There are ways to protect yourself from financial ruin
Oh really? Well, imagine you have $50.000 in your bank, and now you need all those money to pay an immediate, life-threatening chirurgical operation. Now how do you pay your bodyguards? Sure you could have a health insurance, yet I think in such a society its price will skyrocket after they know you are not healthy as you thought to be. And now, again, how do you maintain other services?
If all such services were provided by private industries, you'd only buy the ones you want, of the quality you choose.
Yes, but with all the problems of free market that, alas, is not really "free" as people thinks to be. There are monopolies. There are cartels. There are things hidden from the public. And for example, certification organization like, say, FDA, how would these work in your world? How do you enforce industries not to put mercury-contaminated fish in your supermarket? After all, you wouldn't have any police able to enforce that -every one is protecting himself with bodyguards. You get sick from mercury intoxication? Too bad, you'll pay for the hospital. And free market won't help you saying "ok, I won't choose brand X for fish anymore because has mercury": first, because it could well be that ALL brands of fish have mercury, because it is convenient for them to fish in contaminated sea; second: because you'll only notice the effects tens of years later, when it will be too late.
Free market doesn't work for people: work for marketers. It has had a hell lot of nice side effects on people, but these are just side effects, and it can work even without these effects.
No taking responsibility for other people's mistakes. Very much taking responsibility for *your* mistakes:). Heck, it might be possible to actually respect people in such society.
This I agree, but in another way. For example, I'd want smokers to pay for their heart or lung operations, since they were warned, and if they don't follow that warning, well, OK, but it's up to them to take responsibility. But it's an entirely different thing.
Are you really sure you want to live in such a society? I would hope you could try. I doubt that, unless you're some kind of tycoon, you would really love that. Especially the day that -$DEITY forbid- chance will make you economically ruined for some reason.
I want to agree with you. I'd be OK if you stop pay taxes, but also stop benefiting from all tax-payed services.
This means, when you are struck in an incident, no tax-payed ambulance will bring you at an hospital. No police will help you if you are robbed: better pay your own bodyguards and private investigator. Stay off the roads and streets, please, or pay a fee each time you walk/drive on them. Oh, and please stop voting -after all, you don't want to choose people you should pay with taxes, isn't it?
If you are ready for it, go for it, but please be coherent with your opinions.
Dapper already had a tiny but nasty problem with Davicom ethernet cards (I know, I'm writing from a Dapper box with a Davicom card). Basically, it loaded the wrong driver -tulip.
To me it was enough to add "blacklist tulip" as a line in the/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist file, but it was not immediate at all to understand what the problem was.
Being a Ph.D. student working in Italy, I surely agree our university are a lot chaotic, but the "chaos" in our IT management is actually quite good for us. Basically the IT manages the network connection and controls if infections, bots etc. are running on the network. Other than this, you can pretty much do anything you want with your machines. This allows us to have in lab a couple of Apple boxes, a really old SGI Indigo, a bunch of various Windows and my Kubuntu box. I think that's good -we know how to run our machines, we don't need an IT department to nanny us.
I live in Europe, and since when is Turkey considered Europe? Apart from a small bit at the border with Bulgaria, Turkey is 90% a Middle Eastern country, in Asia.
I know there is the intention of letting Turkey enter EU, but I'm not fond of it. Not for racism or what (I'm even of probable far Turkish descent) but simply because there's no point in letting a non-European country enter EU -at least, if you want to do it, change the name of EU and call it, let's say, Happy Little Nation States Union.
I use Beryl (SVN version!) on my main desktop every day. I used to be skeptic like you, but after trying it, I'd never go back.
Wobbly windows are pure useless eye candy, but transparency (colour-specific transparency is in development,I think), expose-like and wall plugins are really useful. Rain and wobbly are just technology showcases -I think that we'll see useful applications of Beryl/Compiz soon.
and yeah, I'm of that generation that believes World War Two was about right and wrong,
Sorry for the flamebait, but why is nuking Japanese cities "good" and Hebrew genocide "evil", numbers apart? Do you really think USA, UK and USSR joined WW-II to "fight against evil"? Heck, USSR even had a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany! And before Pearl Harbour, USA gave zero military support to UK and France (yes, they helped, but they didn't engage in war).
UK, France etc. had no chance, with of the ever increasing military and economic power of Germany combined with Nazi ruthless expansionism, and wanted to stop it before it was too late. USA and USSR needed to build their influence spheres. Ethics was their least concern -as Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki show.
That said, I'm happy that Allies eventually won the war. But if the Axis won, I guess our ethical and political judgement on 1940 superpowers would be much different. Our culture is just daughter of our history.
