Read your links. All the way down. A Nobel doesn't exactly make a man God. And I have trouble accepting the idea that his bred semi-dwarf grains single-handedly saved a billion people. There's a lot more that goes into such programs when they succeed than simply giving them a new breed of rice or wheat. Witness the trouble his programs have in Africa.
Do you know the difference between genetic editing and breeding, BTW? I'd tell you to go read up on why Japan keeps genetically modified soy and rice out of the country, but can you read Japanese?
Selective breeding can be a good thing or a bad thing. But letting edited genes out into the wild is just asking for trouble. I mean, can you imagine doing a binary edit on a running OS that you don't have source code for, that you've just reverse engineered parts of, and then putting the OS on the web, live, outside a firewall, and unsupervised?
Economics of scale only works when you take individuals out of the picture. What is so hard to understand about that? Yeah, when Model Ts were available in any color the customer wanted, as long as it was black, mass production made a lot more sense.
But food, you're dealing with individuals -- different races, different climates, different customs, different preferences, etc. Some people get along okay on wheat. Some are allergic to wheat. Some do well on rice. People like me need vitamin B supplements occasionally or even regular when on a steady diet of rice. If I'm not careful, I can easily get to the point where I can't metabolize what I'm eating, and I can't maintain weight, and I feel like I'm starving (headaches, gnawing pains in the stomach, etc.) even though I'm averaging well over 3000 kcal a day.
The traditional local diet and the people who live in a place are generally tuned to each other. Try overlaying a monoculture staple grain on that and people may do well for a little while, but unless they find some way to adjust, it starts making them as sick as not having enough food makes them.
But, no, it makes a lot more sense to move grains and other foods the shortest distances possible, and, while large combines might be useful in the big farms of the west (which I don't think should exist, but whatever), the farmers here in Japan use much smaller machines and, thank you very much, they are very efficient at producing a variety of breeds of rice. Small farms, small machines, very efficient. Not entirely problem-free, but it meshes well with the lifestyle and customs here.
Oh, and, yeah, where your Borlaug guy had his first great successes, South America, that's where my cousins are going to help people figure out how to grow their own again. And they are succeeding, bringing tiny villages up in the tops of mountains and in other out-of-the-way places back to life, in some cases helping them break the local economic dependence on coca and cannabis.
I'm not saying Borlaug is all bad, he worked with breeding more than editing, and that has its place. But it doesn't work everywhere.
If you only have quality of life on the weekends, I think you're missing out. You're also missing the point if you think I'm talking about subsistence farming. Technology can do lots of good things without being big.
Now that you mention it, healthy kids do have statistically fewer accidents, and take less damage when they do have accidents.
Setting up a savings account for emergency needs is one alternative to buying insurance, but, then, if you're paying out insurance premiums, it's that much harder to allocate money to it. It's also something of a gamble, true. You might end up needing the money before you've saved it.
Of course, you have to have a certain amount of self-discipline to keep your hands out of that money when the newest XBox or PlayStation or iPhone or whatever comes along.
The Japanese Postal Service sells a kind of insurance that basically turns into savings if you don't use it. It has some limitations, and tends to be bought in addition to the other, semi-compulsory health insurance.
(Either your company arranges the "social" insurance for you or have to buy the "National Insurance", which is more expensive. I'm not sure what the punishment for not having insurance is, besides having to pay full rate if you do need to go to the doc for some reason. Hmm. And employers are required to see that employees are insured, one way or another. The employer is required to foot half the premiums or something like that.)
First, your wage estimate is high for a large part of the world.
Second, it is not value for money. It's kind of like strip-mining -- cheap for now, and you hope you can get your golden parachute before the hidden costs catch up to your company..
It can actually be beneficial to society at large in some cases, however. Depends on how much of the technology being used gets transferred to the people doing the labor.
There is plenty of room on the earth for everyone to have enough land and access to water to live the way this guy suggests. There always has been.
No.
NO, NO, NO, there isn't.
sez yoo.
There's almost 7 Billion people living on planet earth, and without things like genetically modified crops and modern production equipment, we only would produce enough food to feed 4 Billion of them. You volunteering for suicide squad?
You drank the kool-aid, too, huh? (Monsanto's kool-aid, for starters.)
Genetically modified crops are the poorest crops there are in the kinds of nutrition that count for long-term health. And the production rates are temporary. Do some research, man.
Sorry, man, but the hard work of lots of other people, putting in long hard hours and working for a decent wage is what makes that guy's lifestyle possible.
Give me a break.
Seriously.
