That does not explain why the human vocal apparatus matches the peak sensitivity of the ears. The two likely evolved together, as a function of use for speech.
Your theory does not explain why the human ear responds to the 2-4kHz range best. It is true that human speech was essentially predetermined to occur in the 1-10kHz range as a function of that being the most common hearing range for animals (which naturally would be somewhat uniform, so that we can all hear each other), but the human peak sensitivity is relatively low in our overall hearing range (about 10-15% along the line, linearly).
On the other side, the vocal apparatus of humans is too large to be efficient at significantly higher frequencies (and a smaller system would pose other problems in terms of articulation), and simultaneously our throats are too small to have a much lower peak efficiency range. As a result, spoken communication and our ability to produce sound clearly informed the evolution of our ears.
Communication is, therefore, the reason our peak sensitivity is what it is.
There you go with your morality again. You're obsessed. I don't make categorical moral judgments.
If so, then why aren't you out there complaining about stolen bases, stolen kisses, and stealing away into the night?
What's to complain about? You're the one on a moral crusade, skippy. There's a presumption of impropriety implicit in the lack of authorization, which is the entire point of using "steal" to describe those actions (except "steal away", which is a metaphorical extension and not an act of stealing).
They're using the word properly. Why would I complain about that? You've come undone.
Could it be because you realize that some actions which can be described by [...] the word "stealing" are wrong, but others aren't?
That's exactly the point! Stealing is what it is: unauthorized acquisition. You're the one saying that copyright infringement is not stealing, when it plainly is. This discussion has never been whether copyright infringement is morally wrong. Claiming it's not stealing as a way of absolving immorality is imprecise and entirely unsuccessful.
The objectionable acts are those which can more specifically be described as theft
No. The objectionable acts are those which can be described as objectionable. Some, but not all, instances of theft can fall into this category, and many other forms of stealing that do not fall under 'theft' also fall into this category. Stealing your wife away is not theft, but I imagine you'd find it objectionable.
Your continued and unstoppable interweaving of morality is just boring now. Neither theft nor stealing exist as moral binaries.
"It's stealing" and therefore "they shouldn't do it". This argument relies on the belief that stealing is a bad thing that people shouldn't do.
No, it relies on their belief that they shouldn't do it. If they didn't believe it was wrong to steal, they wouldn't make such an effort to make weak and unsupportable arguments that it's not.
Honestly, do you completely fail at interpretation, or do you just mangle language for fun?
But, of course, as soon as you convince someone that an act he considers perfectly acceptable is "stealing" in some sense of the word that doesn't mean theft, you create a category of "stealing" that it's OK to do.
And?
Many perpetrators of socially unacceptable acts believe what they're doing is perfectly acceptable. You continually inject morality into the discussion while claiming you make a distinction between morality and legality.
Clearly, you do not, since you can't actually separate the two concepts in your head. If you take something without permission, you've stolen it. Whether or not you think you were justified in doing so does not change that simple fact. Whether or not you view it as "morally" wrong to do so also does not matter, as that is a personal perspective on an unambiguous act. The only failure to communicate arises when you project your morality onto someone else due to an inability to make logical distinctions.
Semantic wrangling doesn't change morality:
Coming from someone without any background in formal semantics, you sure love that phrase. "Semantic wrangling" is what you're doing.
Similarly, a group of crows is called a "murder", but that doesn't mean anyone will react to a group of crows the same way they react to homicide.
Technically speaking, you're not referring to the same word. They are orthographically identical, but not semantic equivalents.
And if you kept arguing that those bystanders who didn't do anything about the crows were supporting "murder", they'd quickly conclude you were an asshole more interested in semantic games than honest discussion.
More likely they'd wonder what kind of idiot contrived the example and yet so completely failed to make a point.
We're not talking about 'stealing' in some outward context. Homonyms and homographs are not semantic alternates. They're totally separate lexemes. Don't try to swim in the big kid pool.
If you do realize it and you continue using that word anyway, instead of choosing a less ambiguous one
There is nothing ambiguous about it. Stealing: unauthorized acquisition. It's the same damn word. You don't go to jail for "stealing", because stealing is not against the law.
That isn't a widespread belief. You're welcome to it, but don't expect to find much agreement here (or elsewhere).
It's not a belief. It's linguistic constructionism. Anything else is a combination of ignorance or intentional misrepresentation.
I think you'll find that most people aren't concerned about supposed instances of "stealing" where the "stolen" item isn't taken away from its owner,
What people are "concerned" about is irrelevant. It is what it is.
It's possible that with enough semantic wrangling,
It's semantic wrangling that turns the word on its head--something I've observed you doing in post after post. It's flatly wrong. Stealing is an act committed by a person, not a consequence felt by that person. Conflation of the two is a popular method for the construction of a strawman.
Stripping the word "steal" of its emotional connotation
Emotional connotation is irrelevant. I don't care how people feel about stealing. It's clear by the acrobatics performed by people in your position that they're aware it's stealing and that they shouldn't do it, because of the great lengths they go to in order to rationalize it and avoid association with reality.
It's fundamentally about greed, plain and simple. If people really stood on principle, they'd freely admit to stealing. If you're starving and you take a loaf of bread, you don't say, "I didn't steal it!" You say, yes, I did, but here's why--and you accept the consequences and hope that society agrees with your justification.
If someone pointed out that an opportunity, a password, a base, or a kiss hadn't really been stolen -- particularly in a conversation about morals or laws or property, where someone might reasonably think I'd been referring to theft -- I'd happily concede that it hadn't.
That would be an asinine exchange, since all of those instances are perfectly consistent with the word and its definition, and have been used in that manner by society for centuries. You choose this particular instance to complain, not any of the others, because it serves your ideological agenda. It's hypocritical. There's no opposition from you in any of those instances.
And once again, I'll remind you that your individually-crafted idiosyncrasies do not have a significant bearing on the term or sentiment, particularly in reference to a collective.
That shows you have no idea what the context was, because apparently you didn't bother to read the comment I was responding to, or even the part of it that I originally quoted. If you had, you would've seen that it used the word "theft".
I saw that. What does it matter? You both use the term incorrectly. The context is that you collectively can't get anywhere in the argument because neither of you has a clue what you're talking about.
The question isn't whether the owner knows or cares that it's gone, but whether it really is gone at all.
No. The verb's agency is the perpetrator, not the victim. It is the acquisition that is critical, not the result on the victim. Even if the owner cannot be located, you've still stolen it. 'Stole' and 'stolen from' are not parallel construction--stealing is an act, not a consequence. Do you have something you're not authorized to have? Yes? It's stolen.
No, I wouldn't describe either of those as stealing. The only hypocrisy there is that you're arguing against a position you made up yourself.
First, you're quoting a collective use of "you" (unless "the rest of us" refers to your alter egos)--and you can't possibly be so deluded as to believe that's not the sentiment on Slashdot.
So you're going to pretend you've never used the word "steal" to describe the taking of an idea, an opportunity, or the taking of a password?
You're saying that you post in GPL violation threads on Slashdot to remind editors and posters that GPL violation isn't stealing, it's just copying and the developers didn't actually lose anything? You're opposed to the FSF and other open source organizations being able to enforce in court noncompliance with the requirements of open source licenses?
Rrrrright.
Crying "troll" doesn't distract from that hypocrisy.
The fact is, it isn't gone: the owner still has it.
No, this is an impossibility. A copy cannot be in the possession of two parties simultaneously. Moreover, the owner does not still have the integrity of his property--he has been divested of his ownership by the unlawful acts of a third party. This is plainly stealing.
In order to take the copy, you have to misappropriate two rights not belonging to you: production and distribution. The owner has been permanently deprived of his exclusive rights of reproduction, distribution, and contract with regard to that copy.
If you have a problem with folks on Slashdot using common dictionary definitions of these words
But you're not! The fundamental definition of stealing is taking something without permission. It's not "permanent deprivation of a material, finite good, without any consideration as to other possible meanings" as it's being used.
This isn't a courtroom or a law school; we're discussing broad ethics and morals, not intricate legalities.
