You know whereof you speak? I call bullshit. I've lived in China for almost half a decade now, I speak Mandarin at a nearly native level, and I can tell you that face means a great deal to the Chinese. You are guilty of the very mistake you accuse the OP of making: conflating Japanese and Chinese culture. The Japanese and the Chinese both have very strong notions of face, but as with so many other things that seem at first glance to be shared by these two wildly different cultures, they are not the same.
To say that you learned "most of your Mandarin in China" to me seems like a clever way of making the Slashdot masses consider you an authority. Clever because it deliberately omits how much Mandarin you know -- and without knowing anything at all about you I would bet a great deal that it's nearly zilch. Why? Because in order to learn to speak a language well, you must do more than take classes and read books -- you must interact on a personal level with speakers of that language. For someone who presumably does not have native prowess in a language closely related to Mandarin, the language is relatively difficult to learn, which would imply that, if you spoke the language well, you must have spent a lot of time interacting with Chinese people. As someone who has been doing this for quite some time now, I think I can state with reasonable certitude that no one open-minded enough to undertake this would come away from the experience with as narrow-minded and unnuanced an understanding as you appear to have.
Mandarin has so many face-related terms and sayings it is absolutely staggering. I can't speak with any authority on the Japanese interpretation, but I did study the Japanese language for five years while in school and I wasn't exposed to anywhere near the same lexical diversity. But I'll freely admit that I never spoke Japanese well, whereas I speak Mandarin very well.
Another poster said that the Chinese "treat each other like shit", or somesuch, but to me this is a classic example of a westerner using western metrics of politeness and propriety to judge the actions of people with a fundamentally different cultural background. Something similar occurs with the Japanese. There is a fascination with all things Japanese in the geek community -- I'll admit I don't understand it well myself -- but I'm frequently told by all sorts of people that the Japanese are exceptionally polite and well mannered. This is a tremendously two dimensional way of looking at an entire population of people.
Let's make one thing clear here: the percentage of assholes in any particular group is relatively constant. What makes a person an asshole is their intent -- their knowing willingness to insult, degrade, or upset others. A westerner not familiar with Chinese social norms observes inter-Chinese interaction and is surprised by their apparent penchant to treat each other like dirt. What he does not understand is that many things not acceptable in western culture (and even here I am generalizing, as neither Chinese nor Western culture as such are homogenous at all) are acceptable in Chinese culture, and vice-versa. In China, a Chinese person says something to someone else and thinks nothing of it -- he does not consider it rude and did not have any malicious intent whatsoever, and in turn the person who hears it thinks little of it. The same situation, but in the West: exactly the same words are exchanged, but the listener becomes tremendously upset, because in the context of western culture, saying such a thing is a violation of accepted social norms and as such only someone with malicious intent would say them. Conversely, the Chinese often say that westerners don't need much face, by which they mean that they are not hao mianzi, that we put up with all sorts of insulting situations that no Chinese person would ever put up with. I've been involved in street fights on several occasions because of face.
Man, you know things have changed big time when being against government censorship is a trait associated with democrats, of all things. When I was a kid, the democrats were the feel-good party that was associated with increased government spending and a liberal (no pun intended) interpretation of the constitution's restriction of allowable government powers. Heck, as long as you weren't arguing the constitutionality of Roe vs. Wade, they were all for making things like hate speech illegal and pushing the PC agenda.
But now, in this weird alternate reality Bush and Co. have foistered upon us, so-called republicans, once the party of civil liberties, gun ownership, and small government, are saying things like "I'm all for government censorship" and "Let's spend more money! The more the better!" And when you say something like "censorship is wrong and I'm not going to stand for anyone interpreting the first amendment in any way but literally" you're a liberal, a democrat! I can hear the twilight zone music playing!
It's like the democrats and the republicans have completely switched roles, except for the Roe vs. Wade and anti-gay agendas, that's still republican territory.
I'm so confused...
Luckily I've never been too attached to a party, but rather to the things I believe in. So if being against censorship in its myriad forms makes me a democrat, well then, chalk me up as one. Jesus.
While I agree with the general thrust of your post, I think your comparison is a wee bit shy of the mark. Saying Linux is a "homegrown toy" very much depends on your definition of the word toy; if you take toy to mean something for children (implying in most people's minds that it is not fit for adults with real world problems, which is demonstratably false), then this characterisation is basically a lie. You could claim that you were using toy in the sense that it is developed for pleasure rather than profit, which is certainly true (or was, at any rate). Deliberately hard to use is also not particularly fair: GNU/Linux is meant to function like UNIX, and it remains consistantly easy to use for people who desire that interface (like me). It's certainly fair to say that by modeling the system's interface on an operating system that arguably reached its peak in the 70s and 80s, you are deliberately alienating a certain segment of the population (namely those that would like a free Windows or Macintosh clone.) To those people I would say that GNOME and KDE have already been good enough for a long time. Not working exactly like Windows or the Mac is not the same as being deliberately difficult to use, whatever your personal UI preferences may be.
Of course, this is what you meant by flamebait -- looking at what you said in a certain way, you might be able to milk a grain of truth out of it, but it is phrased so as to incite riot among zealous defenders of GNU/Linux et al. You are presumably perfectly aware of the limitations of your own statement, and that's why it's rightfully flamebait.
The Microsoft criticism is less clear. Not all criticisms are flamebait. Microsoft has produced a number of very usable products over the years -- Office in particular has no peer in the market place today. Anti-MS zealots on Slashdot are fond of attempting to undermine MS's genuinely good products by pointing out that most did not originate with MS, but rather were purchased technologies -- I'm tempted to say that this oft-heard cry is irrelevant, as technologies and companies are bought and sold all the time. But the OP's criticism of MS's product delivery schedule is certainly pretty on the mark. In the nearly 20 years I've been using their software, it seems most products have been seriously delayed, and when finally released are missing most of the features that were supposed to be the "killers". Of course a casual look at the industry as a whole shows this to be the norm for much software development. Small shops that release software without pre-release hoopla don't set user expectations that they can't meet, because they aren't big enough or important enough to attract interest, but big shops like Microsoft or Adobe are industry superstars, and so much of their software is preceeded by press releases lauding future features that later don't materialise -- which results in possibly deserved criticism.
As we've all worked in software at some point we all know the probable causes for this -- the overeager manager who sells a product idea to his superiors without consulting with the people who actually do the code to see whether the feature set is feasible for the project time. The marketing department that doesn't understand software architecture and embellish the feature set of a new product in ways that to them seem small but that actually require a massive amount of work to pull together. Even here on Slashdot, where people are pretty tech-savvy, you see a lot of people saying things like, "Why don't they just hack together acid2 compliance?" as if this requires nothing but adding a few if statements and special cases to a clean body of code. You'd think we'd know better.
And with companies as large as Microsoft, there are probably significant diseconomies of scale -- with bureaucratic lag and what not the left hand truly does not know what the right is doing. Microsoft has already delayed Longhorn/Vista for so long that industry analysts are starting to wonder if this will be another C
You'd be surprised. I wish this were the case, but my experience living in China has been that 90% of Chinese are completely uninterested in discussing politics even in a safe setting. It has nothing to do with fear, it has to do with apathy. They think that the Chinese government is doing a good job at the moment (they're not entirely wrong, either) and most of them have drunk the kool-aid and think democracy would bring instability due to the tremendous polarization of wealth that market reforms have brought.
Of course, they might not be wrong.
To be entirely honest with you, the adoption of democracy in a number of countries (Brazil, for example) has not resulted in greater stability, safety, or freedom for the people in those countries. Most successful modern democracies were wealthy and economically viable before the adoption of democratic systems; this is true throughout Europe, it is true for Japan, true for Taiwan, and true for South Korea. Countries that rushed into the democracy thing, like the Philippines, are corrupt, destitute, and economically moribund. This is true of most of Latin America as well, but I hesitate to hold those countries up as prime examples as one could argue convincingly that American foreign policy in that part of the world is largely responsible.
