I noticed that as I went from Kindergarten to a Senior in High School the teachers seemed to become less aggressive. They no longer bellowed "sit down and do your work" but asked you politely to "stay on task, everyone".
I believe that's because you were expected to act more like an adult the older you got.
I don't think this article is evidence for the "bring back corporeal punishment" crowd. Jamming is just a stupid idea for people who want the easy way out.
I don't disagree with your conclusion, but I disagree with one of your premises. Most software companies have gotten rich by providing users with exactly the kind of system your arguing against. While I myself prefer simple and predictable, most users would rather have the software anticipate their needs in some fashion.
A lot of people criticize RMS for scrutinizing every movement related to free software and only free software, but I have to say that other fields could use spokesmen like him. He hasn't tried to "branch out" and talk about other causes he doesn't know much about He sticks to his area of expertise and, as a result, you get nuanced criticisms of positions that might otherwise have unintended consequences.
You don't have to agree with him, of course. That comes down to whether you think copyright should "promote the arts and sciences" as it is written in the constitution and whether the rights of the author/artist/developer to protect their works outweigh the rights of the users.
The second session of the United States Congress established 14 year Copyright terms with an optional 14 year renewal. Going back to that and requiring publication for application of Copyright would be a good step.
Especially now since "publication" on the internet would be relatively trivial.
He is perfectly correct about copyright law- the same laws that are ever so widely abused for Gates' benefit are also required in order for FOSS to exist.
The idea is that FOSS exists by default, and the GPL was created to prevent FOSS from being copyrighted as well as promoting others to contribute to FOSS. So copyright laws aren't required for FOSS to exist, just the GPL couldn't be used to promote FOSS anymore.
FWIW Mr. Stallman would gladly welcome the change. I went to a talk by him on copyright at the Cordozo School of Law(IANAL) not long ago and he said as much.
So, while I'd argue in favor of the Mayo Clinic, I have to admit that I'd rather have the ability to test myself for a disease for $X than to not be able to test for it no matter what the cost.
You do realize you're using a fictional book to support your false dichotomy, right?
I don't mean that to sound as sarcastic as it does, but things were invented, written, and performed long before patents and copyright.
Either that or outlaw PACs and other groups that pool contributions into a single fund, but there would be nothing to prevent an unofficial system from springing up to replace them.
Granted, there will always be corruption. At least with your proposed system this would be a prosecutable offense...
So the headline, and summary are misleading? It's not "18 Million for Website", but "18 Million for Design, Build, and Maintain a Publicly Accessible National Repository of All Gov't Spending for the next 5 Years"? Man, that's just not catchy enough to make a good headline.
Headline's good for a laugh, but it's a bit of a troll.
Now all we have to have to a bigass debate on slashdot about how this is going to make DRM zombie tunas while ignorantly forgetting the fact that "Natural" tuna have had their genes altered through hundreds of years of breading.. Basically like every other time DNA altering comes up in a story..
If they made a terminator gene for Super Tuna preventing them from breeding, similar to the one in corn, HELL YES I'd argue against it.
I'm not against gene manipulation in theory, it's just the practice that worries me. I know you were making a joke by calling it DRM, but that's exactly what it could be; living beings with DRM.
It's talks about the Waxman-Markey bill which doesn't tax the carbon emissions of citizens, and calculates a tax per citizen rate as if it did AND as if it were a flat tax burden across all economic sectors.
Replying to myself before someone says Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009. That only covers:
Electricity generators, liquid fuel refiners and blenders, and fluorinated gas manufacturers are covered starting with emissions in 2012. Industrial sources that emit more than 8
25,000 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent per year are covered starting with emissions in 2014. Local distribution companies that deliver natural gas are covered starting with emissions in 2016.
I haven't heard of any proposed legislation for taxing the CO2 emissions of citizens. And successful cap and trade programs for other emissions have been in the U.S. for a while now(check the wikipedia Emissions trading page for examples). I'll gladly rail against any proposed legislation taxing citizens CO2 usage, but I read through these comments and I feel like I've fallen into a forest of strawmen.
And it's fine if you don't RTFA, I mean this is/., but at least RTFS. The stated problem with the EU legislation is that the trade portion of the program was too generous in awarding credits and let pollution continue be cheaper than improving emissions.
You make a product and you sell it, once it is sold you should have no liability for the product unless it was defective or unsafe along with limits on when you can get damages. For example, 30 years from now if we find that the glass used in the iPhone caused skin deformities but Apple could have no knowledge of that, it makes no sense to sue Apple for that.
You bet your bottom dollar I'd sue apple for that. I'd win too.
