My actual view is that the chief distinction between American imperialism and other imperialism is that we gave ours up without being defeated and forced to give them up. America came to colonialism late, reluctantly, and didn't last long. I don't consider WWI, WWII, Korea, or Vietnam to have been about imperialism at all.
We come reasonably close to some agreement there.
Imperialism is completely contrary to the american character and constitution. We were born out of its backlash, after all. And, for awhile, we were perceived as friends to all colonised people (look at the phillipines, for instance) as a result. And, for awhile, with the exception of course of the north american first nations (a real exception, but one that didn't initially affect relations around the world) we acted that way. And I would argue continuing to act that way was in the genuine interest of the republic.
But the 'leaders' couldn't, in the end, resist the temptation to play that game themselves. First against Mexico. Well, ok, their were plenty of excuses there. And a huge expanse of land the Mexicans weren't doing much with. It was a small start.
Then, with Spain. It certainly didn't start out as an Imperialist adventure (or, more likely, was carefully spun in the other direction, as the american people wouldn't have stood for it.) The Teller amendment was an explicit denunciation of such ambitions after all. We would fight, not to steal Cuba, but to free it! And we did, sort of.
Ahh, but Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Phillipines! We could take those and still free Cuba!
Of course, the Phillipines had their own 'George Washington' in the person of Aguinaldo. They had been fighting for their independence for two years already, and essentially had it won, with or without us. But we were the great anti-imperialists, already on the scene in force, and offered a helping hand. So naturally they took it. And then we stabbed them in the back, and our own republic in the process. But certainly some people got rich off that.
WWI and WWII really follow the same pattern, in one way - they reflect a few powerful people using their influence and authority to maneuver the republic into wars that are in their interest, but not in the interest of the republic. And also the propoganda pattern - the US population was not friendly to the idea of imperialism, and all the stops had to be pulled out to spin things so they would swallow it. But clearly, this was playing the imperial game, what Samuel Clemens called 'the European game' rather than 'the American game.'
This sentiment: "they're equivalent" directly contradicts this one: clearly the larger body count is even worse
No, it doesn't. These are questions of morality, as well as practicality, and they are not simple integer values. Murder is murder. Rape is rape. In that sense they are equivelant, wrong, and also against the interest of the republic, which gains nothing but loses much from such acts.
Equivalent does not mean precisely equal in every way. (If it did, we wouldn't need the word, as it would be indistinguishable from its shorter relative 'equal.') It's a slightly more broad word, encompassing not just true equalities, but 'substantial similarity' as well.
It's in that latter sense I would say these things are equivalent. They are substantially similar, and one cannot consistently approve of one without approving of both.
This is a fact of stunning obviousness that is enshrined in the laws of virtually all civilized nations: if you're found guity for murder the sentence you receive will be proportional to the perceived "wrongness" of the crime. If what you say is true (e.g. "murder is murder") then the sentence for murder would be (for example) 25 years. Period. If you were a serial killer and had murdered 15 people the sentence would be 25 years for all of them. If you got in a bar fight and killed someone your sentence
I think the real problem here, at least what annoys me, is you seem to have an attitude that what America does must be either out of self-interest or for moral reasons. As though they are mutually exclusive.
Then you're pretty much completely misunderstanding me.
There is no contradiction between 'for moral reasons' and 'for reasons of self-interest.' Of course a short-sighted, ignorant, or narrow-minded view of self-interest can lead to problems, as can short-sightedness ignorance and narrow-mindedness in general, but 'enlightened self-interest' is eternally the best hope for moral action.
There is a huge issue, in addition, where we tend to gloss over the difference between the general good, that is the self-interest of america as a republic, and the particular good - the advantage of the individual actors, who hold positions of authority in that republic. It is often to their individual advantage to act completely against the interest of the republic, and those interests consistently wind up being pursued at the expense of the general good. This, in a nutshell, is the problem.
You seem to also believe that if America is not consistent than every right act they've done is meaningless.
Not at all.
I'm quite aware of the Rape of Nanking, the history of comfort women, etc. If you think in any way I'm minimising or defending those events, you're completely misunderstanding me. But, the sad fact is, they aren't actually all that exceptional. Every country that's engaged in imperialistic adventure has been responsible for similar acts. The history of the US in the Phillipines is, frankly, no less ignoble, even if there was no single incident in it to rival the body-count of Nanking. I repeat, every imperial player winds up doing things like this. The lesson I would draw from that is to refrain from playing that game. The lesson you appear to be drawing from it is it's ok to play the game, because the other players are evil and deserve it. I don't see how you can justify that, or what twisted logic might lay behind it, however. Even if the other players are evil and deserve it, the other players don't take the bulk of the damage. Innocent third parties do. Playing the game makes you evil, just as it has the other players. And it's certainly not in the interest of the republic to do so, however much it may be in the interest of a few powerful individuals who stand to gain from it.
If Americans raped, say, 100 Filiplinos (JUST AS AN EXAMPLE) and the Japenese raped 100,000 (AGAIN, HYPOTHETICALLY) would you say the two are equivalent? I think not.
So raping 100 people is alright, as long as someone else rapes 100,000? Where did you learn logic like that?
Of course, they're equivelant, rape is rape, murder is murder. And of course that doesn't mean they're indistinguishable either - clearly the numbers count for something, and clearly the larger body count is even worse, but both cases are fundamentally wrong, for the same reasons and in the same way.
To tie this point back to earlier posts, keep in mind that Stalin murdered more people than Hitler did.
I think the answer to 1 is that obviously they were not. Americans didn't occupy Manilla and then spend 6 weeks raping everything that moved. They just didn't. They did engage in scorched earth policies against villages, and there were unforgivable atrocities but: a) not on the scale of the Japanese and b) American soldiers were also the victims of atrocities where, by contrast, Nanking fell essentially without resistance.
No, it's worse than that, actually. Are you familiar with the Moro Crater massacre? Do you realise it was the rule, not the exception? The surviving writings of many US Soldiers, as well as that of the Phillipinos, supports that contention. Are you familiar with the history of how we got to that point? Quite possibly the most dishono
Isolationism is a boogey-man anyway. No one is isolationist. It's just a word warmongers throw around to smear the rest of us. Call us neutralists, or republicans, but isolationist isn't accurate at all. 'Peace and free trade with all, entangling alliances with none.' That isn't a recipe for 'isolation,' but for the opposite. If you really want to be isolated, engage in a never ending series of foreign adventures and make enemies everywhere.
