I'll agree with you that I perhaps overstated the Bible's condoning of infidel-murder -- upon a review of the relevant text, I should have probably stated that upon a misguided reading of the Bible it is okay to kill nonbelievers. I stand corrected (in another post on this thread I put up the relevant passages, FYI), although I do think that a lot of people carry out exactly such misguided readings, and many churches themselves promote these misinterpretations.
Parent has an excellent point - the old testament != Christianity. While the Old Testament is still read, it isn't taken literally and anything that the New Testament says "overwrites" the Old. Nowhere did Christ say "kill the infidel."
Except that, as another poster put it, the "fucktards" who cause all this trouble, trying to get evolution banned, Christianity forced on everyone, Muslims deported/killed, etc., do take this stuff literally. Christ may have not said "kill the infidel," but that message appears quite clearly in the Bible, which is the official holy book of his church. If the church wants to divorce itself from that message, then remove the message from the book. It's quite easy, really, and if nobody is supposed to believe in the message anyhow, then nothing is lost by deleting it. At the very least, print the thing with annotations that tell the fundies what orders from God are and aren't actually parts of their religion, because it's not like they're ever actually going to read the parts that don't have to do with hating gays and converting infidels. If they did, they might actually be pleasant people once in a while instead of self-satisfied assholes.
Deuteronomy:
7:1 When the LORD thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess it, and hath cast out many nations before thee, the Hittites, and the Girgashites, and the Amorites, and the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and mightier than thou;
7:2 And when the LORD thy God shall deliver them before thee; thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor shew mercy unto them:
7:16 And thou shalt consume all the people which the LORD thy God shall deliver thee; thine eye shall have no pity upon them : neither shalt thou serve their gods; for that will be a snare unto thee.
7:22 And the LORD thy God will put out those nations before thee by little and little: thou mayest not consume them at once, lest the beasts of the field increase upon thee.
7:23 But the LORD thy God shall deliver them unto thee, and shall destroy them with a mighty destruction, until they be destroyed.
13:6 If thy brother, the son of thy mother, or thy son, or thy daughter, or the wife of thy bosom, or thy friend, which is as thine own soul, entice thee secretly, saying, Let us go and serve other gods, which thou hast not known, thou, nor thy fathers;
13:7 Namely, of the gods of the people which are round about you, nigh unto thee, or far off from thee, from the one end of the earth even unto the other end of the earth;
13:8 Thou shalt not consent unto him, nor hearken unto him; neither shall thine eye pity him, neither shalt thou spare, neither shalt thou conceal him:
13:9 But thou shalt surely kill him; thine hand shall be first upon him to put him to death, and afterwards the hand of all the people.
13:10 And thou shalt stone him with stones, that he die; because he hath sought to thrust thee away from the LORD thy God, which brought thee out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage.
13:12 If thou shalt hear say in one of thy cities, which the LORD thy God hath given thee to dwell there, saying,
13:13 Certain men, the children of Belial, are gone out from among you, and have withdrawn the inhabitants of their city, saying, Let us go and serve other gods, which ye have not known;
13:14 Then shalt thou enquire, and make search, and ask diligently; and, behold, if it be truth, and the thing certain, that such abomination is wrought among you;
13:15 Thou shalt surely smite the inhabitants of that city with the edge of the sword, destroying it utterly, and all that is therein, and the cattle thereof, with the edge of the sword.
13:16 And thou shalt gather all the spoil of it into the midst of the street thereof, and shalt burn with fire the city, and all the spoil thereof every whit, for the LORD thy God: and it shall be an heap for ever; it shall not be built again.
17:2 If there be found among you, within any of thy gates which the LORD thy God giveth thee, man or woman, that hath wrought wickedness in the sight of the LORD thy God, in transgressing his covenant,
17:3 And hath gone and served other gods, and worshipped them, either the sun, or moon, or any of the host of heaven, which I have not commanded;
17:4 And it be told thee, and thou hast heard of it, and enquired diligently, and, behold, it be true, and the thing certain, that such abomination is wrought in Israel:
17:5 Then shalt thou bring forth that man or that woman, which have committed that wicked thing, unto thy gates, even that man or that woman, and shalt stone them with stones, till they die.
17:12 And the man that will do presumptuously, and will not hearken unto the priest that standeth to minister there before the LORD thy God, or unto the judge, even that man shall die: and thou shalt put away the evil from Israel.
17:13 And all the people shall hear, and fear, and do no more presumptuously.
Look this game does not represent Christianity, or the qualities of its followers. So much hatred for Christianity on Slashdot. Gleeful and spiteful hatred up and down this article's postings.
Look, I'm with you on this, more or less - after all, TFA tells us that it's a couple of Christian groups that are calling for this game to get taken off the shelves. Obviously your average Christian would find this game appalling, just like your average Muslim found the WTC attack appalling.
But -- and pardon my French, here, I usually try to keep it relatively clean on Slashdot -- it's these fuckhead zealots that get all the attention, thus smearing their shitstink on the rest of us (especially those who happen to share their skin color/place of birth). I don't like being assumed to be a right wing evangelical nutjob just because I live in the US, and it pains me every time I hear someone of Arabic (or anything even remotely mistakable for Arabic!) descent referred to as a terrorist.
I suspect the hatred you're seeing on Slashdot is more a hatred of self righteous dogma and fanaticism (and we all know that whenever one has dogma, one ends up with fanatics - wanna rag on M$, anyone?) than a hatred of moderate Christians. Most Christians are quite reasonable people; however, one can't help but notice that the Christian doctrine offers a lot of ways to justify acting like a turd (like most religious doctrines). So I certainly am not willing to exonerate the religion wholesale in this matter - according to the Bible, it is okay (some might even say it's one's duty) to kill nonbelievers if they won't convert, so contrary to your statement, this game does represent Christianity in a very accurate way. You are correct that it may not represent the qualities of its followers, and you've thus stumbled upon the contradiction inherent in being a moderate in any religion with a "frozen" holy book: if you disagree with some of the messages in the Bible, then you're just picking and choosing anyways, so what's the point of leaving the stuff you disagree with in the text at all? If there is so much interpretation required to understand God's true message, why not just edit the damn thing and be done with it? Yeah, yeah, not allowed to change the book, blah blah. Whatever. The point is that it's retarded, and when you leave crap like that in a holy book, assholes are going to read it and take it to heart, thus elevating their disgusting inclinations to hate and kill to the status of "holy."
And that's why we end up with games like this. Even if most individual Christians bear no responsibility, it is Christianity's fault...
Oops, you're right, I was hasty and didn't finish reading the whole file once I saw the Googlebot section. Any idea why they felt the need to reiterate that particular subset of disallows special for Googlebot, esp. since every one is also in the * listing?
How do you figure? I understand that comments.pl is marked disallow, but comments also show up in article.pl, which is not blocked. And yes, comment header links are marked nofollow, but not links in the body.
Still, I'm not sure if it really matters - I don't have Google toolbar on this computer, so I can't check, but I wouldn't think that the Slashdot article pages have much Pagerank, anyways, since they disappear to the bowels of the site after a day or two, along with thousands of other old articles.
While a math person would strangle another math person for saying something like that, I was a math/physics major, so I'll tell you that at least in the sciences, you're dead on. It so happens that a lot of really messy operations (particularly trig ones like sines and cosines) over the real numbers look really clean once you realize they are just the real/imaginary parts of simple imaginary functions.
