The key requirement is offsite backups. That way, if your house burns down (or a burglar rips off your PC and all surrounding CDs), all your data is still safe.
There's no requirement for a backup to exist forever. If you burn CDs or DVDs to back up, you'll want to redo your backups every 5 years or so, bcos they don't last forever. Similarly, if Google happens to be crashing and burning, it's time to get a new place to put your data.
"Backup" is a continuous process, not a one-shot deal.
No way, Doom was *it*. OK, it was a shooter, but there hadn't been anything like it before. Wolfenstein was interesting but didn't have the same rawness, and it *certainly* didn't have the feeling of taking on things that were way more than you can handle. It wasn't just the FPS thing - there had never been a game before without a score attached to it, where the only purpose was to get further and stay alive longer. Even some of the later Doom clones (Rise of the Triads) added a score bcos they didn't have faith in progressing through levels keeping ppl hooked. Doom *invented* the first-person fight for survival, and it did it perfectly.
After that, it was Heretic and Hexen which added mouse-look, jumping, flying, water currents, better graphics and stuff like that. Both of those were also awesome.
What *wasn't* awesome was Quake - it never did anything for me at all. Where Doom, Heretic and Hexen felt like an altered reality, and you played them that way, Quake felt like an arcade game. "Damn, I'm going to die, where's another quarter?" instead of "Shit, they're coming for me and I can't get out and I've not got enough ammo to hold them off - nononononoooo!!!!"
Believe me, if a school spent the same amount on the music department as is spent on sports, they'd for sure get all that money back from gigs. And the music would achieve a damn sight more for society than sports ever could.
However, no-one's yet seen one, so I wouldn't get too worried. Maybe one positive effect of this would be distributing a zillion monopole detectors across the world...
If schools put as much focus on education as they did on sports, maybe all those other countries *wouldn't* be kicking America's ass. You know, I did hear once that schools were supposed to educate people, rather than just being a training ground for jocks. You wouldn't know it to look, though - sports teams get new shiny gear while classrooms are falling apart.
That's bull. Suppose you give me a hand-drill to drill a hole, and then say "Look, we've got a biological interface for drilling, we don't need Black and Decker!"
They shone light on a slime mould, it moved, and they tracked the movement. This does *not* count as a biological interface. And as other posters have pointed out, robots that could do this have been around since the 80s. It's been a schoolkid-level project since at the latest 1990.
That is precisely why patronage is a much more effective and mature system today.
The problem is, I don't believe that. Talk to any shareware author and ask them how much they get back. I don't mean that they should be *guaranteed* anything back, but of 100 downloads I'd expect at least a couple to think it's worth keeping it installed. Shareware authors generally get much less subscriptions than that.
I agree with you, the technology does now exist. What I don't agree with is that this technological "solution" would make anything better, bcos no events to date have indicated that would happen.
there were far more patrons then artists.
You clearly don't know how widespread musical ability (and other forms of artistic expression) is! Unless you consider a "patron" to be "anyone who attends a performance".
I do what I do because it amuses me and because my contribution brings me a feeling of being helpful to the society at large.
The word in this case is not "amateur". It's "dillettante".
FWIW, I'm also a coder. I code because I couldn't *not* code. I have a job writing embedded software (if you've driven a Ford, you might be using my code), and I do stuff in my free time too. Similarly I play guitar and sing, not because it amuses me but because I can't *not* play. My coding is a lot better than my guitar playing, incidentally.;-) Hence I'm only an amateur guitarist and a professional software engineer. But I'm by no means a dillettante at guitar - I work damn hard at it. It's not bcos it "amuses" me, it's bcos I couldn't *not* do it.
Should I want to become a full-timer at it and get hired by OSDN or some other foundation, or a corporate sponsor, I would have to treat my art far more seriously then I do. But I do not see a barrier, other then quality of my work, which would prevent me from accomplishing that
This is precisely my point. If you're serious at your art, you know the "part-time artist" syndrome. You want to put more time in, but you can't, bcos you have to earn money *somehow*. That means a day-job. If you're sufficiently talented (and/or have put in sufficient work) that your art will allow you to make a living (from performance or whatever), then you can drop the day-job. You then have an extra 8 hours a day to work at your art.
That's the really big difference between amateurs and professionals - the time you put in on that skill-set. There certainly is a large element of native ability (I'll never be able to shred like Steve Vai!) but there's also a huge element of time served. If you're reasonably talented, the only thing separating you as an amateur from similarly reasonably-talented professionals is the time the professionals can devote to practise.