He buys feed from a feedlot - where do you think that comes from? Someone owns a multi-million dollar farm, with millions of dollars worth of silos, grain elevators, combines, tractors, trucks, milling machines, pipelines, augers, and packaging facilities to make that happen. Then, someone drives the feed in a diesel truck from the farm to the warehouse, where a multi-million dollar computer system tracks orders, shipping info, inventory, etc. Then, yet another truck takes it to the feedlot, where the feedlot employees work to stock it, manage the store, sell it to him, etc.
And you're going to tell me that's the only way to make feed grains?
And what do long hours have to do with anything? Are you under the impression that he doesn't work his own garden long hours or something?
Just inside that transaction, you have a farm with probably 20-30 employees and $20,000,000 worth of equipment, a trucking company with millions of dollars worth of trucks, and then you have to find the fuel for the trucks, which probably comes from Venezuela or Saudi Arabia, in a tanker, halfway across the globe, to be refined in a multi-trillion dollar facility into diesel fuel, which is then pumped or driven to gas stations for the truck to fuel up to carry the feed. The trucks need mechanics who have to go to school or have on-the-job training to know how to keep them operating. The oil companies hire Ph.D. Geologists and mechanical engineers to find oil and design oil rigs; their educations each cost $300,000 and can't be repaid on a $9000/yr salary.
And you're going to tell me that moving all that fuel and equipment is efficient?
The warehouse needs electricity that comes from a coal plant that uses coal mined in south africa and shipped across the globe to the plant, which has 100 employees who work round the clock, not to mention full time environmental techs to deal with government regulations. The warehouse also hires software companies or buys commercial software to manage orders and inventory, plus guys who drive forklifts and guys who repair the forklifts. The feedstore has 5 full time employees that handle inventory, stocking, sales, future capacity planning. The feedstore also needs electricity, this time it comes from a hydro-plant which employs 300 full time employees and an army of scientists and engineers and environmental impact researchers; the electrical company has a fleet of trucks that manage all the power poles and transformers that get the electricity to the feed store. Oh, and this year, the feedstore had to repave their parking lot, which involves getting asphalt, which is recycled concrete from other building projects mixed with tar mined out of the same places that the diesel fuel came from that's needed to bring the asphalt to the parking lot.
And you're going to tell me that's the only way to do that?
I have friends and relatives involved in re-educating people in third world countrie
That's the point where people start taking offense at RMS. He encourages that -- pressure politics.
I am not particularly offended. The author did not have to choose to publish his or her code, and society benefits more from the publishing, even if direct use requires reciprocation.
Moreover, the GPL has a lot in common with the original purpose of patents and copyrights. Lots of people think software needs something separate from either copyright or patent, and there it is: copyleft. Share, but retain an important degree of control.
So you choose your license by how much of what kind of control you want to maintain, really.
Is there a +1 stupid mod so we can expose ignorance for what it is?
I lived that way when I was single. Now we pay insurance regularly, etc. My kids get sick regularly. My wife is making herself sick. I'm watching this all go down.
In fifteen years, we've wasted more in insurance than it has saved us, plus whatever it will cost to fix my wife back up.
Me? I've got something that the neither the Japanese version of the AMA nor the AMA recognize. So no insurance covers it. I live with it, and I control it by eating right, as much as is possible in Japan. (Really hard to get good whole-wheat products and other such things that I need here, but somehow I keep finding alternatives when I need them.)
Insurance is just a lottery. It's a luxury neither individuals nor society can afford, in the end, unless we can learn how to quit using insurance as just another whip to keep everyone's noses to the keep-up-with-the-neighbors grindstone.
"If we all don't conform to consumerism the whole world will fall apart."
Don't recognize that one yet?
"If we all don't conform to *ism the whole world will fall apart."
Still having troubles reading that? Bigger hint. Replace the * with an arbitrary religion or philosophy from your list of religions and philosophies to hate.
Now that I've poisoned the well, let me explain.
There is plenty of room on the earth for everyone to have enough land and access to water to live the way this guy suggests. There always has been.
If you can't connect the dots from there, well, maybe I'll have more time to explain it some other day. But I've finally figured out something, and that is that if the other guy would quit competing so hard, I wouldn't need to compete so hard either. But if I keep scaling the competition up because he does, pretty soon it ends in the local equivalent of nuclear war.
I have several moves that beat his anytime -- my leg hits the table leg, my hand sweeps across the table when I lean back to think,...
or if the game is on the computer screen, there's always a plug to pull or a quick trip to the restroom that includes the circuit breaker box.
Adding rules to rules to make the magic works only as long as everyone is willing to play by the rules.
Thus, there are two elements to the "solution": (1) educate the employees so that they understand that copy/paste is not magically free of bad consequences, and (2) somehow inspire loyalty in the employees.