I'm sure they told themselves that when they were raping women in Korea... and then in Manchuko... and then in Indonesia... and then in the Phillipines
Of course they did. Just like the US did in the Phillipines, talking about 'Benevolent Assimilation' and praising 'heroes' for the slaughter of entire tribes.
You throw around bullshit phrases like: "that's so hypocritical; Europeans were doing it, why couldn't the Japanese?" as if that somehow reflects anything but your own idiocy.
By definition, since it's true, it's not bullshit.
It doesn't excuse anything, but it does point one to a realistic understanding of the situation, rather than a propogandistic one. Who was it that said "let he who is without sin throw the first stone?"
It was wrong when the Europeans did it, and it was wrong when the Japanese did it.
Very good! You're starting to get it, perhaps. That was the point.
Now go back and read your history books again, with that realisation in mind, and you might start to understand what I've been saying.
But most certainly the aggressors had to be stopped
Which aggressors?
The Serbian aggressors, or the Austrian? The Russians, or the Germans? The British and the French?
This is the entire point. All the major powers were aggressors here! Even some of the minors. The Serbs (their government, that is) really was involved in the murder plot, after all. Or in WWII, again, which aggressors? The Germans or the Soviets? You see, taking this 'stop the aggressors' imperative seriously would have meant declaring war on BOTH alliances, in both wars!
That's hardly practical, it's ludicrous. Better to let the aggressors exhaust their resources on each other. There is no moral imperative to be the worlds policemen, or the worlds daddy. Better to do as Washington said, and behave like a Republic, minding her own business, always ready to trade, always ready to defend herself - but never wandering abroad in search of dragons to slay.
And that doesn't resemble in the slightest what I said, but it does bear, I fear, a striking resemblance to what some people will read into it, regardless, because they're incapable of actually thinking the issues through instead of just jerking their knee.
Hitler was a megalomaniacal bastard, responsible for hundreds of thousands, probably millions, of deaths, a proponent of a sick ideology, a warmonger and a racist and a very dangerous fool. But he was not the only such, by a long shot, in fact he was arguably second rate at all of that in comparison to Stalin. The end of Hitler's regime, and his life, was undoubtedly a good thing as such - but to ignore the fact that, as it occured, it meant the security of Soviet rule over a much larger portion of the globe, and far more people, than Hitler ever had a realistic hope of holding, is hardly intellectual honesty. To claim a 'necessity' of aiding one sick bastard in his fight with the other makes no sense to me at all, other than as propoganda serving the purposes of those who desire war for other reasons entirely.
It would have been nice to save the Poles, the Slovaks, the Czechs, the Hungarians, certainly, but that didn't happen anyway. They all wound up under the boot of the other sick bastard, and stayed there for decades, after all.
There were a long string of actions, undertaken by the US government rather quietly, to provoke such a response. In 1940 the Panama canal was closed to japanese shipping, and an embargo was placed on them, particularly prohibiting the shipment of scrap iron to Japan, which their industry relied on heavily. In '41, Japanese assets were seized throughout the country, and the US Navy imposed a blockade on all oil shipments to Japan. These are acts of war. All diplomatic efforts to resolve the situation were rebuffed.
Yes, the japanese attacked - but quite relunctantly. Had the US President been truly 'isolationist' rather than simply mouthing the words to match public sentiments while relentlessly working to provoke an attack on the sly...
If pacifists had had their way, Hitler would have had a damn site more than "a small corner of the world".
Not at all. Hitlers held Germany and Austria, a good chunk of central europe, a tiny portion of the globe. His ambition was to overrun eastern europe - Bohemia, Poland, and all the way to Moscow. And that meant he had to fight Stalin.
Remember Stalin? At least as evil as Hitler, at least as mean, at least as ambitious. Those two were heading for a fight, no two ways about it, and pity all the poor folks stuck between them, to be sure, but no one else had to be involved. Left to their own devices, they would have ground each other to Hamburger, and whichever one 'won' would have been left too weak to be much of a threat to the rest of the world anyway.
British fighting spirit was not enough alone to keep the Nazi's out of UK.
Britain (and France!) should have stayed out of it in the first place. Since their politicians were far too greedy for glory to do that and insisted on jumping into a fight that was far beyond their weightclass, yes, they would have gone down eventually. Even so, the addition of a little Island in the north sea, and even the more substantial chunk of western europe that is France, to Germany and Austria would hardly have transformed Hitlers Reich into a global Empire. Europe is a small percentage of Earth's landmass.
With Britain out of the picture and America still pacifist there's no Western front. The Soviet army managed to stop the German onslaught by a whisker. Given the complete attention of the Germany army, not to mention the finest German commanders like Rommel who would no longer be dueling the Brist in North Africa, the USSR would have fallen.
A possible, though I would say far from assured, conclusion. And? This would be a bad thing?
Think about it.
Is this your idea of a "small corner of the world"? At this point Germany would have contolled everything form the UK to China to S. Africa.
Not at all. First you're exagerating the land area considerably (the Soviets never controlled China, just Siberia, which is a totally different thing - and even if the Germans had managed to destroy the Soviet army and taken Moscow, that's still a very long, cold journey from Kamchatka) - you've gone from 'defeated the red army' to 'controls all the territory of the soviet union' in one huge, unwarranted leap.
