"The other, ironically the same physical network, will be the realm where those with the technical know how ellude these goofy and poorly implemented laws."
Your prediction is true already - http://freenet.sourceforge.net/index.php
"Unlike the Web, Freenet is designed to allow thoughts and ideas to be published and read without fear of censorship of any kind. To participate in this system users will simply need to run a piece of server software on their computer, and optionally use a client program to insert and remove information from the system. Anyone can write a client (or indeed a server) program for Freenet. Reference implementations of these programs are being written in the Java programming language."
"I worry about my child and the Internet all the time, even though she's too young to have logged on yet. Here's what I worry about. I worry that 10 or 15 years from now, she will come to me and say 'Daddy, where were you when they took freedom of the press away from the Internet?' " -Mike Godwin
"Here at the Delft university of Technology we are working on compression algorithms that compress audio with a factor of 24, without perceptual loss. Combined with new recordable devices it will become possbile in 5 years to store all the popular music produced of the last year on a single disc."
I'd love to know how you've managed it - with fractal and wavelet algorithms buried under patent encrustation, it'd sure be great to have something else better than mpeg. Are you referring to MPEG-2 AAC, in your link, there, or is Delft's algorithms something else?
"You can "negotiate different terms" by taking your business to a different vendor. However, if all the vendors are using draconian terms, then it's a sign the vendors have too much power"
Aye, and that's exactly my problem with our current system of copyright - it hands all the power over to the publishers and vendors, and power corrupts. We need a system that rewards the authors, not the bosses and publishers. Of course, that situation will resolve itself as people start writing and publishing for themselves, so that's no worry.
"That sounds fair enough. BTW, does the GPL count (-; (I'm going to have to get Berkeley DB, because I can't link against GDBM )"
I guess it does, in your case. But then again, that's why we have different liscenses.:) I like it, personally.
"I don't get your point. I don't think "we'll all become artists" any time soon."
My point is just that competition tends to improve the quality of work. More artists can sometimes mean better art. That's theory. What I know is that when anyone can be a publisher, the artists can set their own terms. IMHO, this is a good thing.
"Yep. I wrote a HOWTO, some miscellaneous perl bits and pieces and contributed to vim ( an award winning project ). So -- where's my money ?"
The big limit, of course, is that only the high-profile volunteers tend to get noticed. As companies IPO, or get rich, they may decide to give back by giving grants to deserving volunteer projects. I have no idea how that will turn out, but I'm not holding my breath for any money, I don't expect any. I haven't done anything worth money yet.
"This system is a nice way of rewarding and recognising volunteers, but can you honestly say that anyone would write free software for the money ?"
No. Programmers might band together and work on open source projects and decide to share any donations, or one of them might get a high paying job and everyone live on Ramen noodles, but someone who writes free software doesn't expect to get paid. That is, with the exception of people working at RedHat, or Mandrake, or Walnut Creek, or any other companies that write or sell free software. They are still exceptions.
"Well, tell us when you have it."
We have it already. RedHat, etc make money off writing and selling free software. FSF gets donations, User Friendly gets banner hits for writing free comics, as does After Y2K. Fanfic, whatever you think of the quality, occasionally gets one of their stories sold. Alan Cox gets paid to write free software he believes in.
Not all of us can go that route, but kudos to those who can.
"Well if the free market can give us a solution that's more efficient, then it will produce such a solution whether the copyright system is there or not."
Yeah, it will. Let's hope the lawyers don't ruin too many of us in the meantime.
"IMO, we won't find a better system."
I know what you mean, but IMHO, we will. It may take awhile, a revolution always does.
"So how do you propose that the creators of intellectual works be compensated in the absence of a copyright system ? "
"By applying them. (note: this is not to say the copyright idea should be nixed, just a reply to a hypothetical)"
Thanks for your support, Wah, but I'm afraid I don't understand. Applying them?
I really would like a new system for rewarding artists - copyright based on legal thugs obviously won't hold up, nor is it ethical, and banner ads are fairly limited. I think real artists should get more than banner ads seem to be giving them. On the other hand, maybe that's the free market's way of saying that that's all they're worth. I hope not.
"No, you don't. In the case of software, you buy a license, which clearly costs more than the price of duplicating media. The payment is primarily to compensate the author. It seems only fair that the author, as well as the distributors, should be compensated."
Okay, then I guess we have a difference of opinion there - I always thought EULA's were a travesty, even if only because I couldn't negotiate different terms. I believe we should respect the author's liscensing terms - by that I mean, if it's a restrictive, lawyer-trash liscense, don't use it. I guess in that way BSD is freer than GPL, but I got nothing against either.
I thought the shareware model worked great for this. I have actually registed shareware, too. But when you pay a company for a piece of software, that money goes to the bosses, not so much the programmers. It'll reach the programmers, but unless they have profit-sharing, it doesn't give the programmers another penny when I buy their product. That bothers me a little, but what can I do about it?
"Well that's a nice theory, but there's an immediate consequence, and that is that creators of intellectual works should only be compensated in "information", and that they should forgo all material things, because their productivity has no material worth."
You're right, that is hard to swallow. I, for one, sure would like the great artists of our time to get rewarded.
The system we have has major and obvious flaws, but at least it rewards artists. Well, what if we all become artists? If worth times supply equals demand, as supply goes up, worth goes down. If we're all artists, then maybe only the really great ones will shine. We'll need a way to dig through the mud to reach the diamonds.
"You say yourself that information isn't free of cost. So how do you propose that the creators of intellectual works be compensated in the absence of a copyright system?"
