FSF licenses make it impossible to force work done with the software and not embedding parts of thw software to be controlled.
So with all the force and control, where the fuck is the freedom? It's pretty clear where the FSF's emphasis is, and it's pretty much the same as the RIAA's.
It is trying to find loopholes to avoid doing what you would otherwise be required to do.
No it isn't. Nobody sets up a web service in order to find loopholes in the GPL.
This is the FSF engaging in creeping authoritarianism, as could have been predicted. "Oh noes!" they say "People are using freedoms we did not explicitly allow them to have! We must stop that immediately! Release the hounds!".
Furthermore, there is often a big difference between code meant for use locally and code suitable for redistribution. Code often needs a fair amount of cleanup before it can be distributed without embarassment, especially if there are sensitive site-specific changes.
Considering how service websites are often in a fairly continual state of flux, with frequent code updates, this looks to be a real hassle. Or how many modifications are made purely to hack around internal environment issues, and aren't really generalizable?
Overall, it seems like this scheme is designed without any understanding of how opensource code is used in the real world. It's like the FSF lawyers and ideologues designed it thinking only of Google and Amazon and how to stop them.
"Lottery tickets can be a fun diversion, cheaper than getting drunk, but they are not a wise use of cash."
This is true, but it's also true of many things, like overpriced foofy coffee drinks or ringtones or neon highlights on a PC. Somehow, ringtones don't bring out the pedantic moralizers to preach that if you pay $2.99 to put Crazy Frog on your phone the odds of it getting you laid are approximately a googol to the zillionth power to 1 against.
Powerball/Megamillions games seem fairly innocuous to me. The drawings are held on a fixed schedule, and only twice a week, which probably reduces the potential for addiction compared to on-demand instant gratification games like scratch-offs. I think those are much more damaging, and even if someone wins it probably isn't enough to really make a difference in their life - yet they also cost at least $1 per play.
When combined with an office space scheme such as Microsoft's Workplace Advantage, which can be reconfigured in minutes to meet rapidly changing staffing and project requirements, square footage and power use per employee is reduced, and management oversight becomes much easier.
Mike, now you've gone and spilled the beans about the upcoming product, Microsoft Prisoner's Dilemma (tm) which will show you how to maximize productivity by covertly pitting each member of a pair programming team against the other.
Those are just equivalent to performers doing live performances on radio or tv shows, which are recorded and distributed on compilations by the show.
An iTunes Original is not particularly different from, say, a band playing a few songs on World Cafe or Mountain Stage, except that there is usually a broadcast on the air some time before the CD goes on sale.
It should be obvious why sales dropped - it's been a while since the last new iPod release, so people knew that there would probably be something new/bigger/cheaper coming out soon. So they delayed their purchases.
But how many cars do those 110 million households have?
(Hm. It might be a good thing if people got some CFL bulbs free with the purchase of a new car. Maybe GM and Ford could get some environmental street cred if they filled their giant SUVs with $1,000 of free CFL bulbs and fixtures.)
"So which drug makes the animals unconscious during recording?"
That likely would be the anesthetic, at a fairly high dose. The tranquilizer is just that, a tranquilizer to get the animal to chill so the rest of the drugs can be administered safely.
" At similar doses of acepromazine "many dogs seem to be able to will themselves to overcome its effects, at least temporarily" and this wasn't continued during the recording (which I see no mention of when or for how long recording happens before the animal is killed)."
Well, good thing they weren't using just acepromazine, right?
"Go tell the average person that your research includes cutting monkey's eyes in half and attaching a grid of wires to the retina, cutting open their skulls and inserting metal probes into their visual cortex while they are still conscious, since their brain has to be operating normally."
Your brain has no pain receptors. You can't feel anything that is done to your brain. Human beings are conscious when they have brain surgery, too, because the surgeons have to be able to get feedback from the patient during the operation in case anything goes wrong.
"I told them to apply at Dachau for their sparkies & left. Believe me you wouldn't want to go there. I'm with the 'terrorists' on this one."
I expect you'd say the same thing if you were in an operating room where a Caesarian section were being performed, or where a baby was having surgery to repair a heart defect, or where doctors were inserting a shunt to drain fluid from a hydrocephalic child's brain.
Many valuable and worthwhile things appear to be barbaric, if you know nothing else about what's going on.
"On one hand we have an established Harvard Phd, who has testified before the U.S. congress,"
Big deal so has Twisted Sister. So has every two-bit celebrity with a pet cause.
There is no "minimal credibility" required before you can testify before Congress.
Chances are, this woman testified before Congress because some moron in Congress, who already didn't like games, swallowed her ridiculous 'research', and invited her to testify in order to shore up said Congressperson's pre-existing agenda.