Anything else is a just a band-aid, and is more along the lines of trying to provide people with "proof" that it wasn't them. If you have to go to that, you've already gone past the real solutions, and so your company is going to get caught pretty soon, one way or another.
Well, the gpg (or pgp) partial solution is actually useful precisely because it is inconvenient enough to make people think twice before casually copy/pasting. Or it can be used in such a way, if you have trained your employees well enough to recognize the responsibilities of sharing information .
Disabling the context menu or the copy/print entries in the menu is a different kind of inconvenience, one which tends more to breed blind resistance more than awareness of responsibility.
You expect to make sense out of this from just one post in the middle of the conversation?
I can make sense of that post, I suppose, because I've gone through the GPL and related stuff for myself, to determine whether I wanted to use a free software or open software license, whether I wanted to use an existing one or roll my own, etc. (I end up using different licenses for different projects.)
So I suggest you do more research of the licenses themselves, and read more of the threads there, for starters.
In the post you link, they were discussing things they thought they should check on, and even whether they they thought it was worth checking. The current situation is that they found stuff, and you'll have to look for other (later) posts to find out what they found.
Oh, and, as I read it, they were talking about the bundling as being an issue if Diebold were to claim to be using the other license, not the GPL.
I guess they consider it a different room to talk in, so to speak. Talking at the firehose is like talking at the front curb near the fire hydrant. Talking here is putting it on the big screen in the convention center.
And you should never trust most of the people you have met, except in specific contexts.
And you should not really want anyone to trust you, except in specific contexts (in other words, where you have made contracts, whether explicit or implicit).
There are some emergency conditions when you have to override the above statements of fact (not rules, statements of fact), but, if you think about it, there is an implicit social contract that covers emergency cases. The rarity or commonality of the good Samaritan in a society is just a reflection on that society's penchant for breaking contracts, rather than evidence that trust does not require contracts. (There is an implicit social contract that we enter at birth, although there are some who make that contract out to be broader than it is.)
This whole business is at the center of what I have against Bill Gates and his crowd, and against Microsoft. The enabled the global ponzi schemes, if you think about it. (And we can rest assured, there will be more of them uncovered in the next year or so.)
Since we assume that the honorable judge is aware of the fundamental difference between moving the bits or waveforms of an electronic copy of a movie and moving the protein strands of a cartload of meat, I think it might be worth trying to see why she uses an analogy that would appear to indicate the opposite conclusion she appears to be trying to assert.
First, let's look closely at the meat.
When it is stolen, the molecules are gone. You can't get another copy of those molecules. So the store would appear to be out the wholesale price of the meat, plus some paperwork and time/wages for bringing meat in to replace it. If the meat is a specialty item, it may not be possible to replace it, and the store could be out the full potential sale price, as well. Also, since it takes finite time to bring the new order in, the store would be losing the sales that would have been while while the replacement meat is coming in.
If the meat is stolen to be sold, then the money of the sales not made is not only lost to the store, but is transferred to the pocket of the thief.
Of course, we should note that most stores have some insurance against theft of merchandise, so the actual loss would be initially less. The insurance premiums are likely to rise, as well. So, while there is not an infinite amount of replacement, there is replacement, but there are also costs.
Now, let's look at the movie.
In the case of the movie, since moving the actual merchandise is performed by copying from the data server, replacement bits are always available, at very minimal cost. The copying does not make the product in any way unavailable from the legitimate sellers, so there are no lost sales from unavailability. The only paperwork costs involved are such as the sellers, copyright holders, authors, etc., insist on. If they don't insist on suits and criminal charges, there isn't going to be much paperwork incurred, nor time/wages to handle the paperwork and re-stocking.
So, the only money that is lost to the legitimate sellers is that from sales which go to the "thief" instead. Now, as the sellers' association is quick to point out, the "thief" does not have to receive any actual money, as long as actual sales have been diverted away from the legitimate sellers.
In the case of the meat, the amount of diverted sales can be calculated to a reasonable upper limit. The legitimate seller could not have lost more sales than there was meat stolen.
The lower limit, of course, is zero.
We could imagine a court asking the store for records on how well the brand and type of meat which was stolen sold, I suppose, but then we also have to note that any unsold meat would have to be disposed of, and the thief has potentially relieved the store of that cost of disposal.
There is no way to calculate the upper limit in the case of the movie. That leaves us with a conundrum, and one that can't be resolved. We could ask the seller to prepare reports on expected sales vs. actual sales, but the vagueries of the market make any such report extremely susceptible to argument. Popularity charts go up and down without any real logic, much though the producers of commercial pop music want to think they have some magic success formula. We really are talking about superstition here.
One very potent argument is the advertising value of the illegitimate distribution channel. It is known that good art actually generally benefits from the illegitimate channel, because people who would buy the physical product will buy it anyway to support the artist. The only art which does not benefit from the illegitimate channel is bad art.
