Re:Burn out at work is not always work related!
on
Pay vs. Happiness
·
· Score: 1
Those who want... to be self-made, or to defend themselves -- are going to find themselves in battle after battle with others who want the same things.
What nonsense. On the face of it.
Two people trying to be self-made gets you... two self-made people. Two people defending themselves gets you... two people in a non-offensive mode, not in each other's way at all.
Self made, defensive people are not "wicked," and by definition aren't clashing. The people you have to worry about are those that think that others should provide for them, or think that they should be able to tell people how they should think or what magical imaginary being they should believe in.
People who provide for themselves and build things may compete with others who also want to make the most of what they produce - but they don't battle with anyone over some imaginary limited number of pie slices... they produce more pie. The people who stress themselves out are the ones who want more pie but don't have the discipline or imagination required to make a new one for themselves. That's laziness or incompetence, and (if coupled with still demanding what they want of others) is "wicked" (if you want to use that word).
Calling the people who produce things and provide employment (for people who themselves don't have the substance to do so) "wicked" says a lot about how you see the world. In my experience, though, the "burn out" among most employees is completely unrelated to their particular employer, and as more to do with being overcommitted or having a desire for a lifestyle beyond their means. The ones that then act unscrupulously to reach that lifestyle without actually producing anything of enough value to fund that lifestyle are the "wicked" ones.
Intelligent design is incomplete, because it depends on faith as much as proof.
No, it depends entirely on faith. There's no reason, at all, to think that all of the factual evidence of evolution has been faked up by a deity with a twisted sense of humor, and that the processes we see around us every day do not result, over time, in the birth of species. Rather, it takes a willful act of self-delusion to ignore all of that evidence, and to embrace instead the fundamentally self-contradictory stuff that's being woven together by the ID crowd in an effort to feel better about their life-long religious choices.
Really, this all just comes down to people not wanting to feel bad about having been duped since childhood, and not wanting to have been demonstrably lying to their own children about how the universe works. The irony, of course, is that it requires a passionate, deliberate, and sustained act of lying to yourself and your kids to reach the point where you stop feeling so bad about swallowing the whole fairy tale in the first place.
Devout religious people who want to believe this stuff can certainly identify (one would hope) with the people, even amongst their ranks, who would wince at a person who, as an adult, believes Santa Claus actually makes rounds and delivers presents. Scientists and other basically rational people are doing that exact same wincing as they listen to the True Believers prop up their religious constructs and carefully tap-dance their way through what they will and will not willingly observe right before their church-clouded eyes.
ID is a "theory" about the origin of species in the same sense that "Santa Clause" is a theory about the origin of gift wrap. A scientist will follow the trail back the paper factory, look at the ink, the wood pulp, and the process... but the True Santa Claus Believers find it more comforting (and, of course, just a lot less work - intellectual laziness is really at the heart of the whole Creationism movement) to imagine that Santa has Elves magically wrapping paper at the North Pole. It's a (not really all that) harmless enough fantasy when you're a kid, but a developmentally normal kid will quickly put that cool meat computer to work and see through the make-believe. How grown-up people manage to cling to the slightly more elaborate make believe that powers so many churches is always amazing to me, but I think shame at the center of it.
You know... If I just keep pretending I believe, I won't have to confront the fact that I've been sort of a chump all these years. And I won't have to allow for the fact that the universe is completely indifferent to whether or not I exist, and thus have to make my own meaning in my own life through the work of my own mind and character.
Santa and his variants are so much... more cozy! But just because it feels good to wash your hands of cause and effect doesn't mean you're immune from its impact. I've noticed that people who truly believe the Creationism stuff are content to do so because it's relatively removed from daily life. People used to believe they saw the daily hand of magic in all sorts of nitty-gritty things. But since it's easy now to point to the underlying mechanisms of all sorts of things that used to be mysterious, God's now sitting at the back of the Causality Bus, just being invoked to explain the stuff that it's harder for poorly educated people to immediately grasp. And franky, I wouldn't care, except that those same people are trying to drag science education back into the Dark Ages, and it's frankly embarassing. Not to mention the long term impact on our country's ability to function prosperously in a wider world that does get causality.
Big response to your short little comment? Yup. And that's a perfect analogy to this whole discussion. The ID crowd wants a tidy little Object O' Faith to explain something complicated, and the scientists and thinkers would rather enjoy the hard work of showing it the way it
This is just further proof that highly complex forms suited to particular functionality don't just happen randomly. It takes a mysterious spark of intelligence to create such an elegant form.
Of course, micro-adaptation might explain the subtle differences between the TR-1 and the iPod, but the genesis of the form is surely supernatural.
Also, have you noticed that the Wheel Interface is actually just perfect for anyone having a Noodly Appendage?
Yah, they told all THOSE people what was up. 30-50 years later...
So, your point is that right now, They(tm) are testing Anthrax-related variables/practices by mailing fake Islamo-fascist terrorist letters to a tabloid "news" company and Capital Hill offices? That the evil-conspiracy government couldn't think up a single better way to test things than that? Or, were they looking for the constant grief and appearance of incompetence (when they can least afford it) that they're getting for not catching the slippery person who did it? Anyone with a nice enough tinfoil hat to suggest that those events were some sort of U.S. weapons test would certainly dream up a better made-for-TV case resolution than the so-far-fruitless pursuit of a guy in that line of work who apparently can't be pinned down with having anything to do with (but whose life has been ruined). The old Ominous Big Bad Government of the slashdot group-think profile would just have simply framed somebody and made a nice arrest... or even better, killed the person while trying to apprehend them, or some other right-out-of-the-X-Files bit of melodrama.
Come on. Use Occam's Razor, here. The country is full of bio-scientists with easy access to the strains, the tools, and the bad attitude to have done what happened. Being scientists, they're also Not Entirely Stupid, and have covered their tracks. But government testing by mailing it to a senate office? Give me a damn break.
Because there appear to be an infinite number of them, and what could be better than putting building your new Martian greenhouse on the south face of "Hoary Hedgehog Hill"?
The fact that Anthrax got loose in Washington, and the way the investigation was stonewalled seems to indicate that the US has not been adhering very stringently to the spirit of any convention.
"got loose"? You mean: "was mailed there" by some loon. You're making it sound like the Downtown Washington DC Anthrax Depot, badly handled by some sort of yukapuk guarding it with a whistle and a nightstick, somehow sprung a leak. Rather, someone who knew what they were doing with the organism and had the specific will to cause some chaos with it acted to do just so. How is that any example of the U.S. not adhering the "spirit of any convention" (my emphasis)? That sentence (and concept) just doesn't make any contextual sense whatsoever.
That's like saying that because some maniac in Japan slit the throats of some school children, that Japan is "once again going to war." Or that the Spanish guy who raped and murdered a French schoolgirl shows that there the spirit of the Geneva convention is being ignored by Spain in their conflict with France. What? That's crazy? Right.
On the other hand testing your weapons on your own population does not infringe on any treaty AFAIK.
Wow! You sure know something that no one else does! Unless of course you're just BSing because it's fun to pretend that a secret US method of testing a bio-weapon on its own citizens would be to mail it to people. What complete, tinfoil-lined crap, and you know it. I can't believe this was modded insightful. Wait... where am I? Slashdot? I suppose I can, actually.
you seem to suggest that a totalitarian government is the most effective since there are no dissenters that will slow down your actions or muddle your decisions
Well, if you want to just make stuff up and pretend I said it, I suppose you might take that away from my comment. Otherwise, let's focus on what I did say. My point is that a hightly fractured many-parties system (I just happened to use Germany as an example where more of that has just led to a disaster of an election for everyone involved) is not as ultimately useful as one with two, or perhaps three philosophical poles. Because the results of an election that produce "leaders" that receive 10 or 20% of the vote is going to be a big grey goo of policy and (in)action. Think there's a lot of finger pointing in the wake of the recent hurricane? Imagine if the government was formed of a dozen different interest groups/parties, not one of which had the political strength to act (or be accountable) for anything without being able to simply point to the other 10 players. For better or worse, we can look to which ever party happens to be in the congressional majority, or sometimes to whichever holds the White House, and seek/expect/complain-about action. And that party can act, or be removed next time around. It happened to the democrats in congress back the early 1990s, and it happened to Bush Sr. The "dissenters" you're referring to are called "voters." And if they have rational enough point of view, they get to regularly change the entire government out for another group of people. That's not totalitarian - it's a republic. In a mess like Germany, the voters tend to vote in and out only small, relatively powerless sections of the government at any given time.
