so what i want to know is: what does this mean for Microsoft? They are the most prolific "licenser's" of software out there... does this mean that all XP "licenses" are now transferable without any push back from MS? I mean, if they deny us activation we can sue them and win?
So what about company site licenses? Does it work for that? What are the restrictions here? For example, can I buy a crap load of site licenses and resell them?
which is actually the interesting part... The more a government pushes monitoring the internet, the more people people will use things like "freenet" for pirating and just a big "FU" to the government. As the use of a "freenet" type of thing increases, the less suspicious encrypted traffic becomes becuase it will be so much more common.
I predict that it'll be a funny side effect of trying to do complete citizen monitoring is that you'll be LESS able to monitor the people the government claims it's trying to monitor. (insert spooky voice: "the terrorists":que dramatic music)
This is of course, is all bullshit. With the exponentially rising number of bits that are being shoved around the internet these days, it would be trivially easy to hide terrorist instructions in on a bit torrent DL, a usenet post, a youtube video, or a flickr picture. And if you're a really creative terrorist you can even use encryption!
This is all a load of shit and I for one can't believe the UK is actually surpassing the US the "2008 Most Fucked Up Government" award. Have you guys seen what's been happening to the republican assholes who've been running our government? You should do the same with the ruling party over there, except in both cases I think we really should get out the tar and feathers and give them a proper going away party. (BTW, any democrats who are supporting this bullshit in the US should also be tossed out on their asses! I'm not partisan when it comes to spying on your own fucking citizens!)
That's true that there is more baggage associated with Nuclear power than with most other power types, however I think we're anti-nuclear power becuase we *can* be anti nuclear. If cheap oil/coal went away I believe we'd change our outlook on nuclear power well before we turned down the air-conditioner or started riding bikes around town.
The fact of he matter is we DO have nuclear power plants and once their built people just learn to live with them. Just becuase we can't get enough political willpower to build more today doesn't mean that it'll never happen. Political will is something that changes with economics too.
I'm going to focus on the Solar discussion because I find that the most interesting and the only one where we can really argue with facts instead of stories.
When I originally wrote my reply I did a search on google and didn't see anything, but punching in YOUR search phrase I get the articles you mentioned. Typically stuff like "the US never landed on the moon" is championed by a few sights pretty heavily, so I figured the first hit would be your strongest advocate. I'll summarize it:
* This is information from a study done in in 1989 theorizing what 1994 technology would be like * They calculated that using 1989 technolgoy they would get an energy payback of 6.4 years * Using what they theorized was 1994 technology they would get an energy payback of 3.1 years * The author is summarizing their study and points out some things he thinks they missed, inverters and the like, but these will only capture a percentage of the power generated so at worst it will take a percentage longer to recapture the energy.
So even in the TOP search item doesn't make the claim that it takes "more energy to create a solar cell than you can EVER get out of the life of the cell" and my quick scan didn't show any others that advocated that.
Ok, so your statement does appear to be bullshit, but i'm curious what more modern numbers are for energy usage, because 6 years is a huge amount of time and if is still that high I could be convinced your statement wasn't far from the truth!
In looking through some other webpages I found a department of energy webpage provides some really good information.
They provide several different technologies and give the Energy Pay Back Time (EPBT) of each. The times range from 2.7 years to 1.0 years for energy pay back using 2004 and 2005 numbers.
There are also some startups that say they're able to produce photovolatics amazingly cheep (which also translates to low energy), but I'll believe that when I see it.
first off, there are plenty of solutions to the "energy crisis". What type of make believe fiticious crap world are we living in where if economics force us to change it's the End Of The World.
1. Solution #1 - switch to an alternate form of energy. There are a ton of options. The last time I checked the sun was still shining and we can still get power from it. Be it solar, wind, or nuclear, there are a ton of options. Why don't we do this? Because the economics don't say we should. Oil is still cheap, but The *second* oil becomes too expensive, there will be a ton of alternate energy sources available to tap. The only reason we don't do it is becuase oil is STILL too cheap.