First, no child is innocent. "Children innocence" is a fantasy invention. Children are ruthlessly cruel creatures that, leaved alone in a natural environment, will kill at least other animals just for fun.
Second: why should children NOT be exposed to the world? The first you get exposed to it, the first you face it, the stronger and more aware will you grow. And eventually you'll be happier.
Third: what's so good in innocence? Why living in a fantasy world where everything is OK should be good or even fun for a child?
I understand your logic, but it is not a 100% self contained environment. If someone scams your child to learn about your new shiny LCD TV set and then asks the children "hey, where do you live?" and later "so sunday you and your parents will leave the city for the whole afternoon? sure! k00l!" and then goes in and robs the TV set, the actions of your child in the virtual world had a very real world aftermath.
I thought it relevant because I think that Theo is incorrect in asserting that there would be no infringement based on the GPL if all of the code had been replaced function by function. It is my understanding that Copyright also pertains to derivative work even if no line remaining is verbatim from the original. As you point out, it would be hard to prove, which I agree, never the less it would be a violation.
Yes, I understood this, but we were going quite off the path... However, "Derivative work", as I understand it, means that it has to bear some resemblance -in code- to the original, or being an intertwined addition to the original (That's why I also think that the closed drivers illegality in the Linux kernel is BS, despite how much I hate closed drivers).
You understand "derivative" as describing an ongoing process, a history - so that the new code "derives" from the precedent, even if it bears no more resemblance. AFAIU, instead, "derivative" in this case has a stricter meaning.
Wikipedia says: "In copyright law, a derivative work is an artistic creation that includes major, basic copyrighted aspects of an original, previously created first work." and cites the US Copyright Office in saying "A typical example of a derivative work received for registration in the Copyright Office is one that is primarily a new work but incorporates some previously published material.", so it seems that inclusion and incorporation are important. However, I must admit "derivative work" includes also film transpositions of literary work, where the formality of "inclusion" is hard to define. The border can be: if the new code is an almost line-by-line or block-by-block transposition of the former (with only, e.g., new variable names and/or written in another language etc.) it is surely derived (just like a movie retains substantial parts of the plot of the original written work). If the new code retains the functionality (this including essential algorithms that cannot have a reasonable substitute) but is structurally different of the previous, it is not derived (in the analogy: two plots about an unhappy love story do not have the same copyright, even if the fundamental structure is the same).
This is an interesting analogy. Two thoughts, first one would be violating Britannica Copyright in doing this, not subjecting them to GPL. Second, the GFDL, on my brief reading, actually suggests one must only give credit back as far as five previous revisions, and so it seems to be fundamentally different than the GPL.
First: why are you violating Britannica copyright, if your assumptions are right? You are working by modifying a free work, if by modifying it you can arrive to the equivalent Britannica page, this means that that page is derived, isn't it? Either this, or there is some flaw in your assumptions.
Second: well, try understand what I mean, instead of sticking to the example.:)
I am glad I am an engineer and not a lawyer.
Well, I'm a biophysics ph.d., and surely I earn much less than a lawyer. But I meet more interesting problems and people.
This is unrelated to the original story, but I personally disagree.
Once you replace ALL the code, the original code has no more something to say. You have no way to tell it has been done from a GPL code, so you have no way to enforce the GPL, unless maybe someone camcorded you doing that. And even if so, I highly doubt. You have a code that is maybe functionally equivalent to the previous GPL one, but that shares nothing with the previous GPL one. If you were right, all functionally equivalent code should share the same license.
Consider this other example: You take a GFDL text, let's say, a Wikipedia page. Then you modify it line by line until it becomes equal to the corresponding Encyclopaedia Britannica page. Does it make the Britannica subject to the GPL?
As for your first three questions, I agree it's exceptionally difficult to rigorously define them in a satisfying way. This would require a LOT of philosophical reasoning and probably coming to a rational division is practically impossible. So pardon me if right now (I'm eating) I will avoid them.
Our aversion to "suffering" originates in the empathy centres of our brain, and evolved to be applied to other people. Animals are not people. Their brains are different from ours. Non-mammalian brains are barely comparable. The brains of birds, for example, are quite different from ours. I think applying this human-oriented empathy to other animals is anthropomorphism at its finest, and needs to either be justified by hard evidence, or dismissed.
Not so fast. First, I don't care for what reason empathy originally evolved for in us: sexual drive is also evolved in us for reproduction and not only for pleasure, yet I wouldn't ask to "justify by hard evidence" people doing sex for their pleasure only. But I guess you ask if human pain is comparable with animal pain. This link basically answers it all. I think that at least for higher mammals evolutively close to us that can be demonstrated to be self-conscious we can agree they perceive pain very closely to us -and that's what we're talking about.