"That's a very insightful point, indeed, to ask if this was a temporary, but well-intended, jump into a higher strata, or a long-term thing. You're right, that makes all the difference in the world; it might even make overtime acceptable."
The key thing is that China has a growing middle class, and everyone there knows this. Or at least, everyone in places urban enough to have large factories. And anyone who knows how well the middle class is living will want to join the middle class ASAP. Especially considering that the homes of the poor are being knocked down or sold out from under them in order to build modern new homes for the middle class (and up).
That's why raising their wages probably wouldn't reduce their work hours. They're working for that deeee-luxe apartment, in the sky-y-y. (Or so their kids can have one when they grow up). Also, it appear that China has changed lately, such that various promised social safety nets have been removed. (They may or may not have had much reality before, but now even the promise is gone.) I would expect Chinese workers to feel that they are very much on their own, more than ever before, and so feel the necessity of getting as far ahead as they can, as quickly as they can, while they have their health.
If the factory were in a place where there is *no* social mobility, but just a calcified layer of wealthy sitting on a pile of eternally poor, then I'd be much more concerned.
" Or rather, with increasing prosperity in the Chinese economy, what's stopping the job market from ironing these things out and improving work-conditions?"
I'd guess it'd be the massive population of rural poor who are worse off than the factory workers. Even if factory workers can change jobs easily, there's going to be huge demand for those jobs, so no pressure to improve conditions
It seems to me that someone who works at one of these factories, and lives in the dorms, is probably treating the job like you might treat a temporary job on a freighter or an offshore oil platform. If they're living on-site, then their life is essentially put on hold for the period of employment, and they want to earn as much money as possible during that period. That means lots of overtime, rather than working less and spending the downtime taking advantage of the few recreational opportunities of the factory/freighter/oil platform.
I haven't seen anyone mention is the typical length of employment at this factory that Apple uses. That information would help us understand whether the workers are trapped in this situation, or if they are leaving for other opportunities after some period of saving money. Really, I'd want to see data on length of employment vs. overtime. There may be longer-term employees who work less and have a life outside the factory, and short-term employees who are there to save up a bunch of money ASAP, then leave. (For instance, if they need money to emigrate somewhere.)
"In a complex society such as China this is not the case. There are no significant threats other than from other people. It is these people, or some of them, that force poverty onto others, thereby creating the opportunity for exploitation. Hence the sweatshops and extended working hours."
So, basically, you want to reduce their work hours, so it takes significantly longer to save money to improve their standard of living, thus locking them into a shitty job for the forseeable future, rather than letting them move on to better opportunities.
Which is to say, you want to keep them in their place - low-paying menial labor in a factory, forever.
Your error is in treating the workers as if they were no different than subsistence farmers in a barter economy who have no use for savings, and no options other than farm labor or leisure.
Well, see, if you're in the position where this is the best job you can get, chances are you want to get *out* of that position as soon as possible.
Getting *out* of such a situation generally requires money.
So the sooner the worker can accumulate enough money, the sooner they can get out of the shitty job, and move to a better city, get into a school, or whatever.
Raising their wages won't help - they'll probably *still* want to work lots of hours then, because the driving goal is to get out of the inherently shitty job and improve their standard of living.
Limiting the number of hours that workers can voluntarily work only keeps them from escaping the shitty job as soon as they would like. And if you cut down on the number of hours they can work at one job, they'll probably seek a second job, rather than wasting time being idle.
Things that I consider impermissible are: involuntary overtime, lock-ins, withheld wages, schemes whereby the workers are made to owe the employer ever-increasing amounts of money which keeps them from leaving and reduces their take-home pay, etc. (ie, if the workers were charged for their room & board, with interest, and they wound up "voluntarily" taking on overtime in order to keep up with their mounting debts to the employer. The canonical 'company store' scam.)
But not overtime voluntarily undertaken by the worker. That's called hustle and initiative when you're talking about Western white people.
I'm sure plenty of Chinese college students spend more than 60 hours a week in their studies. Is that also immoral?
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FSF licenses make it impossible to force work done with the software and not embedding parts of thw software to be controlled.
So with all the force and control, where the fuck is the freedom? It's pretty clear where the FSF's emphasis is, and it's pretty much the same as the RIAA's.
It is trying to find loopholes to avoid doing what you would otherwise be required to do.
No it isn't. Nobody sets up a web service in order to find loopholes in the GPL.
This is the FSF engaging in creeping authoritarianism, as could have been predicted. "Oh noes!" they say "People are using freedoms we did not explicitly allow them to have! We must stop that immediately! Release the hounds!".
