And of course you have no answers for *why* being a gay is a "problem" and exactly for whom it is a problem, and for what good reason?
This is easy. For Christians, sexual relations are a sacrament, meaning you should do it as a sacred rite, as an homage to God and as a way for you to participate in the (sacred) processes set forth by Him, namely, (human) reproduction. Sex, any sex, isn't something you, while a Christian, should do out of a mere desire for pleasures.
Thus, any sexual relation that is done just for pleasure is a sin. This includes many heterosexual practices: masturbation, adultery, sex before marriage, and any sex inside marriage that's done for pure pleasure (using condoms fit this). In the heterosexual field, only sex made for reproduction inside a marriage is legit.
This is what excludes homosexual relations. Not the fact that a person is born an homosexual, but the fact that no homosexual intercourse can yield a baby. An homosexual that does any kind of sex (since all of them are "for pleasure only") is in the same sinful category as an heterosexual that also does any kind of "for pleasure only" sex. It is the exact same sin: that of not setting your bodily acts as those acts of a sacred temple, which is what the body is according to the Christian faith.
Now, please note that nothing in this prevents an homosexual of being a traditional Christian. He is just forbidden, as every other Christian, of doing "for pleasure only" sex. And if he at some moment indulges in doing it, he must, as every other Christian that also do so (including but not limited to a husband who looks his own wife "with desire"), confess and practice penitence.
"Being successful" in this endeavor is not what counts, else only saints would be true Christians. What actually counts is the continuous pursue of that goal by the Christian, the permanent moving in that direction.
As you see, from this point of view an homosexual Christian's struggle is only barely more difficult than that of an heterosexual Christian's struggle. So small is the difference in fact, that I really don't see why it's even brought into discussion. To be a good Christian is incredible difficult for anyone who try. Homosexuals aren't significantly worse in this by any stretch of imagination.
there is just something missing in it so it's creepy
I think I know what it is: real human emotions. The characters act weird because they're built with psychoanalytical nonsense. Not that Freudian Psychology is useless, there are good ideas there. It's just that it's too much limited.
Whenever you try do reduce human complexity to a small set of rules based on a single overreaching characteristic of which every other characteristic is a mere expression (the libido of Freudianism, the class structures of Marxism, the byproducts of natural selection of Evolutive Psychology, the rational egoism of Randian Objectivism, and so on and so forth), you end up creating a system that, although potentially very complex, is devoid of reality. This shows very well when you take one of these systems and build fiction upon it, for the characters and situations always end up being schematic and lifeless.
But there is a positive thing in the creepiness that arise from such efforts. They at least show how badly suited this or that theory is to explain actual human behavior. This is the only way in which, IMHO, Eva can become an useful reading for anyone. Otherwise, it's just not worth it.
I wouldn't use Eva as an example (lets be honest, it's drug filled non-sense)
Hehe, yes. I actually don't like Neon Genesis Evangelion at all. It's a typical underground fiction whose authors are trying to say something with, and that for some mysterious reason became popular outside the niche market that would usually have appreciated it. Whatever its worth is however, we cannot deny that it's mature material wrapped in robot fights, and that it works pretty well as a counterexample to those who think robot cartoons (and cartoons in general) are only children material, which was the "point" of the post to which I replied.
Those who don't have an intuitive perception of infinity (as such, not mere mathematical infinity). Since the atheist cannot notice it, he acts towards reality as if it was finite. And since "infinite" and "god" are pretty much interchangeable terms, he ends up saying "god doesn't exist". A perfectly understandable reaction.
Anyway I'm intrigued. I don't believe in God nor do I believe in fate, "nature", or other non-observable forces that somehow shape the universe. I do believe in matter, causality (that there is cause and effect in the universe), the strong and weak nuclear forces, and other physical concepts.
All of these obey mathematical laws. Matter exists only in discrete quantities. Energy exists only in discrete quantities. Forces interact only according to such and such probabilistic ways, that cancel each other according to such and such median calculations. And yet, you don't "observe" numbers. You only detect them indirectly, through the way reality and your mind both submit and are shaped by them.
Causality, then, is an even more nebulous concept, so much that I won't even enter it (search for Hume's attack on the whole notion in his epistemological studies to see what I mean, although I must add that I disagree with him). Suffice it to say that what you call "cause and effect" is a concept devised by Aristotle, who identified it as one among four types of causes: formal, effective (the one you adopt), final and material. One of the reasons the Intelligent Design folks and evolutionist biologists don't get along is that the ID'ers adopt final causation, while evolutionists adopt effective causation, and both clash when applied to the same set of facts without the people arguing for one or the other previously acknowledging that they're applying different causative principles. Anyway, interestingly enough you cannot "prove" nor "disprove" any of the four causations, you can only "choose" to use one, other, or more than one of them.
So, only here we have at least three Philosophical "beliefs": first, that "the physical world" (let's avoid the term "nature", since you don't like it) is ordered; second, that the way it's ordered is intrinsically mathematical; and third, that this mathematical order is shaped in the form of effective causality. As things stand, none of them can be proved, only used. Interesting, eh?
Are you arguing that believing that the universe exists constitutes believing in god?
In a sense yes, although the universe as we experience it is only a small subset of the infinitely bigger set of possible universes. Because here's another thing you also believe, without noticing this to be the case: that for anything to exist as fact, it must have previously been possible, what implies that "possibilities" also exist as a component of reality. More precisely, then, believing that the infinite set of possibilities of which our universe is a single instance exist, this is the same as believing in god. Although only partially, while immanent, not while transcendent, since as stated above this last aspect isn't perceived by atheists.
If so, aren't you redefining "god" to be essentially meaningless? Certainly it's not the definition of "god" typically used by most theistic religions.
