As terrifying as the prospect is, makes me wonder what would happen if the government enforced the same penalties for copying a $20 DVD as a $20 bill...
Which government? The main problem Obama and the MAFIAA are complaining about is that the Chinese government doesn't seem to care too much about DVD copying. At this point China has too many US$ to just let their value tumble, but when they lose faith in the greenback futures they'll just dump whatever they have.
As for other volatile properties, Linux is around, as I already mentioned. Films, you say? Chineseactors can also make action films, you know...
No, I don't think so. You cannot rely on purely immaterial worth. If you want a future you need something tangible. Bits can be copied, gold, aluminum, steel, energy cannot.
But without any protection, one of the current major assets of the US - media and entertainment - will be in serious jeopardy
Which is one way of asserting that simple Economics 101 principle: the value of things is inversely proportional to their relative scarcity. The only way one has to get any payback from intellectual property is by imposing limits on their reproduction. Good luck on enforcing that.
There was a time once, decades ago, when the US could control any country by controlling trade. Other countries had to sell coffee and bananas to buy American cars, airplanes, radios, etc,
These days, the US goes like this: if you won't buy our movies and software we will not sell you movies and software. The rest of the world has become more or less independent of the US for all practical purposes. Are the American politicians and investors so naive they think they can let manufacturing move overseas while keeping control of the intellectual "property"?
I think Linux is a very good example of how the IP economy works. It was only by strong arm tactics plus a 97% price cut that Microsoft managed to keep their OS on netbooks. Unless American companies completely rethink their pricing tactics for IP the rest of the world is perfectly capable of reinventing everything. That old saying that "ideas are a dime a dozen" has never been more true.
Thank god his father didn't pass away while having sex!
I think it would be better for all of us if his father had passed away before ejaculation during the sexual intercourse that generated Felix Ortiz, D-Brooklyn.
If losing a child doesn't scare a criminal into not committing a crime, what do you think will do it?
By that reasoning, we wouldn't need speed limits. If dying in an accident does not scare people to drive safely, getting a speeding ticket wouldn't either.
The question is that deterrence depends on how likely is the punishment, not on how harsh it would be. Many drivers, particularly those with unsafe habits, do not think they could ever get into a deadly accident, but getting a speeding ticket is highly probable in some roads.
In the same way, almost no one who owns a gun thinks a shooting accident could happen the way he handles his guns. Having a high probability of getting a stiff punishment for unsafe gun handling would be a better deterrent than a possible death by accident. If people would get jail time for any accidental gun discharge or for letting a child get caught carrying a gun that would be a much greater incentive for safe gun handling than occasionally reading about a death by gun accident.
How can we check the published program is the one running ?
How can we check paper votes are counted right? How can we check the ballot results are added correctly? Have you ever tried to track how your paper vote is counted?
Any voting system is subject to fraud. It's only the way of committing the fraud that changes. Political parties and organizations who are concerned with elections must evolve with the times and develop new ways of checking election results in an electronic world.
Those concerns about electronic voting that are presented every time the subject is discussed are becoming rather tiresome. It's like someone complaining that cars are dangerous while at the same time conveniently forgetting that horses bite, kick, and throw their riders to the ground.
and most of those industries were given state funding (as the banks were all nationalized), and were not grown in a laissez faire free market economy.
So, if you think that's the reason for the comparative prosperity of South Korea, then I guess North Korea has private banks and a laissez faire economy, right?
The costs of tracking someone down in order to connect a person with the observed infringing behavior, and then sending out the nasty letter, are likely to exceed 1/3 of the amount demanded (assuming that the other 2/3 are to make the copyright holder, etc. 'whole' for the infringing copy). Thus, they still lose money on the overall deal.
The costs of tracking and suing a teenager vastly exceed any amount she is able to pay. They will lose money on the overall deal.
This may encourage more people to infringe in the future, if they think that the money they save when they don't get caught will be greater than the money they would spend legitimately
That's assuming a music downloader would be willing to pay what a CD costs.
People don't download to save money. You don't save anything when you get for free something that you wouldn't buy at any price higher than zero dollars. People download because it's there and who knows when something interesting might come up.
If I had a significant risk of having to pay $0.05 for every song or $0.25 for every film I download I would never download anything at all, that's how much that shit is worth to me. I haven't even listened to most of the tracks I have downloaded. Downloading is like this: I hear a song that I like, I download the full discography of that artist, I scan over it to see if there's some other song I like.
If the media industry made an effort to understand how and why downloading works I'm sure they could find a way to get a profit from it. But calling me a thief and threatening to sue me will get them nowhere.
We know why children labor -- because the rich aren't willing to pay enough for a man to feed his family under his own pay
No, it's because the middle class would rather pay $30 for a DVD player instead of $300.
Using cheap labor allows you to make cheaper products which sell more. It's as simple as that.
Without this regulation against the free market, the market would drive its labor force to death and into animal-like stupidity.
Henry Ford did not agree. He insisted on paying enough so his workers could afford to buy the cars they built.