I mean, Bush has been granted the right to go on a war without anyone being able to say "no, we don't".
What are you talking about? He's got the same authority that George Washington did (somewhat reduced by the War Powers Act), and the same authority that Ford, Reagan, Carter, Johnson, Kennedy, Clinton, and the rest did. He can't do too much at all without congressional approval, and more importantly, he can't take any tax dollars and hand it to the DoD without congress acting. You may recall the appropriations that Kerry famously "voted against, before voting for it"? That whole process is how congress provides the resources (or doesn't) to the C-in-C.
By the time you'd get him out of there the damage will already be done. That's no longer democracy if that guy is basically an Emperor.
Specifically (careful, now!) what war powers does Bush have that Clinton ("emporer," by your reckoning, for eight years) did not?
And do you honestly think that people shooting their own food, defending their property happens more often then somebody buying a gun with the intention of killing another person?
Happily, I don't have to "believe" it at all, since the facts are right there in front of us.
There are roughly 80,000,000 gun owners in the United States (and this stat is a few years old, so of course it's more now). Note we're talking gun owners, not guns. Their ownership of guns spans hunting, recreation, self defense - all of the activities I mentioned before. If your tought is that the majority of those people bought guns "with the intention of killing another person," then you're assuming that over 40,000,000 million people are planning murder. Except... that's simply nowhere near true.
Going back a couple years for some statistics, you've got 63% of homicides committed with guns. The homicide rate in the U.S. was 5.6 per 100,000 citizens. So, that would be 3.5 per 100,000 by firearms. So that's 35 per million, or roughly 10,000 within the entire country's population. Now, remember that's at least 40,000,000 "murder-intended" gun buyers you're proposing. That's 40,00,000 people you think bought guns while intending to kill someone - but only 10,000 of them succeeding. That's 0.025% of your would-be murderers doing what you say their purpose is. Back in reality, let's allow for the fact that many deaths (especially those in criminal circles) are committed by repeat offenders, and with guns that aren't legally purchased or owned in the first place - both factors hugely skewing the results even further.
How about we use Occam's Razor, and opt for a more likely scenario? How about the possibility that in fact the vast majority of the people that buy a gun (99.9+%) do so for exactly the reasons I mentioned, and that you need to re-evaluate your preconceptions a bit. And also consider the thousands of people that are stabbed and beaten to death, and the thousands currently shot to death that would be killed by other means absent the criminally used gun.
Then, start taking into account the crimes that are prevented because of a gun. Over 2 million times per year, legally owned guns are used in self defense (which can mean to stop or prevent violence). Rarely are those guns fired, but their presence is a strong deterrence. Further, those states where people are legally allowed to carry concealed weapons have lower rates of violent crimes, including fewer rapes, assaults, robberies, carjackings, break-ins, etc. In places where the right to own guns as been severely and recently rolled back (say, in Australia or Scotland), violent crime (including murders) have gone dramatically up.
Guns aren't "bad for society as a whole," people who want to kill people are bad for society as a whole.
Thanks for reading, and I hope you'll at least look into the basis of some of your longer-held thoughts on this sort of thing - especially your stated notion that most people buy guns intending to kill people, which couldn't be farther from the truth.
President Bush has probably run the least effective government in years (Katrina response, Iraq) and yet he has also run one of the most instrusive (Patriot Act).
Oh, please.
The most visibly painful failure in the Katrina response was in downtown New Orleans, where the city and state governments miserably failed to follow their own plans, make use of their own resources, prepare their own people, or even communicate effectively. Meanwhile the feds were responding (on the strategic and longer-term level, which is their role) to terrific damage and displaced people over a 90,000 square mile area. That's bigger than Great Britain, in case you're trying to get a sense of it. Where's your venom for the two democrats with first-responder responsibilities in New Orleans (that would be the mayor and governor)?
Iraq? Yeah, it's a pisser that a crazy religious minority, or the left-over baggage from Saddam's regime, feel it's appropriate to slaughter other Iraqis as the peaceful ones go about setting up a new constitution and working democratic government. Considering the constitution's closer to being done that the US's constitution was for 10 years after it was started, and that the Iraqi population is systematically voting for its own representatives, and has more electicity and water flowing, and more schools and free (as in speech) media outlets than during Saddam's murderous rule... I can't see how that's a bad thing. It's not all perfect, or even close. But neither was rebuilding Japan, getting Bosnia back into shape, etc.
Patriot Act? Shall we count the number of Democrats who loudly backed it, and continue to back it? The president can't pass legislation - that's up to the congress and the senate, who both overwhelmingly did, and not on partisan lines.
*sigh* And in case you're not really paying attention to what this whole political-speech-blog issue is REALLY about, it's Republicans trying to exclude bloggers from regulation, not the other way around. RTFA, OK?
1) Those people in my family that do (or have) lived in rural areas and/or worked farms have made regular use of them. Killing rabid animals, preventing predators from killing or running livestock, and even in running vandals/thieves out of machine sheds/barns with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of farming equipment and fuel. Certain varmits will invade cow pastures, producing holes in which cattle break their legs or in which water/ice collects - and a small caliber rifle is the most common solution (you can't put out traps or poison in such a situation, and the hawks, foxes, and coyotes don't keep up with a healthy prairie dog or groundhog invasion).
2) I put multiple loads of great, low-fat, free-range, no-drugs meat in my freezer every season. This activity also helps reign in the hugely overpopulated deer herds in the suburban mid-Atlantic region (note: there are more whitetail deer in that area now than there were before Columbus showed up - more, in the "many millions more" sense). We don't have timber wolves, mountain lions, or other predators in enough numbers any longer to keep them in check, and we keep making more terrain exactly in a way that causes more whitetail reproduction. The populations, though, swing wildly out of balance, with only hunters and people driving cars (ouch) to take the place of natural predation. Of course, the fact that venison is completely delicious with a nice cabernet-syrah is a happy bonus. To accomplish some of this harvest (when not using a bow), I use guns. Same on the ever popular rabbit, pheasant, quail, partridge and dove. Just had some sauteed dove breasts for dinner last night... great eating, and no poultry farms were used in the process.
3) Ever had a large, crazy someone in a Really Bad Mood trying to beat down your door with a pipe in the middle of the night, even as you waited 15 minutes for the police to make an appearance? I have. My wife was not pleased. The only thing that got the guy to back off was a large, ominous-looking gun. Happily, shooting him was not required.
4) Did you watch the footage of the Koreatown business owners in LA back in the 1990's Rodney King riots? The only thing that kept some of those businesses intact while the police waited hours to deal with the looting and arson was the presence, on the rooftops of those businesses, of the armed owners. Many of those that didn't take that precaution lost their businesses and their livelihoods.
5) Have you caught any of the coverage out of the post-Katrina Gulf Coast areas where looters were being run off of houses (like in Gulfport) by owners who were protecting their property? Alas, the New Orleans officials started actually confiscating guns from owners there... and while that's pretty scary, the only consolation is that there was a mandatory evacuation in effect, so the people who were still there were, essentially, already breaking the law - and there were indeed bad guys stealing guns from houses (though the owners probably should have already removed them when they left, or left them in gunsafes).
Anyway, we can expand on this thread if you want - we can even get into the millions of people that enjoy shooting sports (from old-West style shoots, to the Olympics, to shooting clays in trap and skeet... pretty much like golf, depending on how you look at it), but as much as I include some shooting in some of my recreation, it's the ability (no, the right) to defend my family when law enforcement can't be right there, that minute... that's a "good use" for guns.
Now you're getting it. A less effective government will be less intrusive, and that's Good.
Yes, generally less activity (by last-50-years historical standards) on the part of the federal government is a good thing. But "less effective" != "less intrusive," I think.
Less intrusive is less intrusive. More effective at doing what needs to be done so they don't have to be intrusive is the Good Thing.
But a congress too busy to do anything well because it's just arguing with itself is still going to do things, just Very Badly (read: worse than now). With my money.