Similarly, when I want to throw away an old computer, its not the computer makers fault that I want to throw it away.
Your use of the word "fault" is obscuring the issue. The problem is that your old computer has hazardous pieces that need to be disposed. Ultimately, you have the choice of three groups to pay for that cleanup. The company that used environmentally hazardous parts in it's construction, "you" as the consumer, or "you" the tax payer. Whether it's "you" or "the manufacturer", payment for recycling will be cheaper than payment for cleanup.
Most likely, any charge by the gov't for recycling or cleanup will be at least partially passed on to the consumer. So really, unless you're the owner of a computer manufacturing company, you the consumer, and you the taxpayer would prefer recycling to cleanup, and partial manufacturer burden to none.
It's flamebait because even if the AC has a reasonable point to begin with, it degenerates into name calling and, I would argue, unrelated specious arguments all within a few sentences.
Yes the consumer bought the material, but it's not like a company can release all claim of that manufactured product now. Everything from meat, to children's toys, to vacuum cleaners get recalled for various defects, possible defects, other problems fairly often. If you don't believe me, walk into a Toys-R-Us, Walmart, etc and notice the list of recalled products. It's usually next to the missing/endangered children poster board.
While only a few industries currently have to monitor their waste, there is a strong argument that more should, which is a point the AC poster completely ignores in his short diatribe. The free market is great for some things, but it is lousy at external(societal and environmental) costs. If one company cuts costs by dumping waste products in the ocean it's competitors are forced to do the same or find some equally cheap disposal method to compete. Gov't regulation is supposed to prevent these kinds of abuses because the tax payer ultimately bears the cost of cleanup.
If the consumer chooses not to recycle a product, that is not the manufacturers fault and the consumer should bear that cost. However, if there is no place to recycle the good, then it is the manufacturer's fault and that's really what this is about.
I don't particularly care whose district it's in; I'm just glad the gov't. is loaning money to a company that A.) has a good chance of paying it back and B.) develops a technology that decreases our dependence on oil.
While I agree there are some crazy ones out there, that's really nothing new for any large political group. Also your option of "something green" should probably be "some green things" since the silver bullet approach is generally naive at best.
I wanted to explain, to the best of my ability, why the specific examples you cited are "not green" like they were in the 70s or the other problems that affect them. First is Sen. Kennedy and the Wind Turbines. That was just pure NIMBY and most of the people around here(I'm from MA originally) are sore about that. It's well known they don't kill more birds than an average building. Turbines are still green and the hate you generally hear for them is NIMBY FUD and not "puritanical greens".
Also I haven't heard any "green" objections to geothermal myself, just than it's expensive and not practical in a lot of areas. Ditto for solar. I'm sure you could gripe about trace minerals dug up or the harmful substances in the panels themselves, but those are mining and recycling problems respectively. Maybe insurmountable, but I doubt they are at not least substantially reducible. At any rate most people would rather have these plants over a coal or other fossil fuel plant currently.
Now hydro actually can be pretty bad for the environment when it's done wrong. First through the forced displacement of the residents(check Canada and India's large Hydroelectric dam projects for examples) and second through mercury poisoning. I'm not going to explain the whole process but google "mercury levels in a reservoir" or something similar if you're interested. There are plenty of studies on it out there.
I don't agree with your "conclusion" either. I'd attribute several other reasons for green techs not being green in practice over a conspiracy of greens to prevent us from "finding innovative sources of energy". First is the clash of free market vs sustainability. The free market is great at finding the direct cost of things, providing incentives to build those things, and providing incentives to build those things more efficiently. It's not good at long term costs and indirect costs like environmental and societal costs. The second is information. Innovative technologies are just that. We haven't discovered all of the costs of using them yet, like ethanol increasing the price of food by competing with food production. The third is price and tied to that is momentum. Innovative technologies are expensive when they start out because there is no economy of scale for them yet, among other reasons like accounting for environmental and societal costs. Similarly adoption is slow because of the price, so compromises must be made to either make the product cheaper.
I'd love to see modern safe fission plants if we process the waste afterward in breeder reactors. However, that means you literally have to double the cost of your all ready expensive nuclear powerplant by building two. More likely is that the waste will get stored in beautiful Yucca Mountain, and no other private organization will want to touch it by building a breeder reactor because then they'll be responsible for that whole mess.
"I don't like your products so I'm not your customer base anyway."
or
"I'm an avid user of your products who will probably pay you anyway."