90% perspiration and 10% inspiration is definitely the case. It might look at face value like you're just noodling to get that perfect riff, but what's not visible is 15 years of playing and umpteen hours a week practising to be able to noodle and find the riff. More often than not, I can get the right design first time in my code (barring typos) - but that's not random inspiration, it's 20 years of coding experience. And it's the 20 years of coding experience (the "art industry", to use your term) that lets me produce high-grade works of software art today.
Or more likely, you see multi millionaire "artists"
You misunderstand my meaning of making a living. Recognition and million-dollar contracts are *not* what I'm after. What I *do* want though is the opportunity to make a living off my art, such that I can spend my days doing nothing but my chosen art. I've been lucky enough to do something approximately like that with my software; I'm starting to consider trying to do the same with the music. Note the word "living" - not "riches", not "wild extravagance", but "living". I don't consider it unreasonable to attempt that.
The money paid by patrons (or audience or whoever) does n
Not at all, the music itself would be free to share. Only the actual live performance would not.
That would work today. It wouldn't have worked 100 years ago, because the only method of non-artist-present dissemination was to release the score. And they wouldn't do that, because that would limit their income from performing said score. Also note that this could never work for books (unless we're supposed to go and listen to Arthur C Clarke read his books aloud to us, a more tedious fate than which I really can't imagine).
That is why we will never have access to works of Plato, Shakespeare, Mozart, Beethoven and so many others, right?
Shakespeare, we're lucky to have a lot of his works. Many (especially his poems) have been taken from a single copy found stashed in someone's library/attic. A classic example of my point. Ditto most composers - all of them were happy to perform (for money), but they weren't as happy about dishing out the score to all and sundry. As a result, there's an awful lot of composers for whom we have very little material, even though they were world-famous at the time - their work died with them. Paganini is a particularly good example.
That of course assumes (what a surprise!), that you have any right whatsoever to "profit"
Now we're getting down to it. That and...
Art and "profit" are about as compatible as science and witchcraft are. The purpose of the first is as wide as possible, unencumbered dissemination of ideas and emotional states and the other requires restrictions to access so that a monetary gain can be made.
That's a nice bald statement. So an artist should have no expectation of making a living from his/her art.
Note that I don't say a "right". No-one has a right to expect to make a living doing what they like best. If you're lucky, it happens - if not, then not. But if you have the talent, then you certainly *do* have the *right* to attempt to use that talent to your own best advantage. And one best advantage would be using your art to make a living, so you don't have to piss your life away doing some shitty dead-end job when you could be working on improving your artistic skills. It'd be nice for the universe to say "hey, you've got mega musical skills, so let's give you what you need to stay alive". But it don't work like that...
Mozart, for instance. Sure, Mozart was obsessed by music, and was vastly talented. So what did he do? Answer: he used that talent to get himself patronage (!), get performances sold out, and buy himself a flash lifestyle with the money he made. The fact that he used his artistic talent as a tool for getting himself a dissolute lifestyle is neither here nor there when it comes to his artistic quality. Come the 60s and 70s, you couldn't move for doped-up rockers going the same way.
I've never said that art and profit are in any way linked. The quality of art is not in any way related to the price you pay for it, or the amount an artist earns. But when your artistic talents are significant, it isn't unreasonable to try and use those talents to make a living. This doesn't mean that you've got a *right* to expect a decent living, but it means you've got a *right* to attempt to do so. It sounds like this is where we differ.
If you believe that it's more important for an artist to release their work to the world than to make enough money to live on, then I suspect you're one of the following:
1) not an artist in any way; 2) a part-time artist doing other work to support your art; 3) a full-time artist who's lucked into one of the *hugely* rare patronage schemes (and yes, that is mostly luck); 4) a full-time artist who's made enough money that you can say money isn't an issue; 5) a full-time artist born into a rich family, so money isn't an issue; 6) a full-time artist supported by a partner who brings in money to support you; 7) a full-time artist with severe cash-flow problems who can't afford enough for adeq
Race conditions and deadlocks are going to be your enemies. Especially deadlocks.
A good starting point is an old-school data flow diagram. Draw each of your processes as a bubble, and show links between them. If you have one signal going from bubble A to bubble B, and another signal going from bubble B back to bubble A, you have a possibility for deadlocks or races. A data flow diagram will give you a good insight into which signals need checking.
An illusion. You are paying for a transmission (one of the few activities possible with information) to you, not for the information itself.
That's correct - the transmission is simply how the information is passed, otherwise I could argue "I'm not buying a meal, I'm buying a quantity of food delivered in front of me by another person". Before, I did not have the information. After, I do have the information. Therefore, I have gained the information.
I have news for you, declaring gravity illegal will not make you float.