Another way to think of it is that complex numbers are just a really special way of dealing with 2-dimensional geometry, where scaling and rotation are represented by complex multiplication. i corresponds to a 90 degree rotation, which is why i^2 = -1 (i.e. a 180 degree rotation). It's also why you can arbitrarily choose whether i is a clockwise or anticlockwise rotation as long as it's a consistent choice: two -90 degree rotations are equivalent to two positive ones (um...I hate to even bring it up, but that's actually not true in physics, where we have spinors - imagine a book attached to a ribbon which is attached to a table, and imagine turning the book 360 degrees; the ribbon is now twisted, and without further rotation it can't be untwisted, but if you rotate it another 360 degrees, you can undo the twisting without moving the book, by sort of pulling the loop of ribbon over the book - try it out if you're confused. That's the essence of a spinor, that a single full rotation leaves it in the "opposite" state, and that it leaves you confused).
Now I'll take off the science hat and put on the math one...the reason mathematicians love complex numbers is that if you have a function f(z) that is a function of the complex number z = x + iy (where x and y are both real), but not a function of x or y alone (i.e. f(z) = z+z^2+e^iz qualifies, f(z,x,y) = x - y + z does not), there are many subtle and powerful qualities that that function must possess. The one that comes up a lot is that you can do a Taylor expansion of the function and it "works" within a well defined range of values; another nice thing is that integration of the function along closed paths is all but trivial (it's always zero unless it encloses a "pole," i.e. a place where the function blows up in a certain way). As it turns out you can also take a function that you've defined along a single line (or piece of a line) and use its Taylor expansion to extend it to the whole complex plane. This is especially nice for functions like the Riemann zeta function (zeta(s) = 1/1^s + 1/2^s + 1/3^s +...), which is an infinite sum that only converges to a finite value if the real part of s is greater than 1 (for example, if it's zero, we have zeta(0) = 1+1+1+1+...). We can define its analytic continuation for other values, though, and prove interesting and unintuitive formulae like 1+2+3+4+5+... = -1/12 (which is, amazingly enough, actually somewhat relevant in physics when you look at the Casimir effect or string theory - it's the reason that in bosonic string theory you need 26 dimensions for quantum consistency, as in 2(left/right moving waves)*12(magic number from the zeta formula which counts energies of each mode) = 24, the number of degrees of freedom of a 2 dimensional string world-sheet).
So in summary, complex numbers are very important because they give us so many results that we could not even approach any other way (I haven't even mentioned the more subtle ones, esp. having to do with prime numbers!). To the contrary, the stuff that this professor is pushing seems entirely useless, more of an attempt to push a new term rather than a new concept. Mathematicians have understood infinity and what you can and can't say or do with it for a long time; anything you could even try to explain to a bunch of schoolchildren is either wrong, old news, or irrelevant.
Yeah, I really trust them to dispassionately and rationally decide whether a scientific theory is real.
Here's a hint: any ass with enough money can pay a bunch of people to put together a report that looks like science and seems like science to anyone but an expert in the field, with a predetermined conclusion. Hell, you can even take it further - all you need is a right wing nutjob school to pump out fundy science majors who are smart enough to get PhDs from good schools but too brainwashed to deviate from the party line, and you trot out the PhD parade any time you need to show "established" academics that believe in, for example, intelligent design.
And no, I don't think the Democrats are above this, either, if they ran head-on into the scientists on a matter of importance to them. I'm sick of the accusation that scientists are always picking the liberal side of scientific issues because they are liberal. Frankly, I suspect that it's more the case that the left leans towards science rather than the other way around. A scientist should have no party loyalty whatsoever; if liberals and scientists ever seriously diverge, I suspect the liberals would take exactly the same approach as the conservatives take now:
Make up some fake science
Claim that it's being suppressed by the academic community
Devise a spurious but easy to swallow argument to counter the scientific claim - this step can be dressed up to your liking, perhaps rolling it into a pop science book, or even a full fledged "theory" to make it seem more legitimate
Bank on the fact that Joe America (who hates "them goddamn know it all science queers") doesn't realize that he's so stupid that if he can understand the "explanation" then it must be wrong
...
This is freaking Slashdot, I don't need to explain step 6...
That's all fine and well as long as the damn PS3s actually work a year down the line. Since I've gone through three PS2s now because their DVD readers crapped out (usually within a year - so far my slim has not died yet, although almost immediately it decided it wouldn't read non-game DVDs), I frankly don't trust Sony anymore to provide high quality reliable hardware, especially in the first iteration of a system, and doubly so when that system was plagued by pre-release manufacturing issues relating to the new optical system that they are desperate to push.
Talk to me in a year, show me that your Blue-Ray drive still works and that there are some decent games out for the system, and then I'll consider admitting that $600 is not an insane price to pay for a PS3.
It doesn't make you a good employee, either. There's got to be something wrong if you don't want the boss to know what you're doing (at work)...
Yes, and often (especially with the non-IT types that often manage groups of programmers, and more especially in companies that do not primarily work in IT) that something that's wrong is that your boss is an idiot about computers. If someone doesn't need to (or can't) understand implementation details, then they are best protected from them - this is Encapsulation 101, and it applies just as reasonably to human interactions as digital ones. If it later turns out that they do need more details, it's easy to open up a bit; it's all but impossible to lock people out if they start to get too invasive, though.
Look around you at most of the people you may work with in IT. How many of them are social creatures, going out and partying on weekends etc? Yes, it's a bad stereotype, that computer geeks are antisocial misfits, but all stereotypes come from truth.
Some people would rather not go out and party at bars. I don't see a major problem with this if you fill your need for interaction in other ways. In one day I have more meaningful (i.e. intelligent) interaction over the Internet than I do in a year's worth of partying. As lacking as/. is in reasoned debate, at least the centerpiece of conversation doesn't usually involve my school and major, what some asshole that I knew in high school is doing now, or the great rack on that wasted blond in the corner. And bonus! - online you can actually hear what people are saying, since it's not drowned out by an ear-splitting bar band butchering "Sweet Caroline."
I think it's a shame that most people equate sociality with drinking and chasing tail. Not that I've got any problem with either of those activities, but I like to think that as a race we are also willing to label more meaningful interactions social.
This isn't a comment on "these people are lame!" because it's not one particular group that is falling victim to this. It's the "cool" kids too now that they're getting hooked on text messaging, IMs, console gaming etc. It's a growing problem that is hard for lots of people here to recognize because we're in the middle of it. We don't like to think that maybe we're less social or less connected with the outside world than we should be.
I quibble with the idea that there is a level of connectedness that "should be" at all. In the history of our race, the main problem with being non-social is that you lose the survival/procreation benefits of interacting with other people. Whether or not that is the case, it is something that tends to work itself out in the long run. There is no "should" - if you can be happy in life spending 12 hours of day WoW-ing, then that's great for you! (I couldn't, but maybe that's just me) If you can satisfy your need for romance by meeting people online instead of going out to bars or meeting people at work (probably a laughable concept for most males in IT, given the gender ratio there), great! And what exactly is so much better about driving out to Blockbuster rather than getting DVDs delivered by mail? I must assume you also have a problem with the idea of catalogue shopping and magazine subscriptions, as well, since they take away the joy of life that is putting up with an angry minimum wage counter clerk in order to get your goods. It seems that there is a humanist consensus that the only good interaction is a face-to-face one, but let's be honest - many face to face interactions really suck, and we lose nothing as a race by automating everything that we possibly can. Some tasks are beneath people, and I think it's great if you stop demeaning people by paying them minimum wage to do them.
I am amused that you invoke IM and text messaging as examples of us being disconnected with the outside world. Okay, people may be ignoring the physical world, but they are connecting to people that they actually want to interact with, whenever they like, which I think is a wonderful thing. That my neighbor is proximate to me shouldn't necessarily make us friends; conversely, that my friend is overseas shouldn't preclude a continuing relationship.
