Yes, I've made mine. If you'd bothered reading my post, you'd see that mine is not to use Windows. Here's the reality: that doesn't make a lick of difference to MS's bottom line. Which was my point.
As I said, I've done just that. The point is, it does not have the intended effect -- namely punishing MS for its bad behavior by hurting its bottom line. As long as MS has corporate desktops locked up, many people will need Windows at home for interoperability purposes. And even if everyone at home had Linux or Mac, and interfaced with Windows completely by VPN, that's still ignoring the fact that most of MS's income comes from corporate clients, who aren't going to substitute away from Windows anytime soon.
I applaud anyone who uses something else at home -- I know it can be done, I do it myself. But the OP was suggesting that we could convince MS to act differently by hurting their bottom line, as if any of us really had the power to apply that power individually or as a group.
The "vote with your feet" fallacy depends on the notion that each and every consumer is equal, when in reality that's not at all the case. The analogy with democracy and voting would only hold if some citizens had the ability to vote a million times and the vast majority only once. Because that's how this works: MS makes most of its money in the corporate market, and the decision to buy ten thousand Windows licenses is not made by the people using the product, but by the CTO, who (for reasons I explained earlier) cannot easily choose to do anything else.
In a democracy, everyone has an equal say, and that's one of the cornerstones of the democratic philosophy. In a market-based system, those who have more money have more say, because "votes" are purchased, not tallied. We all like to bitch and moan about the TCO lies that MS bandies around, but in reality, for most companies, Linux isn't the least bit feasible, because so much of their existing industry depends on Windows cruft, much of which they produced themselves. The Mac is even less feasible, because you actually do need to license Mac OS, and you need to run it on specific hardware -- at least Linux is low cost and runs on commodity hardware.
Windows is not a simple commodity, like say, milk. If milk were like Windows, then changing your brand would mean you couldn't eat breakfast with your family unless they all changed brands, too. This is what I mean when I say that libertarians treat all markets as if they were perfectly competitive with low barriers to entry. In reality, there are network effects, and barriers to substitution, and all sorts of other things that make the mere existence of a competitor inadequate. Just because Apple, Redhat, Ubuntu, SuSE, etc, exist, doesn't mean that the market is suddenly competitive. Markets are only competitive if consumers can actually substitute to a competitor's product. The OS market has low barriers to entry, but it is not competitive.
This is completely off the top of my head, but do you remember how early C compilers used to only recognize the first six characters of a function name? So, for example, create_foo() and create_bar() were recognized the same way.
Now, in essentially every program in the world there is a function named 'create_something' or alternatively 'createSomething'. Had Ken Thompson's creat() function been spelled create(), early C compilers would have treated them the same way, thus making any function starting with "create" useless (not to mention resulting in error-prone behavior: which function actually gets called? It varies by compiler...)
By naming the function 'creat', KT neatly sidestepped the whole problem. I wonder if that's why he did it? Either way, if he did it all over again, and this time named the function create(), no early programs would have been able to have any function that started with those six letters. Our programming habits would thus be quite different. Perhaps we'd have to say creat_foo() instead...
I never use the creat() function anyway (it's just an alias for open()) so frankly I prefer it this way. Of course, today's compilers no longer have the silly 6-character rule, but if you're aiming to write über-portable code, it's still advisable to have all your function and global variable names unique in the first six characters. There are utilities that will verify that this is the case for you.
By the way, do you have a source for that quote? I've heard it too, but I'd be interested in knowing where KT said it.
This "vote with your feet" bs needs to stop, seriously. It takes an overly simplistic look at the way a market actually functions in the real world -- which is not the same as the way it functions in this libertarian day dream. The fundamental problem with libertarianism is that it treats all markets as if they were perfectly competitive markets with low barriers to entry, when in reality, the vast majority of them are not.
If you seriously believe that substituting away from Windows, or from Word, is something that the vast majority of people here can actually do, then you're absolutely wrong. Listen, I don't own a Windows system -- I use Debian GNU/Linux exclusively. But Word and Windows are the defacto standard and living outside of that standard is impossible. Let's look at the facts:
Windows comes pre-installed on most any computer you buy. Microsoft does not give this away for free, the OEM pays for it, and so everytime you purchase a computer, regardless of what OS you install, you give MS income. This may be changing, but it hasn't yet. Laptops in particular are still basically impossible to buy without paying the Microsoft tax.
Windows is by far and away the most common corporate desktop, and for 99% of us, we have no choice whatsoever in what gets installed on our computers at work. Since this is also where MS makes the bulk of its money, how do you propose that we vote with our feet, exactly?
Even for those of us that are in the position to make corporate desktop installation decisions, there are many secondary factors that we need to consider when we decide what sort of machine to purchase. Like, does it run the software that we need to use? If it's not Windows, probably not. There's more than just Office you know. What about all the Windows-only corporate internal stuff produced by braindead MSCEs over the last ten years that the entire company now depends on? Do you think replacing it, doing it all over, is easy or cost-effective? How do you justify a switch to Linux or Mac to the bean counters when all that stuff needs to be dealt with?
Whether you want to admit it or not, there is massive inertia in the industry. Everyone runs Windows, and that keeps everyone else running Windows. "Just don't buy MS" is the most ridiculous statement in the world. Sure, if everyone stopped, then that would hurt their bottom-line. But even if every Slashdotter ever stopped buying Windows, MS would still be making billions. Every time a court slaps a fine of a hundred million dollars on MS, everyone on Slashdot whines about how it's a slap on the wrist and nothing more, because the company makes so much money it's sick. The exact same logic applies here.
What you're suggesting would only work if a large percentage of MS's clients all defected. It's like saying, "Big Oil acting badly? Just don't buy oil! That'll teach 'em!"
Come on, this isn't a perfectly competitive market. It's a monopoly. There's a reason economists think that those are bad.
This seems like a no-brainer to me. You don't even need a window manager, although there are some minimalist ones that will do the trick for things like the preferences window, etc. Firefox has font-size adjustment, so that's not a problem, and you can theme gtk to be high contrast with large font sizes in the menu, etc.
This is not actually true. The burden of a tax levied on a product sold to a consumer is shared by both the manufacturer and the consumer. To see why this is, you must take secondary effects into account, mainly as relates to the law of demand: the higher the price of a good, the greater the incentive the consumer has to substitute away from that good. The result is that price and quantity demanded are inversely proportional, absent any other effects. This is balanced by the law of supply -- but it is the law of demand that most affects tax burden, so we'll concentrate on that in this post.
The law of demand affects distribution of tax burden in a relatively predictable way:
Government levies a tax on a corporation.
The corporation responds by increasing the price of its goods and services. This is the step that, in a naive analysis, is known as "passing the cost on to the consumer." Read on to see why it is naive.
In keeping with the law of demand, the increased cost of the corporation's goods and services causes demand for those goods and services to fall. The corporation thus makes fewer sales.
Because the corporation raised its prices to cover the cost of the tax, the amount of money it receives per unit good (or service) has not increased. It is therefore making less money, so clearly it feels the burden of the tax.
