2, Interesting
"So what you get in the end, is a place where content is free to all, but there is no content being created."
That's right. The complete lack of freely available software out there today just shows how necessary it is to have these IP laws in place. It's human nature. People just simply won't make software, or music or films or perform any kind of artistic or creative endeavour, unless they've been co-erced and cajoled into it through the operations of the capitalist system.
Don't those anarchists understand, if it wasn't for EMI's financing of Johann Sebastian Bach, we'd have no such thing as music at all today? How on earth could SpaceWar ever have been invented, if it wasn't for Electronic Arts working those poor MIT hackers to death with the promise of untold riches at the end of it all? The mind boggles.
When I was at university, I used to have two or three favourite computers in the labs- they were the ones hidden away in the corner, where the user-support types couldn't peer over my shoulder and see me playing nethack or X-com or whatever - gaming was outlawed. Maybe these anthropologist types missed something obvious...
You mean the fuckheads who design websites full of this sort of garbage could be forced to cough up swingeing royalties for the privilege of polluting the internet? Almost makes me want to support software patents....
Think rockets, not bullets. Providing the rocket exhaust doesn't hit the platform you're firing from, (e.g. something along the lines of the wing-mounted air to air missiles on modern jet fighters) then the rocket exhaust momentum should cancel out the rocket momentum quite nicely.
Yeah, but remember we're inside Bill Gates' wet dream here. By the time any dribbling idiot can write a program, then Digital Rights Management 3.0 will ensure that said dribbling idiot must have a credit card inserted into the slot in his motherboard in order to use your computer, and if he happens to come up with an algorithm that's already been patented, his trusted computing bios will automatically debit the fees from his credit card balance. Writing software might be theoretically easy in the future, but it's not a sport for the poor...
Slashdot Mirror
"I'm farther to the left than 99% of the population-- have been for years and years."
/.er.
Uhuh? This is Slashdot dude, you should count yourself lucky if someone reads the goddamn article linked to at the top of the page before posting, let alone check out the opinions of the pinheads he or she's responding to. FYI, I did actually have a brief scan of your website. You know what led me to deduce you were some sort of right winger? Lets see:
Your use of the phrase 'so called "left"'
Your eagerness to side with the vast and organised corporate right-wing anti-Moore flak campaign - the largest right-wing attack on one non-politician since, what, Jane Fonda? Makes you a fellow-traveller for them pesky right-wingers at the very least.
An article on your website on how you were in two minds as to whether or not poor people should be allowed to breed.
Your link to 'The Libertarian case against IP' - I didn't read it but I thought it would be unlikely that you were one of the ten Americans on the planet who actually happens to know that 'libertarian' can sometimes mean some flavour of socialist or left-anarchist so I was playing the odds here a bit.
There was some articles on Public Schools and Unions on your site, both bugbears to right-wing folks. Unfortunately the Public Schools article had a conclusion but wasn't finished because you hadn't concocted enough evidence to arrive at your conclusion, and the Unions article was wibbling on about government-sanctioned programmers guilds or some other such fanciful nonsense so I switched off since it was clearly science-fiction.
The only evidence of left-wing-ness was the articles on the anarchist Emma Goldman - and she was a very individualistic, Nietsche-worshipping species of anarchist, with a personal dislike of poor people. I reckon that if, by some magic time travel device, Ayn Rand and Emma Goldman were ever in the same room together, they'd have gotten on like a house on fire. I'll admit it looked odd, but I figured that she was just some sort of left-wing mascot of yours.
That's why I reckoned you were, and still reckon you are, right-wing. I'd have gone back to your site too to make sure I wasn't hallucinating but you seem to have removed the content and replaced it with a nice picture, which is probably for the best, all things considered. I did fish out from the google cache that you were a card-carrying Libertarian Party member, though.
You seem to be using the term 'left-wing' in a manner inconsistent with the way every other person on the planet uses it. Yes, Libertarian capitalists are considered right-wing by most speakers of the English language. (One of the less obnoxious flavours of right-wing IMO, but still right-wing) Yes, I didn't investigate you overly thoroughly but I did a reasonable job given that you're just some random
"However, if you're what passes for the "left" these days, I might consider voting for right wingers just to piss you idiots off. "
Go ahead, it's not as if I live in the same country as you so it's not likely to affect me in the slightest, even in the unlikely event that your one vote manages to affect the outcome of that election, or the unlikely event that the politician, no matter what party he or she belongs to, will do anything other than carry out orders from Wall Street anyway.