You are mixing declaring the rights of intelligent apes with enforcing the rights of humans. Humans already enjoy basic rights almost everywhere, formally: the problem is, of course, of enforcing them. In the case of apes, we just need to raise their formal status (a not-so-expensive operation, I think). As for enforcing them, I may agree resources must be divided with a priority for enforcing human rights, but just denying everything to apes is nonsense.
I think we should be equally outraged at the prospect of elevating apes into that same subhuman role.
Why? They would probably experience a richer life than common apes nonetheless, provided they are of course treated with care and they have basic rights to rest, eat, be healthy and free time to play.
I remember that in the scifi book Rendez-vous with Rama of A.C.Clarke similar beings were engineered for janitorial tasks on spaceships. They were subhumans, yes, but they were extremly respected because of their role. Why can't it be so? What is outraging is that a lot of humans are still forced to do works that a subhuman (or a robot) could do, just to thrive and live.
If a human "baby" is born without a brain, it's a human. By extending human rights on the basis of manifest intelligence alone you either end up in the lawyer driven hellscape of genetically modified sheep, mice, even rocks being people, or the eugenic distopia of a more sanitary version of ancient Sparta.
I endorse the latter (though I wouldn't call it so).
A brainless (anencephalic, technically) human baby is genetically human, but it (no, nor he or she: it) shouldn't be really considered human. It's a mindless body -basically, it's meat. Sorry for the rudeness, but technically it's nothing different.
To me, rights should follow ALSO from mental capabilities. No being should suffer if it's not necessary, but why can we do medical experiments -and thus cause sufference- on well aware, thinking, self conscious chimps and we cannot do them on mindless human bodies (that wouldn't practically suffer)? To me it's pure non sense.
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There are ways to protect yourself from financial ruin
Oh really? Well, imagine you have $50.000 in your bank, and now you need all those money to pay an immediate, life-threatening chirurgical operation. Now how do you pay your bodyguards? Sure you could have a health insurance, yet I think in such a society its price will skyrocket after they know you are not healthy as you thought to be. And now, again, how do you maintain other services?
If all such services were provided by private industries, you'd only buy the ones you want, of the quality you choose.
Yes, but with all the problems of free market that, alas, is not really "free" as people thinks to be. There are monopolies. There are cartels. There are things hidden from the public. And for example, certification organization like, say, FDA, how would these work in your world? How do you enforce industries not to put mercury-contaminated fish in your supermarket? After all, you wouldn't have any police able to enforce that -every one is protecting himself with bodyguards. You get sick from mercury intoxication? Too bad, you'll pay for the hospital. And free market won't help you saying "ok, I won't choose brand X for fish anymore because has mercury": first, because it could well be that ALL brands of fish have mercury, because it is convenient for them to fish in contaminated sea; second: because you'll only notice the effects tens of years later, when it will be too late.
Free market doesn't work for people: work for marketers. It has had a hell lot of nice side effects on people, but these are just side effects, and it can work even without these effects.
No taking responsibility for other people's mistakes. Very much taking responsibility for *your* mistakes :). Heck, it might be possible to actually respect people in such society.
This I agree, but in another way. For example, I'd want smokers to pay for their heart or lung operations, since they were warned, and if they don't follow that warning, well, OK, but it's up to them to take responsibility. But it's an entirely different thing.
Are you really sure you want to live in such a society? I would hope you could try. I doubt that, unless you're some kind of tycoon, you would really love that. Especially the day that -$DEITY forbid- chance will make you economically ruined for some reason.
Energy and mass are still the same. The total mass and energy of the Universe are constant. It's how do you see them distributed that splits.
I want to agree with you. I'd be OK if you stop pay taxes, but also stop benefiting from all tax-payed services.
This means, when you are struck in an incident, no tax-payed ambulance will bring you at an hospital. No police will help you if you are robbed: better pay your own bodyguards and private investigator. Stay off the roads and streets, please, or pay a fee each time you walk/drive on them. Oh, and please stop voting -after all, you don't want to choose people you should pay with taxes, isn't it?
If you are ready for it, go for it, but please be coherent with your opinions.
Dapper already had a tiny but nasty problem with Davicom ethernet cards (I know, I'm writing from a Dapper box with a Davicom card). Basically, it loaded the wrong driver -tulip.
To me it was enough to add "blacklist tulip" as a line in the /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist file, but it was not immediate at all to understand what the problem was.