Now, we all here know these arguments. I find it hard to believe that a modern judge could fail to be aware of these arguments. Is there a possibility that the judge is priming the appeals process with ironic opinion? Maybe to make it obvious to the appropriate court that the law in question is bad?
That's not how I read the article. In fact, if I remember the article correctly, it said something to the effect that, under the new law, they don't have to show any evidence of intent to sell.
The old law, they did have to prove something, and that was why the RIAA wanted to change the law.
Before the Criminal Code amendment, the Crown had to prove a suspect was intending to distribute an illegally recorded film before action could be taken under copyright laws.
Setting aside for a moment what the law is supposed to do, we must recognize that it does reflect the common morality.
Two hundred years ago, the common view of the world was a lot more dog-eat-dog than it is now. Malthus was an optimist. Actually, Malthus is still an optimist, but the misinterpretation was considered optimistic back then. There was a prevailing opinion that the only way a person could have a reasonable standard of living was on the back of at least a few someone else's slave labor. Even the guys on the bottom accepted that idea to a certain extent. (Speaking from a "western" point of view, since we are talking about western laws. The moralities and laws of the people that were imported to be the new bottom rung didn't count, which, of course, makes the slave trade that much more evil.)
The revolutionary concept was that we didn't have to be at war with everyone else to survive. That we didn't have to oppress others to have something good of our own. And we've forgotten that concept.
And this law, frankly, is stark evidence that we have forgotten it.
Your opinion of what the guy was up to is your opinion. Did you get far enough in TFriendlyA to read that they prosecution did not even attempt to show intent? That there was no record of a similar past offense?
I used to carry a video recorder with me all sorts of strange places -- taking pictures of different places in Japan to send home to the folks. That lasted about a half a year before I realized that maybe some of the people around me were not exactly welcoming the sight of the video recorder. In particular, there are a number of moral issues in recording school events.
The duct tape on the indicator LEDs? Well, if it was pre-meditated for whatever purpose, sure, he's probably going to think about that.
But that still does not say that he was going to do more than, for instance, take it home and watch it again, maybe with his buddies, maybe with his family, maybe by himself. You might say that theorizing a desire to critique the movie for a college literature class would be presenting a strawman argument. (Maybe he's trying to get a degree and get off disability?) But, from the information we have, we don't know that he wasn't.
You can form your own opinions, you can draw your own conclusions. But, for me, innocent until proven guilty is as much about not requiring the law to uphold bad logic as it is about being nice. And I guess I'll have to say this, sure, we don't need more proof that he recorded the stuff. But then saying that we might as well have proof that he intended to make money from distributing is a huge jump.
Just like saying that money made by those who pirate copyrighted works necessarily translates to any kind of a direct loss to the owners of the copyrights, much less the authors of said works, is a huge jump.
If a pirated work is represented as an original, that is a criminal offense against the purchaser of the pirated work. I'll grant that. And there have been some cases where systematic pirating has done more damage in lost sales than it made up in advertising. China, in particular, has a bad record on that score. That is to say, some importers in China have a bad record there.
But this "theft of billions" concept is pure wishful thinking, and the fact that it poisons us to the point we accept this kind of illogical law should give us pause.
Yeah, society is sick when so many people are thinking, "But he shouldn't have been..." instead of "Why can't the theatre just confiscate the tape, eject him from the theatre, and bar him from coming back?
I sort of agree with you, except for a few things.
I have other my own reasons to doubt the dating systems in use in science more than I doubt the dates in the Bible.
There are a number of internal inconsistencies in the Bible, as well, so I don't take either system as absolute fact. Two separate hypotheses for two separate contexts, and I hope, someday, probably after I've died and been resurrected, to find out the real story. For now, when I'm doing science, I work within the framework of the group of scientists I'm working with, and when I do religion, I work within the framework of the religions of the people I'm working with, as much as possible. Creates less confusion.
I am sure that all races of humans must be included as children of Adam. That would seem to make Adam the first man, but I'm not going to get too hung up on that issue.
Simians, I'm not sure how they fit in, we have to treat all living things with more respect. Us vs. them just doesn't work.
Slashdot Mirror
One other problem in the midwest would be the availability of water.
I think that would be a bigger problem than the level differences, even if level differences really were a problem.
Flat is relative, and, as someone noted elsewhere, it doesn't take that much elevation difference.
But a small bank of electrochemical batteries in addition might be useful to cover response time.
Read your links. All the way down. A Nobel doesn't exactly make a man God. And I have trouble accepting the idea that his bred semi-dwarf grains single-handedly saved a billion people. There's a lot more that goes into such programs when they succeed than simply giving them a new breed of rice or wheat. Witness the trouble his programs have in Africa.