2. We can also *gasp* change the way we live. Shit, I know i waste plenty of energy. Heating air conditioning... hot water in the mornings, driving to work, pure wastage. How can I get away with wasting energy? Simple, it's cheap. it's less than 5% of my total income so I don't give a crap. I pay roughly 6x that on mortgage. Before the world falls apart, I'm sure we can adjust the way we live at least a tiny bit. But OMG, you may have to sell you SUV and buy a geo metro. Truely the end of the world.
BTW, I'd love to see soemthing backing up that statement about you needing more energy to create a solar panel than all the energy you will ever get out of it. Smells like slanted anti-alternative-energy BS to me, but if you got it from another article or source I'd be interested hearing their twisted logic OR I could even learn something and find out I'm wrong, but i highly doubt it on this issue. Perhaps you're thinking of Ethonal. Either way, source please.
The mortgage crisis.. I guess I don't give a shit. There aren't any losers here. You have gready companies who sold a lot of mortgages when times were good never considering that things may turn south because that might impact their current earnings portfolio. If some of them go belly up its no big shakes to me. I frankly think a few of them SHOULD be put out of business becuase if there was anyone in this mess who was at fault, it was them.
Then you have greedy homeowners who took crazy ass loans or "no paperwork required" loans. Look, buying a house is easily the single biggest investment of your life. If you don't run a few numbers through excel and say "does this make sense" then I don't really feel a lot of pity for you when you can't afford your house. It most likely means you overbought when you got the house (which most people do). But now you've lost your gamble so you have to declare bankruptcy and have to wait 7 years before you buy another house. It's not the end of the world. It sucks, but you took a gamble because housing prices were going up and up and everybody but you was getting rich but you... and now the bubble's burst.
The US is a strong country and we can survive all of these things. The world is not coming to an end. The sky is not falling.
Thank you, but I'll save my pity for a bunch of children who died when their school's clasped after the earthquake in China or other people who actually deserve it.
You know... the REAL question is why was the figure so low?
The RIAA went after AllofMP3.com for 1.6 trillion (with a T). And here the MPAA could only get a 110 million judgment? What's wrong with them? The MPAA has only 1/15000 of the muscle of the RIAA??? Pishya, amateurs....
We're only talking about 10000 sq mile solar farms here... and you want to jump to the extreme scenario of conserving energy??? Come-on man, try to keep this conversation in the realm of reality here!
Hm... ok. I am an engineer and I am responsible for "actually delivering those engineers that can build something" and one general truth of engineers is that they are strange people. It's rare to find a well rounded engineer and it's a fact of life that if you're responsible for getting results you have to be willing to accept a much wider array of people types in order to get the job done.
I mean, how judgmental do you have to be to say "You must be a sucky engineer because you built a Robe Goldberg machine instead of sitting in your dorm room watching TV"?
Stand out, be different, build something for the hell of it, but don't be sucked into the mundane crap that is our bland mind-numbing mass marketing culture.
Wow... That's an unbelievability insane statement. Have you ever been to engineering school? Do you know what an engineer does? Engineering is the PRACTICAL use of scientific knowledge. You can learn all the equations in the world but until you actually apply them to BUILD something it's worthless crap filling your mind. You might as well close your school books and go home.
There is no better application in school than doing a project similar to this. Robot building projects and the like were the best thing I ever did in collage and the skills I learned doing them I still carry with me today.
You're crazy to think that this was a waste of time and that we should more emulate China and India with rote memorization of equations. Give me an engineer who can build something any day of the week.
i don't think that's true at all. The higher the frequency the more the sound waves bounce off of things and the harder it is to locate the direction of the sound. A high pitch sounds is very hard to locate directionally especially if it's in an enclosed room with lots of surfaces to bounce off of.
You know... i hate this mentality. I *like* people who leave their wireless routers open. I think they're friendly and good-neighborly and i think this attitude screws that all to hell. IANAL, but to the best of my legal knowledge you have almost no liability over someone else using your wireless *despite* what the RIAA says. Remember, they sue you becuase your IP address is being used, but if they don't find any corroborating evidence on your computer that you've violated copyright then they have nothing.