Both Republicans and Democrats warmly embrace this system and prop it up, because without it they'd have been resigned the dustbin of history decades ago
Or, you could look at what's been happening to, say, Germany (where the entire country and its economy/public-life is swirling the toilet) and see what a train wreck you get when you have a highly fractured many-partied system. The small-scale, endless noisy squabbles result in a terribly unfocused, continually shifting landscape that never gets anything done. All you have are parties trying to obstruct or tear down one another. The recent election there is a mig muddled mess. Believe me, I've got plenty of bones to pick with behavior of both parties in the US - mostly because the very loud wack jobs on both the left and the right tend to have a disporpotionate impact on the leanings of the larger party as a whole. Of course, if the over-the-top conservatives and the loony lefties each broke away and acted as a third and fourth parties, we'd still have dems or republicans in office, but they'd be acting with what would look like even less of a mandate that typically happens now - and would thus have even less juice to get anything done without the other 75% of the population bitching about it.
When your largest parties in congress only hold a third of the seats, or the presidential candidate that got the office only really attracted 20% of the vote, you end up looking just like the big, soft, paralyzed mush that you now see in places like Germany. No wonder German investors are putting all of their money in businesses outside of that country, and that all of the population growth is from immigration (which is rewarded with lavish social services, even as the country's unemployment rate skyrockets). This is not all entirely due to their multiple political parties, but the general turbulence on that front is crippling. Just a cautionary note, that's all.
Are all theses hi-tech gadgets really effective in today's world, where terrorists are the biggest treat?
Assuming you mean "threat" (not "treat", since they're definitely not).
But big a threat as terrorists are, countries like Iran that actively funnel money and resources to them are starting (slowly) to depend on information infrastructures just like we do. Sure as hell any Chinese movement on Taiwan, for example, would be a lot harder for them to pull off if they suddenly lost their command and control pathways. This is about having the ability to act in such situations, not about whether it contributes to stopping some loon with a backpack bomb from blowing up a train. Those situations are not mutually exclusive, and require their own preparation/action as best we can manage them.
It's good to see that we're taking the initiative at ticking other spacefaring nations off right before we're about to suffer another financial blow, combined with a major hit to the Category-3 limited Johnson Space Center.
Do you supposed that the other spacefaring nations that we might be able to help with such a tool would feel the same way? Meaning, if, say, China were to start using one of their birds to interfere with communications satellites used by Taiwan or India or Japan... wouldn't our ability to jam the Chinese craft's communications be useful to our allies?
Not all weapons are offensive. The deterrence is the value.
On one hand you say that groups are so wise that they would be able to predict security threats, but at the saem time you're complaining about groups of people being so stupid because they don't understand.
Not at all. I'm saying that people who spend their lives dealing with security related issues, intelligence analysis, foreign affairs, law enforcement, diplomacy, and international economics are the components of a group that certainly will have something useful to say about terrorism hotspots.
I'm also saying that people who leap to their blogs (or to slashdot) to fire off a comment about "wagering on terrorism" being some sort of old-boy-network parlor game for the unfeeling military industrial complex elites are, well, wrong. People with a political or philosophical axe to grind are not the group to be tasked with forming any sort of consensus about the statistical and foundational validity of a futures/wager-type predictive system being applied to a particular, very specialized area about which they, by definition, are poorly informed. This would be just as true about plasma physics, meteorology, or any other complex area about which the Average Jane/Joe (no matter how technical in their own area - say, administering Linux boxes, writing video drivers, what have you) cannot authoritatively comment. Sure as hell the average journalist, as can be seen in the circumstance I first cited, handled the job miserably.
So would the Stupid Media(tm) and shrill lefty bloggers be able to predict a terrorist attack?
If the information that would drive their ability to actually do so was within their area of direct experience and knowledge, then yes. For example, people of that political persuasion might be more able to specualate on when or where ELF might next burn down someone's business.
How do you decide which groups are wise and which groups are Stupid(tm)?
I suppose the best way is to use analysis of past predictions combined with some rational up-front filtering of participants. It's pretty much like the mod system here - Taco won't let just anybody be an editor... he personally has to analyze their worth for that role. But the mod and meta-mod system at least approaches the job of providing weight to those that are shown to be germane to the discussion. Of course real decision making systems wouldn't be treated like quite the circus that slashdot is, and there's always the risk of someone with an agenda spamming the collective consensus somehow. The expectation would be that the more important the actions that will be based on collective analysis (like, where do you put an aircraft carrier, or which port do you watch, or where should the CDC station antibiotics at what time of year), the more experts have to shepherd the engine that processes the input.
Why is this modded as funny? Is that just some poor sarcasm on the part of the local audience, or are that many slashdotters that ignorant of the fact that the Pentagon actually DID put together exactly such a system, and that statisticians and other analysts thought it was a great idea. That the Stupid Media(tm) could only bring themselves to report on it in terms of "people betting on next terroris targets" (thus leading shrill lefty bloggers to screech about how craven the DoD is, how much they think of fighting terrorism as just a games, blahditty-blah-blah and other FUD) was, of course, completely predictable. That they had to abandon (or, rename) the project just because people are so anxious to find anything they can identify as politically correct (no matter how much they completely misunderstand it on the face of it) that they can distort into more Cindy Sheehan-esque rants is a damn shame.
The DoD and intelligence sectors do some truly ambitious and cutting edge things with analytical and predictive modeling, and lives are at stake. It's great that Google's doing the same (or even better, on more horizons), but funny how just moving the same research/technologies into a different venue makes slashdotters all drooly, instead of raving about Haliburton.
AOL really has no business charging $24.95 for dialup and annoying bloatware.
No business? Maybe you mean "not as much business," but millions of people are paying them every month for exactly that business. People like it. I even know professional road warriors that keep an AOL account (in the cheap, bring-your-own-access mode for under $10/month) so that when they're in towns with few choices, they can still hit one of those countless local AOL dial-up numbers, or their toll-free access if needed. Plenty of people don't need or want it, but plenty of people still use it happily. For most, it's a portal - just like the others. But for some, it's also their bundled anti-virus, dial-from-anywhere, portable profile, same-as-my-AIM-account platform. Don't dismiss it quite so readily.
but through destroying any company that gets in their way
Was TimeWarner "in the way of" AOL? Other than because it reinforces your sinister portrait of MS to describe investing in a company (and probably saving it from itself) as "destroying" it, why not recognize it as the same thing companies do every day? Google buys companies. Are they "destroying" them? eBay just bought Skype. Did they "destroy" it?
Is that sarcasm? Contract law is pretty clear cut.
No, I meant "right" as in "correct."
The two situations do not clash because 'obtain a copy' does no imply I entered into a contractual relationship with her
Obviously I'm referring to original purchase. If you buy a used book or CD, you're no longer directly interacting with the creator, but you're still obliged to respect that person's rights to their material. Otherwise, you could simply re-publish it as your own... and with no copyrights by the creator, that wouldn't even be fraud. There would be no end to the fights about which person wrote what, etc. But it wouldn't matter much, because the ability for people to make a living from their work would be so dramatically reduced that much less of it would be produced in the first place. It would be a much poorer world.
Further, I would not enter a contract that prohibited me from copying the work
Which means you're not buying any books, newspapers, magazines, cable channels, CDs or much of anything produced by professional, career writers, artists, etc. Because the purchase of each of those (except where the creator has expressly waived their rights) essentially is just such a contract. That's the entire purpose of copyright law - so that people can confidently create works and not have to duke it out over reproduction terms every time someone spends $0.25 on the daily newspaper.
The way the artist makes her money is by having her fans pay her to make and release her work.
You've got it backwards. She makes money by producing work, and letting the marketplace decide, based on merit, if they want to buy it. In exchange for a share of the proceeds, some companies (publishers, specifically) may provide her with an income in advance, gambling that the work will become popular. Her fans do not pay her in advance, and why should they have to?
They would produce the movie, send it to reviewers and offer previews and collect their price.
How? How would they collect it? From whom? When? What stops someone from simply making a copy of the work, and the collecting the price themselves five minutes later in a different venue?
Further, I do not need to support an artists lifesytle in order to enjoy their work. even under copyright, I can hear things on the radio or borrow copies from the library.
That artist is (generally) making money when their work is played on the radio. This is exactly because they have negotiated a deal with a publisher that makes sure that is so. The radio station in turn gets to demonstrate a certain type and number of listeners, and sells advertising to earn a living. The fact that you're willing to let the additional layers of the radio station's revenue stream and the more indirect payments that they make to the artists somehow make you look past what you consider to be immoral, coercive artists and their behavior... it's just another example of exactly situational, relative morals on your part. These aren't doctors or ditch diggers that happen to have something copyrighted on the radio - these are people deliberately entering into a career and relationship with an audience largely through that specific mechanism. That you can pretend to ignore that while tapping your fingers to their music, and then go back to calling them immoral when it may bolster your case for not having to pay for your entertainment - that contrast is so plain as day that you must be blind to it at this point.