Do you know the difference between genetic editing and breeding, BTW? I'd tell you to go read up on why Japan keeps genetically modified soy and rice out of the country, but can you read Japanese?
Selective breeding can be a good thing or a bad thing. But letting edited genes out into the wild is just asking for trouble. I mean, can you imagine doing a binary edit on a running OS that you don't have source code for, that you've just reverse engineered parts of, and then putting the OS on the web, live, outside a firewall, and unsupervised?
Economics of scale only works when you take individuals out of the picture. What is so hard to understand about that? Yeah, when Model Ts were available in any color the customer wanted, as long as it was black, mass production made a lot more sense.
But food, you're dealing with individuals -- different races, different climates, different customs, different preferences, etc. Some people get along okay on wheat. Some are allergic to wheat. Some do well on rice. People like me need vitamin B supplements occasionally or even regular when on a steady diet of rice. If I'm not careful, I can easily get to the point where I can't metabolize what I'm eating, and I can't maintain weight, and I feel like I'm starving (headaches, gnawing pains in the stomach, etc.) even though I'm averaging well over 3000 kcal a day.
The traditional local diet and the people who live in a place are generally tuned to each other. Try overlaying a monoculture staple grain on that and people may do well for a little while, but unless they find some way to adjust, it starts making them as sick as not having enough food makes them.
But, no, it makes a lot more sense to move grains and other foods the shortest distances possible, and, while large combines might be useful in the big farms of the west (which I don't think should exist, but whatever), the farmers here in Japan use much smaller machines and, thank you very much, they are very efficient at producing a variety of breeds of rice. Small farms, small machines, very efficient. Not entirely problem-free, but it meshes well with the lifestyle and customs here.
Oh, and, yeah, where your Borlaug guy had his first great successes, South America, that's where my cousins are going to help people figure out how to grow their own again. And they are succeeding, bringing tiny villages up in the tops of mountains and in other out-of-the-way places back to life, in some cases helping them break the local economic dependence on coca and cannabis.
I'm not saying Borlaug is all bad, he worked with breeding more than editing, and that has its place. But it doesn't work everywhere.
If you only have quality of life on the weekends, I think you're missing out. You're also missing the point if you think I'm talking about subsistence farming. Technology can do lots of good things without being big.
Now that you mention it, healthy kids do have statistically fewer accidents, and take less damage when they do have accidents.
Setting up a savings account for emergency needs is one alternative to buying insurance, but, then, if you're paying out insurance premiums, it's that much harder to allocate money to it. It's also something of a gamble, true. You might end up needing the money before you've saved it.
Of course, you have to have a certain amount of self-discipline to keep your hands out of that money when the newest XBox or PlayStation or iPhone or whatever comes along.
The Japanese Postal Service sells a kind of insurance that basically turns into savings if you don't use it. It has some limitations, and tends to be bought in addition to the other, semi-compulsory health insurance.
(Either your company arranges the "social" insurance for you or have to buy the "National Insurance", which is more expensive. I'm not sure what the punishment for not having insurance is, besides having to pay full rate if you do need to go to the doc for some reason. Hmm. And employers are required to see that employees are insured, one way or another. The employer is required to foot half the premiums or something like that.)
First, your wage estimate is high for a large part of the world.
Second, it is not value for money. It's kind of like strip-mining -- cheap for now, and you hope you can get your golden parachute before the hidden costs catch up to your company..
It can actually be beneficial to society at large in some cases, however. Depends on how much of the technology being used gets transferred to the people doing the labor.
The gift that keeps on taking?
There is plenty of room on the earth for everyone to have enough land and access to water to live the way this guy suggests. There always has been.
No.
NO, NO, NO, there isn't.
sez yoo.
There's almost 7 Billion people living on planet earth, and without things like genetically modified crops and modern production equipment, we only would produce enough food to feed 4 Billion of them. You volunteering for suicide squad?
You drank the kool-aid, too, huh? (Monsanto's kool-aid, for starters.)
Genetically modified crops are the poorest crops there are in the kinds of nutrition that count for long-term health. And the production rates are temporary. Do some research, man.
Sorry, man, but the hard work of lots of other people, putting in long hard hours and working for a decent wage is what makes that guy's lifestyle possible.
Give me a break.
Seriously.
He buys feed from a feedlot - where do you think that comes from? Someone owns a multi-million dollar farm, with millions of dollars worth of silos, grain elevators, combines, tractors, trucks, milling machines, pipelines, augers, and packaging facilities to make that happen. Then, someone drives the feed in a diesel truck from the farm to the warehouse, where a multi-million dollar computer system tracks orders, shipping info, inventory, etc. Then, yet another truck takes it to the feedlot, where the feedlot employees work to stock it, manage the store, sell it to him, etc.