Had the Germans taken Moscow, what that would have bought them is not control over that vast territory - an asset, as you're conceiving it. You're making the same basic mistake, predicated it would seem on the same basic misunderstanding, Hitler did in conceiving this plan. Think about this - did the conquest of Holland make Germany stronger? How about Belgium? France? Bohemia? Poland? Were those, in the end, assets to the third Reich? Quite the contrary, they were liabilities. In each case, and if you'll study history a bit you'll see this is hardly exceptional, these conquests were at least as much liability as asset. In each case, territory was added, yes, but that territory was occupied by a hostile population. Resistance cells formed immediately. Germany had limited manpower and limited resources, and each conquest stretched her thinner, because hostile populations cannot be trusted, they must be occupied, patrolled, kept under heel firmly or they bite back. This is the weakness of Empire. Germany barely managed to keep something resembling control of France and the low countries for a few years. The Soviet Union? Russia alone is over 6.5 million square miles and the full Soviet Union was a good deal more than that! This is hundreds of thousands of people, several times the population of Germany, spread over a VASTLY larger area. Germany trying to control Russia, even if a military conquest was accomplished, would be something like a dog trying to hold a bear pinned. An exhausting
Do you really believe there's any rational people out there who WANT war?
To the degree that sociopaths can be considered rational, absolutely. Every war makes some people dead, some people poorer, but also some people greatly more powerful and more wealthy. That last group of people tend to be the ones that actually get to make the decisions, and as long as they value their own wealth and power over the life, liberty, and property of the rest, war is a rational choice for them.
The problem is that sometimes peace first requires war, whether you want it or not. I know a lot of poeple have misgivings about premptive policies and interventionalist practices, but there are plenty of examples of when war is not just justified (like in Afghanistan or the first Gulf war), but required (like WWI and WWII).
In fact your examples work against you.
I'm not a pacifist, and I'm not going to argue that violence is never necessary, but certainly in your cases, from a US-centric viewpoint, war was neither justified nor necessary in any of those cases. Afghanistan? Come on. A stupid move, stepping up and hitting the same tarbaby we used against the Soviets not so long ago, completely unecessary, accomplishing nothing whatsoever. There were some legitimate goals that were used to justify it (notably, arresting OBL) but note that OBL was never captured? Note further that there were much cheaper (in terms of money and blood) options to pursue him, which all evidence suggests would have been more effective, and at any rate could certainly not have been less effective, as he's still out there podcasting today.
WWI and WWII were closer, but look at them closely and you'll see that, at least for most of the participants, they were unecessary unjustified and avoidable. WWI was sparked by the assassination of the Archduke of Austria, you'll recall. Austria declared war on Serbia. Unjustified, unnecessary, and monstrously immoral - a handful of criminals killed a man, and the response is to attack an entire nation in retaliation. Lest we feel too smug in our moral superiority over those nasty Austrians, though, recall that this is very similar to the current conflict, however - a violent, criminal act answered by more violent, criminal acts, against entire nations, and not even the nations the attackers came from, in the current version!
At any rate, Austria could have chosen not to go to war in WWI. And, in fact, they didn't immediately go to war - first they delivered an Ultimatum. It was one any sovereign nation would have difficulty accepting, but given the vast superiority of the Austrian armed forces, Serbia had to consider it. And they probably would have accepted it, and avoided war, but for the 'great game.' The Russians, always looking for a chance to best their Austrian rivals in the game, encouraged the Serbs to reject it, promising protection. Thus encouraged, the Serbs refused, and Austria declared war.
Now at that point, the Serbs, of course, had to defend themselves. But no one else had to be involved. But the Russian government wanted in. They mobilised their troops. The German government, also, wante in. They called up their troops, and sent the Russians an ultimatum to stand down. The Russians continued mobilising. The Germans declared war. The Germans, of course, were allied with Austria. The Russians were allied with France. These alliances were not necessary - they were chosen by the governments involved. They were part of that same game. Any of these added participants could have avoided the great war, by avoiding that game. The people of these countries would certainly, in the main, have been vastly better off had they done so - but small, influential groups of people saw vast riches and enourmous power to be gained from playing the game, and those people made the decisions.
The Germans, anticipating that France would strike in support of Russia and Serbia, decided to take the initiative and hi
Do you think "creative, non-violent responses" would have been sufficient to end the Holocaust faster than the Holocaust ended all Jews? That's really all this boils down to.
There can be no question of this, for the simple reason that Jews were (and still are) spread throughout the entire world, and Hitler never controlled, nor had any realistic prospect of controlling, more than a small corner of the world.
He was a mass murderer, and I certainly wouldn't want to minimise that - but he never had any chance of destroying all Jews.
I'm not saying that non-violent alternatives shouldn't be considered. They should. And they should be considered first. But if the other party is intent on violence and has the means to carry out that threat than no amount of creative non-violent response will stop them from carrying out their objective. Case in point: two men with shotguns break into your house to kill you and rape your wife. Short of Hollywood fantasy if they really aim to do those things, no non-violent response is going to have a genuine chance of saving your lives.
I agree completely. And so I am not a pacifist. But there's a huge difference between violence in self-defense, and war. Those who seek war, for whatever reason, habitually try to paint the latter as if it were the former, but there's a world of difference between shooting the guy that's about to shoot you, and the game of mass murder we call war.
Those who don't understand history are doomed to repeat it... and drag the rest of us with them.
If you're American, and referring to Americans by 'we,' you really should know that neither Germany nor Japan were ever a threat to 'us.' If it weren't for our politicians ceaselessly itching to get us into 'the great game' we could have easily sat out every war this century, and been happier and richer for it. And today, well, I'm sorry, if you seriously think Iran or Iraq or Syria are capable of posing a threat to the US, even if they wanted to, you're absurdly ignorant. Once again, we have politicians itching to play the great game busy beating the war drums, but the only real threat is the blowback from all that meddling in other peoples business.
Conflict does not have to mean war. Conflict encompasses all kinds of competitions and disagreements. War is not just conflict, it's organised mass murder on a huge scale. Just because we can't eliminate conflict doesn't mean we can't eliminate war.
First off EULAs are not contracts. Lack of consideration alone voids them as contracts, and they have other defects as well.
Proprietizing it through valid contracts, negotiated and signed prior to purchase, might be something that should be legal. That doesn't mean that it would be practical, nor does it mean it would be good. Not everything immoral or stupid is illegal - nor should it be. If you'll think about it for a moment, any legal system so far reaching it could prevent anyone from doing anything immoral, or stupid, would be an oppressive system evil in itself beyond all measure.