Oh, really? Then why all the stilted, convoluted, and just plain inaccurate legal analogies? You're not talking about broad ethics or morals at all--you're disingenuously trying to frame the discussion to put it out of context. You say "it's not stealing"--and then use a precise, legal definition of theft to make your point. They are not interchangeable, and your citing to theft simply does not make your point.
The rest of us have no problem understanding what "stealing" and "theft" mean in this particular context.
Apparently you do, because you can't seem to use the terms correctly. "In this particular context", theft isn't involved or relevant. That doesn't take stealing off the table.
The basic truth is that you're okay with the term "he stole my GPL code" but not "she stole my album", which is hypocrisy at its finest. Attempts to rationalize it mistake either (1) that stealing is not theft, and the finite or tangible nature of the item is not essential to the act (unauthorized acquisition) or (2) that the dispossession is not of the bits of the copy, but the violation of an exclusive right, or some combination of the two.
When people interfere with dominion and exclusivity in land by asserting (unlawfully) title, it's adverse possession, and it's stealing. When someone goes from a state of not having something to having it, by their own deeds and without authorization, they've stolen it, regardless of whether the owner even knows or cares that it's gone.
The moral and philosophical discussion doesn't change the simple fact that it was stolen.
Only to a moron. Theft and stealing are not interchangeable. They never have been, and they never will be. If any of you actually knew what you were talking about, you'd know that much.
Stealing is not itself a crime. It's not a term of art. It's a broad, lay term that has for centuries referred to a multitude of acts, theft being only one of them.
he said the act was "stealing" because the copyright holder was deprived of revenue. HTH.
You can't establish deprivation of revenue unless there's possession of something for which revenue is due. If you don't have the book, you've not satisfied the criterion.
9/10 says you're misconstruing intentionally and you do, in fact, know better.
Well, by that logic, if I have $50 in my pocket and I decide to buy a few books with it instead of a game -- maybe because of the bookstore's actions, like if I saw they were having a sale -- doesn't that mean the bookstore has "stolen" that revenue from the game store?
No, because you don't have the game. If you took the game and then spent the money at the bookstore, that would be stealing.
If you're not interested in buying what someone has for sale, that's fine. But if you acquire something without paying for it, when you have no other claim to its possession, you've stolen it. Attempting muddied and painful misuse of semantics to say anything different is just sad.
It's only stealing when someone takes away something that you already had.
No, it's stealing when you get something you didn't previously have, without authorization. Changing the agency of the verb doesn't help your argument, and it shows how little this community actually understands the mechanics of language and law.
I would argue that to allow otherwise is not allowing freedom, it's allowing freeloading.
That is the price you pay for freedom. Giving people a choice sometimes means that they make ones you don't like.
The terms apply whether modifications were made or not, and often there is no "redistributors work" in the form of derivative code or enhancements to be given up, and it's just as important to apply the terms to these cases.
If you've made no changes, you just have to point to the original code. It's an attribution requirements that's identical between the GPL and BSD/MPL/CC/etc. in that regard.
Downstream freedom is the way to insure that, and BSD simply doesn't provide for that in a practical way.
Sure it does. Every byte that you release remains free until you make it otherwise. No downstream developer can change that, and ensuring that freedom is accomplished. Downstream changes aren't ensuring that your code stays free, it's ensuring that you can get their code for free.
No, it's libre.
I'm sorry, that's what I should have said in my previous reply: "It's not libre, it's gratis." It's "libre if you agree to these demands".
I would hate to find my code in something like a Tivo and discover that the company that was freely redistributing my code was preventing me from applying my latest bugfix to my own code
See, but there's the rub. If it were your code, you wouldn't have any problem applying the bugfix, because you could just build the fixed version and substitute the binaries.
The situation you describe is only when someone has integrated your code into their substantive code, in which case it's their responsibility to provide bugfixes. Your patch might not even work on that code.
I agree that it sounds like you know what you want to get out of your code, and that it's perfectly legitimate to share it on the condition that others do the same. I don't begrudge you that option one bit. I just wish more GPL advocates were as willing as you to see that not everyone wants their development the same way.
"initialisms pronounced as a word (acronyms) are treated as proper nouns"
"In American English initialisms and acronyms are just capitalized."
Just as another tidbit: the word "laser" is the perfect exemplar of this process. It began as an acronym (L.A.S.E.R), dropped the periods to LASER, was then subsequently referred to as a 'Laser' for a while before becoming the generic word 'laser' we have today--with many people not even knowing that it's an acronym in the first place. Cf. "scuba".
Actually, it's not the New York Times that started this. In Commonwealth English (note that TFA is Australian), proper grammar mandates that initialisms pronounced as a word are treated as proper nouns (e.g. Nafta, not NAFTA, because you say "nafta"), while those pronounced as letters are capitalized (e.g. DMA, not Dma, because it's pronounced "dee-em-ey").
In American English, initialisms are just capitalized. The New York Times seems stuck without a style manual in this regard, because there is a growing trend to de-emphasize caps text throughout the English-speaking world. Apart from marking proper nouns (which could be done with punctuation or any number of other means), English doesn't even need capital letters, so I can easily see the trend continuing.
This is quite similar to the rehashing of a major early-90s argument: the inclusion of periods in initialisms. We've seen that fall off to the wayside (when was the last time you saw anyone write "C.E.O."?)
This applies only when "you" are the first-tier recipient of the original code. After that, BSD allows re-licensing under any terms carrying any new restrictions. GPL does not, because that can interfere with the end-user's freedom.
No, it doesn't interfere with freedom. The original code is still available to the end user. It doesn't vanish, and the end user remains free to access the original, freely released code and work with that.
Simple exercise: can you, as an end-user, engage in all possible GPL-mandated behavior with regards to software that originated under the BSD license? Not with regards to any such software that has been redistributed under proprietary terms.
Sure you can. The software originating under the BSD license is still there and still available for you to do as you please with. Every byte of code that was freely released remains free, regardless of what happens downstream.
There's nothing unreasonable, viral, or communistic about that.
Of course it's "viral" and communistic. It requires you to share your work with others when you might otherwise not want to or not be able to. The BSD and similar licenses allow you to choose whether or not to share your updates and modifications without forcing you to. It's communistic because it sacrifices the maximum possible range of choice for one group in order to boost the scope of choice for another group. It is classical redistribution.
would explain to me who the freedom granted by the BSD license is intended for, and how that freedom is protected by the license.
Freedom for everyone to choose how and whether to share their work. The BSD protects the choice by not limiting it. The BSD code originally released remains available straight through to the end user. Any developers along the way maintain the choice of sharing their modifications. Any such modifications voluntarily disclosed remain available to the end user. The end user has no claim of right to the work of others not voluntarily given, and the GPL grants power to originating developers they are not by default entitled to (and is a strings-attached "freedom"), and it grants power to end users they are not otherwise entitled to.
The GPL simply doesn't allow redistribution of the code in ways that do not pass along the same freedoms the re-distributor received when he got it. What's un-free about that?
Exactly that: the GPL doesn't allow distribution unless the redistributor freely gives up his work.
That's not freedom; it's cross-licensing. It's not gratis, it's a conditional gift. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, but it's not as free as possible.
If I offer to give you $50, that's freely given. If I tell you that you can have $50 if you hop on a table and dance a little, that's clearly a bargained-for exchange. It might be a great deal, but it's not truly free. If, however, I give you $50 and ask that you dance on the table without making it conditional, you're still free to do so. That's what the BSD license and similar licenses do, and what the GPL does not tolerate. That's exactly why the argument that the GPL offers "more" freedom absolutely cannot validate.
Certainly there will always be the (rather pointless) philosophical question of which is more 'free', but what's the point? They're both pretty darn free, but take their freedom in different directions.
The problem is more basic than that, and it's one ceaselessly battled out in politics, too. It boils down to, "what is freedom?" Does freedom mean no restrictions, or does it mean equal opportunity, with a "civic duty" for some people to forego optimal satisfaction for the benefit of the greater community?
