I think it might be just you. But then, I'm a student, so I have little experience with typical workplaces at all, never mind the ‘old workplace’, whatever that was like. But I do know something about this, as I take drugs for clinical depression every day (and several times a week, drugs for ADHD). Antidepressants don't really cause persistent euphoria once you've been on them for a couple of days or more. I take an atypical antidepressant called Bupropion, which is a pseudostimulant (it also helps with my ADHD, and that means I get to take less methylphenidate, which I like to avoid taking), so my experience is probably different from those experiences of people who take SSRIs. Nonetheless, I feel very much ‘like myself’ on my anti-depressant medication. I don't think most people would describe me as ‘cheerful’, and certainly none would say I'm a ‘positive’ person, although I like to joke and play. I have several friends who are also prescribed pharmaceutical treatment for depression, and you probably wouldn't be able to pick them out from a crowd because of some strange, numbed, or overly happy-seeming behavior. Anti-depressants aren't really happy-pills.
That's why I instead call mine ‘my don't-kill-yourself’ pills.
Again, just my 2. A lot of people are on different drugs, and even among people I know personally I've seen very different responses to the drugs I take.
Fourthly, even if a generation of kids with a strong anti-authoritarian streak (and who were shocked and appalled by various US administration's behaviour from Guantanamo Bay to Snowden while growing up) aren't interested in doing cybersecurity for the US government or bureaucratic defence contractors, that's a totally different thing to "not being interested in cybersecurity at all".
This is the most important point. As a soon-to-graduate computer science and math major for whom cybersecurity is a possible career option, this is my biggest concern as far as working in cybersecurity goes. It's also a problem more generally. I want as little to do with the military-industrial complex as possible. Here in Tucson, Raytheon is one of the more popular targets for student internships in CS and engineering, but I'm not interested. I don't think I could work for a weapons company, or any the imperialist public structures that support them, in good conscience.
But if I continue to study mathematics and computer science after I finish my undergraduate degrees, I would be very happy to work on projects like Tor and Freenet, or crypto-currencies. There are alsocommercial security technologies I'd be happy to work on (like privacy-enhancing desktop & smartphone apps, a là TextSecure).
A foreigner gets caught up in their own idioms and sometimes erroneously imports them into their understanding of English (and we do the same in other languages). My girlfriend is from Mexico City, and she's likely to occasionally say ‘of X’ rather than ‘X's’. She also sometimes confuses gendered possessive pronouns, because in Spanish the gender is determined by the gender of the object, whereas in English it's determined by the one who possesses it.
A lot of Latinate languages (Spanish and French are the only ones I know well enough to speak for) use two-part negations, which might sometimes seem like double negation to an English speaker. As it happens, we use a two part negation for disjunctive lists as well: neither/nor; neither/or is wrong. It looks like the writer here just didn't know to attach the negation to the word or rather than placing the negation after it.
I would also argue that your position is wrong generally: native speakers can happily pick up idiomatic irregularities by habit, but second-language learners are more likely to presume regularity and just run with it because they haven't had a chance to pick up the irregularities of our idioms by experience.
Neither ‘news for nerds’ nor ‘stuff that matters’ is a proposition, and they can't serve as logical operands as-is. You'd have to change them into propositions, with the most likely and sensible conversions being ‘Slashdot hosts news for nerds’ and ‘Slashdot hosts stuff that matters’. You AND those propositions together, and then it is clear that articles may qualify for being posted to Slashdot without being both news for nerds and stuff that matters.
But the goal in short-circuiting an argument is never to dig for truth or a solution, and the essential role of repeating the meme, 'correlation causation' is to implicitly assert that the correlation is irrelevant or coincidental.
A few friends of mine who are philosophically-grounded, kind of hyperliterate anarchists have adopted alternative names for their positions because of those associations. 'Anti-statist' is a good one. A moderate friend of mine with strong anarchist sympathies calls himself a 'minarchist'.
I actually have seen a handful of anarchist protests. Here in Arizona, they're pretty recognizable because they march together in all black clothing, a loose sort of uniform. Sometimes anarcho-communists and anarcho-syndicalists are included, but I don't think I've personally ever seen them with a communist flag. 'Round here they serve an especially nice function as (often armed) counter-protesters during Neo-Nazi rallies, to whom the police are sometimes, astonishingly sympathetic (although most of the time it's pretty clear that they're just trying to keep the peace and prevent the white supremacists from being injured by angry crowds).