Unfortunately, this simple market economics does not work when there are foreign governments that have no interest in letting their own people prosper too much. By keeping their currency artificially low and import tariffs high, they allow their export products to have lower prices at the expense of costlier imports.
In the long run, this policy is totally insane for the country. I wonder where China would be today if their people could buy the products they export. Only one thing I'm sure of, it would not be the Communist party in power.
If somebody else does it without permission, they literally *DO* deprive the copyright holder of some measure of his or her exclusivity on their right to copy their work, since by definition, exclusive means that nobody else is supposed to be doing it.
Depriving someone of something entirely immaterial is not stealing, by any measure. "Exclusivity" is something that cannot by itself be converted into anything that has material worth, so it cannot be stealing.
What the entertainment industry complains about is not the loss of exclusivity, they claim instead that they would have bigger profits if no one copied their works.
Which is an argument that's not supported by either reason or facts. It's one thing to say they would have more profits if more people would buy their $30 CDs, it's a different thing to say that people would spend $30 on a CD if they didn't have the option to copy it from someone else.
Free market economies are able to go from child labor and sweatshops to banks
Examples ?
South Korea is a notable example of this, because it's right next to North Korea, which shares the same culture and history, up to 1950. Then the country was split in two and each half adopted a different economic orientation. Look at the results today.
an entire family (yes their 4 and 5 year old children happily helped out), or groups of widows, or simply a homeless man working together to pull apart the trashbags left out on the sidewalk and digging through all the thrown away food for the odd aluminum can, recyclable soda bottle, a pile of used staples or bent paperclips
The problem with that is that not all trash has the same value.
Beverage cans are made of aluminum, which has the highest price among common garbage items. No one will want to waste their time recycling plastic bottles if there are aluminum cans available. There's very little value in recycling plastic which will most probably end in a landfill, no matter how many people are gathering garbage.
Empty plastic bottles float in water and get washed away to the nearest water course after any heavy rain and ultimately end in the ocean
the best way that I've seen for enabling this segment of society to grow and prosper and have success is the availability of micro loans.
The best way that I've seen for enabling this segment of society to grow and prosper and have success is the availability of education. Credit will not help people who have no marketable skills.
As someone who deals with industrial chemicals all day, I can tell you that there are already enough problems with people finding unfit purposes for industrial chemicals. I want my ethanol denatured because I don't want to have to babysit every last ounce that I use.
Do you have problems with people finding unfit purposes for other industrial chemicals?
Industrial ethanol is stolen because booze is so ridiculously expensive. Set the taxes for alcoholic drinks at the same level industrial chemicals are taxed and the problem will disappear.
Some "serial" devices use DTR (etc.) pins for communicating. USB adapters do have difficulties with those.
Especially if the device is powered by the serial port. The DTR, CTS, and RTS pins were often used to supply a few milliamps which were enough to power things like a serial port mouse, but sometimes the USB adapters cannot put out the needed current into the auxiliary pins.
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Which government? The main problem Obama and the MAFIAA are complaining about is that the Chinese government doesn't seem to care too much about DVD copying. At this point China has too many US$ to just let their value tumble, but when they lose faith in the greenback futures they'll just dump whatever they have.
As for other volatile properties, Linux is around, as I already mentioned. Films, you say? Chinese actors can also make action films, you know...
No, I don't think so. You cannot rely on purely immaterial worth. If you want a future you need something tangible. Bits can be copied, gold, aluminum, steel, energy cannot.
It seems that you have learned the lesson.
I carry in my wallet a Cr$500000 note to remind me of that.
How about a malware that masquerades as this detector and reports the RAM checksum is OK?
Caves? You had caves, with walls? In my days we had to paint web pages with human blood on human skin...
Then you are a terrorist trying to circumvent an important security measure.
You will tell us everything you know, even if we have to waterboard you until your bladder blows up.
Which is one way of asserting that simple Economics 101 principle: the value of things is inversely proportional to their relative scarcity. The only way one has to get any payback from intellectual property is by imposing limits on their reproduction. Good luck on enforcing that.
There was a time once, decades ago, when the US could control any country by controlling trade. Other countries had to sell coffee and bananas to buy American cars, airplanes, radios, etc,
These days, the US goes like this: if you won't buy our movies and software we will not sell you movies and software. The rest of the world has become more or less independent of the US for all practical purposes. Are the American politicians and investors so naive they think they can let manufacturing move overseas while keeping control of the intellectual "property"?
I think Linux is a very good example of how the IP economy works. It was only by strong arm tactics plus a 97% price cut that Microsoft managed to keep their OS on netbooks. Unless American companies completely rethink their pricing tactics for IP the rest of the world is perfectly capable of reinventing everything. That old saying that "ideas are a dime a dozen" has never been more true.
I think it would be better for all of us if his father had passed away before ejaculation during the sexual intercourse that generated Felix Ortiz, D-Brooklyn.
By that reasoning, we wouldn't need speed limits. If dying in an accident does not scare people to drive safely, getting a speeding ticket wouldn't either.