I have news for you too - declaring that it's illegal to kill people won't magically stop knives and bullets either. The law doesn't stop it happening, it simply says "We don't want this to happen, and you won't like the consequences if you do it."
Your definition of "freely" was written, strike that, purchased from Bill Gates.
"Freely" has too much garbage associated with it. Let's just say that now it's possible to distribute information created by you and not suffer a financial penalty.
There is a regular assertion that when information is shared, the original person still possesses the information and so doesn't lose. That's incorrect, because there is also value in scarcity (being the only person with the score of the 1812 Overture, for example). Look up the later years of Charles Dickens for reference - the guy died in poverty, ironically due to lack of US copyright laws.
GPL was written as a defense against copyright and anti-reverse-engineering laws. Remove those and no GPL will be needed.
That's incorrect, and shows you don't know the content of the GPL or its history. Under your scenario, everything becomes public domain. But PD already exists, so the GPL is superfluous by your argument.
The GPL was conceived as a reaction to a printer manufacturer who closed the source of their driver, when RMS wanted to be able to fix bugs himself and couldn't. RMS's idea in setting up the GPL was that items produced under the GPL could *not* be hidden.
Unless you fancy setting up a new law that you *must* release to the world all information you ever create, then your argument fails here. I could take PD software, modify it slightly, and sell it as my own software without making those mods available to anyone. I don't even have to say that my software was based off some PD software.
This is a situation predicted by my argument on adding value by refusing to release your work - if you can't stop people copying what you've done, the only way is to hide your work so no-one else can benefit. Copyright allows people to prevent direct reuse - but it also allows the GPL to say "you may only use this software in your product if you release the full code of your product to the world".
Yes we do, all of that requires expense on the part of the artist, to look at other art.
So art galleries never charged for entry in your country...?
Your argument is now self-contradictory. On the one hand, one of your major sources of payments for artists is performance, and the only way other artists can learn is by attending performances. But then on the other hand, you say that for an artist to be subjected to expense in learning from other artists by attending these performances is unacceptable. Sorry, you can't have both. As for the level of expense, that's an issue with a specific implementation of copyright law - and if journals *do* get too expensive, then another journal will come out to undercut them. You also forget the existence of libraries......any attempt to actually enforce copyright in a digital world...
Excuse me? I didn't say it was *easy* to implement! Nor are laws against theft, rape and murder easy to implement, as shown by the number of unsolved cases. If we can only impose laws that are easy to enforce, then you'll have no laws against anything except jumping red lights and speeding.
Information cannot be "bought", "sold" nor "owned". It simply lacks the necessary attributes to allow for such a treatment
Certainly it can be "bought" and "sold". Suppose I'm engaged in industrial (or other) espionage, I'd be very likely to say "I can tell you what your competitors are doing, if you pay me $20K for that information". I can give you as many other examples as you like. Hence "bought" and "sold".
"Owned" is a more difficult issue, as it implies sole possession. Which is where copyright comes in, imposing an arbitrary rule to create the concept of ownership. It doesn't stop people gaining access to the information, it just imposes penalties against those who violate that rule. In rather the same way, arbitrary national borders don't stop people crossing them without completing the required formalities, but they do impose penalties if you cross them without it.
There's no reason why your system of patronage wouldn't work. It worked for a long time, before copyright came around. However, the result was *less* freedom of expression. Since you couldn't do anything once the information had escaped, the result was that books and music were carefully controlled to ensure no-one else could share it. For example, sheet music for all the classical music we know today was simply not available. That was possible to beat for a few people with rare talents (Bach famously attended a performance of music which was not available in sheet form and then transcribed it afterwards), but this was rare enough that it wouldn't happen often. And the people who'd had the information shared with them (and even those who'd beaten the system) would hoard it, because there was value in them possessing information that no-one else had - if you're the only person who knows the score to the 1812 Overture, you're the only person who can perform it.
Copyright OTOH allows people to share information freely and still gain value from it. Now any number of people can get the sheet music to the 1812 Overture and study it or make derived works - the flipside is that they have to pay a small amount for doing so. In fact, it's in the author's interest to make it available, because they can then get paid. So more works get shared than would ever have happened under a system of patronage. In other words, copyright is a legislative implementation of micropayments.
You might quote open-source here as a counter-argument. But open-source only works through copyright. Because anyone can read it but it can only be reused under certain conditions, you're using copyright to ensure a better outcome in the future. In other words, you're passing up a small profit today in order to get a larger profit (technical not monetary) in the future.