From the consumer side, how much the consumer is affected by the tax depends largely on how easily he can substitute away from the good or service in question. This is known as elasticity. Some products, like say, peanut butter, can be substituted fairly easily: there are many brands, and for many consumers, there are other products (like almond butter, or jam, or whatever) which they could use instead of peanut butter. So we say that demand for peanut butter is fairly elastic: consumer demand for peanut butter is very sensitive to price changes. Other products, like gasoline, are the opposite: they are very inelastic, at least in the short term, because most people (especially in the US) have little choice in how much they drive and cannot really subsitute away to another product.
So it should be clear that how much of a tax is paid by the consumer and how much is paid by the corporation depend greatly on the demand elasticity for the good whose price is affected by the tax. When a tax is levied on a highly inelastic product (such as gas or cigarettes), the consumer bears nearly all the burden, because the increased price on the good will cause very little change in demand for said good. But on other products, like luxury goods, the corporation will end up bearing most of the burden, because higher prices will drive away consumers without compensating the company.
I'm not really sure what you mean when you talk about non-person entities and corporate income tax -- the "personhood" of a corporation has to do with limiting liability, not with tax. People and corporations are taxed differently already, so I think you may be slightly confused, or perhaps I misunderstood you.
As for your idea of taxing dividends, remember that a corporation is under no obligation to pay dividends and some in fact never have -- it's true that much equity valuation theory (such as the dividend discount model) make the assumption that all corporations will pay dividends at some future date, but this is at best a useful fiction. Higher taxes on dividends will simply have the effect of reducing shareholder demand for high dividend payout on common stock, and transfer that demand to capital gains.
Tax has strange effects on the market and it's not always easy to see how things are going to work; remember that any corporation is always trying to maximize its profits and the introduction of a tax at any level is always going to affect the price of goods and services produced by a company. If you make equity financing more expensive by levying higher taxes on dividends or capital gain
That's the opinion of the FSF, which I hope is correct, but in reality, the question of whether dynamic linking constitutes a derivative work or not is very much a legal gray area without any sort of precedent set by the courts.
The truth is, until some judge out there rules that dynamic linking does indeed constitute a derivative work, we can't be sure whether the GPL applies or not.
According to your link, the name for bang in INTERCAL is wow, actually. The sibling poster is more correct: see the entry on bang in the Jargon file for more information.
Fair enough. As an aside, your use of "straw man" and "red herring" don't seem to fit into my understanding of the terms. Perhaps you can explain? As I understand it, a straw man argument is when you say something which I wish to refute, but instead of refuting the thing you said, I refute another, usually related but inequivalent statement. As for "red herring", I always thought it was the introduction of extraneous information into an argument, often with the intent of distracting the person you're arguing with from your main point. Was I mistaken on either of these counts?
In particular, if I assert something that you agree with or have never disputed, it is not a straw man argument (at least as I understand it -- but as you've pointed out, logic is not my strong point.) So, for example, saying you never disagreed with me about the multiple uses of "yuan" does not make my assertion that yuan is used in multiple ways a straw man argument. It just means that we probably agree with each other on that point. Arguments are typically formulated first by finding out where we agree, and then by finding out where we disagree. If you disagreed with everything I say, how are we ever supposed to find common ground?
Also, you now claim to be taking issue with the article summary, rather than the article itself. That's fair enough, but before you get upset, please note that you never specified this -- the summary and the article used, as you noted, exactly the same wording. How am I supposed to know which you meant? Either way, though, this statement -- that the article was written for a Singaporean audience -- does not seem to be a straw man, either, because again, I am not misrepresenting your argument, I am simply saying something that is evidently true and which by itself refutes nothing. This seems to be simply a miscommunication. I assumed that when you said article, you meant article, not summary.
The comment about Singlish, again -- I'm not sure how this could be construed as a straw man argument. First, this statement by itself refutes no argument at all, so how can it be me refuting an argument you didn't make? That's what I understand a straw man to be -- you claim A and I refute A', which while perhaps similar to A is not logically equivalent to A and thus does not in fact constitute a proper refutation of your argument. You also suggest it could be a red herring, which means that you feel that this statement has no bearing on my argument -- in that case, perhaps you simply don't understand why I brought it up? Only to note that the average Singaporean frequently mixes Chinese and English, and therefore quite conceivably might say "yuan" instead of "dollar" to refer to their own currency. You may disagree with this statement, but it was fairly central to my argument, and so it cannot be a red herring, at least not as I understand it.
Also, for the record, I did not attempt to prove my point using Google. I included that information simply because you have at times said that your own web searches made you think that one should use "yuan" and that using "renminbi" was wrong; I just wanted to provide some context from the same source for you to consider. Consideration means, at least to me, that you think about it and draw your own conclusions, even if they're the same conclusions you started with. They do not constitute a refutation.
I am not a computer, or a philosopher, and I do on occasion make arguments that do not follow -- and I do not mind being called on it when it happens. I cannot guarantee that I have, over the course of our debate, kept my discourse entirely free of logical fallacies, but please let me assure you that despite what you may think, if I have failed in this regard it is due to oversight, not malice. Please do let me know if I make a mistake, but please make sure that the mistake you're pointing out is in fact the mistake you think it is.
For what it's worth, this appears to be the essence of our disagreement:
To be fair, the comics that one was a response to -- the ones published in Denmark which were supposedly an affront to Islam -- weren't actually funny, either. Like this one, they were at best provocative for the sake of it, and at worst racist.
I think the Muslims in this case have a good point -- all cultures have their sacred cows. Islam feels very strongly about producing images of their prophet, which is why (unlike with the religious figures in most religions) you never see paintings of him in mosques or elsewhere.
Likewise, Europe feels very strongly about the Holocaust, and as a result has banned most discourse on the subject which is not in line with mainstream thought.
I understand and empathize with the perspectives of both groups -- just as I empathize with Americans who want to see the constitution amended to make flag burning an illegal act -- but in all of these cases, I see the freedom to say what you want, no matter how vile, as being much more important to the functioning of a free society than ensuring that no one is offended.
After all, everyone is offended by something: if we made it all illegal, we'd never be able to say anything. But if we pick and choose what we're sensitive about, we're necessarily discriminating. The best option, in my opinion? Let people say what they want, no matter how much it pains us to hear it.
CNY is the ISO-4271 standard, no argument from me. You're simply taking one list as official while I'm taking another. The two are in common use, but CNY isn't very common in China, probably for political and linguistic reasons. We use RMB in my work, and most Chinese use RMB (not surprisingly, as it is shorthand for a Chinese term, their term, etc.) CNY is an English acronym, so its root is less clear to Chinese speakers. But I'm agnostic on which to use. They're both quite common, and everyone that works much with the currency is aware of both of them. But here's something for you to consider, as a side point: if a term like "RMB" is in such wide use, despite not being the official ISO standard, what does that say about the popularity of the term it stands for?
