Ball and chain? If the employed decides at any point they don't like the deal, they can violate the terms of the H1B visa and go back to where they came from for free. So obviously they prefer working under these conditions more than living in their home country, and it's not the American corp. that's making the conditions bad in their home country.
So, the "exploiting" company is giving the worker a better life (in the worker's opinion) than if the worker wasn't "exploited". How EVIL of them!
When Gore said he "took the initiative in creating the Internet", it was a miswording and political exaggeration, not an outright lie.
Yes, that's true. The trouble is Gore exaggerates as he breathes:
1) He claimed to be a co-sponsor of the McCain/Feingold campaign finance reform bill -- but Feingold and Gore have never been in Congress at the same time. (Kernel of truth: he supported the bill)
2) He claimed to have discovered Love Canal. But his first involvement was a year after Carter declared it a federal disaster area. (Kernel of truth: he sponsored Congressional hearings on Love Canal)
3) He claimed to be the inspiration for "Love Story". (Kernel of truth: he did have contact with the creator of Love Story)
4) He claimed that as a journalist his investigations put people in prison. (Kernel of truth: someoine he investigated was convicted and fined)
5) He claimed that in Vietnam he came under fire. (Kernel of truth: As a military journalist, he did walk some patrols in downtown Saigon, and may have arived on the scene shortly after shooting had stopped)
6) He claimed to have been the initiator of the Earned Income Tax Credit, which was passed before he entered Congress. (Kernel of truth: he did support the EITC in Congress)
The question thus becomes; does Gore exaggerate deliberately or unconsciously? The first answer is very disturbing; the second would betray either a tendency to self-aggrandizement (fairly harmless, esp. for a politician) or to a lack of self-confidence (a potential problem in a crisis situation).
I think it's probably a tendency to self-aggrandizement, which really is a minor character flaw of little importance in a Presidential election. But given that I'm not voting for him anyway, I'd like everybody to think he's deliberately lying to get votes in an act of contempt for the intelligence of the American people;-)
Oh, certainly. Backwards compatibility, the market, nonstandard devices, and other items are definite reasons why Apple won't do an x86 port. But endian-ness isn't really a barrier, which was the explanation I was addressing.
Because OS X isn't really a new OS, but NeXTSTEP/OpenStep 5. And NeXTSTEP/OpenStep was based on Mach and BSD, and has been ported to the NeXT, Intel, and now PPC.
MacOS X is really a new version of NeXTSTEP/OpenStep, which already runs on x86. While a few new endian issues may have been added, it wouldn't be a "big problem" except when dealing with already-existing Mac apps. And since those don't run on x86 anyway...
Well, it's absolutely impossible for the average person to make a duplicate DVD, because burnable DVDs already have the key-storage space permanently burned out. You can't do it with or without DeCSS or any other tool.
But it's fairly easy to use a legitimate decoder to give you a stream to copy onto a hard disc or VHS. The biggest problem is "Macrovision", which gives you a non-standard NTSC or PAL signal that theoretically can only be decoded successfully by TVs, not VCRs or video decoder cards.
However, numerous times DVD players with secret Macrovision disable modes have been released, and "chipping" mods for DVD players to bypass Macrovision have been successful. And a time base corrector can compensate for and even eliminate Macrovision effects. These can be bought for a few hundred (low-end) to a few thousand (high-end) dollars and are often the lower-end ones are included in higher-end VCRs. Most people who do video editing will have time base correctors, either separate ones or ones that are components of their other equipment.
So, DeCSS makes copying DVDs to hard disk or VHS somewhat easier/cheaper/better than if you don't have DeCSS or a DVD player that allows Macrovision bypass.
I ask this because all the comments so far are based on the statements in the/. summary, not the article itself.
His argument is that ease-of-use has ceased to be the means (as it was initially with the desktop metaphor) but the end of GUI design. That is, programmers are now trying to make things easy on the user, instead of easy to use productively.
An example of his point I'd like to reference is the "smart menus" in Microsoft Office, which deliberately hide functions in order that the user doesn't have to see them. That actually makes it harder to use the software's functions, and it doesn't make it any easier to use the existing ones; it simply lets the user feel at-ease, never even seeing options he doessn't understand.