On the contrary. What happens is simply that religions express themselves through myths, not through analytic reasoning. To make a software analogy, a myth is a way to express a highly compacted perceived aspect of reality. You can leave it as is, since it is useful in this form nevertheless, or you can uncompress it by expressing analytically all of its content. Thus, if you go study (good) religious philosophers, both ancient and recent, you'll see all of them, from Medieval Christianity to Hinduism, doing this uncompressing, and saying in much more details what I abridged above.
It simple in fact. Theology will tell you that "time" and "space" were created. Furthermore, that "logic" and "mathematics" were created. More: that "possibility" and "causality" were created. And so on and so forth. Metaphysics will translate this into a logical hierarchy of "realities". Mathematical phenomena, for example, "includes" physics, since all physical phenomena are also mathematical relations, but isn't limited to physics, since non-physical phenomena also obey to mathematical laws. The study of these levels and how they interact with each other is called ontology, the study of being. And once you study ontology deeply enough, you see that it itself is encompassed by other non-ontological categories, such as those studied in henology, which analyzes non-dual relations (search the term on Google), of which the paragraph you didn't understood is a small overview.
That's nonsense. Are you sure you know what subsets are? Here's an example, the set of Men is a subset of the set of people. All characteristics shared by all people are also shared by Men. i.e. all people have skin, therefore all Men have skin. Now, if atheism were a subset of theism you could say the same thing: all characteristics shared by all theisms would also be shared by atheisms. The fundamental defining characteristic of a theism is the belief in god. All theists believe in god, therefore all atheists believe in god. Obviously this is not true, so atheism is not a subset of theism.
Sigh. After studying philosophy I came to the conclusion that atheists usually don't know what they're talking about. They take the term "god", think it means something like a comics superhero, only bigger, and proceed to denounce that as non-existent. To which I answer: yes, it doesn't exist. Now, since the gods of which religions talk about have nothing in common with this concept, the debunking doesn't apply.
Regarding subsets, yes, all atheists believe in god. They just call it by other names: nature, causality, mater. And under specific conditions: while mathematical relations. In other words: atheists "understand" god while immanence. Religious people add to that transcendence. Both are two sides of the same coin.
WTF are you talking about?
I give an example. Anthropology has a central methodological principle: the anthropologist must study any culture in an objective and value free way. If he adds any value judgment to his studies, he isn't being scientifically precise. And it's all good and well, except for when an anthropologist forgets he began by doing non-judgmental studies. When that happens, he takes years of his studies, look at them, and end up saying something like: "These results are a proof that all cultures are equal, one isn't better than the other." To which I answer: no, they don't. These results, which taken as a whole show that all cultures are equal, prove that you applied very well your method of not being judgmental. Regarding the value of these cultures, they say nothing, because judging the value of cultures isn't something that Anthropology does. Simply put, Anthropology has no method for that, and cannot say anything about that.
Yeah because all that crap up there was perfectly clear. Scientific terminology is plenty precise. Adding irrelevant philosophical mumbojumbo would just get in the way of getting real research done. It would be far more useful for philosophers to study science.
It takes some years for a person to understand the terminology of any field. Why do you think it would be different with Philosophy?:)
It must be really nice to not be expected to produce actual testable results.
Hehe, you inverted it. For something to be "testable", you must first know what "test" is. To test anything you need,
However, I hardly ever see an Intelligent Design advocate even consider the possibility that there is no Creator.
That's because this proposition is meaningless. If you go after the philosophical basis of the "creator" concept, you find that at some point, usually right above the Platonic Ideas level, the identity principle ceases to apply. The Good, or as Plotinus called it, the One, for instance, is the undifferentiated "sum" of all possibilities, past, present and future, including those that contradict each other, excluding everything that is logically impossible, reduced to pure simplicity (or, rather, not-hypostasized into full infinite multiplicity of finites). Thus, it "includes" conscience, lack of conscience, will, complete lack of will, existence of a creator, nonexistence of any creator etc., in such a way that they are all the same.
Now, obviously most religious people aren't philosophers to know high level metaphysical realism, but they nevertheless have some intuition about this. Anyway, the fact of the matter is simply that atheism isn't in opposition to theism. Atheism is merely a subset of theism. Take theism, remove any arbitrary number of elements from it (you choose which ones, although it's usually something you dislike in your culture), then take whatever remains, say it is all there is, and you have (an) atheism.
Afterwards, if inside such a subset you do a lot of very detailed research, you'll surely discover a lot of truths about the subset. And these truths, by definition, improve our understanding of the whole set. But since the study of the subset doesn't include the study of anything outside it, any kind of "negation" at which it arrives of that which is outside its boundaries isn't a negation at all, but only a more detailed description of these boundaries. That's because the subset is defined by this negation, and arriving at it now and again down the line is simply expected. To treat this in any other way would be to incur in a circular reasoning.
Thus, when a biologist says: "Here is natural selection, there is no God, there is no Creator", he is in fact incurring such a circular reasoning. The correct saying would be this: "Here is natural selection. I don't know how a god or a creator affects or interacts with it, because Biology excludes gods and creators from its field of research."
Too bad scientists usually don't study philosophy. It would make their discourse much more precise.
that's why sharia law, for example, is wrong: chopping someone's hand off for stealing, or chopping someone's head off for prostitution, is not civilization
It depends. Actually, Islam has many jurisprudence schools, and in most of those you'll find that the "hand chopping" norm, as well as all the other Koran norms, are understood as something applicable "as written" only in situations identical to those of when they were written, i.e., when prisons, and even a fixed place where to live, were luxuries you didn't have, less harsh conditions implying in the rules being accordingly and proportionately toned down. Notice, by the way, that this is something similar to what the Jews do: you usually won't find a modern day Jew stoning a children for not obeying his parents, even though this is what the Bible mandates.