Consider this conundrum for a moment, if you will. China is a very large country that is still, overall, very poor. While Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou and Shenzhen are massive and relatively modern cities, most Chinese still live in relatively abject poverty compared to the west. If you believe capitalists -- I'm not sure I do, but let's run with it -- economic investment is much more likely to happen in urban centers than in the countryside. It makes sense, if you think about it. With lots of people living together, labour markets are mobile, and any added infrastructure is much more likely to be useful -- and thus marketable -- to a diverse group of people and companies. It stands to reason, then, that as a nation industrializes, infrastructure will be built in the cities before it is built in the countryside.
This was certainly true in Europe during the industrial revolution. The result was urbanization. People from the countryside flocked to the cities seeking to benefit from the increased opportunities. This is happening in China too, but because of China's already extremely populated cities and the massive number of people living in the countryside, the government doesn't allow just anyone to move to the big cities that are the centers of investment (at least not legally). It's not like you're imagining: anyone can get on a train and go to Shanghai or Beijing if it suits them, but in order to get almost anything done (including finding a legal job) you need to have permission from the government to reside in the city. Such permits are not granted easily, because when your capital city has a higher population than the entire continent of Australia, you want to keep it from growing too fast.
The result is that the cities are becoming richer and more developed, but the countryside isn't changing as much. Now, again, if you believe capitalists, in the long run, market pressures will force the cost of operating in these cities up (this is already happening in Shanghai, where I live) and the surrounding countryside will start to look much more attractive to businesses looking to open factories, say. So Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces (the two provinces nearest to Shanghai) are actually receiving a fair amount of foreign investment at the moment, especially within the Suzhou-Hangzhou-Shanghai triangle, because being in Shanghai simply isn't cost effective for a lot of companies.
Taking this process to its logical conclusion, it is easy to see that eventually operating costs in these provinces will also no longer be cost competitive with the poorer, less developed provinces surrounding them. And so investment, which initially was limited to large cities only, moves out into the countrys
I'd like to start out by admitting, in Slashdot tradition, that I have not read the article.
To further underscore the depth of my ignorance, I will admit that I haven't been following the anti-trust proceedings against Intel at all, and certainly not with anything resembling interest.
However, I'm seeing a lot of posts here (including yours) that say something along the lines of "how is this any different from <insert exclusive agreement here>?" and I'm surprised that, this being Slashdot, I have to spell it out for you.
When there is an exclusive agreement between two companies and one of those companies is a suspected monopolist, the rules change somewhat. Because when you make an exclusive agreement with a monopolist, you are decreasing the competitive nature of the market and reinforcing the monopoly. The reason we have anti-trust legislation at all is because economists understand that a market oriented approach is only an efficient and effective distributor of resources in the absence of monopolies. They are bad, and so we periodically intervene to break them up when they form. At least, that's the idea.
If Intel is in fact a monopolist -- something that these anti-trust proceedings are designed to determine -- then by definition all the rules change.
Personally I think this Skype crap seems like a poor example of monopolistic behaviour, but presumably AMD is trying to show in a court of law that Skype made some agreement with intel to cripple their software. If intel is a monopolist, and has cornered the CPU market, this practice would be anti-competitive. The reason is simple to see: signing an exclusivity contract with a monopolist poses practically no risk whatsoever to Skype, because of intel's alleged monopoly status, but it does strengthen intel's alleged monopoly.
Personally, I'm not sure intel really has a monopoly -- AMD has been giving them a run for their money and in a number of things has been leading the market (forcing intel to license x86-64 is a great example) and I think the Skype thing is stupid.
As for the NFL/EA thing, I think that's lame too -- the difference is that the NFL, for some reason, is allowed a monopoly (perhaps people think it's a natural monopoly?) and no one complains about it. Sports franchises may be different. Who knows?
Re:Irresponsible parents
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Flashback NES
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I agree. Video games suck. I have no problems with other people playing them, and I'll admit that as a kid I desperately wanted an NES because the neighbor kid had one and it seemed like so much fun, but now, looking back, it's one of those decisions that I admit was the right one. My parents didn't let me watch commercial television, either, and that's another draconian restriction that I hated at the time but that has left me far less psychologically manipulated by marketers and their ilk.
I'm tempted, from time to time, to play a video game, but I never seem to be able to do it for more than a minute or two without getting bored. I much prefer writing games than playing them.
It seems to me that most "nerds" these days (especially on Slashdot) are also "gamers". That's cool and all, but I'm glad there are others (like me) who just don't get the gamer thing.
Of course, you might just be a troll, in which case IHBT, HAND.
The vast majority of searches on google.cn do not return censored results. However, searching for certain things will result in censorship, in which case Google tells you (in Chinese) at the bottom of the search that some results may have been censored. Only when you get this message does it make sense to compare search results coming from google.cn to search results coming from google.ca or google.com.
Money is an inefficient store of value. It, like gold, tends to decline in value over time (inflation) when many other investments increase in value. Gold decreases in value relative to the dollar, and has been doing so for a long time, as the GP pointed out. So gold is, at least at this point, one of the few things out there that is an even less efficient store of value than money.
Investing in gold is also not productive, from an economic perspective, because gold is useless. You need money to make more money, and that's why the loanable funds market exists. If you're using money as a store of value, you're silly indeed. But I don't think anyone is suggesting that.
Since you're a libertarian and believe in the intelligence of the market, perhaps you should check out gold futures. If you're so certain the dollar is going to crash, maybe you should put your money where your mouth is and buy an asset whose value has been declining for more than a hundred years. You'll make a bundle.
But you'll excuse me if I don't share your passion for losing money.
That's an idiotically stupid thing to bring up. I don't think even the most anti-american of advocates would accuse the USA of being inherently evil, and yet we certainly have done a number of things that make Tibet pale in comparison (have you been to Tibet? I have.)
The OP's point is simply that things aren't black and white, and as usual, someone with monochrome vision has to come out and be a retard. The fact remains that if you compare the current Chinese government with any government the Chinese have ever had you will find that they compare very, very favorably.
It wasn't so long ago that the USA was selling humans as property or committing genocide against the Native Americans in the west (who are now, basically, completely gone).
I think the Tibet thing sucks too, but it's completely irrelevant to the parent's point, which is well made.
Tiananmen square was not a "popular revolt", try reading more about it. (There were two main groups protesting together: the students, who wanted more and faster reforms, and the workers, who had been harmed by the reforms and wanted less of them; they hung out together in the square and sang the Internationale together before they were shot at. It's not as simple as Western propaganda makes it out to be.) And I can tell you that as a freedom-loving American who lives in China, the vast majority of normal Chinese I speak to are against the free press (unless they work in the press), because they believe that there are some things they're better off not knowing. It's infuriatingly frustrating.
Having said that, I think the reason they believe this is largely due to government propaganda. But the fact remains that they do believe it. The whole mishandling of SARS a few years ago helped some people come around to understanding why a free press is beneficial (it was covered up if you'll recall, resulting in the deaths of many who would have otherwise not died) but the vast majority still feel as though there are things that the government should protect them from.
Freedom of Speech is not as valued in most of the world as it is in the US (and recently it's not very much valued there, either.)
I've never understood what makes these crazy psycho-libertarians think that there is anything that makes gold of inherently high worth. Honestly, it's just a metal, it's not even that rare, and with the exception of being a particularly good conductor the only thing that makes it valuable is that some people think it's pretty.
It's really bizarre. It's like they've never bothered to read any economics texts ever.