Because that's how they're going to see it. I'm not saying you shouldn't voice your displeasure, just wondering how you framed it. This is a "win-win" for them. They get to charge more for the same works AND promote anti-net-neutrality which would eventually help them curb those pesky fair use works, parody works, and, of course, infringed copies.
Except what if you only get a choice between two drivers each time? I see nothing wrong with having a forum to voice concerns that is open directly to the public.
I agree with the first parts of your post but the last paragraph doesn't seem quite right to me.
"Give me a few years and a grand for $1,000,000 and I'll do a study that proves this. Just like there have been studies that have also shown that DRM lowers piracy... and this one that shows DRM increases piracy. Now we need a study that shows DRM doesn't affect piracy."
Are you implying she was paid off to influence the study? Who exactly is going to pay her off to find that DRM makes piracy worse? Also she's claiming this is the first empircal study (an easily falsifiable claim if not true) meaning the other studies you speak of aren't based on empirical evidence and whose results are more likely to have been "fiddled with".
Your point in general is true, that studies can be made to say anything, but the methodology she used seems pretty sound if much more narrow than TFA implies. She surveyed a subset of end users(lecturers, government officials, rightsholders) and special needs users(ie the blind) to see how the DRM affects them. The result in most cases is they have no choice but to circumvent DRM(which is currently illegal) in order to get the copyrighted and DRM'd works into a usable format.
"So why the need to force it to happen through a government-backed monopoly?"
Because it wouldn't happen otherwise? Parks get built over because they're in prime real estate areas. Water rights get sold for a quick buck. Cable companies charge more and more for their "Last Mile" monopoly without upgrading service in return.
No one here is arguing that you should be forced to give up your property(which happens in capitalistic society as well, just through different mechanisms of "forcing").
It would be the Ministry of Truth if this organization made sure it was the only supplier and analyzer of this information, rather than allowing it to escape on "the internet".
The data itself could be heavily biased, but since the current data sets seem to be census data and similar sets(taxes, marriage/divorce rates), it doesn't seem to have the aim of a propaganda tool currently.
It could be turned to one to be sure, but if it does provide moderately raw data sets then I'd say it would promote democracy.
Slashdot Mirror
I noticed that as I went from Kindergarten to a Senior in High School the teachers seemed to become less aggressive. They no longer bellowed "sit down and do your work" but asked you politely to "stay on task, everyone".
I believe that's because you were expected to act more like an adult the older you got.
I don't think this article is evidence for the "bring back corporeal punishment" crowd. Jamming is just a stupid idea for people who want the easy way out.
I don't disagree with your conclusion, but I disagree with one of your premises. Most software companies have gotten rich by providing users with exactly the kind of system your arguing against. While I myself prefer simple and predictable, most users would rather have the software anticipate their needs in some fashion.
A lot of people criticize RMS for scrutinizing every movement related to free software and only free software, but I have to say that other fields could use spokesmen like him. He hasn't tried to "branch out" and talk about other causes he doesn't know much about He sticks to his area of expertise and, as a result, you get nuanced criticisms of positions that might otherwise have unintended consequences.
You don't have to agree with him, of course. That comes down to whether you think copyright should "promote the arts and sciences" as it is written in the constitution and whether the rights of the author/artist/developer to protect their works outweigh the rights of the users.
The second session of the United States Congress established 14 year Copyright terms with an optional 14 year renewal. Going back to that and requiring publication for application of Copyright would be a good step.
Especially now since "publication" on the internet would be relatively trivial.
He is perfectly correct about copyright law- the same laws that are ever so widely abused for Gates' benefit are also required in order for FOSS to exist.
The idea is that FOSS exists by default, and the GPL was created to prevent FOSS from being copyrighted as well as promoting others to contribute to FOSS. So copyright laws aren't required for FOSS to exist, just the GPL couldn't be used to promote FOSS anymore.
FWIW Mr. Stallman would gladly welcome the change. I went to a talk by him on copyright at the Cordozo School of Law(IANAL) not long ago and he said as much.
I'll probably get modded off topic but that's the funniest thing I've read in weeks. Bravo sir.
What's amusing to me is that if you want to education or health care funded in the US, you have to lobby Congress like hell to fund it.
What's amusing to me is that people think education or health care is a proper role for the Federal Government.
What's amusing to me is that people think education or health care is a proper role for unaccountable entities whose primary responsibility is profit.
I don't find any of this amusing.
So, while I'd argue in favor of the Mayo Clinic, I have to admit that I'd rather have the ability to test myself for a disease for $X than to not be able to test for it no matter what the cost.
You do realize you're using a fictional book to support your false dichotomy, right?
I don't mean that to sound as sarcastic as it does, but things were invented, written, and performed long before patents and copyright.