"I wasn't criticizing Michael Moore for anything of the sort. I was criticizing your comparison."
Well first-off your criticism was utterly bogus, and secondly, contradicting person A saying statement S is, in most universes, a contradiction of statement S.
Otherwise you can get away with some really heinous arguments with that reasoning.
Witness:
Me: "Jeez, this road is shit"
You: "You're wrong! That's bullshit!"
Me: "Look, there's a pothole right there! And another one right there! If you think this road's good you drive!"
You: "I didn't say this road was good, I was criticising you for saying this road su
"he's given so much credit by the so-called "left". "
Well Mike Moore isn't really the leftie's lefty. He's just the only left wing voice that most normal Americans ever hear, which is why he gets hit by rabid and disproportionate amounts of criticism by dribbling right-wing trolls much like yourself. Greg Palast and Noam Chomsky are much better, but almost nobody hears THEM and they're harder to criticise because they've got a much better command of the facts than Michael Moore. Hence you pick on the guy who gives you most bang for your dribbling troll buck, and even then, you get it wrong.
"So Mikey Moore won't send the IP "gestapo" around to me if I do copy his film? So what?"
Meaning he's a fuckload better than every single other Hollywood director that you conspicuously didn't criticise. Gnats and camels.
"As to the "open source way"... no. You've got it wrong. If Mikey Moore's movie were open source he would be releasing a decent copy of the film in some machine-readable format."
He's released a decent copy of the film. As a proper cinema film in a metal box and everything. That's the 'source' version, since everything else is just a lossy copy of that, even that nice DVD-friendly bitstream you're demanding he gives you for free. You CAN pay for that and make the digital copy you demand. Hey, someone has to make that machine-readable version, and it does involve a lot of actual work and capital expenditure, you know. Won't you get blackballed from your local society of libertarian loons if they hear you demanding that other people do work for you for free?
Richard Stallman didn't put out his early copies of emacs for free- if you got your emacs from Stallman, you had to pay him something like $150 or thereabouts. Do you expect Michael Moore to be even more of a puritan than good old RMS?
Besides, if you're going to criticise him for non 'open-source'-ness get it right. The major way he breaks that 'open source' thing is by his non-commercial restriction. Hope this helps.
So you expect, as a non-paying customer, Michael Moore to go out and waste his own money and/or time to bring you a top-quality movie rip of his film, do you? WTF?
He's already said you're more than welcome to copy it yourself, if you can. If you want a better quality rip out there, you go hire out the film and equipment and make one. That's the open source, information-is-free way - copying and distribution is handled by everyone, via the magic of the internet and all those wonderful technologies we all have these days.
Michael Moore - unlike almost every other filmmaker out there - won't send the Intellectual Property Gestapo round to your home and hit you with massive fines and penalties, if you have the temerity to use those technologies.
"Or, maybe Moore sees P2P as an advertising medium to drive sales of movie tickets?"
Even left wingers have to eat, sleep, and pay rent too. He's not forcing you to pay him in order to see his movie, but I'm sure he'd appreciate it if you did. If you paid him nothing, he owes you nothing.
Jesus christ, what a whiner.
I'm not even sure if the reason has anything to do with the military at all- this could be just an economic decision designed to allow them to place a partial economic blockade on, say, China, without getting taken to a WTO tribunal for imposing trade barriers.
It's happened before. In 1984 the US tried to stop British companies exporting computers to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, and restrict any British citizen who could program a computer from travelling beyond the Iron Curtain for pretty much this same excuse. The real reason was that the US wanted to export computers itself but was annoyed at having to compete with Britain.
In fact, the UK has had a law since 1981 called the 'Protection of Trading Interests act' which was designed specifically to make it harder for the US government to prevent British companies from trading with the old Soviet Bloc. (It was put in place by US sanctions on a UK company for building a Siberian oil pipeline, and the law says that the UK government can force any company under that sort of threat to ignore it)
As the man said, war is a racket.
"There is no possible way for a business that simply offers a product to abuse your freedom. If you don't like what they offer, you can always go somewhere else."