A word about semetic languages like Hebrew, Arabic, and Amaharic: they have a rich infix morphology. What this means in practice is that various inflections of Hebrew words (an English example of inflection is the addition of -s to the end of a verb in the third person, for example, I say versus he says) involve swapping the vowels in a word (but the consonants stay the same).
Indeed, most verbs in Hebrew have a three consonant "root" (some have two). Depending on the tense, person, number, and gender of a verb (Hebrew verbs, unlike say, French verbs, agree with the subject's gender as well as number), the vowels in a Hebrew verb will change (and a prefix or suffix may be added as well).
All of this is just a roundabout way of saying that any word with say, a k-t-v root will have to do with, in this case, writing, whether it's katav or kotev or what have you.
This is why all semetic languages evolved writing systems where the vowels are generally not written: vowels simply don't have much semantic value in semetic languages. It may seem weird at first, but it's actually rather logical if you're exposed to it for a while.
Now, I'm not Jewish, so I don't know exactly, but I remember reading that the religious texts in fact were marked with the vowel diacritics -- that in fact, the vowel diacritics were invented for the sole purpose of reminding Rabbis how the texts should be read, as Hebrew was a dead language for a millenium or more.
Native speakers have little need for them, as it is clear from context what the vowels should be. Thnk abt t, vn n nglsh y cn ndrstnd lrght, and in English the presence or absence of vowels can actually change the root meaning of a word!
Anyone who is actually Hebrew-speaking and/or Jewish feel free to correct me. My Hebrew is very bad.
It's from Robert Frost's poem, "Mending Wall". In the poem, it is his neighbour that says that "good fences make good neighbors", after which Frost writes:
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.'
Wikipedia is a great firewall thing I think. I'm in Shanghai FWIW. Some sites are not consistantly blocked because some blocking is self-censorship at the ISP level.
I share your basic view, but I think that some types of laws intended to enforce egalitarianism are, while inherently freedom-reducing or racist in character, nonetheless good for society as a whole. I am white and not a libertarian (although I used to be).
Let me start with an anecdote. I grew up in the suburbs and didn't interact much with African Americans before university. Like most white kids who aren't affected directly by racism, I felt that racism was mostly dead (but as you pointed out, it's still very much alive and kicking, albeit more underground and subtle than it used to be). I was, in fact, quite racist without realizing it: not in a malicious way, but rather in an insensitive way. I see that now, and am much more aware, which I think is a good thing. I think the vast majority of American whites are like I was at that point: racist and insensitive without knowing it. They don't hate black people, they're just not aware of the discrimination blacks face everyday, and aren't aware of how they in their own small ways contribute to it.
Now, what happened to me was quite accidental: I went to university and the dorms were filled, so I was placed in an African American interest dorm, where there was room. As a result, the vast majority of my friends (and my girlfriend, in fact) throughout college were black. And it was a major awakening for me.
The reason I bring this up is because the civil rights movement has come a long way, righting the most egregious wrongs (like the Jim Crow laws and their ilk) but it has done precious little to curb the everyday annoyances that black people face that the vast majority of white people aren't aware of. Stupid things that I'm sure you're faced with all the time. Stuff that I, as a relatively priveleged white man, would never have otherwise been exposed to, and previously would not have believed existed.
It is my feeling that being racist in this subtle, non-malicious way is a result of lack of exposure. It's certainly true that there is precious little interaction between whites and blacks. The two groups are inherently distrusting of each other. Blacks expect whites to be racist (because we often are) and whites expect blacks to be racist (because you often are) and the result is a lack of mixing which propogates the problem. Black people in my experience also often tire of explaining issues to whites, who more often than not simply don't get it easily. It is only through continuous exposure -- not one-time token discussions -- that people on both sides come to find common ground and recognize that the subtle stereotypes they've bought into are, well, stereotypes.
I think that social ordinances that force mixing -- things like affirmative action, fair housing laws, and their ilk -- are good for this reason despite the fact that they restrict people's freedom to be racially judgemental, or are simply racist themselves (affirmative action is the canonical example). Anything that increases exposure is good. White people in the US are exposed to African American culture largely through the media, which is rather narrow in its depiction, and is no replacement for actual, one on one interaction.
No legislation will ever eleminate the problem, but I hope that greater exposure between blacks and whites will help alleviate some of the more pressing issues. We've come a long way, when you consider that many places in the US were effectively apartheid states as little as 50 years ago. But it is important to remember that despite the magnitude of this achievement, it was only 50 years ago -- and people don't change that quickly. To become complacent in our struggle for an egalitarian society is to accept social segregation, which while less obviously wrong than legal segregation is nonetheless a major obstacle in our development as a society.
Libertarianism is attractive, but remember -- always remember -- that your ancestors were at one time traded on the free market you now see as an efficient distributor
You're an idiot. I can access freebsd.org just fine, and I'm in China.
Everytime a China-blocks-web-sites related article comes up, some moron gives a list of sites that are supposedly blocked in China. There are definitely blocked sites in China, and it's annoying as all get out, but at least 85% of the sites that Slashbots insist are "blocked in China" are perfectly accessible.
Please, before shooting your mouth off, do a little research.
You're absolutely right. Don't mistake me for a champion of copyright. If you want to get the laws changed, more power to you. However, that doesn't change the fact that at the moment copying things you don't have a license to copy is illegal. I mean, that's a fact. That has nothing to do with whether you ought to do it or not, or even whether it's moral or not. For example, I don't think downloading music is immoral, because I've looked at the situation and feel that the RIAA actually benefit quite a bit from so-called "piracy", in exactly the same way that Microsoft has benefited greatly from the piracy that has given Windows a de facto monopoly in the OS market.
On the other hand, I think that if I write a novel, for example, and you copy it and publish it under your own name, pretending that you're the author, and manage to make a living that way, all while in the process depriving me of my glory (I can't very well go publish exactly the same book after you've published, can I) I think that's completely immoral.
Both of these, as it stands, are illegal. This is why I agree with Richard Stallman's points in "Copyright and Globalization in the Age of Computer Networks", where he essentially says that copyright needs a serious overhaul. I don't think it should be done away with completely, but I think different circumstances ought to be treated differently.
But my original point wasn't about what I think, it was about a number of points that I think most people can agree with.
Well, I'm not a moral absolutist, so I think cultural and personal norms define morality rather than legislation or religion, for example. So while I might think its immoral (and many others do too) you're not required to.
Having said that, the main reason I think it's immoral is exactly because of that vague of sense of fairness that you describe. It seems inappropriate for someone to benefit from the work of someone else unless that person agrees to share (which I think is an appropriate and noble thing -- hence my dedication to the free software movement). It sounds as though you agree, and so you say you wouldn't mind someone copying your stuff (we agree on this). However, to say "AC & 808140 don't mind" is not the same as saying that everyone doesn't mind (many obviously do). Even in the free software community, only the public domain guys fail to put any restrictions at all on copying.
It's important to recognize that there's a difference between developing something with the intention that it be free and developing something with the intention that it not be. Now, some people argue (including me, as it happens) that for certain classes of information, including software, preventing other people from copying is immoral in itself. Of course many people disagree with me on that. This is probably why software is protected by copyright -- in a democracy laws presumably exist because the majority agrees with them, or at least doesn't care enough about them to resist them.
On the other hand, if someone does something in order to make a living and has reasonable expectation that he should be able to do that, and someone goes ahead and benefits from his hard work without his permission, and in the process possibly makes it more difficult or even impossible for the first guy to achieve his erstwhile goal of making a living, well, I guess that just seems like a shitty thing to do. Note that this is different from saying that it should be illegal, just that it's shitty, and that's really what I mean when I say it's immoral. People do immoral (shitty) things all the time that are perfectly legal, and some things that in my mind are completely moral are illegal in some places.