This is fucking ridiculous. The Linux magazine selection at B&N is pitiful. I used to go to Borders pretty much exclusively while it was still open for that reason. Now Linux Journal doesn't do print. What good print Linux magazines are left? Are any available at B&N?
I know that our cultures do have real, significant differences, but the notion that the US is ‘anti-social’ whereas China isn't does not adequately describe any of those differences. I know that the individualism of the US can seem cold or disconnected at times, but that doesn't mean that we don't have real friendships or that social connections still don't ultimately drive entertainment for us.
I spend a lot of my time listening to recorded music, and so do my friends. Part of what this lets us do is discover new music and develop specific tastes. What I love about it is that when my friends and I explore new genres, new styles, or particular artists, we have a chance to do it together. One of my favorite things to do with records is recommend them to friends. When I make a successful recommendation, I feel like I get to show a friend that I understand their taste, care about it, and want to share with them all kinds of things that I know they'll love. Often, I then later go out with those same friends to go see the bands to which we introduced one another at live performances. A couple of times, we've even all crammed into a car and driven for 6-9 hours to go to another state so we could go see someone play.
What I mean by all of this is that sometimes the specifics of the music being played are important, and they actually provide a way to show affection and build relationships rather than avoid them. And please, don't let the actions motivated by giant sacks of money in the hands of some of our most powerful industries pervert the way you think about American citizens. We have a lot of flaws, as do all peoples, but music is now and has always been a deeply social affair for human beings. It still is here, and for most ordinary citizens, the social aspect of music is more important than any industrial metrics. Some of us even remember that copyright is not an end-in-itself.
I wouldn't ask you to approve of all aspects of American culture, but please don't tell me that I don't love my friends or family because of some secondhand ideas you have about how I feel about copyright issues. I would always hesitate to jump to similar conclusions about you based upon your national policy.
Geohotz wasn't acting in a professional capacity when he jailbroke the PS3. His ability to feed his family did not depend upon the kinds of limitations Sony imposed or hoped to impose with their PS3's DRM. The kind of subjugation I was talking about is ‘the kind of subjugation that makes you starve’. I also meant only those limitations imposed by restraining from violating the DRM, not the possible legal consequences of reverse-engineering it.
So, as I intended to say before: I don't think DRM on games is capable of imposing the same *kind* of subjugation on end-users, although it's still subjugation and it still sucks.
(Almost) everything should be open source and (eventually) free; freely accessible and readily dissectable contributions to society put society in a better position than it had before. That doesn't mean that non-free software can't also constitute a contribution to the society, especially when it comes in the form of inessential software or art (i.e. video games) which serves (even incidentally) to support the general viability of a free platform.
And I think it's possible to express a preference for an open-source methodology to a company who sells or provides you with closed-source software without being a dick about it. The Desura Linux client was eventually open-sourced, after the Linux Desura community had been suggesting it for some time. Most of those suggestions came in the form of ‘an open-sourced client would be awesome; thanks for all you've done so far’. I hope and expect that in the Steam case, us F/OSS people who request or suggest that they open-source the Steam client do it with an air of gratitude, as was done in the Desura case. As customers, we have a reasonable right to tell the companies who've chosen or might choose to serve us what we would like from them. So long as those demands are expressed civilly, with an attempt toward persuasion rather than insults or tantrum-throwing, I don't think we ever owe it to Valve (or anyone) to sit back down and say that forevermore ‘we are pleased’. Saying that you'd be even happier if things were a little different isn't really biting the hand that feeds.
Linux's success in the server arena definitely doesn't mean that the desktop is ‘in any way, shape, or form at a usable level’ — the desktop experience stands on its own.
Although I'm not a proper Stallmanite, I do see a powerful ethical dimension to the motivations for producing free software (and free culture as related to education). I don't see anything evil in the minimal kind of DRM imposed by Steam, and although I would praise any game company who opened the source code to their engine, or Valve if they opened the source code to the distribution system itself, I don't feel compelled to condemn game companies who don't do so. Those are my two cents, for whatever they're worth, as someone intellectually and ethically committed to the principles of free software.