I'm fairly certain Novell pulled out before they got into linux. They had a number of incidents where the BSA caught businesses pirating Novell and NT, and their 'solution' was to require the businesses to migrate everything to NT and pay MS a nice fine. Novell got nothing. Neither did Symantec, for that matter. Why do they stay onboard? Battered wife syndrome, perhaps?
I realize it's far-fetched, but it could still theoretically happen -- and I just want to point that out to make sure it's fixed so it can't happen in the final GPL v.3.
The thing is, it's really not possible to prevent that in a license. There's no license needed, if they aren't distributing the software. So I'm afraid we'll have to be satisfied with the impracticality of it as a deterrent.
FooCorp wants to build a DRM-infected device, but reduce costs by using Linux. So, it creates two "shell companies," FooCorp A and FooCorp B. FooCorp A makes the hardware, FooCorp B makes the software, and each distributes it separately. People wishing to use the hardware are forced to get FooCorp B's kernel because it's got support for various DRM applications (e.g. "protected [sic]" WMV).
If you can show in court that these are, in fact, shell companies concocted to evade the license requirements, I do believe the court can simply disregard the shell game and enforce it anyway.
To the contrary, the 'freedom to tinker' has been one of the driving principles behind the GPL from day one. You can't define for me what MY hardware can do, even if it was once yours. I paid for it, it's mine now, what it can do is limited only by it's actual capabilities, and my ingenuity, NOT your idea as to what it was 'intended' to do.
My asertion is based on the current claims vendors are using for releasing propriatary drivers.
What manufacturer, specifically? Nvidia claims that writing drivers is just too complex for anyone outside their team. Utter absurd BS, but nowhere near the level of what you are implying.
Bottom line, usage of GPL software to cut business cost is intended, and has always been intended, to be conditional on those business respecting their customers basic liberty. If they aren't willing to do that, they should be writing their own software, or licensing proprietary offerings. No one can take those options away from them, nor is anyone trying to. But they shouldn't be able to have their cake and eat it too.
Now instead of kust returning the changes, I will have to give up control of my hardware too.
Get this through your head, it's NOT your hardware. Not once I buy it. Once I buy it, it's my hardware, and I'll do whatever the heck I want with it, and you have no say in the matter. Deliberately cripple it before selling it? That you can do. It means that a lot of us won't want to buy it anymore, of course, and it also means you need to start writing your own software instead of stealing GPL sources. Simple as that. Respect the rules, or take your ball and go home. Someone else will be happy to take over the market you're refusing to serve.
It will be illegal from a licence standpoint to make a chip for sound that has code lockouts that enable parts of the chip so one main board manufacturer could use one chip design in say all thier on board sound cards but only enable 7.1 suround sound on tuse he higher end boards to save on licensing fees. If i offer a opensource driver, i will have to charge full price for the chip because i cannot lock it out without giving that code away under the GPLv3.
This is a big ball of confusions, let me try to unravel it a little for you.
You can do what you want if you write your own code. It won't be illegal to do what you're describing, it might be problematic to do what you're describing and also use GPL v3 code.
Second, why on earth would we want to encourage more of this paradigm of 'break some of the hardware and sell it cheaper?' This is utter crap. I know tech companies have been doing it for years, but have you ever thought about whether it's the sort of thing that should be encouraged? It's simply ludicrous, it's like if I made a bunch of chairs, then went around with a hammer and beat 9 out of every 10 up a bit, then stuck outrageous price tags on the ones that weren't damaged.
Lastly, even though I'm not sure why I would care if this WERE made impossible, it's actually not. You don't need to turn the chip off in software, that's just a dumbass way to go about doing it anyway. If you really need to do this (why?) use a soldering iron and disconnect that chip. Otherwise people will just patch your drivers, binary or not, and reactivate it anyway.
Another instance might be, if i make a tivo like device that lets you record a show even after the braodcast flag says no because i bought a license from the **aa's that allow it, i cannot use GPLv3ed code because of the propriatary license that i cannot redistibute. Even if the license software only links to LGPL code, GPLv3 will force me not to use it. BSD is about the only way without going with some propriatary vendor.
Well that's kind of the point, now isn't it? If you want to make a Tivo-like 'device' and make money off the **AAs schemes which are predicated from beginning to e
Actually the GPL was explicitly designed to make this sort of usage illegal, and arguably already does so. The problem is, this precise method of taking away the users rights was not anticipated when the GPL v2 was written, so there's too much ambiguity and room to argue it. Hence the 'bug-fix' in version 3.
The GPL was always, explicitly, designed to allow free usage of GPL code only to those who are willing to also allow that same freedom to those downstream of them.
Why you think that people "should" be able to strip those downstream of their freedom is a mystery, since you don't support the absurd assertion in any way.
Your assertion that hardware vendors will decline to use GPL v3, to the extent it's to be interpreted as meaning a significant portion of them will do this, is argued against by history. People claimed the same sort of thing about earlier versions of the GPL, but in fact, commercial vendors that are willing to return value have gravitated overwhelmingly to GPL vs BSD projects. And for good reason. BSD is only 'business friendly' to businesses that return nothing, as it allows that, but to anyone that returns value to the community, GPL is much more 'business friendly' as it prevents competitors from taking that work without returning value in turn. If, for instance, IBM contributes code to a GPL project, they can have some confidence that they aren't strengthening their competitors by doing so. The competitors can use the code, certainly, but they are in turn obligated to 'play nice' and return their additions to the community, so IBM as well as everyone else gets value returned. Licensing under BSD, on the other hand, is a black-hole: your competitors can take your contributions, leverage them to create a product that competes with you, and give you nothing back at all.
Companies that view BSD as being more friendly to their interests do exist, of course, but they're the companies we don't want using our code anyway. They're the ones intent on taking our code, tweaking it slightly, and then using it against us. They would never contribute anything back anyway, so who cares whether they like it? They're to be avoided, not helped.
The rest of the companies, the ones that understand that business is about creating value, appreciate the GPL, once they understand it. I see no reason to think that won't be even more true of v3 than it has been of v2.
Because we do have copyright laws, we work within them to maximise liberty regardless.
Copyleft is a hack of copyright law towards that purpose. It's very valuable and useful inside that context.
But anyone that things copyright is property needs to go back to square one and figure out what property is again. I highly recommend Ludwig von Mises' Liberty and Property as a good starting point.
