In some places it is. My alma mater has a "school of management," which it markets very heavily. Their curriculum is a joke, and the students cheat as a matter of course. The only view of college I have ever heard come out of that school, from students or professors, is that it is an investment, and that the students should expect a return on their investment.
The students in that school complained and struggled with a basic "memorize some formulas with fancy calculus symbols" course, and also in their "learn to make a web page!" course. After four years of "education" than in some cases was less rigorous than high school, they were handed a degree and sent into the workforce.
People yearn to come here to get quality higher education. Ask any international (undergraduate/graduate) student who is studying here.
Sorry, but you are making a sweeping and entirely false generalization there. From what I have seen, most of the international students in my engineering program came here because a degree from an American university was perceived as more valuable than a degree from their own country. I saw far more cheating and far less competence among the international students, even those that spoke English fluently, than I did among the American students; they were not going to school because they were seeking a better education than what they could get back home.
I would feel safer knowing that he was required to be able to solve calculus problems, and did not just rely on a computer to do it for him. I lost track of the number of people who graduated in my engineering class who could not even solve simple differential equations or find multiplicative inverses of complex numbers.
Except that companies routinely choose incompatible hardware; case in point, my Dell laptop shipped with a broadcom network card (this was not in any way indicated when I purchased the system) and I had to use ndiswrapper for literally two years before there was a compatible driver. If they were to expand their line of Ubuntu laptops, that would mean better compatibility -- at least we would have some assurance that they won't put random junk into our systems.
In fact, "ripped off" is colloquially used as a synonym for a bad deal, just as frequently as for "theft." For example, people frequently complain about how movie theaters "rip them off" by charging a high price for popcorn and disallowing outside food. I hear the term "ripped off" used for more frequently to describe outrageously high prices than for "theft."
Are we genuinely to believe that the author claims the original site owners no longer have that property?? Of course not.
Then he needs to find a more descriptive word or term than "theft," since "theft" implies that someone no longer has their property. The very reason that "theft" is considered morally wrong is that it deprives someone of their property, and the right to one's property is considered fundamental in our society.
Also, the person you describe working in "filthy conditions" is most likely there because of the bad decisions they made in life
Those jobs have to be filled by someone. Even if everyone made the best decisions possible, somebody would have to work filthy jobs.
To put it another way, the people who are working those jobs are working hard now. Some of them have been working hard for longer than I have been alive, and longer than many of the people who make millions in cushy office jobs. Again, if the truth was that "hard work always pays off," why are there people who work so hard but never make more than five figure salaries?
More like the people who could not do the work that you do, but take the work that you do and derive an enormous income from it. You know, like the guys mentioned in TFS who make millions of dollars using software that they themselves could not possibly write.
The American Lie (tm) says that if you work hard, you will benefit in the end.
FTFY; seriously, that is the biggest lie ever told. It has never been the case, in the history of this country, that the hardest working people make the most money. I know people who work 6 days a way, 9 hours per day, in filthy conditions, and get paid a fraction of what a guy who works 7 hour days 5 days in a week in an air conditioned office makes. How hard you work only loosely related to how much money you make.
If copyright were less distorted, older works would be legal to trade on BT and that would further dilute the value of new works.
Well, I guess you don't have much faith in the quality of new works; I guess the movies we are supposed to be paying money to see might lead to that.
More to the point, it is legal to trade older works on BT...they just have to be very old. The public domain is stagnating at the behest of the copyright lobby.
In what way does that differ, then, from another business coming along and wooing all your customers away, thus depriving you of sales? Nobody accuses digital camera manufacturers of "stealing" from Kodak, and Kodak spent plenty of time and effort designing film and photochemistry.
Like I said, being deprived of a sale is not equivalent to being stolen from. Theft implies deprivation; deprivation does not imply theft.
What should be done about copyright owners that don't even want to take my money, in a way that "promote[s] the Progress of Science and useful Arts"?
