I'm amazed that any kind of anarchist could be in favour of property rights because, on Hobbes's assumptions which may be right, it can only exist within the confines of a state or at any rate a community acting as a de facto state (and if you're going that way we'll all be Nozick's slaves...). I honestly don't think that there is any justification which can be made for intellectual property (as private property; as social property it might be ok) from first principles which is in line with justice. Most people base their estimations of property "rights" on a Lockean notion (which I suppose might be compatible with some notions of anarchy, but only from the state of nature view) but I really think that this can't justify intellectual property.
On the Lockean grounds if we start assuming that people own themselves and they can appropriate un-owned goods through mixing their labour with it intellectual property might seem justified because the labour belongs to the person and they "mix" it with the common (which in this sense might loosely be taken as all ideas that ever could be). But the real problem with this view is that the intellectual labour doesn't really belong to the person in the same way their capacity to work does. Intellectual labour is based heavily within the confines of the society and the social construction of reality. Further, given that a person's ontology is almost certainly socially defined (or confined) we can claim in the strong sense that no intellectual labour can ever be owned by a single person alone. So even if we can claim that there is a "mixing of labour" and this sho0uld create some kind of right we're really no closer to justifying IP as private property. It seems that if a "labourer" ought to gain a benefit it shouldn't be all of the benefit when they are just the last link in the chain.
I think consequentialist justifications are difficult as well. To actually hold it up as a justification to IP as private property you'd need to show that it really was the case that people wouldn't produce without strong IP protection (which is almost certainly untrue) AND that private property in IP really is a good way to ensure maximum returns. Given that you want to restrict my freedom I'd say you have the burden of proof on you.
To make an argument about respect for person's autonomy - you could have a better line of attack; but even this probably stops short of Ip as private property. Basically it seems disrespectful to people to restrict their freedom just to make others slightly more happy... but this is a difficult issue which given how much my eye is hurting I cant be bothered to explain more fully (anyway, I remain unconvinced that it's a winner).
So my question back might be how exactly can you justify IP as private property?... but then I just plain don't like private property; and neither should you.
Re:News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters.
on
I Will Derive
·
· Score: 1
"Because I think one way slashdot sets itself apart (and I'll get torn up over this but I still think it is true.) is in the quality of the comments."
I really have to agree with you there... I don't seem to post anything like I used to (probably only do about 5 a month or so now, but I still keep coming back. Partly of course this is for the "news" element, but mainly it is because there is always at least one comment that is really worth reading written by someone who actually knows something about the subject. I'm just waiting until the topic comes round to academic political science so I can go for it in a highly insightful way; until then I guess I'll have to wait.
I really dont want to sound like an apple fanboy, but have you considered an iPod touch . I'm on mine now and if you hack it its fine for email, web and ssh. Although getting it to sync over ssh can be a challenge (an one I've not got round actually on 1.1.4), so its probably a deal breaker if you dont have windows or a mac kicking around (fortunately my girlfriend still has a windows laptop kicking around).
its got a fairly good battery life; hours on the web (I think I get over 5 doing normal stuff and a little less watching stuff on the BBC. It can do emails in a similar way to thunderbird and you can stick ssh on it fairly easily from a hack from 1.1.4 using ziphone
I don't mean to break it to you, but there is a god of (free and) open source software, and Stallman is a/one of the saint(s)... you can read more about it here; http://www.stallman.org/saint.html
I mean, I dont want to get into a "who had it worse" thing - we all have bad things happen with our lives and things can seem Especially bad when you're young. But I think that the reason why some people react in a dismissive way is because when you go through things that are really personally difficult for you - especially if it is considered by society to be "worse" - you can come to view other people who didn't deal as well with an almost hostile attitude. I guess its just one of those things...