Being a Ph.D. student working in Italy, I surely agree our university are a lot chaotic, but the "chaos" in our IT management is actually quite good for us. Basically the IT manages the network connection and controls if infections, bots etc. are running on the network. Other than this, you can pretty much do anything you want with your machines. This allows us to have in lab a couple of Apple boxes, a really old SGI Indigo, a bunch of various Windows and my Kubuntu box. I think that's good -we know how to run our machines, we don't need an IT department to nanny us.
I live in Europe, and since when is Turkey considered Europe? Apart from a small bit at the border with Bulgaria, Turkey is 90% a Middle Eastern country, in Asia.
I know there is the intention of letting Turkey enter EU, but I'm not fond of it. Not for racism or what (I'm even of probable far Turkish descent) but simply because there's no point in letting a non-European country enter EU -at least, if you want to do it, change the name of EU and call it, let's say, Happy Little Nation States Union.
Colour-specific transparency is already done?
It's a bit I don't check out...
I use Beryl (SVN version!) on my main desktop every day. I used to be skeptic like you, but after trying it, I'd never go back.
Wobbly windows are pure useless eye candy, but transparency (colour-specific transparency is in development,I think), expose-like and wall plugins are really useful. Rain and wobbly are just technology showcases -I think that we'll see useful applications of Beryl/Compiz soon.
I fully agree. And I also would like to know how this disgustingly politically correct "code of conduct" becomes enforced, in their opinions.
and yeah, I'm of that generation that believes World War Two was about right and wrong,
Sorry for the flamebait, but why is nuking Japanese cities "good" and Hebrew genocide "evil", numbers apart? Do you really think USA, UK and USSR joined WW-II to "fight against evil"? Heck, USSR even had a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany! And before Pearl Harbour, USA gave zero military support to UK and France (yes, they helped, but they didn't engage in war).
UK, France etc. had no chance, with of the ever increasing military and economic power of Germany combined with Nazi ruthless expansionism, and wanted to stop it before it was too late. USA and USSR needed to build their influence spheres. Ethics was their least concern -as Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki show.
That said, I'm happy that Allies eventually won the war. But if the Axis won, I guess our ethical and political judgement on 1940 superpowers would be much different. Our culture is just daughter of our history.
First, no child is innocent. "Children innocence" is a fantasy invention. Children are ruthlessly cruel creatures that, leaved alone in a natural environment, will kill at least other animals just for fun.
Second: why should children NOT be exposed to the world? The first you get exposed to it, the first you face it, the stronger and more aware will you grow. And eventually you'll be happier.
Third: what's so good in innocence? Why living in a fantasy world where everything is OK should be good or even fun for a child?
I understand your logic, but it is not a 100% self contained environment. If someone scams your child to learn about your new shiny LCD TV set and then asks the children "hey, where do you live?" and later "so sunday you and your parents will leave the city for the whole afternoon? sure! k00l!" and then goes in and robs the TV set, the actions of your child in the virtual world had a very real world aftermath.
I thought it relevant because I think that Theo is incorrect in asserting that there would be no infringement based on the GPL if all of the code had been replaced function by function. It is my understanding that Copyright also pertains to derivative work even if no line remaining is verbatim from the original. As you point out, it would be hard to prove, which I agree, never the less it would be a violation.
Yes, I understood this, but we were going quite off the path... However, "Derivative work", as I understand it, means that it has to bear some resemblance -in code- to the original, or being an intertwined addition to the original (That's why I also think that the closed drivers illegality in the Linux kernel is BS, despite how much I hate closed drivers).
You understand "derivative" as describing an ongoing process, a history - so that the new code "derives" from the precedent, even if it bears no more resemblance. AFAIU, instead, "derivative" in this case has a stricter meaning.
Wikipedia says: "In copyright law, a derivative work is an artistic creation that includes major, basic copyrighted aspects of an original, previously created first work." and cites the US Copyright Office in saying "A typical example of a derivative work received for registration in the Copyright Office is one that is primarily a new work but incorporates some previously published material.", so it seems that inclusion and incorporation are important. However, I must admit "derivative work" includes also film transpositions of literary work, where the formality of "inclusion" is hard to define. The border can be: if the new code is an almost line-by-line or block-by-block transposition of the former (with only, e.g., new variable names and/or written in another language etc.) it is surely derived (just like a movie retains substantial parts of the plot of the original written work). If the new code retains the functionality (this including essential algorithms that cannot have a reasonable substitute) but is structurally different of the previous, it is not derived (in the analogy: two plots about an unhappy love story do not have the same copyright, even if the fundamental structure is the same).
This is an interesting analogy. Two thoughts, first one would be violating Britannica Copyright in doing this, not subjecting them to GPL. Second, the GFDL, on my brief reading, actually suggests one must only give credit back as far as five previous revisions, and so it seems to be fundamentally different than the GPL.