Remember the Slashdot Beanie 2000 awards? There's one way to reward artists, limited as it is. I don't know the answer. We will need a new system. I'm a Libertarian, myself, so I trust in the free market to give us a solution.
User Friendly posts comics, lets us read them for free. They collect money from banner ads, and ask that people not mirror them, so UF gets the money they deserve and need. That system works, though not very well, it's good enough for now.
Then we agree totally. Sorry if I overreacted, I had thought you were blaming the tool. I use Napster myself. Just a bit ago, I found a long out-of-print song on there, that I hadn't been able to find anywhere else - right then I was a Napster fan.
Maybe I'm just mad at the RIAA, and am just showing my rebellion, I don't know. What we need is a moderation system for unsigned artists - I mean, on mp3.com, how do you sort the good from the bad? Maybe they could have different reviewers, we could listen to favorite songs of different reviewers, and decide which ones to listen to. I don't know any good answers.
Yeah, you're right - Napster isn't sqeaky clean. At least legally. Ethically, I have no idea. Who's the bad guy? Probably both.
I just wish Napster could be used to share zips, tar.gz's, rpms, etc... it'd be a whole lot more useful to me, and make themselves look a lot more innocent.
"Maybe it's time to create a new internet where Open Source can thrive, as well as projects like Gnutella, Napster and DeCSS."
One word: FreeNet
http://freenet.sourceforge.net/index.php
Designed from the ground up to make censorship impossible and authoring anonymous - even if you can find the author, you can't bully them into taking it down - because they can't take it down.
Foogle, what are you saying? Just because a tool is used mostly illegaly, that makes the tool bad? It does not.
The concepts that went into making Gnutella and Napster are very, very useful in making a distributed file-sharing network. It's not perfect yet, but soon we can have file sharing networks where millions of people can download the latest kernel without clogging, or cdrom images, or the latest *anything*, without a slashdotting or DoS'ing of any large file server.
File sharing, not file serving, is what this is about.
Yes, Napster is usually used for music copying. (nobody murdered, no ships ransacked, not piracy)
Nuclear power was first used in the slaughter of countless Japanese civilians.
VHS VCR tapes became popular beacuse that's where the porn was.
VCR tapes are not bad, Nuclear power is not bad, Napster is not bad. The *users* are at fault, not the tools.
"The point is that the old business models are going away; there is no way to make money by restricting the flow of information: information itself will no longer be a "good." to be bought or sold."
I agree with you fully except for one point - information has never been a good to be bought or sold, it has always been free. We can buy a book that the information is printed on, or a jewel case, liner notes, and cd that the music is recorded on, or a floppy disk that a computer program is written on. We buy and sell the physical media containing the information.
With the rise of widespread networks, we no longer need jewel cases, cds, floppy disks, and soon books to carry information - they are obsolete, as are the companies that have made their living off of information distribution. Now, the unethical of those companies are going to try to fool people into paying for something that's free - they will tell us that information can be payed for with money.
It cannot. Information is worthless and priceless - money cannot buy it. The only thing information is worth is more information.
A fisherman and a trapper in the mountains meet. They teach each other what they know. Then they part, both having gained something that might save their lives, or might be entirely useless.
Information isn't free of cost. It costs work, creativity, memory, bandwidth. Distribution costs money. Physical media costs money. Information doesn't.
"Check out the US goverment farm grants. They are money to NOT make any more food. The US has so much of some grains that they just rot."
You make my point better than I could. I didn't know that... either way, my point was that the US already has more food than it knows what to do with.
As for fish, I eat it for the omega-3 essential fatty acids. I'd like to find a better source, though - preferably plant. Any organic-eating vegetarians around?
Btw, there are lots of people who don't consider fish or fowl to be meat. My mom for one, and she knows quite a lot about the subject. Me, I don't understand, I'm just taking their word for it for now. As for the cuteness factor, well... I actually have been saying for years that the thing to do about catching dolphins in tuna nets is to sell dolphin in little cans, too.
My guess on the 'hard line' thing is that there are thousands or millions of these cables, scattered all over the earth, but they only go so deep. The machines seem to stay on or near the surface, the humans always underground.
Maybe the machines stay above because they still see humans as a large threat. Maybe the machines are waiting for the skies to clear, so they have solar power again.
In any case, they 'get close to the surface', troll around looking for hard lines, hack in, the ais notice them, start a trace, find the line, and my the time the robo-squids get there, the humans are gone... usually.
I noticed the part about consevation of energy, too - I wonder how that 'special form of fusion' worked so that the machines had to use humans as a sort of ac-to-dc converter... I like the fact that they didn't give any details. When they give details, they better get them right, because I'll be looking for mistakes. When they don't, it's easier to focus on the story and the people.
At first I didn't get Tank's line about Zion being 'close to the core, where it's still warm.' Maybe he meant deep in the crust, close to the mantle, and humans use geothermal power? It's a misleading line, but a believable one.
Now that I think about it, I didn't notice any real scientific errors. Any apparant ones can be explained away.
If you're only referring to food and water, we're not overpopulated yet. Wasn't it the US where 80% of farmland area is feeding farm animals? I can't remember what the exact figure is, but it's somewhere around 80%. Personally, I'm vegetarian, if you don't count fish as meat. I won't preach my way of life, but I will say that if more people didn't eat meat, and we stopped breeding farm animals like rabbits, the US would have even more food to spare than it does already.
As for water, we could build nucler desalination plants right now if the majority of the public wasn't terrified of radiation. Once the cost of fresh water goes up enough, someone is going to start desalinating water just because it's the best option we have left. Yes, people will die of dehydration in the meantime. And they will after, and they always have. That's not overpopulation, that's supply and demand - economics and distribution.