H1B visas are protectionist. If I quit my job, I don't get thrown out of the country; why should that be the situation for my co-worker? Increase green cards for skilled workers, don't shackle them with H1B visas
Agreed, but not letting them in at all is worse, since it's easier to get permanent resident status while an H1B than when you're overseas. Politics is the art of the possible; if you can get them in at all, it's better than denying them the choice.
The Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were among the most productive nations in the history of humanity,
True if you're comparing them to all nations in all of history; false if you're comparing them to the democratic states in the same years. Both the Nazis and the Communists were horribly inefficient at everything except killing civilians.
I have a hard time understanding saying "Well, I'd like to let you in with full rights, but I can't get that passed. So rather than let you go through a few years on an H1B and then apply for permanent residency, I'm going to make you stay where you are now, like it or not."
This is the "200,000 more H-1 visas with the indentured servitude feature" that the less-responsible part of the high-tech industry wants. Terrible idea. Allowing those people in as permanent residents would be better; then they could change jobs. On an H-1 visa, you can't quit and stay in the U.S. Drives wages down.
Well, because of immigration politics, the other choice isn't letting them in permanently, but not letting them in at all. At least somebody who gets in with an H-1B can get permanent status later. Since no developed country is producing sufficient competent IT workers anyway, it makes more sense to get them here.
Steven E. Ehrbar
Re:Who really needs a lesson
on
Lawsuits Suck
·
· Score: 2
IF it wasn't for the fact that the tax was taking money from people, the philosophers would have been standing alone, there would have been no revolution.
Yet another American miseducated about the "tax on tea".
The tea party was not protesting an increase in the amount of money they had to spend on tea. The act that gave the British East India Company a monopoly on the American tea buisness actually lowered the taxes charged on tea and lowered the price of tea by suspending mercantilistic rules that added middlemen.
However, to buy the tea at the lower price, the Americans would have to accept the validity of the threepenny tax on tea and the right of Parliament to grant monopolies on American commerce. Those abstract political considerations were sufficient to create American resistance, not just in Boston, but in all U.S. ports where the tea was delivered.
Again, Americans protested an act that lowered tea prices over principle, and that protest over principle is what led to the Tea Party.
Now, why you aren't taught that in high school American history is left as an exercise for the reader. Steven E. Ehrbar
Which is why you, er, TURN THEM OFF or LEAVE THEM HOME?
Why is it that there are millions of whiners in this country that can't figure out that just because you could be connected doesn't mean you have to be connected? Technology can't take over your life unless you let it; and if you laet it, you DESERVE your fate.
The outright lie; Mozilla has been coded "from the ground up". Like hell. If this is the case, why does it have anything to do with Netscape at all? Why, indeed, did the OPen Source Community need to wait for Netscape to open the code base, if there were all these people around who could code a browser "from the ground up".
None of the current Mozilla/NS6.0 codebase was used in any previous version of Netscape, and the architecture is completely different. That's what he means by "from the ground up."
2/3 the programming team are full-time coders employed by Netscape; that's why it has to do with Netscape and why the "Open Source Community" had to wait for Netscape before they had the people who could build it "from the ground up".
Natural rights are all corrolaries of the right to life. To have a right to life, one must own one's own life. A corrolary of that is the right to recieve the benefits of one's own labor, which requires a right to property. And there is no more pure form of that right than intellectual property; material property rights are diluted by the fact they are encased in products that to some degree are not purely the product of labor, but of nature.
Claiming the right to copy without permission is to claim the right to use another's labor for oneself without compensation; that is, to treat his labor as that of a slave you own.
Kant and Jesus were mystics, Mill is the one with the circular definition (the good is what is good for the most people).
You don't have a concept of natural rights, as the fact that you insisted "you had better have a damned good reason that benefits everyone more than it harms everyone". That's a utilitarian argument, and utilitarianism is directly opposed to natural rights. In natural rights theory, you cannot deny anyone a right no matter how many other people it benefits; that's what makes it a right.
And which moral theories, other than the ones I listed, have more influence on our society?
Now relativism. I agree that those three schools are the most powerful in modern definitions of morality. That doesn't make them right, and that doesn't mean their morality is moral.