Unfortunately, the idea that the copyright system is for the benefit of the public was forgotten by most people a long time ago. The copyright lobby has successfully infected the education system with their "copyright is for the benefit of artists" propaganda. The USA now goes around trying to force other countries to abide by our copyright system; at what point did a copyright system that was supposed to be for our benefit suddenly become relevant to any other nation?
As with so many things, the benefit of the people is not really a motive in the law anymore.
You seem to be confused about the laws of supply and demand. When demand increases, price tends to increase. When supply increases, price tends to decrease. This is perhaps the most basic and fundamental pair of laws in economics, and no matter how hard you try, it is inescapable. Copyright is designed to create a situation where the supply can be arbitrarily limited by force of law, but that is entirely secondary to a "free market."
Key facet of stealing: someone is deprived of something. That is why stealing is wrong. So, I make an unauthorized copy of a game; who is deprived and what are they deprived of?
This is the reason that the FSF pushed so hard for Linux to be GPLv3'd; the FSF is more concerned about user freedom than about spreading the software as far and wide as possible as quickly as possible. This, however, is not the position that many open source developers take, as many felt that the use of Linux in TiVo meant both greater exposure (and hence more developers) and code being made available to others (i.e. TiVo's modifications to Linux). This is where free software philosophy and open source software philosophy diverge.
Stealing does not create more of the thing being stolen; the person who was stolen from is deprived of the thing that was stolen.
One final note: depriving someone of a potential sale is not theft, unless you are prepared to say that competing businesses are "stealing" from each other.
In free market capitalism, increasing supply decreases the price. Since there is no limit on the supply of copies of a particular game, the price can be expected to get tangentially close to zero. Additionally, in a free market, I am allowed to make copies of something I buy, and to sell those copies at the price of my choosing.
But not from that specific distro. GP said that "any" Linux distro will give you tons of free (gratis) software, and my point was simply that that was not true.
Strictly speaking, you cannot get "piles of free stuff with any (Linux) distro." There are a number of distros that require payment for repository access; here is a well known one:
Slashdot Mirror
In some places it is. My alma mater has a "school of management," which it markets very heavily. Their curriculum is a joke, and the students cheat as a matter of course. The only view of college I have ever heard come out of that school, from students or professors, is that it is an investment, and that the students should expect a return on their investment.
The students in that school complained and struggled with a basic "memorize some formulas with fancy calculus symbols" course, and also in their "learn to make a web page!" course. After four years of "education" than in some cases was less rigorous than high school, they were handed a degree and sent into the workforce.
People yearn to come here to get quality higher education. Ask any international (undergraduate/graduate) student who is studying here.
Sorry, but you are making a sweeping and entirely false generalization there. From what I have seen, most of the international students in my engineering program came here because a degree from an American university was perceived as more valuable than a degree from their own country. I saw far more cheating and far less competence among the international students, even those that spoke English fluently, than I did among the American students; they were not going to school because they were seeking a better education than what they could get back home.
I would feel safer knowing that he was required to be able to solve calculus problems, and did not just rely on a computer to do it for him. I lost track of the number of people who graduated in my engineering class who could not even solve simple differential equations or find multiplicative inverses of complex numbers.
Except that companies routinely choose incompatible hardware; case in point, my Dell laptop shipped with a broadcom network card (this was not in any way indicated when I purchased the system) and I had to use ndiswrapper for literally two years before there was a compatible driver. If they were to expand their line of Ubuntu laptops, that would mean better compatibility -- at least we would have some assurance that they won't put random junk into our systems.
Are we genuinely to believe that the author claims the original site owners no longer have that property?? Of course not.
Then he needs to find a more descriptive word or term than "theft," since "theft" implies that someone no longer has their property. The very reason that "theft" is considered morally wrong is that it deprives someone of their property, and the right to one's property is considered fundamental in our society.
Also, the person you describe working in "filthy conditions" is most likely there because of the bad decisions they made in life
Those jobs have to be filled by someone. Even if everyone made the best decisions possible, somebody would have to work filthy jobs.