(I wouldn't call it a religion for me because my views about the importance of share-alike copyright licenses, like the GPL, are grounded in other principles that could yield different prescriptions when applied in novel circumstances. But I do often do things make the choice to use free software out of principle, even where technically superior non-free solutions are available. You decide if my views are radical enough to for me to speak on behalf of the subset of the F/OSS community you'd like to address.)
Yeah. It's always seemed to me that because Slashdot generally consists of an intelligent, well-educated readership (bullshit posts and nonsense traditions aside), they have inherited some liberal social views, but the engineering contingent here is too strong to allow anything but a very pragmatic sort of outlook, because of which Slashdot tends to leans toward more conservative attitudes about the nature of ideas and justification. The libertarian streak within/.ers I think is mostly rooted in a kind of skepticism toward policy.
But yeah. Slashdot definitely has an archetypal political outlook, but it's not one quite so simple as ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’.
I could support this view. Copyright, with some corrections/restorations, can stay as a part of the new plan to encourage creative works. It should simply be acknowledged as a temporary monopoly on distribution (rather than property, which it is not), and recognized as a tool rather than an end in itself.
I think it may have to do with the fact that the youth have little or no income, and so their choice is between copying music and just not having it.
But what does 'learning how the world works' really mean here? Which part of learning how the world works might bring this sense of guilt? Is it becoming more familiar with societal expectations? Is it a richer understanding of how laws like copyright seek to support the arts? Is it a more altruistic idea of fairness?
You may be right, but I do wonder just which part of learning how the world works may produce this effect.
There's a problem with your post in that you assume that music pirates only use the irrelevance of music sales to revenue for most artists as a dishonest rationalization. All of the behavior/psychology described in your post could be restated simply as ‘people are more interested in seeing through the success of the artist than they are in supporting the success of some salesman’. They may not necessarily feel any guilt about piracy to begin with. The younger generations certainly don't. The RIAA doesn't have to be evil to justify the view that pirating music is morally acceptable. The facts that (a) publishers are not artists, and (b) copyright law is, for the citizens whose interests it ought to serve in any democracy, purely instrumental, and only valuable to the extent which it helps introduce new art into the ecosystem (which was once-upon-a-time called ‘the public domain’) are enough.
This isn't a view which comes from a place of reflexive entitlement, either. In the case of online piracy, pirates ask nothing of the publishers — they download nothing from the publishers themselves. There is nothing about the view that I should be able to copy a recording from a friend which entails any obligations toward me, on the part of the publisher (or even the artist). The only demand made is one of rational thought: for all parties involved to recognize that ideas are not objects, and do not share the constraints of actual objects. They are not natural property, and the enormous legal efforts to make ideas emulate natural property have proven ineffective in the face of recent technological developments. But this is okay, because the goal of ensuring the production of creative works for the sake of the public good remains attainable by other means — and we can resume pursuit of that goal as soon as we abandon this sinking ship of ideas-as-property.
Please note that, as a civilized country, we use the metric system.)
Hey, man. I deserve no more blame for the bullshit system of measurement I have to use than you deserve credit for inventing metric. I guess if you need to feel better than me, you're just gonna have to get to know me better.;-)
(And yeah, I don't think US oil subsidy is ultimately a good thing for the market or the planet, either.)
The point about veterans is an important one. But it also seems obvious to me that if the US military was ever ordered to fire on the American people in such a way as to constitute a revolution, the main force that would end up fighting against the US military would be a huge portion of defectors from within it. US soldiers are US citizens, and probably most of them have families of some sort or another. Things have gotten pretty shitty in terms of legislation, but I'm still a long way from believing that if asked to, the military would simply comply with an order to assault US civilians.
As a computer science student who has planned his academic career with a commercial one in mind, but is considering tacking on a philosophy major because he just can't stay away from it, I agree. This is important. I hope that anyone seeking to get a degree in philosophy in order to pursue a career in philosophy is met with success. But anyone with such intent should know by now or very soon learn that academic philosophy is very difficult, extremely competitive, and generally requires a LOT of schooling. Aside from teaching, major success in philosophy only happens for a lucky few, and even some of today's most important philosophers were largely unrecognized or undervalued during their lifetime. (The political philosophy which grounds the legal tradition of the US and its Constitution, for example, pre-dates it by several generations.)