The GPL isn't more free, intellectually or economically. It is by its very nature restrictive for the sake of self-expansion--and perfectly legitimate in being so. Yet, oddly enough, many of its strongest advocates support the "no restriction" model economically, complaining about government meddling and redistribution. This very evaluation tells them that the GPL is less free than the BSD license, because GPL meddles in personal/business decisions and stipulates distribution. Somehow they don't realize that.
The simple truth is that BSD has to be more free, because it allows for voluntary GPL-style contribution AND proprietary-style withholding. It provides more options, and if there's any unified definition for 'freedom', it's "choice". Simple exercise: can you engage in all possible GPL-mandated behavior under the BSD license? Yes. Can you voluntarily practice all possible BSD behavior under the GPL license? No.
GPL advocates are usually the ones proclaiming their license to be the freest, and then attributing the indignation they receive in response as condemnation of their license. It's nothing of the sort. GPL zealots are a clear demographic on Slashdot. BSD zealots exist, but not anywhere near the same numbers. It's always the GPL proponent that brings up the "freedom" argument, though--hell, they even chose the term in contrast to "open source".
The only way for this perennial argument to go away is if GPL advocates stop making the claim. But RMS and his throng can't seem to persist without demonizing others.
There's nothing fundamentally wrong with BSD, CC, GPL, or proprietary licenses. The creator of a work, having invested the sweat of his brow, his time, and his passion in its production, should be able to choose how he wishes to share it with others. If his terms are too draconian, then the market should not reward it with popularity.
A corporation, by definition is an Artificial Legal Entity ( ALE ). Which means, that is is CREATED not by Natural Persons, but by another Artificial Entity. ( The State )
Error in the first step.
A corporation is not created by the state. It is created by private citizens, who then register it with the state, where they pay taxes in order for the unmolested privilege of selling to residents of the state and providing a form of accreditation for third parties to verify against.
At no point does the corporation become an arm of the state or an agent of the government.
So, we have a situation where the "rights" of an Artificial Legal Entity are *EXACTLY* what the Secretary of State's office
No. The "rights" of a corporation are those granted to them by the state's business and professions code, its labor laws, and relevant legislation, granted, interestingly enough, by the legislature, which is composed of citizens. The Secretary of State is not legally endowed with the power to grant or deny rights.
Can you explain to me how a corporation like Monsanto is a threat without having a government to buy IP law from?
Sure. They'd do the exact same things, and you'd have no recourse. You might not think you have one now, given the "buying the law" drivel, but without a government to impose a structure, you'd have no power to challenge them. In order to further your view, you'd need the government--to ban enforcement of agreements of this type. Eliminating "IP law" doesn't change the fundamental nature of intellectual labor in a capitalist economic system; it merely eliminates any protections you might have in your favor. A creator would remain free to control release of his work by explicit contract instead and then suing you for breach of contract rather than e.g. copyright infringement.
Your fallacy, and it's an egregious one, is assuming that without IP, you can suddenly get away with anything you want. The opposite, in fact, has been the historical example. Without a statutory grant of access, everything would become prima facie unlawful. Monsanto would say "we don't have an agreement giving you access to our work" and exact appropriate retribution. If you believe that treating research and intellectual labor as an asset is a result of IP law rather than the progenitor of it, you're a poor student of history.
Your plan has less than one-third the RAM and about one-eighth the storage.
EC2 minimum units: 1.7GB RAM, 160GB storage. Price at your host for the closest analogue (2GB/80GB): $140 (well within the 120-200 range I stated). Total price to operate the EC2 unit: $72 plus bandwidth.
Moreover, where EC2 really cuts into the competition is scaling at larger units, particularly with regard to hourly billing (allowing much more granularity in service and pricing). EC2's mid-size unit absolutely crushes the specs of your host's very best plan, and at a comparable price.
Your ability to compare services is subpar. You can get webhosting VPS for $10/month with some plans. That doesn't make it comparable to an EC2 unit. That said, your host has generous bandwidth caps for the price points and is certainly adequate for someone who doesn't need the muscle of EC2 services.
No, it's not. Its closest plan to an EC2 "small" instance is $80/month for one-third the storage and less RAM. If Linode offered a comparable service, it'd be about $110/month.
None of that is comparable hardware. Softlayer has pretty good prices, but you're still looking at $200/mo with no elasticity for the best approximation. EC2 is still roughly 1/3 the price.
An Athlon at a no-name provider isn't even worth mentioning in comparison to one of these units. Web hosting can be found for cheap. I wouldn't even jokingly put them in the same class, though.
if you really have one CPU unit running there non-stop -for year, it is pretty expensive, around 700 dollars I believe.
That's pretty damn cheap. A dedicated rack server is upwards of $300/month most places, and it does not provide the "elastic" part of the Amazon cloud for when your service takes on heavy demand. Rackspace, for example, provides a comparable unit at $383/mo.
You might be talking about a Virtual Private Server--there are a number of services offering similar specs in the $120-200 range...still more expensive, but more comparable to EC2.
Some teachers and classes are naturally better suited to larger class sizes than others. If everyone teaches 30 kids, you can't take advantage of the ones that could handle 200, and you can't use that advantage to support the ones that can handle only 12.
You can't, anyway, unless you mean that some kids should take PE three or four times a day.
PE classes in most schools already combine larger numbers of students--and if you're referring to substantive classes that can support that many students in primary education, I'd like to hear of one. Even taking a large class, such as a concert band of 95 students, you need at least two teachers, and oftentimes more.
If you reserve two periods for PE and put half the kids in each one, then the other half can spread out in smaller classes at that same time--but that only allows for each student to be in one "small section" class in their schedules.
Even if there were substantive classes that could be expanded, where would they be taught? Schools rarely have instruction space for that many people--unless it's a university.
The reason classrooms are overcrowded is because of a lack of resources, mostly number of teachers, but also number of classrooms. Take a look at any suburban school built 30-40 years ago--they're stuffed with students because no one is funding their replacement. It's expensive for the city to buy land when private contractors are able to offer more money, and often it's not politically expedient to use eminent domain; building the school itself is also expensive. Hiring more teachers is expensive, even if there were more teachers to hire. If you've got 10 classrooms and 8 periods, you can only teach 80 subjects. It's that simple.
That's when people who say "throwing money" isn't the solution need to be told to shut up. They're not throwing enough money. What most schools do get, they have to triage. It's the same result as the government program rule. If it will take $100M to do it right, giving them $80M doesn't mean it's enough to do it 80% right--it could, and frequently does, mean that it's $80M spent on total failure. Opponents can then talk about the $80M boondoggle (sidestepping the fact that their opposition was what castrated it and prevented it from having a chance for success), and proponents don't get another chance at bat for awhile because their political capital was spent on something that fell short.
I submit that 200 years ago, copying someone else's words or music would be most accurately described as plagariasm or copyright violation.
I suggest you consult an unabridged OED, then. "Copyright infringement" in the modern sense is a term approximately one century old. The act of stealing by the false assumption of a right to print has been referred to as "stealing" for at least four centuries. 200 years ago, "copying" was not a concern--misappropriation of ideas, instead, was--something very much known as stealing.
How is my model, which argues that copyright violation and plagiarism are/were more appropriate terms, nonfunctioning?
Because it conflates the means with the ends. They are more specific terms, not more appropriate. Your statement contains the implicit assumption that "stealing" is a specific term of art, and it is not.
Are you some kind of expert on copyright law of 200 years ago, or are you just speaking out of your ass?
As a matter of fact, I am. What would you like to know? Would it interest you to know that another word that ruffles the feathers of some Slashdotters--piracy--has been used to describe intellectual property infringement for 150 years?
If you want to reserve "stealing" as a lay term with multiple meanings, therefore loading it with emotional overtones and rendering it unsuitable for strictly logical discussions, then that's fine with me.
Your prose makes no sense. Stealing is a lay term.
p.s. theft is a lay term as well as a term of art, and though I know litle about the law,
No, it's not, and yes, your knowledge of the law is poor. To wit, if I asked you to define 'term of art', I don't believe you could do so. As a matter of fact, the very quote you selected demonstrates this: "the courts interpreting those words have declared that they do not have a necessary common law meaning coterminous with larceny and exclusive of other theft crimes." In other words, 'stealing' is not larceny or even theft, but a broader concept.