Personally, there are artists whose music - no matter how catchy or artfully crafted - I simply find distasteful knowing what I know about their moral position, and to which I therefore won't listen - I have the cognitive ability to hear the music and remember what I know about their politics or personal behavior, and the two can be impossible to separate when that moral position is strident/abrasive enough to interf
The real question is, what is more important: the content makers being able to make money or the free exchange and remix of culture that abolishing copyrights would allow (in even larger way than it's happening today) ?
So, you're of a mind that we don't need any new elements in our culture - we can do just fine by eternally "remixing" that which has already been produced?
Some of us actually enjoy the experience of reading/viewing/listening-to something new, innovative, and artfully produced. That takes a lot more work than rehashing other people's work, and can involve years of planning, research, practice, abandoned efforts, and yes, marketing when the time comes (so that all of that work can be meaningfully rewarded). You ask what's more important, and I say that allowing creative artists to not be your pet entertainment slave is at the top of the list. If you're right, and real artists are just those people that want to remix, then you should have no problem eloquently persuading artists to waive their copyrights. They have that option right now, and always have.
Enough is enough, I now copy everything I want for free and the copyright holders can starve to death for all I care.
So, you want what they spend their lives producing, but want other people to pay them to produce it for you? You're a parasite, and a hypocrite as well. If you don't like how an author decides to create, sell, and promote her work, just don't buy it, support, or read it. You can reclaim some of your intellectual honesty by simply disregarding the work by people that you say you don't respect. You might also consider that citing a non-disclosure agreement between advance reviewers of a recent Harry Potter book and its author - if you find it so distasteful - doesn't justify your deciding that the work of every creative artist is now yours to take without paying them. To say that's your justification is simply childish on the face of it. Show a little backbone, why don't you, and just skip Rowling's next book/film? Talk other people into doing the same. But don't pretend that her pre-release NDA is somehow justification for ripping off U2's latest CD or any and all movies you're too cheap to pay for.
If an artist is selling her work, and I agree to buy it, but do not pay her, she would have every right to take me to court for breach of contract.
Right.
If an artist publishes her work, and I obtain a copy, but do not pay her, I have not wronged her in any way
Unless the way she sells her work (as in your first example) is through publishing it. In fact, selling a single copy of it to you, even if it's the only copy she ever sells, could be considered "publishing" it. And if she wants to attach contractual terms to that transaction, she's welcome to. And if you enter into that transaction but ignore the terms, then your second example is clashing with the first.
This is a logical fallacy
No, it's using words as if they actually have meaning. Someone who acts immorally is immoral by definition. By definition.
Everyone does immoral things at one time or another. I do not believe this condemns the person as a whole.
So what you're saying is that creative artists are just to dumb to know how to act morally in this one regard? Again, displaying a lot of respect there.
Further, why would I not want art simply because it has been produced by an person who as done immoral things? If Michael Jackson molested little boys, does that change the quality of his music?
Your support (by buying their work) of someone who makes a career out of doing something that you call immoral means that you endorse their immorality. Don't you even listen to yourself? A professional artist makes the decision to copyright work and use those rights to defend the value of their work, and then finds people willing to work within that framework to make a living. That is a fundamental aspect of how that person lives their life, and is central to their view of their work, of the marketplace, and their relationship with the people who value their work. You consider that posture to be "immoral," but still want that person to entertain you since they're only being immoral some of the time? You've got a really bad case of moral relativism, and a world view that's completely full of holes. Mostly, though, you just want to dictate the terms under which someone works for you. You're willing to have pet entertainment slaves, since you see their business decisions as intellectual and moral failings that conveniently serve you as some sort of personal waiver of their rights.
I resepect artists, as artists, for their art. I will not respect their attempts at coercion.
How are you being coerced? If you don't like the form of commerce that the artist you claim to respect has personally chosen to use, all you have to do is walk away. There is no one forcing you to take that artist's work. There is only you pretending that you're philosophically whole as you condemn the artist's thoughts and world view while simultaneously saying those things don't matter because... what? they know how to paint, write, or play the guitar in a way that you like? How can you dare say you respect an artist while telling them, in the same breath, that they're coercive and immoral? Are you that lacking in intellectual honesty? No need to answer that one.
People want art, people will pay artists.
But people who want art are already, in the millions, finding ways not to pay artists what they are asking for their work. Which people did you have in mind?
The street performer protocol is one moral way to get paid.
And how will that protocol produce the type of works that take years to make? You certainly don't have to attend or buy copies of films that employed a thousand cast and crew to produce, or listen to recordings that involved performers from all over the world, assembled into one production at different times - but some people want to enjoy work of that scope, and are willing to pay what the producers of that work ask (I'm v
Content producers need to start using moral ways to get paid, rather than relying on immoral copyrights.
Ok, so what you're saying is that if there were no copyright protections, that would be fine, because the person who spends a year recording music, or 10 years writing a novel, will certainly find that she'll get what she asks when she wants to sell it, right? There won't be anyone immorally deciding to skip out on paying her for her work, right? Certainly, people who don't want to pay what the artist is asking would just say, "oh well! I'll have to find an equally talented artist who wants to work for me for free!"
Sorry, but that doesn't happen across the board. And how would you handle the reality of an unscrupulous publisher simply taking a copy of the work and selling another printing of it, ignoring the original artist's intent, permission, and moral ownership of their own work?
With no recourse against people that decide to rip of the artist, the artist will not have the protection needed to attract the investment off of which they live while working. Or, choosing to live like a pauper while putting time into what the artist hopes will become a paying creative project will become a fool's choice, and the world will be much, much worse for it.
So, what is your idea of a "moral" way to get paid? I'm always amused by people who think they're doing artists a favor by removing the protection those artists have against actually immoral people who have no problem ripping them off.
Your position is that artists are acting in an immoral way. That makes the artists immoral. Why would you want art produced by such a person? You obviously already know of proper, moral artists that are working for you in some other way, right? Surely you have the intellectual honesty not to want the work of people that you consider immoral. Immoral people like Peter Jackson, or Christopher Walken, or Maya Angelou, or Stephen Hawking, or the Blackeyed Peas, or U2.
It's quite a secret you're keeping - the cadre of artists you know that produce work of that scope and quality without any concern about being compensated for their efforts. Your morality comes at quite a price (the price of eating, and putting a roof over your head).
If you can demonstrate the absence of any actually immoral people that would disregard the price that an artists is asking for their work, then we'll have something to talk about. But even with such recourse in place, there are millions of people willing to give the finger to the very artists they say they respect.
But since artists can, right now, waive their copyrights any time they see fit, the only people you're worried about are the "immoral" ones, and since you hate them, why not just let them, and their customers, be? You hate the artists, and thus you must feel the same way about their fans, so how is this hurting you (who would never want their work anyway?). You, and the nice, moral filmmakers and recording artists that you patronize with your money outside of the copyright system are in a self-contained universe, no question. Somewhere in that everything-belongs-to-everybody universe you occupy, there are surely still people making movies that take years, and involve large casts and crews - because they all are willing to make that investment, right?
Buggy-whip makers concerned that new automobile may hurt industry revenues
Perhaps not a very helpful analogy. How about, "Buggy whip stores concerned that rampant theft of buggy whips from the factory will reduce retail demand." OK, not the best analogy either, but the point is that someone who goes to a lot of trouble (and time, and money) to produce something that people will want for their education and entertainment are not going to be buggy-whipped out of demand. We're talking about whether or not they, and the people who invest the money they live on while they work and wait for sales to happen, will be able to continue to thrive. I sure hope that professional writers, and the industry that supports them and produces things you don't have charge up with electricity in order to enjoy, don't go the way of buggy whips.
If that's the opposite of moronic, then sure... at least a couple of people are. Don't worry, though, the built-in slashdot rationality immune system will soon squash any outbreaks of reason that pop up. A quick round of emotocillan or some sociodoctricyclan will also clear it right up.
Slashdot Mirror
Those who want ... to be self-made, or to defend themselves -- are going to find themselves in battle after battle with others who want the same things.