Either that or outlaw PACs and other groups that pool contributions into a single fund, but there would be nothing to prevent an unofficial system from springing up to replace them.
Granted, there will always be corruption. At least with your proposed system this would be a prosecutable offense...
So the headline, and summary are misleading? It's not "18 Million for Website", but "18 Million for Design, Build, and Maintain a Publicly Accessible National Repository of All Gov't Spending for the next 5 Years"? Man, that's just not catchy enough to make a good headline.
Headline's good for a laugh, but it's a bit of a troll.
I really wish I had mod points right now.
Now all we have to have to a bigass debate on slashdot about how this is going to make DRM zombie tunas while ignorantly forgetting the fact that "Natural" tuna have had their genes altered through hundreds of years of breading.. Basically like every other time DNA altering comes up in a story..
If they made a terminator gene for Super Tuna preventing them from breeding, similar to the one in corn, HELL YES I'd argue against it.
I'm not against gene manipulation in theory, it's just the practice that worries me. I know you were making a joke by calling it DRM, but that's exactly what it could be; living beings with DRM.
How is it great?
It's talks about the Waxman-Markey bill which doesn't tax the carbon emissions of citizens, and calculates a tax per citizen rate as if it did AND as if it were a flat tax burden across all economic sectors.
Electricity generators, liquid fuel refiners and blenders, and fluorinated gas manufacturers are covered starting with emissions in 2012. Industrial sources that emit more than 8 25,000 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent per year are covered starting with emissions in 2014. Local distribution companies that deliver natural gas are covered starting with emissions in 2016.
I haven't heard of any proposed legislation for taxing the CO2 emissions of citizens. And successful cap and trade programs for other emissions have been in the U.S. for a while now(check the wikipedia Emissions trading page for examples). I'll gladly rail against any proposed legislation taxing citizens CO2 usage, but I read through these comments and I feel like I've fallen into a forest of strawmen.
/., but at least RTFS. The stated problem with the EU legislation is that the trade portion of the program was too generous in awarding credits and let pollution continue be cheaper than improving emissions.
And it's fine if you don't RTFA, I mean this is
You make a product and you sell it, once it is sold you should have no liability for the product unless it was defective or unsafe along with limits on when you can get damages. For example, 30 years from now if we find that the glass used in the iPhone caused skin deformities but Apple could have no knowledge of that, it makes no sense to sue Apple for that.
You bet your bottom dollar I'd sue apple for that. I'd win too.
Similarly, when I want to throw away an old computer, its not the computer makers fault that I want to throw it away.
Your use of the word "fault" is obscuring the issue. The problem is that your old computer has hazardous pieces that need to be disposed. Ultimately, you have the choice of three groups to pay for that cleanup. The company that used environmentally hazardous parts in it's construction, "you" as the consumer, or "you" the tax payer. Whether it's "you" or "the manufacturer", payment for recycling will be cheaper than payment for cleanup.
Most likely, any charge by the gov't for recycling or cleanup will be at least partially passed on to the consumer. So really, unless you're the owner of a computer manufacturing company, you the consumer, and you the taxpayer would prefer recycling to cleanup, and partial manufacturer burden to none.
It's flamebait because even if the AC has a reasonable point to begin with, it degenerates into name calling and, I would argue, unrelated specious arguments all within a few sentences.
Yes the consumer bought the material, but it's not like a company can release all claim of that manufactured product now. Everything from meat, to children's toys, to vacuum cleaners get recalled for various defects, possible defects, other problems fairly often. If you don't believe me, walk into a Toys-R-Us, Walmart, etc and notice the list of recalled products. It's usually next to the missing/endangered children poster board.
While only a few industries currently have to monitor their waste, there is a strong argument that more should, which is a point the AC poster completely ignores in his short diatribe. The free market is great for some things, but it is lousy at external(societal and environmental) costs. If one company cuts costs by dumping waste products in the ocean it's competitors are forced to do the same or find some equally cheap disposal method to compete. Gov't regulation is supposed to prevent these kinds of abuses because the tax payer ultimately bears the cost of cleanup.
If the consumer chooses not to recycle a product, that is not the manufacturers fault and the consumer should bear that cost. However, if there is no place to recycle the good, then it is the manufacturer's fault and that's really what this is about.
I was going to reply disagreeing, but you're right about investing in anything other than an IPO or other major expansion.
I don't particularly care whose district it's in; I'm just glad the gov't. is loaning money to a company that A.) has a good chance of paying it back and B.) develops a technology that decreases our dependence on oil.