I don't understand why you are so bent on extending this discussion unnecessarily by intentionally misunderstanding my points, it's pretty simple.
It is simple. Stealing is a lay term, covering any form or iteration of unauthorized acquisition. It has never been associated strictly with the dispossession of physical items, either at law or idiomatically. No one is intentionally misunderstanding your points--you're just making bad ones.
I would prefer merely to ask you a hypothetical question: if it were clear to you that from a practical standpoint, copyright law were to inevitably be doomed to be either revoked or massively weakened in the near future, would you then feel it more accurate to stop using the term stealing to refer to copyright infringement?
No. Taking something without permission, regardless of the means, is stealing.
Or would you persist in using such black and white, loaded terminology to describe a situation that had become quite gray,until the laws had actually been revoked?
It is you who persists in claiming the term is loaded. It is not, nor is it grey. If it is not yours to have, and you take it, you've stolen it, even if you've committed no crime in the process.
The imputation of legal or moral blame is of no concern to me. The rationalization and equivocation that people here undertake to bend out of that reality is the truly amazing part. Weak attempts to dispossess emotion from mere words belies a conscious effort to avoid that association. It is a simple inquiry: do you have permission to have it? If not, did you move from a state of not having it to a state of having it? If so, you've stolen it. Whether or not you believe it was wrong to steal is not the issue.
MY experience is that there are three groups of people who start and maintain free software:
1) Students, who are essentially doing it for the compensation of a degree and self-improvement ( creation of: linux, apache, the start of the BSDs,...) 2) Professionals who either do the work for companies like RedHat, HP, et al or are small independents who sell consulting services based on the software with which they have expertise (and sometimes fame) ( creation of: mysql, Qt, mozilla,...) 3) People who need the tools to get their real work done. Scientists, system admins, etc. ( creation of: perl, sendmail, octave,...)
What a joke!
You're responding to a point stating that "free software" developers don't support themselves through F/OSS development...with three examples of people who don't support themselves through F/OSS development.
Consulting services don't pay the bills--most people have no use for them, and certainly wouldn't pay the immense costs of such a contract when they could just buy a copy. Sure, at the enterprise level, it's a living for some, but it's no across-the-board replacement for salaried programmers.
There's still not a Linux distro as polished as OS X or even Windows, and they've been trying for over a decade to get Linux on the desktop. This exposes another point: FOSS developers don't develop what they don't care about, and UI people don't work in F/OSS because no one is willing to pay them. Same goes for all the other ancillary services involved in the software industry. Support contracts just won't support the depth and breadth of products we have now, and businesses seeking common tools just don't interact in a way that supports the F/OSS model. Adobe Photoshop would never be a for-hire work with F/OSS developers; it's too big and too expensive a project. It's telling that F/OSS alternatives trail behind proprietary development for these kinds of projects.
Where it works, F/OSS is a great community effort, and home cooking can be great fun. Sometimes you even score a hit. That's no evidence that the model is viable as the sole approach--it's just not. If anything, it suggests that the most successful approach is one leveraging community participation while simultaneously protecting a core of proprietary development as a business asset and avoiding the political turmoil of the open source community.
Apple and Tivo do it well, which is why RMS and GPL3 are shooting themselves in the foot. If the goal were to spread software freedom, Tivoization would be welcomed. But it's not the goal. For GPL zealots, it's to further their own greed and jealous ego: they want unlimited access to the work of others under the guise of "freedom for everyone" (except for developers). It's not to release great products for anyone to use or improve, it's to spread their ideology while criticizing others as "greedy" (and failing to recognize their equal greed).
All that is required for clear logical debate of the subject is that the same word not be used for unauthorized copying, and unauthorized physical dispossession of property. If you agree to stop calling the latter stealing, than you can have the word stealing for the former.
It is not a matter of agreement. Stealing is a simple and broad concept, and has been for centuries. It is legally and factually distinct from theft, infringement, fraud, misappropriation and a number of other mechanisms.
The same word can easily be used. Under no possible functioning model of the English language can 'stealing' be deemed an inappropriate term, except to advance a political agenda. In order for 'stealing' to be inapplicable, there would have to be no possible definition it fits. This is demonstrably false.
That is why it's just easier for us to agree to call physical theft stealing, and unauthorized copying, unauthorized copying.
No, it's easiest to call theft theft and stealing stealing. They are not the same and are not interchangeable in all circumstances, and this is a critical point and the nature of the argument.
Saying that copyright infringement isn't stealing is both false and a strawman. It is stealing. It is not theft.
I believe it to be incumbent upon you to come up with a new word, to use a word like "stealing" which for hundreds of years had only the latter definition is a low rhetorical device reeking with intellectual dishonesty.
I'd agree, if that were the case. The verb 'to steal' has for centuries referred to far more than physical dispossession. It is only in the past decade that the movement against it has started, with the ignorant and misguided notion that they're combating its association with 'theft'. This is particularly evident in discussion on Slashdot, which attempt (rather poorly) to use legal interpretation without realizing their step one error: stealing is not theft at law.
The law has already addressed the discrepancy in terms of art as to the physical vs. intellectual dispossession. At no point does this have any bearing on the word 'stealing', which is a lay term referring to the unauthorized acquisition of something to which one is not entitled, be it information, a kiss, a document, or a stack of lumber.
To claim that because I paraphrased one of your statements in order to show that is was an equivocation, means that I have to accept it as true or be inconsistent, is ridiculous
You are as confused as your prose. You paraphrased, poorly and inaccurately, a reduction to "copying = taking = stealing". This is entirely inaccurate, because it attempts to insert a precursor step of no relevance. This has already been debunked.
The part about accepting the definition to be true comes from your use of the following: "stop calling people names because you can't steal their code".
If your "logical clarity" actually meant anything, you'd see that you've just spent several days arguing against your own construction.
You see, developers ignoring GPL requirements are stealing code, just as downloaders who pirate media are stealing. You need to turn your quest for clarity on yourself. There's no inconsistency on my side.
How many times is a disc rented out over its lifetime? That $10 extra per disc gets divided up quite a bit.
Not as many as you'd think, and the prorata share of the disc cost is not the issue. The inventory price is 70-90% greater.
Assuming the monthly subscription rate charged is $10 for normal users, there will be a breakdown for inventory wear/tear and library expansion. Say that's $2. There will be a cost for shipping. Say that's another $2. Then there's just business overhead, call it $5. They're left with $1 profit.
Now consider that the inventory price surges 66%--that increases the base rate to $2.80 or so, and eliminates their profit entirely. Prices must go up for the users of the expensive media, or profits must go down. Users should not have to subsidize the collection of a small number of people demanding premium product.
Charge the BD users an extra buck or two and call it even. Everybody wins, and everybody is paying the same amount.
Users who constantly send their discs back within a day don't get charged more. Users who use the profile feature (which we now know is expensive to maintain) don't get charged more.
All of that has already been built into the base subscription rate. Online services, including profiles and streaming, are infrastructure costs that are impractical to charge per use. The system needed to do so would cost more than the benefit of allocating the costs.
As to frequent returns, that's part of the queuing system. They ship out millions of discs per day, and the marginal cost of increasing that number is negligible--right up to the maximum output of their systems. Filling capacity actually makes things cheaper, which is why they offer so many unlimited plans to begin with.
The cost of media surging 75%, though, is not factored into those rates. Even with just one million discs in the library, the annual cost increase is going to be in excess of $20 million--assuming a $10 increase over DVD and one replacement per year (the actual number of replacements is likely higher). They have an online services development budget to handle the other parts (as well as the ability to invest profits in developing that service, since profiles and streaming are likely to attract new customers, while BD offerings are instead dependent on Blu-ray player uptake, not Netflix availability). They cannot budget for or absorb higher materials costs without raising subscription rates or cutting profit.
Slashdot Mirror
That does not explain why the human vocal apparatus matches the peak sensitivity of the ears. The two likely evolved together, as a function of use for speech.