Copyright is not property, 'intellectual property' in general is not property. It's privilege, and the antithesis of property. I'll happily give up the GPL the day that 'intellectual property' privilege is gone across the board. Until then, it's a wonderful tool to preserve some sanity inside an insane system.
The only reason they would have to provide that signing key would be if they rig the hardware so that it is NOT possible to run modified binaries in any other way. This would be silly.
Instead, what they should do, is include a documented, warranty-voiding method to turn off the circuit that refuses to load unsigned binaries. As an example - you have a locked, tamper proof box (like all medical equipment) and the purchaser receives a key. They may, at their discrection, use that key, unlock the box, and change a jumper on the main board. Then replace and relock the case, reboot, and answer 'yes' to a confirmation dialogue with GIANT WARNING TEXT all over it. At this point, they can load whatever kernel they want. They've also voided the warranty and any and all FDA certifications of the box, so it's now illegal to use it for its original purpose. There could also be a permanently visible tamper indicator, I would suggest a red and green light placed prominently for all to see, clearly labeled, that would switch from green to red if the box was even opened.
There's no need to distribute any signing keys here, as the ability to run modified binaries is preserved without doing that. And legal liabilities are clearly shifted from the manufacturer in the event that a customer chooses to do that.
In this case the manufacturer would have to release that key. They can't release that key, however, as it's not theirs. Therefore, they cannot comply with the license, and cannot ship the software.
IF they shipped the hardware bare, with no software actually included, that would seem to solve the 'problem' from their point of view. It would be a staggeringly painful system for the purchaser to deal with, however, and thus that dodge seems rather pointless.
Another reason the whole idea here is pointless is because Linus' kernel doesn't have spyware in it, probably never will, and that's what's motivating these companies in the first place, so there's no advantage from their point of view to enforcing a vanilla kernel. They want to enforce their customised software, laden with spyware and crippleware, on their customers. Unless and until Linus' starts putting that crap in his kernels, there's no motivation for them to try and force his kernels on the customers....
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We come reasonably close to some agreement there.
Imperialism is completely contrary to the american character and constitution. We were born out of its backlash, after all. And, for awhile, we were perceived as friends to all colonised people (look at the phillipines, for instance) as a result. And, for awhile, with the exception of course of the north american first nations (a real exception, but one that didn't initially affect relations around the world) we acted that way. And I would argue continuing to act that way was in the genuine interest of the republic.
But the 'leaders' couldn't, in the end, resist the temptation to play that game themselves. First against Mexico. Well, ok, their were plenty of excuses there. And a huge expanse of land the Mexicans weren't doing much with. It was a small start.
Then, with Spain. It certainly didn't start out as an Imperialist adventure (or, more likely, was carefully spun in the other direction, as the american people wouldn't have stood for it.) The Teller amendment was an explicit denunciation of such ambitions after all. We would fight, not to steal Cuba, but to free it! And we did, sort of.
Ahh, but Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Phillipines! We could take those and still free Cuba!
Of course, the Phillipines had their own 'George Washington' in the person of Aguinaldo. They had been fighting for their independence for two years already, and essentially had it won, with or without us. But we were the great anti-imperialists, already on the scene in force, and offered a helping hand. So naturally they took it. And then we stabbed them in the back, and our own republic in the process. But certainly some people got rich off that.
WWI and WWII really follow the same pattern, in one way - they reflect a few powerful people using their influence and authority to maneuver the republic into wars that are in their interest, but not in the interest of the republic. And also the propoganda pattern - the US population was not friendly to the idea of imperialism, and all the stops had to be pulled out to spin things so they would swallow it. But clearly, this was playing the imperial game, what Samuel Clemens called 'the European game' rather than 'the American game.'
No, it doesn't. These are questions of morality, as well as practicality, and they are not simple integer values. Murder is murder. Rape is rape. In that sense they are equivelant, wrong, and also against the interest of the republic, which gains nothing but loses much from such acts.
Equivalent does not mean precisely equal in every way. (If it did, we wouldn't need the word, as it would be indistinguishable from its shorter relative 'equal.') It's a slightly more broad word, encompassing not just true equalities, but 'substantial similarity' as well.
It's in that latter sense I would say these things are equivalent. They are substantially similar, and one cannot consistently approve of one without approving of both.
Then you're pretty much completely misunderstanding me.
There is no contradiction between 'for moral reasons' and 'for reasons of self-interest.' Of course a short-sighted, ignorant, or narrow-minded view of self-interest can lead to problems, as can short-sightedness ignorance and narrow-mindedness in general, but 'enlightened self-interest' is eternally the best hope for moral action.
There is a huge issue, in addition, where we tend to gloss over the difference between the general good, that is the self-interest of america as a republic, and the particular good - the advantage of the individual actors, who hold positions of authority in that republic. It is often to their individual advantage to act completely against the interest of the republic, and those interests consistently wind up being pursued at the expense of the general good. This, in a nutshell, is the problem.
Not at all.
I'm quite aware of the Rape of Nanking, the history of comfort women, etc. If you think in any way I'm minimising or defending those events, you're completely misunderstanding me. But, the sad fact is, they aren't actually all that exceptional. Every country that's engaged in imperialistic adventure has been responsible for similar acts. The history of the US in the Phillipines is, frankly, no less ignoble, even if there was no single incident in it to rival the body-count of Nanking. I repeat, every imperial player winds up doing things like this. The lesson I would draw from that is to refrain from playing that game. The lesson you appear to be drawing from it is it's ok to play the game, because the other players are evil and deserve it. I don't see how you can justify that, or what twisted logic might lay behind it, however. Even if the other players are evil and deserve it, the other players don't take the bulk of the damage. Innocent third parties do. Playing the game makes you evil, just as it has the other players. And it's certainly not in the interest of the republic to do so, however much it may be in the interest of a few powerful individuals who stand to gain from it.
So raping 100 people is alright, as long as someone else rapes 100,000? Where did you learn logic like that?
Of course, they're equivelant, rape is rape, murder is murder. And of course that doesn't mean they're indistinguishable either - clearly the numbers count for something, and clearly the larger body count is even worse, but both cases are fundamentally wrong, for the same reasons and in the same way.