The more you *bow* to the government and let them change your behavior even when what you're doing is not illegal, the more power you give them. I don't know how we let things get to this state in our country when it comes to wireless access.
I *want* people to leave their wireless access open, and I *don't* want people to feel that even though they're not doing something illegal they have to change their behavior because the police or other government folks are trying to push us into line.
Why is it that YOU guys, you/.'ers don't seem to feel the same way???
ok... i don't get it. Why does Delegate LeRoy E. Myers Jr. give a rats ass?
Why has our government been involved in this issue so much?
let me put it this way... what if i *want* to allow my neighbors to use my wireless access point? I consider it being polite and friendly, why is my neighbor guilty of a crime? (I'm always happy when I'm someplace I want to use the internet and I find an open router so I want to return the favor.)
Now the question is, why does LeRoy care?
The only thing my only thing my mildly paranoid brain comes up with is that they want to track you on the internet. Truly, is there any other reason? This is about as tame as tame gets when it comes to "crimes". Nearly victim-less.
Oh... i came up with one more reason, to force you to get cell phone based wireless internet. If everybody was friendly with their internet access points then the need for you to buy a cell based wireless internet account would be significantly reduced. (actually this sounds much more likely. I bet Leroy has a nice fat campaign contribution from AT&T in his bank account?)
I hear what you're saying, but I think you're incorrect. When people go out and put down the money for "the entertainment system", MOST people aren't really very techno literate and they buy what's hot and what the sales person recommends. Everybody buying one of these systems today will be sold on the sales pitch that "blue ray won the format wars and therefore you're investing in the future when you buy this player".
You think the sales person who sold them a $1-2k plasma and a $1k sound system will tell them "aw, i'm sure you won't notice the difference between 720p and 1080p. No need to spend an extra $300 right now" Hell no.
$200 is not a lot to pay for a HD player. Have you seen what plasma TV's are going for? You think people will plop down $1-4k on a big screen HD ready plasma TV and squirm at $200?!
I don't think you understand this market. The sub $200 is when low income people buy players whereas middle income and high income people will adopt way before that point. There are a lot of people in the "middle income" bracket who have $5k entertainment setups and they won't have a problem with $200.
Shush. Apple has a huge percentage of market share of smart phones with screen sizes larger than 4" and that have dual touch input and and are made by companies that start with the letter "A". H U G E!
As the government tries more and more to clamp down on the internet and bandwidth becomes more and more free OR the government successfully forces us to go to this "Second" internet (let's call this "surveillance net"), people will come up with a new "freenet" to lay on top of this new freedom restricting internet.
All it would take would be an open source program protocol that would pass information over the "surveillance net" by encoding the data, chopping it up, and passing it through multiple nodes (think parallel, not serial distribution) before it gets to the recipient. That way nobody (i.e. government) at any single node would be able to tell what data was being passed or even to who. This would successfully nuke any second internet benefits. With this expectation of a free internet that the general masses have grown to expect, I think you'd get a large percentage of people who were willing to be freenet nodes. (you can of course try to mandate this like bittorrent nodes where you have to be a node on the freenet in order to use the freenet).
I think all this really requires is that bandwidth be cheap and a push by the government to clap down on internet freedoms. I think we'd very quickly see a counter-revolution and open source developers would create the freenet.
yeah... this is an interesting idea and all... but don't you think that if we had a government that would make laws for public benefit, when it came to copyright, that they would just write a law to change the copyright time to 20 yrs or something beneficial to society?
The reality is that we have a corrupt form of government in which money can buy laws. Since the "public domain" has no money it will therefore get screwed every single time.
Don't get me wrong, I don't want to take the wind out of anyone's sails. I would LOVE to see copyright reform (and Patent reform), but this seems like a classic case of putting the cart ahead of the horse. What's the idea here, that the thought of more tax money would encourage the government to act? That has to be enough money to counter the lobbyist's money. I wonder what the exchange rate is? An extra 100 million in taxes is equal to how much in re-election money? Now that would be a question I'd love to see research on.