Well I differ with you on what constitutes an abusive relationship. An abusive relationship isn't one which the weaker party can't necessarily escape from, but one where one party holds far more power than the other - if you can leave the relationship, but at a grave cost, such as never being able to use a computer at all, then that's an abusive relationship.
As an analogy, people were often 'free' to be christians in the Warsaw pact countries during the cold war. However, being an active christian was likely to involve state surveillance and harassment such as being denied job promotions or whatever. By your definition of the term 'abuse', however, that wasn't abusive. People did actually have a choice. They could chose between foregoing their beliefs or being harassed. According to you, that's not abusive.
(There were, of course, worse crimes committed against christians in the eastern bloc - those are irrelevant for this particular argument)
Being told that you MUST use proprietary software, or not use a computer at all (which was the case before about 1991 or so) is an abuse of power, even though it isn't outright coercion. Being told that you must have DRM-enabled software, that you must dial up microsoft.com or whoever and be spied on every time you switch your computer on, being denied the right to look at or change the software on 'your' computer, and being made to fork out large sums of cash every 3 years or so in order for your computer to be able to talk to the rest of the world IS an abuse.
It only stops being abusive when we DO have a reasonable choice without being, in this case, ostracised, economically speaking. If free software is killed, (it won't just die a natural death, patent laws or DRM-type legislation, or the annulment of the GPL, or some sort of hardware restrictions will be needed to kill it) then we'll go back to your fairly stark, 'non-abusive' choice - either be subjected to proprietary handcuffs and surveillance, or never use a computer again, and be effectively ignored by the rest of the world.
This was the case before 1991 or so, but then, the economic consequenses of not having a computer were less severe than they are now. We're very, very, lucky to have a real and fair choice now, and it was only made possible by the creation of the GPL.
"Your arguement is irrational.
I'm not irrational, I just disagree with you on what certain words mean.
"The only abuse of freedom is that of the govt. by restricting what taxpayers can do with software they paid for."
I'm glad to see you're opposed to government funding and support of proprietary software.
Yeah but firstly, the US government aids and abets proprietary software, which is much MORE restrictive than the GPL, so whining about the GPL without complaining about them is major-league hypocritical, and secondly, the GPL doesn't stop anyone profiting from the software, including companies, it just stops people profiting with certain types of business model that abuse people's freedom.
Since it apparently annoys the Wiki owners, why don't they just stop the google bot indexing the sandbox files using 'robots.txt'? Just a thought...
I have it on good authority that Strategic Air Command received an email from one Richard M Stallman telling them that the most ethical and easiest way to deal with their passwords was to hit enter at the 'change password' prompt...
"Noam likes to make wild claims while assuming you'll take his word for it...Moore at least cites his sources."
Huh? What??? Are you on crack? Almost every book of Chomsky's I've ever read has been choc-a-block with footnotes and citations. Picking the first Chomsky book at random off my shelf (Year 501: The Conquest continues) I find that there's 20 dense pages of footnotes at the end, followed by 6 pages of bibliography. That's a fairly lightweight set of citations, by Noam's standards.
I suppose some of Chomsky's books are collections of interviews with people like David Barsamian, and aren't intended as formal scholarship, which might be the ones you're thinking of.
Either that or you've never actually picked up a book by Chomsky, which appears to be the case with at least half of Chomsky's critics.
Well you could try swapping away jurors who are perceived to be neutral, but it'd be foolish. Being the first person to swap a jury member puts you at a slight disadvantage, since the bad guys now have one more swap than you. And you probably don't have any control over the replacement juror either.
If they were inclined to ennumerate the potential biasedness of a juror, I imagine game theorists would say the opposite to what you're saying - the litigants would generally only weed out the ones who appear most biased, since knocking out a 'neutral' would a) invite retaliation and b) has a 50-50 chance of making the jury worse.
Insofar as it goes, it seems a reasonable system,
though it's probably broken somewhere, if those liberal horror stories about all-white Southern juries sending innocent black guys to death row are to be believed.
Well both sides in an American jury have the same rights to alternate jurors so it's hardly unfair. If the defence swaps a juror, the prosecution can swap another one and vice versa, up to a limit - it's the same for both sides and the effect is hopefully to get a jury that both prosecution and defence agree on..
Pah, who needs education when you've got google!
Linus' innovation isn't in some technical doohickery in Linux itself, but in the way he used the internet and the open source methodology to perform the gargantuan effort of actually producing a mainstream working operating system, for a whole bunch of different architectures.
