1) Show where I used a term even close to "hateful." Clue: For the third time, I didn't.
2) Re-read what I wrote and who I was attributing that interpretation to. Clue: This is the government's own supplier's interpretation. You NEVER see 'charity drives' even remotely similar to that for the employees of a business partner in any other context because they would be considered demeaning by that business partner.
What does seem clear to me is that you have an "issue" you wish to beat your chest about, you saw something that kinda sorta sounded like it might be a contrary opinion to your "issue" and you tried to use that as a springboard without taking the time to really grasp the context of your springboard.
Despite all that, we're still the most free place on Earth, or else we wouldn't even be allowed to post sensationalist coverage of this story and talk about it and the so-called "Bush regime."
According to Reports Without Borders, the USA has fallen to 53rd (from 16th in 2002) in terms of the freedom of the press. That is one hell of a long way from most free place on the Earth.
No, I haven't. Perhaps you could provide some smidgen of evidence?
"Each year new countries in less-developed parts of the world move up the Index to positions above some European countries or the United States. This is good news and shows once again that, even though very poor, countries can be very observant of freedom of expression. Meanwhile the steady erosion of press freedom in the United States, France and Japan is extremely alarming,"
The United States (53rd) has fallen nine places since last year, after being in 17th position in the first year of the Index, in 2002.
I'm actually still discussing the article blurb itself, where the submitter complains about how depressing it is that the military doesn't pay its soldiers enough to start a family.
Sorry, I don't see any claims of hatefulness of the military towards its people anywhere in this thread nor in the articles linked to. What I do see are people who think compensation is not commensurate with the risks many servicemen take in the course of duty.
The wrong way to change government policy is to start a family you can't afford, and then pretend that the military is being hateful because they don't much care to back your irresponsiblity.
Good job on the emotionally loaded strawman. Read what I originally posted and you will see that I am neither in the service nor have I said that anyone in the service is "pretending the military is being hateful."
Sorry, but I'd rather watch a good film with a good plot and good acting on VHS any day over a whizz-bang technical film with crappy pretty-boy/barbie-girl actors and a script written by a committee...
Spoken like someone without an HDTV.
When most people first get an HDTV set, they will watch anything in HD, no matter how inane, just for the visual quality. The wow-factor tends to wear off after 6-9 months, but just about everyone with an HDTV set still remembers those first few months where the only thing that mattered was picture quality.
By the way, you have to be really stupid to buy murdering books, and keep them when you're done.
I think I have heard his explanation for the book purchases - they aren't "howto" manuals, they are descriptions of the legal and investigative process. He was being investigated for murder so he wanted to get a better idea of what was being done to him.
That certainly fits with the purchase of the books over a week after she went missing.
When your company's sole product is named after the lead developer, it makes it awfully difficult to convince anyone that there is much ongoing value in that product once the namesake is out of the picture.
Reiser may end up on death row because he was unable to raise enough funds to hire a good enough attorney. All because he named the product after himself instead of something more generic. Who would have guessed that he might pay for that bit of ego indulgement with his life?
What we haven't heard is if he has an explanation for why the seat is missing. The news, especially when driven by the police press reports, tends to leave that sort of information out.
I can easily think of one possibility right off the top of my head - he left the window down and/or the door open and some animal like a cat or racoon climbed in and took a piss all over the seat. That's the kind of thing that would cause me to just chuck the seat and saturate the floorboards with water and probably some other chemicals.
Right, because individuals have no responsibility to look at their paycheck and decide not to incur additional expenses by starting a family.
So, you are saying that people who serve in the military don't deserve to have families, because obviously the government isn't paying them enough to do so. Thus assuring that our military is even more stratified, with even less breadth of experience, than it is now.
Considering how little soldiers get paid (starting at $1,204 per month), and how much engineers get paid (~$3,500 per month starting), you start wondering who the Defense Department's priorities are...
