If you check net birthrates, the better socio-economic places have the least population increases. In fact, in 2007 most of Europe and Russia had *negative* effective birth rates (i.e. population decrease), Canada almost neutral, the US had slight positive, so had China. High positive net birthrates can be seen to a lesser degree in India and Mongolia and to a very high degree in Africa and the Middle East.
So maybe instead of disease, famine and war we could stabilise world population by actually rising the quality of life of those much less fortunate (e.g. by eliminating famine, diseases and war...). Of course, killing them en masse is also a solution and it is also much more profitable, especially if we can cleverly organise that they kill each other while paying us from both sides for the weaponry to do it efficiently. Alas, since they are usually quite poor, they can't really afford the best stuff, so often they have to (literally) hack throgh each other, but at least we can make shocking documentaries with nice washing powder (guaranteed to make your socks 7.3% more pleasant!) advertisement revenues.
Being held without charge and then released is still better than an ammo clip emptied into your head at a public place for no reason whatsoever. Experience shows that there are enough truely patriotic police around to do that too. 30 years ago we've been protesting against military dictators doing the same thing, now we legistlate it. Funny how this brave new world of ours turned out...
Probably because after a decade of embargo that followed their defeat in Kuwait Iraq was thought to be an easy target: march in, demolish the underequipped local military, secure the oil fields, make a big parade in Baghdad while the "We are the champions" is blasting from the speakers, put a pupet government in place, build a few big military bases with a handful of missiles so that the nearby Axis of Evil countries crap themselves, open a few McDonald's so that the Axis of Evil can see that freedom can't be stopped, then get home in two months' time and enjoy the cheap oil for ever and ever and ever. A pretty good investment plan indeed. When it works, that is.
Considering the military strength of Iraq compared to that of Saudi Arabia or Iran and the fact that after so many years the Iraq war is still going (while the oil is apparently not flowing that easily), it was a very wise decision not to try to attack some other country there - the mighty US Army might have been ass-kicked, which is generally an embarrassing thing to a Last Remaining Superpower, I guess.
> The various treaties that address the topic are quite clear - in space, as on earth, government property > remains government property forever unless specifically yields title.
I know very little about these laws, but at least at first sight the above seems a bit of a tricky issue:
What if said governemnt does not exist any more? E.g. there's no Soviet Union and there's no soviet government any more. So who owns a ship on the bottom of the sea with big CCCP all over it?
The Spanish Armada was clearly government property, if you find such a ship, is it still owned by Spain?
If you find a say 4000 years old shipwreck, how can you decide if it was government property or a private ship? You said it was government property forever, 4000 years is nothing to forever.
If someone finds an unexploded napalm bomb in Vietnam, do they have to mark it with a little flag "US Property, do not touch" instead of just destroying it?
How do you define "government"? I'm dead serious, what is the legal definition of the government that has perpetual property rights?
More akin to "Since this bank has been transferring billions of dollars a year for many years now, there is no reason to accuse us with financial mismanagement or malicie of any sort just because this one single account somehow became short by a couple of measly millions and in the same time, completely accidentally and coincidentally, the private accounts of our head accountant, a cashier and the CEO has received donations from and undisclosed source in the vicinity of a couple of millions."
> The reason some open source enthusiasts are opposed to OOXML is because they would like to create a market for > ODF through legislation rather than through competition. While others, such as myself, would be glad to have > a document file format that is described well enough to be considered a standard which can be implemented by > anyone regardless of the standard's author.
You got that completely wrong. Those "some open source enthusiasts" are opposed to OOXML because it actually wants to kill ODF by killing competition.
ODF causes problems to Microsoft because: - It *is* a real standard - Large entities like standard compliant products - Large entities have lots of IT budget - Microsoft wants most of that budget - Anyone can implement ODF, possibly better than Microsoft - There is that damned C-word again, competition!
So, what Microsoft decided was to create a so-called standard, namely OOXML, that while formally a standard (and thus the decision makers of above mentioned large entities will like it), in practice nobody can implement it but Microsoft. This guarantees the continuation of the monopoly position for Microsoft while pleases the governemnts and corporate management. If it costs money, so be it. If it costs the reputation of ISO, who cares. Microsoft is not a charity organisation (although, if a little charity buys good PR, then they might even spend some money on that), they a business and they don't give a damn about standards - standards mean interoperability, competition and a possible revelation of their technical inferiority. No, they do NOT want a real document standard *especially* because it would open up competition.