All are based on the lack of intrinsic worth of the individual. A Christian is nothing before God, and is commanded to conform his will to God as a slave, even if his reason suggests another course of action. Kant, of course, wrote a "Critque of Pure Reason" that set up a straw man caricature of reason and then declared faith and religion superior the the caricature, and declared that morality is the denial of the self and serving others. Utilitarians will execute an innocent and harvest him for organs that could save a dozen other lives, since saving a dozen lives is of greater value than the innocent's right to life.
I am an advocate of the fourth school of morality influenceing modern thought, one that is strongest in the United States and weakening there. It is the school of the Enlightenment and of Locke and of Jefferson and of the Declaration of the Rights of Man. It is the doctrine of natural rights.
Kant, Mill, and Christianity. A mystic, a man whose definition of "good" is circular, and a mystical sect. None with any concept of individual rights, except for some minor foreign grafts onto Christianity put on during the Enlightenment.
No wonder you can't figure out why you shouldn't be able to copy whatever you want; you have no concept of natural rights.
The problem here is that copyrights are NOT property. Property as defined in the traditional capitalist economic theory is forever
Wrong. All forms of capitalist theory except the most simplictic and caricatured have accepted the concept of property rights for limited times in numerous forms.
And it exists for one reason...It exists because one object cannot be owned by two persons at the same time. They cannot use it both.
Wrong. Labor creates property in the theories of Locke, Smith, and the Chicago and Austrian schools. It exists because you have a right to the products of your labor.
Please learn capitalist theory before you lecture about it.
Never before in history has a merchant been able to charge different prices to different people, based on secret (unpublished) criteria, with no opportunity for the buyer to negotiate a better price.
Okay, only the part in bold is even partly true. Even then, you still can't get a lower price than what the merchant is willing to accept from you; the haggling process is simply a customary way of reaching a mutually acceptable price.
The only substantive difference is occasioinally people screw up when haggling. Merchants will occasionally screw up and offer you a better price than they intended; on the other hand, it's more likely that a purchaser (who will generally have less experience haggling over the particular item) will screw up and pay even more than he would if he effectively haggled.
It still doesn't change the fact that this is merely an argument that "this is different, therefore it's wrong." Nobody is forcing anyone to buy anything from Amazon; therefore anybody who buys anything from Amazon has decided the price they're being charged is acceptable.
Well, I guess there could be people who still buy into the inane medieval notions of "just price" and "fair price" promulgated by the Catholic Church. But they should be arguing for price controls on everything, instead of railing against this specific situation.
This is pure cultural chauvinism -- "That's they way they do it from the time and place I'm from, so it must be RIGHT!"
Do you think that, in the kind of markets that existed for most of humanity's existence, and which still exist in most of the world, the seller doesn't try to charge a guy who looks rich more than a guy who looks poor?
Just because in a handful of cultures for about 100 years there have been one-price stores does NOT make that kind of pricing the "right way" to do things.
If the DVD is worth $70 to me, why should I give a damn? I got what I consider adequate value for my money. If it isn't woth $70 to me, then why in hell am I buying a DVD for $70?
And if it is being sold for $30 then somebody will be willing to sell it to me for around that price; after all, a couple bucks' profit is a couple bucks' profit, no matter who is buying.
Yes, he's wrong. he was wrong the last six times, too. So let's actually be polite and do him the favor of ignoring his statements, okay?
Remember, this guy's technical specialty in in networking, yet he predicited in 1995 that the Internet would cease to exist in 1996. Why in hell would anyone expect his predictions in non-networking areas to have any more validity?
Whether or not the license itself gives permission to distribute under the GPL (and that vaugeness is the whole reason for this debate and why I'm suggesting the revisions to make it explicit), IV allows the authors (as defined in XI) to also give permisssion for the software to be released under any license that allows for-fee distribution.
Slashdot Mirror
Ball and chain? If the employed decides at any point they don't like the deal, they can violate the terms of the H1B visa and go back to where they came from for free. So obviously they prefer working under these conditions more than living in their home country, and it's not the American corp. that's making the conditions bad in their home country.
So, the "exploiting" company is giving the worker a better life (in the worker's opinion) than if the worker wasn't "exploited". How EVIL of them!
Steven E. Ehrbar
I do a right-and-left double swipe which seems to work 99% of the time on the RadioShack and Forbes cues.