The mistake some people make is that a degree in philosophy is, or ought to be, a step towards a career elsewhere. If you are currently pursuing a degree in philosophy, but only because you enjoy that subject for your general education, make other plans for a career elsewhere. Don't pretend that you can do otherwise.
It sucks, because there are many wonderful pursuits that are hard to making a living on. I think they should still be pursued wherever that's possible, but we should just be honest with ourselves about (a) the difficulty of attaining success in our fields, (b) the motive for our pursuit of knowledge, and (c) whether or not the initial plan (a single bachelor's degree --> a professional career --> no more formal education ever again) will satisfy all our goals realistically.
We absolutely need good philosophers and psychologists, not to mention artists of all sorts. But there's no shortage of people who just kinda dug those subjects in their twenties, so don't pretend that kinda digging something for a few years is a career move!
If anything, this will probably be good for the greater Gnome community. It means that Mint can have its desktop and applications based upon the same tools (Gnome 3.x libraries & applications, Gnome 3.x-based desktop). The developers of libraries and apps for Gnome will have a larger userbase, more people testing, and more developers looking at and using their code.
Here are a few good command-line tools for managing and playing your music: dnuos, a list-generating script which you could use to create something like your catalog.txt file. It's pretty nice, and it can do things like read the metadata of the files if you want, as well as the file names. morituri, a command line CD ripper with error correction support and metadata fetching beets, a command line music manager which includes an MPD server and so can be interacted with using any number of command line MPD clients
I think beets + [some command line MPD client] would be best for you. I'm a happy Amarok user, but I've got a large collection that is partially hosted on a little Samba server that was for a long time headless, so I've played with command line management tools and I found beets and morituri to be very impressive. I hope one of those links is useful to you.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
So the robot-driven, (mostly) post-scarcity economy won't be a capitalist economy
I think it might be just you. But then, I'm a student, so I have little experience with typical workplaces at all, never mind the ‘old workplace’, whatever that was like. But I do know something about this, as I take drugs for clinical depression every day (and several times a week, drugs for ADHD). Antidepressants don't really cause persistent euphoria once you've been on them for a couple of days or more. I take an atypical antidepressant called Bupropion, which is a pseudostimulant (it also helps with my ADHD, and that means I get to take less methylphenidate, which I like to avoid taking), so my experience is probably different from those experiences of people who take SSRIs. Nonetheless, I feel very much ‘like myself’ on my anti-depressant medication. I don't think most people would describe me as ‘cheerful’, and certainly none would say I'm a ‘positive’ person, although I like to joke and play. I have several friends who are also prescribed pharmaceutical treatment for depression, and you probably wouldn't be able to pick them out from a crowd because of some strange, numbed, or overly happy-seeming behavior. Anti-depressants aren't really happy-pills.
That's why I instead call mine ‘my don't-kill-yourself’ pills.
Again, just my 2. A lot of people are on different drugs, and even among people I know personally I've seen very different responses to the drugs I take.
These guys (like the vast majority of Satanists) are atheists.
Fourthly, even if a generation of kids with a strong anti-authoritarian streak (and who were shocked and appalled by various US administration's behaviour from Guantanamo Bay to Snowden while growing up) aren't interested in doing cybersecurity for the US government or bureaucratic defence contractors, that's a totally different thing to "not being interested in cybersecurity at all".
This is the most important point. As a soon-to-graduate computer science and math major for whom cybersecurity is a possible career option, this is my biggest concern as far as working in cybersecurity goes. It's also a problem more generally. I want as little to do with the military-industrial complex as possible. Here in Tucson, Raytheon is one of the more popular targets for student internships in CS and engineering, but I'm not interested. I don't think I could work for a weapons company, or any the imperialist public structures that support them, in good conscience.
But if I continue to study mathematics and computer science after I finish my undergraduate degrees, I would be very happy to work on projects like Tor and Freenet, or crypto-currencies. There are alsocommercial security technologies I'd be happy to work on (like privacy-enhancing desktop & smartphone apps, a là TextSecure).
Technically it should be ‘Neither Google nor Facebook...'.