The geeks are the one who want interoperability and competition - hence ODF is a real standard. Microsoft is the one that wants to avoid both with religious zeal, hence their refusal of implementing ODF (an open standard) and caming up with OOXML, a "standard" specifically designed to be unimplementable and then rammed through ISO using loopholes, bribes and everything else that was needed.
> BTW, most of the time in my trips (only in Europe - I'm French) is not spent flying. > It is spent to reach (or go away from) the airport and waiting. Supersonic flights > (that are much too expensive for me) do not help here.
Well, on the other hand, an Australia-Europe trip, where you spend ~22 hours flying, is an area where supersonic would be a very attractive option. Your total time, including to/from/at airport time is about 30-34 hours (depending on how much you have to wait in the middle, Singapore or Thailand usually), if you could cut that to say 20-24, that would be a significant advantage. I don't say that Australia's European traffic would be enough to support a commercially successful supersonic fleet, but the passangers would definitely welcome the time savings.
> An instruction manual with, say, 200 contributors (like the service manual for a Boeing 737). > Each of those 200 content creators would have a share of the copyright. To print a new > copy of the manual, you'd need to get permission from each of them -- or their descendants.
Not their descendants. Them. But why would you need copyright protection on the instruction manual of the 737?
> You're saying that artists should not be able to sell their copyrights. That they > should only be able to make a living by distributing their own works -- that artist > and publisher must be combined into one role. That nobody should be allowed to buy > the rights to creative work on spec, thus nurturing and publicizing new talent.
Nope. The artist can hire a publishing firm. If you come up with an electronic gizmo and want to sell in quantity, you hire a manufacturer to make them. But you do *not* sell them the "intellectual property" of your gizmo. A publisher is indeed doing exactly the same: the author or artist provides the "manufaturing documentation", i.e. the content, and the publisher turns it into a physical book or CD or whatnot.
Why should the publisher own the rights for the work? They have not produced it, they simply, well, make copies of it.
Science and arts have been very well without copyright law and transferrable rights for hundreds of years. Artists did not all became filthy rich since the introduction of semi-ethernal transferrable copyright, big publishing corporations did.
Could you please point me out why do we have to pay royalties for a keyring to a corporation just because the mouse on the keyring looks like the mouse that a guy of whom only the bones remain by now drew more that 3 generations ago? I can't really see how that advances the arts and sciences... Have you talked to kids recently? They don't even know what Mickey Mouse was and they don't give a damn about a 60-yer old cartoon either. Yet, when they buy the keyring with the mouse, the till at the W.D. Corporation rings. Why? Why does a scientist have to *pay* for publishing his/her work *and* transfer the copyright to the publisher? How exactly does that help the scientists in their work? I understand, of course, how it helps the publisher - it is a good business model: you are paid to obtain someone else's work. That's pretty much how the copyright industry operates.
> That has no bearing on any of the other ISO standards. Such as > ISO 9000: quality management in production environments
Um, ISO produces standards. With the OOXML they seem to be not ISO-9000 certified, or their certification should be withdrawn. Therefore, their products (including ISO-9000 itself) is a result of an uncertified process and therefore can not be trusted.
> Someone who creates a work should be allowed to have a say in how it can be distributed, > and nobody should be allowed to make money off of somebody else's work without compensating > them.
That is fine, but most "intellectual property" creators are compensated in lump-sum. I think there is a lot more IP created by scientists and engineers than by musicians. Yet, the overwhelming majority of the scientists and engineers are paid a wage and if they create someting that allows you, say, to record 50 hours of music in a thingy smaller than a matchbox or something other that allows you to recover from nasty bacterial disease, at most they get a little fame and appreciation from their peers. Yet Paul McCarthy recently complained that it was ridiculous that copyright expired and you would not get compensated for a song you had written half a century before.
I agree with you that copyright should not be transferable but imagine the havoc it would make in the software world... Like Linux, Windows would be owned by the programmers who wrote it, not by Microsoft... If Bill doesn't treat them right, well, bye bye Vista.
So, while I agree with you on a non-transferrable copyright, I'd also limit it: you got a temporary monopoly of copying your work. However, if you get a fair compensation, you MUST copy the work and can not ban or hinder its use or performance in any way.
With all that, we could just abolish the whole copyright thing and work out how we shall compensate the artists (note: artists, not entertainment industry fatcats and lawyers).