> Of course, Bill is right. Nanotechnology could > be nasty shit in malicious hands. That's why we > need to stay involved in the development of > space, because there is no greater protective > barrier than a few million miles of hard vacuume > and radiation.
Amen.:) Of course, if they happen to be intelligent nanites, we may have Saberhagen's Breserkers to worry about... a thought... would nano-spaceships be feasible? Of course, they can't hold much reaction mass, or carry much energy, but maybe they wouldn't have to. Take a solar-powered rail gun, load it with nanite shot, and fire off randomly. Every once in awhile, you hit an asteroid, the nanites build another solar-powered rail gun, reproduce, and start firing off again. Good pings come in small packets?:) Yipes... try defending against *that*.
> Self-replicating machines? Nanotechnology run > amok? Machines that become smart and enslave > humanity? Please, this is reality, not an > episode of star trek.
Those are all pretty big threats, I don't see how you can brush them off so easily. IMHO, far more dangerous than nukes. We've lived with nuclear power for over half a century, and most of us have benefited. Cheaper electricity, lower CO2 emissions, less consumption of fossil fuels. There have been disasters. Some accidental, a couple were deliberate, but the nuclear armageddon so many have predicted hasn't happened. It still might, but now we have far greater dangers. AI enslaving mankind is not merely a star trek episode, I've seen it on Outer Limits, The Terminator, and The Matrix, to name a few.
Nanotech run amok is a danger, but only from sufficiently adaptable nanites. Simple, we just don't build any like that, right?
When you have enough experts thinking about it for a long enough time, someone is going to build it, just for curiosity's sake. Or maybe trillions of particles of radiation hitting trillions of nanites will cause most to die, but one to become dangerous. When you start talking about self-replicating machines, you have to be very careful. If evolution can happen to wet nanites (bacteria, viruses), it can happen to dry nanites, too.
I'm not saying we shouldn't investigate it. It's a pandora's box. First comes the evil, then the good that helps us survive the evil. We might wipe ourselves out with nukes, or we might use nuclear propulsion to colonize mars, titan, or alpha centauri. Nanite-boosted immune systems might defend our bodies from rapidly evolving nanite plauges. If AI turns evil on us, we might build smarter, stronger AI to defend us.
We just have to be careful, stay paranoid, and don't stop asking questions.
I'm sorry - are you saying that owning a lockpick is illegal unless you have some sort of license? That using a lockpick to enter your own house because you forgot your key is illegal? I'm not arguing, I'm just trying to understand what you're saying. If having and using a lockpick without committing a crime is illegal, then that law is wrong.
So, when they rushed into the game room and Mulder was missing, they said there was only the exit they just came through. But at the end, we find out there's another exit - okay, so it's not very big, like closet sized, but still they should have thought of that when Mulder first disappeared.
Also, I can buy the idea of someone dying from shock, simply because they think they've been killed - ala "Spectre of the Gun", in original Trek, or the Matrix. But what physical object blew that hole in the one guy's chest, and what physical object sliced off the other guy's hands and head? When the Agent shot Neo, Trinity saw no bullethole. There wasn't any. The bullets weren't real in Matrix, and they weren't real in FPS.
Btw, why didn't Mulder and Scully just strip off their suits? Without the suits, the game would have no power over them, right?
I'm a big fan of the original Descent, and Freespace. I'm not sure if FPSs are the same, but in Descent or Freespace, if you stop moving, you die. These people used no strategy, no way to defend themselves, and they didn't move.
And I know this is a touchy subject, but who wrote Scully saying, "No fair picking on a girl?" A. That ain't Scully, B. no fair picking on anybody, and C. why the mudslinging at males? Maybe males are by nature more apt to hurt people than females. I don't know. What I know is I've known 4 abusive people, and 3 of them were women. I know my sample size is too small. I know different people have had different experiences. But women have no monopoly on pain. We've all been hurt. Blaming it on whites, or blakcs, or males, or females, or teenagers, or adults, or rich people, or Jews... it's all the same. It's collective self-pity, and it just spreads more hatred around.
I don't mean to offend anybody. I like girls, I'm a big fan of the female species. But I'm a scrawny geek, so don't tell me girls don't cause pain.
"This record has been engineered in accordance with standards developed by the recording industry association of america, inc., a non-profit organization dedicated to the betterment of recorded music and literature."
-- Frank Mills & His Orchestra, Music Box Dancer, 1979
"The days of the traditionalist "text based" web are dead, get used to it."
Really now? I routinely turn off css, javascript, java, most cookies, and sometimes turn off auto image loading. What am I supposed to get used to, again?:)
"Given that, your perspective is like looking a gift horse in the mouth. I mean these guys invent a process that could significantly improve the lives of people around the world -- a product of their own minds and their own creative efforts -- and you all but demand they give it to you? Talk about greed! It's theirs to dispose of as they see fit."
Sure it is. And if I reinvent it, then it's mine, too, to do with as I see fit. I don't care what they do with their invention, as long as they don't interfere with my right to invent it on my own. This isn't about who gets rewarded for their invention. It's about the freedom of others to reinvent it.
"Sure, they might choose to put it into the public domain. But that will be their choice to make."
Yeah, that is their choice. But they have no right to sue me for following in their footsteps. Not that it matters to me, after all, I wouldn't be able to reinvent it. But other people are, and now they're not allowed to. That's not right.
"Let's get real, here. Did Edison put his inventions in the public domain?"