What nonsense. On the face of it.
Two people trying to be self-made gets you... two self-made people. Two people defending themselves gets you... two people in a non-offensive mode, not in each other's way at all.
Self made, defensive people are not "wicked," and by definition aren't clashing. The people you have to worry about are those that think that others should provide for them, or think that they should be able to tell people how they should think or what magical imaginary being they should believe in.
People who provide for themselves and build things may compete with others who also want to make the most of what they produce - but they don't battle with anyone over some imaginary limited number of pie slices... they produce more pie. The people who stress themselves out are the ones who want more pie but don't have the discipline or imagination required to make a new one for themselves. That's laziness or incompetence, and (if coupled with still demanding what they want of others) is "wicked" (if you want to use that word).
Calling the people who produce things and provide employment (for people who themselves don't have the substance to do so) "wicked" says a lot about how you see the world. In my experience, though, the "burn out" among most employees is completely unrelated to their particular employer, and as more to do with being overcommitted or having a desire for a lifestyle beyond their means. The ones that then act unscrupulously to reach that lifestyle without actually producing anything of enough value to fund that lifestyle are the "wicked" ones.
Intelligent design is incomplete, because it depends on faith as much as proof.
No, it depends entirely on faith. There's no reason, at all, to think that all of the factual evidence of evolution has been faked up by a deity with a twisted sense of humor, and that the processes we see around us every day do not result, over time, in the birth of species. Rather, it takes a willful act of self-delusion to ignore all of that evidence, and to embrace instead the fundamentally self-contradictory stuff that's being woven together by the ID crowd in an effort to feel better about their life-long religious choices.
Really, this all just comes down to people not wanting to feel bad about having been duped since childhood, and not wanting to have been demonstrably lying to their own children about how the universe works. The irony, of course, is that it requires a passionate, deliberate, and sustained act of lying to yourself and your kids to reach the point where you stop feeling so bad about swallowing the whole fairy tale in the first place.
Devout religious people who want to believe this stuff can certainly identify (one would hope) with the people, even amongst their ranks, who would wince at a person who, as an adult, believes Santa Claus actually makes rounds and delivers presents. Scientists and other basically rational people are doing that exact same wincing as they listen to the True Believers prop up their religious constructs and carefully tap-dance their way through what they will and will not willingly observe right before their church-clouded eyes.
ID is a "theory" about the origin of species in the same sense that "Santa Clause" is a theory about the origin of gift wrap. A scientist will follow the trail back the paper factory, look at the ink, the wood pulp, and the process... but the True Santa Claus Believers find it more comforting (and, of course, just a lot less work - intellectual laziness is really at the heart of the whole Creationism movement) to imagine that Santa has Elves magically wrapping paper at the North Pole. It's a (not really all that) harmless enough fantasy when you're a kid, but a developmentally normal kid will quickly put that cool meat computer to work and see through the make-believe. How grown-up people manage to cling to the slightly more elaborate make believe that powers so many churches is always amazing to me, but I think shame at the center of it.
You know... If I just keep pretending I believe, I won't have to confront the fact that I've been sort of a chump all these years. And I won't have to allow for the fact that the universe is completely indifferent to whether or not I exist, and thus have to make my own meaning in my own life through the work of my own mind and character.
Santa and his variants are so much... more cozy! But just because it feels good to wash your hands of cause and effect doesn't mean you're immune from its impact. I've noticed that people who truly believe the Creationism stuff are content to do so because it's relatively removed from daily life. People used to believe they saw the daily hand of magic in all sorts of nitty-gritty things. But since it's easy now to point to the underlying mechanisms of all sorts of things that used to be mysterious, God's now sitting at the back of the Causality Bus, just being invoked to explain the stuff that it's harder for poorly educated people to immediately grasp. And franky, I wouldn't care, except that those same people are trying to drag science education back into the Dark Ages, and it's frankly embarassing. Not to mention the long term impact on our country's ability to function prosperously in a wider world that does get causality.
Big response to your short little comment? Yup. And that's a perfect analogy to this whole discussion. The ID crowd wants a tidy little Object O' Faith to explain something complicated, and the scientists and thinkers would rather enjoy the hard work of showing it the way it
This is just further proof that highly complex forms suited to particular functionality don't just happen randomly. It takes a mysterious spark of intelligence to create such an elegant form.
Of course, micro-adaptation might explain the subtle differences between the TR-1 and the iPod, but the genesis of the form is surely supernatural.
Also, have you noticed that the Wheel Interface is actually just perfect for anyone having a Noodly Appendage?
Yah, they told all THOSE people what was up. 30-50 years later...
So, your point is that right now, They(tm) are testing Anthrax-related variables/practices by mailing fake Islamo-fascist terrorist letters to a tabloid "news" company and Capital Hill offices? That the evil-conspiracy government couldn't think up a single better way to test things than that? Or, were they looking for the constant grief and appearance of incompetence (when they can least afford it) that they're getting for not catching the slippery person who did it? Anyone with a nice enough tinfoil hat to suggest that those events were some sort of U.S. weapons test would certainly dream up a better made-for-TV case resolution than the so-far-fruitless pursuit of a guy in that line of work who apparently can't be pinned down with having anything to do with (but whose life has been ruined). The old Ominous Big Bad Government of the slashdot group-think profile would just have simply framed somebody and made a nice arrest... or even better, killed the person while trying to apprehend them, or some other right-out-of-the-X-Files bit of melodrama.
Come on. Use Occam's Razor, here. The country is full of bio-scientists with easy access to the strains, the tools, and the bad attitude to have done what happened. Being scientists, they're also Not Entirely Stupid, and have covered their tracks. But government testing by mailing it to a senate office? Give me a damn break.
Because there appear to be an infinite number of them, and what could be better than putting building your new Martian greenhouse on the south face of "Hoary Hedgehog Hill"?
The fact that Anthrax got loose in Washington, and the way the investigation was stonewalled seems to indicate that the US has not been adhering very stringently to the spirit of any convention.
"got loose"? You mean: "was mailed there" by some loon. You're making it sound like the Downtown Washington DC Anthrax Depot, badly handled by some sort of yukapuk guarding it with a whistle and a nightstick, somehow sprung a leak. Rather, someone who knew what they were doing with the organism and had the specific will to cause some chaos with it acted to do just so. How is that any example of the U.S. not adhering the "spirit of any convention" (my emphasis)? That sentence (and concept) just doesn't make any contextual sense whatsoever.
That's like saying that because some maniac in Japan slit the throats of some school children, that Japan is "once again going to war." Or that the Spanish guy who raped and murdered a French schoolgirl shows that there the spirit of the Geneva convention is being ignored by Spain in their conflict with France. What? That's crazy? Right.
On the other hand testing your weapons on your own population does not infringe on any treaty AFAIK.
Wow! You sure know something that no one else does! Unless of course you're just BSing because it's fun to pretend that a secret US method of testing a bio-weapon on its own citizens would be to mail it to people. What complete, tinfoil-lined crap, and you know it. I can't believe this was modded insightful. Wait... where am I? Slashdot? I suppose I can, actually.
you seem to suggest that a totalitarian government is the most effective since there are no dissenters that will slow down your actions or muddle your decisions
Well, if you want to just make stuff up and pretend I said it, I suppose you might take that away from my comment. Otherwise, let's focus on what I did say. My point is that a hightly fractured many-parties system (I just happened to use Germany as an example where more of that has just led to a disaster of an election for everyone involved) is not as ultimately useful as one with two, or perhaps three philosophical poles. Because the results of an election that produce "leaders" that receive 10 or 20% of the vote is going to be a big grey goo of policy and (in)action. Think there's a lot of finger pointing in the wake of the recent hurricane? Imagine if the government was formed of a dozen different interest groups/parties, not one of which had the political strength to act (or be accountable) for anything without being able to simply point to the other 10 players. For better or worse, we can look to which ever party happens to be in the congressional majority, or sometimes to whichever holds the White House, and seek/expect/complain-about action. And that party can act, or be removed next time around. It happened to the democrats in congress back the early 1990s, and it happened to Bush Sr. The "dissenters" you're referring to are called "voters." And if they have rational enough point of view, they get to regularly change the entire government out for another group of people. That's not totalitarian - it's a republic. In a mess like Germany, the voters tend to vote in and out only small, relatively powerless sections of the government at any given time.
I mean, Bush has been granted the right to go on a war without anyone being able to say "no, we don't".