> The main similarity, of course, is that X is completely legal, legit, and paid for.
It's the same thing with stores. You open a CD or a DVD store. You buy your stuff legit, you sell them at reasonable prices, you pay your taxes. You think you are legit. But then, the local representatives of the Music And Film Industry Association (MAFIA) come to visit you and point out that you should pay a licence fee to them for *not* participating in the niche sport equipment business that they own in an esoteric level. The on-site demonstration that usually follows practically always convinces shopkeepers that they would rather pay the license fee than to be forced to enter the very tough baseball bat business.
However, the above method is not very efficient. Thugs are way too soft and too dumb to come up with new ways in innovative licensing. Hence the use of lawyers (they are smart) and politicians (they are tough). Costs a wee bit more, but your profits will skyrocket.
Nauru is actually demanding compensation because the new kids on the block told them that they wanted to shut down the lucrative (to Nauru, that is) off-shored concentration camp business.
Maybe the whole ISO process was a bit like the Internet. The protocols were originally designed with the assumption that the participants (at least the servers) are trusted entities. The protocols themselves trust the underlying delivery mechanisms and servers trust their peer servers. Then came the realisation that you can't trust servers, you can't trust administrators, you can't trust routers or even the cable - you can't trust anything and anyone on the Net.
Probably the whole ISO process was designed with a similar mindset, assuming that the standard sub-committies themselves are serving the public interest and not their own, the thought of corruption didn't even occur to them. Now we have a malicious script kiddie with a very powerful toolset (i.e. billions of dollars) to wreck havoc and to set up a spam botnet.
> Imagine if C let you hook into the tokenizer and the parser! Why, you could invent your > own language for solving your problem, and then solve your problem in that language!
Actually, the humble FORTH allowed you to do that; you had access to the entire compilation process. It's a very cool feature, but like self-modifying code, the power comes at the price of responsibility. You can shoot yourself in the foot big time with those.
Agreed. Wikipedia's math pages are seemingly written by mathematicians to be read by other mathematicians. I've been taught enough math to falsely believe that I could follow a mathematical explanation but Wikipedia proved me wrong in no time at all. Wikipedia, in general, is a fast way to access information and follow information chains but in the particular case of maths it seems that dusting off an old uni book about the subject is both faster and way more productive.
> The lawsuit accuses Eircom of abetting illegal downloading by allowing copyrighted > material to traverse its network unimpeded.
Wow. How about suing tollway operators for allowing illegal drugs/weapons/stolen goods/etc to traverse their tollways unimpeded? Or the state for that matter, that operates public roads? Or the public transport operators?
The "intellectual rights" industry is just getting more and more insane with each passing day. Next they will sue the electricity board to provide support for illicit activity by providing the electricity that runs the illegal servers and the illegal distribution network (aka the Internet).
I remeber reading an article in the IEEE magazine, written by an MPAA lawyer, in which he explains why without the DMCA there would be no art or entertainment and that the only thing standing between humanity and universal happiness is the analog hole.
I wonder how long will it go on and escalate before the whole thing will just crush and burn? Alternatively, we the people, also known as "the sheep" will just slowly succumb to the thought police and will learn to love Big Brother...
> when the police start realizing that they can't do anything with anyone's > data without their permission, they might just give up?
Nope, they stamp you as a 'terrorist' and from that on you can more or less just disappear (sedition laws by Ruddock & Friends) never to be seen again. As the above named individual pointed out sleep deprivation, for example, is not torture, sooner or later you will tell them the passphrase. Or you won't, because you can't talk any more or can't remember it any more. But they won't give up, no.
> First, there is a difference between proven and provable. "Provable" means that, given sufficient data > (which could exist, but is not required to), the theory could be proven if the data were applied to it. > "Proven" means that the theory in question is not only provable but also that the required data actually > does exist, has been found, and has been applied to the theory. To be scientific, a thing has to be > provable but not necessarily proven.
