Perhaps it is a flawed metaphor (as all metaphors by definition are) but can you think of a better one? A love fest perhaps (wherein you give something, love, but still possess it after you give it, and soon there are a lot of children who all have your eye color...no, wait...)? In the marketplace, ideas are like money trees, the ultimate renewable resource (though with logarithmically decreasing value potential over time and use); but they are, in fact, traded, and the closest system we have to describe such a mechanism of trade is a market.
That we should make books illegal. After all, for competition they are the epitome of unfair (they don't require a player, they have free rental distribution, they don't effectively track users, they are portable, user friendly, and have low power consumption, and, goddamit, people have been training to use them since the age of five!), and clearly if there were fewer books distracting people, they would see more movies and listen to more music.
Re:How much editorial oversight is enough?
on
When Wikipedia Fails
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Most professors I know would bitchslap a student six ways from sunday from using any secondary source whenever it was possible to reference a primary. Heaven help you if you referenced Britannica, never mind Wikipedia. The more enlightened and less cranky of them advised us that we should use Britannica and Wikipedia as a good way to get a quick overview of a completely unfamiliar or tangential topic, which in turn suggests what areas of primary research to pursue (as primary research is time intensive). I consider that to be good advice.
Re:Too recent & controversial for an encyclope
on
When Wikipedia Fails
·
· Score: 1
I was reading along fairly smoothly until:
...even though the entry is hopelessly biased (articles on US, Israel etc edited by muslims and Islamic Fundamentalists etc).
And everything ground to a painful halt. Are you saying that, in a community with a diversity of opinion, people adverse to the subject at hand should not have a hand in editing, but those who are not should? Are Swiss people going to be the only ones doing Country articles from now on? And then who does Switzerland?;) I know this is painful for some to realize, but the perspectives of, for the current example, Muslims on the State of Israel represent a facet of the truth, important in itself, with its own strengths and biases. Is it *more* important than that of Israeli citizens? No, of course not. That's the point of the Neutrality policy. And the demand for citations and sources allow any claim made from one of these points of view to be trackable back to its source (a la the Phenomenological Method).
An article written about the US, or any other nation, without contributions from critics and patriots would be an article impoverished of critical aspects of the truth that fall well within the ability of an encyclopedia to treat, within the bounds of its own policy.
Re:Too recent & controversial for an encyclope
on
When Wikipedia Fails
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I would agree that Wikipedia is poor at reporting stories that are both recent AND controversial - but to be fair, I don't think those are the kinds of things you should be looking up in an encyclopedia anyway.
The comment above is just the sort of comment that deserves a few 'insightful' mod points. Sometimes, pointing out the blindingly obvious is difficult when people so desperately want things to be something other than what they are. Wikipedia is, at best, something *like* an encyclopedia, and as such should serve similar purposes. Some people think that somehow there is a way to take the human element and passion out of a user-contributed site, or any site, or any work or endeavor of humankind for that matter. There isn't. Let us simply understand that you can't have the factual accuracy and neutrality of an encyclopedia for something that occurred yesterday; technology alters the quantity and speed of information, not its quality. If you want neutrality, you must wait for cooler (and further removed) heads to prevail.
Way to miss the context of the conversation. We were talking about whether kids should have these things. Yes, in my world as well, guns are a tool taht can be used well or poorly. However, children don't, by and large, have the capacity to tell in many situations what a good or bad use of tools are, and so we keep the more dangerous ones out of their hands. It's easier for a ten year old who doesn't know much about alcohol (and is smaller in general) to drink themselves to death upon finding a bottle of good vodka. Or, for a poignant example, accidentally blow their friend's head off playing cops & robbers with a real gun.
If everyone were a real, honest-to-goodness, think-before-acting, rational adult creature, I'd be right there with ya. As it stands, kids, at least, don't meet those qualifications, and putting certain tools in their hands is therefore an outright poor idea. My original point was that some tools (mainly for entertainment) are deemed dangerous by society but really are not, such as books, movies, and games, of all genres and levels of prurience; at least, not nearly as dangerous in the hands of a child as, say, a loaded gun.
Any moment in which he is giving testimony is one more moment in which he is not raping some poor defenseless franchise of its worth, dignity, and scruples. So, those moments? Worth their weight in gold. Heck, one moment testifying is one moment closer for him to oblivion. Assuming he's human.