What are you talking about? He's got the same authority that George Washington did (somewhat reduced by the War Powers Act), and the same authority that Ford, Reagan, Carter, Johnson, Kennedy, Clinton, and the rest did. He can't do too much at all without congressional approval, and more importantly, he can't take any tax dollars and hand it to the DoD without congress acting. You may recall the appropriations that Kerry famously "voted against, before voting for it"? That whole process is how congress provides the resources (or doesn't) to the C-in-C.
By the time you'd get him out of there the damage will already be done. That's no longer democracy if that guy is basically an Emperor.
Specifically (careful, now!) what war powers does Bush have that Clinton ("emporer," by your reckoning, for eight years) did not?
And do you honestly think that people shooting their own food, defending their property happens more often then somebody buying a gun with the intention of killing another person?
Happily, I don't have to "believe" it at all, since the facts are right there in front of us.
There are roughly 80,000,000 gun owners in the United States (and this stat is a few years old, so of course it's more now). Note we're talking gun owners, not guns. Their ownership of guns spans hunting, recreation, self defense - all of the activities I mentioned before. If your tought is that the majority of those people bought guns "with the intention of killing another person," then you're assuming that over 40,000,000 million people are planning murder. Except... that's simply nowhere near true.
Going back a couple years for some statistics, you've got 63% of homicides committed with guns. The homicide rate in the U.S. was 5.6 per 100,000 citizens. So, that would be 3.5 per 100,000 by firearms. So that's 35 per million, or roughly 10,000 within the entire country's population. Now, remember that's at least 40,000,000 "murder-intended" gun buyers you're proposing. That's 40,00,000 people you think bought guns while intending to kill someone - but only 10,000 of them succeeding. That's 0.025% of your would-be murderers doing what you say their purpose is. Back in reality, let's allow for the fact that many deaths (especially those in criminal circles) are committed by repeat offenders, and with guns that aren't legally purchased or owned in the first place - both factors hugely skewing the results even further.
How about we use Occam's Razor, and opt for a more likely scenario? How about the possibility that in fact the vast majority of the people that buy a gun (99.9+%) do so for exactly the reasons I mentioned, and that you need to re-evaluate your preconceptions a bit. And also consider the thousands of people that are stabbed and beaten to death, and the thousands currently shot to death that would be killed by other means absent the criminally used gun.
Then, start taking into account the crimes that are prevented because of a gun. Over 2 million times per year, legally owned guns are used in self defense (which can mean to stop or prevent violence). Rarely are those guns fired, but their presence is a strong deterrence. Further, those states where people are legally allowed to carry concealed weapons have lower rates of violent crimes, including fewer rapes, assaults, robberies, carjackings, break-ins, etc. In places where the right to own guns as been severely and recently rolled back (say, in Australia or Scotland), violent crime (including murders) have gone dramatically up.
Guns aren't "bad for society as a whole," people who want to kill people are bad for society as a whole.
Thanks for reading, and I hope you'll at least look into the basis of some of your longer-held thoughts on this sort of thing - especially your stated notion that most people buy guns intending to kill people, which couldn't be farther from the truth.
this is the very thing Microsoft was proposing as a new business model
.Net layer of tools. They were sort of ahead of themselves on that one. Reality's catching up, though.
Not only that, it's why they produced the whole
President Bush has probably run the least effective government in years (Katrina response, Iraq) and yet he has also run one of the most instrusive (Patriot Act).
Oh, please.
The most visibly painful failure in the Katrina response was in downtown New Orleans, where the city and state governments miserably failed to follow their own plans, make use of their own resources, prepare their own people, or even communicate effectively. Meanwhile the feds were responding (on the strategic and longer-term level, which is their role) to terrific damage and displaced people over a 90,000 square mile area. That's bigger than Great Britain, in case you're trying to get a sense of it. Where's your venom for the two democrats with first-responder responsibilities in New Orleans (that would be the mayor and governor)?
Iraq? Yeah, it's a pisser that a crazy religious minority, or the left-over baggage from Saddam's regime, feel it's appropriate to slaughter other Iraqis as the peaceful ones go about setting up a new constitution and working democratic government. Considering the constitution's closer to being done that the US's constitution was for 10 years after it was started, and that the Iraqi population is systematically voting for its own representatives, and has more electicity and water flowing, and more schools and free (as in speech) media outlets than during Saddam's murderous rule... I can't see how that's a bad thing. It's not all perfect, or even close. But neither was rebuilding Japan, getting Bosnia back into shape, etc.
Patriot Act? Shall we count the number of Democrats who loudly backed it, and continue to back it? The president can't pass legislation - that's up to the congress and the senate, who both overwhelmingly did, and not on partisan lines.
*sigh* And in case you're not really paying attention to what this whole political-speech-blog issue is REALLY about, it's Republicans trying to exclude bloggers from regulation, not the other way around. RTFA, OK?
I can't think of any good uses for guns...
... and while that's pretty scary, the only consolation is that there was a mandatory evacuation in effect, so the people who were still there were, essentially, already breaking the law - and there were indeed bad guys stealing guns from houses (though the owners probably should have already removed them when they left, or left them in gunsafes).
Hmm. I'll take a shot (bada-bing!) at that one...
1) Those people in my family that do (or have) lived in rural areas and/or worked farms have made regular use of them. Killing rabid animals, preventing predators from killing or running livestock, and even in running vandals/thieves out of machine sheds/barns with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of farming equipment and fuel. Certain varmits will invade cow pastures, producing holes in which cattle break their legs or in which water/ice collects - and a small caliber rifle is the most common solution (you can't put out traps or poison in such a situation, and the hawks, foxes, and coyotes don't keep up with a healthy prairie dog or groundhog invasion).
2) I put multiple loads of great, low-fat, free-range, no-drugs meat in my freezer every season. This activity also helps reign in the hugely overpopulated deer herds in the suburban mid-Atlantic region (note: there are more whitetail deer in that area now than there were before Columbus showed up - more, in the "many millions more" sense). We don't have timber wolves, mountain lions, or other predators in enough numbers any longer to keep them in check, and we keep making more terrain exactly in a way that causes more whitetail reproduction. The populations, though, swing wildly out of balance, with only hunters and people driving cars (ouch) to take the place of natural predation. Of course, the fact that venison is completely delicious with a nice cabernet-syrah is a happy bonus. To accomplish some of this harvest (when not using a bow), I use guns. Same on the ever popular rabbit, pheasant, quail, partridge and dove. Just had some sauteed dove breasts for dinner last night... great eating, and no poultry farms were used in the process.
3) Ever had a large, crazy someone in a Really Bad Mood trying to beat down your door with a pipe in the middle of the night, even as you waited 15 minutes for the police to make an appearance? I have. My wife was not pleased. The only thing that got the guy to back off was a large, ominous-looking gun. Happily, shooting him was not required.
4) Did you watch the footage of the Koreatown business owners in LA back in the 1990's Rodney King riots? The only thing that kept some of those businesses intact while the police waited hours to deal with the looting and arson was the presence, on the rooftops of those businesses, of the armed owners. Many of those that didn't take that precaution lost their businesses and their livelihoods.
5) Have you caught any of the coverage out of the post-Katrina Gulf Coast areas where looters were being run off of houses (like in Gulfport) by owners who were protecting their property? Alas, the New Orleans officials started actually confiscating guns from owners there
Anyway, we can expand on this thread if you want - we can even get into the millions of people that enjoy shooting sports (from old-West style shoots, to the Olympics, to shooting clays in trap and skeet... pretty much like golf, depending on how you look at it), but as much as I include some shooting in some of my recreation, it's the ability (no, the right) to defend my family when law enforcement can't be right there, that minute... that's a "good use" for guns.
Now you're getting it. A less effective government will be less intrusive, and that's Good.
Yes, generally less activity (by last-50-years historical standards) on the part of the federal government is a good thing. But "less effective" != "less intrusive," I think.
Less intrusive is less intrusive. More effective at doing what needs to be done so they don't have to be intrusive is the Good Thing.
But a congress too busy to do anything well because it's just arguing with itself is still going to do things, just Very Badly (read: worse than now). With my money.