Not even that. By the Popperian definition of scientific it only has to be DISprovable. That is, if you have a theory and you can come up with an experiment (whether it can actually be performed in practice or not is irrelevant) that could prove that the theory is wrong, then your theory is scientific. A nice, and related, example is Pasteur's experiment. He had the theory that living creatures come from other living creatures (in particular, that the microorganisms that spoil food get there from the air) and they do not pop into exsitence by divine interaction or due to some life-force. So he brew broth in two flasks and boiled it until he knew all living things were dead in the soup. Then he let the broth cool. He let one flash open to the air and the other also open, but through a U-bend so microorganisms could not get into it (but divine power and life force, both or which should be weightless could). Of course the open flask broth will get spoiled in a few days. Here's why his theory was scientific: if the soup gets spoiled in the flask with the U-bend, that DISproves his theory that living comes only from living. It does NOT prove that it was due to God or due to the life-force, it just proves that it was NOT by a biological process, i.e. Pasteur's theory is wrong (which it wasn't - at least so far it has not been proven wrong).
In case of the evolution it is scientific, because you can find things that would disprove the theory. ID and Creationism and the question of existence of God and all that religious stuff is not science beacuse you have no way of disprove them. You can not come up with an experiment that can succeed (or fail) only if God does not exist, simply because if God is omnipotent then he/she/it can make your experiment to succeed (or fail) despite of his/her/its existence.
> Do you find it morally objectionable to remove morally objectionable content from movies?
Yes. What's morally objectionable to you might not be that to me. If we'd remove everything that is morally objectionable to someone, there would be nothing left. I guess if you are a really good person, you do not like to watch violence. You can still like Arnie, so here you go, this is Terminator for you, with all violence deleted. It is pretty much the opening and closing credits plus that scene with the empty street, but hey, it is still the Terminator, with morally objectionable scenes deleted! Do you think the gist of the film is still preserved? Does it have the same entertainment value (I think we can skip the "artistic integrity" in this case...)? In cultures where it is morally objectionable that women show their face publicly, should we sell versions of films where all scenes with a female actress with uncovered face are deleted? Queen Elisabeth would make an interesting viewing:-)
There is the rating system. If you do not like to look at naked bodies, then do not watch films with 'nudity' and 'sex scenes' tags and by all means try to avoid any museum that hosts stuff from the great ancient places or from Europe during the Renaissance or later (the XI-XIV century period should be safe). But please do not demand museums to remove all the pictures by, say, Rubens just because they amorally show naked women, do not demand the chiselling off the penises of ancient statues (it was in vogue once, though, about 800 years ago). If Gauguin wanted all Tahitian women being painted in bikinis, probably he would have painted them that way. He didn't, there are half naked and fully naked women on a lot of his paintings. Yes, you could paint a bikini over every naked girl on his pictures, but that would not really be Gauguin any more, would it?
Deleting scenes that *you* don't like is dangerously close to declaring that they should not be available to *anyone* because it is our duty to save our fellow human beings from immoral temptation, then we can start burning books, then burning people...
> When Democrats spend tax dollars propping up "unsuccessful" citizens its called welfare-state communism. > When Republicans spend tax dollars propping up "unsuccessful" corporations its called...what exactly?
Freedom and democracy are the fashionable terms, I think.
The problem with that is that when there's a law that almost everybody routinely breaks, then you gave your government a weapon that they can turn against you. You have a right to protest even if they don't like it. But if you *do* protest, you will be one of those whose home is searched and computers and other equipment seized to check copyrigth infringement, and if they find say deCSS on your drive anywhere or an MP3 that you can't produce the CD for, then you are going to be squashed.
This is the same stuff as locking up Al Capone for tax evasion, except that if you make tax evasion virtually unavoidable, then you can lock up anyone you wish.
The problem is that politicians do not represent the interest of the people, they represent the interests of the highest bidder, and it seems that people can't pay as much as huge industries can. Until the people get to the point that they decide to "re-educate" politicians by some effective (albeit drastic) means, things are not going to get better.
I think when "V for Vendetta" gets banned in the movies and 1984 is no longer on sale in the bookstores you can start to seriously worry. We're getting there...
> In a world driven by money and commerce, the injection of money into artistic works is > NOT artifical. It's the natural product of the way the world works. > > I'd rather have enforced copyright of reasonable length than be reduced to crap > packed to the gills with advertising, or more American Idol type trash. Which is > largely what you'd get if what you want were to happen.
Um, American Idol and adware ridden rubbish *is* the result of money driven "art". If you could not make money out of American Idol, it would not be on show.