A foreigner gets caught up in their own idioms and sometimes erroneously imports them into their understanding of English (and we do the same in other languages). My girlfriend is from Mexico City, and she's likely to occasionally say ‘of X’ rather than ‘X's’. She also sometimes confuses gendered possessive pronouns, because in Spanish the gender is determined by the gender of the object, whereas in English it's determined by the one who possesses it.
A lot of Latinate languages (Spanish and French are the only ones I know well enough to speak for) use two-part negations, which might sometimes seem like double negation to an English speaker. As it happens, we use a two part negation for disjunctive lists as well: neither/nor; neither/or is wrong. It looks like the writer here just didn't know to attach the negation to the word or rather than placing the negation after it.
I would also argue that your position is wrong generally: native speakers can happily pick up idiomatic irregularities by habit, but second-language learners are more likely to presume regularity and just run with it because they haven't had a chance to pick up the irregularities of our idioms by experience.
Neither ‘news for nerds’ nor ‘stuff that matters’ is a proposition, and they can't serve as logical operands as-is. You'd have to change them into propositions, with the most likely and sensible conversions being ‘Slashdot hosts news for nerds’ and ‘Slashdot hosts stuff that matters’. You AND those propositions together, and then it is clear that articles may qualify for being posted to Slashdot without being both news for nerds and stuff that matters.
But the goal in short-circuiting an argument is never to dig for truth or a solution, and the essential role of repeating the meme, 'correlation causation' is to implicitly assert that the correlation is irrelevant or coincidental.
A few friends of mine who are philosophically-grounded, kind of hyperliterate anarchists have adopted alternative names for their positions because of those associations. 'Anti-statist' is a good one. A moderate friend of mine with strong anarchist sympathies calls himself a 'minarchist'.
I actually have seen a handful of anarchist protests. Here in Arizona, they're pretty recognizable because they march together in all black clothing, a loose sort of uniform. Sometimes anarcho-communists and anarcho-syndicalists are included, but I don't think I've personally ever seen them with a communist flag. 'Round here they serve an especially nice function as (often armed) counter-protesters during Neo-Nazi rallies, to whom the police are sometimes, astonishingly sympathetic (although most of the time it's pretty clear that they're just trying to keep the peace and prevent the white supremacists from being injured by angry crowds).
This is fucking ridiculous. The Linux magazine selection at B&N is pitiful. I used to go to Borders pretty much exclusively while it was still open for that reason. Now Linux Journal doesn't do print. What good print Linux magazines are left? Are any available at B&N?
I know that our cultures do have real, significant differences, but the notion that the US is ‘anti-social’ whereas China isn't does not adequately describe any of those differences. I know that the individualism of the US can seem cold or disconnected at times, but that doesn't mean that we don't have real friendships or that social connections still don't ultimately drive entertainment for us.
I spend a lot of my time listening to recorded music, and so do my friends. Part of what this lets us do is discover new music and develop specific tastes. What I love about it is that when my friends and I explore new genres, new styles, or particular artists, we have a chance to do it together. One of my favorite things to do with records is recommend them to friends. When I make a successful recommendation, I feel like I get to show a friend that I understand their taste, care about it, and want to share with them all kinds of things that I know they'll love. Often, I then later go out with those same friends to go see the bands to which we introduced one another at live performances. A couple of times, we've even all crammed into a car and driven for 6-9 hours to go to another state so we could go see someone play.
What I mean by all of this is that sometimes the specifics of the music being played are important, and they actually provide a way to show affection and build relationships rather than avoid them. And please, don't let the actions motivated by giant sacks of money in the hands of some of our most powerful industries pervert the way you think about American citizens. We have a lot of flaws, as do all peoples, but music is now and has always been a deeply social affair for human beings. It still is here, and for most ordinary citizens, the social aspect of music is more important than any industrial metrics. Some of us even remember that copyright is not an end-in-itself.
I wouldn't ask you to approve of all aspects of American culture, but please don't tell me that I don't love my friends or family because of some secondhand ideas you have about how I feel about copyright issues. I would always hesitate to jump to similar conclusions about you based upon your national policy.