First: why are you violating Britannica copyright, if your assumptions are right? You are working by modifying a free work, if by modifying it you can arrive to the equivalent Britannica page, this means that that page is derived, isn't it? Either this, or there is some flaw in your assumptions.
Second: well, try understand what I mean, instead of sticking to the example. :)
I am glad I am an engineer and not a lawyer.
Well, I'm a biophysics ph.d., and surely I earn much less than a lawyer. But I meet more interesting problems and people.
This is unrelated to the original story, but I personally disagree.
Once you replace ALL the code, the original code has no more something to say. You have no way to tell it has been done from a GPL code, so you have no way to enforce the GPL, unless maybe someone camcorded you doing that. And even if so, I highly doubt. You have a code that is maybe functionally equivalent to the previous GPL one, but that shares nothing with the previous GPL one. If you were right, all functionally equivalent code should share the same license.
Consider this other example: You take a GFDL text, let's say, a Wikipedia page. Then you modify it line by line until it becomes equal to the corresponding Encyclopaedia Britannica page. Does it make the Britannica subject to the GPL?
Well, Linux distributions help me get my work done at home and at the office.
While the Bible doesn't help me at all at anything.
To argue, even as devil's advocate, that the mindless human babies are "meat" does disservice to your point
I didn't say that to prove a point. I said that because it's what I think.
Ehm. I am a biophysics Ph.D., and I basically agree with you. :).
And Dawkins is my favourite scientist
If a mentally challenged 'human' is less mentally aware or capable than a mental maverick... dog, do we give the dog rights and not the human?
I would pretty answer "yes".
As for your first three questions, I agree it's exceptionally difficult to rigorously define them in a satisfying way. This would require a LOT of philosophical reasoning and probably coming to a rational division is practically impossible. So pardon me if right now (I'm eating) I will avoid them.
Our aversion to "suffering" originates in the empathy centres of our brain, and evolved to be applied to other people. Animals are not people. Their brains are different from ours. Non-mammalian brains are barely comparable. The brains of birds, for example, are quite different from ours. I think applying this human-oriented empathy to other animals is anthropomorphism at its finest, and needs to either be justified by hard evidence, or dismissed.
Not so fast. First, I don't care for what reason empathy originally evolved for in us: sexual drive is also evolved in us for reproduction and not only for pleasure, yet I wouldn't ask to "justify by hard evidence" people doing sex for their pleasure only. But I guess you ask if human pain is comparable with animal pain. This link basically answers it all. I think that at least for higher mammals evolutively close to us that can be demonstrated to be self-conscious we can agree they perceive pain very closely to us -and that's what we're talking about.
This only looks like a reasonable argument.
You are mixing declaring the rights of intelligent apes with enforcing the rights of humans. Humans already enjoy basic rights almost everywhere, formally: the problem is, of course, of enforcing them. In the case of apes, we just need to raise their formal status (a not-so-expensive operation, I think). As for enforcing them, I may agree resources must be divided with a priority for enforcing human rights, but just denying everything to apes is nonsense.
I don't get the pun.
'Nuff said.
I don't understand why granting realization of human rights to humans and endorsement of primate rights are mutually exclusive.
I think we should be equally outraged at the prospect of elevating apes into that same subhuman role.
Why? They would probably experience a richer life than common apes nonetheless, provided they are of course treated with care and they have basic rights to rest, eat, be healthy and free time to play.
I remember that in the scifi book Rendez-vous with Rama of A.C.Clarke similar beings were engineered for janitorial tasks on spaceships. They were subhumans, yes, but they were extremly respected because of their role. Why can't it be so? What is outraging is that a lot of humans are still forced to do works that a subhuman (or a robot) could do, just to thrive and live.
If a human "baby" is born without a brain, it's a human. By extending human rights on the basis of manifest intelligence alone you either end up in the lawyer driven hellscape of genetically modified sheep, mice, even rocks being people, or the eugenic distopia of a more sanitary version of ancient Sparta.
I endorse the latter (though I wouldn't call it so).
A brainless (anencephalic, technically) human baby is genetically human, but it (no, nor he or she: it) shouldn't be really considered human. It's a mindless body -basically, it's meat. Sorry for the rudeness, but technically it's nothing different.
To me, rights should follow ALSO from mental capabilities. No being should suffer if it's not necessary, but why can we do medical experiments -and thus cause sufference- on well aware, thinking, self conscious chimps and we cannot do them on mindless human bodies (that wouldn't practically suffer)? To me it's pure non sense.