The bad news for O'Reilly and Co.: you haven't seen anything yet. Once they crack this whole bit-to-brain thing, most of us will be logged on 24-7 without so much as a cellphone in hand to give it away. You may see this as the death of bona-fide human interaction, and I might agree; however, sometimes the whole is much greater than the sum of the parts, and we'll only truly realize the information age when the entire planet is plugged in all the time. Laugh all you want at the idea of a planet full of people acting as a single unit, but look - if the idea scares you, you should be fighting connectivity at every step along the way, because even that cellphone in your pocket is a step in that direction.
I think the question is valid, as the financial resources are limited. Take for example the agricultural research institutes working for Africa: the money going in the overhyped genetic engineering meant that the funding went to this technology, at the expense of other research, which sometimes was more appropriate.
Yes, financial resources are limited, but (avoiding the issue of agricultural research, which I know nothing about) this is not an issue of choosing between spending money on OLPC and, for instance, food and medicine shipments. This money (and the brain-time, to address TFA) would have been entirely pissed away on something not likely to help these people at all - from what I hear, to a large extent this category even includes traditional charities, which have little to no long term impact on developing countries (the main problem with the feed-the-poor charities is that investments are expended on the short term goal of keeping people alive and healthy rather than addressing the underlying reasons that the resources to achieve this independently do not exist already; educational investment compounds, whereas investment in consumables does not).
I totally agree that this is a slightly off-the-wall project, and I'm not entirely sure that it's what developing countries need most. But viewed as a replacement for textbooks, if these things serve their educational purpose well, then I think it's at least a worthwhile experiment. Sometimes, especially when the standard methods don't seem to be helping a group of people, it's worth going out on a limb to see what happens. There are plenty of people donating $100 here and there to feed villages, and this is a safe bet. You know what your $100 (minus whatever cuts are taken out along the way) is going to ultimately be worth to those that receive it; with a $100 laptop, it's a much more volatile investment. It's very likely that a few people will benefit greatly from them and emerge as the educated, and most will either sell them off, have them stolen, or not get anything useful out of it. Is that worth $100? [Actually, the figure may be closer to $1000 for every person that actually makes good use of the thing.] Keep in mind that here in America, the price of one education is ~$120,000 at the college level. Have you ever in your life heard a person argue that we should not send our kids to college because using that money we could have fed 1,200 African villages for a year? Education is a very valuable thing, and sometimes the lowest levels of education are both the easiest to achieve and the most valuable.
In any case, I don't know if it's "worth" it, whatever that means. But neither does G. Pascal Zachary, and at least I'm happy that someone's trying something new. We know quite well that you can't alleviate hunger in the long term by donating food; can you get rid of the uneducated, thus creating more people able to solve the day-to-day problems, just by sending computers? Seems worth a shot...
The difference is that MySpace actually generates revenue from advertisement - so they materially benefit when people perform copyright infringement using their tool, and can quite easily be shown to have a vested interest in not vigorously policing their site.
But using that argument, anyone that hosts ad-supported user content is screwed unless they have the time, staff, and knowledge to filter out every possible infringing item before it is publicly displayed (which is, needless to say, absolutely impossible at the current CPMs that most sites would be seeing on their ads). And even then, if something slips by, hey, they should've been watching more closely, right?
This is one of the tricky things that I (and to my knowledge, the courts) still don't quite have clear, though. MySpace benefits, like just about every website out there, from traffic to its site. Yes, of course they would benefit if they became known as the central free music/music video site on the net, but this is hardly the case. MySpace's primary purpose is now, and to my knowledge always has been, to allow people with no technical skills to put up really obnoxious looking websites and let them rack up friend counts while showing the world that they have "really cool" taste in music.
So yes - they do advertise, and yes - there are some infringing items on their site. But I don't agree that they have such a clear vested interest in not policing the site, simply because I don't think most people give a crap what videos are hosted there. Do you seriously think there are people out there thinking, "Hmm, I really want to see that Trent Reznor video I was hearing about, where can I find it...oh, yeah, I think I'll go to MySpace." Please. This is not a serious element of MySpace's business model. It seems to me that what we're talking about here is the potential to materially benefit from infringement rather than the actuality, and I think it would be presumptive to accuse MySpace of deliberately letting violations slide until there is evidence to the contrary.
But the law is unclear on whether this makes them immune to punishment or not, and I hope that this case will clarify things a bit - given the history of these cases, though, it probably won't, which suits the record/movie industries perfectly because the ambiguity makes it impossible to chart a safe legal course through these waters, so most companies will probably just stay away altogether.
Except that they really shouldn't have a case as long as MySpace is taking infringing material down as soon as it is brought to their attention. By my reading, the safe harbor provisions were specifically put in place to protect exactly the type of thing that MySpace has going on, a webpage hosting service that they cannot be expected to police entirely. The fact that their software automatically does a format-shift when people upload videos isn't (or at least shouldn't be) relevant at all.
This is more of the same - someone provides a tool, some people abuse the tool and do illegal things with it. Too many people to police means that the provider cannot afford to make sure everyone is acting within the law. But the people whose copyrights are being infringed upon can't afford to go after the individuals for both PR and practical reasons, so they look for someone with fat pockets to blame. Frankly I'm confused about what is so different about a tool on a web server somewhere and a tool on my hard drive - if I used Winamp to convert a copyrighted video and then uploaded it to a GoDaddy hosted server, nobody would be blaming Nullsoft or GoDaddy for my crime. It would be my fault, 100%. It is ridiculous that the courts continue to allow these types of suits to continue without any clarification as to what the law actually means when it comes to hosting user submitted content.
I've got to say, I really thought MySpace would be immune to this type of thing, as much as I'd love to see it implode. The fact is, they don't base their revenue model on infringement in the least. If you removed video hosting altogether from MySpace, I sincerely doubt if anyone would even notice, considering YouTube's success in that venue. It's looking more and more like the only safe user content to host is plain old text, and I think that's a damn shame. The record industry middlemen seem to feel that it's more than appropriate to expect everyone on the net to protect their copyrights as fiercely as they do.
Authoritarian?? Social conservatives are the opposite of authoritarian, as their highest goal is to return the control of social issues back to the peoples' representatives (where the Constitution put it in the first place), instead of the Supreme Court.
Actually, the Constitution explicitly took control of many social issues out of the people's hands because democracy is extraordinarily dangerous to the rights of those outside of the majority. Whenever you hear Bill O'Reilly whine about "judicial activism," you should immediately step back, look at the situation, and ask yourself if what he's complaining about is the court telling the majority that unless it has a solid legal reason to do so, it may not impose its views or morals on an unwilling minority. If that is the situation, then sit down and shut up - that's the Constitution's main purpose, to protect us all from ending up on the other side of a crazy mob's wrath. In terms that you may find more familiar, the Supreme Court protects those that are least able to protect themselves. And hey, bonus!, this time it actually applies to people with nontrivial brain activity!
"Yeah, so they can enact authoritarian laws," you might say. But calling laws that say you can't kill human beings without a damn good reason, regardless of their stage of development, "authoritarian" is more than a little twisted.
That's true, and I'll emphatically agree with you there. In fact, I'd like to condemn everyone here on Slashdot for killing unborn babies. After all, every time you've not had sex with a member of the opposite sex, that's another dead baby. A pre-coital baby, perhaps...but "regardless of their stage of development" includes those, too. My condemnation is doubly levelled at those evil religious folks who think that it's dirty to fornicate - how dare you kill all of these babies with your misplaced morality!
