True, although often I find that the people who do that believe that the point is to combat Microsoft, and that by using Apple products they are "fighting the good fight..."
It depends on network effects. Are many of your friends/family using Facebook? If so, it might be polite to them if you were to sign up.
Or they could be polite and not demand that everyone follow the crowd they are part of. I have my reasons for not joining Facebook, why should I be forced to give in and join? If my friends want to communicate with me, they can use email, the telephone, or even just talk to me in person, so signups or invasions of privacy needed.
Sure, you could say "I can use email for that", but if everyone else would prefer to use Facebook, your not being on it causes them a nuisance.
Too bad, if they consider me to be a nuisance for not signing up for Facebook, then they have a choice. They can suck it up, or they can stop communicating with me. If Facebook is so important to someone that they will get aggravated just because I refuse to use it, to the point of not talking to me, then I am not certain I really want to keep them as a friend. Nobody in my social circle has any doubts as to my feelings on Facebook.
Staying away from Facebook is easy...if you are willing to fight with everyone around you when they say, "Did you see those pictures I posted on Facebook? No, I won't email my pictures to you! Can't you see everyone is on Facebook?!"
When people show up to LUG meetings with Apple laptops running Mac OS X, I think it is fair to say that the movement to GNU/Linux on the desktop has a few problems...
I have been using GNU/Linux (not that I always called it that) for an even longer period of time, but unfortunately, I have seen the movement really suffer these past few years. For me, the reason why is entirely clear: we spent too many years attacking Microsoft and Microsoft Windows. Apple swooped in, took advantage among some of the anti-Microsoft sentiment that developed, and even recycled some old Linux-vs.-Windows arguments. It has gotten to the point where people sometimes show up at LUG meetings with Apple products running Mac OS X.
The differences are not just in the licensing; there is a broad difference in the philosophy of the two movements. The open source movement is about software development, and the free software movement is about the freedom of software users.
A good example of the difference is the TiVo issue. For someone who follows the free software philosophy, what TiVo did was wrong; TiVo prevented users from hacking their own devices. On the other hand, there is nothing specifically wrong about TiVo from an open source perspective; TiVo met their obligation to give back to the community by making their modifications to the Linux kernel available to the public. Thus, the free software foundation releases all its software under the GPLv3, but the Linux kernel and a number of open source projects stuck with the GPLv2. The open source crowd sees the GPLv3 as a potential threat to growing the community (of developers), whereas the free software crowd sees the GPLv3 as a necessary step to prevent new encroachments on user freedom.
Really, nobody is a purist. Most people in the open source crowd also hold (at least some part of) the free software philosophy, and most free software folk also follow the principles of open source development.
My point was that these philosophical difference are probably the biggest reason that the BSA ignores the free software movement and attacks the open source movement. Open source is something that proprietary software can compete with (in fact, ESR pretty much said the open source was going to compete with proprietary software and win on technical merits); the open source movement wants to gain users for strategic purposes, which the BSA understands and can fight against. I personally believe that even if the BSA's executives were to read the free software definition and all the supporting documents, and everything that was ever written about the free software movement, they still wouldn't really understand free software, because it is just too different from their own view of the world.
Perhaps the courts don't mind confusing terminology? Personally, I agree, the term "intellectual property" should be abolished entirely -- it creates too much confusion between copyrights, patents, trademarks, trade secrets, and real property.
I'm not sure I agree with your characterization of a corporation as 'chartered by the state.'
Why not? Corporations receive their corporate charter from the government (these days, at the state level, not the federal level) to be in some particular business. The corporate system is intended to encourage businesses that might not otherwise be able to form -- as you noted, limited liability is part of this -- which is undeniably for the benefit of the people (at least in theory; the idea is that some businesses ultimately make our society better, and that the system of incorporation encourages those businesses to be formed).
This, of course, means that a corporation is in a position to become far more powerful, and take far greater risks, than a business whose owners do not have limited liability. That is why in the early years of America, corporate charters expired after a certain amount of time. Corporations couldn't become as large and powerful as they are today, because there was not enough time for that to happen. Eventually some clever lawyers managed to convince a judge that corporations should be protected by the 14th amendment, just like people are, and so corporate charters could not have expiration dates; thus we wound up with the situation we have now, where corporations can become so large and powerful that they can influence the law itself.
Why shouldn't the people decide what corporations can or cannot do? As you correctly stated, a corporation is a legal construct, and in America, laws are supposed to be passed by representatives of the people. There are no natural rights for corporations; corporations are not natural, they are legal constructs, and they have whatever rights we the people give them.