"Well that is the point of the exercise here, NSF trying to get money from Congress. But its more of an aspirational list of goals and the real problem is that the feedback system is out of whack. "
you know.... the NSF's idea of "securing the internet" scares the shit out of me and is actually the exact opposite of what my definition is for the said task. So frankly, the money that they're trying to get from congress is, IMHO, not forward progress.
Stop stop stop stop stop. What is all this bullshit? Patents are there to keep someone from STEALING someone else's idea. If people are independently developing the same idea over and over and over and nobody is stealing anything from anybody, then patents are worthless.
This arguing that creators of software or engineering or other have to jump through extra hoops just so they don't step where someone else may have stepped once before is stupid. That adds NO value to the economy and NO value to economics in general. THIS is why engineers and software designers get pissed off about patents! There is no value added.
The whole point is to create a level playing field where someone who invents something truly revolutionary can make money off it without some "big company" copying the idea. As soon as no one is copying from anyone, patents should go away, and in NONE of these cases is anyone actually saying "he stole that idea from me", it's only "I thought of it first... he didn't know about me thinking about it first... he didn't copy my idea... hell, I didn't even do shit with my idea but file a piece of paper on it... but still i should get a pile of cash for all of HIS hard work since he managed to make a real fucking working ass product out of it that was actually useful while all i did was sit on my ass!".
Slashdot Mirror
so what i want to know is: what does this mean for Microsoft? They are the most prolific "licenser's" of software out there... does this mean that all XP "licenses" are now transferable without any push back from MS? I mean, if they deny us activation we can sue them and win?
So what about company site licenses? Does it work for that? What are the restrictions here? For example, can I buy a crap load of site licenses and resell them?
d
which is actually the interesting part... The more a government pushes monitoring the internet, the more people people will use things like "freenet" for pirating and just a big "FU" to the government. As the use of a "freenet" type of thing increases, the less suspicious encrypted traffic becomes becuase it will be so much more common.
:que dramatic music)
I predict that it'll be a funny side effect of trying to do complete citizen monitoring is that you'll be LESS able to monitor the people the government claims it's trying to monitor. (insert spooky voice: "the terrorists"
This is of course, is all bullshit. With the exponentially rising number of bits that are being shoved around the internet these days, it would be trivially easy to hide terrorist instructions in on a bit torrent DL, a usenet post, a youtube video, or a flickr picture. And if you're a really creative terrorist you can even use encryption!
This is all a load of shit and I for one can't believe the UK is actually surpassing the US the "2008 Most Fucked Up Government" award. Have you guys seen what's been happening to the republican assholes who've been running our government? You should do the same with the ruling party over there, except in both cases I think we really should get out the tar and feathers and give them a proper going away party. (BTW, any democrats who are supporting this bullshit in the US should also be tossed out on their asses! I'm not partisan when it comes to spying on your own fucking citizens!)
d
he was only able to keep them convinced for around 12 months....
d
That's true that there is more baggage associated with Nuclear power than with most other power types, however I think we're anti-nuclear power becuase we *can* be anti nuclear. If cheap oil/coal went away I believe we'd change our outlook on nuclear power well before we turned down the air-conditioner or started riding bikes around town.
The fact of he matter is we DO have nuclear power plants and once their built people just learn to live with them. Just becuase we can't get enough political willpower to build more today doesn't mean that it'll never happen. Political will is something that changes with economics too.
don
Well written reply.
I'm going to focus on the Solar discussion because I find that the most interesting and the only one where we can really argue with facts instead of stories.