Most of my clients are defense contractors, which, I guess makes me a defense contractor. Anyway, around this time of year they like to put on a show of doing donation-drives "for the troops." They tend to fall into two categories - getting "comfort items" (like tons of instant coffee and phone card minutes to call home with) for troops in the field and getting necessities (like food and children's clothing) for their families at home.
Its blatantly obvious that management at these companies is doing the drives to appear patriotic and weasel into the good graces of their customer, so blatant that I can't believe it works. But even worse, to me it seems like a terrible state of affairs because it is tantamount to saying that our government can't provision our troops with something as basic as enough coffee and they don't pay our troops enough to feed and clothe their families.
There are a few websites out there that will tell you your IP address, browser type, OS type and even guess at your general geographic location based on things your browser tells it. Some of these sites do it to "shock" people into realizing they are NOT anonymous on the net.
What a great enhancement it would be for such websites to display a picture of the user at his computer! "We know you use a Mac, Live in California and Look like THIS!" Just one visit such a site would go a LONG way to instilling a useful level of caution.
Copying a book of knowledge or virtues when these kinds of books have very limited circulation to make available to a wider audience is a little different than copying a Pink Floyd album that you can buy in any Wal Mart or Target.
The context you are missing is that at the time these religious texts had the highest circulation of any genre. Compared today, they were all very limited circulation, but in the context of the day the copying that was considered the most virtuous was of books that were the most common - the Bible being first among such.
I see your statment about public making decisions as a fallacy.
If the majority of the public flouts a law, then law is effectively void. It is already the situation that there are not enough lawyers in North America to prosecute all the people violating copyright in a single day.
I'm not opposed to renegotiating copyright. In fact that makes sense. I still think we need copyrights, but we need to reduce the copyright back to a reasonable amount of time 20-30 years.
A term of of 20-30 years would, at best, be no better than the original term of US copyrights which I believe were 17 years plus an optional 17 year renewal if the author was still alive to request it.
A return to the original terms doesn't at all seem like renegotiation that takes into account the significant change in the value given up by the public.
The Roo talks about natural rights, those originating from the Creator as Jefferson would have said. You talk about constitutionally protected rights, those originating from the law of Man that are only in part recognition of natural rights. I'm pretty confident that natural rights trump constitutional rights, especially in places outside the jurisdiction of the US constitution.
The right to express ones self exists as the default state, no government force required to allow it in the first place. At this point, someone usually comes along and says that private real property is dependent on government enforcement and not the default state, but saying that ignores the inherently rivalrous nature of private real property that a property of ideas does not share.
If copyright isn't a property, then stop according property rights to your creative works (such as using the GPL).
While many of RMS's critics like to portray him as a zealot, he is in fact a pragmatist through and through. The whole reason for the creation of the GPL is that RMS realized that such property rights are not going to go away on their own any time soon.
So, instead of raging pointlessly against the machine, he decided to turn the machine on itself. The GPL is a hack of copyright law, that he intended it as a hack is evident in the name he gave it -- copyleft. That's not right and left as in the political simplification, it is one direction versus the other direction. The copyleft takes copyright in a direction directly opposite of where most copyright supporters want it to go.
With that background, it should be easy to understand that RMS would have no problem if all the property rights of copyright law were to be made void tomorrow. The expectation is that in a free market for software (i.e. not one artificially constrained by copyright) the benefits of Free software would completely dominate. Just as no one would ever think of buying a car with the engine-compartment completely welded shut, no one purchase software that was not Freely modifiable.
You may not believe in that vision, but that doesn't make it any less part of the reasoning behind the GPL. Thus arguments like yours that the GPL requires copyright law are technically true, but are ignorant of the actual intent of the GPL and Copyleft.
Guess what, 100 years ago copying a book required that you buy the physical materials to print the book on and an expensive printer to print the book. It wasn't cheap. Enter VHS and VCRs... all of sudden where copyright holders had been protected by the high cost of copying their products they're now exposed to easy ultra-low cost duplication means. Enter p2p and you're totally fucked if you create ideas and content and hope to sell it.