My personal experience with the older gamer crowd is that, yes, while there are a few 'old' twitch gamers left, most tend to leave the hand-eye coordination gymnastics to more flexible youngsters. And I was exaggerating (perhaps unfairly) to emphasize the basic point that I still believe correct: the average fifty-five year old parent/legislator knows a shite sight more about a 30.06 rifle than he/she does about Half Life 2; and being thus informed make stupid and hypocritical legal and parenting decisions.
Oh that's where I basically disagree. The UN charter (which all the above nations are signatories) defines fairly explicitly what is and is not a legal use of force. Sure, you could say that since the UN never actually passed a resolution saying for sure (using the absurd standard already discussed) that there is no ruling defining this or that conflict as an illegal war, but nonetheless a reasonably intelligent person can look at the charter and come to a reasonable and supportable opinion for a war's legality or lack thereof. And that opinion is not so easily dismissed in a discussion about the relative legality of wars.
Before you go on with the "illegal war" rants, I advise you to search hard for UNSC resolution(s) condemning it as such...
I'm sorry, but that's just a ridiculous, impossible standard. Security Council resolution? USA is ON the security council. Permanently.With a VETO. It's kind of like demanding that a rape victim go get an affidavit from their attacker confessing the crime before they can go to trial.
And there I was all agreeing with you, till you pulled that.
"Yeah, but I like guns. That flashy screen is the devil's work."
And that's the real problem. Guns are yesterday's toys. Video games are tomorrow's. Adults, by and large, get guns, they do not get video games. Yeah, sure we all spew the statistic about how the gamer population is aging, but seriously, those are people who play zork, king's quest, and fucking tetris (or their modern equivalents). Just like people protested the waltz, the novel, the TV, and Elvis Presley, the curmudgeony old folks can take their well earned completely hypocritical and misinformed crack at the entertainment of their kids. It's a tradition, you see. Let 'em get it all out of their system. You can embarass them with it when they retire, and then they can laugh at you when you cry about how the new 3d Holovids of badass interactive porn are gonna warp your kids.
Shhhh!!! Damn it, dude, you're gonna spoil the secret! Banning video games is easy. Solving bullying is hard. For fuck's sake, think of the children and keep that sensible shit to yourself.;)
Difference: Alcohol kills. Cigarettes kill. Guns, believe it or not, kill. Video games do not. (Yeah, I don't count the idiot who starved to death playing for days straight.) Nor do movies, nor does music. Nor ponro mags, nor prurient posters, nor Shakesperean plays. See the difference? (Occasionally books move humans to kill, re: politics, re: religion. But those folks were pretty messed in the head to begin with. And rarely under 18 these days, in any case.)
Have enough faith that the speech portion of the 1st amendment, which is fairly clear and defended pretty damn consistantly even by the 'conservative' members of SCOTUS, that things will work out alright...that is, if they don't fall for that 'games aren't expression' crap. Oh wait: tech issue, new medium, crotchedy old justices. Damn, maybe we are screwed all along.
What, you don't think they don't still read the ol' snail mail? Dude, get your tinfoil cap tightened, it's breathing too much. Loose foil lets the bad rays in.
What do you think? Is fixing someone else's property an immoral act? It's usually an illegal act, unless you have their consent, but since when is what is legal the determinant of what is moral?
I am soooooooo glad you don't run things. Did your daddy do anything naughty? Do you even know? Would you feel comfortable taking his sins upon yourself? His sons and daughters didn't choose to be born from his loins, you idiot.
I'm fairly sure that Mr. Energy Company CEO had life insurance before he stole those millions. Life insurance is an asset of the beneficiaries of the policy, not the payee. Thus, making the life insurance payouts that would go to his children instead go 'somewhere else' is a perverse description of justice.
Here's where things get subtle, and if you think I'm stretching things, by all means disagree and make fun of me.
When an advertiser is negotiating with a network to place adverts in a program, they do so with several things in mind; the price of the ad is related to how many people watch the program at any given time, that some will pay attention to the commercials and some will (like you) go make tea, or even take the effort to pause a VCR to avoid them in the future. These behaviors are factored in to the original 'calculation', if you will, tht goes on in the advertiser's head when he tries to determine whether it is worth it for him to place the ad. However, despite the most assiduous efforts of the adphobic, the vast majority of persons watching the TV sit through the ads and watch them. What the advertiser is buying is a reasonable chance you will lazy enough to watch his/her 45 seconds of consumer candy; if you choose not to do so after the ad (which is embedded in the program you chose to watch) reaches you, that's not 'theft', becuase it was part of the original calculation.