When I originally wrote my reply I did a search on google and didn't see anything, but punching in YOUR search phrase I get the articles you mentioned. Typically stuff like "the US never landed on the moon" is championed by a few sights pretty heavily, so I figured the first hit would be your strongest advocate. I'll summarize it:
* This is information from a study done in in 1989 theorizing what 1994 technology would be like
* They calculated that using 1989 technolgoy they would get an energy payback of 6.4 years
* Using what they theorized was 1994 technology they would get an energy payback of 3.1 years
* The author is summarizing their study and points out some things he thinks they missed, inverters and the like, but these will only capture a percentage of the power generated so at worst it will take a percentage longer to recapture the energy.
So even in the TOP search item doesn't make the claim that it takes "more energy to create a solar cell than you can EVER get out of the life of the cell" and my quick scan didn't show any others that advocated that.
Ok, so your statement does appear to be bullshit, but i'm curious what more modern numbers are for energy usage, because 6 years is a huge amount of time and if is still that high I could be convinced your statement wasn't far from the truth!
In looking through some other webpages I found a department of energy webpage provides some really good information.
They provide several different technologies and give the Energy Pay Back Time (EPBT) of each. The times range from 2.7 years to 1.0 years for energy pay back using 2004 and 2005 numbers.
There are also some startups that say they're able to produce photovolatics amazingly cheep (which also translates to low energy), but I'll believe that when I see it.
The DPoE webpage is here: http://www1.eere.energy.gov/solar/pv_basics.html
don
Wow... talk about negative.
first off, there are plenty of solutions to the "energy crisis". What type of make believe fiticious crap world are we living in where if economics force us to change it's the End Of The World.
1. Solution #1 - switch to an alternate form of energy. There are a ton of options. The last time I checked the sun was still shining and we can still get power from it. Be it solar, wind, or nuclear, there are a ton of options. Why don't we do this? Because the economics don't say we should. Oil is still cheap, but The *second* oil becomes too expensive, there will be a ton of alternate energy sources available to tap. The only reason we don't do it is becuase oil is STILL too cheap.
2. We can also *gasp* change the way we live. Shit, I know i waste plenty of energy. Heating air conditioning... hot water in the mornings, driving to work, pure wastage. How can I get away with wasting energy? Simple, it's cheap. it's less than 5% of my total income so I don't give a crap. I pay roughly 6x that on mortgage. Before the world falls apart, I'm sure we can adjust the way we live at least a tiny bit. But OMG, you may have to sell you SUV and buy a geo metro. Truely the end of the world.
BTW, I'd love to see soemthing backing up that statement about you needing more energy to create a solar panel than all the energy you will ever get out of it. Smells like slanted anti-alternative-energy BS to me, but if you got it from another article or source I'd be interested hearing their twisted logic OR I could even learn something and find out I'm wrong, but i highly doubt it on this issue. Perhaps you're thinking of Ethonal. Either way, source please.
The mortgage crisis.. I guess I don't give a shit. There aren't any losers here. You have gready companies who sold a lot of mortgages when times were good never considering that things may turn south because that might impact their current earnings portfolio. If some of them go belly up its no big shakes to me. I frankly think a few of them SHOULD be put out of business becuase if there was anyone in this mess who was at fault, it was them.
Then you have greedy homeowners who took crazy ass loans or "no paperwork required" loans. Look, buying a house is easily the single biggest investment of your life. If you don't run a few numbers through excel and say "does this make sense" then I don't really feel a lot of pity for you when you can't afford your house. It most likely means you overbought when you got the house (which most people do). But now you've lost your gamble so you have to declare bankruptcy and have to wait 7 years before you buy another house. It's not the end of the world. It sucks, but you took a gamble because housing prices were going up and up and everybody but you was getting rich but you... and now the bubble's burst.
The US is a strong country and we can survive all of these things. The world is not coming to an end. The sky is not falling.
Thank you, but I'll save my pity for a bunch of children who died when their school's clasped after the earthquake in China or other people who actually deserve it.
don
They're awesome! I would so buy one if I actually read books.
d
You know... the REAL question is why was the figure so low?
The RIAA went after AllofMP3.com for 1.6 trillion (with a T). And here the MPAA could only get a 110 million judgment? What's wrong with them? The MPAA has only 1/15000 of the muscle of the RIAA??? Pishya, amateurs....
d
Welcome to the religion-ization of science.