Uhh... I wouldn't use Edison as any kind of example here. He was the Bill Gates of his age. Used a good many of Tesla's patents without licensing them, then turned around and stole ideas and patented them himself. For example, the light bulb was invented by a British researcher a few years before Edison got the US patent for it.
"What we need now are massive government subsidies to push this hydrogen-algae phenomemon forward (provided it can provide useful yields, and a cancellation of all those subsidies for fossil fuels and nuclear power, both of which are dirty, polluting, and a long-term dead end."
It seems to me better to withdraw all subsidies and let progress happen at its own, natural pace. Fossil fuels are a terrible thing to burn anyhow, they are much better as a source of reduced carbon, for sythesizing plastics and such. However, we're not running out just yet, and even if we do, there's still Titan.
As for nuclear power, how is this a dead end? Volcanos continue to bring up radioactives from the core for our fission reactors, and there's enough hydrogen in the oceans to last us a very long time.
Radioactives occur naturally, spread throughout the enviroment. What's wrong with putting our radioactive waste back in the hole where we dug up the fuel in the first place?
Re:This article makes me sick!
on
Giving Back
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· Score: 1
You got Linux in return. And GIMP, and GNU, and DeCSS, and Livid, and xanim, and xmms, and the WWW, and UUCP, and email, and Mozilla, etc... Information wants to be free, but it sure ain't cheap.
I'm one to talk. I've given $15 total. To the North Texas Linux Users Group. I should give more, they've earned it.
You've brought up some things I hadn't thought of, but after thinking about it, I gotta say I haven't changed my mind.
"You can make bathtub gin that tastes just like Old Mr. Boston, but you have no "rights" to do so because you aren't licensed to distill alcohol."
I wasn't aware I had to have a license to distill alcohol. Bummer. I was actually going to, too, for a alcohol burning engine I'd like to build. I'm not into drinking the stuff, personally.
"You can file down the firing pin on your daddy's hunting rifle and make it into an automatic weapon, but it's not your right to do that either."
Some people would argue there's nothing wrong with having such a weapon, as long as it isn't used in a crime. Examples of that being, a storeowner defending against a rampaging mob, the US Army using them to drive Hussain out of Kuwait, or Austrailian farmers trying to wipe out their rabbit infestation.
Personally, I can't stand guns - horrid, nasty, brutish things. But it's very important not to give up our rights to have them if we choose.
"To carry your argument to the extreme, you could make your own "compatible" thermonuclear device. Clearly, that falls outside your legal rights, too."
Actually, this is my favorite example... granted, a private citizen doesn't have many ethical uses for a nuclear bomb, at least while he's on Earth.
Asteroid miners could (and I'm sure they will) use nukes to break asteroids into smaller pieces, or carve out a crater to get deep inside. The Orion drive uses small nukes for propulsion. A thousand tactical hydrogen bombs would work great there. A large radar dish might use a gigaton nuke to generate an EMP, then listen for the bounce-back, ala Arthur C Clarke's Spaceguard. An asteroid colony might find itself on a collision course with another asteroid, very close, and the only choice might be to nuke the asteroid into rubble.
In short, private citizens don't need nuclear devices on Earth, but we will in space. Actually, if you count cold-fusion research and electrostatic fusion reactors as "nuclear devices", then it's very important to keep our rights to build and use nuclear devices, as long as we don't hurt anyone.
"Just because you can do something doesn't mean that society grants you the right to do it."
Maybe that's our fundamental difference of opinion. I'm a right-leaning Libertarian, so I believe rights are a default. We can do anything we want to, so long as it hurts no one else. If I hurt someone else, then I deserve to be tossed in jail or worse. But until that point, I'm totally free to do anything I'm able to and want to do.
Btw, I'm not talking about what's legal. I'm talking about what's ethical. If you want to talk about what's legal, I'm not qualified.
"Arguing that you shouldn't have to use their player is like arguing you shouldn't have to have a DSS receiver to watch DirecTV broadcasts or you shouldn't have to buy your cable company's cable modem to hook up to their net."
Actually, it's like arguing that once I've paid for DirecTV access, I can toss their DSS receiver in the trash and build my own, better one. I'm not stealing anything when I pay for cable, then use a software decoder to watch that cable.
"The bottom line is that no one is forcing you to buy DVDs and the DVD playback software is a licensed product."
No one is forcing me to buy DVDs, in fact I've been boycotting the MPAA for some time now. No cable, no movie theaters, buying no tapes or DVDs. If I want to watch a movie I wait for it to be on broadcast tv, or I borrow it from the library. In the meanwhile, I have a stack of books to read...
"So don't expect unrestricted access to playback technology. You're misinformed if you think it's your "right" to have it."
Oh, I don't care about their playback technology. But I can make my own, compatible playback technology, and there is not a thing wrong with that. That's a right.
"Saw this one off 3DNews, some guy has written step by step instructions on how to turn your computer case into one that looks like a Furry Cow."
Ahh, but there's all sorts of places you can take this idea... for example, if you were to cover the case with plastic wrap and a bit of dirt... or whatever it is chia grass grows in.
Chia grass... for a martian cow.
Moss... for a mangy martian cow.
or maybe use those annoying fuzzy pink toilet seat covers, for a... um... weird mutant people-eating cow.
or epoxy and clippings from your local barbershop- I'm sorry, "hair styling parlor"... for a computer case that resembles Cousin It.
oh, the sky's the limit.
There's gotta be something you can do with it for valentine's day...
Slashdot Mirror
"The other, ironically the same physical network, will be the realm where those with the technical know how ellude these goofy and poorly implemented laws."