Now, significantly, the problem with the downloaded programs is that, 99% of the time, the adverts are stripped out before the program reaches the viewer. Thus, it is no longer a choice or effort for the viewer to avoid the ad, it is done for them. The thing that the advertiser was buying, namely the ability to have a chance to get your attention, is gone, and their investment is made worthless. Whether that should actually be a tort or not depends greatly on how intentional the harm was, and its scale. Regular time shifting, single copies for archival use, stuff like this are (or at least should be) covered under fair use. Copying an entire television series with the adverts pre-stripped (such as what the original example was) is obviously enough of a deliberate harm that it should incur civil penalties. (Criminalizing this sort of thing I think is absolutely moronic).
Please post this every single time people start crying about piracy.
Perhaps you didn't read so carefully, but in the same pint-sized summary the USSC did say that a copyright-infringement is an invasion of a lawfully protected zone and interferes with the ability of a person to profit from their own property. That it does not deprive the owner from the literal ownership of the property does indeed distingush it from theft. But that certainly doesn't therefore mean that therefore copyright-infringement is somehow okay.
Perhaps there is a strong technical distinction between theft and copyright infringement, but I see no strong ethical distinction, as both involve taking possession for personal purposes or enjoyment something for which the person who legally controls it is not compensated for its use. Some say that using words like 'piracy' and 'theft' to describe copyright infringement is intellectually dishonest; they may be right. However, I would say that the far greater and more harmful deceit that which argues that because a crime has no convenient word assigned to it in the language, and the victims are almost uniformly repulsive greedy people, that therefore it is OK to commit it. And these morally demeted people are not Robin Hood; songs and movies, while nice, are neither bread for the stomach nor a roof for the head.
Are there legitimate and ethically clean uses for file-sharing? Of course; fair use is a useful legal doctrine (which should be used, fought for, and probably slightly expanded) that delineates the legitimate use of technologies that copy information whose licence is owned by another. As I've said elsewhere, the **AA's position on these issues is as ridiculous and perhaps as morally bankrupt as the one the 'pirate' uses to sooth his own conscience. There is a middle way.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps it is a flawed metaphor (as all metaphors by definition are) but can you think of a better one? A love fest perhaps (wherein you give something, love, but still possess it after you give it, and soon there are a lot of children who all have your eye color...no, wait...)? In the marketplace, ideas are like money trees, the ultimate renewable resource (though with logarithmically decreasing value potential over time and use); but they are, in fact, traded, and the closest system we have to describe such a mechanism of trade is a market.
I'm not sure if I should be flattered or annoyed.
How about both? Sounds like a good option to me.
But then shouldn't they have killed you? Something's fishy....
I really have no idea why this was included in the article at all.
For 'balance'. Duuuuhhh!
That we should make books illegal. After all, for competition they are the epitome of unfair (they don't require a player, they have free rental distribution, they don't effectively track users, they are portable, user friendly, and have low power consumption, and, goddamit, people have been training to use them since the age of five!), and clearly if there were fewer books distracting people, they would see more movies and listen to more music.
Most professors I know would bitchslap a student six ways from sunday from using any secondary source whenever it was possible to reference a primary. Heaven help you if you referenced Britannica, never mind Wikipedia. The more enlightened and less cranky of them advised us that we should use Britannica and Wikipedia as a good way to get a quick overview of a completely unfamiliar or tangential topic, which in turn suggests what areas of primary research to pursue (as primary research is time intensive). I consider that to be good advice.
I was reading along fairly smoothly until:
And everything ground to a painful halt. Are you saying that, in a community with a diversity of opinion, people adverse to the subject at hand should not have a hand in editing, but those who are not should? Are Swiss people going to be the only ones doing Country articles from now on? And then who does Switzerland? ;) I know this is painful for some to realize, but the perspectives of, for the current example, Muslims on the State of Israel represent a facet of the truth, important in itself, with its own strengths and biases. Is it *more* important than that of Israeli citizens? No, of course not. That's the point of the Neutrality policy. And the demand for citations and sources allow any claim made from one of these points of view to be trackable back to its source (a la the Phenomenological Method).
An article written about the US, or any other nation, without contributions from critics and patriots would be an article impoverished of critical aspects of the truth that fall well within the ability of an encyclopedia to treat, within the bounds of its own policy.