Steven E. Ehrbar
When Gore said he "took the initiative in creating the Internet", it was a miswording and political exaggeration, not an outright lie.
;-)
Yes, that's true. The trouble is Gore exaggerates as he breathes:
1) He claimed to be a co-sponsor of the McCain/Feingold campaign finance reform bill -- but Feingold and Gore have never been in Congress at the same time. (Kernel of truth: he supported the bill)
2) He claimed to have discovered Love Canal. But his first involvement was a year after Carter declared it a federal disaster area. (Kernel of truth: he sponsored Congressional hearings on Love Canal)
3) He claimed to be the inspiration for "Love Story". (Kernel of truth: he did have contact with the creator of Love Story)
4) He claimed that as a journalist his investigations put people in prison. (Kernel of truth: someoine he investigated was convicted and fined)
5) He claimed that in Vietnam he came under fire. (Kernel of truth: As a military journalist, he did walk some patrols in downtown Saigon, and may have arived on the scene shortly after shooting had stopped)
6) He claimed to have been the initiator of the Earned Income Tax Credit, which was passed before he entered Congress. (Kernel of truth: he did support the EITC in Congress)
The question thus becomes; does Gore exaggerate deliberately or unconsciously? The first answer is very disturbing; the second would betray either a tendency to self-aggrandizement (fairly harmless, esp. for a politician) or to a lack of self-confidence (a potential problem in a crisis situation).
I think it's probably a tendency to self-aggrandizement, which really is a minor character flaw of little importance in a Presidential election. But given that I'm not voting for him anyway, I'd like everybody to think he's deliberately lying to get votes in an act of contempt for the intelligence of the American people
Steven E. Ehrbar
Oh, certainly. Backwards compatibility, the market, nonstandard devices, and other items are definite reasons why Apple won't do an x86 port. But endian-ness isn't really a barrier, which was the explanation I was addressing.
Steven E. Ehrbar
Because OS X isn't really a new OS, but NeXTSTEP/OpenStep 5. And NeXTSTEP/OpenStep was based on Mach and BSD, and has been ported to the NeXT, Intel, and now PPC.
Steven E. Ehrbar
MacOS X is really a new version of NeXTSTEP/OpenStep, which already runs on x86. While a few new endian issues may have been added, it wouldn't be a "big problem" except when dealing with already-existing Mac apps. And since those don't run on x86 anyway...
Steven E. Ehrbar
I'll remind people that King James I wrote a leaflet where he mentioned how doctors knew smoking tobacco was injurious to health.
And today, there are more tobbaco smokers as a percentage of population in Britain than there were when it was written.
So, how exactly did the tobacco companies supress data released by a soverign hundreds of years before they were organized?
Steven E. Ehrbar
Well, it's absolutely impossible for the average person to make a duplicate DVD, because burnable DVDs already have the key-storage space permanently burned out. You can't do it with or without DeCSS or any other tool.
But it's fairly easy to use a legitimate decoder to give you a stream to copy onto a hard disc or VHS. The biggest problem is "Macrovision", which gives you a non-standard NTSC or PAL signal that theoretically can only be decoded successfully by TVs, not VCRs or video decoder cards.
However, numerous times DVD players with secret Macrovision disable modes have been released, and "chipping" mods for DVD players to bypass Macrovision have been successful. And a time base corrector can compensate for and even eliminate Macrovision effects. These can be bought for a few hundred (low-end) to a few thousand (high-end) dollars and are often the lower-end ones are included in higher-end VCRs. Most people who do video editing will have time base correctors, either separate ones or ones that are components of their other equipment.
So, DeCSS makes copying DVDs to hard disk or VHS somewhat easier/cheaper/better than if you don't have DeCSS or a DVD player that allows Macrovision bypass.
Steven E. Ehrbar
I ask this because all the comments so far are based on the statements in the /. summary, not the article itself.
His argument is that ease-of-use has ceased to be the means (as it was initially with the desktop metaphor) but the end of GUI design. That is, programmers are now trying to make things easy on the user, instead of easy to use productively.
An example of his point I'd like to reference is the "smart menus" in Microsoft Office, which deliberately hide functions in order that the user doesn't have to see them. That actually makes it harder to use the software's functions, and it doesn't make it any easier to use the existing ones; it simply lets the user feel at-ease, never even seeing options he doessn't understand.