Your prediction is true already - http://freenet.sourceforge.net/index.php
"Unlike the Web, Freenet is designed to allow thoughts and ideas to be published and read without fear of censorship of any kind. To participate in this system users will simply need to run a piece of server software on their computer, and optionally use a client program to insert and remove information from the system. Anyone can write a client (or indeed a server) program for Freenet. Reference implementations of these programs are being written in the Java programming language."
"I worry about my child and the Internet all the time, even though she's too young to have logged on yet. Here's what I worry about. I worry that 10 or 15 years from now, she will come to me and say 'Daddy, where were you when they took freedom of the press away from the Internet?' " -Mike Godwin
"Here at the Delft university of Technology we are working on compression algorithms that compress audio with a factor of 24, without perceptual loss. Combined with new recordable devices it will become possbile in 5 years to store all the popular music produced of the last year on a single disc."
I'd love to know how you've managed it - with fractal and wavelet algorithms buried under patent encrustation, it'd sure be great to have something else better than mpeg. Are you referring to MPEG-2 AAC, in your link, there, or is Delft's algorithms something else?
"You can "negotiate different terms" by taking your business to a different vendor. However, if all the vendors are using draconian terms, then it's a sign the vendors have too much power"
:) I like it, personally.
Aye, and that's exactly my problem with our current system of copyright - it hands all the power over to the publishers and vendors, and power corrupts. We need a system that rewards the authors, not the bosses and publishers. Of course, that situation will resolve itself as people start writing and publishing for themselves, so that's no worry.
"That sounds fair enough. BTW, does the GPL count (-; (I'm going to have to get Berkeley DB, because I can't link against GDBM )"
I guess it does, in your case. But then again, that's why we have different liscenses.
"I don't get your point. I don't think "we'll all become artists" any time soon."
My point is just that competition tends to improve the quality of work. More artists can sometimes mean better art. That's theory. What I know is that when anyone can be a publisher, the artists can set their own terms. IMHO, this is a good thing.
"Yep. I wrote a HOWTO, some miscellaneous perl bits and pieces and contributed to vim ( an award winning project ). So -- where's my money ?"
The big limit, of course, is that only the high-profile volunteers tend to get noticed. As companies IPO, or get rich, they may decide to give back by giving grants to deserving volunteer projects. I have no idea how that will turn out, but I'm not holding my breath for any money, I don't expect any. I haven't done anything worth money yet.
"This system is a nice way of rewarding and recognising volunteers, but can you honestly say that anyone would write free software for the money ?"
No. Programmers might band together and work on open source projects and decide to share any donations, or one of them might get a high paying job and everyone live on Ramen noodles, but someone who writes free software doesn't expect to get paid. That is, with the exception of people working at RedHat, or Mandrake, or Walnut Creek, or any other companies that write or sell free software. They are still exceptions.
"Well, tell us when you have it."
We have it already. RedHat, etc make money off writing and selling free software. FSF gets donations, User Friendly gets banner hits for writing free comics, as does After Y2K. Fanfic, whatever you think of the quality, occasionally gets one of their stories sold. Alan Cox gets paid to write free software he believes in.
Not all of us can go that route, but kudos to those who can.
"Well if the free market can give us a solution that's more efficient, then it will produce such a solution whether the copyright system is there or not."
Yeah, it will. Let's hope the lawyers don't ruin too many of us in the meantime.
"IMO, we won't find a better system."
I know what you mean, but IMHO, we will. It may take awhile, a revolution always does.
"So how do you propose that the creators of intellectual works be compensated in the absence of a copyright system ? "
"By applying them. (note: this is not to say the copyright idea should be nixed, just a reply to a hypothetical)"
Thanks for your support, Wah, but I'm afraid I don't understand. Applying them?
I really would like a new system for rewarding artists - copyright based on legal thugs obviously won't hold up, nor is it ethical, and banner ads are fairly limited. I think real artists should get more than banner ads seem to be giving them. On the other hand, maybe that's the free market's way of saying that that's all they're worth. I hope not.
"No, you don't. In the case of software, you buy a license, which clearly costs more than the price of duplicating media. The payment is primarily to compensate the author. It seems only fair that the author, as well as the distributors, should be compensated."
Okay, then I guess we have a difference of opinion there - I always thought EULA's were a travesty, even if only because I couldn't negotiate different terms. I believe we should respect the author's liscensing terms - by that I mean, if it's a restrictive, lawyer-trash liscense, don't use it. I guess in that way BSD is freer than GPL, but I got nothing against either.
I thought the shareware model worked great for this. I have actually registed shareware, too. But when you pay a company for a piece of software, that money goes to the bosses, not so much the programmers. It'll reach the programmers, but unless they have profit-sharing, it doesn't give the programmers another penny when I buy their product. That bothers me a little, but what can I do about it?
"Well that's a nice theory, but there's an immediate consequence, and that is that creators of intellectual works should only be compensated in "information", and that they should forgo all material things, because their productivity has no material worth."
You're right, that is hard to swallow. I, for one, sure would like the great artists of our time to get rewarded.
The system we have has major and obvious flaws, but at least it rewards artists. Well, what if we all become artists? If worth times supply equals demand, as supply goes up, worth goes down. If we're all artists, then maybe only the really great ones will shine. We'll need a way to dig through the mud to reach the diamonds.
"You say yourself that information isn't free of cost. So how do you propose that the creators of intellectual works be compensated in the absence of a copyright system?"