And you're going to tell me that's the only way to make feed grains?
And what do long hours have to do with anything? Are you under the impression that he doesn't work his own garden long hours or something?
Just inside that transaction, you have a farm with probably 20-30 employees and $20,000,000 worth of equipment, a trucking company with millions of dollars worth of trucks, and then you have to find the fuel for the trucks, which probably comes from Venezuela or Saudi Arabia, in a tanker, halfway across the globe, to be refined in a multi-trillion dollar facility into diesel fuel, which is then pumped or driven to gas stations for the truck to fuel up to carry the feed. The trucks need mechanics who have to go to school or have on-the-job training to know how to keep them operating. The oil companies hire Ph.D. Geologists and mechanical engineers to find oil and design oil rigs; their educations each cost $300,000 and can't be repaid on a $9000/yr salary.
And you're going to tell me that moving all that fuel and equipment is efficient?
The warehouse needs electricity that comes from a coal plant that uses coal mined in south africa and shipped across the globe to the plant, which has 100 employees who work round the clock, not to mention full time environmental techs to deal with government regulations. The warehouse also hires software companies or buys commercial software to manage orders and inventory, plus guys who drive forklifts and guys who repair the forklifts. The feedstore has 5 full time employees that handle inventory, stocking, sales, future capacity planning. The feedstore also needs electricity, this time it comes from a hydro-plant which employs 300 full time employees and an army of scientists and engineers and environmental impact researchers; the electrical company has a fleet of trucks that manage all the power poles and transformers that get the electricity to the feed store. Oh, and this year, the feedstore had to repave their parking lot, which involves getting asphalt, which is recycled concrete from other building projects mixed with tar mined out of the same places that the diesel fuel came from that's needed to bring the asphalt to the parking lot.
And you're going to tell me that's the only way to do that?
I have friends and relatives involved in re-educating people in third world countrie
That's the point where people start taking offense at RMS. He encourages that -- pressure politics.
I am not particularly offended. The author did not have to choose to publish his or her code, and society benefits more from the publishing, even if direct use requires reciprocation.
Moreover, the GPL has a lot in common with the original purpose of patents and copyrights. Lots of people think software needs something separate from either copyright or patent, and there it is: copyleft. Share, but retain an important degree of control.
So you choose your license by how much of what kind of control you want to maintain, really.
Does that help?
Is there a +1 stupid mod so we can expose ignorance for what it is?
I lived that way when I was single. Now we pay insurance regularly, etc. My kids get sick regularly. My wife is making herself sick. I'm watching this all go down.
In fifteen years, we've wasted more in insurance than it has saved us, plus whatever it will cost to fix my wife back up.
Me? I've got something that the neither the Japanese version of the AMA nor the AMA recognize. So no insurance covers it. I live with it, and I control it by eating right, as much as is possible in Japan. (Really hard to get good whole-wheat products and other such things that I need here, but somehow I keep finding alternatives when I need them.)
Insurance is just a lottery. It's a luxury neither individuals nor society can afford, in the end, unless we can learn how to quit using insurance as just another whip to keep everyone's noses to the keep-up-with-the-neighbors grindstone.
"If we all don't conform to consumerism the whole world will fall apart."
Don't recognize that one yet?
"If we all don't conform to *ism the whole world will fall apart."
Still having troubles reading that? Bigger hint. Replace the * with an arbitrary religion or philosophy from your list of religions and philosophies to hate.
Now that I've poisoned the well, let me explain.
There is plenty of room on the earth for everyone to have enough land and access to water to live the way this guy suggests. There always has been.
If you can't connect the dots from there, well, maybe I'll have more time to explain it some other day. But I've finally figured out something, and that is that if the other guy would quit competing so hard, I wouldn't need to compete so hard either. But if I keep scaling the competition up because he does, pretty soon it ends in the local equivalent of nuclear war.
Bill Gates claims to be a good chess player.
I have several moves that beat his anytime -- my leg hits the table leg, my hand sweeps across the table when I lean back to think, ...
or if the game is on the computer screen, there's always a plug to pull or a quick trip to the restroom that includes the circuit breaker box.
Adding rules to rules to make the magic works only as long as everyone is willing to play by the rules.
Thus, there are two elements to the "solution": (1) educate the employees so that they understand that copy/paste is not magically free of bad consequences, and (2) somehow inspire loyalty in the employees.
Anything else is a just a band-aid, and is more along the lines of trying to provide people with "proof" that it wasn't them. If you have to go to that, you've already gone past the real solutions, and so your company is going to get caught pretty soon, one way or another.