So, what you are saying is that when the copyright social contract was made a few hundred years ago, the average Joe really didn't give up much because it was next to impossible for him to make a copy anyway. Joe gave away something of no value (the right to make copies that he couldn't possibly make in the first place) in exchange for encouraging creators to create.
So, now that any Joe can make as many copies as he wants for almost zero cost, don't you think it is time for the contract to be renegotiated? After all, what was a good deal for Joe 100 years is no longer a good deal anymore. Isn't that what a smart businessman would do in the same situation?
After all, copyright only exists at Joe's discretion anyway. If the public collectively decides that copyright is no longer a worthwhile bargain, well, that would be the end of copyright now wouldn't it?
So Chomsky's propaganda:democracy::bludgeon:totalitarian analogy is a false one, because in totalitarian states propaganda is just as, if not more, powerful than traditional state levers of power (the bludgeon).
Your argument is the equivalent of saying that "all leaves are green" is false because some flowers are green. Sure totalitarian states use propaganda too, but that doesn't stop it from playing a different role in a democracy that is more analogous to totalitarian uses of violence.
Your example of all the violence that Mao incited during the Cultural Revolution is even further off the mark because the end result was the exact kind of violence that Chomsky was talking about, silencing critics and opponents (through death and threat of death) by the state organized Red Guard. Whereas in a democracy the step of violence is skipped, the propaganda leading directly to the silencing of critics and opponents through social ostrization.
The typical totalitarian state uses violence in a regular fashion, both directly through secret police and other state organs (like the Red Guard) and by convincing the regular citizenry to lynch people through propaganda. The typical democracy does not regularly use violence in either fashion, instead relying on propaganda to directly get the job done.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry, but you will have to:
1) Show where I used a term even close to "hateful."
Clue: For the third time, I didn't.
2) Re-read what I wrote and who I was attributing that interpretation to.
Clue: This is the government's own supplier's interpretation. You NEVER see 'charity drives' even remotely similar to that for the employees of a business partner in any other context because they would be considered demeaning by that business partner.
What does seem clear to me is that you have an "issue" you wish to beat your chest about, you saw something that kinda sorta sounded like it might be a contrary opinion to your "issue" and you tried to use that as a springboard without taking the time to really grasp the context of your springboard.
Despite all that, we're still the most free place on Earth, or else we wouldn't even be allowed to post sensationalist coverage of this story and talk about it and the so-called "Bush regime."
According to Reports Without Borders, the USA has fallen to 53rd (from 16th in 2002) in terms of the freedom of the press.
That is one hell of a long way from most free place on the Earth.
--Worldwide Press Freedom Index 2006
I'm actually still discussing the article blurb itself, where the submitter complains about how depressing it is that the military doesn't pay its soldiers enough to start a family.
Sorry, I don't see any claims of hatefulness of the military towards its people anywhere in this thread nor in the articles linked to. What I do see are people who think compensation is not commensurate with the risks many servicemen take in the course of duty.
watches are one of the only forms of jewelry allowed for upper-class and upper-middle-class men.
Don't forget the men who wear those very expensive trophy wives on their arms.
The wrong way to change government policy is to start a family you can't afford, and then pretend that the military is being hateful because they don't much care to back your irresponsiblity.
Good job on the emotionally loaded strawman. Read what I originally posted and you will see that I am neither in the service nor have I said that anyone in the service is "pretending the military is being hateful."
Sorry, but I'd rather watch a good film with a good plot and good acting on VHS any day over a whizz-bang technical film with crappy pretty-boy/barbie-girl actors and a script written by a committee...
Spoken like someone without an HDTV.
When most people first get an HDTV set, they will watch anything in HD, no matter how inane, just for the visual quality. The wow-factor tends to wear off after 6-9 months, but just about everyone with an HDTV set still remembers those first few months where the only thing that mattered was picture quality.
By the way, you have to be really stupid to buy murdering books, and keep them when you're done.