Anyway, let's be totally clear about this. Here's your original post, titled "I'm pretty sure the currency..":
.. should be referenced in this case as yuan, not renminbi.
Since you insist that we are just debating your point, let's restrict ourselves to that. Here are some facts to consider, which you can verify.
"yuan" is a generic term in Chinese and can refer to many currencies. If you do not accept this Chinese usage, please ask your Chinese friends.
The article in question -- that is to say, "in this case" -- was written with a Singaporean audience in mind. IDG News Services, to be exact.
Singapore is mostly a Chinese city -- 75% of its population, roughly, is Chinese.
Singapore has 4 official languages, two of which are Mandarin and English. English is the language of instruction in school, and is officially used in business settings. In addition to this, Singaporeans are required to study their "mother tongue", which may be one of Mandarin, Malay, Hindi, or Tamil. Not surprisingly, the "mother tongue" chosen by the ethnic Chinese majority is Mandarin, rather than the other choices.
It follows easily that roughly 75% of Singaporeans are bilingual in English and Mandarin.
In fact, Singlish, the semi-official creole spoken on the island, is largely a mixing of Chinese and English. Singaporeans are thus used to hearing Chinese words interspersed in English.
When speaking Chinese, the term "yuan" is applied to Singaporean dollars as well.
The conclusion to draw, here, is that the use of yuan, within the context of a Singaporean audience, could have been ambiguous. Your assertion that "the currency.... should in this case be referenced as yuan, not renminbi" is therefore incorrect.
As I've stated in my previous posts, I don't think there's ever a time that using "renminbi" is wrong, but I think it's pretty clear that you're not on the same page with me there, and that you're not going to budge on it. So for closure, I'd just like to point out, that in any case, your original point -- the one we are ostensibly debating, because conversations are apparently not allowed to evolve -- is far more trivially debunked than the much more widespread claim I "reframed" the argument into.
Here's something else for you to consider: why is it correct to say "250 RMB" but not "250 renminbi" in your mind, when the former is simply shorthand for the latter? Or do you dispute that "250 RMB" is correct? Since you're fond of google, consider the following data:
Are you being deliberately dense? You cannot say "san renminbi" in Chinese because the grammar does not allow it! How many times have I said this already? When I said "There's nothing wrong with saying renminbi", it should have been completely clear that use of the term, like the use of any term, is necessarily restricted by grammar. Look, would the following post make sense?
Hey, by the way:
There's nothing wrong with saying 'I'.
Nothing? You said:
Yes, in English, no one would say 'come with I'.
That's something!
I mean, I'm at a loss. Is this really the argument you're trying to make?
You may feel like I'm being condescending because I talk like I know I'm right -- a crime you yourself are guilty of, incidentally, but not one I'm likely to take offense to -- but at least I've taken the time to actually read and respond to your posts.
Sometimes, it's not the least bit clear you actually bothered to read mine.
I think it's great that you have such well-educated Chinese friends. I'm at a loss, however, as to why you are asking them about proper English usage. True, no one would say "san renminbi" when speaking Mandarin, as I outlined (in some detail) in my previous post, because Chinese requires a measure word between the "san" and the "renminbi". That measure word, as I said before, could be "kuai", or "yuan", or even "jiao", "mao", or "fen", depending. Between "yuan" and "kuai", the latter is far, far, far more common in colloquial Chinese than "yuan", which is formal and mostly used in writing. But in English, as we lack measure words, we omit them in translation. I have no doubt that to a native Chinese person, "three renminbi" sounds strange, because it is an English word glued onto a Chinese word without a measure word in between. Thankfully, we don't care what they think.
Having established that yes, in Chinese, no one would say "3 renminbi", we can move on to the subject at hand: whether such a phrase is acceptable in English. I explained to you that those of us that work in Forex prefer to say renminbi, because it unambiguously refers to the mainland's currency. It also sounds a lot like RMB, which is the official acronym for the currency (I think you can guess what it stands for). "Yuan," on the other hand, while commonly used in other contexts, can refer to lots of currencies.
You seem to have accepted this, and are now arguing that there would have been nothing wrong with the author of the submission using the term "yuan" in place of "renminbi". This is what is known as a straw man fallacy -- creating an argument I never made and shooting it down instead of the one I did. To reiterate, what you said originally was that the author of the article was wrong and that "renminbi" should not be used, and that "yuan" should be used instead. To this I countered that there was nothing wrong with using "renminbi." I then elaborated, explaining that "renminbi" is actually preferable to "yuan" for a number of reasons. Now, if the thesis of your argument were: "It would have been ok to say 'yuan' instead of 'renminbi' in the context in question", I would agree with you, and that would be the end of it. People frequently say "yuan" when speaking English, especially when the context is clear, and lamentably even when it's not (although those people are likely to not be the sort that work with Asian currencies much). This, however, is not what you are claiming.
You are claiming that using "plain 'renminbi' is still wrong", to quote. In this, you are completely incorrect.
Perhaps I should put this another way: if you were asked by a foreign friend whether saying "30 USD" was incorrect, what would you tell them?
You'd probably say: "If you're in the US, it would be better to say '30 dollars', but if you're discussing the currency in an international setting, saying USD might be better, because there are lots of currencies that are denominated in dollars." You most certainly would not say "no, saying '30 USD' is incorrect" (if you did, you'd be doing your friend a grave disservice, and most everyone who works in international finance would have words with you on the matter).
This situation is analogous, as I have already said several times now. To extend the analogy, you might argue that in an article about the US, just saying "30 dollars" is acceptable, and that saying USD is redundant (which of course would not be the case if the article were written with an Australian, Canadian, or New Zealand audience in mind). But you would never say that saying USD is wrong. That would be ridiculous.
Similarly, in this situation, the article, which was authored by IDG News Service in Singapore, used the term "renminbi" instead of "yuan". It discussed China, certainly, so perhaps the context was clear -- then again, when speaking Chinese, as most of Singapore does, the Singaporean currency is also called "yuan" (in
You probably should have responded in the last thread, because this is all off-topic here. I never once said that yuan is not used, just that it is uncommon, except occasionally in writing, and sometimes when dealing with very large sums. If you'll recall, someone (you?) was saying that using renminbi in the context of the article summary was incorrect, and that yuan should be used; I countered by saying that there was nothing wrong with saying renminbi, and that yuan was ambiguous and anyway not particularly common when one is speaking Chinese.
You are correct that no Chinese person would say "3 renminbi" directly (san renminbi) when speaking Mandarin, but this has to do with Chinese grammar, and the usage does not carry over into English. Chinese has an extensive system of measure words. For example, in English we might say "3 sheets of paper" or "3 heads of cattle", but generally speaking, when counting objects it is acceptable in most cases to just prefix the noun with the number: "3 people", "3 US dollars", "1 chair", "3 desks", etc. Chinese, however, never allows one to directly prefix a number to a noun. Every noun has an associated measure word, which functions in a manner analogous to "sheets of" and "heads of" in the previous examples. With me so far?