This guy who wants to make a living off of his content is very different from the two of us: I develop software expressly to give it away, and perhaps you do the same with your content. Clearly, we aren't going to be incensed when someone copies our stuff.
Now, perhaps we believe that information should be free -- I certainly do, especially where software is concerned, read some of my other posts to see where I stand on the issue -- but the point of my original post was to present a relatively balanced and bias-free (insofar as that's possible) outlook on the whole debate.
Fact: you can either abide by the law, or you can copy copyrighted works without the copyright holder's permission. Pick one. As it stands, all other questions aside, that's how society is today.
Of course, I smoke pot sometimes, and that's illegal, so, perhaps being law abiding isn't what you want to do. I'm not going to be a hypocrite and call you on that.
I think what he means is that you aren't deprived of the fruits of your labour, in this case, the blueprints (assuming they were copied and not stolen). The other guy takes them, but you still have them. So you aren't deprived of your work.
What you are deprived of is a monopoly on the right to benefit from the fruits of your labour. Without taking either side of the debate on this, it is important to recognize that there is nothing that naturally guarantees you this monopoly. If you amass knowledge (a feat that definitely can and often is prohibitively expensive) with an intent to capitalize on it, and someone copies that knowledge in its digital or written form with an intent to capitalize on it in the same way that you intended to (but without investing the time and money required to do the research), then you could definitely say that the person doing the copying has done something immoral -- but he has not actually deprived you of the fruits of your labour.
He has, most likely, decreased the amount of money you'll be able to make. This I think is what the RIAA and its ilk mean when they say that you are stealing -- not the music, per se, but the profits that they would have had had you been forced to buy instead of just copy.
Unfortunately, this argument is relatively hard to make conclusively, because you're arguing about something that hasn't happened yet and is not at all guaranteed to happen. It's like Minority Report -- is it moral to incarcerate criminals who have not yet commited a crime but that you believe are certain to?
I think from a philosophical perspective, all of this is very interesting, and is in fact far more complex than both sides want to admit.
Fortunately, we decided early on that copyright infringement is a crime, so there's not much guess work involved here: copying something that you did not create without a license allowing you to do so is illegal. It's not stealing, because theft deprives the owner of property, but it is still illegal.
I see this argument rehashed a lot on Slashdot, and so I'd like to take a moment to say something about it, because it's always bothered me.
Slashdot is a huge site, with lots and lots of readers (it's certainly the most read blog on the internet). They all have different opinions, and they all express themselves here. There is no "slashverse consistancy" or whatever you'd like to call it. People have disagreements here all the time.
For example, I don't use proprietary software (well, except for the binary firmware for my wireless network card, but I have a license for that). Everything on my computer, with the naggling exception of this little piece of code, is 100% free software. I don't copy software illegally, and I respect license agreements to the best of my ability -- mainly by restricting myself to GPL/BSD/MPL type licenses.
When I hear about a GPL violation, I throw a shit-fit about it, certainly. My posts are likely to be among the ones you see complaining when that happens. Later on, some photoshop related story will be posted and some people will say they just copy photoshop, and that information wants to be free and that's ok. There's no inconsistancy here: I am defending the GPL, and they are defending their copyright infringment. While these two (contradictory) opinions are both posted on the same forum, and both are widely supported, I think you'll find that the two groups don't overlap very much, at least among thinking individuals.
There is a camp that disagrees with copyright on principle -- I certainly disagree with it as it is practiced today. Some of these people copy software as a sort of activism, or at least justify it that way. If these people then expect copyright law to protect a GPL infringment, they're being hypocritical, and you're completely correct to point it out to them.
But it's important to recognize that there are many groups and dissenting opinions on Slashdot. There's a whole crew of "Win2k doesn't suck, in fact it's very stable" folks. There's also a whole slew of "Win2k crashes constantly, wah wah wah" folks. Both routinely post their opinions, and both are routinely modded up to +5. And yet this isn't "inconsistancy in the slashverse", it's simply two different opinions being represented.
I just thought I'd point this out, because it's been bugging me for a while.
I understand what you're trying to say, but most Free Software advocates (certainly Stallman, but many others as well, including myself) would say that your advocation of Free Software "where it makes sense" puts convenience above principle, which is the "Open Source compromise" in a nutshell. This places you, at least from the perspective of Free Software advocates, firmly in the OSS camp.
You say you understand the difference between the two, and yet see yourself in both camps -- lots of OSS advocates say this. But when it comes right down to it, the Free Software movement is about eschewing proprietary software from our lives, even if it makes our lives more difficult or results in decreased efficiency. The fact that free software happens to often be better quality than its proprietary counterparts is a welcome thing, but even if it were far less stable and much less feature rich -- as GNU/Linux certainly was when I started using it exclusively -- a Free Software advocate would still advocate it, because it's ultimately a question of principle, not a question of convenience.
Simply put, from our perspective, it always makes sense.
Thanks for the link. That's a very insightful article that puts into words (very eloquently, I might add) exactly the vague feelings of discomfort I have about Paul Graham and his ilk.
Check out the parent's link if you have a moment, and throw modpoints his way if you're so inclined.
There's a concept in marketing: any attention, even negative attention, is good attention. I'm not being tongue in cheek, I'm quite serious. It has to do with psychology. Let me explain.
In today's world, we are assaulted daily with a barage of advertisements from numerous vendors, the vast majority of which we probably won't be able to recall 20 minutes after the advertisement. As an exercize, think of all the annoying popups and such you've seen on the internet. What do you remember about them? My guess is not much. Most users aren't as tech-savvy as the Slashdot crowd, and see even more of these than we do -- ten minutes later, the only thing that remains of a popup is the feeling of annoyance.
Sure, lots of people say, "I'll never buy anything from these jerks because of their invasive advertising," but unless you can clearly recall each and every invasive advertiser you've ever experienced you haven't a hope in hell of making good on that threat.
Consider also that most people who advertise in this manner are not the big brands -- it's not Coca Cola or Microsoft. The reason is simple: for brands with strong recognition, invasive advertisement backfires. If you saw an advert for Mac OS X delivered to your Windows desktop courtesy of 180solutions, how would that change your perception of Apple? Probably for the worse, and so Apple would never try that. But for companies without brand recognition, they don't sweat the "I'm going to boycott their products" line that people spout, because there's a massive amount of evidence that viewers aren't able to recall who the annoying advertiser was all that well after being exposed to it anyway.
What's the upside then? Well, this is the beauty of the situation (from their perspective, not yours). Later, when you're browsing at the supermarket, and you need to buy some product that you don't care much about -- say, I don't know, corn starch -- and there are a number of brands to choose from, you will be more likely to buy from a brand that you've heard about.
But because of the way your memory works, you probably won't be able to recall where you heard about them. You'll probably just think to yourself, "Oh, I've heard about this brand somewhere before" and think "maybe a friend recommended it to me." or something similar. Your exposure to the brand was so quick that the only imprint it leaves on you is subconcious.
I'm sure some Slashdotters will say "I remember every popup brand and make sure not to buy from them" and while there may be people like that (although privately I doubt it) studies have borne out what I'm saying for the vast majority of people. You can annoy the hell out of someone, but in the grand scheme of things, lots of things annoy the hell out of people and as long as you're not considerably more annoying than everyone else your target's brain will cut it out as a sort of white noise, all while increasing the target's recognition of your brand.
So it's a win-win situation for them, which is why spyware is so profitable. They pay very little for a relatively effective marketing technique.