The problem with Sharia is actually on the "Islamic protestant" movements that began developing from the XVIII century onwards. These guys disregarded (and still disregard) the more reasonable versions of the Sharia developed in centuries past by the orthodox Muslim scholars, and apply the Koranic laws literally. Nowadays they would remain a very minor sect inside Islam weren't for the fact that Western empires (in the XIX and XX centuries) saw their radicalism as an useful tool in destabilizing Islamic regimes in places they were interested in, thus financing and protecting them. So much that even today USA is still giving tons of money to Saudi Arabia, which in turn uses this money to fund the spreading of literalist Islam.
Stop funding Islamic literalists with one hand while promoting anti-Western hatred in Middle East with the other, and in some decades, luckily years, the non-literal, non-absurd, non-terrorism-promoting, non-evil, orthodox Sharia will become mainstream again over there.
That's not what you said, thank you for your new statement. What you said was a copy of RMS, about his redefinition of "freedom" for his personal world view.
Not really. If you go back to the 2nd half of my original post, you'll notice I say that proprietary, BSD and GPL can only maximize the rights ("freedoms") granted to a party by minimizing the rights granted to the other two parties. A license (or, rather, licensing style) is freer than the other two only from the point of view of a specific group: that favored by it. The other two groups, evidently, see that same license as being clearly less free for them. So, although I myself prefer GPL, I'm not naive enough to think it's better for all. It's only better for me.:-)
GPL is a license for people who can't talk about it without FUDding some other respected open source license, where they don't do that kind of thing. Whenever you see FUD about other open source licenses when someone is talking about the GPL, be aware, be very aware... and tell them reality is Webkit.
What FUD? This is simply reality. Anyone can lock down BSD software, the license was designed to allow this. Being so is neither "good" nor "evil", it's simply the way it is, and lots of people, in the open source as well as in the proprietary software world, love it for this. Stating a broadly known, acknowledged and praised fact is in no way, shape or form FUD.
The fact is that GPLv2 and GPLv3 are fundamentally different licenses with different repurcussions. RMS may have *meant* some of the things in GPLv3 when he wrote v2, but they aren't there, and a hell of a lot of people never wanted them.
Well, I think that's why those who didn't want what RMS meant (and never hid, writing and speaking about it whenever he managed to, to anyone who would listen), only what a specific license explicitly said, kept removing the "or later" clause.
Now, if someone wrote a software, licensed it under GPLv1 or GPLv2 maintaining the "or later" clause, all the while not even trying to know RMS' texts and speeches to know what he meant with the licenses, and thus what the future of the license held, that person was, well, lazy. Nothing in this was a secret.
By the way: all of this might be said about the transition from GPLv1 to GPLv2. Who had had the trouble of reading/listening RMS wasn't caught by surprise then. At any time you either support the spirit and vision in the non-legalese "philosophy" behind the GPL by allowing the "or later" to remain, or the letter of a specific GPL version by removing the "or later" clause. Both options are clearly explained all over the Internet, and opting for one or the other doesn't carry any kind of ambiguity.
hat is false. "Tivoization" (what a horrible word) still allows you to run your (modified) software for any purpose you wish. It just prevents you from using the original hardware to do so. Call a spade "a spade": The GPLv3 aims to control the distribution of hardware.
In a certain way, yes, but only if the hardware vendor wants to use GPLv3 software, what he isn't obliged to do. I myself don't know whether I'm really opposed to tivoization, but anyone who knows the case of the Xerox 9700 printer that triggered Stallman's creation of the free software movement would be very naive in thinking that he would just sit idly while the software he created as a means against this very thing was being subverted instead into a means of supporting hardware lock down. In their core the GPL, the FSF and the free software movement are all about freeing the user from undue 3rd party controls.
Thus, I really understand why he is doing this. It isn't really about controlling the distribution of hardware, but quite the opposite, to avoid the hardware control of his software. More specifically, he probably doesn't want any GPL covered software to ever help in anything described in his (poorly written, but interesting nevertheless) 1997 short story The Right to Read, something that GPLv2 allows, and GPLv3 definitely doesn't.
Which is next to impossible. Not directly because of Linus, but because the whole Linux codebase is not owned by a single entity, and you would have to convince everyone who has ever submitted code to the kernel to agree (which would take an act of St. iGNUcious)
Of course it would be difficult to get the remaining code relicensed, and some of it might have to be rewritten due to some authors not being found and a handful of those found not wanting to relicense, but it's not impossible, only something that would be very time consuming and probably done by some 3rd party organization.
I believe in the near future a non-profit will be established for doing exactly this author research and contacting for files not yet marked as "or later". Afterwards, a kernel fork will be made to rewrite the (few) pieces that the non-profit didn't manage to get relicensed while keeping all the pieces "GPLv3 compatible" synced. And over time, once the rewritten pieces have been properly tested, the fork will become the new official version, now fully GPLv3 licensed.
This time, preferably, with the "or later" kept intact.;)
Can anyone explain why the V3, which appears to impose more restrictions, actually imposes fewer?
Because it restricts software distributors efforts to restrict their users.
The GPL license is always a legalese means to a concrete end, as explained in FSF's definition of free software. This definition is what you might consider as the true and only "ideal GPL", of which the specific licenses are mere material expressions:
Free software is a matter of the users' freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. More precisely, it refers to four kinds of freedom, for the users of the software:
The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
So, whenever someone discover a way around the "spirit" of any of the four freedoms while still complying with the "letter" of the most recent version of the license, a new license is devised to close that hole and keep the spirit intact.
In the specific case of GPLv3, what was corrected was the hole that allowed a distributor to work its way around the "for any purpose" sentence in freedom 0. A DRM'ed hardware, the means chosen by the distributor do distribute the software, only allows the end user to use that software for certain purposes. "Certain" is always less than "any", and as such, a clear violation of the "ideal GPL".