Your theory does not explain why the human ear responds to the 2-4kHz range best. It is true that human speech was essentially predetermined to occur in the 1-10kHz range as a function of that being the most common hearing range for animals (which naturally would be somewhat uniform, so that we can all hear each other), but the human peak sensitivity is relatively low in our overall hearing range (about 10-15% along the line, linearly).
On the other side, the vocal apparatus of humans is too large to be efficient at significantly higher frequencies (and a smaller system would pose other problems in terms of articulation), and simultaneously our throats are too small to have a much lower peak efficiency range. As a result, spoken communication and our ability to produce sound clearly informed the evolution of our ears.
Communication is, therefore, the reason our peak sensitivity is what it is.
Do you believe it's wrong to steal?
There you go with your morality again. You're obsessed. I don't make categorical moral judgments.
If so, then why aren't you out there complaining about stolen bases, stolen kisses, and stealing away into the night?
What's to complain about? You're the one on a moral crusade, skippy. There's a presumption of impropriety implicit in the lack of authorization, which is the entire point of using "steal" to describe those actions (except "steal away", which is a metaphorical extension and not an act of stealing).
They're using the word properly. Why would I complain about that? You've come undone.
Could it be because you realize that some actions which can be described by [...] the word "stealing" are wrong, but others aren't?
That's exactly the point! Stealing is what it is: unauthorized acquisition. You're the one saying that copyright infringement is not stealing, when it plainly is. This discussion has never been whether copyright infringement is morally wrong. Claiming it's not stealing as a way of absolving immorality is imprecise and entirely unsuccessful.
The objectionable acts are those which can more specifically be described as theft
No. The objectionable acts are those which can be described as objectionable. Some, but not all, instances of theft can fall into this category, and many other forms of stealing that do not fall under 'theft' also fall into this category. Stealing your wife away is not theft, but I imagine you'd find it objectionable.
Your continued and unstoppable interweaving of morality is just boring now. Neither theft nor stealing exist as moral binaries.
"It's stealing" and therefore "they shouldn't do it". This argument relies on the belief that stealing is a bad thing that people shouldn't do.
No, it relies on their belief that they shouldn't do it. If they didn't believe it was wrong to steal, they wouldn't make such an effort to make weak and unsupportable arguments that it's not.
Honestly, do you completely fail at interpretation, or do you just mangle language for fun?
But, of course, as soon as you convince someone that an act he considers perfectly acceptable is "stealing" in some sense of the word that doesn't mean theft, you create a category of "stealing" that it's OK to do.
And?
Many perpetrators of socially unacceptable acts believe what they're doing is perfectly acceptable. You continually inject morality into the discussion while claiming you make a distinction between morality and legality.
Clearly, you do not, since you can't actually separate the two concepts in your head. If you take something without permission, you've stolen it. Whether or not you think you were justified in doing so does not change that simple fact. Whether or not you view it as "morally" wrong to do so also does not matter, as that is a personal perspective on an unambiguous act. The only failure to communicate arises when you project your morality onto someone else due to an inability to make logical distinctions.
Semantic wrangling doesn't change morality:
Coming from someone without any background in formal semantics, you sure love that phrase. "Semantic wrangling" is what you're doing.
Similarly, a group of crows is called a "murder", but that doesn't mean anyone will react to a group of crows the same way they react to homicide.
Technically speaking, you're not referring to the same word. They are orthographically identical, but not semantic equivalents.
And if you kept arguing that those bystanders who didn't do anything about the crows were supporting "murder", they'd quickly conclude you were an asshole more interested in semantic games than honest discussion.
More likely they'd wonder what kind of idiot contrived the example and yet so completely failed to make a point.
We're not talking about 'stealing' in some outward context. Homonyms and homographs are not semantic alternates. They're totally separate lexemes. Don't try to swim in the big kid pool.
If you do realize it and you continue using that word anyway, instead of choosing a less ambiguous one
There is nothing ambiguous about it. Stealing: unauthorized acquisition. It's the same damn word. You don't go to jail for "stealing", because stealing is not against the law.
That isn't a widespread belief. You're welcome to it, but don't expect to find much agreement here (or elsewhere).
It's not a belief. It's linguistic constructionism. Anything else is a combination of ignorance or intentional misrepresentation.
I think you'll find that most people aren't concerned about supposed instances of "stealing" where the "stolen" item isn't taken away from its owner,
What people are "concerned" about is irrelevant. It is what it is.
It's possible that with enough semantic wrangling,
It's semantic wrangling that turns the word on its head--something I've observed you doing in post after post. It's flatly wrong. Stealing is an act committed by a person, not a consequence felt by that person. Conflation of the two is a popular method for the construction of a strawman.
Stripping the word "steal" of its emotional connotation
Emotional connotation is irrelevant. I don't care how people feel about stealing. It's clear by the acrobatics performed by people in your position that they're aware it's stealing and that they shouldn't do it, because of the great lengths they go to in order to rationalize it and avoid association with reality.
It's fundamentally about greed, plain and simple. If people really stood on principle, they'd freely admit to stealing. If you're starving and you take a loaf of bread, you don't say, "I didn't steal it!" You say, yes, I did, but here's why--and you accept the consequences and hope that society agrees with your justification.
If someone pointed out that an opportunity, a password, a base, or a kiss hadn't really been stolen -- particularly in a conversation about morals or laws or property, where someone might reasonably think I'd been referring to theft -- I'd happily concede that it hadn't.
That would be an asinine exchange, since all of those instances are perfectly consistent with the word and its definition, and have been used in that manner by society for centuries. You choose this particular instance to complain, not any of the others, because it serves your ideological agenda. It's hypocritical. There's no opposition from you in any of those instances.
And once again, I'll remind you that your individually-crafted idiosyncrasies do not have a significant bearing on the term or sentiment, particularly in reference to a collective.
That shows you have no idea what the context was, because apparently you didn't bother to read the comment I was responding to, or even the part of it that I originally quoted. If you had, you would've seen that it used the word "theft".
I saw that. What does it matter? You both use the term incorrectly. The context is that you collectively can't get anywhere in the argument because neither of you has a clue what you're talking about.
The question isn't whether the owner knows or cares that it's gone, but whether it really is gone at all.
No. The verb's agency is the perpetrator, not the victim. It is the acquisition that is critical, not the result on the victim. Even if the owner cannot be located, you've still stolen it. 'Stole' and 'stolen from' are not parallel construction--stealing is an act, not a consequence. Do you have something you're not authorized to have? Yes? It's stolen.
No, I wouldn't describe either of those as stealing. The only hypocrisy there is that you're arguing against a position you made up yourself.
First, you're quoting a collective use of "you" (unless "the rest of us" refers to your alter egos)--and you can't possibly be so deluded as to believe that's not the sentiment on Slashdot.
So you're going to pretend you've never used the word "steal" to describe the taking of an idea, an opportunity, or the taking of a password?
You're saying that you post in GPL violation threads on Slashdot to remind editors and posters that GPL violation isn't stealing, it's just copying and the developers didn't actually lose anything? You're opposed to the FSF and other open source organizations being able to enforce in court noncompliance with the requirements of open source licenses?
Rrrrright.
Crying "troll" doesn't distract from that hypocrisy.
The fact is, it isn't gone: the owner still has it.
No, this is an impossibility. A copy cannot be in the possession of two parties simultaneously. Moreover, the owner does not still have the integrity of his property--he has been divested of his ownership by the unlawful acts of a third party. This is plainly stealing.
In order to take the copy, you have to misappropriate two rights not belonging to you: production and distribution. The owner has been permanently deprived of his exclusive rights of reproduction, distribution, and contract with regard to that copy.
If you have a problem with folks on Slashdot using common dictionary definitions of these words
But you're not! The fundamental definition of stealing is taking something without permission. It's not "permanent deprivation of a material, finite good, without any consideration as to other possible meanings" as it's being used.
This isn't a courtroom or a law school; we're discussing broad ethics and morals, not intricate legalities.