Slashdot Mirror
You know whereof you speak? I call bullshit. I've lived in China for almost half a decade now, I speak Mandarin at a nearly native level, and I can tell you that face means a great deal to the Chinese. You are guilty of the very mistake you accuse the OP of making: conflating Japanese and Chinese culture. The Japanese and the Chinese both have very strong notions of face, but as with so many other things that seem at first glance to be shared by these two wildly different cultures, they are not the same.
To say that you learned "most of your Mandarin in China" to me seems like a clever way of making the Slashdot masses consider you an authority. Clever because it deliberately omits how much Mandarin you know -- and without knowing anything at all about you I would bet a great deal that it's nearly zilch. Why? Because in order to learn to speak a language well, you must do more than take classes and read books -- you must interact on a personal level with speakers of that language. For someone who presumably does not have native prowess in a language closely related to Mandarin, the language is relatively difficult to learn, which would imply that, if you spoke the language well, you must have spent a lot of time interacting with Chinese people. As someone who has been doing this for quite some time now, I think I can state with reasonable certitude that no one open-minded enough to undertake this would come away from the experience with as narrow-minded and unnuanced an understanding as you appear to have.
Mandarin has so many face-related terms and sayings it is absolutely staggering. I can't speak with any authority on the Japanese interpretation, but I did study the Japanese language for five years while in school and I wasn't exposed to anywhere near the same lexical diversity. But I'll freely admit that I never spoke Japanese well, whereas I speak Mandarin very well.
Another poster said that the Chinese "treat each other like shit", or somesuch, but to me this is a classic example of a westerner using western metrics of politeness and propriety to judge the actions of people with a fundamentally different cultural background. Something similar occurs with the Japanese. There is a fascination with all things Japanese in the geek community -- I'll admit I don't understand it well myself -- but I'm frequently told by all sorts of people that the Japanese are exceptionally polite and well mannered. This is a tremendously two dimensional way of looking at an entire population of people.
Let's make one thing clear here: the percentage of assholes in any particular group is relatively constant. What makes a person an asshole is their intent -- their knowing willingness to insult, degrade, or upset others. A westerner not familiar with Chinese social norms observes inter-Chinese interaction and is surprised by their apparent penchant to treat each other like dirt. What he does not understand is that many things not acceptable in western culture (and even here I am generalizing, as neither Chinese nor Western culture as such are homogenous at all) are acceptable in Chinese culture, and vice-versa. In China, a Chinese person says something to someone else and thinks nothing of it -- he does not consider it rude and did not have any malicious intent whatsoever, and in turn the person who hears it thinks little of it. The same situation, but in the West: exactly the same words are exchanged, but the listener becomes tremendously upset, because in the context of western culture, saying such a thing is a violation of accepted social norms and as such only someone with malicious intent would say them. Conversely, the Chinese often say that westerners don't need much face, by which they mean that they are not hao mianzi, that we put up with all sorts of insulting situations that no Chinese person would ever put up with. I've been involved in street fights on several occasions because of face.
To get back to the Japanese, Westerners
Man, you know things have changed big time when being against government censorship is a trait associated with democrats, of all things. When I was a kid, the democrats were the feel-good party that was associated with increased government spending and a liberal (no pun intended) interpretation of the constitution's restriction of allowable government powers. Heck, as long as you weren't arguing the constitutionality of Roe vs. Wade, they were all for making things like hate speech illegal and pushing the PC agenda.
...
But now, in this weird alternate reality Bush and Co. have foistered upon us, so-called republicans, once the party of civil liberties, gun ownership, and small government, are saying things like "I'm all for government censorship" and "Let's spend more money! The more the better!" And when you say something like "censorship is wrong and I'm not going to stand for anyone interpreting the first amendment in any way but literally" you're a liberal, a democrat! I can hear the twilight zone music playing!
It's like the democrats and the republicans have completely switched roles, except for the Roe vs. Wade and anti-gay agendas, that's still republican territory.
I'm so confused
Luckily I've never been too attached to a party, but rather to the things I believe in. So if being against censorship in its myriad forms makes me a democrat, well then, chalk me up as one. Jesus.
While I agree with the general thrust of your post, I think your comparison is a wee bit shy of the mark. Saying Linux is a "homegrown toy" very much depends on your definition of the word toy; if you take toy to mean something for children (implying in most people's minds that it is not fit for adults with real world problems, which is demonstratably false), then this characterisation is basically a lie. You could claim that you were using toy in the sense that it is developed for pleasure rather than profit, which is certainly true (or was, at any rate). Deliberately hard to use is also not particularly fair: GNU/Linux is meant to function like UNIX, and it remains consistantly easy to use for people who desire that interface (like me). It's certainly fair to say that by modeling the system's interface on an operating system that arguably reached its peak in the 70s and 80s, you are deliberately alienating a certain segment of the population (namely those that would like a free Windows or Macintosh clone.) To those people I would say that GNOME and KDE have already been good enough for a long time. Not working exactly like Windows or the Mac is not the same as being deliberately difficult to use, whatever your personal UI preferences may be.
Of course, this is what you meant by flamebait -- looking at what you said in a certain way, you might be able to milk a grain of truth out of it, but it is phrased so as to incite riot among zealous defenders of GNU/Linux et al. You are presumably perfectly aware of the limitations of your own statement, and that's why it's rightfully flamebait.
The Microsoft criticism is less clear. Not all criticisms are flamebait. Microsoft has produced a number of very usable products over the years -- Office in particular has no peer in the market place today. Anti-MS zealots on Slashdot are fond of attempting to undermine MS's genuinely good products by pointing out that most did not originate with MS, but rather were purchased technologies -- I'm tempted to say that this oft-heard cry is irrelevant, as technologies and companies are bought and sold all the time. But the OP's criticism of MS's product delivery schedule is certainly pretty on the mark. In the nearly 20 years I've been using their software, it seems most products have been seriously delayed, and when finally released are missing most of the features that were supposed to be the "killers". Of course a casual look at the industry as a whole shows this to be the norm for much software development. Small shops that release software without pre-release hoopla don't set user expectations that they can't meet, because they aren't big enough or important enough to attract interest, but big shops like Microsoft or Adobe are industry superstars, and so much of their software is preceeded by press releases lauding future features that later don't materialise -- which results in possibly deserved criticism.
As we've all worked in software at some point we all know the probable causes for this -- the overeager manager who sells a product idea to his superiors without consulting with the people who actually do the code to see whether the feature set is feasible for the project time. The marketing department that doesn't understand software architecture and embellish the feature set of a new product in ways that to them seem small but that actually require a massive amount of work to pull together. Even here on Slashdot, where people are pretty tech-savvy, you see a lot of people saying things like, "Why don't they just hack together acid2 compliance?" as if this requires nothing but adding a few if statements and special cases to a clean body of code. You'd think we'd know better.
And with companies as large as Microsoft, there are probably significant diseconomies of scale -- with bureaucratic lag and what not the left hand truly does not know what the right is doing. Microsoft has already delayed Longhorn/Vista for so long that industry analysts are starting to wonder if this will be another C
That wasn't a troll. He's just fucking retarded.
You'd be surprised. I wish this were the case, but my experience living in China has been that 90% of Chinese are completely uninterested in discussing politics even in a safe setting. It has nothing to do with fear, it has to do with apathy. They think that the Chinese government is doing a good job at the moment (they're not entirely wrong, either) and most of them have drunk the kool-aid and think democracy would bring instability due to the tremendous polarization of wealth that market reforms have brought.
Of course, they might not be wrong.
To be entirely honest with you, the adoption of democracy in a number of countries (Brazil, for example) has not resulted in greater stability, safety, or freedom for the people in those countries. Most successful modern democracies were wealthy and economically viable before the adoption of democratic systems; this is true throughout Europe, it is true for Japan, true for Taiwan, and true for South Korea. Countries that rushed into the democracy thing, like the Philippines, are corrupt, destitute, and economically moribund. This is true of most of Latin America as well, but I hesitate to hold those countries up as prime examples as one could argue convincingly that American foreign policy in that part of the world is largely responsible.