To make things even more clear, let's abstract it even more. When we think about "software restrictions", we must always make this question: "restrictions to whom?"
Any piece of software has at least three parties involved: its authors, its distributors, and its end users. Since it's impossible to maximize all of the three, a license will necessarily place different restrictions level on each of the three, maximizing the rights of one while, by definition, reducing those granted to the other two. A typical proprietary license, for instance, maximize the author rights: he can keep the source closed, showing it only to specific persons after they sign extremely restrictive NDAs, all the while being allowed to impose severe distribution conditions to the distributor, and any EULA he wants to the user, up to the extend allowed by law. A BSD license, on the the other hand, maximizes the distributor rights, while minimizing both the author rights (who cannot forbid him from doing whatever he wants with the software) and the end user rights, who can still be subjected to any EULA.
What about the GPL then? Well, the GPL is the license that attempts to maximize the end user rights by restricting both authors rights (to stop redistribution, to restrict who can look and work in the software, from imposing EULAs, etc.) as well as distributors (from imposing EULAs).
So, any time a distributor (the paradigmatic example being Tivo) attempts to impose an indirect EULA to a GPL'ed piece of software, it is in fact violating one of the key elements of what the GPL stands for: end user rights. It's attempting, roughly speaking, to "BSD'ize" GPL. And the GPL will defend itself against this, by closing the hole that allowed it.
The whole point then is: if you, as a distributor, want a software that maximizes your distributor rights while limiting the end user rights, go for a BSD licensed one and never, ever, attempt to make the GPL fit it, because it won't. For the GPL folks the end user always comes first, and you will not be able to avoid them stopping your end-user-limiting business model.
Sure, in an ideal world. My understanding is that these are going to be made and shipped from Brazil, Maybe they aren't current in their abilities?
I'm not sure whether this is generalized or not, but I live in Brazil and work at a small company that resells data acquisition and process control systems imported from USA and Europe to other Brazilian companies, and these delivery times are pretty standard for us. Now, admittedly we don't sell directly to end users (prices for these systems are too high), only to other companies, but it's really common for we to take up to 90 days to deliver a system. And the reason is simple: we rarely maintain goods in stock, only importing what has already been purchased (and paid) by our customers, and as such, to minimize shipping costs we must include in a single shipment as many purchase orders as possible.
Is perfectly possible that this company is scamming, yes. However, as you pointed out, if they aren't scammers, there are in fact good reasons for them to have these long delivery times. Not all countries, much less all companies, meet the conditions required for almost instantaneous delivery times as are common in USA nowadays.
Simply put, it's not that such delivery times are "a thing of the past", as many other posts say. It's more that the USA are years ahead of everyone else in this regards.
Nope. Non-paying accounts, such as inactive accounts (in countries where it's charged per month), accounts not played in the last 30 days (in countries where it's charged per hour), and trial accounts, aren't included in the total. This 9,000,000 number is really for active, paying accounts only.
I find the Tivo section to make it sound very much like "You are free to use this however you want. Except for things we disagree with."
This isn't a correct reading. You ("you" as in "the end user") is always, always free to use the software to do whatever you want. Whatever! The GPLv3, being a license about copy rights, only places restrictions on how you ("you" as in "the copier") can copy it.
Always remember: copying != using.
Freedom 0, roughly speaking, was always about protecting the end user from EULAs, explicit or implicit. Since tivoization is about imposing an indirect EULA through messing with the copying aspect of the thing (again: copying != using - Tivo isn't the end user, the owner of the device is), to protect the end user's freedom 0 from such indirect EULAs, FSF adjusted the copying directives. And that's all there is to it.
Sure, as a copier you might not be happy about it. How dare the FSF oblige you to not restrict your end user in any shape, way or form?!? But as an end user, nothing has changed. Your freedom to use the software however you like is intact.
Do you have any evidence that fansubbing is financially beneficial to the companies that make and produce anime, or are you just making stuff up because you want it to be true?
I don't know about fansubing per se, but on the realm of scanlations (scanning of mangas with fan translations) I do have strong evidence. In the letters section of a recent volume of the Brazilian edition of Karekano, published by the local branch of Panini, Elza Keiko, editor of the whole manga department, replied to a reader's letter about this. In her answer she openly says that, yes, scanlations are valuable for the industry in that they show what has good chances of becoming popular if licensed, and that there is no problem in it provided the unofficial translators do their part by stopping the unofficial translation project and removing from their websites what's already available once a publisher officially licenses it.
If someone's interested I can search my Karekano collection for her answer and translate it. But the short answer is: no, the OP isn't making stuff. This is for real.
But the group need not view the law in such a fashion. I'll go so far as to say that political power can be embedded in a matter of persuasion (pure democracy); but persuasion need not be based on power.
I agree with what you say on a purely theoretical way. However, so far as different individuals take different approaches to the social reality, practice will twist the pure theory back into an hierarchical model. You will always have people thirsty for power, you will always have power thirsty for wealth, and you will always have people thirsty for a stable, even if poor and powerless, life. The first group will always manage to use the greed of the 2nd and the wishes of the 3rd towards the construction of a coercive power structure. So, unless your social scheme has a place for all of them, it'll break, in which case either you build power stronger than those of the 1st group would be able to do, thus becoming yourself a member of the 1st group who's merely opposed to the other members, or they will end up all fighting as local warlords, sometimes agreeing on cease fires, sometimes engaging in open war, without and end in sight. This is the reality of all stateless regions in the world.
(. ..) the solution to all our identity "theft" problems was to get rid of capitalism and the state.