Brought to you by the "you-can-pry-my-SUV-from-my-cold-dead-fingers" institute for the preservation of the status quo.
Wake me when an actual conversation starts...
d
Will you guys KNOCK IT OFF! That guy was trying very hard to be a naysayer so quit trying to ruin his buzz.
Show some courtesy.
d
We're only talking about 10000 sq mile solar farms here... and you want to jump to the extreme scenario of conserving energy??? Come-on man, try to keep this conversation in the realm of reality here!
d
Hm... ok. I am an engineer and I am responsible for "actually delivering those engineers that can build something" and one general truth of engineers is that they are strange people. It's rare to find a well rounded engineer and it's a fact of life that if you're responsible for getting results you have to be willing to accept a much wider array of people types in order to get the job done.
I mean, how judgmental do you have to be to say "You must be a sucky engineer because you built a Robe Goldberg machine instead of sitting in your dorm room watching TV"?
Stand out, be different, build something for the hell of it, but don't be sucked into the mundane crap that is our bland mind-numbing mass marketing culture.
d
Wow... That's an unbelievability insane statement. Have you ever been to engineering school? Do you know what an engineer does? Engineering is the PRACTICAL use of scientific knowledge. You can learn all the equations in the world but until you actually apply them to BUILD something it's worthless crap filling your mind. You might as well close your school books and go home.
There is no better application in school than doing a project similar to this. Robot building projects and the like were the best thing I ever did in collage and the skills I learned doing them I still carry with me today.
You're crazy to think that this was a waste of time and that we should more emulate China and India with rote memorization of equations. Give me an engineer who can build something any day of the week.
d
i don't think that's true at all. The higher the frequency the more the sound waves bounce off of things and the harder it is to locate the direction of the sound. A high pitch sounds is very hard to locate directionally especially if it's in an enclosed room with lots of surfaces to bounce off of.
don
You know... i hate this mentality. I *like* people who leave their wireless routers open. I think they're friendly and good-neighborly and i think this attitude screws that all to hell. IANAL, but to the best of my legal knowledge you have almost no liability over someone else using your wireless *despite* what the RIAA says. Remember, they sue you becuase your IP address is being used, but if they don't find any corroborating evidence on your computer that you've violated copyright then they have nothing.
/.'ers don't seem to feel the same way???
The more you *bow* to the government and let them change your behavior even when what you're doing is not illegal, the more power you give them. I don't know how we let things get to this state in our country when it comes to wireless access.
I *want* people to leave their wireless access open, and I *don't* want people to feel that even though they're not doing something illegal they have to change their behavior because the police or other government folks are trying to push us into line.
Why is it that YOU guys, you
d
sry, "moTivation"
Firefox doesn't seem to catch spelling errors in subject lines. Weird.
d
ok... i don't get it. Why does Delegate LeRoy E. Myers Jr. give a rats ass?
Why has our government been involved in this issue so much?
let me put it this way... what if i *want* to allow my neighbors to use my wireless access point? I consider it being polite and friendly, why is my neighbor guilty of a crime? (I'm always happy when I'm someplace I want to use the internet and I find an open router so I want to return the favor.)
Now the question is, why does LeRoy care?
The only thing my only thing my mildly paranoid brain comes up with is that they want to track you on the internet. Truly, is there any other reason? This is about as tame as tame gets when it comes to "crimes". Nearly victim-less.
Oh... i came up with one more reason, to force you to get cell phone based wireless internet. If everybody was friendly with their internet access points then the need for you to buy a cell based wireless internet account would be significantly reduced. (actually this sounds much more likely. I bet Leroy has a nice fat campaign contribution from AT&T in his bank account?)
d
I hear what you're saying, but I think you're incorrect. When people go out and put down the money for "the entertainment system", MOST people aren't really very techno literate and they buy what's hot and what the sales person recommends. Everybody buying one of these systems today will be sold on the sales pitch that "blue ray won the format wars and therefore you're investing in the future when you buy this player".