The question is that deterrence depends on how likely is the punishment, not on how harsh it would be. Many drivers, particularly those with unsafe habits, do not think they could ever get into a deadly accident, but getting a speeding ticket is highly probable in some roads.
In the same way, almost no one who owns a gun thinks a shooting accident could happen the way he handles his guns. Having a high probability of getting a stiff punishment for unsafe gun handling would be a better deterrent than a possible death by accident. If people would get jail time for any accidental gun discharge or for letting a child get caught carrying a gun that would be a much greater incentive for safe gun handling than occasionally reading about a death by gun accident.
How can we check paper votes are counted right? How can we check the ballot results are added correctly? Have you ever tried to track how your paper vote is counted?
Any voting system is subject to fraud. It's only the way of committing the fraud that changes. Political parties and organizations who are concerned with elections must evolve with the times and develop new ways of checking election results in an electronic world.
Those concerns about electronic voting that are presented every time the subject is discussed are becoming rather tiresome. It's like someone complaining that cars are dangerous while at the same time conveniently forgetting that horses bite, kick, and throw their riders to the ground.
This makes me seriously consider getting a subscription to their dead tree version again.
Given that each person will only lose one cent per lifetime, I propose to move $0.01 from each bank account in the world to my own account.
So, if you think that's the reason for the comparative prosperity of South Korea, then I guess North Korea has private banks and a laissez faire economy, right?
The costs of tracking and suing a teenager vastly exceed any amount she is able to pay. They will lose money on the overall deal.
That's assuming a music downloader would be willing to pay what a CD costs.
People don't download to save money. You don't save anything when you get for free something that you wouldn't buy at any price higher than zero dollars. People download because it's there and who knows when something interesting might come up.
If I had a significant risk of having to pay $0.05 for every song or $0.25 for every film I download I would never download anything at all, that's how much that shit is worth to me. I haven't even listened to most of the tracks I have downloaded. Downloading is like this: I hear a song that I like, I download the full discography of that artist, I scan over it to see if there's some other song I like.
If the media industry made an effort to understand how and why downloading works I'm sure they could find a way to get a profit from it. But calling me a thief and threatening to sue me will get them nowhere.
No, it's because the middle class would rather pay $30 for a DVD player instead of $300.
Using cheap labor allows you to make cheaper products which sell more. It's as simple as that.
Henry Ford did not agree. He insisted on paying enough so his workers could afford to buy the cars they built.
Unfortunately, this simple market economics does not work when there are foreign governments that have no interest in letting their own people prosper too much. By keeping their currency artificially low and import tariffs high, they allow their export products to have lower prices at the expense of costlier imports.
In the long run, this policy is totally insane for the country. I wonder where China would be today if their people could buy the products they export. Only one thing I'm sure of, it would not be the Communist party in power.
Depriving someone of something entirely immaterial is not stealing, by any measure. "Exclusivity" is something that cannot by itself be converted into anything that has material worth, so it cannot be stealing.
What the entertainment industry complains about is not the loss of exclusivity, they claim instead that they would have bigger profits if no one copied their works.
Which is an argument that's not supported by either reason or facts. It's one thing to say they would have more profits if more people would buy their $30 CDs, it's a different thing to say that people would spend $30 on a CD if they didn't have the option to copy it from someone else.
So is "stealing" when applied to copying a CD.
Would you allow us to have open streets, sir, or should we wear tags to identify us while we walk outside?
South Korea is a notable example of this, because it's right next to North Korea, which shares the same culture and history, up to 1950. Then the country was split in two and each half adopted a different economic orientation. Look at the results today.
The problem with that is that not all trash has the same value.
Beverage cans are made of aluminum, which has the highest price among common garbage items. No one will want to waste their time recycling plastic bottles if there are aluminum cans available. There's very little value in recycling plastic which will most probably end in a landfill, no matter how many people are gathering garbage.
Empty plastic bottles float in water and get washed away to the nearest water course after any heavy rain and ultimately end in the ocean
The best way that I've seen for enabling this segment of society to grow and prosper and have success is the availability of education. Credit will not help people who have no marketable skills.
Do you have problems with people finding unfit purposes for other industrial chemicals?
Industrial ethanol is stolen because booze is so ridiculously expensive. Set the taxes for alcoholic drinks at the same level industrial chemicals are taxed and the problem will disappear.
You can also grow tobacco in your backyard, dry the leaves in the sun, and smoke it in your homemade pipe.
You'll still have a significant risk of dying of cancer, even if you never use industrial pesticides in your garden.
A poison is a poison, no matter how or where it's produced.
Not the last, those contain water. Methanol has a lower boiling point than ethanol, so it will boil out of the mixture at the start of the process.
Anyhow, it's not difficult to build a fractioning column at home that will give you very pure ethanol. It's so simple a child can use it.
Nothing is "to the east" of anywhere in Chile. That would be in Argentina.
Especially if the device is powered by the serial port. The DTR, CTS, and RTS pins were often used to supply a few milliamps which were enough to power things like a serial port mouse, but sometimes the USB adapters cannot put out the needed current into the auxiliary pins.