Oh, really? Then why all the stilted, convoluted, and just plain inaccurate legal analogies? You're not talking about broad ethics or morals at all--you're disingenuously trying to frame the discussion to put it out of context. You say "it's not stealing"--and then use a precise, legal definition of theft to make your point. They are not interchangeable, and your citing to theft simply does not make your point.
The rest of us have no problem understanding what "stealing" and "theft" mean in this particular context.
Apparently you do, because you can't seem to use the terms correctly. "In this particular context", theft isn't involved or relevant. That doesn't take stealing off the table.
The basic truth is that you're okay with the term "he stole my GPL code" but not "she stole my album", which is hypocrisy at its finest. Attempts to rationalize it mistake either (1) that stealing is not theft, and the finite or tangible nature of the item is not essential to the act (unauthorized acquisition) or (2) that the dispossession is not of the bits of the copy, but the violation of an exclusive right, or some combination of the two.
When people interfere with dominion and exclusivity in land by asserting (unlawfully) title, it's adverse possession, and it's stealing. When someone goes from a state of not having something to having it, by their own deeds and without authorization, they've stolen it, regardless of whether the owner even knows or cares that it's gone.
The moral and philosophical discussion doesn't change the simple fact that it was stolen.
...bam! Now that's comedy.
Only to a moron. Theft and stealing are not interchangeable. They never have been, and they never will be. If any of you actually knew what you were talking about, you'd know that much.
Stealing is not itself a crime. It's not a term of art. It's a broad, lay term that has for centuries referred to a multitude of acts, theft being only one of them.
he said the act was "stealing" because the copyright holder was deprived of revenue. HTH.
You can't establish deprivation of revenue unless there's possession of something for which revenue is due. If you don't have the book, you've not satisfied the criterion.
9/10 says you're misconstruing intentionally and you do, in fact, know better.
Well, by that logic, if I have $50 in my pocket and I decide to buy a few books with it instead of a game -- maybe because of the bookstore's actions, like if I saw they were having a sale -- doesn't that mean the bookstore has "stolen" that revenue from the game store?
No, because you don't have the game. If you took the game and then spent the money at the bookstore, that would be stealing.
If you're not interested in buying what someone has for sale, that's fine. But if you acquire something without paying for it, when you have no other claim to its possession, you've stolen it. Attempting muddied and painful misuse of semantics to say anything different is just sad.
It's only stealing when someone takes away something that you already had.
No, it's stealing when you get something you didn't previously have, without authorization. Changing the agency of the verb doesn't help your argument, and it shows how little this community actually understands the mechanics of language and law.
Theft makes the victim poorer
Stealing != theft.
Because edgesuite.net is part of Akamai, which hosts Apple content. Almost half of the iTunes Store links are on edgesuite servers.
I would argue that to allow otherwise is not allowing freedom, it's allowing freeloading.
That is the price you pay for freedom. Giving people a choice sometimes means that they make ones you don't like.
The terms apply whether modifications were made or not, and often there is no "redistributors work" in the form of derivative code or enhancements to be given up, and it's just as important to apply the terms to these cases.
If you've made no changes, you just have to point to the original code. It's an attribution requirements that's identical between the GPL and BSD/MPL/CC/etc. in that regard.
Downstream freedom is the way to insure that, and BSD simply doesn't provide for that in a practical way.
Sure it does. Every byte that you release remains free until you make it otherwise. No downstream developer can change that, and ensuring that freedom is accomplished. Downstream changes aren't ensuring that your code stays free, it's ensuring that you can get their code for free.
No, it's libre.
I'm sorry, that's what I should have said in my previous reply: "It's not libre, it's gratis." It's "libre if you agree to these demands".
I would hate to find my code in something like a Tivo and discover that the company that was freely redistributing my code was preventing me from applying my latest bugfix to my own code
See, but there's the rub. If it were your code, you wouldn't have any problem applying the bugfix, because you could just build the fixed version and substitute the binaries.
The situation you describe is only when someone has integrated your code into their substantive code, in which case it's their responsibility to provide bugfixes. Your patch might not even work on that code.
I agree that it sounds like you know what you want to get out of your code, and that it's perfectly legitimate to share it on the condition that others do the same. I don't begrudge you that option one bit. I just wish more GPL advocates were as willing as you to see that not everyone wants their development the same way.
Replying to myself to correct HTML stripping:
"initialisms pronounced as a word (acronyms) are treated as proper nouns"
"In American English initialisms and acronyms are just capitalized."
Just as another tidbit: the word "laser" is the perfect exemplar of this process. It began as an acronym (L.A.S.E.R), dropped the periods to LASER, was then subsequently referred to as a 'Laser' for a while before becoming the generic word 'laser' we have today--with many people not even knowing that it's an acronym in the first place. Cf. "scuba".
Actually, it's not the New York Times that started this. In Commonwealth English (note that TFA is Australian), proper grammar mandates that initialisms pronounced as a word are treated as proper nouns (e.g. Nafta, not NAFTA, because you say "nafta"), while those pronounced as letters are capitalized (e.g. DMA, not Dma, because it's pronounced "dee-em-ey").
In American English, initialisms are just capitalized. The New York Times seems stuck without a style manual in this regard, because there is a growing trend to de-emphasize caps text throughout the English-speaking world. Apart from marking proper nouns (which could be done with punctuation or any number of other means), English doesn't even need capital letters, so I can easily see the trend continuing.
This is quite similar to the rehashing of a major early-90s argument: the inclusion of periods in initialisms. We've seen that fall off to the wayside (when was the last time you saw anyone write "C.E.O."?)
This applies only when "you" are the first-tier recipient of the original code. After that, BSD allows re-licensing under any terms carrying any new restrictions. GPL does not, because that can interfere with the end-user's freedom.
No, it doesn't interfere with freedom. The original code is still available to the end user. It doesn't vanish, and the end user remains free to access the original, freely released code and work with that.
Simple exercise: can you, as an end-user, engage in all possible GPL-mandated behavior with regards to software that originated under the BSD license? Not with regards to any such software that has been redistributed under proprietary terms.
Sure you can. The software originating under the BSD license is still there and still available for you to do as you please with. Every byte of code that was freely released remains free, regardless of what happens downstream.
There's nothing unreasonable, viral, or communistic about that.
Of course it's "viral" and communistic. It requires you to share your work with others when you might otherwise not want to or not be able to. The BSD and similar licenses allow you to choose whether or not to share your updates and modifications without forcing you to. It's communistic because it sacrifices the maximum possible range of choice for one group in order to boost the scope of choice for another group. It is classical redistribution.
would explain to me who the freedom granted by the BSD license is intended for, and how that freedom is protected by the license.
Freedom for everyone to choose how and whether to share their work. The BSD protects the choice by not limiting it. The BSD code originally released remains available straight through to the end user. Any developers along the way maintain the choice of sharing their modifications. Any such modifications voluntarily disclosed remain available to the end user. The end user has no claim of right to the work of others not voluntarily given, and the GPL grants power to originating developers they are not by default entitled to (and is a strings-attached "freedom"), and it grants power to end users they are not otherwise entitled to.
The GPL simply doesn't allow redistribution of the code in ways that do not pass along the same freedoms the re-distributor received when he got it. What's un-free about that?
Exactly that: the GPL doesn't allow distribution unless the redistributor freely gives up his work.
That's not freedom; it's cross-licensing. It's not gratis, it's a conditional gift. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, but it's not as free as possible.
If I offer to give you $50, that's freely given. If I tell you that you can have $50 if you hop on a table and dance a little, that's clearly a bargained-for exchange. It might be a great deal, but it's not truly free. If, however, I give you $50 and ask that you dance on the table without making it conditional, you're still free to do so. That's what the BSD license and similar licenses do, and what the GPL does not tolerate. That's exactly why the argument that the GPL offers "more" freedom absolutely cannot validate.
Certainly there will always be the (rather pointless) philosophical question of which is more 'free', but what's the point? They're both pretty darn free, but take their freedom in different directions.
The problem is more basic than that, and it's one ceaselessly battled out in politics, too. It boils down to, "what is freedom?" Does freedom mean no restrictions, or does it mean equal opportunity, with a "civic duty" for some people to forego optimal satisfaction for the benefit of the greater community?