I would agree that Wikipedia is poor at reporting stories that are both recent AND controversial - but to be fair, I don't think those are the kinds of things you should be looking up in an encyclopedia anyway.
The comment above is just the sort of comment that deserves a few 'insightful' mod points. Sometimes, pointing out the blindingly obvious is difficult when people so desperately want things to be something other than what they are. Wikipedia is, at best, something *like* an encyclopedia, and as such should serve similar purposes. Some people think that somehow there is a way to take the human element and passion out of a user-contributed site, or any site, or any work or endeavor of humankind for that matter. There isn't. Let us simply understand that you can't have the factual accuracy and neutrality of an encyclopedia for something that occurred yesterday; technology alters the quantity and speed of information, not its quality. If you want neutrality, you must wait for cooler (and further removed) heads to prevail.
Way to miss the context of the conversation. We were talking about whether kids should have these things. Yes, in my world as well, guns are a tool taht can be used well or poorly. However, children don't, by and large, have the capacity to tell in many situations what a good or bad use of tools are, and so we keep the more dangerous ones out of their hands. It's easier for a ten year old who doesn't know much about alcohol (and is smaller in general) to drink themselves to death upon finding a bottle of good vodka. Or, for a poignant example, accidentally blow their friend's head off playing cops & robbers with a real gun.
If everyone were a real, honest-to-goodness, think-before-acting, rational adult creature, I'd be right there with ya. As it stands, kids, at least, don't meet those qualifications, and putting certain tools in their hands is therefore an outright poor idea. My original point was that some tools (mainly for entertainment) are deemed dangerous by society but really are not, such as books, movies, and games, of all genres and levels of prurience; at least, not nearly as dangerous in the hands of a child as, say, a loaded gun.
Any moment in which he is giving testimony is one more moment in which he is not raping some poor defenseless franchise of its worth, dignity, and scruples. So, those moments? Worth their weight in gold. Heck, one moment testifying is one moment closer for him to oblivion. Assuming he's human.
My personal experience with the older gamer crowd is that, yes, while there are a few 'old' twitch gamers left, most tend to leave the hand-eye coordination gymnastics to more flexible youngsters. And I was exaggerating (perhaps unfairly) to emphasize the basic point that I still believe correct: the average fifty-five year old parent/legislator knows a shite sight more about a 30.06 rifle than he/she does about Half Life 2; and being thus informed make stupid and hypocritical legal and parenting decisions.
Oh that's where I basically disagree. The UN charter (which all the above nations are signatories) defines fairly explicitly what is and is not a legal use of force. Sure, you could say that since the UN never actually passed a resolution saying for sure (using the absurd standard already discussed) that there is no ruling defining this or that conflict as an illegal war, but nonetheless a reasonably intelligent person can look at the charter and come to a reasonable and supportable opinion for a war's legality or lack thereof. And that opinion is not so easily dismissed in a discussion about the relative legality of wars.
Before you go on with the "illegal war" rants, I advise you to search hard for UNSC resolution(s) condemning it as such...
I'm sorry, but that's just a ridiculous, impossible standard. Security Council resolution? USA is ON the security council. Permanently. With a VETO . It's kind of like demanding that a rape victim go get an affidavit from their attacker confessing the crime before they can go to trial.
And there I was all agreeing with you, till you pulled that.
"Yeah, but I like guns. That flashy screen is the devil's work."
And that's the real problem. Guns are yesterday's toys. Video games are tomorrow's. Adults, by and large, get guns, they do not get video games. Yeah, sure we all spew the statistic about how the gamer population is aging, but seriously, those are people who play zork, king's quest, and fucking tetris (or their modern equivalents). Just like people protested the waltz, the novel, the TV, and Elvis Presley, the curmudgeony old folks can take their well earned completely hypocritical and misinformed crack at the entertainment of their kids. It's a tradition, you see. Let 'em get it all out of their system. You can embarass them with it when they retire, and then they can laugh at you when you cry about how the new 3d Holovids of badass interactive porn are gonna warp your kids.
Shhhh!!! Damn it, dude, you're gonna spoil the secret! Banning video games is easy. Solving bullying is hard. For fuck's sake, think of the children and keep that sensible shit to yourself. ;)
Difference: Alcohol kills. Cigarettes kill. Guns, believe it or not, kill. Video games do not. (Yeah, I don't count the idiot who starved to death playing for days straight.) Nor do movies, nor does music. Nor ponro mags, nor prurient posters, nor Shakesperean plays. See the difference? (Occasionally books move humans to kill, re: politics, re: religion. But those folks were pretty messed in the head to begin with. And rarely under 18 these days, in any case.)