Because English doesn't make much use of measure words, and when it does they are often optional, when translating a Chinese expression to English one generally simply omits the measure word. For example, 3 people in Chinese is "san ge ren", the middle "ge" being the measure word. But when we translate it into English, we drop the "ge", because there is no equivalent word in English, as it is not required by our grammar. We simply say 3 people.
Similarly, with currency, renminbi is the name of the currency, but as with all other objects in Chinese, you cannot simply prefix a number to the front of it and call it a day. This, however, is Chinese usage and not English usage. When we translate "san kuai renminbi" into English, we omit the "kuai" (which is a measure word for pieces) and just say "3 renminbi", or, if the context is clear, we might say "3 yuan".
So what about the word yuan in Chinese? It too is a measure word, specifically for money. Because it is specific to money, and because speakers of western languages are generally not particularly aware of the whole measure word thing, it has been imported into casual English as the name of the mainland's Chinese currency, when really it just means something like "units of" and is the grammatical glue that allows us to connect "3" and "renminbi" together.
Further confusion arises from the Chinese habit of omitting the noun and keeping the measure word if the noun is clear; in fact, this is required by the grammar. So for example, to extend it to an English example, this is like saying "3 sheets" and omitting "of paper". Except in English, if I asked you how many sheets of paper you needed, you could say "3" and omit sheets; not so in Chinese.
The thing is though -- and your Chinese friends will confirm this -- that while saying "3 yuan renminbi" is most certainly not incorrect, it is exceedingly uncommon in speech; Chinese speakers prefer to say "3 kuai renminbi", where kuai is the counter for pieces of a whole (and if you really do have friends from Beijing, you can confirm that Beijing speakers omit the erhuayin on the word kuai when talking about money specifically, and tend to put the erhuayin in other contexts as a means of disambiguation).
Furthermore, kuai/yuan is not the only counter used when dealing with money, it is only the one used when dealing with whole units of currency. "mao" is used when dealing with tenths of a unit, and "fen" when dealing with hundredths of a unit; so 3.50 RMB is "3 kuai 5 mao renminbi", or more colloquially, "3 kuai 5".
So, to recap, in the same way that we would not translate "3 ge ren" into English as "3 ge people", we don't generally translate "3 kuai renminbi" as "
They are government granted monopolies, certainly. Over ideas -- no, not at all. Patents could possibly be construed as being a temporary government granted monopoly on the application of an idea, specifically, an idea for the construction of a machine.
Copyrights have nothing to do with ideas. Copyright only applies to works you have already created, whether they be art or words on the printed page. If you describe to me your idea for a novel, and I later write a novel based on your idea, you have no legal claim, despite my capitalization on your idea. Copyrights do not protect ideas. They protect information, and only in certain forms.
Trademarks, likewise, have nothing whatever to do with ideas. As you said yourself, they protect a specific usage of a phrase (or image) with respect to a product. I fail to see how this relates to ideas at all.
You clearly know what copyrights, patents, and trademarks are, that much is clear from your post, but your assertion that they all have to do with ideas is silly, unless you concede that everything begins with an idea; if you do that, I think you've made your argument so broad as to be meaningless.
Mentioning the framers of the constitution and how they placed copyright and patent law next to each other is not only an appeal to authority, but it also assumes that the reason for this was because they saw a connection (no proof of that), and that that connection had to do with ideas (likewise no evidence). While I could see seeing the two as related -- both involve temporary, government sanctioned and enforced monopolies -- your addition of the term "idea" (presumably to help justify the use of the term intellectual property) doesn't really seem relevant at all.
Listen to yourself: "... they are government granted monopolies over 'ideas'. Obviously, copyright protects your expression of an idea, patents protect a process, and trademarks protect a specific usage of a phrase with respect to a product." Well... "your expression of an idea", "a process", "a specific usage of a phrase with respect to a product"? Even your own explanation fails to make the similarities clear.
If any term is going to be used to cover all three concepts, it should be "Government Sanctioned Temporary Monopolies". This is accurate, and doesn't tempt the listener to think of something fundamentally unlike property as if it were property. It's rather cumbersome though. Heck, even you, in your post, suggest "Intellectual monopoly rights" as being "more apt". But both of these are quite a mouthful, and still tempt people into thinking of the three concepts as if they were similar. How often do you hear Slashdotters claim that a patent must be defended or be invalidated? Or that if the Linux kernel violates MS's software patents, that MS should tell them which lines of code are infringing so that they can be "changed", as if there is some way to change the NTFS driver (for example) to not violate MS's patents? These mistakes are made by people because they're used to hearing these three completely different legal constructs lumped together, and so they have a hard time keeping them separate.
The whole point of my post, and of his article, was that using the term "property" is counter-productive and worse misleading, and that the disparate nature of the three monopolies makes making generalizations about one from what you know about another dangerous and error-prone.
I believe he knows full well what "Intellectual Property" means -- he is (rightly, in my opinion) trying to point out that we should avoid using the term altogether. I know I may be alienating some of you who harbor ill feelings or feelings of suspicion towards RMS by linking to this, but even if you don't agree with RMS on other issues, I would suggest you read what he has to say about the term "Intellectual Property" before you use the term too much yourself.
The basic thesis of his article is that "intellectual property" lumps three completely different legal constructs (copyright, patents, and trademarks) together even though in reality, they have essentially nothing in common. This suits people who profit from these assets, because by getting people to use the term "intellectual property" they encourage people to think of them as real property, despite the fundamental differences between these concepts. By cultivating this sort of intuitive (but incorrect) understanding, the long term effect is that so-called "IP" laws are tightened and morphed to increase their similarities to real property laws.
RMS is anti-copyright, or at the very least pro-copyright reform (of the extreme, extreme variety). This view is controversial at best, and I know many Slashdotters take a much more conservative position on these issues. However, I doubt very much that any of you would be in favor of eternal copyright, for example -- we all want copyrighted works to fall back into the public domain at some point, even if we differ on the details of when exactly that should be.
But consider, if copyrights were treated like real property -- something people who profit tremendously from copyrights would like -- copyrights would never revert to the public domain.
In China, property rights (real ones) are like copyright in the US today. That is, property belongs to the state, and you only "own" it for some renewable period (70 years, I think). Since Deng Xiao Ping's economic reforms were enacted, this is really just a formality, something left over from old school socialism -- unless you're unlucky enough to have property that's worth an awful lot and unwilling to sell it, "extension" on your "ownership" is pretty much automatic. Of course, this isn't de facto all that different from the US what with eminent domain and all, but I want you to see something sinister here: the idea that property reverting to the commons is "socialist". Europeans may not see the big deal here, but in the USA, "socialist" is synonymous with "evil" and calling something socialist is a very effective political weapon.
Now, there's a very good reason that copyright and real property are different: the former is not truly scarce, in the sense that any perceived scarcity is enforced by a government granted monopoly (not necessarily a bad thing). Real property, for example land, is truly scarce. If the land your house is built on "reverts" to the state, well, surely you can see how unfair that would be -- because you'd have to move out of your house. But with copyright, say a program you wrote, your work entering the public domain does not take the program away from you. You still have it.