Both impossible. You cannot "get rid" of the fact that some people are good at convincing others to do this instead of that (rhetorics, ergo politics, ergo state), and you also cannot "get rid" of the fact A will do 'x' for B so long as B does 'y' to A (goods and services exchanges, ergo capitalism, which happens with or without a currency system).
You can switch from individuals to collective committees doing this, or from collective committees to even bigger groups, but things will stay the same: the member who doesn't comply with the group decision is obliged by their peers to comply (police force, thus state); a group representative will try to convince other groups representatives (politics); a group will make deals with other groups towards the exchange of mutually beneficial goods and services (capitalism); and so on and so forth.
Anarchism is in practice nothing more than political power done in different, less clear ways. Everything is still there, only with different and much murkier names.
If someone uses a window's box to violate a license, the user is the violator not Microsoft.
Yes, but the Zune is the opposite. It's designed to both forbid and protect the users (both the sender and the receiver) from violating a license. It's blessed by the main content producers as a tool that, no matter how a user uses it, won't make neither the sender nor the receiver a copyright violator. Thus, it's the active party in the non-violating behavior, and as such, is also the responsible for when the violation happens. IMHO, of course.
Wrong. It's the same work in a different wrapper. If your theory was correct, iTMS (or in fact anyone) could avoid the need to license music from recording companies just by adding DRM. Obviously this isn't how it works.
In order to be a "derivative work" as defined by copyright legislation, the nature of the original work must be changed substantially (more than MC Hammer changed Rick James' "Superfreak" for "Can't Touch This", if you want a real world example). Adding DRM does not remix, change lyrics, tempo or melody, all it does is limit what exactly the same song can be played on.
IANAL, but if what you're saying is correct, then the whole section 6 of GPLv3 (a.k.a. "the anti-tivoization clause") is for all practical purposes void and null, because I would be able to workaround it by, say, asking a 3rd party to add DRM "features" to it, build it in a non-DRMed machine, distribute the new version for all the world to download, then take this pre-built version myself, CRC and SHA-1 it, put it into a machine who will only run a Samba with such a CRC and SHA-1, and sell said machine. This, I'm glad to say, isn't the way it works. If you read section 6 you'll notice that no, DRM-wrapping a GPLv3 component in this way isn't allowed and voids your right to distribute it.
By the way, causing a GPLv3 work which is explicitly intended (by the fact of it being a GPLv3 music!) to be used (played) in any place, way or form to not be usable (played) in any place, way or form is, IMHO, an extreme change in the nature of said work. iTMS can change the musics it carries because the copyright owner explicitly allowed iTMS to do so. If a GPLv3 music's author don't allow its copyrighted work to be DRM'ed (by the fact of having GPLv3'ed it!), then no one can do so without breaking his copyright. What he does allow (by the fact of having GPLv3'ed it!) is for the music to be changed so long as it's not DRM'ed. What he does not allow (per section 6) is for it to be DRM'ed without the DRM'er providing his recipient with the tools or with the complete information needed for him, the recipient, to un-DRM'ing it.
The user transferring music via a Zune is technically the distributor, not Microsoft. When you consider that (DRM excepted) the Zune is essentially a hardware file-sharing device, what you're asking is exactly the same as insisting that BitTorrent's developers take responsibility for making sure that no licenses are violated...you do see the problem with that, I hope.
The user asked for the file 'haha.mp3' to be sent. Microsoft itself, by automated means, decided to not send the file 'haha.mp3' as is, but to edit it, "compiling" a new into 'haha.drm', and sending this 'haha.drm' itself instead of the file the user asked it to send. Thus, Microsoft is already acting as censor, and must comply with everything the law says about it. Where the Zune to work as a dumb passive means of data transfer, which is what a BitTorrent softwares (and sites!) do, and you might argue it weren't responsible for what the user (the active party) is doing. If the user sent copyrighted work, it would be his wrong, not Zune's. But the moment the Zune steps inside to force copyright-compliance on users, by not letting them freely share as they do with any normal WiFi device out there, then it must do this right, or it will be responsible for any copyright violation, not the user. And what is the DRM'ing of a non-DRM'able GPLv3 music other than copyright violation by the party responsible, namely Microsoft?
I might be completely wrong on this, I admit. But to be completely sure I think we (and Microsoft) should check this with a lawyer specialized on both GPLv3 as well as copyright law applied to music. Anyone reading this who can solve the matter?
This would solve nothing. The anti-patent clause is already present in GPLv2. As soon as Microsoft itself did any work on any GPLv2 software, and distributed it, it would ipso facto be licensing all patents it own present in that piece of software to all its recipients, as well as to anyone those recipients redistributed the software, and so on and so forth. Failure to do so would forbid it from distributing any GPLv2 software at all, forked or not.
Microsoft isn't a party to the GPLv3 license and none of its actions are to be misinterpreted as accepting status as a contracting party of GPLv3 or assuming any legal obligations under such license
Then I urge Microsoft to change the Zune firmware so that no GPLv3-licensed MP3 file is edited by the device when sending it over WiFi, or at least a provision explicitly prohibiting users from sending those. A Zune-modified MP3 is, AFAIK, a derivative work, and as such any change made by Microsoft to it "carries over" into the receiving Zune the requirement for fully licensing the DRM technology used to lock it down, as well as any and all related patents.
It would be a good idea to also block or forbid transmission of GPLv2 MP3. Although GPLv2 doesn't have the anti-DRM clause, it does indeed have the patent-licensing one. If Microsoft doesn't agree with such licensing, it must cease and desist, effective always, from distributing said GPLv2 music.
Just out of curiosity: does someone know what are the legal ramifications of using a Zune to send a GPLv3 licensed MP3 to another Zune? Isn't the edited version a derivative work made by Microsoft? As a result, don't the anti-DRM and anti-patent clauses take effect, causing Microsoft to both auto-license their DRM technology as well as all the patents covering Zune? After all, I instructed the device to send a file, and it was Microsoft who, instead of doing as I instructed, choose to change it. Or at least, that's how it seems to me.