I've actually seen a fair few of the files in the archieves about the ufos. Whilst there is always the chance that they just dont release the good stuff (elistism and your conspiracy theories, I'm looking at you...). But I honestly believe that our government genuinely doesn't know anything about them and\or doesn't think they exist. There is some pretty classified things in the archieves (like wheb civil servants were admitting that they may have broken international law) so I dont really buy the argument that they censor stuff that goes in there
your right about magicrescue. I had a USB stick fail with a fair bit of important data on it but magicrescue managed to salvage pretty much everything on the drive. Shame it can't do PDFs though; but I would recomend it to anyone
for me the only windows application I want is iTunes (with USb support). Not being able to put music on my mp3 player without burning it to CD and then using my girlfriends crappy ancient dell w/ celeron processor is a tad annoying... because of what Apple has done with the Touch in terms of how you get music on it* I'm not sure there will be another viable solution for getting it to work with linux anytime soon
Interesting you used to be able to do it wirelessly from linux using ssh but they have effectively disabled that in 1.1.4 by changing how its done again
as someone who has spent the last several years studying the constitution, amongst other political activities, I dont really find any of this surprising. We have a largely Hobbesian culture when it comes to high politics and this just seems to be continuing... Its an elected dictatorship, if you will. I think that its always been like this, just there was a period with not enough will to use the resources we had for this aim (the home offiice used to have just 18 staff) but even then no one wanted seriously to challenge the moral authority of government
I dont know if its just for proffesional gamers even if this is a market its well suited for. I'd consider getting one just for typing and the odd game. They did say it was rather quite good even at the say to day tasks.. I guess if they could get the price down to £50 that's about the point I, and a lot of other people, might think about it as a productivity tool
I'm not a kde user but I must say some of the things that I've seen about it would make me consider giving it another go. I quite like some of the ideas they've got, but I can't help but feel that its a bit of a shame that we have two desktop environmnets for Linux which effectively means twice the effort and a dividing of the developers. I know that there are idealigical differences between the two camps... Perhaps this is part of the downside of open source. We've had the same thing with pidgin - in the end perhaps we could all just get along?
I was a little confused about that at first but I think the reason for this is partly the permanence of the images. Whilst we think that someone who is 18 ought to be able to think through for the future implications of present actions (like prono pictures of yourself ending up on the net for effectively all eternity). We restrict the right of people under 18 to get into that mess. It might not be perfect (and I dare say a fair few people end up breaking it whilst they are that age) I think generally it seems like a fairly good idea (but should probably be publicised more in schools)...
...perhaps. I found it quite pleasant to install last time I tried it, I think they've made it a lot easier to work with than some other distros I've tried (SUSE, I'm looking at you). I've been on and off Linux for several years (started running red-hat on a win-95 era laptop) and I've definitely noticed since about 2005 things have really rapidly improved - so maybe we really are nearly ready.
Still, I must say that personally I have some issues with ubuntu that would stop me recommending it to my friends who I felt were slightly better than n00b standard at computers already (or could easily become so). For me the terminal is so incredibly powerful that learning how to use it really can increase productivity massively; you can still do that on ubuntu but it has been designed with the idea of cutting it out (I know... different markets, right?). The other issue I have with Ubuntu is more serious and is about security. Last time I checked running "sudo su - " gave you root access without a password, which is at least a little concern. Also, I really can't see why all distros don't know come with SELinux running as default. I've never had a problem with it on fedora and to me it seems to really be worth its salt, as it were.
not being an American I don't have any special interest in how this case turns out from the social realities of living with laws like this, but if this does go through then people could cause serious problems for the record labels. For example 100,000 people could get together and send riaa companies CDs through the post with stickers saying they have to be stored at the central lobby of head office. Under their rules they would have accepted the contract by opening the package - the best they could do would be to return them at their own massive cost.
They might even have to listen to them if they often get CDs through for business - according to the that's certainly enough to have accepted a contract
indeed, but ISPs will lose out on this not matter what way this goes. If they change their prices to become more realistic then I'll just downgrade to 128k (instead of my supposedly 8MB) and probably end up paying less anyway. I think most people would probably do the same. So ISPs can lose a vast majority of their revenue and broadband customers or they can just swallow the damn bullet and provide the service they should have been doing for years and upgrade the system
that's pretty impressive. (It should have said in TFS though that it was their objective to make it have as many steps as possible) But I do have to wonder if it maybe wasn't the case that some of the steps were useless - things like "turn burger 1 degree clockwise, turn burger 1 degree anti-clockwise" - but I suppose even so it is an impressive feat of uselessness
I agree they should do something radical, but to me it seems that a free way to gain market share is just to be more open than the competition. How would our buying habits change if they made the spec 100% open source? Unless they think that tens of thousands of early adopters with (usually) large amounts of disposable income just aren't worth the hassle of opening up. The same goes for ATI.