Not a great analogy, right? "Well, that's ridiculous," you argue, "there's a line that has to be drawn somewhere. You're only talking about a potential baby, and you're not really killing it since it was never alive in the first place." I agree. I don't fancy killing humans any more than you do; however, that doesn't mean I agree on your definition of human. A potentiality means balls in this world. You may think that human life begins at conception, because you can't think of a more plausible time for God to put the soul in. But our legal system doesn't deal in souls, and a lot of scientists will tell you that up until fairly late in the birth cycle that embryo bears little to no resemblance to a human. So despite what you may believe, this is not an open and shut case (same goes for the other side - I would argue that there is a decent period of time before actual birth during which we probably should call it human; of course, this is the current legal situation, so I can't really complain). If you wish to impose your moral view on the rest of society, feel free to back it up with something other than religion - if you can, for instance, prove that an embryo feels pain after a month in the womb, I'll be listening. But if all you can back it up with is your personal conviction, then I'm sorry, you're free to choose what to do yourself, but the Constitution won't let you choose for others, regardless of whether the majority of your peers agree with you.
That said, don't despair - a good number (daresay a majority? only time will tell...) of those currently on the Supreme Court don't seem to care for the Constitution's minority protections all that much, so you may end up getting your way in the end, founding fathers be damned.
If there is a chance he might recover something useful, he should get access to the hard drive. Welcome to the world of civil discovery.
Um, no. That's just not the way it works. There is always a chance that if given access to a person's hard drive their courtroom adversary will find something useful. Do you seriously mean to suggest that if any person enters into IT related litigation they should be automatically required to offer a copy of their hard drive to their opponent? Because that's where your logic leads. This case has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with what is on the plaintiff's hard drive, given that all the relevant evidence exists on a webmail server.
An analogy: if the government was prosecuting an child pornography case, and the defendant's website had kiddie porn up, it would be absolutely ludicrous for the defendant to request a mirror copy of the government computers used to find said kiddie porn under the theory that there might be something useful in the cache. It's irrelevant, it's distracting, and it's clearly being used in the current spam case as an attempt to intimidate the plaintiff.
Also (relating to the article, not this thread), shouldn't the title read "Spammer Can Have Accuser's Hard Drive," given the results of the ruling, or am I just too high on a coffee buzz to read properly?
But you middle-of-the road right-oriented guys who claim maximum capitalism and minimum regulation actually
provides the best life for the average guy: really, get a grip. Why not go all the way and just claim Santa will fix everything.
There are somewhat reasonable economic arguments for massive deregulation, ones that I'll leave to your econ 101 professor to explain, but the significant flaw in any of these is that they tend to maximize simple cash values rather than more realistic metrics of what a country should be interested in. For instance, to oversimplify a bit, if I make $10,000 a year and my neighbor makes $1,000,000, most models would treat this exactly the same as if I made $505,000 and my neighbor made $505,000. But this is ridiculous. At 10k a year, I'm going to be miserable, whereas once you pass 100k a year your happiness is not going to increase by much no matter how much you make, so clearly the second situation is "better" than the first for society (here consisting of just two people) as a whole, by almost any reasonable metric. Even supposing that the forced redistribution of wealth negatively impacted our outputs and therefore cut each of our salaries down to $400,000 (thus cutting the overall "economy" by a good 20%), I still think most people would agree that the more equitable distribution was "better."
But by overregulating (eg through redistribution of wealth) you are going to hurt the economy; by underregulating you're going to hurt the individual. There's got to be a happy medium, and I think that happy medium is what we're always looking for. Personally I would guess that we'll only know that we're there when the income distribution loses its fat tails and turns into something more normal - to me, the power law scaling at the edges suggest that when a person has a lot of money, it's too easy to make a lot more. Clearly it should be easier to make a million dollars starting with 10 million than with 1 million, but it shouldn't be quite as easy as it is to make 100k when you're starting with 1 million; currently, it seems that the difficulty is almost exactly the same, at least according to the wealth distribution. At least if the income levels were normally distributed, we could say that it's a bit of luck and a bit of hard work that determine how much you make, rather than a lot of money and privilege.
Unfortunately, it's those who live in the fat tails that have the most resources available to fight anything that would threaten their fortunes, so I doubt anything will change very soon.
Your point is taken - the people of America are ultimately to blame for the country's misdeeds and mistakes. However, the people make (or at least accept) these mistakes because they accept authority views as well researched facts, realizing that they do not have the personal expertise to evaluate the best course of action on their own. For the majority of the American public, this is quite true, since most people don't know where Iraq is let alone how likely it is that it will attack us with nuclear weapons.
This does not, however, exonerate those who abuse the trust that the American people put in them to actually research these "facts" and come to reasonable conclusions. In the war on drugs case, the ONDCP/DEA/etc. has abused the American trust by exerting authority and telling the thought-phobic average Joe that a) there is a serious drug problem in the country that might affect the children, and b) the best way to fight it is by pounding the fist of moral right rather than through education and regulation. That the public falls for this is unfortunate, but ultimately an unsolvable problem. People are programmed to take orders and defer to authority - witness evolution in action.
Bush is blamed for the current problems merely because he holds such sway over the American people - or at least did until it became so painfully obvious that he was wrong that they were forced to start ignoring his words. I do understand that the Dems are not likely any better at this stuff in an absolute sense. But it's only by punishing the current ruling party that the American public can voice their discontent, and the Republicans have been at the wheel this whole time, so I say go ahead, kick 'em all out! If the Democrats had gotten us in this mess, I'd say the exact same thing.
America's problem is simple. The people are too rich, fat and lazy, and forgot the important principles of their country's founding. It is as simple as that. There is only one way the current trend will be reversed, and that's when all the soccer moms care deeply about their, and their country's, liberty. Do you think that's happening anytime soon?
And the only way the soccer moms will care about their/their country's liberty is if the leaders whose authority they respect realize that liberty is what the country is about, not some twisted idealized version of contagious democracy - democracy can be a terribly dangerous concept, since the average person is an asshole (especially when dealing with the other-than-average person). Let a bunch of assholes vote, and - surprise! - you get a group of people that make asshole decisions. The magic happens when you construct a system of checks and balances that keeps a group of assholes from acting as such, and in my opinion, that is essence of the American way. But it is a way that is easily lost, especially when the rallying cry becomes "Democracy!" instead of "Freedom!". It is unfortunate that the average American is not reminded on a regular basis that the two concepts are not the same thing.
The public has been on an all-fear-all-the-time diet of propaganda for five years now, so it is hardly surprising that fear is what's on its mind. Punish the fearmongers by removing their influence, and maybe we'll start to remember what it is that this country actually stands for...
On the chance that you don't actually want to download and search through that obnoxiously long bill for the one relevant section, and recognizing that the article is currently Slashdotted, here's the text of section 1076 of this bill:
SEC. 1076. USE OF THE ARMED FORCES IN MAJOR PUBLIC EMERGENCIES. a USE OF THE ARMED FORCES AUTHORIZED.
1 IN GENERAL. Section 333 of title 10, United States Code, is amended to read as follows:
333. Major public emergencies; interference with State and Federal law
a USE OF ARMED FORCES IN MAJOR PUBLIC EMERGENCIES.
1 The President may employ the armed forces, including the National Guard in Federal service, to
A restore public order and enforce the laws of the United States when, as a result of a natural disaster, epidemic, or other serious public health emergency, terrorist attack or incident, or other condition in any State or possession of the United States, the President determines that
i domestic violence has occurred to such an extent that the constituted authorities of the State or possession are incapable of maintaining public order; and
ii such violence results in a condition described in paragraph 2; or
B suppress, in a State, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy if such insurrection, violation, combination, or conspiracy results in a condition described in paragraph 2.
2 A condition described in this paragraph is a condition that
A so hinders the execution of the laws of a State or possession, as applicable, and of the United States within that State or possession, that any part or class of its people is deprived of a right, privilege, immunity, or protection named in the Constitution and secured by law, and the constituted authorities of that State or possession are unable, fail, or refuse to protect that right, privilege, or immunity, or to give that protection; or
B opposes or obstructs the execution of the laws of the United States or impedes the course of justice under those laws.