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Thus, any sexual relation that is done just for pleasure is a sin. This includes many heterosexual practices: masturbation, adultery, sex before marriage, and any sex inside marriage that's done for pure pleasure (using condoms fit this). In the heterosexual field, only sex made for reproduction inside a marriage is legit.
This is what excludes homosexual relations. Not the fact that a person is born an homosexual, but the fact that no homosexual intercourse can yield a baby. An homosexual that does any kind of sex (since all of them are "for pleasure only") is in the same sinful category as an heterosexual that also does any kind of "for pleasure only" sex. It is the exact same sin: that of not setting your bodily acts as those acts of a sacred temple, which is what the body is according to the Christian faith.
Now, please note that nothing in this prevents an homosexual of being a traditional Christian. He is just forbidden, as every other Christian, of doing "for pleasure only" sex. And if he at some moment indulges in doing it, he must, as every other Christian that also do so (including but not limited to a husband who looks his own wife "with desire"), confess and practice penitence.
"Being successful" in this endeavor is not what counts, else only saints would be true Christians. What actually counts is the continuous pursue of that goal by the Christian, the permanent moving in that direction.
As you see, from this point of view an homosexual Christian's struggle is only barely more difficult than that of an heterosexual Christian's struggle. So small is the difference in fact, that I really don't see why it's even brought into discussion. To be a good Christian is incredible difficult for anyone who try. Homosexuals aren't significantly worse in this by any stretch of imagination.
Whenever you try do reduce human complexity to a small set of rules based on a single overreaching characteristic of which every other characteristic is a mere expression (the libido of Freudianism, the class structures of Marxism, the byproducts of natural selection of Evolutive Psychology, the rational egoism of Randian Objectivism, and so on and so forth), you end up creating a system that, although potentially very complex, is devoid of reality. This shows very well when you take one of these systems and build fiction upon it, for the characters and situations always end up being schematic and lifeless.
But there is a positive thing in the creepiness that arise from such efforts. They at least show how badly suited this or that theory is to explain actual human behavior. This is the only way in which, IMHO, Eva can become an useful reading for anyone. Otherwise, it's just not worth it.
Causality, then, is an even more nebulous concept, so much that I won't even enter it (search for Hume's attack on the whole notion in his epistemological studies to see what I mean, although I must add that I disagree with him). Suffice it to say that what you call "cause and effect" is a concept devised by Aristotle, who identified it as one among four types of causes: formal, effective (the one you adopt), final and material. One of the reasons the Intelligent Design folks and evolutionist biologists don't get along is that the ID'ers adopt final causation, while evolutionists adopt effective causation, and both clash when applied to the same set of facts without the people arguing for one or the other previously acknowledging that they're applying different causative principles. Anyway, interestingly enough you cannot "prove" nor "disprove" any of the four causations, you can only "choose" to use one, other, or more than one of them.
So, only here we have at least three Philosophical "beliefs": first, that "the physical world" (let's avoid the term "nature", since you don't like it) is ordered; second, that the way it's ordered is intrinsically mathematical; and third, that this mathematical order is shaped in the form of effective causality. As things stand, none of them can be proved, only used. Interesting, eh?In a sense yes, although the universe as we experience it is only a small subset of the infinitely bigger set of possible universes. Because here's another thing you also believe, without noticing this to be the case: that for anything to exist as fact, it must have previously been possible, what implies that "possibilities" also exist as a component of reality. More precisely, then, believing that the infinite set of possibilities of which our universe is a single instance exist, this is the same as believing in god. Although only partially, while immanent, not while transcendent, since as stated above this last aspect isn't perceived by atheists.On the contrary. What happens is simply that religions express themselves through myths, not through analytic reasoning. To make a software analogy, a myth is a way to express a highly compacted perceived aspect of reality. You can leave it as is, since it is useful in this form nevertheless, or you can uncompress it by expressing analytically all of its content. Thus, if you go study (good) religious philosophers, both ancient and recent, you'll see all of them, from Medieval Christianity to Hinduism, doing this uncompressing, and saying in much more details what I abridged above.
This article on wikipedia offers some very nice examples. It's worth reading.
Seems to me you didn't grasp it. :)
It simple in fact. Theology will tell you that "time" and "space" were created. Furthermore, that "logic" and "mathematics" were created. More: that "possibility" and "causality" were created. And so on and so forth. Metaphysics will translate this into a logical hierarchy of "realities". Mathematical phenomena, for example, "includes" physics, since all physical phenomena are also mathematical relations, but isn't limited to physics, since non-physical phenomena also obey to mathematical laws. The study of these levels and how they interact with each other is called ontology, the study of being. And once you study ontology deeply enough, you see that it itself is encompassed by other non-ontological categories, such as those studied in henology, which analyzes non-dual relations (search the term on Google), of which the paragraph you didn't understood is a small overview.
Sigh. After studying philosophy I came to the conclusion that atheists usually don't know what they're talking about. They take the term "god", think it means something like a comics superhero, only bigger, and proceed to denounce that as non-existent. To which I answer: yes, it doesn't exist. Now, since the gods of which religions talk about have nothing in common with this concept, the debunking doesn't apply.
Regarding subsets, yes, all atheists believe in god. They just call it by other names: nature, causality, mater. And under specific conditions: while mathematical relations. In other words: atheists "understand" god while immanence. Religious people add to that transcendence. Both are two sides of the same coin.