Turn "ATI: enemy of your freedom" into "AMD/ATI: we love your freedom"
the thing is, they are trying to deal with aspects of the social world and human nature. These things are difficult and a shade unpredictable. Political science and sociology have been working in this field for hundreds of years and we still have significant amounts of disagreement over the first principles of society - so it hardly seems like a huge criticism to say they don't often agree.
As to whether the science is "junk", I would say not. Lets say that the conditions that it was conducted under were good enough for the standards of Middlesex Uni (which will hopefully be as high as at other unis). Given that I think this sort of research is, if anything, more important theortical physics because this offers the ability to directly affect how we organise our social world now. You'd have a hard time making that claim about 24-dimensional super gravitys
I should apologize, I read a scroll of genocide but had no idea it was cursed - now the moat is full of krakens and evidently they seem to be spreading...
Also, have you seen how much spam they are sending out? "Its bots are prolific, too: The firm has seen single Kraken bots sending out up to 500,000 pieces of spam in a day." - if all 400000 bots did that that'd be 200 billion a day. That has to represent a pretty large (albeit distributed) cost to ISPs
I agree, and the worst part is that I have to pay tribute to the just so I can have the Internet and phone at all. I'm currently with Virgin (though it seems they'll be just as bad) and had to pay over £10 a month just so they would give me a phone number which is a pre-requisate for getting any adsl Internet connection here (annoyingly despite being in the middle of the country I can't get cable... Or freeview, but that's another story)
When I was looking to learn more about how to use linux a little while after I'd started doing so I asked on the Fedora forum what they would recommend and someone sent me a link to a really great online book which contained so much information of such high quality that I felt like I really learned loads. It's also really easy going for complete n00bs, but I suspect that if I went back I'd still learn new things and have new interesting stuff to look at... you can check it out at http://rute.2038bug.com/index.html.gz
If you want a good unix/linux book I honestly don't think there is a better place to start (although some of the information seemed a little out of date (like modems being based on sound waves and hard drives being measured in MBs...) UNIX is UNIX, even if we now have slightly shiny-er linux wrappers)
Slashdot Mirror
I'm amazed that any kind of anarchist could be in favour of property rights because, on Hobbes's assumptions which may be right, it can only exist within the confines of a state or at any rate a community acting as a de facto state (and if you're going that way we'll all be Nozick's slaves...). I honestly don't think that there is any justification which can be made for intellectual property (as private property; as social property it might be ok) from first principles which is in line with justice. Most people base their estimations of property "rights" on a Lockean notion (which I suppose might be compatible with some notions of anarchy, but only from the state of nature view) but I really think that this can't justify intellectual property.
On the Lockean grounds if we start assuming that people own themselves and they can appropriate un-owned goods through mixing their labour with it intellectual property might seem justified because the labour belongs to the person and they "mix" it with the common (which in this sense might loosely be taken as all ideas that ever could be). But the real problem with this view is that the intellectual labour doesn't really belong to the person in the same way their capacity to work does. Intellectual labour is based heavily within the confines of the society and the social construction of reality. Further, given that a person's ontology is almost certainly socially defined (or confined) we can claim in the strong sense that no intellectual labour can ever be owned by a single person alone. So even if we can claim that there is a "mixing of labour" and this sho0uld create some kind of right we're really no closer to justifying IP as private property. It seems that if a "labourer" ought to gain a benefit it shouldn't be all of the benefit when they are just the last link in the chain.
I think consequentialist justifications are difficult as well. To actually hold it up as a justification to IP as private property you'd need to show that it really was the case that people wouldn't produce without strong IP protection (which is almost certainly untrue) AND that private property in IP really is a good way to ensure maximum returns. Given that you want to restrict my freedom I'd say you have the burden of proof on you.
To make an argument about respect for person's autonomy - you could have a better line of attack; but even this probably stops short of Ip as private property. Basically it seems disrespectful to people to restrict their freedom just to make others slightly more happy... but this is a difficult issue which given how much my eye is hurting I cant be bothered to explain more fully (anyway, I remain unconvinced that it's a winner).
So my question back might be how exactly can you justify IP as private property?... but then I just plain don't like private property; and neither should you.
"Because I think one way slashdot sets itself apart (and I'll get torn up over this but I still think it is true.) is in the quality of the comments."
I really have to agree with you there... I don't seem to post anything like I used to (probably only do about 5 a month or so now, but I still keep coming back. Partly of course this is for the "news" element, but mainly it is because there is always at least one comment that is really worth reading written by someone who actually knows something about the subject. I'm just waiting until the topic comes round to academic political science so I can go for it in a highly insightful way; until then I guess I'll have to wait.