Also note that contrary to your assertion, there is no requirement for works to be in the public domain in order for other art to be created - "The Incredibles" and other Pixar films can still take the piss out of comics, cartoons and other films, without those other films being out of copyright. The only thing they can't do is directly imitate other works - but that would not be creating new art, and so we don't have any loss.
So I disagree. Copyright *is* logical. The particular implementation we may have (duration, etc) is flawed, and it's also prone to technological issues, but it's preferable to most alternatives - in particular, to the alternative you describe.
Don't bet on it. Buying bottles is a killer on the budget. And you don't have to leave your comfy chair to do it, you just have to stock up on extra at each shopping trip...
Great - if you've got $$$ to spare to donate to protein folding stuff (and other random stuff that doesn't achieve anything) then that's fine.
OP doesn't *have* spare $$$ (or £££), so the first thing to go is anything that doesn't give you a benefit. Protein folding and P2P would be prime examples.
Does it? I know that at max quality on my cheap Canon A80 (4.some MP), it can resolve individual hairs in a portrait pretty damn well in a JPEG.
And it's only the point-and-shoot ones that force you into JPEG. Digital SLRs without exception give you RAW. PNG compression on that RAW would be good though, I grant you. Anyway, if it's a poster print, you'd better have more than 6MP for it to be decent quality...
The "people to care" don't always have to be passive observers. This is a very modern phenomenon - the football (American or soccer) fans sitting on their fat arses watching other people having fun taking part in sport...
FWIW though, there *are* adventure sports catering to the spectator market. In hang-gliding there's a discipline called "speed gliding", which is basically a hang-glider following a downhill skiing course, complete with checkpoints where they have to go under/over/round a gate. You're right that many airsports take place too far away from the ground for ppl to see them; speed gliding is trying to make this work for spectators. HG is very popular in Brazil, which is a major mover in commercialising the sport, and speed gliding is definitely a step forward.
And as for boat races - well, I can tell you're not a sailor.;-) Boats are driven by wind. Wind changes. Even America's Cup one-on-one races (which are often boring, I'll freely admit) have a random element in there. Add the random element of wind changes into your typical race of 20 people racing the same type of boat, all trying to get round quicker than each other, and you've basically got an aquatic version of Nascar. Really - the fact that it's never on the TV doesn't stop it being a pretty damn good sport.
Nah - the military has just cashed in on civilian inventions, and in many cases has simply squshed them to prevent them reaching the civilian domain. Frequency-hopping transmissions and encryption technology are classic examples. As far as I'm concerned, it ain't "revolutionary" unless it changes things.
Jets were invented by Frank Whittle in the 1930s. He couldn't get taken seriously until the Allies saw the Me-262 and realised he'd been right for the last 10 years. And then he was systematically blocked (by the military) from working on his own invention, and prevented from claiming royalties. The main civilian use of jets is for transport, and the military has done FA on that.
Christopher Cockerell got screwed over the same way with the hovercraft - totally stolen by the military.
Computers have *never* had any significant military input. Von Neumann and co did work for the military during the war, but only on stuff they'd already thought about as civilians. The knowledge from decoding machines in the 40s and 50s never went outside the military environment. As a result, all the early computer makers were making it up as they went along - and since there were many more of them, inevitably they overtook the military pretty early on.
GPS is neat, I'll grant you. But Galileo is ready to do better in the civilian market - and I reckon it would have done so sooner if GPS hadn't existed.
Radar is also neat, but again it was a civilian invention that got pushed during wartime.
The Internet is also neat, but the idea of having a large robust network is nothing without the software to run it. The software was produced by civilians, as was the whole expansion of the Internet into something useful, which was largely based off the whole BBS experience (again a civilian concept).
I hope you get my point. The military will do nothing if it doesn't help the military. That's fair enough, but there are very few cases where what helps the military will also help civilians - and in those cases, the military will not release that information to civilians. So the military as a technology driver simply doesn't exist, bcos you can't drive technology unless you feed back your inventions into pushing the field further.
Already is with cruise control. The number of accidents bcos ppl aren't actively controlling the distance to the car in front is scary. This is mostly a problem in the US - cruise control is less common in Europe.
Slashdot Mirror
The key requirement is offsite backups. That way, if your house burns down (or a burglar rips off your PC and all surrounding CDs), all your data is still safe.
There's no requirement for a backup to exist forever. If you burn CDs or DVDs to back up, you'll want to redo your backups every 5 years or so, bcos they don't last forever. Similarly, if Google happens to be crashing and burning, it's time to get a new place to put your data.
"Backup" is a continuous process, not a one-shot deal.
Grab.
When everyone knows that triffids are the answer, and have absolutely no adverse consequences at all...?