The GPL isn't more free, intellectually or economically. It is by its very nature restrictive for the sake of self-expansion--and perfectly legitimate in being so. Yet, oddly enough, many of its strongest advocates support the "no restriction" model economically, complaining about government meddling and redistribution. This very evaluation tells them that the GPL is less free than the BSD license, because GPL meddles in personal/business decisions and stipulates distribution. Somehow they don't realize that.
The simple truth is that BSD has to be more free, because it allows for voluntary GPL-style contribution AND proprietary-style withholding. It provides more options, and if there's any unified definition for 'freedom', it's "choice". Simple exercise: can you engage in all possible GPL-mandated behavior under the BSD license? Yes. Can you voluntarily practice all possible BSD behavior under the GPL license? No.
GPL advocates are usually the ones proclaiming their license to be the freest, and then attributing the indignation they receive in response as condemnation of their license. It's nothing of the sort. GPL zealots are a clear demographic on Slashdot. BSD zealots exist, but not anywhere near the same numbers. It's always the GPL proponent that brings up the "freedom" argument, though--hell, they even chose the term in contrast to "open source".
The only way for this perennial argument to go away is if GPL advocates stop making the claim. But RMS and his throng can't seem to persist without demonizing others.
There's nothing fundamentally wrong with BSD, CC, GPL, or proprietary licenses. The creator of a work, having invested the sweat of his brow, his time, and his passion in its production, should be able to choose how he wishes to share it with others. If his terms are too draconian, then the market should not reward it with popularity.
A corporation, by definition is an Artificial Legal Entity ( ALE ). Which means, that is is CREATED not by Natural Persons, but by another Artificial Entity. ( The State )
Error in the first step.
A corporation is not created by the state. It is created by private citizens, who then register it with the state, where they pay taxes in order for the unmolested privilege of selling to residents of the state and providing a form of accreditation for third parties to verify against.
At no point does the corporation become an arm of the state or an agent of the government.
So, we have a situation where the "rights" of an Artificial Legal Entity are *EXACTLY* what the Secretary of State's office
No. The "rights" of a corporation are those granted to them by the state's business and professions code, its labor laws, and relevant legislation, granted, interestingly enough, by the legislature, which is composed of citizens. The Secretary of State is not legally endowed with the power to grant or deny rights.
Can you explain to me how a corporation like Monsanto is a threat without having a government to buy IP law from?
Sure. They'd do the exact same things, and you'd have no recourse. You might not think you have one now, given the "buying the law" drivel, but without a government to impose a structure, you'd have no power to challenge them. In order to further your view, you'd need the government--to ban enforcement of agreements of this type. Eliminating "IP law" doesn't change the fundamental nature of intellectual labor in a capitalist economic system; it merely eliminates any protections you might have in your favor. A creator would remain free to control release of his work by explicit contract instead and then suing you for breach of contract rather than e.g. copyright infringement.
Your fallacy, and it's an egregious one, is assuming that without IP, you can suddenly get away with anything you want. The opposite, in fact, has been the historical example. Without a statutory grant of access, everything would become prima facie unlawful. Monsanto would say "we don't have an agreement giving you access to our work" and exact appropriate retribution. If you believe that treating research and intellectual labor as an asset is a result of IP law rather than the progenitor of it, you're a poor student of history.
Your plan has less than one-third the RAM and about one-eighth the storage.
EC2 minimum units: 1.7GB RAM, 160GB storage. Price at your host for the closest analogue (2GB/80GB): $140 (well within the 120-200 range I stated). Total price to operate the EC2 unit: $72 plus bandwidth.
Moreover, where EC2 really cuts into the competition is scaling at larger units, particularly with regard to hourly billing (allowing much more granularity in service and pricing). EC2's mid-size unit absolutely crushes the specs of your host's very best plan, and at a comparable price.
Your ability to compare services is subpar. You can get webhosting VPS for $10/month with some plans. That doesn't make it comparable to an EC2 unit. That said, your host has generous bandwidth caps for the price points and is certainly adequate for someone who doesn't need the muscle of EC2 services.
No, it's not. Its closest plan to an EC2 "small" instance is $80/month for one-third the storage and less RAM. If Linode offered a comparable service, it'd be about $110/month.
None of that is comparable hardware. Softlayer has pretty good prices, but you're still looking at $200/mo with no elasticity for the best approximation. EC2 is still roughly 1/3 the price.
An Athlon at a no-name provider isn't even worth mentioning in comparison to one of these units. Web hosting can be found for cheap. I wouldn't even jokingly put them in the same class, though.
if you really have one CPU unit running there non-stop -for year, it is pretty expensive, around 700 dollars I believe.
That's pretty damn cheap. A dedicated rack server is upwards of $300/month most places, and it does not provide the "elastic" part of the Amazon cloud for when your service takes on heavy demand. Rackspace, for example, provides a comparable unit at $383/mo.
You might be talking about a Virtual Private Server--there are a number of services offering similar specs in the $120-200 range...still more expensive, but more comparable to EC2.
Some teachers and classes are naturally better suited to larger class sizes than others. If everyone teaches 30 kids, you can't take advantage of the ones that could handle 200, and you can't use that advantage to support the ones that can handle only 12.
You can't, anyway, unless you mean that some kids should take PE three or four times a day.
PE classes in most schools already combine larger numbers of students--and if you're referring to substantive classes that can support that many students in primary education, I'd like to hear of one. Even taking a large class, such as a concert band of 95 students, you need at least two teachers, and oftentimes more.
If you reserve two periods for PE and put half the kids in each one, then the other half can spread out in smaller classes at that same time--but that only allows for each student to be in one "small section" class in their schedules.
Even if there were substantive classes that could be expanded, where would they be taught? Schools rarely have instruction space for that many people--unless it's a university.
The reason classrooms are overcrowded is because of a lack of resources, mostly number of teachers, but also number of classrooms. Take a look at any suburban school built 30-40 years ago--they're stuffed with students because no one is funding their replacement. It's expensive for the city to buy land when private contractors are able to offer more money, and often it's not politically expedient to use eminent domain; building the school itself is also expensive. Hiring more teachers is expensive, even if there were more teachers to hire. If you've got 10 classrooms and 8 periods, you can only teach 80 subjects. It's that simple.
That's when people who say "throwing money" isn't the solution need to be told to shut up. They're not throwing enough money. What most schools do get, they have to triage. It's the same result as the government program rule. If it will take $100M to do it right, giving them $80M doesn't mean it's enough to do it 80% right--it could, and frequently does, mean that it's $80M spent on total failure. Opponents can then talk about the $80M boondoggle (sidestepping the fact that their opposition was what castrated it and prevented it from having a chance for success), and proponents don't get another chance at bat for awhile because their political capital was spent on something that fell short.
I submit that 200 years ago, copying someone else's words or music would be most accurately described as plagariasm or copyright violation.
I suggest you consult an unabridged OED, then. "Copyright infringement" in the modern sense is a term approximately one century old. The act of stealing by the false assumption of a right to print has been referred to as "stealing" for at least four centuries. 200 years ago, "copying" was not a concern--misappropriation of ideas, instead, was--something very much known as stealing.
How is my model, which argues that copyright violation and plagiarism are/were more appropriate terms, nonfunctioning?
Because it conflates the means with the ends. They are more specific terms, not more appropriate. Your statement contains the implicit assumption that "stealing" is a specific term of art, and it is not.
Are you some kind of expert on copyright law of 200 years ago, or are you just speaking out of your ass?
As a matter of fact, I am. What would you like to know? Would it interest you to know that another word that ruffles the feathers of some Slashdotters--piracy--has been used to describe intellectual property infringement for 150 years?
If you want to reserve "stealing" as a lay term with multiple meanings, therefore loading it with emotional overtones and rendering it unsuitable for strictly logical discussions, then that's fine with me.