I give an example. Anthropology has a central methodological principle: the anthropologist must study any culture in an objective and value free way. If he adds any value judgment to his studies, he isn't being scientifically precise. And it's all good and well, except for when an anthropologist forgets he began by doing non-judgmental studies. When that happens, he takes years of his studies, look at them, and end up saying something like: "These results are a proof that all cultures are equal, one isn't better than the other." To which I answer: no, they don't. These results, which taken as a whole show that all cultures are equal, prove that you applied very well your method of not being judgmental. Regarding the value of these cultures, they say nothing, because judging the value of cultures isn't something that Anthropology does. Simply put, Anthropology has no method for that, and cannot say anything about that.
It takes some years for a person to understand the terminology of any field. Why do you think it would be different with Philosophy? :)
Hehe, you inverted it. For something to be "testable", you must first know what "test" is. To test anything you need,
Now, obviously most religious people aren't philosophers to know high level metaphysical realism, but they nevertheless have some intuition about this. Anyway, the fact of the matter is simply that atheism isn't in opposition to theism. Atheism is merely a subset of theism. Take theism, remove any arbitrary number of elements from it (you choose which ones, although it's usually something you dislike in your culture), then take whatever remains, say it is all there is, and you have (an) atheism.
Afterwards, if inside such a subset you do a lot of very detailed research, you'll surely discover a lot of truths about the subset. And these truths, by definition, improve our understanding of the whole set. But since the study of the subset doesn't include the study of anything outside it, any kind of "negation" at which it arrives of that which is outside its boundaries isn't a negation at all, but only a more detailed description of these boundaries. That's because the subset is defined by this negation, and arriving at it now and again down the line is simply expected. To treat this in any other way would be to incur in a circular reasoning.
Thus, when a biologist says: "Here is natural selection, there is no God, there is no Creator", he is in fact incurring such a circular reasoning. The correct saying would be this: "Here is natural selection. I don't know how a god or a creator affects or interacts with it, because Biology excludes gods and creators from its field of research."
Too bad scientists usually don't study philosophy. It would make their discourse much more precise.
The problem with Sharia is actually on the "Islamic protestant" movements that began developing from the XVIII century onwards. These guys disregarded (and still disregard) the more reasonable versions of the Sharia developed in centuries past by the orthodox Muslim scholars, and apply the Koranic laws literally. Nowadays they would remain a very minor sect inside Islam weren't for the fact that Western empires (in the XIX and XX centuries) saw their radicalism as an useful tool in destabilizing Islamic regimes in places they were interested in, thus financing and protecting them. So much that even today USA is still giving tons of money to Saudi Arabia, which in turn uses this money to fund the spreading of literalist Islam.
Stop funding Islamic literalists with one hand while promoting anti-Western hatred in Middle East with the other, and in some decades, luckily years, the non-literal, non-absurd, non-terrorism-promoting, non-evil, orthodox Sharia will become mainstream again over there.
Now, if someone wrote a software, licensed it under GPLv1 or GPLv2 maintaining the "or later" clause, all the while not even trying to know RMS' texts and speeches to know what he meant with the licenses, and thus what the future of the license held, that person was, well, lazy. Nothing in this was a secret.
By the way: all of this might be said about the transition from GPLv1 to GPLv2. Who had had the trouble of reading/listening RMS wasn't caught by surprise then. At any time you either support the spirit and vision in the non-legalese "philosophy" behind the GPL by allowing the "or later" to remain, or the letter of a specific GPL version by removing the "or later" clause. Both options are clearly explained all over the Internet, and opting for one or the other doesn't carry any kind of ambiguity.
Thus, I really understand why he is doing this. It isn't really about controlling the distribution of hardware, but quite the opposite, to avoid the hardware control of his software. More specifically, he probably doesn't want any GPL covered software to ever help in anything described in his (poorly written, but interesting nevertheless) 1997 short story The Right to Read, something that GPLv2 allows, and GPLv3 definitely doesn't.
Of course it would be difficult to get the remaining code relicensed, and some of it might have to be rewritten due to some authors not being found and a handful of those found not wanting to relicense, but it's not impossible, only something that would be very time consuming and probably done by some 3rd party organization.
I believe in the near future a non-profit will be established for doing exactly this author research and contacting for files not yet marked as "or later". Afterwards, a kernel fork will be made to rewrite the (few) pieces that the non-profit didn't manage to get relicensed while keeping all the pieces "GPLv3 compatible" synced. And over time, once the rewritten pieces have been properly tested, the fork will become the new official version, now fully GPLv3 licensed.
This time, preferably, with the "or later" kept intact.
The GPL license is always a legalese means to a concrete end, as explained in FSF's definition of free software. This definition is what you might consider as the true and only "ideal GPL", of which the specific licenses are mere material expressions:
Free software is a matter of the users' freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. More precisely, it refers to four kinds of freedom, for the users of the software:
- The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
- The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
- The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
- The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
So, whenever someone discover a way around the "spirit" of any of the four freedoms while still complying with the "letter" of the most recent version of the license, a new license is devised to close that hole and keep the spirit intact.In the specific case of GPLv3, what was corrected was the hole that allowed a distributor to work its way around the "for any purpose" sentence in freedom 0. A DRM'ed hardware, the means chosen by the distributor do distribute the software, only allows the end user to use that software for certain purposes. "Certain" is always less than "any", and as such, a clear violation of the "ideal GPL".
To make things even more clear, let's abstract it even more. When we think about "software restrictions", we must always make this question: "restrictions to whom?"
Any piece of software has at least three parties involved: its authors, its distributors, and its end users. Since it's impossible to maximize all of the three, a license will necessarily place different restrictions level on each of the three, maximizing the rights of one while, by definition, reducing those granted to the other two. A typical proprietary license, for instance, maximize the author rights: he can keep the source closed, showing it only to specific persons after they sign extremely restrictive NDAs, all the while being allowed to impose severe distribution conditions to the distributor, and any EULA he wants to the user, up to the extend allowed by law. A BSD license, on the the other hand, maximizes the distributor rights, while minimizing both the author rights (who cannot forbid him from doing whatever he wants with the software) and the end user rights, who can still be subjected to any EULA.