While I agree there are some crazy ones out there, that's really nothing new for any large political group. Also your option of "something green" should probably be "some green things" since the silver bullet approach is generally naive at best.
I wanted to explain, to the best of my ability, why the specific examples you cited are "not green" like they were in the 70s or the other problems that affect them. First is Sen. Kennedy and the Wind Turbines. That was just pure NIMBY and most of the people around here(I'm from MA originally) are sore about that. It's well known they don't kill more birds than an average building. Turbines are still green and the hate you generally hear for them is NIMBY FUD and not "puritanical greens".
Also I haven't heard any "green" objections to geothermal myself, just than it's expensive and not practical in a lot of areas. Ditto for solar. I'm sure you could gripe about trace minerals dug up or the harmful substances in the panels themselves, but those are mining and recycling problems respectively. Maybe insurmountable, but I doubt they are at not least substantially reducible. At any rate most people would rather have these plants over a coal or other fossil fuel plant currently.
Now hydro actually can be pretty bad for the environment when it's done wrong. First through the forced displacement of the residents(check Canada and India's large Hydroelectric dam projects for examples) and second through mercury poisoning. I'm not going to explain the whole process but google "mercury levels in a reservoir" or something similar if you're interested. There are plenty of studies on it out there.
I don't agree with your "conclusion" either. I'd attribute several other reasons for green techs not being green in practice over a conspiracy of greens to prevent us from "finding innovative sources of energy". First is the clash of free market vs sustainability. The free market is great at finding the direct cost of things, providing incentives to build those things, and providing incentives to build those things more efficiently. It's not good at long term costs and indirect costs like environmental and societal costs. The second is information. Innovative technologies are just that. We haven't discovered all of the costs of using them yet, like ethanol increasing the price of food by competing with food production. The third is price and tied to that is momentum. Innovative technologies are expensive when they start out because there is no economy of scale for them yet, among other reasons like accounting for environmental and societal costs. Similarly adoption is slow because of the price, so compromises must be made to either make the product cheaper.
I'd love to see modern safe fission plants if we process the waste afterward in breeder reactors. However, that means you literally have to double the cost of your all ready expensive nuclear powerplant by building two. More likely is that the waste will get stored in beautiful Yucca Mountain, and no other private organization will want to touch it by building a breeder reactor because then they'll be responsible for that whole mess.
What did you say?
"I don't like your products so I'm not your customer base anyway."
or
"I'm an avid user of your products who will probably pay you anyway."
Because that's how they're going to see it. I'm not saying you shouldn't voice your displeasure, just wondering how you framed it. This is a "win-win" for them. They get to charge more for the same works AND promote anti-net-neutrality which would eventually help them curb those pesky fair use works, parody works, and, of course, infringed copies.
Except what if you only get a choice between two drivers each time? I see nothing wrong with having a forum to voice concerns that is open directly to the public.
I agree with the first parts of your post but the last paragraph doesn't seem quite right to me.
"Give me a few years and a grand for $1,000,000 and I'll do a study that proves this. Just like there have been studies that have also shown that DRM lowers piracy... and this one that shows DRM increases piracy. Now we need a study that shows DRM doesn't affect piracy."
Are you implying she was paid off to influence the study? Who exactly is going to pay her off to find that DRM makes piracy worse? Also she's claiming this is the first empircal study (an easily falsifiable claim if not true) meaning the other studies you speak of aren't based on empirical evidence and whose results are more likely to have been "fiddled with".
Your point in general is true, that studies can be made to say anything, but the methodology she used seems pretty sound if much more narrow than TFA implies. She surveyed a subset of end users(lecturers, government officials, rightsholders) and special needs users(ie the blind) to see how the DRM affects them. The result in most cases is they have no choice but to circumvent DRM(which is currently illegal) in order to get the copyrighted and DRM'd works into a usable format.
"So why the need to force it to happen through a government-backed monopoly?"
Because it wouldn't happen otherwise? Parks get built over because they're in prime real estate areas. Water rights get sold for a quick buck. Cable companies charge more and more for their "Last Mile" monopoly without upgrading service in return.
No one here is arguing that you should be forced to give up your property(which happens in capitalistic society as well, just through different mechanisms of "forcing").
It would be the Ministry of Truth if this organization made sure it was the only supplier and analyzer of this information, rather than allowing it to escape on "the internet".
The data itself could be heavily biased, but since the current data sets seem to be census data and similar sets(taxes, marriage/divorce rates), it doesn't seem to have the aim of a propaganda tool currently.
It could be turned to one to be sure, but if it does provide moderately raw data sets then I'd say it would promote democracy.