As long as people don't think of copyright as property -- I'm singling out copyright here because I know the most about it, others can comment on trademarks and patents, which are very different animals and cannot be treated the same way -- it's fairly easy to make them understand that having a temporary copyright term with eventual reversion to the public domain is not socialist at all. But if they think of it as property -- which they will, if they don't care much about the issues, are ignorant of the legal distinctions, and are constantly hearing the term "intellectual property" bandied about -- a politician saying that having limited copyright terms is a socialist notion will seem reasonable to them.
Beijing is huge -- think New York, or LA. People were on foot, so of course they weren't right on the other side of the city, but they were allowed to retreat quite far before they were shot at. They were still shot at, of course.
My ex's father told me that they were in a residential neighborhood when the army descended on them. I don't know what Beijing was like in 1989 -- doubtless far less developed than the city I know today -- but you do need to go pretty far out of the city center to find residential areas.
So perhaps 30 blocks away is the best of the options you've given me.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I've made mine. If you'd bothered reading my post, you'd see that mine is not to use Windows. Here's the reality: that doesn't make a lick of difference to MS's bottom line. Which was my point.
If we ever go to war with China, they're fucked too. We buy all their shit, and all of their money is tied up in US treasury securities.
This is why we will never go to war with China. Fuck Taiwan.
As I said, I've done just that. The point is, it does not have the intended effect -- namely punishing MS for its bad behavior by hurting its bottom line. As long as MS has corporate desktops locked up, many people will need Windows at home for interoperability purposes. And even if everyone at home had Linux or Mac, and interfaced with Windows completely by VPN, that's still ignoring the fact that most of MS's income comes from corporate clients, who aren't going to substitute away from Windows anytime soon.
I applaud anyone who uses something else at home -- I know it can be done, I do it myself. But the OP was suggesting that we could convince MS to act differently by hurting their bottom line, as if any of us really had the power to apply that power individually or as a group.
The "vote with your feet" fallacy depends on the notion that each and every consumer is equal, when in reality that's not at all the case. The analogy with democracy and voting would only hold if some citizens had the ability to vote a million times and the vast majority only once. Because that's how this works: MS makes most of its money in the corporate market, and the decision to buy ten thousand Windows licenses is not made by the people using the product, but by the CTO, who (for reasons I explained earlier) cannot easily choose to do anything else.
In a democracy, everyone has an equal say, and that's one of the cornerstones of the democratic philosophy. In a market-based system, those who have more money have more say, because "votes" are purchased, not tallied. We all like to bitch and moan about the TCO lies that MS bandies around, but in reality, for most companies, Linux isn't the least bit feasible, because so much of their existing industry depends on Windows cruft, much of which they produced themselves. The Mac is even less feasible, because you actually do need to license Mac OS, and you need to run it on specific hardware -- at least Linux is low cost and runs on commodity hardware.
Windows is not a simple commodity, like say, milk. If milk were like Windows, then changing your brand would mean you couldn't eat breakfast with your family unless they all changed brands, too. This is what I mean when I say that libertarians treat all markets as if they were perfectly competitive with low barriers to entry. In reality, there are network effects, and barriers to substitution, and all sorts of other things that make the mere existence of a competitor inadequate. Just because Apple, Redhat, Ubuntu, SuSE, etc, exist, doesn't mean that the market is suddenly competitive. Markets are only competitive if consumers can actually substitute to a competitor's product. The OS market has low barriers to entry, but it is not competitive.
This is completely off the top of my head, but do you remember how early C compilers used to only recognize the first six characters of a function name? So, for example, create_foo() and create_bar() were recognized the same way.
Now, in essentially every program in the world there is a function named 'create_something' or alternatively 'createSomething'. Had Ken Thompson's creat() function been spelled create(), early C compilers would have treated them the same way, thus making any function starting with "create" useless (not to mention resulting in error-prone behavior: which function actually gets called? It varies by compiler...)
By naming the function 'creat', KT neatly sidestepped the whole problem. I wonder if that's why he did it? Either way, if he did it all over again, and this time named the function create(), no early programs would have been able to have any function that started with those six letters. Our programming habits would thus be quite different. Perhaps we'd have to say creat_foo() instead...
I never use the creat() function anyway (it's just an alias for open()) so frankly I prefer it this way. Of course, today's compilers no longer have the silly 6-character rule, but if you're aiming to write über-portable code, it's still advisable to have all your function and global variable names unique in the first six characters. There are utilities that will verify that this is the case for you.
By the way, do you have a source for that quote? I've heard it too, but I'd be interested in knowing where KT said it.
In other words, OOXML will be what everyone uses?
Great.
This "vote with your feet" bs needs to stop, seriously. It takes an overly simplistic look at the way a market actually functions in the real world -- which is not the same as the way it functions in this libertarian day dream. The fundamental problem with libertarianism is that it treats all markets as if they were perfectly competitive markets with low barriers to entry, when in reality, the vast majority of them are not.
If you seriously believe that substituting away from Windows, or from Word, is something that the vast majority of people here can actually do, then you're absolutely wrong. Listen, I don't own a Windows system -- I use Debian GNU/Linux exclusively. But Word and Windows are the defacto standard and living outside of that standard is impossible. Let's look at the facts:
Whether you want to admit it or not, there is massive inertia in the industry. Everyone runs Windows, and that keeps everyone else running Windows. "Just don't buy MS" is the most ridiculous statement in the world. Sure, if everyone stopped, then that would hurt their bottom-line. But even if every Slashdotter ever stopped buying Windows, MS would still be making billions. Every time a court slaps a fine of a hundred million dollars on MS, everyone on Slashdot whines about how it's a slap on the wrist and nothing more, because the company makes so much money it's sick. The exact same logic applies here.
What you're suggesting would only work if a large percentage of MS's clients all defected. It's like saying, "Big Oil acting badly? Just don't buy oil! That'll teach 'em!"
Come on, this isn't a perfectly competitive market. It's a monopoly. There's a reason economists think that those are bad.
This seems like a no-brainer to me. You don't even need a window manager, although there are some minimalist ones that will do the trick for things like the preferences window, etc. Firefox has font-size adjustment, so that's not a problem, and you can theme gtk to be high contrast with large font sizes in the menu, etc.
Why make life difficult on yourself?
This is not actually true. The burden of a tax levied on a product sold to a consumer is shared by both the manufacturer and the consumer. To see why this is, you must take secondary effects into account, mainly as relates to the law of demand: the higher the price of a good, the greater the incentive the consumer has to substitute away from that good. The result is that price and quantity demanded are inversely proportional, absent any other effects. This is balanced by the law of supply -- but it is the law of demand that most affects tax burden, so we'll concentrate on that in this post.