Remember the Slashdot Beanie 2000 awards? There's one way to reward artists, limited as it is. I don't know the answer. We will need a new system. I'm a Libertarian, myself, so I trust in the free market to give us a solution.
User Friendly posts comics, lets us read them for free. They collect money from banner ads, and ask that people not mirror them, so UF gets the money they deserve and need. That system works, though not very well, it's good enough for now.
Then we agree totally. Sorry if I overreacted, I had thought you were blaming the tool. I use Napster myself. Just a bit ago, I found a long out-of-print song on there, that I hadn't been able to find anywhere else - right then I was a Napster fan.
Maybe I'm just mad at the RIAA, and am just showing my rebellion, I don't know. What we need is a moderation system for unsigned artists - I mean, on mp3.com, how do you sort the good from the bad? Maybe they could have different reviewers, we could listen to favorite songs of different reviewers, and decide which ones to listen to. I don't know any good answers.
Yeah, you're right - Napster isn't sqeaky clean. At least legally. Ethically, I have no idea. Who's the bad guy? Probably both.
I just wish Napster could be used to share zips, tar.gz's, rpms, etc... it'd be a whole lot more useful to me, and make themselves look a lot more innocent.
"Maybe it's time to create a new internet where Open Source can thrive, as well as projects like Gnutella, Napster and DeCSS."
One word: FreeNet
http://freenet.sourceforge.net/index.php
Designed from the ground up to make censorship impossible and authoring anonymous - even if you can find the author, you can't bully them into taking it down - because they can't take it down.
Foogle, what are you saying? Just because a tool is used mostly illegaly, that makes the tool bad? It does not.
The concepts that went into making Gnutella and Napster are very, very useful in making a distributed file-sharing network. It's not perfect yet, but soon we can have file sharing networks where millions of people can download the latest kernel without clogging, or cdrom images, or the latest *anything*, without a slashdotting or DoS'ing of any large file server.
File sharing, not file serving, is what this is about.
Yes, Napster is usually used for music copying. (nobody murdered, no ships ransacked, not piracy)
Nuclear power was first used in the slaughter of countless Japanese civilians.
VHS VCR tapes became popular beacuse that's where the porn was.
VCR tapes are not bad, Nuclear power is not bad, Napster is not bad. The *users* are at fault, not the tools.
"The point is that the old business models are going away; there is no way to make money by restricting the flow of information: information itself will no longer be a "good." to be bought or sold."
I agree with you fully except for one point - information has never been a good to be bought or sold, it has always been free. We can buy a book that the information is printed on, or a jewel case, liner notes, and cd that the music is recorded on, or a floppy disk that a computer program is written on. We buy and sell the physical media containing the information.
With the rise of widespread networks, we no longer need jewel cases, cds, floppy disks, and soon books to carry information - they are obsolete, as are the companies that have made their living off of information distribution. Now, the unethical of those companies are going to try to fool people into paying for something that's free - they will tell us that information can be payed for with money.
It cannot. Information is worthless and priceless - money cannot buy it. The only thing information is worth is more information.
A fisherman and a trapper in the mountains meet. They teach each other what they know. Then they part, both having gained something that might save their lives, or might be entirely useless.
Information isn't free of cost. It costs work, creativity, memory, bandwidth. Distribution costs money. Physical media costs money. Information doesn't.
"Check out the US goverment farm grants. They are money to NOT make any more food. The US has so much of some grains that they just rot."
You make my point better than I could. I didn't know that... either way, my point was that the US already has more food than it knows what to do with.
As for fish, I eat it for the omega-3 essential fatty acids. I'd like to find a better source, though - preferably plant. Any organic-eating vegetarians around?
Btw, there are lots of people who don't consider fish or fowl to be meat. My mom for one, and she knows quite a lot about the subject. Me, I don't understand, I'm just taking their word for it for now. As for the cuteness factor, well... I actually have been saying for years that the thing to do about catching dolphins in tuna nets is to sell dolphin in little cans, too.
My guess on the 'hard line' thing is that there are thousands or millions of these cables, scattered all over the earth, but they only go so deep. The machines seem to stay on or near the surface, the humans always underground.
Maybe the machines stay above because they still see humans as a large threat. Maybe the machines are waiting for the skies to clear, so they have solar power again.
In any case, they 'get close to the surface', troll around looking for hard lines, hack in, the ais notice them, start a trace, find the line, and my the time the robo-squids get there, the humans are gone... usually.
I noticed the part about consevation of energy, too - I wonder how that 'special form of fusion' worked so that the machines had to use humans as a sort of ac-to-dc converter... I like the fact that they didn't give any details. When they give details, they better get them right, because I'll be looking for mistakes. When they don't, it's easier to focus on the story and the people.
At first I didn't get Tank's line about Zion being 'close to the core, where it's still warm.' Maybe he meant deep in the crust, close to the mantle, and humans use geothermal power? It's a misleading line, but a believable one.
Now that I think about it, I didn't notice any real scientific errors. Any apparant ones can be explained away.
If you're only referring to food and water, we're not overpopulated yet. Wasn't it the US where 80% of farmland area is feeding farm animals? I can't remember what the exact figure is, but it's somewhere around 80%. Personally, I'm vegetarian, if you don't count fish as meat. I won't preach my way of life, but I will say that if more people didn't eat meat, and we stopped breeding farm animals like rabbits, the US would have even more food to spare than it does already.
As for water, we could build nucler desalination plants right now if the majority of the public wasn't terrified of radiation. Once the cost of fresh water goes up enough, someone is going to start desalinating water just because it's the best option we have left. Yes, people will die of dehydration in the meantime. And they will after, and they always have. That's not overpopulation, that's supply and demand - economics and distribution.