I really dont want to sound like an apple fanboy, but have you considered an iPod touch . I'm on mine now and if you hack it its fine for email, web and ssh. Although getting it to sync over ssh can be a challenge (an one I've not got round actually on 1.1.4), so its probably a deal breaker if you dont have windows or a mac kicking around (fortunately my girlfriend still has a windows laptop kicking around).
its got a fairly good battery life; hours on the web (I think I get over 5 doing normal stuff and a little less watching stuff on the BBC. It can do emails in a similar way to thunderbird and you can stick ssh on it fairly easily from a hack from 1.1.4 using ziphone
I don't mean to break it to you, but there is a god of (free and) open source software, and Stallman is a/one of the saint(s)... you can read more about it here; http://www.stallman.org/saint.html
I mean, I dont want to get into a "who had it worse" thing - we all have bad things happen with our lives and things can seem Especially bad when you're young. But I think that the reason why some people react in a dismissive way is because when you go through things that are really personally difficult for you - especially if it is considered by society to be "worse" - you can come to view other people who didn't deal as well with an almost hostile attitude. I guess its just one of those things...
I've actually seen a fair few of the files in the archieves about the ufos. Whilst there is always the chance that they just dont release the good stuff (elistism and your conspiracy theories, I'm looking at you...). But I honestly believe that our government genuinely doesn't know anything about them and\or doesn't think they exist. There is some pretty classified things in the archieves (like wheb civil servants were admitting that they may have broken international law) so I dont really buy the argument that they censor stuff that goes in there
your right about magicrescue. I had a USB stick fail with a fair bit of important data on it but magicrescue managed to salvage pretty much everything on the drive. Shame it can't do PDFs though; but I would recomend it to anyone
for me the only windows application I want is iTunes (with USb support). Not being able to put music on my mp3 player without burning it to CD and then using my girlfriends crappy ancient dell w/ celeron processor is a tad annoying... because of what Apple has done with the Touch in terms of how you get music on it* I'm not sure there will be another viable solution for getting it to work with linux anytime soon
Interesting you used to be able to do it wirelessly from linux using ssh but they have effectively disabled that in 1.1.4 by changing how its done again
as someone who has spent the last several years studying the constitution, amongst other political activities, I dont really find any of this surprising. We have a largely Hobbesian culture when it comes to high politics and this just seems to be continuing... Its an elected dictatorship, if you will. I think that its always been like this, just there was a period with not enough will to use the resources we had for this aim (the home offiice used to have just 18 staff) but even then no one wanted seriously to challenge the moral authority of government
Not to be pedantic, but the number of the beast is actually 616... they have a wikipedia article about it here; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_of_the_Beast
I dont know if its just for proffesional gamers even if this is a market its well suited for. I'd consider getting one just for typing and the odd game. They did say it was rather quite good even at the say to day tasks.. I guess if they could get the price down to £50 that's about the point I, and a lot of other people, might think about it as a productivity tool
I'm not a kde user but I must say some of the things that I've seen about it would make me consider giving it another go. I quite like some of the ideas they've got, but I can't help but feel that its a bit of a shame that we have two desktop environmnets for Linux which effectively means twice the effort and a dividing of the developers. I know that there are idealigical differences between the two camps... Perhaps this is part of the downside of open source. We've had the same thing with pidgin - in the end perhaps we could all just get along?
I was a little confused about that at first but I think the reason for this is partly the permanence of the images. Whilst we think that someone who is 18 ought to be able to think through for the future implications of present actions (like prono pictures of yourself ending up on the net for effectively all eternity). We restrict the right of people under 18 to get into that mess. It might not be perfect (and I dare say a fair few people end up breaking it whilst they are that age) I think generally it seems like a fairly good idea (but should probably be publicised more in schools)...
Fibonacci is a better game; you start drinking at one and have one shot for each number in the sequence. First one to die or pass out losses!
"They have proclaimed it the best game of the decade."
Then they are wrong. I suppose I only need to point out that Majora's Mask came out in 2000 and that clearly makes it the best game of this decade
...perhaps. I found it quite pleasant to install last time I tried it, I think they've made it a lot easier to work with than some other distros I've tried (SUSE, I'm looking at you). I've been on and off Linux for several years (started running red-hat on a win-95 era laptop) and I've definitely noticed since about 2005 things have really rapidly improved - so maybe we really are nearly ready.