Well, the gpg (or pgp) partial solution is actually useful precisely because it is inconvenient enough to make people think twice before casually copy/pasting. Or it can be used in such a way, if you have trained your employees well enough to recognize the responsibilities of sharing information .
Disabling the context menu or the copy/print entries in the menu is a different kind of inconvenience, one which tends more to breed blind resistance more than awareness of responsibility.
You expect to make sense out of this from just one post in the middle of the conversation?
I can make sense of that post, I suppose, because I've gone through the GPL and related stuff for myself, to determine whether I wanted to use a free software or open software license, whether I wanted to use an existing one or roll my own, etc. (I end up using different licenses for different projects.)
So I suggest you do more research of the licenses themselves, and read more of the threads there, for starters.
In the post you link, they were discussing things they thought they should check on, and even whether they they thought it was worth checking. The current situation is that they found stuff, and you'll have to look for other (later) posts to find out what they found.
Oh, and, as I read it, they were talking about the bundling as being an issue if Diebold were to claim to be using the other license, not the GPL.
I guess they consider it a different room to talk in, so to speak. Talking at the firehose is like talking at the front curb near the fire hydrant. Talking here is putting it on the big screen in the convention center.
Or something like that.
But, as far as I know, that's the way it works.
You should never trust anyone you haven't met.
And you should never trust most of the people you have met, except in specific contexts.
And you should not really want anyone to trust you, except in specific contexts (in other words, where you have made contracts, whether explicit or implicit).
There are some emergency conditions when you have to override the above statements of fact (not rules, statements of fact), but, if you think about it, there is an implicit social contract that covers emergency cases. The rarity or commonality of the good Samaritan in a society is just a reflection on that society's penchant for breaking contracts, rather than evidence that trust does not require contracts. (There is an implicit social contract that we enter at birth, although there are some who make that contract out to be broader than it is.)
This whole business is at the center of what I have against Bill Gates and his crowd, and against Microsoft. The enabled the global ponzi schemes, if you think about it. (And we can rest assured, there will be more of them uncovered in the next year or so.)
Since we assume that the honorable judge is aware of the fundamental difference between moving the bits or waveforms of an electronic copy of a movie and moving the protein strands of a cartload of meat, I think it might be worth trying to see why she uses an analogy that would appear to indicate the opposite conclusion she appears to be trying to assert.
First, let's look closely at the meat.
When it is stolen, the molecules are gone. You can't get another copy of those molecules. So the store would appear to be out the wholesale price of the meat, plus some paperwork and time/wages for bringing meat in to replace it. If the meat is a specialty item, it may not be possible to replace it, and the store could be out the full potential sale price, as well. Also, since it takes finite time to bring the new order in, the store would be losing the sales that would have been while while the replacement meat is coming in.
If the meat is stolen to be sold, then the money of the sales not made is not only lost to the store, but is transferred to the pocket of the thief.
Of course, we should note that most stores have some insurance against theft of merchandise, so the actual loss would be initially less. The insurance premiums are likely to rise, as well. So, while there is not an infinite amount of replacement, there is replacement, but there are also costs.
Now, let's look at the movie.
In the case of the movie, since moving the actual merchandise is performed by copying from the data server, replacement bits are always available, at very minimal cost. The copying does not make the product in any way unavailable from the legitimate sellers, so there are no lost sales from unavailability. The only paperwork costs involved are such as the sellers, copyright holders, authors, etc., insist on. If they don't insist on suits and criminal charges, there isn't going to be much paperwork incurred, nor time/wages to handle the paperwork and re-stocking.
So, the only money that is lost to the legitimate sellers is that from sales which go to the "thief" instead. Now, as the sellers' association is quick to point out, the "thief" does not have to receive any actual money, as long as actual sales have been diverted away from the legitimate sellers.
In the case of the meat, the amount of diverted sales can be calculated to a reasonable upper limit. The legitimate seller could not have lost more sales than there was meat stolen.
The lower limit, of course, is zero.
We could imagine a court asking the store for records on how well the brand and type of meat which was stolen sold, I suppose, but then we also have to note that any unsold meat would have to be disposed of, and the thief has potentially relieved the store of that cost of disposal.
There is no way to calculate the upper limit in the case of the movie. That leaves us with a conundrum, and one that can't be resolved. We could ask the seller to prepare reports on expected sales vs. actual sales, but the vagueries of the market make any such report extremely susceptible to argument. Popularity charts go up and down without any real logic, much though the producers of commercial pop music want to think they have some magic success formula. We really are talking about superstition here.
One very potent argument is the advertising value of the illegitimate distribution channel. It is known that good art actually generally benefits from the illegitimate channel, because people who would buy the physical product will buy it anyway to support the artist. The only art which does not benefit from the illegitimate channel is bad art.