Have enough faith that the speech portion of the 1st amendment, which is fairly clear and defended pretty damn consistantly even by the 'conservative' members of SCOTUS, that things will work out alright...that is, if they don't fall for that 'games aren't expression' crap. Oh wait: tech issue, new medium, crotchedy old justices. Damn, maybe we are screwed all along.
What, you don't think they don't still read the ol' snail mail? Dude, get your tinfoil cap tightened, it's breathing too much. Loose foil lets the bad rays in.
Fucking brilliant. Really, pure gold! This post is why mods should go from -10 to 10, you know, to really separate out the wheat from the chaff.
My comment was more to do with his other assets, cash, bonds etc.
And on that we agree. ;)
What do you think? Is fixing someone else's property an immoral act? It's usually an illegal act, unless you have their consent, but since when is what is legal the determinant of what is moral?
I am soooooooo glad you don't run things. Did your daddy do anything naughty? Do you even know? Would you feel comfortable taking his sins upon yourself? His sons and daughters didn't choose to be born from his loins, you idiot.
I'm fairly sure that Mr. Energy Company CEO had life insurance before he stole those millions. Life insurance is an asset of the beneficiaries of the policy, not the payee. Thus, making the life insurance payouts that would go to his children instead go 'somewhere else' is a perverse description of justice.
Here's where things get subtle, and if you think I'm stretching things, by all means disagree and make fun of me.
When an advertiser is negotiating with a network to place adverts in a program, they do so with several things in mind; the price of the ad is related to how many people watch the program at any given time, that some will pay attention to the commercials and some will (like you) go make tea, or even take the effort to pause a VCR to avoid them in the future. These behaviors are factored in to the original 'calculation', if you will, tht goes on in the advertiser's head when he tries to determine whether it is worth it for him to place the ad. However, despite the most assiduous efforts of the adphobic, the vast majority of persons watching the TV sit through the ads and watch them. What the advertiser is buying is a reasonable chance you will lazy enough to watch his/her 45 seconds of consumer candy; if you choose not to do so after the ad (which is embedded in the program you chose to watch) reaches you, that's not 'theft', becuase it was part of the original calculation.
Now, significantly, the problem with the downloaded programs is that, 99% of the time, the adverts are stripped out before the program reaches the viewer. Thus, it is no longer a choice or effort for the viewer to avoid the ad, it is done for them. The thing that the advertiser was buying, namely the ability to have a chance to get your attention, is gone, and their investment is made worthless. Whether that should actually be a tort or not depends greatly on how intentional the harm was, and its scale. Regular time shifting, single copies for archival use, stuff like this are (or at least should be) covered under fair use. Copying an entire television series with the adverts pre-stripped (such as what the original example was) is obviously enough of a deliberate harm that it should incur civil penalties. (Criminalizing this sort of thing I think is absolutely moronic).
Please post this every single time people start crying about piracy.
Perhaps you didn't read so carefully, but in the same pint-sized summary the USSC did say that a copyright-infringement is an invasion of a lawfully protected zone and interferes with the ability of a person to profit from their own property. That it does not deprive the owner from the literal ownership of the property does indeed distingush it from theft. But that certainly doesn't therefore mean that therefore copyright-infringement is somehow okay.
Perhaps there is a strong technical distinction between theft and copyright infringement, but I see no strong ethical distinction, as both involve taking possession for personal purposes or enjoyment something for which the person who legally controls it is not compensated for its use. Some say that using words like 'piracy' and 'theft' to describe copyright infringement is intellectually dishonest; they may be right. However, I would say that the far greater and more harmful deceit that which argues that because a crime has no convenient word assigned to it in the language, and the victims are almost uniformly repulsive greedy people, that therefore it is OK to commit it. And these morally demeted people are not Robin Hood; songs and movies, while nice, are neither bread for the stomach nor a roof for the head.
Are there legitimate and ethically clean uses for file-sharing? Of course; fair use is a useful legal doctrine (which should be used, fought for, and probably slightly expanded) that delineates the legitimate use of technologies that copy information whose licence is owned by another. As I've said elsewhere, the **AA's position on these issues is as ridiculous and perhaps as morally bankrupt as the one the 'pirate' uses to sooth his own conscience. There is a middle way.