To put it another way, the people who are working those jobs are working hard now. Some of them have been working hard for longer than I have been alive, and longer than many of the people who make millions in cushy office jobs. Again, if the truth was that "hard work always pays off," why are there people who work so hard but never make more than five figure salaries?
More like the people who could not do the work that you do, but take the work that you do and derive an enormous income from it. You know, like the guys mentioned in TFS who make millions of dollars using software that they themselves could not possibly write.
The American Lie (tm) says that if you work hard, you will benefit in the end.
FTFY; seriously, that is the biggest lie ever told. It has never been the case, in the history of this country, that the hardest working people make the most money. I know people who work 6 days a way, 9 hours per day, in filthy conditions, and get paid a fraction of what a guy who works 7 hour days 5 days in a week in an air conditioned office makes. How hard you work only loosely related to how much money you make.
Hi, you must be new to America. Here, money is more important than life, ethics, or anything else.
When did SETI become interested in fossils?
If copyright were less distorted, older works would be legal to trade on BT and that would further dilute the value of new works.
Well, I guess you don't have much faith in the quality of new works; I guess the movies we are supposed to be paying money to see might lead to that.
More to the point, it is legal to trade older works on BT...they just have to be very old. The public domain is stagnating at the behest of the copyright lobby.
In what way does that differ, then, from another business coming along and wooing all your customers away, thus depriving you of sales? Nobody accuses digital camera manufacturers of "stealing" from Kodak, and Kodak spent plenty of time and effort designing film and photochemistry.
Like I said, being deprived of a sale is not equivalent to being stolen from. Theft implies deprivation; deprivation does not imply theft.
What should be done about copyright owners that don't even want to take my money, in a way that "promote[s] the Progress of Science and useful Arts"?
Unfortunately, the idea that the copyright system is for the benefit of the public was forgotten by most people a long time ago. The copyright lobby has successfully infected the education system with their "copyright is for the benefit of artists" propaganda. The USA now goes around trying to force other countries to abide by our copyright system; at what point did a copyright system that was supposed to be for our benefit suddenly become relevant to any other nation?
As with so many things, the benefit of the people is not really a motive in the law anymore.
You seem to be confused about the laws of supply and demand. When demand increases, price tends to increase. When supply increases, price tends to decrease. This is perhaps the most basic and fundamental pair of laws in economics, and no matter how hard you try, it is inescapable. Copyright is designed to create a situation where the supply can be arbitrarily limited by force of law, but that is entirely secondary to a "free market."
Just when I thought we couldn't stoop any lower...
Corporations are not people; I'll give you the borg icon, since it is Gates' face.
Key facet of stealing: someone is deprived of something. That is why stealing is wrong. So, I make an unauthorized copy of a game; who is deprived and what are they deprived of?
This is the reason that the FSF pushed so hard for Linux to be GPLv3'd; the FSF is more concerned about user freedom than about spreading the software as far and wide as possible as quickly as possible. This, however, is not the position that many open source developers take, as many felt that the use of Linux in TiVo meant both greater exposure (and hence more developers) and code being made available to others (i.e. TiVo's modifications to Linux). This is where free software philosophy and open source software philosophy diverge.
One final note: depriving someone of a potential sale is not theft, unless you are prepared to say that competing businesses are "stealing" from each other.
In free market capitalism, increasing supply decreases the price. Since there is no limit on the supply of copies of a particular game, the price can be expected to get tangentially close to zero. Additionally, in a free market, I am allowed to make copies of something I buy, and to sell those copies at the price of my choosing.
you cheap schmucks
Insulting people is not going to get you anywhere.
But not from that specific distro. GP said that "any" Linux distro will give you tons of free (gratis) software, and my point was simply that that was not true.
Strictly speaking, you cannot get "piles of free stuff with any (Linux) distro." There are a number of distros that require payment for repository access; here is a well known one:
http://www.redhat.com/
You can get piles of cool stuff for free. Or you can be an honorable, ethical being. You don't get both.
http://www.fedoraproject.org/
most code is written with the intent of releasing
Not true.