3 In any situation covered by paragraph 1B, the State shall be considered to have denied the equal protection of the laws secured by the Constitution.
b NOTICE TO CONGRESS.The President shall notify Congress of the determination to exercise the authority in subsection a1A as soon as practicable after the determination and every 14 days thereafter during the duration of the exercise of that authority.
2 PROCLAMATION TO DISPERSE.Section 334 of such title is amended by inserting "or those obstructing the enforcement of the laws" after "insurgents".
3 HEADING AMENDMENT.The heading of chapter 15 of such title is amended to read as follows:
CHAPTER 15 ENFORCEMENT OF THE LAWS TO RESTORE PUBLIC ORDER.
4 CLERICAL AMENDMENTS.A The tables of chapters at the beginning of subtitle A of title 10, United States Code, and at the beginning of part I of such subtitle, are each amended by striking the item relating to chapter 15 and inserting the following new item:
15 Enforcement of the Laws to Restore Public Order 33.
B The table of sections at the beginning of chapter 15 of such title is amended by striking the item relating to sections 333 and inserting the following new item:
333. Major public emergencies; interference with State and Federal law.
b PROVISION OF SUPPLIES, SERVICES, AND EQUIPMENT.
1 IN GENERAL.Chapter 152 of such title is amended by adding at the end the following new section:
2567. Supplies, services, and equipment: provision in major public emergencies
a PROVISION AUTHORIZED.In any situation in which the President determines to exercise the authority in section 333a1A of this title, the President may direct the Secretary of Defense to provide supplies, services, and equipment to persons affected by the situation.
b COVERED SUPPLIES, SERVICES, AND EQUIPMENT.The supplies, services, and equipment provided under this section may include food, water, utilit
That's a fair criticism, as is your subsequent explanation (not quoted to save space). I realized after I posted that it did sound like an argument in favor of DRM, but it was late at night and I decided to sleep rather than touch that one.
I personally agree with you - DRM is evil, and in my opinion it's one of the most harmful developments of the last decade (to the consumer, at least). But, it's just not smart business to sell a product that's easy to rip off without doing anything to protect it other than prosecuting those that steal it (or copy it, for those who don't like the word "steal" in this context). So yes, DRM is a step in the direction of protecting the music industry's product, and as such, it is a logical business decision (that doesn't make it right, of course).
That said, I don't think DRM puts the music industry in a much better position than the unattended apples guy, since even DRM-ed music is not that difficult to copy. The analog hole alone pretty much makes the whole struggle moot, since your average music listener doesn't care if the sound quality is less than perfect. Honestly, I don't think there's much that the music industry can do to handle this at this point, unless it somehow manages to trim so much fat from its system that it could actually offer a wide selection of decent music at a fair price. But these corporations are behemoths, and generally take so long to make major changes that it's too late by the time they are done.
The best case scenario for the customer is that people pirate so much music that it actually does hurt the current big players, opening up the field enough for some smaller artists/labels to step in - and trust me, there are plenty of folks ready and willing to step up to the plate and work with the new smaller profit margin should (for instance) Sony collapse or bow out. If someone could make a business model work that didn't involve screwing the customer over at every step (given that we're in the Web-2.0 era, this probably means through ads), it would be quite a hit with the public.
After all, customers want information to be free, but those who produce it want to be paid. Google made billions on this concept without charging the average Joe a cent, and broadcast TV has been at the teat for decades. Why is it so tough for the music industry to figure out where this is all headed?
Your pumpkin argument breaks down: most working musicians play music primarily because they love it, not because they think they will sell records. In most cases, just about the worst thing that can happen to a musician's career is to get suckered into a major label deal. Normally all that will get you is a CD that's not on the shelves, an obligation not to sign with anyone else for a ridiculous amount of time, and occasionally even a good deal of debt, not to mention large amounts of your time wasted working on a project that the label never intended to promote. There are thousands upon thousands of bands out there that love to play music, want you to hear it, and are happy to give it away. I think it's going a bit far to call these people chumps - most of the musicians in the world sell their services, not their IP, and many programmers do the same.
Does this mean that we should not respect copyrights? No, I suppose not. The law is the law, and it's not likely to change, although I might take issue with criminal cases being brought against offenders (esp. since as we know, YouTube is immune to this type of thing even though they actually host the offending content rather than just providing a link to it...gotta say, I still fail to understand the legal details behind this difference, although I get the spirit of the thing). But I can't say I'd shed a tear if all the labels went belly up due to file-sharing, since my general feeling is that their major purpose is not so much to aid the creative process along as to throw such large sums of money behind the top 100 cookie-cutter artists that none of the more original performers can get their stuff heard at all.
Another way to look at it: if you leave out an unattended pile of apples and a sign asking that a dollar be put in a box for each one, then yes, I suppose if someone came and took an apple without leaving the dollar, it would be theft. If enough people were filching your apples, then the police might even arrest the people stealing them if you pointed them out. But you're still a freaking idiot for being in the unattended-pile-of-apples business. It should be your problem if you choose to sell a product that is too easy to steal for you to turn a profit, not the taxpayer's.
It's not the choice between going it alone and not going it alone that bothers me; it's the choice of where we're going at all! I don't know if you remember, but during the leadup to the war, there were a whole lot of people asking why Bush & Co. were so eager to go into Iraq (where there was no real indication of nuclear programs) and so reluctant to address the looming North Korea problem. This is one of the main reasons Bush's opponents suspect ulterior motive - in North Korea we actually could have had more international support, as there was unambiguous evidence that Kim Jong Il was succeeding in his quest for nuclear weapons. So why focus on Iraq? It just doesn't make sense based on the rationale we were given.
[That said, I don't think it was for money or oil, or even to justify scaling back personal freedoms, despite what the conspiracy theorists would claim - if I had to guess, the hawks were well-intentioned but just mistakenly thought Iraq would be an easy warm-up battle to boost public support for the fights that really mattered]
If the cause is just, by all means, we should go it alone. But let's at least make sure we're going to the right place - thanks to the thing in Iraq, North Korea has essentially been given a two year free pass to do whatever the hell it wants while we waste time in the desert...
And by the way, Bush doesn't seem to be choosing between going it alone and multilateral talks. He appears to be just stubbornly refusing to take any tangible action on the issue at all, which is what I object to.
If you look at the other articles on the WND site, a good part of it is them bitching about anti-Conservative Googlebombs and stuff like that; apparently they feel that it's perfectly reasonable to accuse companies of bias for not enforcing neutral POV on all their users. Sorry, guys - the Internet ain't all Wikipedia, and out here people actually have opinions.
Plus, while I'm not in favor of censorship of most things, I can't say I'm too disappointed in Google for discarding some of the anti-gay propaganda that these guys have been complaining about. Yes, maybe it's not as bad as it comes, as it's generally not advocating violence or anything like that, but if you look at most of the anti-gay sites and replace the word "homosexual" with "black," the message becomes unambiguously offensive. I understand that these nutters don't think sexuality is as worthy of protection as race, but I think that said substitution is a fair litmus test for whether something will get advertised by Google; after all, sexual orientation is considered important by Google, whether or not it is by you.
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I'll agree with you that I perhaps overstated the Bible's condoning of infidel-murder -- upon a review of the relevant text, I should have probably stated that upon a misguided reading of the Bible it is okay to kill nonbelievers. I stand corrected (in another post on this thread I put up the relevant passages, FYI), although I do think that a lot of people carry out exactly such misguided readings, and many churches themselves promote these misinterpretations.
With pleasure.
Isn't that what televangelists are for?
But -- and pardon my French, here, I usually try to keep it relatively clean on Slashdot -- it's these fuckhead zealots that get all the attention, thus smearing their shitstink on the rest of us (especially those who happen to share their skin color/place of birth). I don't like being assumed to be a right wing evangelical nutjob just because I live in the US, and it pains me every time I hear someone of Arabic (or anything even remotely mistakable for Arabic!) descent referred to as a terrorist.