Also, don't forget that the whole film industry is using the copyright the same way they fight so vehemently. You make a play on stage, pay the actors, the theatre, all the other artists (painters, designers, whatever) and people come and pay to see it. Now here comes Hollywood: Make the same play, but store it on a medium that is very easy to copy (i.e. film). Then you can cash in from that single performance many, many times because the copying costs are very low. Since you have eneromous profits, you can afford to build your custom theatre, pay obscene salaries to your actors and so on. What's more, you have enough money to get the entire lawmaking and enforcing on your budget to guarantee that you and only you can copy the material, thus quaranteeing the profit level. Naturally, you go for the lowest common denominator, that being the largest market, that is, you generate crap. There's nothing about "art" anywhere near the whole thing. (As a side issue, if you manage to push the general level of expectation aka dumb people down as much as possible, they became a better target for advertisements, increasing your revenue and they will become more controllable, to the pleasure of your governmental pals).
Hollywood and music studios now face the problem that copying became not just extremely cheap and available for everyone, but it is pretty technically feasible for a layman to create perfect copies, you need neither equipment (apart from that is already available in the household) nor sophistication to download MP3-s or MPEG4-s from the 'Web.
Nevertheless, art is what you get when the motivation is *not* money. American Idol, the soap operas, the run-of-the-mill bands, Rocky-XXXVIII and alike is what you get if the motivation *is* money - if it didn't make money it simply would not be made/aired.
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If you check net birthrates, the better socio-economic places have the least population increases. In fact, in 2007 most of Europe and Russia had *negative* effective birth rates (i.e. population decrease), Canada almost neutral, the US had slight positive, so had China. High positive net birthrates can be seen to a lesser degree in India and Mongolia and to a very high degree in Africa and the Middle East.
So maybe instead of disease, famine and war we could stabilise world population by actually rising the quality of life of those much less fortunate (e.g. by eliminating famine, diseases and war...). Of course, killing them en masse is also a solution and it is also much more profitable, especially if we can cleverly organise that they kill each other while paying us from both sides for the weaponry to do it efficiently. Alas, since they are usually quite poor, they can't really afford the best stuff, so often they have to (literally) hack throgh each other, but at least we can make shocking documentaries with nice washing powder (guaranteed to make your socks 7.3% more pleasant!) advertisement revenues.
Being held without charge and then released is still better than an ammo clip emptied into your head at a public place for no reason whatsoever. Experience shows that there are enough truely patriotic police around to do that too. 30 years ago we've been protesting against military dictators doing the same thing, now we legistlate it. Funny how this brave new world of ours turned out...
Probably because after a decade of embargo that followed their defeat in Kuwait Iraq was thought to be an easy target: march in, demolish the underequipped local military, secure the oil fields, make a big parade in Baghdad while the "We are the champions" is blasting from the speakers, put a pupet government in place, build a few big military bases with a handful of missiles so that the nearby Axis of Evil countries crap themselves, open a few McDonald's so that the Axis of Evil can see that freedom can't be stopped, then get home in two months' time and enjoy the cheap oil for ever and ever and ever. A pretty good investment plan indeed. When it works, that is.
Considering the military strength of Iraq compared to that of Saudi Arabia or Iran and the fact that after so many years the Iraq war is still going (while the oil is apparently not flowing that easily), it was a very wise decision not to try to attack some other country there - the mighty US Army might have been ass-kicked, which is generally an embarrassing thing to a Last Remaining Superpower, I guess.
> The various treaties that address the topic are quite clear - in space, as on earth, government property
> remains government property forever unless specifically yields title.
I know very little about these laws, but at least at first sight the above seems a bit of a tricky issue:
What if said governemnt does not exist any more? E.g. there's no Soviet Union and there's no soviet government any more. So who owns a ship on the bottom of the sea with big CCCP all over it?
The Spanish Armada was clearly government property, if you find such a ship, is it still owned by Spain?
If you find a say 4000 years old shipwreck, how can you decide if it was government property or a private ship? You said it was government property forever, 4000 years is nothing to forever.
If someone finds an unexploded napalm bomb in Vietnam, do they have to mark it with a little flag "US Property, do not touch" instead of just destroying it?
How do you define "government"? I'm dead serious, what is the legal definition of the government that has perpetual property rights?
> (E.g., "How can they be power-hungry autocrats when they just gave us sufferage?").
Was it a really good pun or just a typo?
More akin to "Since this bank has been transferring billions of dollars a year for many years now, there is no reason to accuse us with financial mismanagement or malicie of any sort just because this one single account somehow became short by a couple of measly millions and in the same time, completely accidentally and coincidentally, the private accounts of our head accountant, a cashier and the CEO has received donations from and undisclosed source in the vicinity of a couple of millions."