You think the sales person who sold them a $1-2k plasma and a $1k sound system will tell them "aw, i'm sure you won't notice the difference between 720p and 1080p. No need to spend an extra $300 right now" Hell no.
d
$200 is not a lot to pay for a HD player. Have you seen what plasma TV's are going for? You think people will plop down $1-4k on a big screen HD ready plasma TV and squirm at $200?!
I don't think you understand this market. The sub $200 is when low income people buy players whereas middle income and high income people will adopt way before that point. There are a lot of people in the "middle income" bracket who have $5k entertainment setups and they won't have a problem with $200.
d
Shush. Apple has a huge percentage of market share of smart phones with screen sizes larger than 4" and that have dual touch input and and are made by companies that start with the letter "A". H U G E!
(maybe even greater than 6.5%!)
d
Here's my prediction:
As the government tries more and more to clamp down on the internet and bandwidth becomes more and more free OR the government successfully forces us to go to this "Second" internet (let's call this "surveillance net"), people will come up with a new "freenet" to lay on top of this new freedom restricting internet.
All it would take would be an open source program protocol that would pass information over the "surveillance net" by encoding the data, chopping it up, and passing it through multiple nodes (think parallel, not serial distribution) before it gets to the recipient. That way nobody (i.e. government) at any single node would be able to tell what data was being passed or even to who. This would successfully nuke any second internet benefits. With this expectation of a free internet that the general masses have grown to expect, I think you'd get a large percentage of people who were willing to be freenet nodes. (you can of course try to mandate this like bittorrent nodes where you have to be a node on the freenet in order to use the freenet).
I think all this really requires is that bandwidth be cheap and a push by the government to clap down on internet freedoms. I think we'd very quickly see a counter-revolution and open source developers would create the freenet.
d
yeah... this is an interesting idea and all... but don't you think that if we had a government that would make laws for public benefit, when it came to copyright, that they would just write a law to change the copyright time to 20 yrs or something beneficial to society?
The reality is that we have a corrupt form of government in which money can buy laws. Since the "public domain" has no money it will therefore get screwed every single time.
Don't get me wrong, I don't want to take the wind out of anyone's sails. I would LOVE to see copyright reform (and Patent reform), but this seems like a classic case of putting the cart ahead of the horse. What's the idea here, that the thought of more tax money would encourage the government to act? That has to be enough money to counter the lobbyist's money. I wonder what the exchange rate is? An extra 100 million in taxes is equal to how much in re-election money? Now that would be a question I'd love to see research on.
d
Ok... mod me stupid.
I read NSF and heard "NSA".
me - dumbshit
"Well that is the point of the exercise here, NSF trying to get money from Congress. But its more of an aspirational list of goals and the real problem is that the feedback system is out of whack. "
you know.... the NSF's idea of "securing the internet" scares the shit out of me and is actually the exact opposite of what my definition is for the said task. So frankly, the money that they're trying to get from congress is, IMHO, not forward progress.
d
Stop stop stop stop stop. What is all this bullshit? Patents are there to keep someone from STEALING someone else's idea. If people are independently developing the same idea over and over and over and nobody is stealing anything from anybody, then patents are worthless.
This arguing that creators of software or engineering or other have to jump through extra hoops just so they don't step where someone else may have stepped once before is stupid. That adds NO value to the economy and NO value to economics in general. THIS is why engineers and software designers get pissed off about patents! There is no value added.
The whole point is to create a level playing field where someone who invents something truly revolutionary can make money off it without some "big company" copying the idea. As soon as no one is copying from anyone, patents should go away, and in NONE of these cases is anyone actually saying "he stole that idea from me", it's only "I thought of it first... he didn't know about me thinking about it first... he didn't copy my idea... hell, I didn't even do shit with my idea but file a piece of paper on it... but still i should get a pile of cash for all of HIS hard work since he managed to make a real fucking working ass product out of it that was actually useful while all i did was sit on my ass!".
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