The law of demand affects distribution of tax burden in a relatively predictable way:
From the consumer side, how much the consumer is affected by the tax depends largely on how easily he can substitute away from the good or service in question. This is known as elasticity. Some products, like say, peanut butter, can be substituted fairly easily: there are many brands, and for many consumers, there are other products (like almond butter, or jam, or whatever) which they could use instead of peanut butter. So we say that demand for peanut butter is fairly elastic: consumer demand for peanut butter is very sensitive to price changes. Other products, like gasoline, are the opposite: they are very inelastic, at least in the short term, because most people (especially in the US) have little choice in how much they drive and cannot really subsitute away to another product.
So it should be clear that how much of a tax is paid by the consumer and how much is paid by the corporation depend greatly on the demand elasticity for the good whose price is affected by the tax. When a tax is levied on a highly inelastic product (such as gas or cigarettes), the consumer bears nearly all the burden, because the increased price on the good will cause very little change in demand for said good. But on other products, like luxury goods, the corporation will end up bearing most of the burden, because higher prices will drive away consumers without compensating the company.
I'm not really sure what you mean when you talk about non-person entities and corporate income tax -- the "personhood" of a corporation has to do with limiting liability, not with tax. People and corporations are taxed differently already, so I think you may be slightly confused, or perhaps I misunderstood you.
As for your idea of taxing dividends, remember that a corporation is under no obligation to pay dividends and some in fact never have -- it's true that much equity valuation theory (such as the dividend discount model) make the assumption that all corporations will pay dividends at some future date, but this is at best a useful fiction. Higher taxes on dividends will simply have the effect of reducing shareholder demand for high dividend payout on common stock, and transfer that demand to capital gains.
Tax has strange effects on the market and it's not always easy to see how things are going to work; remember that any corporation is always trying to maximize its profits and the introduction of a tax at any level is always going to affect the price of goods and services produced by a company. If you make equity financing more expensive by levying higher taxes on dividends or capital gain
I cannot believe this was moderated insightful.
That's the opinion of the FSF, which I hope is correct, but in reality, the question of whether dynamic linking constitutes a derivative work or not is very much a legal gray area without any sort of precedent set by the courts.
The truth is, until some judge out there rules that dynamic linking does indeed constitute a derivative work, we can't be sure whether the GPL applies or not.
I hope it does, though.
According to your link, the name for bang in INTERCAL is wow, actually. The sibling poster is more correct: see the entry on bang in the Jargon file for more information.
That's cool. I never knew "payed" was a legitimate spelling in American English at least. You learn something new everyday.
Fair enough. As an aside, your use of "straw man" and "red herring" don't seem to fit into my understanding of the terms. Perhaps you can explain? As I understand it, a straw man argument is when you say something which I wish to refute, but instead of refuting the thing you said, I refute another, usually related but inequivalent statement. As for "red herring", I always thought it was the introduction of extraneous information into an argument, often with the intent of distracting the person you're arguing with from your main point. Was I mistaken on either of these counts?
In particular, if I assert something that you agree with or have never disputed, it is not a straw man argument (at least as I understand it -- but as you've pointed out, logic is not my strong point.) So, for example, saying you never disagreed with me about the multiple uses of "yuan" does not make my assertion that yuan is used in multiple ways a straw man argument. It just means that we probably agree with each other on that point. Arguments are typically formulated first by finding out where we agree, and then by finding out where we disagree. If you disagreed with everything I say, how are we ever supposed to find common ground?
Also, you now claim to be taking issue with the article summary, rather than the article itself. That's fair enough, but before you get upset, please note that you never specified this -- the summary and the article used, as you noted, exactly the same wording. How am I supposed to know which you meant? Either way, though, this statement -- that the article was written for a Singaporean audience -- does not seem to be a straw man, either, because again, I am not misrepresenting your argument, I am simply saying something that is evidently true and which by itself refutes nothing. This seems to be simply a miscommunication. I assumed that when you said article, you meant article, not summary.
The comment about Singlish, again -- I'm not sure how this could be construed as a straw man argument. First, this statement by itself refutes no argument at all, so how can it be me refuting an argument you didn't make? That's what I understand a straw man to be -- you claim A and I refute A', which while perhaps similar to A is not logically equivalent to A and thus does not in fact constitute a proper refutation of your argument. You also suggest it could be a red herring, which means that you feel that this statement has no bearing on my argument -- in that case, perhaps you simply don't understand why I brought it up? Only to note that the average Singaporean frequently mixes Chinese and English, and therefore quite conceivably might say "yuan" instead of "dollar" to refer to their own currency. You may disagree with this statement, but it was fairly central to my argument, and so it cannot be a red herring, at least not as I understand it.
Also, for the record, I did not attempt to prove my point using Google. I included that information simply because you have at times said that your own web searches made you think that one should use "yuan" and that using "renminbi" was wrong; I just wanted to provide some context from the same source for you to consider. Consideration means, at least to me, that you think about it and draw your own conclusions, even if they're the same conclusions you started with. They do not constitute a refutation.
I am not a computer, or a philosopher, and I do on occasion make arguments that do not follow -- and I do not mind being called on it when it happens. I cannot guarantee that I have, over the course of our debate, kept my discourse entirely free of logical fallacies, but please let me assure you that despite what you may think, if I have failed in this regard it is due to oversight, not malice. Please do let me know if I make a mistake, but please make sure that the mistake you're pointing out is in fact the mistake you think it is.
For what it's worth, this appears to be the essence of our disagreement:
To be fair, the comics that one was a response to -- the ones published in Denmark which were supposedly an affront to Islam -- weren't actually funny, either. Like this one, they were at best provocative for the sake of it, and at worst racist.
I think the Muslims in this case have a good point -- all cultures have their sacred cows. Islam feels very strongly about producing images of their prophet, which is why (unlike with the religious figures in most religions) you never see paintings of him in mosques or elsewhere.
Likewise, Europe feels very strongly about the Holocaust, and as a result has banned most discourse on the subject which is not in line with mainstream thought.
I understand and empathize with the perspectives of both groups -- just as I empathize with Americans who want to see the constitution amended to make flag burning an illegal act -- but in all of these cases, I see the freedom to say what you want, no matter how vile, as being much more important to the functioning of a free society than ensuring that no one is offended.
After all, everyone is offended by something: if we made it all illegal, we'd never be able to say anything. But if we pick and choose what we're sensitive about, we're necessarily discriminating. The best option, in my opinion? Let people say what they want, no matter how much it pains us to hear it.
Wow, you guys were seriously trolled. HAND.
I mean, NetBSD as a distro of Linux? Come on, don't make it so easy for them!
CNY is the ISO-4271 standard, no argument from me. You're simply taking one list as official while I'm taking another. The two are in common use, but CNY isn't very common in China, probably for political and linguistic reasons. We use RMB in my work, and most Chinese use RMB (not surprisingly, as it is shorthand for a Chinese term, their term, etc.) CNY is an English acronym, so its root is less clear to Chinese speakers. But I'm agnostic on which to use. They're both quite common, and everyone that works much with the currency is aware of both of them. But here's something for you to consider, as a side point: if a term like "RMB" is in such wide use, despite not being the official ISO standard, what does that say about the popularity of the term it stands for?