I suspect the hatred you're seeing on Slashdot is more a hatred of self righteous dogma and fanaticism (and we all know that whenever one has dogma, one ends up with fanatics - wanna rag on M$, anyone?) than a hatred of moderate Christians. Most Christians are quite reasonable people; however, one can't help but notice that the Christian doctrine offers a lot of ways to justify acting like a turd (like most religious doctrines). So I certainly am not willing to exonerate the religion wholesale in this matter - according to the Bible, it is okay (some might even say it's one's duty) to kill nonbelievers if they won't convert, so contrary to your statement, this game does represent Christianity in a very accurate way. You are correct that it may not represent the qualities of its followers, and you've thus stumbled upon the contradiction inherent in being a moderate in any religion with a "frozen" holy book: if you disagree with some of the messages in the Bible, then you're just picking and choosing anyways, so what's the point of leaving the stuff you disagree with in the text at all? If there is so much interpretation required to understand God's true message, why not just edit the damn thing and be done with it? Yeah, yeah, not allowed to change the book, blah blah. Whatever. The point is that it's retarded, and when you leave crap like that in a holy book, assholes are going to read it and take it to heart, thus elevating their disgusting inclinations to hate and kill to the status of "holy."
And that's why we end up with games like this. Even if most individual Christians bear no responsibility, it is Christianity's fault...
Oops, you're right, I was hasty and didn't finish reading the whole file once I saw the Googlebot section. Any idea why they felt the need to reiterate that particular subset of disallows special for Googlebot, esp. since every one is also in the * listing?
How do you figure? I understand that comments.pl is marked disallow, but comments also show up in article.pl, which is not blocked. And yes, comment header links are marked nofollow, but not links in the body.
Still, I'm not sure if it really matters - I don't have Google toolbar on this computer, so I can't check, but I wouldn't think that the Slashdot article pages have much Pagerank, anyways, since they disappear to the bowels of the site after a day or two, along with thousands of other old articles.
While a math person would strangle another math person for saying something like that, I was a math/physics major, so I'll tell you that at least in the sciences, you're dead on. It so happens that a lot of really messy operations (particularly trig ones like sines and cosines) over the real numbers look really clean once you realize they are just the real/imaginary parts of simple imaginary functions.
...), which is an infinite sum that only converges to a finite value if the real part of s is greater than 1 (for example, if it's zero, we have zeta(0) = 1+1+1+1+...). We can define its analytic continuation for other values, though, and prove interesting and unintuitive formulae like 1+2+3+4+5+... = -1/12 (which is, amazingly enough, actually somewhat relevant in physics when you look at the Casimir effect or string theory - it's the reason that in bosonic string theory you need 26 dimensions for quantum consistency, as in 2(left/right moving waves)*12(magic number from the zeta formula which counts energies of each mode) = 24, the number of degrees of freedom of a 2 dimensional string world-sheet).
Another way to think of it is that complex numbers are just a really special way of dealing with 2-dimensional geometry, where scaling and rotation are represented by complex multiplication. i corresponds to a 90 degree rotation, which is why i^2 = -1 (i.e. a 180 degree rotation). It's also why you can arbitrarily choose whether i is a clockwise or anticlockwise rotation as long as it's a consistent choice: two -90 degree rotations are equivalent to two positive ones (um...I hate to even bring it up, but that's actually not true in physics, where we have spinors - imagine a book attached to a ribbon which is attached to a table, and imagine turning the book 360 degrees; the ribbon is now twisted, and without further rotation it can't be untwisted, but if you rotate it another 360 degrees, you can undo the twisting without moving the book, by sort of pulling the loop of ribbon over the book - try it out if you're confused. That's the essence of a spinor, that a single full rotation leaves it in the "opposite" state, and that it leaves you confused).
Now I'll take off the science hat and put on the math one...the reason mathematicians love complex numbers is that if you have a function f(z) that is a function of the complex number z = x + iy (where x and y are both real), but not a function of x or y alone (i.e. f(z) = z+z^2+e^iz qualifies, f(z,x,y) = x - y + z does not), there are many subtle and powerful qualities that that function must possess. The one that comes up a lot is that you can do a Taylor expansion of the function and it "works" within a well defined range of values; another nice thing is that integration of the function along closed paths is all but trivial (it's always zero unless it encloses a "pole," i.e. a place where the function blows up in a certain way). As it turns out you can also take a function that you've defined along a single line (or piece of a line) and use its Taylor expansion to extend it to the whole complex plane. This is especially nice for functions like the Riemann zeta function (zeta(s) = 1/1^s + 1/2^s + 1/3^s +
So in summary, complex numbers are very important because they give us so many results that we could not even approach any other way (I haven't even mentioned the more subtle ones, esp. having to do with prime numbers!). To the contrary, the stuff that this professor is pushing seems entirely useless, more of an attempt to push a new term rather than a new concept. Mathematicians have understood infinity and what you can and can't say or do with it for a long time; anything you could even try to explain to a bunch of schoolchildren is either wrong, old news, or irrelevant.
Yeah, I really trust them to dispassionately and rationally decide whether a scientific theory is real.
Here's a hint: any ass with enough money can pay a bunch of people to put together a report that looks like science and seems like science to anyone but an expert in the field, with a predetermined conclusion. Hell, you can even take it further - all you need is a right wing nutjob school to pump out fundy science majors who are smart enough to get PhDs from good schools but too brainwashed to deviate from the party line, and you trot out the PhD parade any time you need to show "established" academics that believe in, for example, intelligent design.
And no, I don't think the Democrats are above this, either, if they ran head-on into the scientists on a matter of importance to them. I'm sick of the accusation that scientists are always picking the liberal side of scientific issues because they are liberal. Frankly, I suspect that it's more the case that the left leans towards science rather than the other way around. A scientist should have no party loyalty whatsoever; if liberals and scientists ever seriously diverge, I suspect the liberals would take exactly the same approach as the conservatives take now:
He's just sockpuppeting as AC and hoping we won't actually scroll up to see whether he was modded up or not.
That's all fine and well as long as the damn PS3s actually work a year down the line. Since I've gone through three PS2s now because their DVD readers crapped out (usually within a year - so far my slim has not died yet, although almost immediately it decided it wouldn't read non-game DVDs), I frankly don't trust Sony anymore to provide high quality reliable hardware, especially in the first iteration of a system, and doubly so when that system was plagued by pre-release manufacturing issues relating to the new optical system that they are desperate to push.
Talk to me in a year, show me that your Blue-Ray drive still works and that there are some decent games out for the system, and then I'll consider admitting that $600 is not an insane price to pay for a PS3.
I think it's a shame that most people equate sociality with drinking and chasing tail. Not that I've got any problem with either of those activities, but I like to think that as a race we are also willing to label more meaningful interactions social.
I quibble with the idea that there is a level of connectedness that "should be" at all. In the history of our race, the main problem with being non-social is that you lose the survival/procreation benefits of interacting with other people. Whether or not that is the case, it is something that tends to work itself out in the long run. There is no "should" - if you can be happy in life spending 12 hours of day WoW-ing, then that's great for you! (I couldn't, but maybe that's just me) If you can satisfy your need for romance by meeting people online instead of going out to bars or meeting people at work (probably a laughable concept for most males in IT, given the gender ratio there), great! And what exactly is so much better about driving out to Blockbuster rather than getting DVDs delivered by mail? I must assume you also have a problem with the idea of catalogue shopping and magazine subscriptions, as well, since they take away the joy of life that is putting up with an angry minimum wage counter clerk in order to get your goods. It seems that there is a humanist consensus that the only good interaction is a face-to-face one, but let's be honest - many face to face interactions really suck, and we lose nothing as a race by automating everything that we possibly can. Some tasks are beneath people, and I think it's great if you stop demeaning people by paying them minimum wage to do them.