Or at least that is the theory behind corporations. In practice, we now have a government that works for the benefit of corporations, frequently putting corporate interests before the interests of the people...
All it really boils down to is whether or not a particular activity was done in the course of running your business. In theory, a political contribution is your activity as an individual, not as a business (if you were a larger corporation, and the money was coming out of your corporate funds, things would be different). There are some edge cases; in theory, we have a system of courts and judges that can help decide what the intent of the law was in cases where it might not be clear (e.g. if you run a business out of your home).
Now, if you are running a chartered corporation, I think things are a little more clear: you were chartered by the state to do something, presumably for the benefit of the people, and you enjoy certain benefits (limited liability, for example) that you would not otherwise enjoy. Corporations should be held to an entirely different standard than individuals, with an entirely different set of rights -- presumably fewer rights than individuals.
Yes but the original point that I was replying to was that businesses should have the same rights as individuals, since they are collections of individuals. Since the government is a collection of individuals, why is it acceptable to restrict the government, when it is not acceptable to restrict businesses?
Personally, I think that the government should be restricted, and that businesses should also be restricted, and that individuals should enjoy more freedom than any government agency or business.
Ironically, videos delivered over the Internet should be rescuing us from this sort of behavior -- we should not have to worry about two large corporations that we really have no say in the conduct of getting into a spat and suddenly making videos inaccessible to us. Of course, we are, once again, relying on large corporations (Youtube, Hulu) whose conduct we have no say over to provide us with our videos...
The government is also a collection of individuals, so why is OK to restrict what the government is allowed to do to other individuals in ways that individuals are not restricted? You know, like how I can refuse to allow people of a particular skin color or religion enter my home, yet the government cannot do the same with government buildings?
Hey now, Fox has, in the past, had decent programming; Firefly comes to mind. Of course, Fox also has a habit of killing off cool series, though I guess withholding access to their entire network from millions of people is a new level entirely.
It is fair to point out that the BSA and its member companies operate under an entirely different view of the world than you or I do. In their view of the world, there are two disjoint sets of people: developers, and end users. Developers write software, and end users pay developers to use the software. If a particular team of developers created some software package, the end users are supposed to get their software from that particular team, on whatever terms that team mandates. Open source fits into this by simply allowing lots of developers to collaborate; there is still supposed to be a partition of users and developers.
The BSA folk have trouble with the very concept of libre software; it is a case of "not getting it." The idea that users can share software with each other is foreign to these people, and it goes against everything they believe is true of software development. They have an easier time with "open source," since at least they can still categorize people in a way that is comfortable to them; but when it comes to software freedom, when it comes to actually prioritizing the rights of non-developers, they have trouble with the very concept. "Open source" is something the BSA can compete with, attack, and so forth, because they can wrap their minds around it; "free software," on the other hand, is too different from the world as they understand it, and the best they can do is write it off as "academic."
I'm with you on disbanding corporations and restructuring the system, holding people accountable for their actions, except that the same argument applies: the general population needs to wake up before that can happen.
Read my post again, sir. I do not use Facebook or any similar website. There are plenty of people who do, though, and the overwhelming majority of them are not very knowledgeable about how the web or the Internet work, nor do they have a good enough grasp of what Facebook's privacy settings really mean.
Seriously, try talking to some humanities majors and you'll see what I mean (yes, this is a broad generalization; I am sure that there are humanities majors out there who are well informed when it comes to technology. I am making a generalization about people who are not well informed, and while it is stereotypical, humanities majors are probably a good group to start looking for such people). These are certainly college educated people, and they are generally intelligent enough to understand technology when it is explained to them, but they are not very informed on these issues. The idea that Facebook could be recording everything they do is novel to them. The idea that the privacy settings are nothing more than an entry in a database, which can easily be ignored by Facebook, is novel to them -- a lot of people never really give much thought to how privacy settings work, they just know that when they click a radio button, certain information becomes inaccessible to certain people.
I know this is hard to believe, but the number of people who actually understand what it means to "trust Facebook to keep their information private" is a small fraction of the number of people who use the Internet.
Slashdot Mirror
True, although often I find that the people who do that believe that the point is to combat Microsoft, and that by using Apple products they are "fighting the good fight..."
It depends on network effects. Are many of your friends/family using Facebook? If so, it might be polite to them if you were to sign up.
Or they could be polite and not demand that everyone follow the crowd they are part of. I have my reasons for not joining Facebook, why should I be forced to give in and join? If my friends want to communicate with me, they can use email, the telephone, or even just talk to me in person, so signups or invasions of privacy needed.