Really, they're no different from the RIAA.
Someone in Russia should start MyGPL.com, where for mere pennies you can download software with all GPL references stripped from them.
The GPL is about enforcing give and take in the "free software" community
If it's forced, then it isn't given, it's purely taken.
"If you can't live with the AGPL, don't use software licensed under it."
Or ignore it. Civil disobedience. I'm not sure why the AGPL's onerous requirements would be respected when the RIAA's aren't.
Furthermore, there is often a big difference between code meant for use locally and code suitable for redistribution. Code often needs a fair amount of cleanup before it can be distributed without embarassment, especially if there are sensitive site-specific changes.
Considering how service websites are often in a fairly continual state of flux, with frequent code updates, this looks to be a real hassle. Or how many modifications are made purely to hack around internal environment issues, and aren't really generalizable?
Overall, it seems like this scheme is designed without any understanding of how opensource code is used in the real world. It's like the FSF lawyers and ideologues designed it thinking only of Google and Amazon and how to stop them.
WTF? Is that supposed to be a brand name?
A radio built at a scale appropriate to the amount of worthwhile content on the airwaves.
"The target must click through a series of screens"
And engage in a specific pattern of toe-tapping and handwaving.
"Lottery tickets can be a fun diversion, cheaper than getting drunk, but they are not a wise use of cash."
This is true, but it's also true of many things, like overpriced foofy coffee drinks or ringtones or neon highlights on a PC. Somehow, ringtones don't bring out the pedantic moralizers to preach that if you pay $2.99 to put Crazy Frog on your phone the odds of it getting you laid are approximately a googol to the zillionth power to 1 against.
Powerball/Megamillions games seem fairly innocuous to me. The drawings are held on a fixed schedule, and only twice a week, which probably reduces the potential for addiction compared to on-demand instant gratification games like scratch-offs. I think those are much more damaging, and even if someone wins it probably isn't enough to really make a difference in their life - yet they also cost at least $1 per play.
When combined with an office space scheme such as Microsoft's Workplace Advantage, which can be reconfigured in minutes to meet rapidly changing staffing and project requirements, square footage and power use per employee is reduced, and management oversight becomes much easier.
Mike, now you've gone and spilled the beans about the upcoming product, Microsoft Prisoner's Dilemma (tm) which will show you how to maximize productivity by covertly pitting each member of a pair programming team against the other.
Those are just equivalent to performers doing live performances on radio or tv shows, which are recorded and distributed on compilations by the show.
An iTunes Original is not particularly different from, say, a band playing a few songs on World Cafe or Mountain Stage, except that there is usually a broadcast on the air some time before the CD goes on sale.
Basically, the band has to make the case that the bar will make up in cover charges what it loses in alcohol sales.
It should be obvious why sales dropped - it's been a while since the last new iPod release, so people knew that there would probably be something new/bigger/cheaper coming out soon. So they delayed their purchases.
The lawsuit has been amended so now the company is only seeking, like ten cents from the reporters.
But how many cars do those 110 million households have?
(Hm. It might be a good thing if people got some CFL bulbs free with the purchase of a new car. Maybe GM and Ford could get some environmental street cred if they filled their giant SUVs with $1,000 of free CFL bulbs and fixtures.)
"So which drug makes the animals unconscious during recording?"
That likely would be the anesthetic, at a fairly high dose. The tranquilizer is just that, a tranquilizer to get the animal to chill so the rest of the drugs can be administered safely.
" At similar doses of acepromazine "many dogs seem to be able to will themselves to overcome its effects, at least temporarily" and this wasn't continued during the recording (which I see no mention of when or for how long recording happens before the animal is killed)."
Well, good thing they weren't using just acepromazine, right?
For God's sake, use your brain.
"Go tell the average person that your research includes cutting monkey's eyes in half and attaching a grid of wires to the retina, cutting open their skulls and inserting metal probes into their visual cortex while they are still conscious, since their brain has to be operating normally."
Your brain has no pain receptors. You can't feel anything that is done to your brain. Human beings are conscious when they have brain surgery, too, because the surgeons have to be able to get feedback from the patient during the operation in case anything goes wrong.
Ignorant shit.
"I told them to apply at Dachau for their sparkies & left. Believe me you wouldn't want to go there. I'm with the 'terrorists' on this one."
I expect you'd say the same thing if you were in an operating room where a Caesarian section were being performed, or where a baby was having surgery to repair a heart defect, or where doctors were inserting a shunt to drain fluid from a hydrocephalic child's brain.
Many valuable and worthwhile things appear to be barbaric, if you know nothing else about what's going on.