I am amused that you invoke IM and text messaging as examples of us being disconnected with the outside world. Okay, people may be ignoring the physical world, but they are connecting to people that they actually want to interact with, whenever they like, which I think is a wonderful thing. That my neighbor is proximate to me shouldn't necessarily make us friends; conversely, that my friend is overseas shouldn't preclude a continuing relationship.
The bad news for O'Reilly and Co.: you haven't seen anything yet. Once they crack this whole bit-to-brain thing, most of us will be logged on 24-7 without so much as a cellphone in hand to give it away. You may see this as the death of bona-fide human interaction, and I might agree; however, sometimes the whole is much greater than the sum of the parts, and we'll only truly realize the information age when the entire planet is plugged in all the time. Laugh all you want at the idea of a planet full of people acting as a single unit, but look - if the idea scares you, you should be fighting connectivity at every step along the way, because even that cellphone in your pocket is a step in that direction.
I totally agree that this is a slightly off-the-wall project, and I'm not entirely sure that it's what developing countries need most. But viewed as a replacement for textbooks, if these things serve their educational purpose well, then I think it's at least a worthwhile experiment. Sometimes, especially when the standard methods don't seem to be helping a group of people, it's worth going out on a limb to see what happens. There are plenty of people donating $100 here and there to feed villages, and this is a safe bet. You know what your $100 (minus whatever cuts are taken out along the way) is going to ultimately be worth to those that receive it; with a $100 laptop, it's a much more volatile investment. It's very likely that a few people will benefit greatly from them and emerge as the educated, and most will either sell them off, have them stolen, or not get anything useful out of it. Is that worth $100? [Actually, the figure may be closer to $1000 for every person that actually makes good use of the thing.] Keep in mind that here in America, the price of one education is ~$120,000 at the college level. Have you ever in your life heard a person argue that we should not send our kids to college because using that money we could have fed 1,200 African villages for a year? Education is a very valuable thing, and sometimes the lowest levels of education are both the easiest to achieve and the most valuable.
In any case, I don't know if it's "worth" it, whatever that means. But neither does G. Pascal Zachary, and at least I'm happy that someone's trying something new. We know quite well that you can't alleviate hunger in the long term by donating food; can you get rid of the uneducated, thus creating more people able to solve the day-to-day problems, just by sending computers? Seems worth a shot...
This is one of the tricky things that I (and to my knowledge, the courts) still don't quite have clear, though. MySpace benefits, like just about every website out there, from traffic to its site. Yes, of course they would benefit if they became known as the central free music/music video site on the net, but this is hardly the case. MySpace's primary purpose is now, and to my knowledge always has been, to allow people with no technical skills to put up really obnoxious looking websites and let them rack up friend counts while showing the world that they have "really cool" taste in music.
So yes - they do advertise, and yes - there are some infringing items on their site. But I don't agree that they have such a clear vested interest in not policing the site, simply because I don't think most people give a crap what videos are hosted there. Do you seriously think there are people out there thinking, "Hmm, I really want to see that Trent Reznor video I was hearing about, where can I find it...oh, yeah, I think I'll go to MySpace." Please. This is not a serious element of MySpace's business model. It seems to me that what we're talking about here is the potential to materially benefit from infringement rather than the actuality, and I think it would be presumptive to accuse MySpace of deliberately letting violations slide until there is evidence to the contrary.
But the law is unclear on whether this makes them immune to punishment or not, and I hope that this case will clarify things a bit - given the history of these cases, though, it probably won't, which suits the record/movie industries perfectly because the ambiguity makes it impossible to chart a safe legal course through these waters, so most companies will probably just stay away altogether.
Except that they really shouldn't have a case as long as MySpace is taking infringing material down as soon as it is brought to their attention. By my reading, the safe harbor provisions were specifically put in place to protect exactly the type of thing that MySpace has going on, a webpage hosting service that they cannot be expected to police entirely. The fact that their software automatically does a format-shift when people upload videos isn't (or at least shouldn't be) relevant at all.
This is more of the same - someone provides a tool, some people abuse the tool and do illegal things with it. Too many people to police means that the provider cannot afford to make sure everyone is acting within the law. But the people whose copyrights are being infringed upon can't afford to go after the individuals for both PR and practical reasons, so they look for someone with fat pockets to blame. Frankly I'm confused about what is so different about a tool on a web server somewhere and a tool on my hard drive - if I used Winamp to convert a copyrighted video and then uploaded it to a GoDaddy hosted server, nobody would be blaming Nullsoft or GoDaddy for my crime. It would be my fault, 100%. It is ridiculous that the courts continue to allow these types of suits to continue without any clarification as to what the law actually means when it comes to hosting user submitted content.
I've got to say, I really thought MySpace would be immune to this type of thing, as much as I'd love to see it implode. The fact is, they don't base their revenue model on infringement in the least. If you removed video hosting altogether from MySpace, I sincerely doubt if anyone would even notice, considering YouTube's success in that venue. It's looking more and more like the only safe user content to host is plain old text, and I think that's a damn shame. The record industry middlemen seem to feel that it's more than appropriate to expect everyone on the net to protect their copyrights as fiercely as they do.
That's true, and I'll emphatically agree with you there. In fact, I'd like to condemn everyone here on Slashdot for killing unborn babies. After all, every time you've not had sex with a member of the opposite sex, that's another dead baby. A pre-coital baby, perhaps...but "regardless of their stage of development" includes those, too. My condemnation is doubly levelled at those evil religious folks who think that it's dirty to fornicate - how dare you kill all of these babies with your misplaced morality!
Not a great analogy, right? "Well, that's ridiculous," you argue, "there's a line that has to be drawn somewhere. You're only talking about a potential baby, and you're not really killing it since it was never alive in the first place." I agree. I don't fancy killing humans any more than you do; however, that doesn't mean I agree on your definition of human. A potentiality means balls in this world. You may think that human life begins at conception, because you can't think of a more plausible time for God to put the soul in. But our legal system doesn't deal in souls, and a lot of scientists will tell you that up until fairly late in the birth cycle that embryo bears little to no resemblance to a human. So despite what you may believe, this is not an open and shut case (same goes for the other side - I would argue that there is a decent period of time before actual birth during which we probably should call it human; of course, this is the current legal situation, so I can't really complain). If you wish to impose your moral view on the rest of society, feel free to back it up with something other than religion - if you can, for instance, prove that an embryo feels pain after a month in the womb, I'll be listening. But if all you can back it up with is your personal conviction, then I'm sorry, you're free to choose what to do yourself, but the Constitution won't let you choose for others, regardless of whether the majority of your peers agree with you.
That said, don't despair - a good number (daresay a majority? only time will tell...) of those currently on the Supreme Court don't seem to care for the Constitution's minority protections all that much, so you may end up getting your way in the end, founding fathers be damned.
An analogy: if the government was prosecuting an child pornography case, and the defendant's website had kiddie porn up, it would be absolutely ludicrous for the defendant to request a mirror copy of the government computers used to find said kiddie porn under the theory that there might be something useful in the cache. It's irrelevant, it's distracting, and it's clearly being used in the current spam case as an attempt to intimidate the plaintiff.
Also (relating to the article, not this thread), shouldn't the title read "Spammer Can Have Accuser's Hard Drive," given the results of the ruling, or am I just too high on a coffee buzz to read properly?