Consider this conundrum for a moment, if you will. China is a very large country that is still, overall, very poor. While Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou and Shenzhen are massive and relatively modern cities, most Chinese still live in relatively abject poverty compared to the west. If you believe capitalists -- I'm not sure I do, but let's run with it -- economic investment is much more likely to happen in urban centers than in the countryside. It makes sense, if you think about it. With lots of people living together, labour markets are mobile, and any added infrastructure is much more likely to be useful -- and thus marketable -- to a diverse group of people and companies. It stands to reason, then, that as a nation industrializes, infrastructure will be built in the cities before it is built in the countryside.
This was certainly true in Europe during the industrial revolution. The result was urbanization. People from the countryside flocked to the cities seeking to benefit from the increased opportunities. This is happening in China too, but because of China's already extremely populated cities and the massive number of people living in the countryside, the government doesn't allow just anyone to move to the big cities that are the centers of investment (at least not legally). It's not like you're imagining: anyone can get on a train and go to Shanghai or Beijing if it suits them, but in order to get almost anything done (including finding a legal job) you need to have permission from the government to reside in the city. Such permits are not granted easily, because when your capital city has a higher population than the entire continent of Australia, you want to keep it from growing too fast.
The result is that the cities are becoming richer and more developed, but the countryside isn't changing as much. Now, again, if you believe capitalists, in the long run, market pressures will force the cost of operating in these cities up (this is already happening in Shanghai, where I live) and the surrounding countryside will start to look much more attractive to businesses looking to open factories, say. So Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces (the two provinces nearest to Shanghai) are actually receiving a fair amount of foreign investment at the moment, especially within the Suzhou-Hangzhou-Shanghai triangle, because being in Shanghai simply isn't cost effective for a lot of companies.
Taking this process to its logical conclusion, it is easy to see that eventually operating costs in these provinces will also no longer be cost competitive with the poorer, less developed provinces surrounding them. And so investment, which initially was limited to large cities only, moves out into the countrys
I'd like to start out by admitting, in Slashdot tradition, that I have not read the article.
To further underscore the depth of my ignorance, I will admit that I haven't been following the anti-trust proceedings against Intel at all, and certainly not with anything resembling interest.
However, I'm seeing a lot of posts here (including yours) that say something along the lines of "how is this any different from <insert exclusive agreement here>?" and I'm surprised that, this being Slashdot, I have to spell it out for you.
When there is an exclusive agreement between two companies and one of those companies is a suspected monopolist, the rules change somewhat. Because when you make an exclusive agreement with a monopolist, you are decreasing the competitive nature of the market and reinforcing the monopoly. The reason we have anti-trust legislation at all is because economists understand that a market oriented approach is only an efficient and effective distributor of resources in the absence of monopolies. They are bad, and so we periodically intervene to break them up when they form. At least, that's the idea.
If Intel is in fact a monopolist -- something that these anti-trust proceedings are designed to determine -- then by definition all the rules change.
Personally I think this Skype crap seems like a poor example of monopolistic behaviour, but presumably AMD is trying to show in a court of law that Skype made some agreement with intel to cripple their software. If intel is a monopolist, and has cornered the CPU market, this practice would be anti-competitive. The reason is simple to see: signing an exclusivity contract with a monopolist poses practically no risk whatsoever to Skype, because of intel's alleged monopoly status, but it does strengthen intel's alleged monopoly.
Personally, I'm not sure intel really has a monopoly -- AMD has been giving them a run for their money and in a number of things has been leading the market (forcing intel to license x86-64 is a great example) and I think the Skype thing is stupid.
As for the NFL/EA thing, I think that's lame too -- the difference is that the NFL, for some reason, is allowed a monopoly (perhaps people think it's a natural monopoly?) and no one complains about it. Sports franchises may be different. Who knows?
I agree. Video games suck. I have no problems with other people playing them, and I'll admit that as a kid I desperately wanted an NES because the neighbor kid had one and it seemed like so much fun, but now, looking back, it's one of those decisions that I admit was the right one. My parents didn't let me watch commercial television, either, and that's another draconian restriction that I hated at the time but that has left me far less psychologically manipulated by marketers and their ilk.
I'm tempted, from time to time, to play a video game, but I never seem to be able to do it for more than a minute or two without getting bored. I much prefer writing games than playing them.
It seems to me that most "nerds" these days (especially on Slashdot) are also "gamers". That's cool and all, but I'm glad there are others (like me) who just don't get the gamer thing.
Of course, you might just be a troll, in which case IHBT, HAND.
The vast majority of searches on google.cn do not return censored results. However, searching for certain things will result in censorship, in which case Google tells you (in Chinese) at the bottom of the search that some results may have been censored. Only when you get this message does it make sense to compare search results coming from google.cn to search results coming from google.ca or google.com.
The results will not always be different.
Money is an inefficient store of value. It, like gold, tends to decline in value over time (inflation) when many other investments increase in value. Gold decreases in value relative to the dollar, and has been doing so for a long time, as the GP pointed out. So gold is, at least at this point, one of the few things out there that is an even less efficient store of value than money.
Investing in gold is also not productive, from an economic perspective, because gold is useless. You need money to make more money, and that's why the loanable funds market exists. If you're using money as a store of value, you're silly indeed. But I don't think anyone is suggesting that.
Since you're a libertarian and believe in the intelligence of the market, perhaps you should check out gold futures. If you're so certain the dollar is going to crash, maybe you should put your money where your mouth is and buy an asset whose value has been declining for more than a hundred years. You'll make a bundle.
But you'll excuse me if I don't share your passion for losing money.
That's an idiotically stupid thing to bring up. I don't think even the most anti-american of advocates would accuse the USA of being inherently evil, and yet we certainly have done a number of things that make Tibet pale in comparison (have you been to Tibet? I have.)
The OP's point is simply that things aren't black and white, and as usual, someone with monochrome vision has to come out and be a retard. The fact remains that if you compare the current Chinese government with any government the Chinese have ever had you will find that they compare very, very favorably.
It wasn't so long ago that the USA was selling humans as property or committing genocide against the Native Americans in the west (who are now, basically, completely gone).
I think the Tibet thing sucks too, but it's completely irrelevant to the parent's point, which is well made.
Tiananmen square was not a "popular revolt", try reading more about it. (There were two main groups protesting together: the students, who wanted more and faster reforms, and the workers, who had been harmed by the reforms and wanted less of them; they hung out together in the square and sang the Internationale together before they were shot at. It's not as simple as Western propaganda makes it out to be.) And I can tell you that as a freedom-loving American who lives in China, the vast majority of normal Chinese I speak to are against the free press (unless they work in the press), because they believe that there are some things they're better off not knowing. It's infuriatingly frustrating.
Having said that, I think the reason they believe this is largely due to government propaganda. But the fact remains that they do believe it. The whole mishandling of SARS a few years ago helped some people come around to understanding why a free press is beneficial (it was covered up if you'll recall, resulting in the deaths of many who would have otherwise not died) but the vast majority still feel as though there are things that the government should protect them from.
Freedom of Speech is not as valued in most of the world as it is in the US (and recently it's not very much valued there, either.)
I've never understood what makes these crazy psycho-libertarians think that there is anything that makes gold of inherently high worth. Honestly, it's just a metal, it's not even that rare, and with the exception of being a particularly good conductor the only thing that makes it valuable is that some people think it's pretty.
It's really bizarre. It's like they've never bothered to read any economics texts ever.