Sure, you could say "I can use email for that", but if everyone else would prefer to use Facebook, your not being on it causes them a nuisance.
Too bad, if they consider me to be a nuisance for not signing up for Facebook, then they have a choice. They can suck it up, or they can stop communicating with me. If Facebook is so important to someone that they will get aggravated just because I refuse to use it, to the point of not talking to me, then I am not certain I really want to keep them as a friend. Nobody in my social circle has any doubts as to my feelings on Facebook.
Staying away from Facebook is easy...if you are willing to fight with everyone around you when they say, "Did you see those pictures I posted on Facebook? No, I won't email my pictures to you! Can't you see everyone is on Facebook?!"
When people show up to LUG meetings with Apple laptops running Mac OS X, I think it is fair to say that the movement to GNU/Linux on the desktop has a few problems...
I have been using GNU/Linux (not that I always called it that) for an even longer period of time, but unfortunately, I have seen the movement really suffer these past few years. For me, the reason why is entirely clear: we spent too many years attacking Microsoft and Microsoft Windows. Apple swooped in, took advantage among some of the anti-Microsoft sentiment that developed, and even recycled some old Linux-vs.-Windows arguments. It has gotten to the point where people sometimes show up at LUG meetings with Apple products running Mac OS X.
The differences are not just in the licensing; there is a broad difference in the philosophy of the two movements. The open source movement is about software development, and the free software movement is about the freedom of software users.
A good example of the difference is the TiVo issue. For someone who follows the free software philosophy, what TiVo did was wrong; TiVo prevented users from hacking their own devices. On the other hand, there is nothing specifically wrong about TiVo from an open source perspective; TiVo met their obligation to give back to the community by making their modifications to the Linux kernel available to the public. Thus, the free software foundation releases all its software under the GPLv3, but the Linux kernel and a number of open source projects stuck with the GPLv2. The open source crowd sees the GPLv3 as a potential threat to growing the community (of developers), whereas the free software crowd sees the GPLv3 as a necessary step to prevent new encroachments on user freedom.
Really, nobody is a purist. Most people in the open source crowd also hold (at least some part of) the free software philosophy, and most free software folk also follow the principles of open source development.
My point was that these philosophical difference are probably the biggest reason that the BSA ignores the free software movement and attacks the open source movement. Open source is something that proprietary software can compete with (in fact, ESR pretty much said the open source was going to compete with proprietary software and win on technical merits); the open source movement wants to gain users for strategic purposes, which the BSA understands and can fight against. I personally believe that even if the BSA's executives were to read the free software definition and all the supporting documents, and everything that was ever written about the free software movement, they still wouldn't really understand free software, because it is just too different from their own view of the world.
Perhaps the courts don't mind confusing terminology? Personally, I agree, the term "intellectual property" should be abolished entirely -- it creates too much confusion between copyrights, patents, trademarks, trade secrets, and real property.
Copyrights are not property.
the Fox network did everything fans asked
Except for airing the episodes in the correct order. You know, so that people wouldn't be totally confused.
I'm not sure I agree with your characterization of a corporation as 'chartered by the state.'
Why not? Corporations receive their corporate charter from the government (these days, at the state level, not the federal level) to be in some particular business. The corporate system is intended to encourage businesses that might not otherwise be able to form -- as you noted, limited liability is part of this -- which is undeniably for the benefit of the people (at least in theory; the idea is that some businesses ultimately make our society better, and that the system of incorporation encourages those businesses to be formed).
This, of course, means that a corporation is in a position to become far more powerful, and take far greater risks, than a business whose owners do not have limited liability. That is why in the early years of America, corporate charters expired after a certain amount of time. Corporations couldn't become as large and powerful as they are today, because there was not enough time for that to happen. Eventually some clever lawyers managed to convince a judge that corporations should be protected by the 14th amendment, just like people are, and so corporate charters could not have expiration dates; thus we wound up with the situation we have now, where corporations can become so large and powerful that they can influence the law itself.
Why shouldn't the people decide what corporations can or cannot do? As you correctly stated, a corporation is a legal construct, and in America, laws are supposed to be passed by representatives of the people. There are no natural rights for corporations; corporations are not natural, they are legal constructs, and they have whatever rights we the people give them.
Or at least that is the theory behind corporations. In practice, we now have a government that works for the benefit of corporations, frequently putting corporate interests before the interests of the people...