Both Republicans and Democrats warmly embrace this system and prop it up, because without it they'd have been resigned the dustbin of history decades ago
Or, you could look at what's been happening to, say, Germany (where the entire country and its economy/public-life is swirling the toilet) and see what a train wreck you get when you have a highly fractured many-partied system. The small-scale, endless noisy squabbles result in a terribly unfocused, continually shifting landscape that never gets anything done. All you have are parties trying to obstruct or tear down one another. The recent election there is a mig muddled mess. Believe me, I've got plenty of bones to pick with behavior of both parties in the US - mostly because the very loud wack jobs on both the left and the right tend to have a disporpotionate impact on the leanings of the larger party as a whole. Of course, if the over-the-top conservatives and the loony lefties each broke away and acted as a third and fourth parties, we'd still have dems or republicans in office, but they'd be acting with what would look like even less of a mandate that typically happens now - and would thus have even less juice to get anything done without the other 75% of the population bitching about it.
When your largest parties in congress only hold a third of the seats, or the presidential candidate that got the office only really attracted 20% of the vote, you end up looking just like the big, soft, paralyzed mush that you now see in places like Germany. No wonder German investors are putting all of their money in businesses outside of that country, and that all of the population growth is from immigration (which is rewarded with lavish social services, even as the country's unemployment rate skyrockets). This is not all entirely due to their multiple political parties, but the general turbulence on that front is crippling. Just a cautionary note, that's all.
Are all theses hi-tech gadgets really effective in today's world, where terrorists are the biggest treat?
Assuming you mean "threat" (not "treat", since they're definitely not).
But big a threat as terrorists are, countries like Iran that actively funnel money and resources to them are starting (slowly) to depend on information infrastructures just like we do. Sure as hell any Chinese movement on Taiwan, for example, would be a lot harder for them to pull off if they suddenly lost their command and control pathways. This is about having the ability to act in such situations, not about whether it contributes to stopping some loon with a backpack bomb from blowing up a train. Those situations are not mutually exclusive, and require their own preparation/action as best we can manage them.
It's good to see that we're taking the initiative at ticking other spacefaring nations off right before we're about to suffer another financial blow, combined with a major hit to the Category-3 limited Johnson Space Center.
Do you supposed that the other spacefaring nations that we might be able to help with such a tool would feel the same way? Meaning, if, say, China were to start using one of their birds to interfere with communications satellites used by Taiwan or India or Japan... wouldn't our ability to jam the Chinese craft's communications be useful to our allies?
Not all weapons are offensive. The deterrence is the value.
On one hand you say that groups are so wise that they would be able to predict security threats, but at the saem time you're complaining about groups of people being so stupid because they don't understand.
Not at all. I'm saying that people who spend their lives dealing with security related issues, intelligence analysis, foreign affairs, law enforcement, diplomacy, and international economics are the components of a group that certainly will have something useful to say about terrorism hotspots.
I'm also saying that people who leap to their blogs (or to slashdot) to fire off a comment about "wagering on terrorism" being some sort of old-boy-network parlor game for the unfeeling military industrial complex elites are, well, wrong. People with a political or philosophical axe to grind are not the group to be tasked with forming any sort of consensus about the statistical and foundational validity of a futures/wager-type predictive system being applied to a particular, very specialized area about which they, by definition, are poorly informed. This would be just as true about plasma physics, meteorology, or any other complex area about which the Average Jane/Joe (no matter how technical in their own area - say, administering Linux boxes, writing video drivers, what have you) cannot authoritatively comment. Sure as hell the average journalist, as can be seen in the circumstance I first cited, handled the job miserably.
So would the Stupid Media(tm) and shrill lefty bloggers be able to predict a terrorist attack?
If the information that would drive their ability to actually do so was within their area of direct experience and knowledge, then yes. For example, people of that political persuasion might be more able to specualate on when or where ELF might next burn down someone's business.
How do you decide which groups are wise and which groups are Stupid(tm)?
I suppose the best way is to use analysis of past predictions combined with some rational up-front filtering of participants. It's pretty much like the mod system here - Taco won't let just anybody be an editor... he personally has to analyze their worth for that role. But the mod and meta-mod system at least approaches the job of providing weight to those that are shown to be germane to the discussion. Of course real decision making systems wouldn't be treated like quite the circus that slashdot is, and there's always the risk of someone with an agenda spamming the collective consensus somehow. The expectation would be that the more important the actions that will be based on collective analysis (like, where do you put an aircraft carrier, or which port do you watch, or where should the CDC station antibiotics at what time of year), the more experts have to shepherd the engine that processes the input.
Does this seem less ironic to you, now?
Why is this modded as funny? Is that just some poor sarcasm on the part of the local audience, or are that many slashdotters that ignorant of the fact that the Pentagon actually DID put together exactly such a system, and that statisticians and other analysts thought it was a great idea. That the Stupid Media(tm) could only bring themselves to report on it in terms of "people betting on next terroris targets" (thus leading shrill lefty bloggers to screech about how craven the DoD is, how much they think of fighting terrorism as just a games, blahditty-blah-blah and other FUD) was, of course, completely predictable. That they had to abandon (or, rename) the project just because people are so anxious to find anything they can identify as politically correct (no matter how much they completely misunderstand it on the face of it) that they can distort into more Cindy Sheehan-esque rants is a damn shame.
The DoD and intelligence sectors do some truly ambitious and cutting edge things with analytical and predictive modeling, and lives are at stake. It's great that Google's doing the same (or even better, on more horizons), but funny how just moving the same research/technologies into a different venue makes slashdotters all drooly, instead of raving about Haliburton.
AOL really has no business charging $24.95 for dialup and annoying bloatware.
No business? Maybe you mean "not as much business," but millions of people are paying them every month for exactly that business. People like it. I even know professional road warriors that keep an AOL account (in the cheap, bring-your-own-access mode for under $10/month) so that when they're in towns with few choices, they can still hit one of those countless local AOL dial-up numbers, or their toll-free access if needed. Plenty of people don't need or want it, but plenty of people still use it happily. For most, it's a portal - just like the others. But for some, it's also their bundled anti-virus, dial-from-anywhere, portable profile, same-as-my-AIM-account platform. Don't dismiss it quite so readily.
but through destroying any company that gets in their way
Was TimeWarner "in the way of" AOL? Other than because it reinforces your sinister portrait of MS to describe investing in a company (and probably saving it from itself) as "destroying" it, why not recognize it as the same thing companies do every day? Google buys companies. Are they "destroying" them? eBay just bought Skype. Did they "destroy" it?
Right.
Is that sarcasm? Contract law is pretty clear cut.
No, I meant "right" as in "correct."
The two situations do not clash because 'obtain a copy' does no imply I entered into a contractual relationship with her
Obviously I'm referring to original purchase. If you buy a used book or CD, you're no longer directly interacting with the creator, but you're still obliged to respect that person's rights to their material. Otherwise, you could simply re-publish it as your own... and with no copyrights by the creator, that wouldn't even be fraud. There would be no end to the fights about which person wrote what, etc. But it wouldn't matter much, because the ability for people to make a living from their work would be so dramatically reduced that much less of it would be produced in the first place. It would be a much poorer world.
Further, I would not enter a contract that prohibited me from copying the work
Which means you're not buying any books, newspapers, magazines, cable channels, CDs or much of anything produced by professional, career writers, artists, etc. Because the purchase of each of those (except where the creator has expressly waived their rights) essentially is just such a contract. That's the entire purpose of copyright law - so that people can confidently create works and not have to duke it out over reproduction terms every time someone spends $0.25 on the daily newspaper.
The way the artist makes her money is by having her fans pay her to make and release her work.
You've got it backwards. She makes money by producing work, and letting the marketplace decide, based on merit, if they want to buy it. In exchange for a share of the proceeds, some companies (publishers, specifically) may provide her with an income in advance, gambling that the work will become popular. Her fans do not pay her in advance, and why should they have to?
They would produce the movie, send it to reviewers and offer previews and collect their price.
How? How would they collect it? From whom? When? What stops someone from simply making a copy of the work, and the collecting the price themselves five minutes later in a different venue?
Further, I do not need to support an artists lifesytle in order to enjoy their work. even under copyright, I can hear things on the radio or borrow copies from the library.