No way, Doom was *it*. OK, it was a shooter, but there hadn't been anything like it before. Wolfenstein was interesting but didn't have the same rawness, and it *certainly* didn't have the feeling of taking on things that were way more than you can handle. It wasn't just the FPS thing - there had never been a game before without a score attached to it, where the only purpose was to get further and stay alive longer. Even some of the later Doom clones (Rise of the Triads) added a score bcos they didn't have faith in progressing through levels keeping ppl hooked. Doom *invented* the first-person fight for survival, and it did it perfectly.
After that, it was Heretic and Hexen which added mouse-look, jumping, flying, water currents, better graphics and stuff like that. Both of those were also awesome.
What *wasn't* awesome was Quake - it never did anything for me at all. Where Doom, Heretic and Hexen felt like an altered reality, and you played them that way, Quake felt like an arcade game. "Damn, I'm going to die, where's another quarter?" instead of "Shit, they're coming for me and I can't get out and I've not got enough ammo to hold them off - nononononoooo!!!!"
Grab.
Believe me, if a school spent the same amount on the music department as is spent on sports, they'd for sure get all that money back from gigs. And the music would achieve a damn sight more for society than sports ever could.
However, no-one's yet seen one, so I wouldn't get too worried. Maybe one positive effect of this would be distributing a zillion monopole detectors across the world...
And you get spam saying "See really grim pictures of ugly, frigid, unfriendly women"...
If schools put as much focus on education as they did on sports, maybe all those other countries *wouldn't* be kicking America's ass. You know, I did hear once that schools were supposed to educate people, rather than just being a training ground for jocks. You wouldn't know it to look, though - sports teams get new shiny gear while classrooms are falling apart.
Grab.
Why settle for the lesser of two evils?
That's bull. Suppose you give me a hand-drill to drill a hole, and then say "Look, we've got a biological interface for drilling, we don't need Black and Decker!"
They shone light on a slime mould, it moved, and they tracked the movement. This does *not* count as a biological interface. And as other posters have pointed out, robots that could do this have been around since the 80s. It's been a schoolkid-level project since at the latest 1990.
Grab.
This would be the "Red Cross" or the local Sgt Bilkos...? My money's on the latter, especially in wartime with a *huge* black market economy.
That is precisely why patronage is a much more effective and mature system today.
;-) Hence I'm only an amateur guitarist and a professional software engineer. But I'm by no means a dillettante at guitar - I work damn hard at it. It's not bcos it "amuses" me, it's bcos I couldn't *not* do it.
The problem is, I don't believe that. Talk to any shareware author and ask them how much they get back. I don't mean that they should be *guaranteed* anything back, but of 100 downloads I'd expect at least a couple to think it's worth keeping it installed. Shareware authors generally get much less subscriptions than that.
I agree with you, the technology does now exist. What I don't agree with is that this technological "solution" would make anything better, bcos no events to date have indicated that would happen.
there were far more patrons then artists.
You clearly don't know how widespread musical ability (and other forms of artistic expression) is! Unless you consider a "patron" to be "anyone who attends a performance".
I do what I do because it amuses me and because my contribution brings me a feeling of being helpful to the society at large.
The word in this case is not "amateur". It's "dillettante".
FWIW, I'm also a coder. I code because I couldn't *not* code. I have a job writing embedded software (if you've driven a Ford, you might be using my code), and I do stuff in my free time too. Similarly I play guitar and sing, not because it amuses me but because I can't *not* play. My coding is a lot better than my guitar playing, incidentally.
Should I want to become a full-timer at it and get hired by OSDN or some other foundation, or a corporate sponsor, I would have to treat my art far more seriously then I do. But I do not see a barrier, other then quality of my work, which would prevent me from accomplishing that
This is precisely my point. If you're serious at your art, you know the "part-time artist" syndrome. You want to put more time in, but you can't, bcos you have to earn money *somehow*. That means a day-job. If you're sufficiently talented (and/or have put in sufficient work) that your art will allow you to make a living (from performance or whatever), then you can drop the day-job. You then have an extra 8 hours a day to work at your art.
That's the really big difference between amateurs and professionals - the time you put in on that skill-set. There certainly is a large element of native ability (I'll never be able to shred like Steve Vai!) but there's also a huge element of time served. If you're reasonably talented, the only thing separating you as an amateur from similarly reasonably-talented professionals is the time the professionals can devote to practise.
90% perspiration and 10% inspiration is definitely the case. It might look at face value like you're just noodling to get that perfect riff, but what's not visible is 15 years of playing and umpteen hours a week practising to be able to noodle and find the riff. More often than not, I can get the right design first time in my code (barring typos) - but that's not random inspiration, it's 20 years of coding experience. And it's the 20 years of coding experience (the "art industry", to use your term) that lets me produce high-grade works of software art today.