Anyway, let's be totally clear about this. Here's your original post, titled "I'm pretty sure the currency..":
Since you insist that we are just debating your point, let's restrict ourselves to that. Here are some facts to consider, which you can verify.
The conclusion to draw, here, is that the use of yuan, within the context of a Singaporean audience, could have been ambiguous. Your assertion that "the currency .. .. should in this case be referenced as yuan, not renminbi" is therefore incorrect.
As I've stated in my previous posts, I don't think there's ever a time that using "renminbi" is wrong, but I think it's pretty clear that you're not on the same page with me there, and that you're not going to budge on it. So for closure, I'd just like to point out, that in any case, your original point -- the one we are ostensibly debating, because conversations are apparently not allowed to evolve -- is far more trivially debunked than the much more widespread claim I "reframed" the argument into.
Here's something else for you to consider: why is it correct to say "250 RMB" but not "250 renminbi" in your mind, when the former is simply shorthand for the latter? Or do you dispute that "250 RMB" is correct? Since you're fond of google, consider the following data:
Are you being deliberately dense? You cannot say "san renminbi" in Chinese because the grammar does not allow it! How many times have I said this already? When I said "There's nothing wrong with saying renminbi", it should have been completely clear that use of the term, like the use of any term, is necessarily restricted by grammar. Look, would the following post make sense?
I mean, I'm at a loss. Is this really the argument you're trying to make?
You may feel like I'm being condescending because I talk like I know I'm right -- a crime you yourself are guilty of, incidentally, but not one I'm likely to take offense to -- but at least I've taken the time to actually read and respond to your posts.
Sometimes, it's not the least bit clear you actually bothered to read mine.
I think it's great that you have such well-educated Chinese friends. I'm at a loss, however, as to why you are asking them about proper English usage. True, no one would say "san renminbi" when speaking Mandarin, as I outlined (in some detail) in my previous post, because Chinese requires a measure word between the "san" and the "renminbi". That measure word, as I said before, could be "kuai", or "yuan", or even "jiao", "mao", or "fen", depending. Between "yuan" and "kuai", the latter is far, far, far more common in colloquial Chinese than "yuan", which is formal and mostly used in writing. But in English, as we lack measure words, we omit them in translation. I have no doubt that to a native Chinese person, "three renminbi" sounds strange, because it is an English word glued onto a Chinese word without a measure word in between. Thankfully, we don't care what they think.
Having established that yes, in Chinese, no one would say "3 renminbi", we can move on to the subject at hand: whether such a phrase is acceptable in English. I explained to you that those of us that work in Forex prefer to say renminbi, because it unambiguously refers to the mainland's currency. It also sounds a lot like RMB, which is the official acronym for the currency (I think you can guess what it stands for). "Yuan," on the other hand, while commonly used in other contexts, can refer to lots of currencies.
You seem to have accepted this, and are now arguing that there would have been nothing wrong with the author of the submission using the term "yuan" in place of "renminbi". This is what is known as a straw man fallacy -- creating an argument I never made and shooting it down instead of the one I did. To reiterate, what you said originally was that the author of the article was wrong and that "renminbi" should not be used, and that "yuan" should be used instead. To this I countered that there was nothing wrong with using "renminbi." I then elaborated, explaining that "renminbi" is actually preferable to "yuan" for a number of reasons. Now, if the thesis of your argument were: "It would have been ok to say 'yuan' instead of 'renminbi' in the context in question", I would agree with you, and that would be the end of it. People frequently say "yuan" when speaking English, especially when the context is clear, and lamentably even when it's not (although those people are likely to not be the sort that work with Asian currencies much). This, however, is not what you are claiming.
You are claiming that using "plain 'renminbi' is still wrong", to quote. In this, you are completely incorrect.
Perhaps I should put this another way: if you were asked by a foreign friend whether saying "30 USD" was incorrect, what would you tell them?
You'd probably say: "If you're in the US, it would be better to say '30 dollars', but if you're discussing the currency in an international setting, saying USD might be better, because there are lots of currencies that are denominated in dollars." You most certainly would not say "no, saying '30 USD' is incorrect" (if you did, you'd be doing your friend a grave disservice, and most everyone who works in international finance would have words with you on the matter).
This situation is analogous, as I have already said several times now. To extend the analogy, you might argue that in an article about the US, just saying "30 dollars" is acceptable, and that saying USD is redundant (which of course would not be the case if the article were written with an Australian, Canadian, or New Zealand audience in mind). But you would never say that saying USD is wrong. That would be ridiculous.
Similarly, in this situation, the article, which was authored by IDG News Service in Singapore, used the term "renminbi" instead of "yuan". It discussed China, certainly, so perhaps the context was clear -- then again, when speaking Chinese, as most of Singapore does, the Singaporean currency is also called "yuan" (in
You probably should have responded in the last thread, because this is all off-topic here. I never once said that yuan is not used, just that it is uncommon, except occasionally in writing, and sometimes when dealing with very large sums. If you'll recall, someone (you?) was saying that using renminbi in the context of the article summary was incorrect, and that yuan should be used; I countered by saying that there was nothing wrong with saying renminbi, and that yuan was ambiguous and anyway not particularly common when one is speaking Chinese.
You are correct that no Chinese person would say "3 renminbi" directly (san renminbi) when speaking Mandarin, but this has to do with Chinese grammar, and the usage does not carry over into English. Chinese has an extensive system of measure words. For example, in English we might say "3 sheets of paper" or "3 heads of cattle", but generally speaking, when counting objects it is acceptable in most cases to just prefix the noun with the number: "3 people", "3 US dollars", "1 chair", "3 desks", etc. Chinese, however, never allows one to directly prefix a number to a noun. Every noun has an associated measure word, which functions in a manner analogous to "sheets of" and "heads of" in the previous examples. With me so far?
Because English doesn't make much use of measure words, and when it does they are often optional, when translating a Chinese expression to English one generally simply omits the measure word. For example, 3 people in Chinese is "san ge ren", the middle "ge" being the measure word. But when we translate it into English, we drop the "ge", because there is no equivalent word in English, as it is not required by our grammar. We simply say 3 people.
Similarly, with currency, renminbi is the name of the currency, but as with all other objects in Chinese, you cannot simply prefix a number to the front of it and call it a day. This, however, is Chinese usage and not English usage. When we translate "san kuai renminbi" into English, we omit the "kuai" (which is a measure word for pieces) and just say "3 renminbi", or, if the context is clear, we might say "3 yuan".
So what about the word yuan in Chinese? It too is a measure word, specifically for money. Because it is specific to money, and because speakers of western languages are generally not particularly aware of the whole measure word thing, it has been imported into casual English as the name of the mainland's Chinese currency, when really it just means something like "units of" and is the grammatical glue that allows us to connect "3" and "renminbi" together.
Further confusion arises from the Chinese habit of omitting the noun and keeping the measure word if the noun is clear; in fact, this is required by the grammar. So for example, to extend it to an English example, this is like saying "3 sheets" and omitting "of paper". Except in English, if I asked you how many sheets of paper you needed, you could say "3" and omit sheets; not so in Chinese.