All it really boils down to is whether or not a particular activity was done in the course of running your business. In theory, a political contribution is your activity as an individual, not as a business (if you were a larger corporation, and the money was coming out of your corporate funds, things would be different). There are some edge cases; in theory, we have a system of courts and judges that can help decide what the intent of the law was in cases where it might not be clear (e.g. if you run a business out of your home).
Now, if you are running a chartered corporation, I think things are a little more clear: you were chartered by the state to do something, presumably for the benefit of the people, and you enjoy certain benefits (limited liability, for example) that you would not otherwise enjoy. Corporations should be held to an entirely different standard than individuals, with an entirely different set of rights -- presumably fewer rights than individuals.
Yes but the original point that I was replying to was that businesses should have the same rights as individuals, since they are collections of individuals. Since the government is a collection of individuals, why is it acceptable to restrict the government, when it is not acceptable to restrict businesses?
Personally, I think that the government should be restricted, and that businesses should also be restricted, and that individuals should enjoy more freedom than any government agency or business.
Ironically, videos delivered over the Internet should be rescuing us from this sort of behavior -- we should not have to worry about two large corporations that we really have no say in the conduct of getting into a spat and suddenly making videos inaccessible to us. Of course, we are, once again, relying on large corporations (Youtube, Hulu) whose conduct we have no say over to provide us with our videos...
Many sites block entire countries, because they don't have the legal right to serve the same content in all regions
Do they have some other operation in that country? Why should they care about foreign laws?
The government is also a collection of individuals, so why is OK to restrict what the government is allowed to do to other individuals in ways that individuals are not restricted? You know, like how I can refuse to allow people of a particular skin color or religion enter my home, yet the government cannot do the same with government buildings?
I thought the whole "more babies are born 9 months after a blackout" theory was debunked...
using the government to force private businesses
use government to force individuals
How many times do we have to go over this? Look, I'll make it simple for you: businesses != individuals.
Hey now, Fox has, in the past, had decent programming; Firefly comes to mind. Of course, Fox also has a habit of killing off cool series, though I guess withholding access to their entire network from millions of people is a new level entirely.
ESPN already does this, and we have already criticized them for it.
It is fair to point out that the BSA and its member companies operate under an entirely different view of the world than you or I do. In their view of the world, there are two disjoint sets of people: developers, and end users. Developers write software, and end users pay developers to use the software. If a particular team of developers created some software package, the end users are supposed to get their software from that particular team, on whatever terms that team mandates. Open source fits into this by simply allowing lots of developers to collaborate; there is still supposed to be a partition of users and developers.
The BSA folk have trouble with the very concept of libre software; it is a case of "not getting it." The idea that users can share software with each other is foreign to these people, and it goes against everything they believe is true of software development. They have an easier time with "open source," since at least they can still categorize people in a way that is comfortable to them; but when it comes to software freedom, when it comes to actually prioritizing the rights of non-developers, they have trouble with the very concept. "Open source" is something the BSA can compete with, attack, and so forth, because they can wrap their minds around it; "free software," on the other hand, is too different from the world as they understand it, and the best they can do is write it off as "academic."
Then we were all happy, because we could develop libre software and buy generic cell phone chargers?
However, the EU could easily solve the patent troll issue when it comes to software: they could simply not recognize software patents.
talk about a sense of entitlement
Should this surprise you? Think about the group of people you are talking about.
I'm with you on disbanding corporations and restructuring the system, holding people accountable for their actions, except that the same argument applies: the general population needs to wake up before that can happen.
Read my post again, sir. I do not use Facebook or any similar website. There are plenty of people who do, though, and the overwhelming majority of them are not very knowledgeable about how the web or the Internet work, nor do they have a good enough grasp of what Facebook's privacy settings really mean.
Seriously, try talking to some humanities majors and you'll see what I mean (yes, this is a broad generalization; I am sure that there are humanities majors out there who are well informed when it comes to technology. I am making a generalization about people who are not well informed, and while it is stereotypical, humanities majors are probably a good group to start looking for such people). These are certainly college educated people, and they are generally intelligent enough to understand technology when it is explained to them, but they are not very informed on these issues. The idea that Facebook could be recording everything they do is novel to them. The idea that the privacy settings are nothing more than an entry in a database, which can easily be ignored by Facebook, is novel to them -- a lot of people never really give much thought to how privacy settings work, they just know that when they click a radio button, certain information becomes inaccessible to certain people.
I know this is hard to believe, but the number of people who actually understand what it means to "trust Facebook to keep their information private" is a small fraction of the number of people who use the Internet.