Or more likely, you see multi millionaire "artists"
You misunderstand my meaning of making a living. Recognition and million-dollar contracts are *not* what I'm after. What I *do* want though is the opportunity to make a living off my art, such that I can spend my days doing nothing but my chosen art. I've been lucky enough to do something approximately like that with my software; I'm starting to consider trying to do the same with the music. Note the word "living" - not "riches", not "wild extravagance", but "living". I don't consider it unreasonable to attempt that.
The money paid by patrons (or audience or whoever) does n
Dude, it took me a moment to work out what you were on about. Then it took me a minute to wipe the drink off my keyboard...
Not at all, the music itself would be free to share. Only the actual live performance would not.
That would work today. It wouldn't have worked 100 years ago, because the only method of non-artist-present dissemination was to release the score. And they wouldn't do that, because that would limit their income from performing said score. Also note that this could never work for books (unless we're supposed to go and listen to Arthur C Clarke read his books aloud to us, a more tedious fate than which I really can't imagine).
That is why we will never have access to works of Plato, Shakespeare, Mozart, Beethoven and so many others, right?
Shakespeare, we're lucky to have a lot of his works. Many (especially his poems) have been taken from a single copy found stashed in someone's library/attic. A classic example of my point. Ditto most composers - all of them were happy to perform (for money), but they weren't as happy about dishing out the score to all and sundry. As a result, there's an awful lot of composers for whom we have very little material, even though they were world-famous at the time - their work died with them. Paganini is a particularly good example.
That of course assumes (what a surprise!), that you have any right whatsoever to "profit"
Now we're getting down to it. That and...
Art and "profit" are about as compatible as science and witchcraft are. The purpose of the first is as wide as possible, unencumbered dissemination of ideas and emotional states and the other requires restrictions to access so that a monetary gain can be made.
That's a nice bald statement. So an artist should have no expectation of making a living from his/her art.
Note that I don't say a "right". No-one has a right to expect to make a living doing what they like best. If you're lucky, it happens - if not, then not. But if you have the talent, then you certainly *do* have the *right* to attempt to use that talent to your own best advantage. And one best advantage would be using your art to make a living, so you don't have to piss your life away doing some shitty dead-end job when you could be working on improving your artistic skills. It'd be nice for the universe to say "hey, you've got mega musical skills, so let's give you what you need to stay alive". But it don't work like that...
Mozart, for instance. Sure, Mozart was obsessed by music, and was vastly talented. So what did he do? Answer: he used that talent to get himself patronage (!), get performances sold out, and buy himself a flash lifestyle with the money he made. The fact that he used his artistic talent as a tool for getting himself a dissolute lifestyle is neither here nor there when it comes to his artistic quality. Come the 60s and 70s, you couldn't move for doped-up rockers going the same way.
I've never said that art and profit are in any way linked. The quality of art is not in any way related to the price you pay for it, or the amount an artist earns. But when your artistic talents are significant, it isn't unreasonable to try and use those talents to make a living. This doesn't mean that you've got a *right* to expect a decent living, but it means you've got a *right* to attempt to do so. It sounds like this is where we differ.
If you believe that it's more important for an artist to release their work to the world than to make enough money to live on, then I suspect you're one of the following:
1) not an artist in any way;
2) a part-time artist doing other work to support your art;
3) a full-time artist who's lucked into one of the *hugely* rare patronage schemes (and yes, that is mostly luck);
4) a full-time artist who's made enough money that you can say money isn't an issue;
5) a full-time artist born into a rich family, so money isn't an issue;
6) a full-time artist supported by a partner who brings in money to support you;
7) a full-time artist with severe cash-flow problems who can't afford enough for adeq
I'd forgotten that one. :-) That's the double-Polaroid episode, right?
"Is this normal?"
"..."
"It wouldn't all fit on one."
"How's Kryten doing?"
"If he asks you to look at his photo album, just say no."
Race conditions and deadlocks are going to be your enemies. Especially deadlocks.
A good starting point is an old-school data flow diagram. Draw each of your processes as a bubble, and show links between them. If you have one signal going from bubble A to bubble B, and another signal going from bubble B back to bubble A, you have a possibility for deadlocks or races. A data flow diagram will give you a good insight into which signals need checking.
Grab.
An illusion. You are paying for a transmission (one of the few activities possible with information) to you, not for the information itself.
...any attempt to actually enforce copyright in a digital world...