The thing is though -- and your Chinese friends will confirm this -- that while saying "3 yuan renminbi" is most certainly not incorrect, it is exceedingly uncommon in speech; Chinese speakers prefer to say "3 kuai renminbi", where kuai is the counter for pieces of a whole (and if you really do have friends from Beijing, you can confirm that Beijing speakers omit the erhuayin on the word kuai when talking about money specifically, and tend to put the erhuayin in other contexts as a means of disambiguation).
Furthermore, kuai/yuan is not the only counter used when dealing with money, it is only the one used when dealing with whole units of currency. "mao" is used when dealing with tenths of a unit, and "fen" when dealing with hundredths of a unit; so 3.50 RMB is "3 kuai 5 mao renminbi", or more colloquially, "3 kuai 5".
So, to recap, in the same way that we would not translate "3 ge ren" into English as "3 ge people", we don't generally translate "3 kuai renminbi" as "
Bbbut... That's microevolution! Right? Right?
Apes, man, apes. Not monkeys. Apes.
Are you smoking crack? (emphasis mine)
They are government granted monopolies, certainly. Over ideas -- no, not at all. Patents could possibly be construed as being a temporary government granted monopoly on the application of an idea, specifically, an idea for the construction of a machine.
Copyrights have nothing to do with ideas. Copyright only applies to works you have already created, whether they be art or words on the printed page. If you describe to me your idea for a novel, and I later write a novel based on your idea, you have no legal claim, despite my capitalization on your idea. Copyrights do not protect ideas. They protect information, and only in certain forms.
Trademarks, likewise, have nothing whatever to do with ideas. As you said yourself, they protect a specific usage of a phrase (or image) with respect to a product. I fail to see how this relates to ideas at all.
You clearly know what copyrights, patents, and trademarks are, that much is clear from your post, but your assertion that they all have to do with ideas is silly, unless you concede that everything begins with an idea; if you do that, I think you've made your argument so broad as to be meaningless.
Mentioning the framers of the constitution and how they placed copyright and patent law next to each other is not only an appeal to authority, but it also assumes that the reason for this was because they saw a connection (no proof of that), and that that connection had to do with ideas (likewise no evidence). While I could see seeing the two as related -- both involve temporary, government sanctioned and enforced monopolies -- your addition of the term "idea" (presumably to help justify the use of the term intellectual property) doesn't really seem relevant at all.
Listen to yourself: "... they are government granted monopolies over 'ideas'. Obviously, copyright protects your expression of an idea, patents protect a process, and trademarks protect a specific usage of a phrase with respect to a product." Well... "your expression of an idea", "a process", "a specific usage of a phrase with respect to a product"? Even your own explanation fails to make the similarities clear.
If any term is going to be used to cover all three concepts, it should be "Government Sanctioned Temporary Monopolies". This is accurate, and doesn't tempt the listener to think of something fundamentally unlike property as if it were property. It's rather cumbersome though. Heck, even you, in your post, suggest "Intellectual monopoly rights" as being "more apt". But both of these are quite a mouthful, and still tempt people into thinking of the three concepts as if they were similar. How often do you hear Slashdotters claim that a patent must be defended or be invalidated? Or that if the Linux kernel violates MS's software patents, that MS should tell them which lines of code are infringing so that they can be "changed", as if there is some way to change the NTFS driver (for example) to not violate MS's patents? These mistakes are made by people because they're used to hearing these three completely different legal constructs lumped together, and so they have a hard time keeping them separate.
The whole point of my post, and of his article, was that using the term "property" is counter-productive and worse misleading, and that the disparate nature of the three monopolies makes making generalizations about one from what you know about another dangerous and error-prone.
I believe he knows full well what "Intellectual Property" means -- he is (rightly, in my opinion) trying to point out that we should avoid using the term altogether. I know I may be alienating some of you who harbor ill feelings or feelings of suspicion towards RMS by linking to this, but even if you don't agree with RMS on other issues, I would suggest you read what he has to say about the term "Intellectual Property" before you use the term too much yourself.
The basic thesis of his article is that "intellectual property" lumps three completely different legal constructs (copyright, patents, and trademarks) together even though in reality, they have essentially nothing in common. This suits people who profit from these assets, because by getting people to use the term "intellectual property" they encourage people to think of them as real property, despite the fundamental differences between these concepts. By cultivating this sort of intuitive (but incorrect) understanding, the long term effect is that so-called "IP" laws are tightened and morphed to increase their similarities to real property laws.
RMS is anti-copyright, or at the very least pro-copyright reform (of the extreme, extreme variety). This view is controversial at best, and I know many Slashdotters take a much more conservative position on these issues. However, I doubt very much that any of you would be in favor of eternal copyright, for example -- we all want copyrighted works to fall back into the public domain at some point, even if we differ on the details of when exactly that should be.
But consider, if copyrights were treated like real property -- something people who profit tremendously from copyrights would like -- copyrights would never revert to the public domain.
In China, property rights (real ones) are like copyright in the US today. That is, property belongs to the state, and you only "own" it for some renewable period (70 years, I think). Since Deng Xiao Ping's economic reforms were enacted, this is really just a formality, something left over from old school socialism -- unless you're unlucky enough to have property that's worth an awful lot and unwilling to sell it, "extension" on your "ownership" is pretty much automatic. Of course, this isn't de facto all that different from the US what with eminent domain and all, but I want you to see something sinister here: the idea that property reverting to the commons is "socialist". Europeans may not see the big deal here, but in the USA, "socialist" is synonymous with "evil" and calling something socialist is a very effective political weapon.
Now, there's a very good reason that copyright and real property are different: the former is not truly scarce, in the sense that any perceived scarcity is enforced by a government granted monopoly (not necessarily a bad thing). Real property, for example land, is truly scarce. If the land your house is built on "reverts" to the state, well, surely you can see how unfair that would be -- because you'd have to move out of your house. But with copyright, say a program you wrote, your work entering the public domain does not take the program away from you. You still have it.
As long as people don't think of copyright as property -- I'm singling out copyright here because I know the most about it, others can comment on trademarks and patents, which are very different animals and cannot be treated the same way -- it's fairly easy to make them understand that having a temporary copyright term with eventual reversion to the public domain is not socialist at all. But if they think of it as property -- which they will, if they don't care much about the issues, are ignorant of the legal distinctions, and are constantly hearing the term "intellectual property" bandied about -- a politician saying that having limited copyright terms is a socialist notion will seem reasonable to them.
With recent copyright term extensions in the US
Beijing is huge -- think New York, or LA. People were on foot, so of course they weren't right on the other side of the city, but they were allowed to retreat quite far before they were shot at. They were still shot at, of course.
My ex's father told me that they were in a residential neighborhood when the army descended on them. I don't know what Beijing was like in 1989 -- doubtless far less developed than the city I know today -- but you do need to go pretty far out of the city center to find residential areas.
So perhaps 30 blocks away is the best of the options you've given me.