That artist is (generally) making money when their work is played on the radio. This is exactly because they have negotiated a deal with a publisher that makes sure that is so. The radio station in turn gets to demonstrate a certain type and number of listeners, and sells advertising to earn a living. The fact that you're willing to let the additional layers of the radio station's revenue stream and the more indirect payments that they make to the artists somehow make you look past what you consider to be immoral, coercive artists and their behavior... it's just another example of exactly situational, relative morals on your part. These aren't doctors or ditch diggers that happen to have something copyrighted on the radio - these are people deliberately entering into a career and relationship with an audience largely through that specific mechanism. That you can pretend to ignore that while tapping your fingers to their music, and then go back to calling them immoral when it may bolster your case for not having to pay for your entertainment - that contrast is so plain as day that you must be blind to it at this point.
Personally, there are artists whose music - no matter how catchy or artfully crafted - I simply find distasteful knowing what I know about their moral position, and to which I therefore won't listen - I have the cognitive ability to hear the music and remember what I know about their politics or personal behavior, and the two can be impossible to separate when that moral position is strident/abrasive enough to interf
The real question is, what is more important: the content makers being able to make money or the free exchange and remix of culture that abolishing copyrights would allow (in even larger way than it's happening today) ?
So, you're of a mind that we don't need any new elements in our culture - we can do just fine by eternally "remixing" that which has already been produced?
Some of us actually enjoy the experience of reading/viewing/listening-to something new, innovative, and artfully produced. That takes a lot more work than rehashing other people's work, and can involve years of planning, research, practice, abandoned efforts, and yes, marketing when the time comes (so that all of that work can be meaningfully rewarded). You ask what's more important, and I say that allowing creative artists to not be your pet entertainment slave is at the top of the list. If you're right, and real artists are just those people that want to remix, then you should have no problem eloquently persuading artists to waive their copyrights. They have that option right now, and always have.
Enough is enough, I now copy everything I want for free and the copyright holders can starve to death for all I care.
So, you want what they spend their lives producing, but want other people to pay them to produce it for you? You're a parasite, and a hypocrite as well. If you don't like how an author decides to create, sell, and promote her work, just don't buy it, support, or read it. You can reclaim some of your intellectual honesty by simply disregarding the work by people that you say you don't respect. You might also consider that citing a non-disclosure agreement between advance reviewers of a recent Harry Potter book and its author - if you find it so distasteful - doesn't justify your deciding that the work of every creative artist is now yours to take without paying them. To say that's your justification is simply childish on the face of it. Show a little backbone, why don't you, and just skip Rowling's next book/film? Talk other people into doing the same. But don't pretend that her pre-release NDA is somehow justification for ripping off U2's latest CD or any and all movies you're too cheap to pay for.
If an artist is selling her work, and I agree to buy it, but do not pay her, she would have every right to take me to court for breach of contract.
Right.
If an artist publishes her work, and I obtain a copy, but do not pay her, I have not wronged her in any way
Unless the way she sells her work (as in your first example) is through publishing it. In fact, selling a single copy of it to you, even if it's the only copy she ever sells, could be considered "publishing" it. And if she wants to attach contractual terms to that transaction, she's welcome to. And if you enter into that transaction but ignore the terms, then your second example is clashing with the first.
This is a logical fallacy
No, it's using words as if they actually have meaning. Someone who acts immorally is immoral by definition. By definition.
Everyone does immoral things at one time or another. I do not believe this condemns the person as a whole.
So what you're saying is that creative artists are just to dumb to know how to act morally in this one regard? Again, displaying a lot of respect there.
Further, why would I not want art simply because it has been produced by an person who as done immoral things? If Michael Jackson molested little boys, does that change the quality of his music?
Your support (by buying their work) of someone who makes a career out of doing something that you call immoral means that you endorse their immorality. Don't you even listen to yourself? A professional artist makes the decision to copyright work and use those rights to defend the value of their work, and then finds people willing to work within that framework to make a living. That is a fundamental aspect of how that person lives their life, and is central to their view of their work, of the marketplace, and their relationship with the people who value their work. You consider that posture to be "immoral," but still want that person to entertain you since they're only being immoral some of the time? You've got a really bad case of moral relativism, and a world view that's completely full of holes. Mostly, though, you just want to dictate the terms under which someone works for you. You're willing to have pet entertainment slaves, since you see their business decisions as intellectual and moral failings that conveniently serve you as some sort of personal waiver of their rights.
I resepect artists, as artists, for their art. I will not respect their attempts at coercion.
How are you being coerced? If you don't like the form of commerce that the artist you claim to respect has personally chosen to use, all you have to do is walk away. There is no one forcing you to take that artist's work. There is only you pretending that you're philosophically whole as you condemn the artist's thoughts and world view while simultaneously saying those things don't matter because... what? they know how to paint, write, or play the guitar in a way that you like? How can you dare say you respect an artist while telling them, in the same breath, that they're coercive and immoral? Are you that lacking in intellectual honesty? No need to answer that one.
People want art, people will pay artists.
But people who want art are already, in the millions, finding ways not to pay artists what they are asking for their work. Which people did you have in mind?
The street performer protocol is one moral way to get paid.
And how will that protocol produce the type of works that take years to make? You certainly don't have to attend or buy copies of films that employed a thousand cast and crew to produce, or listen to recordings that involved performers from all over the world, assembled into one production at different times - but some people want to enjoy work of that scope, and are willing to pay what the producers of that work ask (I'm v
Content producers need to start using moral ways to get paid, rather than relying on immoral copyrights.
Ok, so what you're saying is that if there were no copyright protections, that would be fine, because the person who spends a year recording music, or 10 years writing a novel, will certainly find that she'll get what she asks when she wants to sell it, right? There won't be anyone immorally deciding to skip out on paying her for her work, right? Certainly, people who don't want to pay what the artist is asking would just say, "oh well! I'll have to find an equally talented artist who wants to work for me for free!"
Sorry, but that doesn't happen across the board. And how would you handle the reality of an unscrupulous publisher simply taking a copy of the work and selling another printing of it, ignoring the original artist's intent, permission, and moral ownership of their own work?
With no recourse against people that decide to rip of the artist, the artist will not have the protection needed to attract the investment off of which they live while working. Or, choosing to live like a pauper while putting time into what the artist hopes will become a paying creative project will become a fool's choice, and the world will be much, much worse for it.
So, what is your idea of a "moral" way to get paid? I'm always amused by people who think they're doing artists a favor by removing the protection those artists have against actually immoral people who have no problem ripping them off.
Your position is that artists are acting in an immoral way. That makes the artists immoral. Why would you want art produced by such a person? You obviously already know of proper, moral artists that are working for you in some other way, right? Surely you have the intellectual honesty not to want the work of people that you consider immoral. Immoral people like Peter Jackson, or Christopher Walken, or Maya Angelou, or Stephen Hawking, or the Blackeyed Peas, or U2.
It's quite a secret you're keeping - the cadre of artists you know that produce work of that scope and quality without any concern about being compensated for their efforts. Your morality comes at quite a price (the price of eating, and putting a roof over your head).
If you can demonstrate the absence of any actually immoral people that would disregard the price that an artists is asking for their work, then we'll have something to talk about. But even with such recourse in place, there are millions of people willing to give the finger to the very artists they say they respect.
But since artists can, right now, waive their copyrights any time they see fit, the only people you're worried about are the "immoral" ones, and since you hate them, why not just let them, and their customers, be? You hate the artists, and thus you must feel the same way about their fans, so how is this hurting you (who would never want their work anyway?). You, and the nice, moral filmmakers and recording artists that you patronize with your money outside of the copyright system are in a self-contained universe, no question. Somewhere in that everything-belongs-to-everybody universe you occupy, there are surely still people making movies that take years, and involve large casts and crews - because they all are willing to make that investment, right?
Buggy-whip makers concerned that new automobile may hurt industry revenues
Perhaps not a very helpful analogy. How about, "Buggy whip stores concerned that rampant theft of buggy whips from the factory will reduce retail demand." OK, not the best analogy either, but the point is that someone who goes to a lot of trouble (and time, and money) to produce something that people will want for their education and entertainment are not going to be buggy-whipped out of demand. We're talking about whether or not they, and the people who invest the money they live on while they work and wait for sales to happen, will be able to continue to thrive. I sure hope that professional writers, and the industry that supports them and produces things you don't have charge up with electricity in order to enjoy, don't go the way of buggy whips.
Is everybody trying to be ironic?
If that's the opposite of moronic, then sure... at least a couple of people are. Don't worry, though, the built-in slashdot rationality immune system will soon squash any outbreaks of reason that pop up. A quick round of emotocillan or some sociodoctricyclan will also clear it right up.