Now, we all here know these arguments. I find it hard to believe that a modern judge could fail to be aware of these arguments. Is there a possibility that the judge is priming the appeals process with ironic opinion? Maybe to make it obvious to the appropriate court that the law in question is bad?
First post and you're already asking if you're going to be the only shill?
But the new law says he could have, and the MPAA female-dog-on-a-leash expressed disappointment that he didn't.
So, because he got lucky we should be satisfied that the law is okay?
Everybody steals a riff or two.
Un-negotiated covers are a stock way to get a start in the industry.
Nothing new under the sun.
All creative work is derivative.
There should have to be proof of flagrant activities misdirecting profits before any criminal charges can be made.
That's not how I read the article. In fact, if I remember the article correctly, it said something to the effect that, under the new law, they don't have to show any evidence of intent to sell.
The old law, they did have to prove something, and that was why the RIAA wanted to change the law.
Are you sure that was quite clear?
From TFriendlyA:
Setting aside for a moment what the law is supposed to do, we must recognize that it does reflect the common morality.
Two hundred years ago, the common view of the world was a lot more dog-eat-dog than it is now. Malthus was an optimist. Actually, Malthus is still an optimist, but the misinterpretation was considered optimistic back then. There was a prevailing opinion that the only way a person could have a reasonable standard of living was on the back of at least a few someone else's slave labor. Even the guys on the bottom accepted that idea to a certain extent. (Speaking from a "western" point of view, since we are talking about western laws. The moralities and laws of the people that were imported to be the new bottom rung didn't count, which, of course, makes the slave trade that much more evil.)
The revolutionary concept was that we didn't have to be at war with everyone else to survive. That we didn't have to oppress others to have something good of our own. And we've forgotten that concept.
And this law, frankly, is stark evidence that we have forgotten it.
Your opinion of what the guy was up to is your opinion. Did you get far enough in TFriendlyA to read that they prosecution did not even attempt to show intent? That there was no record of a similar past offense?
I used to carry a video recorder with me all sorts of strange places -- taking pictures of different places in Japan to send home to the folks. That lasted about a half a year before I realized that maybe some of the people around me were not exactly welcoming the sight of the video recorder. In particular, there are a number of moral issues in recording school events.
The duct tape on the indicator LEDs? Well, if it was pre-meditated for whatever purpose, sure, he's probably going to think about that.
But that still does not say that he was going to do more than, for instance, take it home and watch it again, maybe with his buddies, maybe with his family, maybe by himself. You might say that theorizing a desire to critique the movie for a college literature class would be presenting a strawman argument. (Maybe he's trying to get a degree and get off disability?) But, from the information we have, we don't know that he wasn't.
You can form your own opinions, you can draw your own conclusions. But, for me, innocent until proven guilty is as much about not requiring the law to uphold bad logic as it is about being nice. And I guess I'll have to say this, sure, we don't need more proof that he recorded the stuff. But then saying that we might as well have proof that he intended to make money from distributing is a huge jump.
Just like saying that money made by those who pirate copyrighted works necessarily translates to any kind of a direct loss to the owners of the copyrights, much less the authors of said works, is a huge jump.
If a pirated work is represented as an original, that is a criminal offense against the purchaser of the pirated work. I'll grant that. And there have been some cases where systematic pirating has done more damage in lost sales than it made up in advertising. China, in particular, has a bad record on that score. That is to say, some importers in China have a bad record there.
But this "theft of billions" concept is pure wishful thinking, and the fact that it poisons us to the point we accept this kind of illogical law should give us pause.
Yeah, society is sick when so many people are thinking, "But he shouldn't have been ..." instead of "Why can't the theatre just confiscate the tape, eject him from the theatre, and bar him from coming back?
As far as we know, this was a first offense.
Your definition of religion, I suppose, requires blind faith.
Mine requires sighted faith. By definition.
I guess we define religion differently.
I sort of agree with you, except for a few things.
I have other my own reasons to doubt the dating systems in use in science more than I doubt the dates in the Bible.
There are a number of internal inconsistencies in the Bible, as well, so I don't take either system as absolute fact. Two separate hypotheses for two separate contexts, and I hope, someday, probably after I've died and been resurrected, to find out the real story. For now, when I'm doing science, I work within the framework of the group of scientists I'm working with, and when I do religion, I work within the framework of the religions of the people I'm working with, as much as possible. Creates less confusion.
I am sure that all races of humans must be included as children of Adam. That would seem to make Adam the first man, but I'm not going to get too hung up on that issue.
Simians, I'm not sure how they fit in, we have to treat all living things with more respect. Us vs. them just doesn't work.
I'd say the same is true of English.