To tie this point back to earlier posts, keep in mind that Stalin murdered more people than Hitler did.
No, it's worse than that, actually. Are you familiar with the Moro Crater massacre? Do you realise it was the rule, not the exception? The surviving writings of many US Soldiers, as well as that of the Phillipinos, supports that contention. Are you familiar with the history of how we got to that point? Quite possibly the most dishono
No, there isn't.
Isolationism is a boogey-man anyway. No one is isolationist. It's just a word warmongers throw around to smear the rest of us. Call us neutralists, or republicans, but isolationist isn't accurate at all. 'Peace and free trade with all, entangling alliances with none.' That isn't a recipe for 'isolation,' but for the opposite. If you really want to be isolated, engage in a never ending series of foreign adventures and make enemies everywhere.
DRM doesn't really require security through obscurity, but all implementations of it so far seem to.
Which, in a way, is a good thing. It means it's always breakable.
Fair use is an exception to copyright, not to patents.
Of course they did. Just like the US did in the Phillipines, talking about 'Benevolent Assimilation' and praising 'heroes' for the slaughter of entire tribes.
By definition, since it's true, it's not bullshit.
It doesn't excuse anything, but it does point one to a realistic understanding of the situation, rather than a propogandistic one. Who was it that said "let he who is without sin throw the first stone?"
Very good! You're starting to get it, perhaps. That was the point.
Now go back and read your history books again, with that realisation in mind, and you might start to understand what I've been saying.
Which aggressors?
The Serbian aggressors, or the Austrian? The Russians, or the Germans? The British and the French?
This is the entire point. All the major powers were aggressors here! Even some of the minors. The Serbs (their government, that is) really was involved in the murder plot, after all. Or in WWII, again, which aggressors? The Germans or the Soviets? You see, taking this 'stop the aggressors' imperative seriously would have meant declaring war on BOTH alliances, in both wars!
That's hardly practical, it's ludicrous. Better to let the aggressors exhaust their resources on each other. There is no moral imperative to be the worlds policemen, or the worlds daddy. Better to do as Washington said, and behave like a Republic, minding her own business, always ready to trade, always ready to defend herself - but never wandering abroad in search of dragons to slay.
Spur of the moment. If I was going to pre-write such a thing, I would have fixed the awkward spots.
It is a fact indeed. It's also a fact that the first belligerent *acts*, however, were initiated against, rather than by, them.
And that doesn't resemble in the slightest what I said, but it does bear, I fear, a striking resemblance to what some people will read into it, regardless, because they're incapable of actually thinking the issues through instead of just jerking their knee.
Hitler was a megalomaniacal bastard, responsible for hundreds of thousands, probably millions, of deaths, a proponent of a sick ideology, a warmonger and a racist and a very dangerous fool. But he was not the only such, by a long shot, in fact he was arguably second rate at all of that in comparison to Stalin. The end of Hitler's regime, and his life, was undoubtedly a good thing as such - but to ignore the fact that, as it occured, it meant the security of Soviet rule over a much larger portion of the globe, and far more people, than Hitler ever had a realistic hope of holding, is hardly intellectual honesty. To claim a 'necessity' of aiding one sick bastard in his fight with the other makes no sense to me at all, other than as propoganda serving the purposes of those who desire war for other reasons entirely.
It would have been nice to save the Poles, the Slovaks, the Czechs, the Hungarians, certainly, but that didn't happen anyway. They all wound up under the boot of the other sick bastard, and stayed there for decades, after all.
Yes, the Japanese attacked at Pearl Harbour.
What you apparently don't realise is why.
There were a long string of actions, undertaken by the US government rather quietly, to provoke such a response. In 1940 the Panama canal was closed to japanese shipping, and an embargo was placed on them, particularly prohibiting the shipment of scrap iron to Japan, which their industry relied on heavily. In '41, Japanese assets were seized throughout the country, and the US Navy imposed a blockade on all oil shipments to Japan. These are acts of war. All diplomatic efforts to resolve the situation were rebuffed.
Yes, the japanese attacked - but quite relunctantly. Had the US President been truly 'isolationist' rather than simply mouthing the words to match public sentiments while relentlessly working to provoke an attack on the sly...
Not at all. Hitlers held Germany and Austria, a good chunk of central europe, a tiny portion of the globe. His ambition was to overrun eastern europe - Bohemia, Poland, and all the way to Moscow. And that meant he had to fight Stalin.
Remember Stalin? At least as evil as Hitler, at least as mean, at least as ambitious. Those two were heading for a fight, no two ways about it, and pity all the poor folks stuck between them, to be sure, but no one else had to be involved. Left to their own devices, they would have ground each other to Hamburger, and whichever one 'won' would have been left too weak to be much of a threat to the rest of the world anyway.
Britain (and France!) should have stayed out of it in the first place. Since their politicians were far too greedy for glory to do that and insisted on jumping into a fight that was far beyond their weightclass, yes, they would have gone down eventually. Even so, the addition of a little Island in the north sea, and even the more substantial chunk of western europe that is France, to Germany and Austria would hardly have transformed Hitlers Reich into a global Empire. Europe is a small percentage of Earth's landmass.
A possible, though I would say far from assured, conclusion. And? This would be a bad thing?
Think about it.
Not at all. First you're exagerating the land area considerably (the Soviets never controlled China, just Siberia, which is a totally different thing - and even if the Germans had managed to destroy the Soviet army and taken Moscow, that's still a very long, cold journey from Kamchatka) - you've gone from 'defeated the red army' to 'controls all the territory of the soviet union' in one huge, unwarranted leap.