> Of course, Bill is right. Nanotechnology could
:) Of course, if they happen to be intelligent nanites, we may have Saberhagen's Breserkers to worry about... a thought... would nano-spaceships be feasible? Of course, they can't hold much reaction mass, or carry much energy, but maybe they wouldn't have to. Take a solar-powered rail gun, load it with nanite shot, and fire off randomly. Every once in awhile, you hit an asteroid, the nanites build another solar-powered rail gun, reproduce, and start firing off again. Good pings come in small packets? :) Yipes... try defending against *that*.
> be nasty shit in malicious hands. That's why we
> need to stay involved in the development of
> space, because there is no greater protective
> barrier than a few million miles of hard vacuume
> and radiation.
Amen.
> Self-replicating machines? Nanotechnology run
> amok? Machines that become smart and enslave
> humanity? Please, this is reality, not an
> episode of star trek.
Those are all pretty big threats, I don't see how you can brush them off so easily. IMHO, far more dangerous than nukes. We've lived with nuclear power for over half a century, and most of us have benefited. Cheaper electricity, lower CO2 emissions, less consumption of fossil fuels. There have been disasters. Some accidental, a couple were deliberate, but the nuclear armageddon so many have predicted hasn't happened. It still might, but now we have far greater dangers. AI enslaving mankind is not merely a star trek episode, I've seen it on Outer Limits, The Terminator, and The Matrix, to name a few.
Nanotech run amok is a danger, but only from sufficiently adaptable nanites. Simple, we just don't build any like that, right?
When you have enough experts thinking about it for a long enough time, someone is going to build it, just for curiosity's sake. Or maybe trillions of particles of radiation hitting trillions of nanites will cause most to die, but one to become dangerous. When you start talking about self-replicating machines, you have to be very careful. If evolution can happen to wet nanites (bacteria, viruses), it can happen to dry nanites, too.
I'm not saying we shouldn't investigate it. It's a pandora's box. First comes the evil, then the good that helps us survive the evil. We might wipe ourselves out with nukes, or we might use nuclear propulsion to colonize mars, titan, or alpha centauri. Nanite-boosted immune systems might defend our bodies from rapidly evolving nanite plauges. If AI turns evil on us, we might build smarter, stronger AI to defend us.
We just have to be careful, stay paranoid, and don't stop asking questions.
I'm sorry - are you saying that owning a lockpick is illegal unless you have some sort of license? That using a lockpick to enter your own house because you forgot your key is illegal? I'm not arguing, I'm just trying to understand what you're saying. If having and using a lockpick without committing a crime is illegal, then that law is wrong.
So, when they rushed into the game room and Mulder was missing, they said there was only the exit they just came through. But at the end, we find out there's another exit - okay, so it's not very big, like closet sized, but still they should have thought of that when Mulder first disappeared.
Also, I can buy the idea of someone dying from shock, simply because they think they've been killed - ala "Spectre of the Gun", in original Trek, or the Matrix. But what physical object blew that hole in the one guy's chest, and what physical object sliced off the other guy's hands and head? When the Agent shot Neo, Trinity saw no bullethole. There wasn't any. The bullets weren't real in Matrix, and they weren't real in FPS.
Btw, why didn't Mulder and Scully just strip off their suits? Without the suits, the game would have no power over them, right?
I'm a big fan of the original Descent, and Freespace. I'm not sure if FPSs are the same, but in Descent or Freespace, if you stop moving, you die. These people used no strategy, no way to defend themselves, and they didn't move.
And I know this is a touchy subject, but who wrote Scully saying, "No fair picking on a girl?" A. That ain't Scully, B. no fair picking on anybody, and C. why the mudslinging at males? Maybe males are by nature more apt to hurt people than females. I don't know. What I know is I've known 4 abusive people, and 3 of them were women. I know my sample size is too small. I know different people have had different experiences. But women have no monopoly on pain. We've all been hurt. Blaming it on whites, or blakcs, or males, or females, or teenagers, or adults, or rich people, or Jews... it's all the same. It's collective self-pity, and it just spreads more hatred around.
I don't mean to offend anybody. I like girls, I'm a big fan of the female species. But I'm a scrawny geek, so don't tell me girls don't cause pain.
"This record has been engineered in accordance with standards developed by the recording industry association of america, inc., a non-profit organization dedicated to the betterment of recorded music and literature."
-- Frank Mills & His Orchestra, Music Box Dancer, 1979
"The days of the traditionalist "text based" web are dead, get used to it."
:)
Really now? I routinely turn off css, javascript, java, most cookies, and sometimes turn off auto image loading. What am I supposed to get used to, again?
"Given that, your perspective is like looking a gift horse in the mouth. I mean these guys invent a process that could significantly improve the lives of people around the world -- a product of their own minds and their own creative efforts -- and you all but demand they give it to you? Talk about greed! It's theirs to dispose of as they see fit."
Sure it is. And if I reinvent it, then it's mine, too, to do with as I see fit. I don't care what they do with their invention, as long as they don't interfere with my right to invent it on my own. This isn't about who gets rewarded for their invention. It's about the freedom of others to reinvent it.
"Sure, they might choose to put it into the public domain. But that will be their choice to make."
Yeah, that is their choice. But they have no right to sue me for following in their footsteps. Not that it matters to me, after all, I wouldn't be able to reinvent it. But other people are, and now they're not allowed to. That's not right.
"Let's get real, here. Did Edison put his inventions in the public domain?"