> The reason some open source enthusiasts are opposed to OOXML is because they would like to create a market for
> ODF through legislation rather than through competition. While others, such as myself, would be glad to have
> a document file format that is described well enough to be considered a standard which can be implemented by
> anyone regardless of the standard's author.
You got that completely wrong. Those "some open source enthusiasts" are opposed to OOXML because it actually wants to kill ODF by killing competition.
ODF causes problems to Microsoft because:
- It *is* a real standard
- Large entities like standard compliant products
- Large entities have lots of IT budget
- Microsoft wants most of that budget
- Anyone can implement ODF, possibly better than Microsoft
- There is that damned C-word again, competition!
So, what Microsoft decided was to create a so-called standard, namely OOXML, that while formally a standard (and thus the decision makers of above mentioned large entities will like it), in practice nobody can implement it but Microsoft. This guarantees the continuation of the monopoly position for Microsoft while pleases the governemnts and corporate management. If it costs money, so be it. If it costs the reputation of ISO, who cares. Microsoft is not a charity organisation (although, if a little charity buys good PR, then they might even spend some money on that), they a business and they don't give a damn about standards - standards mean interoperability, competition and a possible revelation of their technical inferiority. No, they do NOT want a real document standard *especially* because it would open up competition.
The geeks are the one who want interoperability and competition - hence ODF is a real standard. Microsoft is the one that wants to avoid both with religious zeal, hence their refusal of implementing ODF (an open standard) and caming up with OOXML, a "standard" specifically designed to be unimplementable and then rammed through ISO using loopholes, bribes and everything else that was needed.
> BTW, most of the time in my trips (only in Europe - I'm French) is not spent flying.
> It is spent to reach (or go away from) the airport and waiting. Supersonic flights
> (that are much too expensive for me) do not help here.
Well, on the other hand, an Australia-Europe trip, where you spend ~22 hours flying, is an area where supersonic would be a very attractive option. Your total time, including to/from/at airport time is about 30-34 hours (depending on how much you have to wait in the middle, Singapore or Thailand usually), if you could cut that to say 20-24, that would be a significant advantage. I don't say that Australia's European traffic would be enough to support a commercially successful supersonic fleet, but the passangers would definitely welcome the time savings.
> An instruction manual with, say, 200 contributors (like the service manual for a Boeing 737).
> Each of those 200 content creators would have a share of the copyright. To print a new
> copy of the manual, you'd need to get permission from each of them -- or their descendants.
Not their descendants. Them. But why would you need copyright protection on the instruction manual of the 737?
> You're saying that artists should not be able to sell their copyrights. That they
> should only be able to make a living by distributing their own works -- that artist
> and publisher must be combined into one role. That nobody should be allowed to buy
> the rights to creative work on spec, thus nurturing and publicizing new talent.
Nope. The artist can hire a publishing firm. If you come up with an electronic gizmo and want to sell in quantity, you hire a manufacturer to make them. But you do *not* sell them the "intellectual property" of your gizmo. A publisher is indeed doing exactly the same: the author or artist provides the "manufaturing documentation", i.e. the content, and the publisher turns it into a physical book or CD or whatnot.
Why should the publisher own the rights for the work? They have not produced it, they simply, well, make copies of it.
Science and arts have been very well without copyright law and transferrable rights for hundreds of years. Artists did not all became filthy rich since the introduction of semi-ethernal transferrable copyright, big publishing corporations did.
Could you please point me out why do we have to pay royalties for a keyring to a corporation just because the mouse on the keyring looks like the mouse that a guy of whom only the bones remain by now drew more that 3 generations ago? I can't really see how that advances the arts and sciences... Have you talked to kids recently? They don't even know what Mickey Mouse was and they don't give a damn about a 60-yer old cartoon either. Yet, when they buy the keyring with the mouse, the till at the W.D. Corporation rings. Why? Why does a scientist have to *pay* for publishing his/her work *and* transfer the copyright to the publisher? How exactly does that help the scientists in their work? I understand, of course, how it helps the publisher - it is a good business model: you are paid to obtain someone else's work. That's pretty much how the copyright industry operates.
> That has no bearing on any of the other ISO standards. Such as
> ISO 9000: quality management in production environments
Um, ISO produces standards. With the OOXML they seem to be not ISO-9000 certified, or their certification should be withdrawn. Therefore, their products (including ISO-9000 itself) is a result of an uncertified process and therefore can not be trusted.