Had the Germans taken Moscow, what that would have bought them is not control over that vast territory - an asset, as you're conceiving it. You're making the same basic mistake, predicated it would seem on the same basic misunderstanding, Hitler did in conceiving this plan. Think about this - did the conquest of Holland make Germany stronger? How about Belgium? France? Bohemia? Poland? Were those, in the end, assets to the third Reich? Quite the contrary, they were liabilities. In each case, and if you'll study history a bit you'll see this is hardly exceptional, these conquests were at least as much liability as asset. In each case, territory was added, yes, but that territory was occupied by a hostile population. Resistance cells formed immediately. Germany had limited manpower and limited resources, and each conquest stretched her thinner, because hostile populations cannot be trusted, they must be occupied, patrolled, kept under heel firmly or they bite back. This is the weakness of Empire. Germany barely managed to keep something resembling control of France and the low countries for a few years. The Soviet Union? Russia alone is over 6.5 million square miles and the full Soviet Union was a good deal more than that! This is hundreds of thousands of people, several times the population of Germany, spread over a VASTLY larger area. Germany trying to control Russia, even if a military conquest was accomplished, would be something like a dog trying to hold a bear pinned. An exhausting
To the degree that sociopaths can be considered rational, absolutely. Every war makes some people dead, some people poorer, but also some people greatly more powerful and more wealthy. That last group of people tend to be the ones that actually get to make the decisions, and as long as they value their own wealth and power over the life, liberty, and property of the rest, war is a rational choice for them.
In fact your examples work against you.
I'm not a pacifist, and I'm not going to argue that violence is never necessary, but certainly in your cases, from a US-centric viewpoint, war was neither justified nor necessary in any of those cases. Afghanistan? Come on. A stupid move, stepping up and hitting the same tarbaby we used against the Soviets not so long ago, completely unecessary, accomplishing nothing whatsoever. There were some legitimate goals that were used to justify it (notably, arresting OBL) but note that OBL was never captured? Note further that there were much cheaper (in terms of money and blood) options to pursue him, which all evidence suggests would have been more effective, and at any rate could certainly not have been less effective, as he's still out there podcasting today.
WWI and WWII were closer, but look at them closely and you'll see that, at least for most of the participants, they were unecessary unjustified and avoidable. WWI was sparked by the assassination of the Archduke of Austria, you'll recall. Austria declared war on Serbia. Unjustified, unnecessary, and monstrously immoral - a handful of criminals killed a man, and the response is to attack an entire nation in retaliation. Lest we feel too smug in our moral superiority over those nasty Austrians, though, recall that this is very similar to the current conflict, however - a violent, criminal act answered by more violent, criminal acts, against entire nations, and not even the nations the attackers came from, in the current version!
At any rate, Austria could have chosen not to go to war in WWI. And, in fact, they didn't immediately go to war - first they delivered an Ultimatum. It was one any sovereign nation would have difficulty accepting, but given the vast superiority of the Austrian armed forces, Serbia had to consider it. And they probably would have accepted it, and avoided war, but for the 'great game.' The Russians, always looking for a chance to best their Austrian rivals in the game, encouraged the Serbs to reject it, promising protection. Thus encouraged, the Serbs refused, and Austria declared war.
Now at that point, the Serbs, of course, had to defend themselves. But no one else had to be involved. But the Russian government wanted in. They mobilised their troops. The German government, also, wante in. They called up their troops, and sent the Russians an ultimatum to stand down. The Russians continued mobilising. The Germans declared war. The Germans, of course, were allied with Austria. The Russians were allied with France. These alliances were not necessary - they were chosen by the governments involved. They were part of that same game. Any of these added participants could have avoided the great war, by avoiding that game. The people of these countries would certainly, in the main, have been vastly better off had they done so - but small, influential groups of people saw vast riches and enourmous power to be gained from playing the game, and those people made the decisions.
The Germans, anticipating that France would strike in support of Russia and Serbia, decided to take the initiative and hi
There can be no question of this, for the simple reason that Jews were (and still are) spread throughout the entire world, and Hitler never controlled, nor had any realistic prospect of controlling, more than a small corner of the world.
He was a mass murderer, and I certainly wouldn't want to minimise that - but he never had any chance of destroying all Jews.
I agree completely. And so I am not a pacifist. But there's a huge difference between violence in self-defense, and war. Those who seek war, for whatever reason, habitually try to paint the latter as if it were the former, but there's a world of difference between shooting the guy that's about to shoot you, and the game of mass murder we call war.
Those who don't understand history are doomed to repeat it... and drag the rest of us with them.
If you're American, and referring to Americans by 'we,' you really should know that neither Germany nor Japan were ever a threat to 'us.' If it weren't for our politicians ceaselessly itching to get us into 'the great game' we could have easily sat out every war this century, and been happier and richer for it. And today, well, I'm sorry, if you seriously think Iran or Iraq or Syria are capable of posing a threat to the US, even if they wanted to, you're absurdly ignorant. Once again, we have politicians itching to play the great game busy beating the war drums, but the only real threat is the blowback from all that meddling in other peoples business.
True, and utterly besides the point.
Conflict does not have to mean war. Conflict encompasses all kinds of competitions and disagreements. War is not just conflict, it's organised mass murder on a huge scale. Just because we can't eliminate conflict doesn't mean we can't eliminate war.
First off EULAs are not contracts. Lack of consideration alone voids them as contracts, and they have other defects as well.
Proprietizing it through valid contracts, negotiated and signed prior to purchase, might be something that should be legal. That doesn't mean that it would be practical, nor does it mean it would be good. Not everything immoral or stupid is illegal - nor should it be. If you'll think about it for a moment, any legal system so far reaching it could prevent anyone from doing anything immoral, or stupid, would be an oppressive system evil in itself beyond all measure.
I'm fairly certain Novell pulled out before they got into linux. They had a number of incidents where the BSA caught businesses pirating Novell and NT, and their 'solution' was to require the businesses to migrate everything to NT and pay MS a nice fine. Novell got nothing. Neither did Symantec, for that matter. Why do they stay onboard? Battered wife syndrome, perhaps?
The thing is, it's really not possible to prevent that in a license. There's no license needed, if they aren't distributing the software. So I'm afraid we'll have to be satisfied with the impracticality of it as a deterrent.
If you can show in court that these are, in fact, shell companies concocted to evade the license requirements, I do believe the court can simply disregard the shell game and enforce it anyway.
To the contrary, the 'freedom to tinker' has been one of the driving principles behind the GPL from day one. You can't define for me what MY hardware can do, even if it was once yours. I paid for it, it's mine now, what it can do is limited only by it's actual capabilities, and my ingenuity, NOT your idea as to what it was 'intended' to do.
