[sclug] Cheap'n'nasty Tesco Linux machines

[Dickon Hood]

On Sun, Mar 16, 2008 at 20:34:25 +0000, Phillip Chandler wrote:
: "I'd also put it to you that enforced freedom is no freedom at all."

: Im firmly in the belief that we currently have enforced freedom (as I
: see it).

Er, no, we don't.  We have a collection of freedoms, but they're not the
freedom to do exactly what you please when you want to.

: Every counties government dictates what rights a person has,
: they decide the goal posts and we have to live within those goal posts,
: and our freedom is within those same goal posts.

You have to live within the norms of society; you end up with anarchy if
not.

: And we apparently live
: in a free capitalise society in the UK !!!!! Id love to see any of us
: standing outside Reading Train Station on a monday morning, between 7am
: and 8am, slagging off the government, saying that they are all a bunch
: of lying, deceitful bunch of two faced old gits, and that you want to
: question the legitimacy of their parentage, and see how long you last
: before getting arrested.

As long as you're not obstructing anybody, I suspect you'd be there for
some good number of hours.  See, eg., the protestors outside the
Scientologists' building in London (YouTube has plenty of footage), and,
one better, Mark Thomas' highly entertaining series of protests on pretty
much the things you're complaining about outside the mother of parliaments
herself.

: We dont live in a democracy, else there would have been a referendum on
: the EU constitution, we would be able to tell dear Mr Brown what we do
: and dont like, without resorting to the poll tax riots.
: Theres an old expression "Im always in the S**T only the depth varies",

A friend[0] has this on a T-shirt: 'Sempa in excreta solus solum profundum
variat', along with its English translation.  It looks much more profound
in Latin.

: and what does this have to do with this email, well the same applies to
: to our rights and the rights of other countries peoples. We probably may
: be better off than some countries, but at the end of the day, its all
: the same sort of government, just by a different name.
: Plus Communism in its purest sense would work perfect, to start a
: village going. But what kills communism is capitalism. 

Well, no.  What kills communism is human nature: why work when you will be
provided for anyway (more specifically, why work your hardest, when you'll
get a tolerable standard of living anyway, and working any harder won't
make that better, except on a marginal basis), and the old power-corrupts
problem.  It's a nice idea in theory, but unworkable in practice.

None of which actually answers my original point: intellectual creations,
whether they be books, films, software, hard-core pornography, the world's
greatest encyclopaedia, or role-playing games, needs to be paid for.  The
current model we have is that the creator (and / or performer, depending
on context) has a limited-time monopoly on the use of their creation.  This
is a model that you appear to reject, without (so far) being able to
provide a workable mechanism to replace it with.

So: we gather you don't like it.  Now please provide a sensible
alternative to replace it with.


[0] Declan.

-- 
Dickon Hood

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