"On one hand we have an established Harvard Phd, who has testified before the U.S. congress,"
Big deal so has Twisted Sister. So has every two-bit celebrity with a pet cause.
There is no "minimal credibility" required before you can testify before Congress.
Chances are, this woman testified before Congress because some moron in Congress, who already didn't like games, swallowed her ridiculous 'research', and invited her to testify in order to shore up said Congressperson's pre-existing agenda.
"That's a very insightful point, indeed, to ask if this was a temporary, but well-intended, jump into a higher strata, or a long-term thing. You're right, that makes all the difference in the world; it might even make overtime acceptable."
The key thing is that China has a growing middle class, and everyone there knows this. Or at least, everyone in places urban enough to have large factories. And anyone who knows how well the middle class is living will want to join the middle class ASAP. Especially considering that the homes of the poor are being knocked down or sold out from under them in order to build modern new homes for the middle class (and up).
That's why raising their wages probably wouldn't reduce their work hours. They're working for that deeee-luxe apartment, in the sky-y-y. (Or so their kids can have one when they grow up). Also, it appear that China has changed lately, such that various promised social safety nets have been removed. (They may or may not have had much reality before, but now even the promise is gone.) I would expect Chinese workers to feel that they are very much on their own, more than ever before, and so feel the necessity of getting as far ahead as they can, as quickly as they can, while they have their health.
If the factory were in a place where there is *no* social mobility, but just a calcified layer of wealthy sitting on a pile of eternally poor, then I'd be much more concerned.
" Or rather, with increasing prosperity in the Chinese economy, what's stopping the job market from ironing these things out and improving work-conditions?"
I'd guess it'd be the massive population of rural poor who are worse off than the factory workers. Even if factory workers can change jobs easily, there's going to be huge demand for those jobs, so no pressure to improve conditions
It seems to me that someone who works at one of these factories, and lives in the dorms, is probably treating the job like you might treat a temporary job on a freighter or an offshore oil platform. If they're living on-site, then their life is essentially put on hold for the period of employment, and they want to earn as much money as possible during that period. That means lots of overtime, rather than working less and spending the downtime taking advantage of the few recreational opportunities of the factory/freighter/oil platform.
I haven't seen anyone mention is the typical length of employment at this factory that Apple uses. That information would help us understand whether the workers are trapped in this situation, or if they are leaving for other opportunities after some period of saving money. Really, I'd want to see data on length of employment vs. overtime. There may be longer-term employees who work less and have a life outside the factory, and short-term employees who are there to save up a bunch of money ASAP, then leave. (For instance, if they need money to emigrate somewhere.)
"In a complex society such as China this is not the case. There are no significant threats other than from other people. It is these people, or some of them, that force poverty onto others, thereby creating the opportunity for exploitation. Hence the sweatshops and extended working hours."
So, basically, you want to reduce their work hours, so it takes significantly longer to save money to improve their standard of living, thus locking them into a shitty job for the forseeable future, rather than letting them move on to better opportunities.
Which is to say, you want to keep them in their place - low-paying menial labor in a factory, forever.
Your error is in treating the workers as if they were no different than subsistence farmers in a barter economy who have no use for savings, and no options other than farm labor or leisure.
Well, see, if you're in the position where this is the best job you can get, chances are you want to get *out* of that position as soon as possible.
Getting *out* of such a situation generally requires money.
So the sooner the worker can accumulate enough money, the sooner they can get out of the shitty job, and move to a better city, get into a school, or whatever.
Raising their wages won't help - they'll probably *still* want to work lots of hours then, because the driving goal is to get out of the inherently shitty job and improve their standard of living.
Limiting the number of hours that workers can voluntarily work only keeps them from escaping the shitty job as soon as they would like. And if you cut down on the number of hours they can work at one job, they'll probably seek a second job, rather than wasting time being idle.
Things that I consider impermissible are: involuntary overtime, lock-ins, withheld wages, schemes whereby the workers are made to owe the employer ever-increasing amounts of money which keeps them from leaving and reduces their take-home pay, etc. (ie, if the workers were charged for their room & board, with interest, and they wound up "voluntarily" taking on overtime in order to keep up with their mounting debts to the employer. The canonical 'company store' scam.)
But not overtime voluntarily undertaken by the worker. That's called hustle and initiative when you're talking about Western white people.
I'm sure plenty of Chinese college students spend more than 60 hours a week in their studies. Is that also immoral?
Everybody knows the China law "usually" doesn't mean anything, the Capitalist around the world build factories to torture the China workers
Historically, the greatest torturer of Chinese workers has been the Communist Chinese government.