Steven E. Ehrbar
H1B visas are protectionist. If I quit my job, I don't get thrown out of the country; why should that be the situation for my co-worker? Increase green cards for skilled workers, don't shackle them with H1B visas
Agreed, but not letting them in at all is worse, since it's easier to get permanent resident status while an H1B than when you're overseas. Politics is the art of the possible; if you can get them in at all, it's better than denying them the choice.
Steven E. Ehrbar
The Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were among the most productive nations in the history of humanity,
True if you're comparing them to all nations in all of history; false if you're comparing them to the democratic states in the same years. Both the Nazis and the Communists were horribly inefficient at everything except killing civilians.
Steven E. Ehrbar
I have a hard time understanding saying "Well, I'd like to let you in with full rights, but I can't get that passed. So rather than let you go through a few years on an H1B and then apply for permanent residency, I'm going to make you stay where you are now, like it or not."
Let people make their own decisions.
Steven E. Ehrbar
This is the "200,000 more H-1 visas with the indentured servitude feature" that the less-responsible part of the high-tech industry wants. Terrible idea. Allowing those people in as permanent residents would be better; then they could change jobs. On an H-1 visa, you can't quit and stay in the U.S. Drives wages down.
Well, because of immigration politics, the other choice isn't letting them in permanently, but not letting them in at all. At least somebody who gets in with an H-1B can get permanent status later. Since no developed country is producing sufficient competent IT workers anyway, it makes more sense to get them here.
Steven E. Ehrbar
IF it wasn't for the fact that the tax was taking money from people, the philosophers would have been standing alone, there would have been no revolution. Yet another American miseducated about the "tax on tea". The tea party was not protesting an increase in the amount of money they had to spend on tea. The act that gave the British East India Company a monopoly on the American tea buisness actually lowered the taxes charged on tea and lowered the price of tea by suspending mercantilistic rules that added middlemen. However, to buy the tea at the lower price, the Americans would have to accept the validity of the threepenny tax on tea and the right of Parliament to grant monopolies on American commerce. Those abstract political considerations were sufficient to create American resistance, not just in Boston, but in all U.S. ports where the tea was delivered. Again, Americans protested an act that lowered tea prices over principle, and that protest over principle is what led to the Tea Party. Now, why you aren't taught that in high school American history is left as an exercise for the reader.
Steven E. Ehrbar
Which is why you, er, TURN THEM OFF or LEAVE THEM HOME?
Why is it that there are millions of whiners in this country that can't figure out that just because you could be connected doesn't mean you have to be connected? Technology can't take over your life unless you let it; and if you laet it, you DESERVE your fate.
Steven E. Ehrbar
The outright lie; Mozilla has been coded "from the ground up". Like hell. If this is the case, why does it have anything to do with Netscape at all? Why, indeed, did the OPen Source Community need to wait for Netscape to open the code base, if there were all these people around who could code a browser "from the ground up".
None of the current Mozilla/NS6.0 codebase was used in any previous version of Netscape, and the architecture is completely different. That's what he means by "from the ground up."
2/3 the programming team are full-time coders employed by Netscape; that's why it has to do with Netscape and why the "Open Source Community" had to wait for Netscape before they had the people who could build it "from the ground up".
Steven E. Ehrbar
Of course not.
Natural rights are all corrolaries of the right to life. To have a right to life, one must own one's own life. A corrolary of that is the right to recieve the benefits of one's own labor, which requires a right to property. And there is no more pure form of that right than intellectual property; material property rights are diluted by the fact they are encased in products that to some degree are not purely the product of labor, but of nature.
Claiming the right to copy without permission is to claim the right to use another's labor for oneself without compensation; that is, to treat his labor as that of a slave you own.
Steven E. Ehrbar
Kant and Jesus were mystics, Mill is the one with the circular definition (the good is what is good for the most people).
You don't have a concept of natural rights, as the fact that you insisted "you had better have a damned good reason that benefits everyone more than it harms everyone". That's a utilitarian argument, and utilitarianism is directly opposed to natural rights. In natural rights theory, you cannot deny anyone a right no matter how many other people it benefits; that's what makes it a right.
