I write software for a large company, and get paid rather well for it. I just don't expect to get paid EVERY TIME they use or copy my software. If I want to keep on getting paid, I have to keep on writing NEW software for them.
It would have surprised Shakespeare to learn that his plays were not the property of his theatrical company. It would have surprised him even more to see them performed by a rival.
Ummmm...no. He might've been pissed off (perhaps gotten involved in sword fight or an act of petty revenge), but the playhouses & writers of those times copied & ripped each other off all the time - Shakespeare is well-known for the amount of stuff he ripped off from his contemporaries.
Here and here are links which mention the copyright context in Shakespeare's time. The first link is specifically about Shakespeare & describes how he had to fight to make money from his plays, and the 2nd mentions Shakespeare briefly in the context of an argument of why copyright is a good idea (which I don't necessarily agree with), but both of them are fairly straightforward that copyright as we know it did not exist in Shakespeare's time, and that he did not depend on copyright in order to make a living.
Personally, I think what will happen in 10, 20, and 30 years is that these college kids will finally get real jobs and realize that when folks steal their stuff without compensation, they don't get paid.
Oh, bull. They'd get paid like every other craftsperson: by rendering services for appropriate compensation.
"IP Providers" have a artificially-inflated idea of their own self-worth, supported by the artificially-inflated cost added by "intellectual property" laws. Get rid of those laws, let people provide goods or services in a normal market scenario, and then you'll get a proper valuation of what such services are really worth.
Yes, I've read that blurb (and others) - and noted that he isn't actually advocating legislation to force Christianity upon the public, only that there NOT be legislation which stops anyone from pursuing their own religious agendas. As much as I dislike blind religious faith, this is entirely consistent with his other stances on the Constitution.
As far as abortion is concerned, again, although I dislike his personal opinions, his Constitutional stances are still consistent. There's enough controversy about the way that Roe v Wade decision stretched the bounds of the privacy Amendment that (given the new makeup of the Supreme Court) that his state-rights interpretation of the abortion issue might get traction there.
At that point, depending on how repressive various states become, there might be a lot of young women who will realise how much they were taking for granted by not becoming involved in the political process to protect their own right of choice. Either way, it's a conclusion that should be coming from the grass-roots up, not imposed from the topdown.
OTOH, if another case goes through the Supreme Court, and they make another Roe v Wade decision again, I'm pretty sure he'll abide by it due to his respect for the system (unlike people like Bush & Co).
I think there's a good for-the-general-good argument to be made for decent, solid, consistent education for all members of the society - but I don't think the current state of the U.S. educational system is making that argument very well.
In support of the U.S. educational system, it has done pretty well for quite a few generations of citizens, but it seems to be having more problems than usual lately, it doesn't seem to be coping with those problems well, and there seems to be quite a bit of resistance to the experimentation necessary to find new ways of educating that might provide a path to fix those problems.
If you'd done any research on his positions at all(it's all over the web), you'd have read that he bumps any abortion-decisions off to the states - as is consistent with his its-none-of-the-federal-government's-business position.
There is no denying that he has a firm anti-abortion personal opinion, but when it gets down to the legislation, he has been pretty darn consistent about trying to push everything down to state-level decisions.
If you're going to criticize stuff about him, please research (and report back) on his opinions on the separation between church & state. Evangelicals have been giving me a serious case of the political heebie-jeebies for years, and the thought of those irrational numbskulls gloating over being able to plaster religious mumbo-jumbo all over government offices & in schools puts me on edge.
I heard from a lawyer relative that the smart judges like to give people rope to hang themselves with.
It's very frustrating when you're a lawyer on the opposite side since it seems like the judge is always on the opponent's side, but the judge will keep letting the smartass get deeper and deeper until they've blocked themselves from every possible avenue of escape, then the judge pulls the trapdoor out from underneath them.
There might be very short-duration reasons why the pilot might want to push the limits of the aircraft (testing and/or outrunning missiles). If you can trust the competency of your highly-trained pilot, then you can give them a little more flexibility than if you are trying to "idiotproof" a commercial solution.
There's many ways of setting up a personal VPN, including stuff that looks like surfing to an encrypted web site. As usual, those in-the-know will still have the power.
Better yet, organize a nationwide competition like that. After all the fighting is done, the people left over can shoot the winner & then go about electing a president based on intelligence & wisdom rather than aggression.
I've started thinking that there should be some kind of limit on how big any single company can get.
The "free market" works best when you've got a decent number of smaller vendors competing for customers. Limiting the max size of companies would also make the labor market more of a "free market", where workers would have choices about where they could work.
Layoff decisions at any particular company wouldn't have such a major effect on the job market & economy. Similarly, criminal activities such as fraud or dumping pollutants would be limited in scope per each company due to the max size of the company (plus the companies wouldn't have such overwhelming legal resources to crush valid lawsuits against them).