Geohotz wasn't acting in a professional capacity when he jailbroke the PS3. His ability to feed his family did not depend upon the kinds of limitations Sony imposed or hoped to impose with their PS3's DRM. The kind of subjugation I was talking about is ‘the kind of subjugation that makes you starve’. I also meant only those limitations imposed by restraining from violating the DRM, not the possible legal consequences of reverse-engineering it.
So, as I intended to say before: I don't think DRM on games is capable of imposing the same *kind* of subjugation on end-users, although it's still subjugation and it still sucks.
(Almost) everything should be open source and (eventually) free; freely accessible and readily dissectable contributions to society put society in a better position than it had before. That doesn't mean that non-free software can't also constitute a contribution to the society, especially when it comes in the form of inessential software or art (i.e. video games) which serves (even incidentally) to support the general viability of a free platform.
And I think it's possible to express a preference for an open-source methodology to a company who sells or provides you with closed-source software without being a dick about it. The Desura Linux client was eventually open-sourced, after the Linux Desura community had been suggesting it for some time. Most of those suggestions came in the form of ‘an open-sourced client would be awesome; thanks for all you've done so far’. I hope and expect that in the Steam case, us F/OSS people who request or suggest that they open-source the Steam client do it with an air of gratitude, as was done in the Desura case. As customers, we have a reasonable right to tell the companies who've chosen or might choose to serve us what we would like from them. So long as those demands are expressed civilly, with an attempt toward persuasion rather than insults or tantrum-throwing, I don't think we ever owe it to Valve (or anyone) to sit back down and say that forevermore ‘we are pleased’. Saying that you'd be even happier if things were a little different isn't really biting the hand that feeds.
Linux's success in the server arena definitely doesn't mean that the desktop is ‘in any way, shape, or form at a usable level’ — the desktop experience stands on its own.
Stallman is actually less (ethically) invested in the freedom of works of art than he is about practical software tools. He probably wouldn't like Steam's DRM, but I don't think DRM on games is capable of imposing the same kind of subjugation that he sees done by companies who produce tools which are more strictly necessary to the lives and livelihoods of their customers.
Although I'm not a proper Stallmanite, I do see a powerful ethical dimension to the motivations for producing free software (and free culture as related to education). I don't see anything evil in the minimal kind of DRM imposed by Steam, and although I would praise any game company who opened the source code to their engine, or Valve if they opened the source code to the distribution system itself, I don't feel compelled to condemn game companies who don't do so. Those are my two cents, for whatever they're worth, as someone intellectually and ethically committed to the principles of free software.
(I wouldn't call it a religion for me because my views about the importance of share-alike copyright licenses, like the GPL, are grounded in other principles that could yield different prescriptions when applied in novel circumstances. But I do often do things make the choice to use free software out of principle, even where technically superior non-free solutions are available. You decide if my views are radical enough to for me to speak on behalf of the subset of the F/OSS community you'd like to address.)
I found this PDF through Google Scholar. Is it accessible to you?
Yeah. It's always seemed to me that because Slashdot generally consists of an intelligent, well-educated readership (bullshit posts and nonsense traditions aside), they have inherited some liberal social views, but the engineering contingent here is too strong to allow anything but a very pragmatic sort of outlook, because of which Slashdot tends to leans toward more conservative attitudes about the nature of ideas and justification. The libertarian streak within /.ers I think is mostly rooted in a kind of skepticism toward policy.
But yeah. Slashdot definitely has an archetypal political outlook, but it's not one quite so simple as ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’.
I could support this view. Copyright, with some corrections/restorations, can stay as a part of the new plan to encourage creative works. It should simply be acknowledged as a temporary monopoly on distribution (rather than property, which it is not), and recognized as a tool rather than an end in itself.
I think it may have to do with the fact that the youth have little or no income, and so their choice is between copying music and just not having it.
But what does 'learning how the world works' really mean here? Which part of learning how the world works might bring this sense of guilt? Is it becoming more familiar with societal expectations? Is it a richer understanding of how laws like copyright seek to support the arts? Is it a more altruistic idea of fairness?
You may be right, but I do wonder just which part of learning how the world works may produce this effect.