A word about semetic languages like Hebrew, Arabic, and Amaharic: they have a rich infix morphology. What this means in practice is that various inflections of Hebrew words (an English example of inflection is the addition of -s to the end of a verb in the third person, for example, I say versus he says) involve swapping the vowels in a word (but the consonants stay the same).
Indeed, most verbs in Hebrew have a three consonant "root" (some have two). Depending on the tense, person, number, and gender of a verb (Hebrew verbs, unlike say, French verbs, agree with the subject's gender as well as number), the vowels in a Hebrew verb will change (and a prefix or suffix may be added as well).
All of this is just a roundabout way of saying that any word with say, a k-t-v root will have to do with, in this case, writing, whether it's katav or kotev or what have you.
This is why all semetic languages evolved writing systems where the vowels are generally not written: vowels simply don't have much semantic value in semetic languages. It may seem weird at first, but it's actually rather logical if you're exposed to it for a while.
Now, I'm not Jewish, so I don't know exactly, but I remember reading that the religious texts in fact were marked with the vowel diacritics -- that in fact, the vowel diacritics were invented for the sole purpose of reminding Rabbis how the texts should be read, as Hebrew was a dead language for a millenium or more.
Native speakers have little need for them, as it is clear from context what the vowels should be. Thnk abt t, vn n nglsh y cn ndrstnd lrght, and in English the presence or absence of vowels can actually change the root meaning of a word!
Anyone who is actually Hebrew-speaking and/or Jewish feel free to correct me. My Hebrew is very bad.
It's from Robert Frost's poem, "Mending Wall". In the poem, it is his neighbour that says that "good fences make good neighbors", after which Frost writes:
Wikipedia is a great firewall thing I think. I'm in Shanghai FWIW. Some sites are not consistantly blocked because some blocking is self-censorship at the ISP level.
I share your basic view, but I think that some types of laws intended to enforce egalitarianism are, while inherently freedom-reducing or racist in character, nonetheless good for society as a whole. I am white and not a libertarian (although I used to be).
Let me start with an anecdote. I grew up in the suburbs and didn't interact much with African Americans before university. Like most white kids who aren't affected directly by racism, I felt that racism was mostly dead (but as you pointed out, it's still very much alive and kicking, albeit more underground and subtle than it used to be). I was, in fact, quite racist without realizing it: not in a malicious way, but rather in an insensitive way. I see that now, and am much more aware, which I think is a good thing. I think the vast majority of American whites are like I was at that point: racist and insensitive without knowing it. They don't hate black people, they're just not aware of the discrimination blacks face everyday, and aren't aware of how they in their own small ways contribute to it.
Now, what happened to me was quite accidental: I went to university and the dorms were filled, so I was placed in an African American interest dorm, where there was room. As a result, the vast majority of my friends (and my girlfriend, in fact) throughout college were black. And it was a major awakening for me.
The reason I bring this up is because the civil rights movement has come a long way, righting the most egregious wrongs (like the Jim Crow laws and their ilk) but it has done precious little to curb the everyday annoyances that black people face that the vast majority of white people aren't aware of. Stupid things that I'm sure you're faced with all the time. Stuff that I, as a relatively priveleged white man, would never have otherwise been exposed to, and previously would not have believed existed.
It is my feeling that being racist in this subtle, non-malicious way is a result of lack of exposure. It's certainly true that there is precious little interaction between whites and blacks. The two groups are inherently distrusting of each other. Blacks expect whites to be racist (because we often are) and whites expect blacks to be racist (because you often are) and the result is a lack of mixing which propogates the problem. Black people in my experience also often tire of explaining issues to whites, who more often than not simply don't get it easily. It is only through continuous exposure -- not one-time token discussions -- that people on both sides come to find common ground and recognize that the subtle stereotypes they've bought into are, well, stereotypes.
I think that social ordinances that force mixing -- things like affirmative action, fair housing laws, and their ilk -- are good for this reason despite the fact that they restrict people's freedom to be racially judgemental, or are simply racist themselves (affirmative action is the canonical example). Anything that increases exposure is good. White people in the US are exposed to African American culture largely through the media, which is rather narrow in its depiction, and is no replacement for actual, one on one interaction.
No legislation will ever eleminate the problem, but I hope that greater exposure between blacks and whites will help alleviate some of the more pressing issues. We've come a long way, when you consider that many places in the US were effectively apartheid states as little as 50 years ago. But it is important to remember that despite the magnitude of this achievement, it was only 50 years ago -- and people don't change that quickly. To become complacent in our struggle for an egalitarian society is to accept social segregation, which while less obviously wrong than legal segregation is nonetheless a major obstacle in our development as a society.
Libertarianism is attractive, but remember -- always remember -- that your ancestors were at one time traded on the free market you now see as an efficient distributor
You're an idiot. I can access freebsd.org just fine, and I'm in China.
Everytime a China-blocks-web-sites related article comes up, some moron gives a list of sites that are supposedly blocked in China. There are definitely blocked sites in China, and it's annoying as all get out, but at least 85% of the sites that Slashbots insist are "blocked in China" are perfectly accessible.
Please, before shooting your mouth off, do a little research.
Thanks.
You're absolutely right. Don't mistake me for a champion of copyright. If you want to get the laws changed, more power to you. However, that doesn't change the fact that at the moment copying things you don't have a license to copy is illegal. I mean, that's a fact. That has nothing to do with whether you ought to do it or not, or even whether it's moral or not. For example, I don't think downloading music is immoral, because I've looked at the situation and feel that the RIAA actually benefit quite a bit from so-called "piracy", in exactly the same way that Microsoft has benefited greatly from the piracy that has given Windows a de facto monopoly in the OS market.
On the other hand, I think that if I write a novel, for example, and you copy it and publish it under your own name, pretending that you're the author, and manage to make a living that way, all while in the process depriving me of my glory (I can't very well go publish exactly the same book after you've published, can I) I think that's completely immoral.
Both of these, as it stands, are illegal. This is why I agree with Richard Stallman's points in "Copyright and Globalization in the Age of Computer Networks", where he essentially says that copyright needs a serious overhaul. I don't think it should be done away with completely, but I think different circumstances ought to be treated differently.
But my original point wasn't about what I think, it was about a number of points that I think most people can agree with.
Well, I'm not a moral absolutist, so I think cultural and personal norms define morality rather than legislation or religion, for example. So while I might think its immoral (and many others do too) you're not required to.
Having said that, the main reason I think it's immoral is exactly because of that vague of sense of fairness that you describe. It seems inappropriate for someone to benefit from the work of someone else unless that person agrees to share (which I think is an appropriate and noble thing -- hence my dedication to the free software movement). It sounds as though you agree, and so you say you wouldn't mind someone copying your stuff (we agree on this). However, to say "AC & 808140 don't mind" is not the same as saying that everyone doesn't mind (many obviously do). Even in the free software community, only the public domain guys fail to put any restrictions at all on copying.
It's important to recognize that there's a difference between developing something with the intention that it be free and developing something with the intention that it not be. Now, some people argue (including me, as it happens) that for certain classes of information, including software, preventing other people from copying is immoral in itself. Of course many people disagree with me on that. This is probably why software is protected by copyright -- in a democracy laws presumably exist because the majority agrees with them, or at least doesn't care enough about them to resist them.
On the other hand, if someone does something in order to make a living and has reasonable expectation that he should be able to do that, and someone goes ahead and benefits from his hard work without his permission, and in the process possibly makes it more difficult or even impossible for the first guy to achieve his erstwhile goal of making a living, well, I guess that just seems like a shitty thing to do. Note that this is different from saying that it should be illegal, just that it's shitty, and that's really what I mean when I say it's immoral. People do immoral (shitty) things all the time that are perfectly legal, and some things that in my mind are completely moral are illegal in some places.