The major disadvantage, of course, is dealing with projects that require economies of scale. That could probably be taken care of by having specialized "logistics" companies, whose sole purpose is to organize the efforts of a large # of smaller companies via contract.
Colonialism is not "official" genocide, that's still unofficial. Official genocide by a nation/state is where the government announces to the world that they are deliberately wiping out every inhabitant of a targeted area, and the general population is publically supporting their actions.
Gandhi would have never survived his passive-resistance tactics if the Brits had been willing to practice genocide. The fact that the British public couldn't stomach the reports of utter brutality coming back from India was a significant factor in the effectiveness of such passive-resistance tactics.
Even in the situation with the American Indians, where there was quite a bit of evidence of large groups of soldiers & settlers driving the Indians off lands in an organized fashion, the new U.S. & state governments had to at least make a token effort to set up "reservations" where the remnants of the Indian tribes were allowed to live, rather than out-and-out destroying all of them.
I can't deny that a fair number of large countries have used warfare tactics with genocide-like results, but I can't think of a single example where the entire country (including the general population) flat-out stated that they were using those tactics for the sole purpose of committing a genocide, and not because of some other rationalization. If you can find a reasonably-recent historical example of a decent-sized nation/state (& the general public) that explicitly stated that their purpose was to completely eliminate ALL of the enemies in a targeted area, I'd be interested in hearing it.
I stand by my statement that any nation/state with enough power to disturb the world order, who was using genocide as an officially-supported form of foreign policy, would cause every other nation in the world to unite against it simply for the sake of their own survival.
To put it another way, all those rich lawyers and doctors and executives who don't have kids ought to be cast down from their authority to the very lowest class of our society.
Point taken about the "material social ties to the future of civilization", but I'm going to be very reluctant to surrender control over my own life to people whose only qualifications might have been an inability to keep their pants on.
You're wrong. Pro-abortion is saying that you WANT abortions to occur. Pro-choice is when you want the woman to have the ultimate choice of whether or not she has an abortion. It's not that difficult to understand, unless you've closed your mind.
One rather wonders what would have happened if in 2003 we hadn't sent an Army but just airdropped a few million pacifists into Iraq to sing songs and cuddle with everybody.
We should've sent the guys who said we were going to be greeted with candy and flowers.
Slashdot Mirror
I write software for a large company, and get paid rather well for it. I just don't expect to get paid EVERY TIME they use or copy my software. If I want to keep on getting paid, I have to keep on writing NEW software for them.
Ummmm...no. He might've been pissed off (perhaps gotten involved in sword fight or an act of petty revenge), but the playhouses & writers of those times copied & ripped each other off all the time - Shakespeare is well-known for the amount of stuff he ripped off from his contemporaries.
Here and here are links which mention the copyright context in Shakespeare's time. The first link is specifically about Shakespeare & describes how he had to fight to make money from his plays, and the 2nd mentions Shakespeare briefly in the context of an argument of why copyright is a good idea (which I don't necessarily agree with), but both of them are fairly straightforward that copyright as we know it did not exist in Shakespeare's time, and that he did not depend on copyright in order to make a living.
Oh, bull. They'd get paid like every other craftsperson: by rendering services for appropriate compensation.
"IP Providers" have a artificially-inflated idea of their own self-worth, supported by the artificially-inflated cost added by "intellectual property" laws. Get rid of those laws, let people provide goods or services in a normal market scenario, and then you'll get a proper valuation of what such services are really worth.
That's more of an ethical issue of fraud/plagiarism. Copyright infringement woudl be a secondary issue in that example.
Yes, I've read that blurb (and others) - and noted that he isn't actually advocating legislation to force Christianity upon the public, only that there NOT be legislation which stops anyone from pursuing their own religious agendas. As much as I dislike blind religious faith, this is entirely consistent with his other stances on the Constitution.
As far as abortion is concerned, again, although I dislike his personal opinions, his Constitutional stances are still consistent. There's enough controversy about the way that Roe v Wade decision stretched the bounds of the privacy Amendment that (given the new makeup of the Supreme Court) that his state-rights interpretation of the abortion issue might get traction there.
At that point, depending on how repressive various states become, there might be a lot of young women who will realise how much they were taking for granted by not becoming involved in the political process to protect their own right of choice. Either way, it's a conclusion that should be coming from the grass-roots up, not imposed from the topdown.
OTOH, if another case goes through the Supreme Court, and they make another Roe v Wade decision again, I'm pretty sure he'll abide by it due to his respect for the system (unlike people like Bush & Co).
I think there's a good for-the-general-good argument to be made for decent, solid, consistent education for all members of the society - but I don't think the current state of the U.S. educational system is making that argument very well.
In support of the U.S. educational system, it has done pretty well for quite a few generations of citizens, but it seems to be having more problems than usual lately, it doesn't seem to be coping with those problems well, and there seems to be quite a bit of resistance to the experimentation necessary to find new ways of educating that might provide a path to fix those problems.