What manufacturer, specifically? Nvidia claims that writing drivers is just too complex for anyone outside their team. Utter absurd BS, but nowhere near the level of what you are implying.
Bottom line, usage of GPL software to cut business cost is intended, and has always been intended, to be conditional on those business respecting their customers basic liberty. If they aren't willing to do that, they should be writing their own software, or licensing proprietary offerings. No one can take those options away from them, nor is anyone trying to. But they shouldn't be able to have their cake and eat it too.
Get this through your head, it's NOT your hardware. Not once I buy it. Once I buy it, it's my hardware, and I'll do whatever the heck I want with it, and you have no say in the matter. Deliberately cripple it before selling it? That you can do. It means that a lot of us won't want to buy it anymore, of course, and it also means you need to start writing your own software instead of stealing GPL sources. Simple as that. Respect the rules, or take your ball and go home. Someone else will be happy to take over the market you're refusing to serve.
This is a big ball of confusions, let me try to unravel it a little for you.
You can do what you want if you write your own code. It won't be illegal to do what you're describing, it might be problematic to do what you're describing and also use GPL v3 code.
Second, why on earth would we want to encourage more of this paradigm of 'break some of the hardware and sell it cheaper?' This is utter crap. I know tech companies have been doing it for years, but have you ever thought about whether it's the sort of thing that should be encouraged? It's simply ludicrous, it's like if I made a bunch of chairs, then went around with a hammer and beat 9 out of every 10 up a bit, then stuck outrageous price tags on the ones that weren't damaged.
Lastly, even though I'm not sure why I would care if this WERE made impossible, it's actually not. You don't need to turn the chip off in software, that's just a dumbass way to go about doing it anyway. If you really need to do this (why?) use a soldering iron and disconnect that chip. Otherwise people will just patch your drivers, binary or not, and reactivate it anyway.
Well that's kind of the point, now isn't it? If you want to make a Tivo-like 'device' and make money off the **AAs schemes which are predicated from beginning to e
Actually the GPL was explicitly designed to make this sort of usage illegal, and arguably already does so. The problem is, this precise method of taking away the users rights was not anticipated when the GPL v2 was written, so there's too much ambiguity and room to argue it. Hence the 'bug-fix' in version 3.
The GPL was always, explicitly, designed to allow free usage of GPL code only to those who are willing to also allow that same freedom to those downstream of them.
Why you think that people "should" be able to strip those downstream of their freedom is a mystery, since you don't support the absurd assertion in any way.
Your assertion that hardware vendors will decline to use GPL v3, to the extent it's to be interpreted as meaning a significant portion of them will do this, is argued against by history. People claimed the same sort of thing about earlier versions of the GPL, but in fact, commercial vendors that are willing to return value have gravitated overwhelmingly to GPL vs BSD projects. And for good reason. BSD is only 'business friendly' to businesses that return nothing, as it allows that, but to anyone that returns value to the community, GPL is much more 'business friendly' as it prevents competitors from taking that work without returning value in turn. If, for instance, IBM contributes code to a GPL project, they can have some confidence that they aren't strengthening their competitors by doing so. The competitors can use the code, certainly, but they are in turn obligated to 'play nice' and return their additions to the community, so IBM as well as everyone else gets value returned. Licensing under BSD, on the other hand, is a black-hole: your competitors can take your contributions, leverage them to create a product that competes with you, and give you nothing back at all.
Companies that view BSD as being more friendly to their interests do exist, of course, but they're the companies we don't want using our code anyway. They're the ones intent on taking our code, tweaking it slightly, and then using it against us. They would never contribute anything back anyway, so who cares whether they like it? They're to be avoided, not helped.
The rest of the companies, the ones that understand that business is about creating value, appreciate the GPL, once they understand it. I see no reason to think that won't be even more true of v3 than it has been of v2.
Because we do have copyright laws, we work within them to maximise liberty regardless.
Copyleft is a hack of copyright law towards that purpose. It's very valuable and useful inside that context.
But anyone that things copyright is property needs to go back to square one and figure out what property is again. I highly recommend Ludwig von Mises' Liberty and Property as a good starting point.
Copyright is not property, 'intellectual property' in general is not property. It's privilege, and the antithesis of property. I'll happily give up the GPL the day that 'intellectual property' privilege is gone across the board. Until then, it's a wonderful tool to preserve some sanity inside an insane system.
Your example is clearly misinformed.
The only reason they would have to provide that signing key would be if they rig the hardware so that it is NOT possible to run modified binaries in any other way. This would be silly.
Instead, what they should do, is include a documented, warranty-voiding method to turn off the circuit that refuses to load unsigned binaries. As an example - you have a locked, tamper proof box (like all medical equipment) and the purchaser receives a key. They may, at their discrection, use that key, unlock the box, and change a jumper on the main board. Then replace and relock the case, reboot, and answer 'yes' to a confirmation dialogue with GIANT WARNING TEXT all over it. At this point, they can load whatever kernel they want. They've also voided the warranty and any and all FDA certifications of the box, so it's now illegal to use it for its original purpose. There could also be a permanently visible tamper indicator, I would suggest a red and green light placed prominently for all to see, clearly labeled, that would switch from green to red if the box was even opened.
There's no need to distribute any signing keys here, as the ability to run modified binaries is preserved without doing that. And legal liabilities are clearly shifted from the manufacturer in the event that a customer chooses to do that.
In this case the manufacturer would have to release that key. They can't release that key, however, as it's not theirs. Therefore, they cannot comply with the license, and cannot ship the software.
IF they shipped the hardware bare, with no software actually included, that would seem to solve the 'problem' from their point of view. It would be a staggeringly painful system for the purchaser to deal with, however, and thus that dodge seems rather pointless.
Another reason the whole idea here is pointless is because Linus' kernel doesn't have spyware in it, probably never will, and that's what's motivating these companies in the first place, so there's no advantage from their point of view to enforcing a vanilla kernel. They want to enforce their customised software, laden with spyware and crippleware, on their customers. Unless and until Linus' starts putting that crap in his kernels, there's no motivation for them to try and force his kernels on the customers....