That's correct - the transmission is simply how the information is passed, otherwise I could argue "I'm not buying a meal, I'm buying a quantity of food delivered in front of me by another person". Before, I did not have the information. After, I do have the information. Therefore, I have gained the information.
I have news for you, declaring gravity illegal will not make you float.
I have news for you too - declaring that it's illegal to kill people won't magically stop knives and bullets either. The law doesn't stop it happening, it simply says "We don't want this to happen, and you won't like the consequences if you do it."
Your definition of "freely" was written, strike that, purchased from Bill Gates.
"Freely" has too much garbage associated with it. Let's just say that now it's possible to distribute information created by you and not suffer a financial penalty.
There is a regular assertion that when information is shared, the original person still possesses the information and so doesn't lose. That's incorrect, because there is also value in scarcity (being the only person with the score of the 1812 Overture, for example). Look up the later years of Charles Dickens for reference - the guy died in poverty, ironically due to lack of US copyright laws.
GPL was written as a defense against copyright and anti-reverse-engineering laws. Remove those and no GPL will be needed.
That's incorrect, and shows you don't know the content of the GPL or its history. Under your scenario, everything becomes public domain. But PD already exists, so the GPL is superfluous by your argument.
The GPL was conceived as a reaction to a printer manufacturer who closed the source of their driver, when RMS wanted to be able to fix bugs himself and couldn't. RMS's idea in setting up the GPL was that items produced under the GPL could *not* be hidden.
Unless you fancy setting up a new law that you *must* release to the world all information you ever create, then your argument fails here. I could take PD software, modify it slightly, and sell it as my own software without making those mods available to anyone. I don't even have to say that my software was based off some PD software.
This is a situation predicted by my argument on adding value by refusing to release your work - if you can't stop people copying what you've done, the only way is to hide your work so no-one else can benefit. Copyright allows people to prevent direct reuse - but it also allows the GPL to say "you may only use this software in your product if you release the full code of your product to the world".
Yes we do, all of that requires expense on the part of the artist, to look at other art.
So art galleries never charged for entry in your country...?
Your argument is now self-contradictory. On the one hand, one of your major sources of payments for artists is performance, and the only way other artists can learn is by attending performances. But then on the other hand, you say that for an artist to be subjected to expense in learning from other artists by attending these performances is unacceptable. Sorry, you can't have both. As for the level of expense, that's an issue with a specific implementation of copyright law - and if journals *do* get too expensive, then another journal will come out to undercut them. You also forget the existence of libraries...
Excuse me? I didn't say it was *easy* to implement! Nor are laws against theft, rape and murder easy to implement, as shown by the number of unsolved cases. If we can only impose laws that are easy to enforce, then you'll have no laws against anything except jumping red lights and speeding.
I don't consider it to be "assembly line"
Information cannot be "bought", "sold" nor "owned". It simply lacks the necessary attributes to allow for such a treatment
Certainly it can be "bought" and "sold". Suppose I'm engaged in industrial (or other) espionage, I'd be very likely to say "I can tell you what your competitors are doing, if you pay me $20K for that information". I can give you as many other examples as you like. Hence "bought" and "sold".
"Owned" is a more difficult issue, as it implies sole possession. Which is where copyright comes in, imposing an arbitrary rule to create the concept of ownership. It doesn't stop people gaining access to the information, it just imposes penalties against those who violate that rule. In rather the same way, arbitrary national borders don't stop people crossing them without completing the required formalities, but they do impose penalties if you cross them without it.
There's no reason why your system of patronage wouldn't work. It worked for a long time, before copyright came around. However, the result was *less* freedom of expression. Since you couldn't do anything once the information had escaped, the result was that books and music were carefully controlled to ensure no-one else could share it. For example, sheet music for all the classical music we know today was simply not available. That was possible to beat for a few people with rare talents (Bach famously attended a performance of music which was not available in sheet form and then transcribed it afterwards), but this was rare enough that it wouldn't happen often. And the people who'd had the information shared with them (and even those who'd beaten the system) would hoard it, because there was value in them possessing information that no-one else had - if you're the only person who knows the score to the 1812 Overture, you're the only person who can perform it.
Copyright OTOH allows people to share information freely and still gain value from it. Now any number of people can get the sheet music to the 1812 Overture and study it or make derived works - the flipside is that they have to pay a small amount for doing so. In fact, it's in the author's interest to make it available, because they can then get paid. So more works get shared than would ever have happened under a system of patronage. In other words, copyright is a legislative implementation of micropayments.