I think I have heard his explanation for the book purchases - they aren't "howto" manuals, they are descriptions of the legal and investigative process. He was being investigated for murder so he wanted to get a better idea of what was being done to him.
That certainly fits with the purchase of the books over a week after she went missing.
How much is it worth without Hans Reiser?
Talk about unintended consequences.
When your company's sole product is named after the lead developer, it makes it awfully difficult to convince anyone that there is much ongoing value in that product once the namesake is out of the picture.
Reiser may end up on death row because he was unable to raise enough funds to hire a good enough attorney. All because he named the product after himself instead of something more generic. Who would have guessed that he might pay for that bit of ego indulgement with his life?
What we haven't heard is if he has an explanation for why the seat is missing. The news, especially when driven by the police press reports, tends to leave that sort of information out.
I can easily think of one possibility right off the top of my head - he left the window down and/or the door open and some animal like a cat or racoon climbed in and took a piss all over the seat. That's the kind of thing that would cause me to just chuck the seat and saturate the floorboards with water and probably some other chemicals.
Right, because individuals have no responsibility to look at their paycheck and decide not to incur additional expenses by starting a family.
So, you are saying that people who serve in the military don't deserve to have families, because obviously the government isn't paying them enough to do so. Thus assuring that our military is even more stratified, with even less breadth of experience, than it is now.
Who's going to feel sorry for (arguably) a bunch of lawyers though?
Politicians with their hands out.
Responding to the report, Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) released a strongly worded statement suggesting that a legislative response will be forthcoming.
Friday, Dec 22nd
Dick Durbin Announces Cost Savings Plan to Eliminate the GAO and use Savings for Medicare Spending.
Considering how little soldiers get paid (starting at $1,204 per month), and how much engineers get paid (~$3,500 per month starting), you start wondering who the Defense Department's priorities are...
Most of my clients are defense contractors, which, I guess makes me a defense contractor. Anyway, around this time of year they like to put on a show of doing donation-drives "for the troops." They tend to fall into two categories - getting "comfort items" (like tons of instant coffee and phone card minutes to call home with) for troops in the field and getting necessities (like food and children's clothing) for their families at home.
Its blatantly obvious that management at these companies is doing the drives to appear patriotic and weasel into the good graces of their customer, so blatant that I can't believe it works. But even worse, to me it seems like a terrible state of affairs because it is tantamount to saying that our government can't provision our troops with something as basic as enough coffee and they don't pay our troops enough to feed and clothe their families.
There are a few websites out there that will tell you your IP address, browser type, OS type and even guess at your general geographic location based on things your browser tells it. Some of these sites do it to "shock" people into realizing they are NOT anonymous on the net.
What a great enhancement it would be for such websites to display a picture of the user at his computer! "We know you use a Mac, Live in California and Look like THIS!" Just one visit such a site would go a LONG way to instilling a useful level of caution.
Copying a book of knowledge or virtues when these kinds of books have very limited circulation to make available to a wider audience is a little different than copying a Pink Floyd album that you can buy in any Wal Mart or Target.
The context you are missing is that at the time these religious texts had the highest circulation of any genre. Compared today, they were all very limited circulation, but in the context of the day the copying that was considered the most virtuous was of books that were the most common - the Bible being first among such.
I see your statment about public making decisions as a fallacy.
If the majority of the public flouts a law, then law is effectively void. It is already the situation that there are not enough lawyers in North America to prosecute all the people violating copyright in a single day.
I'm not opposed to renegotiating copyright. In fact that makes sense. I still think we need copyrights, but we need to reduce the copyright back to a reasonable amount of time 20-30 years.
A term of of 20-30 years would, at best, be no better than the original term of US copyrights which I believe were 17 years plus an optional 17 year renewal if the author was still alive to request it.
A return to the original terms doesn't at all seem like renegotiation that takes into account the significant change in the value given up by the public.