And which moral theories, other than the ones I listed, have more influence on our society?
Now relativism. I agree that those three schools are the most powerful in modern definitions of morality. That doesn't make them right, and that doesn't mean their morality is moral.
All are based on the lack of intrinsic worth of the individual. A Christian is nothing before God, and is commanded to conform his will to God as a slave, even if his reason suggests another course of action. Kant, of course, wrote a "Critque of Pure Reason" that set up a straw man caricature of reason and then declared faith and religion superior the the caricature, and declared that morality is the denial of the self and serving others. Utilitarians will execute an innocent and harvest him for organs that could save a dozen other lives, since saving a dozen lives is of greater value than the innocent's right to life.
I am an advocate of the fourth school of morality influenceing modern thought, one that is strongest in the United States and weakening there. It is the school of the Enlightenment and of Locke and of Jefferson and of the Declaration of the Rights of Man. It is the doctrine of natural rights.
Steven E. Ehrbar
Kant, Mill, and Christianity. A mystic, a man whose definition of "good" is circular, and a mystical sect. None with any concept of individual rights, except for some minor foreign grafts onto Christianity put on during the Enlightenment.
No wonder you can't figure out why you shouldn't be able to copy whatever you want; you have no concept of natural rights.
Steven E. Ehrbar
The problem here is that copyrights are NOT property. Property as defined in the traditional capitalist economic theory is forever
Wrong. All forms of capitalist theory except the most simplictic and caricatured have accepted the concept of property rights for limited times in numerous forms.
And it exists for one reason...It exists because one object cannot be owned by two persons at the same time. They cannot use it both.
Wrong. Labor creates property in the theories of Locke, Smith, and the Chicago and Austrian schools. It exists because you have a right to the products of your labor.
Please learn capitalist theory before you lecture about it.
Steven E. Ehrbar
Never before in history has a merchant been able to charge different prices to different people, based on secret (unpublished) criteria, with no opportunity for the buyer to negotiate a better price.
Okay, only the part in bold is even partly true. Even then, you still can't get a lower price than what the merchant is willing to accept from you; the haggling process is simply a customary way of reaching a mutually acceptable price.
The only substantive difference is occasioinally people screw up when haggling. Merchants will occasionally screw up and offer you a better price than they intended; on the other hand, it's more likely that a purchaser (who will generally have less experience haggling over the particular item) will screw up and pay even more than he would if he effectively haggled.
It still doesn't change the fact that this is merely an argument that "this is different, therefore it's wrong." Nobody is forcing anyone to buy anything from Amazon; therefore anybody who buys anything from Amazon has decided the price they're being charged is acceptable.
Well, I guess there could be people who still buy into the inane medieval notions of "just price" and "fair price" promulgated by the Catholic Church. But they should be arguing for price controls on everything, instead of railing against this specific situation.
Steven E. Ehrbar
This is pure cultural chauvinism -- "That's they way they do it from the time and place I'm from, so it must be RIGHT!"
Do you think that, in the kind of markets that existed for most of humanity's existence, and which still exist in most of the world, the seller doesn't try to charge a guy who looks rich more than a guy who looks poor?
Just because in a handful of cultures for about 100 years there have been one-price stores does NOT make that kind of pricing the "right way" to do things.
Steven E. Ehrbar
If the DVD is worth $70 to me, why should I give a damn? I got what I consider adequate value for my money. If it isn't woth $70 to me, then why in hell am I buying a DVD for $70?
And if it is being sold for $30 then somebody will be willing to sell it to me for around that price; after all, a couple bucks' profit is a couple bucks' profit, no matter who is buying.
Steven E. Ehrbar
Yes, he's wrong. he was wrong the last six times, too. So let's actually be polite and do him the favor of ignoring his statements, okay?
Remember, this guy's technical specialty in in networking, yet he predicited in 1995 that the Internet would cease to exist in 1996. Why in hell would anyone expect his predictions in non-networking areas to have any more validity?
Steven E. Ehrbar
Whether or not the license itself gives permission to distribute under the GPL (and that vaugeness is the whole reason for this debate and why I'm suggesting the revisions to make it explicit), IV allows the authors (as defined in XI) to also give permisssion for the software to be released under any license that allows for-fee distribution.
Steven E. Ehrbar