Your prose makes no sense. Stealing is a lay term.
p.s. theft is a lay term as well as a term of art, and though I know litle about the law,No, it's not, and yes, your knowledge of the law is poor. To wit, if I asked you to define 'term of art', I don't believe you could do so. As a matter of fact, the very quote you selected demonstrates this: "the courts interpreting those words have declared that they do not have a necessary common law meaning coterminous with larceny and exclusive of other theft crimes." In other words, 'stealing' is not larceny or even theft, but a broader concept.
I don't understand why you are so bent on extending this discussion unnecessarily by intentionally misunderstanding my points, it's pretty simple.
It is simple. Stealing is a lay term, covering any form or iteration of unauthorized acquisition. It has never been associated strictly with the dispossession of physical items, either at law or idiomatically. No one is intentionally misunderstanding your points--you're just making bad ones.
I would prefer merely to ask you a hypothetical question: if it were clear to you that from a practical standpoint, copyright law were to inevitably be doomed to be either revoked or massively weakened in the near future, would you then feel it more accurate to stop using the term stealing to refer to copyright infringement?
No. Taking something without permission, regardless of the means, is stealing.
Or would you persist in using such black and white, loaded terminology to describe a situation that had become quite gray,until the laws had actually been revoked?
It is you who persists in claiming the term is loaded. It is not, nor is it grey. If it is not yours to have, and you take it, you've stolen it, even if you've committed no crime in the process.
The imputation of legal or moral blame is of no concern to me. The rationalization and equivocation that people here undertake to bend out of that reality is the truly amazing part. Weak attempts to dispossess emotion from mere words belies a conscious effort to avoid that association. It is a simple inquiry: do you have permission to have it? If not, did you move from a state of not having it to a state of having it? If so, you've stolen it. Whether or not you believe it was wrong to steal is not the issue.
MY experience is that there are three groups of people who start and maintain free software:
1) Students, who are essentially doing it for the compensation of a degree and self-improvement ( creation of: linux, apache, the start of the BSDs,...) ...) ...)
2) Professionals who either do the work for companies like RedHat, HP, et al or are small independents who sell consulting services based on the software with which they have expertise (and sometimes fame) ( creation of: mysql, Qt, mozilla,
3) People who need the tools to get their real work done. Scientists, system admins, etc. ( creation of: perl, sendmail, octave,
What a joke!
You're responding to a point stating that "free software" developers don't support themselves through F/OSS development...with three examples of people who don't support themselves through F/OSS development.
Consulting services don't pay the bills--most people have no use for them, and certainly wouldn't pay the immense costs of such a contract when they could just buy a copy. Sure, at the enterprise level, it's a living for some, but it's no across-the-board replacement for salaried programmers.
There's still not a Linux distro as polished as OS X or even Windows, and they've been trying for over a decade to get Linux on the desktop. This exposes another point: FOSS developers don't develop what they don't care about, and UI people don't work in F/OSS because no one is willing to pay them. Same goes for all the other ancillary services involved in the software industry. Support contracts just won't support the depth and breadth of products we have now, and businesses seeking common tools just don't interact in a way that supports the F/OSS model. Adobe Photoshop would never be a for-hire work with F/OSS developers; it's too big and too expensive a project. It's telling that F/OSS alternatives trail behind proprietary development for these kinds of projects.
Where it works, F/OSS is a great community effort, and home cooking can be great fun. Sometimes you even score a hit. That's no evidence that the model is viable as the sole approach--it's just not. If anything, it suggests that the most successful approach is one leveraging community participation while simultaneously protecting a core of proprietary development as a business asset and avoiding the political turmoil of the open source community.
Apple and Tivo do it well, which is why RMS and GPL3 are shooting themselves in the foot. If the goal were to spread software freedom, Tivoization would be welcomed. But it's not the goal. For GPL zealots, it's to further their own greed and jealous ego: they want unlimited access to the work of others under the guise of "freedom for everyone" (except for developers). It's not to release great products for anyone to use or improve, it's to spread their ideology while criticizing others as "greedy" (and failing to recognize their equal greed).
All that is required for clear logical debate of the subject is that the same word not be used for unauthorized copying, and unauthorized physical dispossession of property. If you agree to stop calling the latter stealing, than you can have the word stealing for the former.
It is not a matter of agreement. Stealing is a simple and broad concept, and has been for centuries. It is legally and factually distinct from theft, infringement, fraud, misappropriation and a number of other mechanisms.
The same word can easily be used. Under no possible functioning model of the English language can 'stealing' be deemed an inappropriate term, except to advance a political agenda. In order for 'stealing' to be inapplicable, there would have to be no possible definition it fits. This is demonstrably false.
That is why it's just easier for us to agree to call physical theft stealing, and unauthorized copying, unauthorized copying.
No, it's easiest to call theft theft and stealing stealing. They are not the same and are not interchangeable in all circumstances, and this is a critical point and the nature of the argument.
Saying that copyright infringement isn't stealing is both false and a strawman. It is stealing. It is not theft.
I believe it to be incumbent upon you to come up with a new word, to use a word like "stealing" which for hundreds of years had only the latter definition is a low rhetorical device reeking with intellectual dishonesty.
I'd agree, if that were the case. The verb 'to steal' has for centuries referred to far more than physical dispossession. It is only in the past decade that the movement against it has started, with the ignorant and misguided notion that they're combating its association with 'theft'. This is particularly evident in discussion on Slashdot, which attempt (rather poorly) to use legal interpretation without realizing their step one error: stealing is not theft at law.
The law has already addressed the discrepancy in terms of art as to the physical vs. intellectual dispossession. At no point does this have any bearing on the word 'stealing', which is a lay term referring to the unauthorized acquisition of something to which one is not entitled, be it information, a kiss, a document, or a stack of lumber.
To claim that because I paraphrased one of your statements in order to show that is was an equivocation, means that I have to accept it as true or be inconsistent, is ridiculous
You are as confused as your prose. You paraphrased, poorly and inaccurately, a reduction to "copying = taking = stealing". This is entirely inaccurate, because it attempts to insert a precursor step of no relevance. This has already been debunked.
The part about accepting the definition to be true comes from your use of the following: "stop calling people names because you can't steal their code".
If your "logical clarity" actually meant anything, you'd see that you've just spent several days arguing against your own construction.
You see, developers ignoring GPL requirements are stealing code, just as downloaders who pirate media are stealing. You need to turn your quest for clarity on yourself. There's no inconsistency on my side.
How many times is a disc rented out over its lifetime? That $10 extra per disc gets divided up quite a bit.
Not as many as you'd think, and the prorata share of the disc cost is not the issue. The inventory price is 70-90% greater.
Assuming the monthly subscription rate charged is $10 for normal users, there will be a breakdown for inventory wear/tear and library expansion. Say that's $2. There will be a cost for shipping. Say that's another $2. Then there's just business overhead, call it $5. They're left with $1 profit.
Now consider that the inventory price surges 66%--that increases the base rate to $2.80 or so, and eliminates their profit entirely. Prices must go up for the users of the expensive media, or profits must go down. Users should not have to subsidize the collection of a small number of people demanding premium product.
Charge the BD users an extra buck or two and call it even. Everybody wins, and everybody is paying the same amount.
Users who constantly send their discs back within a day don't get charged more. Users who use the profile feature (which we now know is expensive to maintain) don't get charged more.
All of that has already been built into the base subscription rate. Online services, including profiles and streaming, are infrastructure costs that are impractical to charge per use. The system needed to do so would cost more than the benefit of allocating the costs.
As to frequent returns, that's part of the queuing system. They ship out millions of discs per day, and the marginal cost of increasing that number is negligible--right up to the maximum output of their systems. Filling capacity actually makes things cheaper, which is why they offer so many unlimited plans to begin with.
The cost of media surging 75%, though, is not factored into those rates. Even with just one million discs in the library, the annual cost increase is going to be in excess of $20 million--assuming a $10 increase over DVD and one replacement per year (the actual number of replacements is likely higher). They have an online services development budget to handle the other parts (as well as the ability to invest profits in developing that service, since profiles and streaming are likely to attract new customers, while BD offerings are instead dependent on Blu-ray player uptake, not Netflix availability). They cannot budget for or absorb higher materials costs without raising subscription rates or cutting profit.
It's really fairly basic.