You might quote open-source here as a counter-argument. But open-source only works through copyright. Because anyone can read it but it can only be reused under certain conditions, you're using copyright to ensure a better outcome in the future. In other words, you're passing up a small profit today in order to get a larger profit (technical not monetary) in the future.
Also note that contrary to your assertion, there is no requirement for works to be in the public domain in order for other art to be created - "The Incredibles" and other Pixar films can still take the piss out of comics, cartoons and other films, without those other films being out of copyright. The only thing they can't do is directly imitate other works - but that would not be creating new art, and so we don't have any loss.
So I disagree. Copyright *is* logical. The particular implementation we may have (duration, etc) is flawed, and it's also prone to technological issues, but it's preferable to most alternatives - in particular, to the alternative you describe.
Grab.
Don't bet on it. Buying bottles is a killer on the budget. And you don't have to leave your comfy chair to do it, you just have to stock up on extra at each shopping trip...
Don't buy a more efficient laptop instead of a desktop if it'll save you £20 in electricity over the year but cost you £500 extra to buy...
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Great - if you've got $$$ to spare to donate to protein folding stuff (and other random stuff that doesn't achieve anything) then that's fine.
OP doesn't *have* spare $$$ (or £££), so the first thing to go is anything that doesn't give you a benefit. Protein folding and P2P would be prime examples.
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Does it? I know that at max quality on my cheap Canon A80 (4.some MP), it can resolve individual hairs in a portrait pretty damn well in a JPEG.
And it's only the point-and-shoot ones that force you into JPEG. Digital SLRs without exception give you RAW. PNG compression on that RAW would be good though, I grant you. Anyway, if it's a poster print, you'd better have more than 6MP for it to be decent quality...
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The "people to care" don't always have to be passive observers. This is a very modern phenomenon - the football (American or soccer) fans sitting on their fat arses watching other people having fun taking part in sport...
;-) Boats are driven by wind. Wind changes. Even America's Cup one-on-one races (which are often boring, I'll freely admit) have a random element in there. Add the random element of wind changes into your typical race of 20 people racing the same type of boat, all trying to get round quicker than each other, and you've basically got an aquatic version of Nascar. Really - the fact that it's never on the TV doesn't stop it being a pretty damn good sport.
FWIW though, there *are* adventure sports catering to the spectator market. In hang-gliding there's a discipline called "speed gliding", which is basically a hang-glider following a downhill skiing course, complete with checkpoints where they have to go under/over/round a gate. You're right that many airsports take place too far away from the ground for ppl to see them; speed gliding is trying to make this work for spectators. HG is very popular in Brazil, which is a major mover in commercialising the sport, and speed gliding is definitely a step forward.
And as for boat races - well, I can tell you're not a sailor.
Grab.
Nah - the military has just cashed in on civilian inventions, and in many cases has simply squshed them to prevent them reaching the civilian domain. Frequency-hopping transmissions and encryption technology are classic examples. As far as I'm concerned, it ain't "revolutionary" unless it changes things.
Jets were invented by Frank Whittle in the 1930s. He couldn't get taken seriously until the Allies saw the Me-262 and realised he'd been right for the last 10 years. And then he was systematically blocked (by the military) from working on his own invention, and prevented from claiming royalties. The main civilian use of jets is for transport, and the military has done FA on that.
Christopher Cockerell got screwed over the same way with the hovercraft - totally stolen by the military.
Computers have *never* had any significant military input. Von Neumann and co did work for the military during the war, but only on stuff they'd already thought about as civilians. The knowledge from decoding machines in the 40s and 50s never went outside the military environment. As a result, all the early computer makers were making it up as they went along - and since there were many more of them, inevitably they overtook the military pretty early on.
GPS is neat, I'll grant you. But Galileo is ready to do better in the civilian market - and I reckon it would have done so sooner if GPS hadn't existed.
Radar is also neat, but again it was a civilian invention that got pushed during wartime.
The Internet is also neat, but the idea of having a large robust network is nothing without the software to run it. The software was produced by civilians, as was the whole expansion of the Internet into something useful, which was largely based off the whole BBS experience (again a civilian concept).
I hope you get my point. The military will do nothing if it doesn't help the military. That's fair enough, but there are very few cases where what helps the military will also help civilians - and in those cases, the military will not release that information to civilians. So the military as a technology driver simply doesn't exist, bcos you can't drive technology unless you feed back your inventions into pushing the field further.
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Already is with cruise control. The number of accidents bcos ppl aren't actively controlling the distance to the car in front is scary. This is mostly a problem in the US - cruise control is less common in Europe.
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So if I duct-taped a PDA to the cover of my laptop, you'd be impressed? This is all it is.
You must be easily impressed...
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