This guy who wants to make a living off of his content is very different from the two of us: I develop software expressly to give it away, and perhaps you do the same with your content. Clearly, we aren't going to be incensed when someone copies our stuff.
Now, perhaps we believe that information should be free -- I certainly do, especially where software is concerned, read some of my other posts to see where I stand on the issue -- but the point of my original post was to present a relatively balanced and bias-free (insofar as that's possible) outlook on the whole debate.
Fact: you can either abide by the law, or you can copy copyrighted works without the copyright holder's permission. Pick one. As it stands, all other questions aside, that's how society is today.
Of course, I smoke pot sometimes, and that's illegal, so, perhaps being law abiding isn't what you want to do. I'm not going to be a hypocrite and call you on that.
I think what he means is that you aren't deprived of the fruits of your labour, in this case, the blueprints (assuming they were copied and not stolen). The other guy takes them, but you still have them. So you aren't deprived of your work.
What you are deprived of is a monopoly on the right to benefit from the fruits of your labour. Without taking either side of the debate on this, it is important to recognize that there is nothing that naturally guarantees you this monopoly. If you amass knowledge (a feat that definitely can and often is prohibitively expensive) with an intent to capitalize on it, and someone copies that knowledge in its digital or written form with an intent to capitalize on it in the same way that you intended to (but without investing the time and money required to do the research), then you could definitely say that the person doing the copying has done something immoral -- but he has not actually deprived you of the fruits of your labour.
He has, most likely, decreased the amount of money you'll be able to make. This I think is what the RIAA and its ilk mean when they say that you are stealing -- not the music, per se, but the profits that they would have had had you been forced to buy instead of just copy.
Unfortunately, this argument is relatively hard to make conclusively, because you're arguing about something that hasn't happened yet and is not at all guaranteed to happen. It's like Minority Report -- is it moral to incarcerate criminals who have not yet commited a crime but that you believe are certain to?
I think from a philosophical perspective, all of this is very interesting, and is in fact far more complex than both sides want to admit.
Fortunately, we decided early on that copyright infringement is a crime, so there's not much guess work involved here: copying something that you did not create without a license allowing you to do so is illegal. It's not stealing, because theft deprives the owner of property, but it is still illegal.
Everything else is just mincing words.
I see this argument rehashed a lot on Slashdot, and so I'd like to take a moment to say something about it, because it's always bothered me.
Slashdot is a huge site, with lots and lots of readers (it's certainly the most read blog on the internet). They all have different opinions, and they all express themselves here. There is no "slashverse consistancy" or whatever you'd like to call it. People have disagreements here all the time.
For example, I don't use proprietary software (well, except for the binary firmware for my wireless network card, but I have a license for that). Everything on my computer, with the naggling exception of this little piece of code, is 100% free software. I don't copy software illegally, and I respect license agreements to the best of my ability -- mainly by restricting myself to GPL/BSD/MPL type licenses.
When I hear about a GPL violation, I throw a shit-fit about it, certainly. My posts are likely to be among the ones you see complaining when that happens. Later on, some photoshop related story will be posted and some people will say they just copy photoshop, and that information wants to be free and that's ok. There's no inconsistancy here: I am defending the GPL, and they are defending their copyright infringment. While these two (contradictory) opinions are both posted on the same forum, and both are widely supported, I think you'll find that the two groups don't overlap very much, at least among thinking individuals.
There is a camp that disagrees with copyright on principle -- I certainly disagree with it as it is practiced today. Some of these people copy software as a sort of activism, or at least justify it that way. If these people then expect copyright law to protect a GPL infringment, they're being hypocritical, and you're completely correct to point it out to them.
But it's important to recognize that there are many groups and dissenting opinions on Slashdot. There's a whole crew of "Win2k doesn't suck, in fact it's very stable" folks. There's also a whole slew of "Win2k crashes constantly, wah wah wah" folks. Both routinely post their opinions, and both are routinely modded up to +5. And yet this isn't "inconsistancy in the slashverse", it's simply two different opinions being represented.
I just thought I'd point this out, because it's been bugging me for a while.
I understand what you're trying to say, but most Free Software advocates (certainly Stallman, but many others as well, including myself) would say that your advocation of Free Software "where it makes sense" puts convenience above principle, which is the "Open Source compromise" in a nutshell. This places you, at least from the perspective of Free Software advocates, firmly in the OSS camp.
You say you understand the difference between the two, and yet see yourself in both camps -- lots of OSS advocates say this. But when it comes right down to it, the Free Software movement is about eschewing proprietary software from our lives, even if it makes our lives more difficult or results in decreased efficiency. The fact that free software happens to often be better quality than its proprietary counterparts is a welcome thing, but even if it were far less stable and much less feature rich -- as GNU/Linux certainly was when I started using it exclusively -- a Free Software advocate would still advocate it, because it's ultimately a question of principle, not a question of convenience.
Simply put, from our perspective, it always makes sense.
Thanks for the link. That's a very insightful article that puts into words (very eloquently, I might add) exactly the vague feelings of discomfort I have about Paul Graham and his ilk.
Check out the parent's link if you have a moment, and throw modpoints his way if you're so inclined.
There's a concept in marketing: any attention, even negative attention, is good attention. I'm not being tongue in cheek, I'm quite serious. It has to do with psychology. Let me explain.
In today's world, we are assaulted daily with a barage of advertisements from numerous vendors, the vast majority of which we probably won't be able to recall 20 minutes after the advertisement. As an exercize, think of all the annoying popups and such you've seen on the internet. What do you remember about them? My guess is not much. Most users aren't as tech-savvy as the Slashdot crowd, and see even more of these than we do -- ten minutes later, the only thing that remains of a popup is the feeling of annoyance.
Sure, lots of people say, "I'll never buy anything from these jerks because of their invasive advertising," but unless you can clearly recall each and every invasive advertiser you've ever experienced you haven't a hope in hell of making good on that threat.
Consider also that most people who advertise in this manner are not the big brands -- it's not Coca Cola or Microsoft. The reason is simple: for brands with strong recognition, invasive advertisement backfires. If you saw an advert for Mac OS X delivered to your Windows desktop courtesy of 180solutions, how would that change your perception of Apple? Probably for the worse, and so Apple would never try that. But for companies without brand recognition, they don't sweat the "I'm going to boycott their products" line that people spout, because there's a massive amount of evidence that viewers aren't able to recall who the annoying advertiser was all that well after being exposed to it anyway.
What's the upside then? Well, this is the beauty of the situation (from their perspective, not yours). Later, when you're browsing at the supermarket, and you need to buy some product that you don't care much about -- say, I don't know, corn starch -- and there are a number of brands to choose from, you will be more likely to buy from a brand that you've heard about.
But because of the way your memory works, you probably won't be able to recall where you heard about them. You'll probably just think to yourself, "Oh, I've heard about this brand somewhere before" and think "maybe a friend recommended it to me." or something similar. Your exposure to the brand was so quick that the only imprint it leaves on you is subconcious.
I'm sure some Slashdotters will say "I remember every popup brand and make sure not to buy from them" and while there may be people like that (although privately I doubt it) studies have borne out what I'm saying for the vast majority of people. You can annoy the hell out of someone, but in the grand scheme of things, lots of things annoy the hell out of people and as long as you're not considerably more annoying than everyone else your target's brain will cut it out as a sort of white noise, all while increasing the target's recognition of your brand.
So it's a win-win situation for them, which is why spyware is so profitable. They pay very little for a relatively effective marketing technique.
I live in Asia, you moron, and have for nearly 4 years now.
Admittedly, not Thailand (China), but I've been there several times as a tourist.
I've never been to Ohio, as it happens.