The Roo talks about natural rights, those originating from the Creator as Jefferson would have said. You talk about constitutionally protected rights, those originating from the law of Man that are only in part recognition of natural rights. I'm pretty confident that natural rights trump constitutional rights, especially in places outside the jurisdiction of the US constitution.
The right to express ones self exists as the default state, no government force required to allow it in the first place. At this point, someone usually comes along and says that private real property is dependent on government enforcement and not the default state, but saying that ignores the inherently rivalrous nature of private real property that a property of ideas does not share.
If copyright isn't a property, then stop according property rights to your creative works (such as using the GPL).
While many of RMS's critics like to portray him as a zealot, he is in fact a pragmatist through and through. The whole reason for the creation of the GPL is that RMS realized that such property rights are not going to go away on their own any time soon.
So, instead of raging pointlessly against the machine, he decided to turn the machine on itself. The GPL is a hack of copyright law, that he intended it as a hack is evident in the name he gave it -- copyleft. That's not right and left as in the political simplification, it is one direction versus the other direction. The copyleft takes copyright in a direction directly opposite of where most copyright supporters want it to go.
With that background, it should be easy to understand that RMS would have no problem if all the property rights of copyright law were to be made void tomorrow. The expectation is that in a free market for software (i.e. not one artificially constrained by copyright) the benefits of Free software would completely dominate. Just as no one would ever think of buying a car with the engine-compartment completely welded shut, no one purchase software that was not Freely modifiable.
You may not believe in that vision, but that doesn't make it any less part of the reasoning behind the GPL. Thus arguments like yours that the GPL requires copyright law are technically true, but are ignorant of the actual intent of the GPL and Copyleft.
Guess what, 100 years ago copying a book required that you buy the physical materials to print the book on and an expensive printer to print the book. It wasn't cheap. Enter VHS and VCRs... all of sudden where copyright holders had been protected by the high cost of copying their products they're now exposed to easy ultra-low cost duplication means. Enter p2p and you're totally fucked if you create ideas and content and hope to sell it.
So, what you are saying is that when the copyright social contract was made a few hundred years ago, the average Joe really didn't give up much because it was next to impossible for him to make a copy anyway. Joe gave away something of no value (the right to make copies that he couldn't possibly make in the first place) in exchange for encouraging creators to create.
So, now that any Joe can make as many copies as he wants for almost zero cost, don't you think it is time for the contract to be renegotiated? After all, what was a good deal for Joe 100 years is no longer a good deal anymore. Isn't that what a smart businessman would do in the same situation?
After all, copyright only exists at Joe's discretion anyway. If the public collectively decides that copyright is no longer a worthwhile bargain, well, that would be the end of copyright now wouldn't it?
Who cares about the flu? What the world needs is experimental proof that a really good screw can prevent AIDS.
That doesn't mean that you have a legal right to copy copyrighted material.
But it does make a pretty good argument for a moral right to copy copyrighted material.
So Chomsky's propaganda:democracy::bludgeon:totalitarian analogy is a false one, because in totalitarian states propaganda is just as, if not more, powerful than traditional state levers of power (the bludgeon).
Your argument is the equivalent of saying that "all leaves are green" is false because some flowers are green. Sure totalitarian states use propaganda too, but that doesn't stop it from playing a different role in a democracy that is more analogous to totalitarian uses of violence.
Your example of all the violence that Mao incited during the Cultural Revolution is even further off the mark because the end result was the exact kind of violence that Chomsky was talking about, silencing critics and opponents (through death and threat of death) by the state organized Red Guard. Whereas in a democracy the step of violence is skipped, the propaganda leading directly to the silencing of critics and opponents through social ostrization.
The typical totalitarian state uses violence in a regular fashion, both directly through secret police and other state organs (like the Red Guard) and by convincing the regular citizenry to lynch people through propaganda. The typical democracy does not regularly use violence in either fashion, instead relying on propaganda to directly get the job done.
What is "Chomskyite" supposed to mean anyway?
It is easy to categorize other people as mental automatons when you are one yourself.