There's a problem with your post in that you assume that music pirates only use the irrelevance of music sales to revenue for most artists as a dishonest rationalization. All of the behavior/psychology described in your post could be restated simply as ‘people are more interested in seeing through the success of the artist than they are in supporting the success of some salesman’. They may not necessarily feel any guilt about piracy to begin with. The younger generations certainly don't. The RIAA doesn't have to be evil to justify the view that pirating music is morally acceptable. The facts that (a) publishers are not artists, and (b) copyright law is, for the citizens whose interests it ought to serve in any democracy, purely instrumental, and only valuable to the extent which it helps introduce new art into the ecosystem (which was once-upon-a-time called ‘the public domain’) are enough.
This isn't a view which comes from a place of reflexive entitlement, either. In the case of online piracy, pirates ask nothing of the publishers — they download nothing from the publishers themselves. There is nothing about the view that I should be able to copy a recording from a friend which entails any obligations toward me, on the part of the publisher (or even the artist). The only demand made is one of rational thought: for all parties involved to recognize that ideas are not objects, and do not share the constraints of actual objects. They are not natural property, and the enormous legal efforts to make ideas emulate natural property have proven ineffective in the face of recent technological developments. But this is okay, because the goal of ensuring the production of creative works for the sake of the public good remains attainable by other means — and we can resume pursuit of that goal as soon as we abandon this sinking ship of ideas-as-property.
Please note that, as a civilized country, we use the metric system.)
Hey, man. I deserve no more blame for the bullshit system of measurement I have to use than you deserve credit for inventing metric. I guess if you need to feel better than me, you're just gonna have to get to know me better. ;-)
(And yeah, I don't think US oil subsidy is ultimately a good thing for the market or the planet, either.)
The point about veterans is an important one. But it also seems obvious to me that if the US military was ever ordered to fire on the American people in such a way as to constitute a revolution, the main force that would end up fighting against the US military would be a huge portion of defectors from within it. US soldiers are US citizens, and probably most of them have families of some sort or another. Things have gotten pretty shitty in terms of legislation, but I'm still a long way from believing that if asked to, the military would simply comply with an order to assault US civilians.
As a computer science student who has planned his academic career with a commercial one in mind, but is considering tacking on a philosophy major because he just can't stay away from it, I agree. This is important. I hope that anyone seeking to get a degree in philosophy in order to pursue a career in philosophy is met with success. But anyone with such intent should know by now or very soon learn that academic philosophy is very difficult, extremely competitive, and generally requires a LOT of schooling. Aside from teaching, major success in philosophy only happens for a lucky few, and even some of today's most important philosophers were largely unrecognized or undervalued during their lifetime. (The political philosophy which grounds the legal tradition of the US and its Constitution, for example, pre-dates it by several generations.)
The mistake some people make is that a degree in philosophy is, or ought to be, a step towards a career elsewhere. If you are currently pursuing a degree in philosophy, but only because you enjoy that subject for your general education, make other plans for a career elsewhere. Don't pretend that you can do otherwise.
It sucks, because there are many wonderful pursuits that are hard to making a living on. I think they should still be pursued wherever that's possible, but we should just be honest with ourselves about (a) the difficulty of attaining success in our fields, (b) the motive for our pursuit of knowledge, and (c) whether or not the initial plan (a single bachelor's degree --> a professional career --> no more formal education ever again) will satisfy all our goals realistically.
We absolutely need good philosophers and psychologists, not to mention artists of all sorts. But there's no shortage of people who just kinda dug those subjects in their twenties, so don't pretend that kinda digging something for a few years is a career move!
If anything, this will probably be good for the greater Gnome community. It means that Mint can have its desktop and applications based upon the same tools (Gnome 3.x libraries & applications, Gnome 3.x-based desktop). The developers of libraries and apps for Gnome will have a larger userbase, more people testing, and more developers looking at and using their code.
Here are a few good command-line tools for managing and playing your music:
dnuos, a list-generating script which you could use to create something like your catalog.txt file. It's pretty nice, and it can do things like read the metadata of the files if you want, as well as the file names.
morituri, a command line CD ripper with error correction support and metadata fetching
beets, a command line music manager which includes an MPD server and so can be interacted with using any number of command line MPD clients
I think beets + [some command line MPD client] would be best for you. I'm a happy Amarok user, but I've got a large collection that is partially hosted on a little Samba server that was for a long time headless, so I've played with command line management tools and I found beets and morituri to be very impressive. I hope one of those links is useful to you. :-)