But by overregulating (eg through redistribution of wealth) you are going to hurt the economy; by underregulating you're going to hurt the individual. There's got to be a happy medium, and I think that happy medium is what we're always looking for. Personally I would guess that we'll only know that we're there when the income distribution loses its fat tails and turns into something more normal - to me, the power law scaling at the edges suggest that when a person has a lot of money, it's too easy to make a lot more. Clearly it should be easier to make a million dollars starting with 10 million than with 1 million, but it shouldn't be quite as easy as it is to make 100k when you're starting with 1 million; currently, it seems that the difficulty is almost exactly the same, at least according to the wealth distribution. At least if the income levels were normally distributed, we could say that it's a bit of luck and a bit of hard work that determine how much you make, rather than a lot of money and privilege.
Unfortunately, it's those who live in the fat tails that have the most resources available to fight anything that would threaten their fortunes, so I doubt anything will change very soon.
This does not, however, exonerate those who abuse the trust that the American people put in them to actually research these "facts" and come to reasonable conclusions. In the war on drugs case, the ONDCP/DEA/etc. has abused the American trust by exerting authority and telling the thought-phobic average Joe that a) there is a serious drug problem in the country that might affect the children, and b) the best way to fight it is by pounding the fist of moral right rather than through education and regulation. That the public falls for this is unfortunate, but ultimately an unsolvable problem. People are programmed to take orders and defer to authority - witness evolution in action.
Bush is blamed for the current problems merely because he holds such sway over the American people - or at least did until it became so painfully obvious that he was wrong that they were forced to start ignoring his words. I do understand that the Dems are not likely any better at this stuff in an absolute sense. But it's only by punishing the current ruling party that the American public can voice their discontent, and the Republicans have been at the wheel this whole time, so I say go ahead, kick 'em all out! If the Democrats had gotten us in this mess, I'd say the exact same thing.
And the only way the soccer moms will care about their/their country's liberty is if the leaders whose authority they respect realize that liberty is what the country is about, not some twisted idealized version of contagious democracy - democracy can be a terribly dangerous concept, since the average person is an asshole (especially when dealing with the other-than-average person). Let a bunch of assholes vote, and - surprise! - you get a group of people that make asshole decisions. The magic happens when you construct a system of checks and balances that keeps a group of assholes from acting as such, and in my opinion, that is essence of the American way. But it is a way that is easily lost, especially when the rallying cry becomes "Democracy!" instead of "Freedom!". It is unfortunate that the average American is not reminded on a regular basis that the two concepts are not the same thing.
The public has been on an all-fear-all-the-time diet of propaganda for five years now, so it is hardly surprising that fear is what's on its mind. Punish the fearmongers by removing their influence, and maybe we'll start to remember what it is that this country actually stands for...
I personally agree with you - DRM is evil, and in my opinion it's one of the most harmful developments of the last decade (to the consumer, at least). But, it's just not smart business to sell a product that's easy to rip off without doing anything to protect it other than prosecuting those that steal it (or copy it, for those who don't like the word "steal" in this context). So yes, DRM is a step in the direction of protecting the music industry's product, and as such, it is a logical business decision (that doesn't make it right, of course).
That said, I don't think DRM puts the music industry in a much better position than the unattended apples guy, since even DRM-ed music is not that difficult to copy. The analog hole alone pretty much makes the whole struggle moot, since your average music listener doesn't care if the sound quality is less than perfect. Honestly, I don't think there's much that the music industry can do to handle this at this point, unless it somehow manages to trim so much fat from its system that it could actually offer a wide selection of decent music at a fair price. But these corporations are behemoths, and generally take so long to make major changes that it's too late by the time they are done.
The best case scenario for the customer is that people pirate so much music that it actually does hurt the current big players, opening up the field enough for some smaller artists/labels to step in - and trust me, there are plenty of folks ready and willing to step up to the plate and work with the new smaller profit margin should (for instance) Sony collapse or bow out. If someone could make a business model work that didn't involve screwing the customer over at every step (given that we're in the Web-2.0 era, this probably means through ads), it would be quite a hit with the public.
After all, customers want information to be free, but those who produce it want to be paid. Google made billions on this concept without charging the average Joe a cent, and broadcast TV has been at the teat for decades. Why is it so tough for the music industry to figure out where this is all headed?
Your pumpkin argument breaks down: most working musicians play music primarily because they love it, not because they think they will sell records. In most cases, just about the worst thing that can happen to a musician's career is to get suckered into a major label deal. Normally all that will get you is a CD that's not on the shelves, an obligation not to sign with anyone else for a ridiculous amount of time, and occasionally even a good deal of debt, not to mention large amounts of your time wasted working on a project that the label never intended to promote. There are thousands upon thousands of bands out there that love to play music, want you to hear it, and are happy to give it away. I think it's going a bit far to call these people chumps - most of the musicians in the world sell their services, not their IP, and many programmers do the same.
Does this mean that we should not respect copyrights? No, I suppose not. The law is the law, and it's not likely to change, although I might take issue with criminal cases being brought against offenders (esp. since as we know, YouTube is immune to this type of thing even though they actually host the offending content rather than just providing a link to it...gotta say, I still fail to understand the legal details behind this difference, although I get the spirit of the thing). But I can't say I'd shed a tear if all the labels went belly up due to file-sharing, since my general feeling is that their major purpose is not so much to aid the creative process along as to throw such large sums of money behind the top 100 cookie-cutter artists that none of the more original performers can get their stuff heard at all.
Another way to look at it: if you leave out an unattended pile of apples and a sign asking that a dollar be put in a box for each one, then yes, I suppose if someone came and took an apple without leaving the dollar, it would be theft. If enough people were filching your apples, then the police might even arrest the people stealing them if you pointed them out. But you're still a freaking idiot for being in the unattended-pile-of-apples business. It should be your problem if you choose to sell a product that is too easy to steal for you to turn a profit, not the taxpayer's.
It's not the choice between going it alone and not going it alone that bothers me; it's the choice of where we're going at all! I don't know if you remember, but during the leadup to the war, there were a whole lot of people asking why Bush & Co. were so eager to go into Iraq (where there was no real indication of nuclear programs) and so reluctant to address the looming North Korea problem. This is one of the main reasons Bush's opponents suspect ulterior motive - in North Korea we actually could have had more international support, as there was unambiguous evidence that Kim Jong Il was succeeding in his quest for nuclear weapons. So why focus on Iraq? It just doesn't make sense based on the rationale we were given.
[That said, I don't think it was for money or oil, or even to justify scaling back personal freedoms, despite what the conspiracy theorists would claim - if I had to guess, the hawks were well-intentioned but just mistakenly thought Iraq would be an easy warm-up battle to boost public support for the fights that really mattered]
If the cause is just, by all means, we should go it alone. But let's at least make sure we're going to the right place - thanks to the thing in Iraq, North Korea has essentially been given a two year free pass to do whatever the hell it wants while we waste time in the desert...
And by the way, Bush doesn't seem to be choosing between going it alone and multilateral talks. He appears to be just stubbornly refusing to take any tangible action on the issue at all, which is what I object to.
If you look at the other articles on the WND site, a good part of it is them bitching about anti-Conservative Googlebombs and stuff like that; apparently they feel that it's perfectly reasonable to accuse companies of bias for not enforcing neutral POV on all their users. Sorry, guys - the Internet ain't all Wikipedia, and out here people actually have opinions.
Plus, while I'm not in favor of censorship of most things, I can't say I'm too disappointed in Google for discarding some of the anti-gay propaganda that these guys have been complaining about. Yes, maybe it's not as bad as it comes, as it's generally not advocating violence or anything like that, but if you look at most of the anti-gay sites and replace the word "homosexual" with "black," the message becomes unambiguously offensive. I understand that these nutters don't think sexuality is as worthy of protection as race, but I think that said substitution is a fair litmus test for whether something will get advertised by Google; after all, sexual orientation is considered important by Google, whether or not it is by you.