Uhh... I wouldn't use Edison as any kind of example here. He was the Bill Gates of his age. Used a good many of Tesla's patents without licensing them, then turned around and stole ideas and patented them himself. For example, the light bulb was invented by a British researcher a few years before Edison got the US patent for it.
Edison wasn't an inventor, he was a salesman.
"What we need now are massive government subsidies to push this hydrogen-algae phenomemon forward (provided it can provide useful yields, and a cancellation of all those subsidies for fossil fuels and nuclear power, both of which are dirty, polluting, and a long-term dead end."
It seems to me better to withdraw all subsidies and let progress happen at its own, natural pace. Fossil fuels are a terrible thing to burn anyhow, they are much better as a source of reduced carbon, for sythesizing plastics and such. However, we're not running out just yet, and even if we do, there's still Titan.
As for nuclear power, how is this a dead end? Volcanos continue to bring up radioactives from the core for our fission reactors, and there's enough hydrogen in the oceans to last us a very long time.
Radioactives occur naturally, spread throughout the enviroment. What's wrong with putting our radioactive waste back in the hole where we dug up the fuel in the first place?
You got Linux in return. And GIMP, and GNU, and DeCSS, and Livid, and xanim, and xmms, and the WWW, and UUCP, and email, and Mozilla, etc... Information wants to be free, but it sure ain't cheap.
I'm one to talk. I've given $15 total. To the North Texas Linux Users Group. I should give more, they've earned it.
You've brought up some things I hadn't thought of, but after thinking about it, I gotta say I haven't changed my mind.
"You can make bathtub gin that tastes just like Old Mr. Boston, but you have no "rights" to do so because you aren't licensed to distill alcohol."
I wasn't aware I had to have a license to distill alcohol. Bummer. I was actually going to, too, for a alcohol burning engine I'd like to build. I'm not into drinking the stuff, personally.
"You can file down the firing pin on your daddy's hunting rifle and make it into an automatic weapon, but it's not your right to do that either."
Some people would argue there's nothing wrong with having such a weapon, as long as it isn't used in a crime. Examples of that being, a storeowner defending against a rampaging mob, the US Army using them to drive Hussain out of Kuwait, or Austrailian farmers trying to wipe out their rabbit infestation.
Personally, I can't stand guns - horrid, nasty, brutish things. But it's very important not to give up our rights to have them if we choose.
"To carry your argument to the extreme, you could make your own "compatible" thermonuclear device. Clearly, that falls outside your legal rights, too."
Actually, this is my favorite example... granted, a private citizen doesn't have many ethical uses for a nuclear bomb, at least while he's on Earth.
Asteroid miners could (and I'm sure they will) use nukes to break asteroids into smaller pieces, or carve out a crater to get deep inside. The Orion drive uses small nukes for propulsion. A thousand tactical hydrogen bombs would work great there. A large radar dish might use a gigaton nuke to generate an EMP, then listen for the bounce-back, ala Arthur C Clarke's Spaceguard. An asteroid colony might find itself on a collision course with another asteroid, very close, and the only choice might be to nuke the asteroid into rubble.
In short, private citizens don't need nuclear devices on Earth, but we will in space. Actually, if you count cold-fusion research and electrostatic fusion reactors as "nuclear devices", then it's very important to keep our rights to build and use nuclear devices, as long as we don't hurt anyone.
"Just because you can do something doesn't mean that society grants you the right to do it."
Maybe that's our fundamental difference of opinion. I'm a right-leaning Libertarian, so I believe rights are a default. We can do anything we want to, so long as it hurts no one else. If I hurt someone else, then I deserve to be tossed in jail or worse. But until that point, I'm totally free to do anything I'm able to and want to do.
Btw, I'm not talking about what's legal. I'm talking about what's ethical. If you want to talk about what's legal, I'm not qualified.
"Arguing that you shouldn't have to use their player is like arguing you shouldn't have to have a DSS receiver to watch DirecTV broadcasts or you shouldn't have to buy your cable company's cable modem to hook up to their net."
Actually, it's like arguing that once I've paid for DirecTV access, I can toss their DSS receiver in the trash and build my own, better one. I'm not stealing anything when I pay for cable, then use a software decoder to watch that cable.
"The bottom line is that no one is forcing you to buy DVDs and the DVD playback software is a licensed product."
No one is forcing me to buy DVDs, in fact I've been boycotting the MPAA for some time now. No cable, no movie theaters, buying no tapes or DVDs. If I want to watch a movie I wait for it to be on broadcast tv, or I borrow it from the library. In the meanwhile, I have a stack of books to read...
"So don't expect unrestricted access to playback technology. You're misinformed if you think it's your "right" to have it."
Oh, I don't care about their playback technology. But I can make my own, compatible playback technology, and there is not a thing wrong with that. That's a right.
"Saw this one off 3DNews, some guy has written step by step instructions on how to turn your computer case into one that looks like a Furry Cow."
Ahh, but there's all sorts of places you can take this idea... for example, if you were to cover the case with plastic wrap and a bit of dirt... or whatever it is chia grass grows in.
Chia grass... for a martian cow.
Moss... for a mangy martian cow.
or maybe use those annoying fuzzy pink toilet seat covers, for a... um... weird mutant people-eating cow.
or epoxy and clippings from your local barbershop- I'm sorry, "hair styling parlor"... for a computer case that resembles Cousin It.
oh, the sky's the limit.
There's gotta be something you can do with it for valentine's day...
something red with hearts?
Beats me, I'm tired... g'night, ya'll...
*rereads post*
I... have had too much caffeine.