If you'd done any research on his positions at all(it's all over the web), you'd have read that he bumps any abortion-decisions off to the states - as is consistent with his its-none-of-the-federal-government's-business position.
There is no denying that he has a firm anti-abortion personal opinion, but when it gets down to the legislation, he has been pretty darn consistent about trying to push everything down to state-level decisions.
If you're going to criticize stuff about him, please research (and report back) on his opinions on the separation between church & state. Evangelicals have been giving me a serious case of the political heebie-jeebies for years, and the thought of those irrational numbskulls gloating over being able to plaster religious mumbo-jumbo all over government offices & in schools puts me on edge.
The Larch.
It doesn't have anything to do with right or wrong - most nationalists (not just Americans) have an "us" versus "them" attitude.
I heard from a lawyer relative that the smart judges like to give people rope to hang themselves with.
It's very frustrating when you're a lawyer on the opposite side since it seems like the judge is always on the opponent's side, but the judge will keep letting the smartass get deeper and deeper until they've blocked themselves from every possible avenue of escape, then the judge pulls the trapdoor out from underneath them.
There might be very short-duration reasons why the pilot might want to push the limits of the aircraft (testing and/or outrunning missiles). If you can trust the competency of your highly-trained pilot, then you can give them a little more flexibility than if you are trying to "idiotproof" a commercial solution.
What if McCain was singing "bomb bomb Iran" in an airport?
*wark* *wark* *wark*
Attempt at starting religious emacs vs vi. flame war has been detected!
All civilians evacuate to the safety zones!
Repeat,
All civilians evacuate to the safety zones!
There's many ways of setting up a personal VPN, including stuff that looks like surfing to an encrypted web site. As usual, those in-the-know will still have the power.
That's GNU/Stallman, you insensitive clod.
Better yet, organize a nationwide competition like that. After all the fighting is done, the people left over can shoot the winner & then go about electing a president based on intelligence & wisdom rather than aggression.
If privacy becomes a serious enough issue, then somebody will build an auto-encrypting memory interface (with a volatile key register).
Of course, the DRM folks will insist on a section of memory that only THEY have the key for, and the government will insist on key escrow, etc, etc...
Chain of reasoning:
Amendment IV (and probably V) -> implied right to privacy -> implied right to anonymity
Of course, each link in that chain has been, is, and will be argued in the courts,
with varying degrees of agreement on their validity.
I've started thinking that there should be some kind of limit on how big any single company can get.
The "free market" works best when you've got a decent number of smaller vendors competing for customers. Limiting the max size of companies would also make the labor market more of a "free market", where workers would have choices about where they could work.
Layoff decisions at any particular company wouldn't have such a major effect on the job market & economy. Similarly, criminal activities such as fraud or dumping pollutants would be limited in scope per each company due to the max size of the company (plus the companies wouldn't have such overwhelming legal resources to crush valid lawsuits against them).
The major disadvantage, of course, is dealing with projects that require economies of scale. That could probably be taken care of by having specialized "logistics" companies, whose sole purpose is to organize the efforts of a large # of smaller companies via contract.
Only in certain localized areas. Unfortunately, the global average temperature is still going up.
Colonialism is not "official" genocide, that's still unofficial. Official genocide by a nation/state is where the government announces to the world that they are deliberately wiping out every inhabitant of a targeted area, and the general population is publically supporting their actions.
Gandhi would have never survived his passive-resistance tactics if the Brits had been willing to practice genocide. The fact that the British public couldn't stomach the reports of utter brutality coming back from India was a significant factor in the effectiveness of such passive-resistance tactics.
Even in the situation with the American Indians, where there was quite a bit of evidence of large groups of soldiers & settlers driving the Indians off lands in an organized fashion, the new U.S. & state governments had to at least make a token effort to set up "reservations" where the remnants of the Indian tribes were allowed to live, rather than out-and-out destroying all of them.
I can't deny that a fair number of large countries have used warfare tactics with genocide-like results, but I can't think of a single example where the entire country (including the general population) flat-out stated that they were using those tactics for the sole purpose of committing a genocide, and not because of some other rationalization. If you can find a reasonably-recent historical example of a decent-sized nation/state (& the general public) that explicitly stated that their purpose was to completely eliminate ALL of the enemies in a targeted area, I'd be interested in hearing it.
I stand by my statement that any nation/state with enough power to disturb the world order, who was using genocide as an officially-supported form of foreign policy, would cause every other nation in the world to unite against it simply for the sake of their own survival.
Hey, those tree-hugging druids get along REALLY well with dryads, if you know what I mean.
Point taken about the "material social ties to the future of civilization", but I'm going to be very reluctant to surrender control over my own life to people whose only qualifications might have been an inability to keep their pants on.
You're wrong. Pro-abortion is saying that you WANT abortions to occur.
Pro-choice is when you want the woman to have the ultimate choice of whether or not she has an abortion.
It's not that difficult to understand, unless you've closed your mind.
We should've sent the guys who said we were going to be greeted with candy and flowers.