What about the GPL then? Well, the GPL is the license that attempts to maximize the end user rights by restricting both authors rights (to stop redistribution, to restrict who can look and work in the software, from imposing EULAs, etc.) as well as distributors (from imposing EULAs).
So, any time a distributor (the paradigmatic example being Tivo) attempts to impose an indirect EULA to a GPL'ed piece of software, it is in fact violating one of the key elements of what the GPL stands for: end user rights. It's attempting, roughly speaking, to "BSD'ize" GPL. And the GPL will defend itself against this, by closing the hole that allowed it.
The whole point then is: if you, as a distributor, want a software that maximizes your distributor rights while limiting the end user rights, go for a BSD licensed one and never, ever, attempt to make the GPL fit it, because it won't. For the GPL folks the end user always comes first, and you will not be able to avoid them stopping your end-user-limiting business model.
Is perfectly possible that this company is scamming, yes. However, as you pointed out, if they aren't scammers, there are in fact good reasons for them to have these long delivery times. Not all countries, much less all companies, meet the conditions required for almost instantaneous delivery times as are common in USA nowadays.
Simply put, it's not that such delivery times are "a thing of the past", as many other posts say. It's more that the USA are years ahead of everyone else in this regards.
Nope. Non-paying accounts, such as inactive accounts (in countries where it's charged per month), accounts not played in the last 30 days (in countries where it's charged per hour), and trial accounts, aren't included in the total. This 9,000,000 number is really for active, paying accounts only.
Always remember: copying != using.
Freedom 0, roughly speaking, was always about protecting the end user from EULAs, explicit or implicit. Since tivoization is about imposing an indirect EULA through messing with the copying aspect of the thing (again: copying != using - Tivo isn't the end user, the owner of the device is), to protect the end user's freedom 0 from such indirect EULAs, FSF adjusted the copying directives. And that's all there is to it.
Sure, as a copier you might not be happy about it. How dare the FSF oblige you to not restrict your end user in any shape, way or form?!? But as an end user, nothing has changed. Your freedom to use the software however you like is intact.
If someone's interested I can search my Karekano collection for her answer and translate it. But the short answer is: no, the OP isn't making stuff. This is for real.
You can switch from individuals to collective committees doing this, or from collective committees to even bigger groups, but things will stay the same: the member who doesn't comply with the group decision is obliged by their peers to comply (police force, thus state); a group representative will try to convince other groups representatives (politics); a group will make deals with other groups towards the exchange of mutually beneficial goods and services (capitalism); and so on and so forth.
Anarchism is in practice nothing more than political power done in different, less clear ways. Everything is still there, only with different and much murkier names.
By the way, causing a GPLv3 work which is explicitly intended (by the fact of it being a GPLv3 music!) to be used (played) in any place, way or form to not be usable (played) in any place, way or form is, IMHO, an extreme change in the nature of said work. iTMS can change the musics it carries because the copyright owner explicitly allowed iTMS to do so. If a GPLv3 music's author don't allow its copyrighted work to be DRM'ed (by the fact of having GPLv3'ed it!), then no one can do so without breaking his copyright. What he does allow (by the fact of having GPLv3'ed it!) is for the music to be changed so long as it's not DRM'ed. What he does not allow (per section 6) is for it to be DRM'ed without the DRM'er providing his recipient with the tools or with the complete information needed for him, the recipient, to un-DRM'ing it.The user asked for the file 'haha.mp3' to be sent. Microsoft itself, by automated means, decided to not send the file 'haha.mp3' as is, but to edit it, "compiling" a new into 'haha.drm', and sending this 'haha.drm' itself instead of the file the user asked it to send. Thus, Microsoft is already acting as censor, and must comply with everything the law says about it. Where the Zune to work as a dumb passive means of data transfer, which is what a BitTorrent softwares (and sites!) do, and you might argue it weren't responsible for what the user (the active party) is doing. If the user sent copyrighted work, it would be his wrong, not Zune's. But the moment the Zune steps inside to force copyright-compliance on users, by not letting them freely share as they do with any normal WiFi device out there, then it must do this right, or it will be responsible for any copyright violation, not the user. And what is the DRM'ing of a non-DRM'able GPLv3 music other than copyright violation by the party responsible, namely Microsoft?
I might be completely wrong on this, I admit. But to be completely sure I think we (and Microsoft) should check this with a lawyer specialized on both GPLv3 as well as copyright law applied to music. Anyone reading this who can solve the matter?
This would solve nothing. The anti-patent clause is already present in GPLv2. As soon as Microsoft itself did any work on any GPLv2 software, and distributed it, it would ipso facto be licensing all patents it own present in that piece of software to all its recipients, as well as to anyone those recipients redistributed the software, and so on and so forth. Failure to do so would forbid it from distributing any GPLv2 software at all, forked or not.
It would be a good idea to also block or forbid transmission of GPLv2 MP3. Although GPLv2 doesn't have the anti-DRM clause, it does indeed have the patent-licensing one. If Microsoft doesn't agree with such licensing, it must cease and desist, effective always, from distributing said GPLv2 music.
Just out of curiosity: does someone know what are the legal ramifications of using a Zune to send a GPLv3 licensed MP3 to another Zune? Isn't the edited version a derivative work made by Microsoft? As a result, don't the anti-DRM and anti-patent clauses take effect, causing Microsoft to both auto-license their DRM technology as well as all the patents covering Zune? After all, I instructed the device to send a file, and it was Microsoft who, instead of doing as I instructed, choose to change it. Or at least, that's how it seems to me.