Still, I must say that personally I have some issues with ubuntu that would stop me recommending it to my friends who I felt were slightly better than n00b standard at computers already (or could easily become so). For me the terminal is so incredibly powerful that learning how to use it really can increase productivity massively; you can still do that on ubuntu but it has been designed with the idea of cutting it out (I know... different markets, right?). The other issue I have with Ubuntu is more serious and is about security. Last time I checked running "sudo su - " gave you root access without a password, which is at least a little concern. Also, I really can't see why all distros don't know come with SELinux running as default. I've never had a problem with it on fedora and to me it seems to really be worth its salt, as it were.
Anyway, good news though
not being an American I don't have any special interest in how this case turns out from the social realities of living with laws like this, but if this does go through then people could cause serious problems for the record labels. For example 100,000 people could get together and send riaa companies CDs through the post with stickers saying they have to be stored at the central lobby of head office. Under their rules they would have accepted the contract by opening the package - the best they could do would be to return them at their own massive cost.
They might even have to listen to them if they often get CDs through for business - according to the that's certainly enough to have accepted a contract
indeed, but ISPs will lose out on this not matter what way this goes. If they change their prices to become more realistic then I'll just downgrade to 128k (instead of my supposedly 8MB) and probably end up paying less anyway. I think most people would probably do the same. So ISPs can lose a vast majority of their revenue and broadband customers or they can just swallow the damn bullet and provide the service they should have been doing for years and upgrade the system
that's pretty impressive. (It should have said in TFS though that it was their objective to make it have as many steps as possible) But I do have to wonder if it maybe wasn't the case that some of the steps were useless - things like "turn burger 1 degree clockwise, turn burger 1 degree anti-clockwise" - but I suppose even so it is an impressive feat of uselessness
I agree they should do something radical, but to me it seems that a free way to gain market share is just to be more open than the competition. How would our buying habits change if they made the spec 100% open source? Unless they think that tens of thousands of early adopters with (usually) large amounts of disposable income just aren't worth the hassle of opening up. The same goes for ATI.
Turn "ATI: enemy of your freedom" into "AMD/ATI: we love your freedom"
the thing is, they are trying to deal with aspects of the social world and human nature. These things are difficult and a shade unpredictable. Political science and sociology have been working in this field for hundreds of years and we still have significant amounts of disagreement over the first principles of society - so it hardly seems like a huge criticism to say they don't often agree.
As to whether the science is "junk", I would say not. Lets say that the conditions that it was conducted under were good enough for the standards of Middlesex Uni (which will hopefully be as high as at other unis). Given that I think this sort of research is, if anything, more important theortical physics because this offers the ability to directly affect how we organise our social world now. You'd have a hard time making that claim about 24-dimensional super gravitys
I should apologize, I read a scroll of genocide but had no idea it was cursed - now the moat is full of krakens and evidently they seem to be spreading...
Also, have you seen how much spam they are sending out? "Its bots are prolific, too: The firm has seen single Kraken bots sending out up to 500,000 pieces of spam in a day." - if all 400000 bots did that that'd be 200 billion a day. That has to represent a pretty large (albeit distributed) cost to ISPs
I agree, and the worst part is that I have to pay tribute to the just so I can have the Internet and phone at all. I'm currently with Virgin (though it seems they'll be just as bad) and had to pay over £10 a month just so they would give me a phone number which is a pre-requisate for getting any adsl Internet connection here (annoyingly despite being in the middle of the country I can't get cable... Or freeview, but that's another story)
When I was looking to learn more about how to use linux a little while after I'd started doing so I asked on the Fedora forum what they would recommend and someone sent me a link to a really great online book which contained so much information of such high quality that I felt like I really learned loads. It's also really easy going for complete n00bs, but I suspect that if I went back I'd still learn new things and have new interesting stuff to look at... you can check it out at http://rute.2038bug.com/index.html.gz
If you want a good unix/linux book I honestly don't think there is a better place to start (although some of the information seemed a little out of date (like modems being based on sound waves and hard drives being measured in MBs...) UNIX is UNIX, even if we now have slightly shiny-er linux wrappers)
I got;
"Invalid query: Table 'jester5_emptyjokeclusters' is marked as crashed and should be repaired"
I think the joke is that their server can't handle a slashdotting... i'd rate it "more funny"