This was a student, ffs, finding a means of securing and managing resources that would normally only be under the control of a government or a multinational corporation.
He hasn't changed the way that software is made and sold (yet), but if it wasn't for him, there wouldn't be an alternative to proprietary software at all. Surely that has to be worth something?
Well the good news is anyone can cite "Madonna - American Life.mp3" as prior art and nullify the patent, so it should end up as one less patent in the world....
It's not copyright law, if any, that does it - it's the DMCA, or the counterpart in whatever country you happen to be in:
" `(a) VIOLATIONS REGARDING CIRCUMVENTION OF TECHNOLOGICAL MEASURES- (1)(A) No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title. The prohibition contained in the preceding sentence shall take effect at the end of the 2-year period beginning on the date of the enactment of this chapter."
If they put copy protection on it, then cracking the protection is now illegal.
"How many free software authors manage to support themselves on donations or support fees versus having a day job (where they probably code software for a commercial company)?"
And so? Either way, that software gets made in their free time, without the restrictions of copyright and license fees.
"The money to finance his lifestyle and allow him to compose didn't materialize out of thin air or come from donation buckets."
Bad choice, I know. I should have rooted around for a great composer who spent his life starving in a garret. But there's millions of unemployed musicians with day jobs kicking around. There's buskers in the streets. There's guys who play in bars. Are you seriously trying to say that there'd be no music if there was no copyright law?
"In fact, I'm sure GTA3 or Morrowind could easily have been coded in the spare time of some teenage hackers and given away for free."
Well fine. So we do without GTA3 or Morrowind or the Lord of the Rings film. We won't have huge hundred-million-dollar budget movies. We won't have massive stadium-rock extravaganzas. Bye bye U2. Bye Bye Francis Ford Coppola. That doesn't mean we won't have software, or music, or films, far from it - just not the massive capital-intensive spectaculars that us fat complacent westerners been fed by Hollywood and Electronic Arts and the RIAA*. Isn't that, really, a small price to pay for a world in which all information (some of the most important products of our economy) is free, and where no-one is excluded from them on the basis of poverty?
*Well maybe not. Linux is probably the largest computer software project that has ever existed, and there's no proprietary software manufacturer out there that could dream of making a piece of software that does half of the things that comes bundled with every linux distro. Hell in some ways, humble old nethack kicks the pants out of every commercial rpg out there, or at least it did last time I bought a commercial role-playing game.
"So what you get in the end, is a place where content is free to all, but there is no content being created." That's right. The complete lack of freely available software out there today just shows how necessary it is to have these IP laws in place. It's human nature. People just simply won't make software, or music or films or perform any kind of artistic or creative endeavour, unless they've been co-erced and cajoled into it through the operations of the capitalist system. Don't those anarchists understand, if it wasn't for EMI's financing of Johann Sebastian Bach, we'd have no such thing as music at all today? How on earth could SpaceWar ever have been invented, if it wasn't for Electronic Arts working those poor MIT hackers to death with the promise of untold riches at the end of it all? The mind boggles.
What's wrong with write only code? You DO want to still have your job in six months time, don't you?
When I was at university, I used to have two or three favourite computers in the labs- they were the ones hidden away in the corner, where the user-support types couldn't peer over my shoulder and see me playing nethack or X-com or whatever - gaming was outlawed. Maybe these anthropologist types missed something obvious...
"... pop-up windows, targeted banner ads, ... "
You mean the fuckheads who design websites full of this sort of garbage could be forced to cough up swingeing royalties for the privilege of polluting the internet? Almost makes me want to support software patents....
Think rockets, not bullets. Providing the rocket exhaust doesn't hit the platform you're firing from, (e.g. something along the lines of the wing-mounted air to air missiles on modern jet fighters) then the rocket exhaust momentum should cancel out the rocket momentum quite nicely.
Yeah, but remember we're inside Bill Gates' wet dream here. By the time any dribbling idiot can write a program, then Digital Rights Management 3.0 will ensure that said dribbling idiot must have a credit card inserted into the slot in his motherboard in order to use your computer, and if he happens to come up with an algorithm that's already been patented, his trusted computing bios will automatically debit the fees from his credit card balance. Writing software might be theoretically easy in the future, but it's not a sport for the poor...