Tongue in cheeck in your own discretion.
> Someone who creates a work should be allowed to have a say in how it can be distributed,
> and nobody should be allowed to make money off of somebody else's work without compensating
> them.
That is fine, but most "intellectual property" creators are compensated in lump-sum. I think there is a lot more IP created by scientists and engineers than by musicians. Yet, the overwhelming majority of the scientists and engineers are paid a wage and if they create someting that allows you, say, to record 50 hours of music in a thingy smaller than a matchbox or something other that allows you to recover from nasty bacterial disease, at most they get a little fame and appreciation from their peers. Yet Paul McCarthy recently complained that it was ridiculous that copyright expired and you would not get compensated for a song you had written half a century before.
I agree with you that copyright should not be transferable but imagine the havoc it would make in the software world... Like Linux, Windows would be owned by the programmers who wrote it, not by Microsoft... If Bill doesn't treat them right, well, bye bye Vista.
So, while I agree with you on a non-transferrable copyright, I'd also limit it: you got a temporary monopoly of copying your work. However, if you get a fair compensation, you MUST copy the work and can not ban or hinder its use or performance in any way.
With all that, we could just abolish the whole copyright thing and work out how we shall compensate the artists (note: artists, not entertainment industry fatcats and lawyers).
> The main similarity, of course, is that X is completely legal, legit, and paid for.
It's the same thing with stores. You open a CD or a DVD store. You buy your stuff legit, you sell them at reasonable prices, you pay your taxes. You think you are legit. But then, the local representatives of the Music And Film Industry Association (MAFIA) come to visit you and point out that you should pay a licence fee to them for *not* participating in the niche sport equipment business that they own in an esoteric level. The on-site demonstration that usually follows practically always convinces shopkeepers that they would rather pay the license fee than to be forced to enter the very tough baseball bat business.
However, the above method is not very efficient. Thugs are way too soft and too dumb to come up with new ways in innovative licensing. Hence the use of lawyers (they are smart) and politicians (they are tough). Costs a wee bit more, but your profits will skyrocket.
Nauru is actually demanding compensation because the new kids on the block told them that they wanted to shut down the lucrative (to Nauru, that is) off-shored concentration camp business.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/02/26/2172904.htm
Maybe the whole ISO process was a bit like the Internet. The protocols were originally designed with the assumption that the participants (at least the servers) are trusted entities. The protocols themselves trust the underlying delivery mechanisms and servers trust their peer servers. Then came the realisation that you can't trust servers, you can't trust administrators, you can't trust routers or even the cable - you can't trust anything and anyone on the Net.
Probably the whole ISO process was designed with a similar mindset, assuming that the standard sub-committies themselves are serving the public interest and not their own, the thought of corruption didn't even occur to them. Now we have a malicious script kiddie with a very powerful toolset (i.e. billions of dollars) to wreck havoc and to set up a spam botnet.
> Imagine if C let you hook into the tokenizer and the parser! Why, you could invent your
> own language for solving your problem, and then solve your problem in that language!
Actually, the humble FORTH allowed you to do that; you had access to the entire compilation process. It's a very cool feature, but like self-modifying code, the power comes at the price of responsibility. You can shoot yourself in the foot big time with those.
That reminded me that some 15+ years ago I seem to remember seeing an Amiga and a Mac ad, side by side:
:-)
Amiga: the computer for the creative mind!
Macintosh: the computer for the rest of us!
Agreed. Wikipedia's math pages are seemingly written by mathematicians to be read by other mathematicians. I've been taught enough math to falsely believe that I could follow a mathematical explanation but Wikipedia proved me wrong in no time at all. Wikipedia, in general, is a fast way to access information and follow information chains but in the particular case of maths it seems that dusting off an old uni book about the subject is both faster and way more productive.
> The lawsuit accuses Eircom of abetting illegal downloading by allowing copyrighted
> material to traverse its network unimpeded.
Wow. How about suing tollway operators for allowing illegal drugs/weapons/stolen goods/etc to traverse their tollways unimpeded? Or the state for that matter, that operates public roads? Or the public transport operators?
The "intellectual rights" industry is just getting more and more insane with each passing day. Next they will sue the electricity board to provide support for illicit activity by providing the electricity that runs the illegal servers and the illegal distribution network (aka the Internet).
I remeber reading an article in the IEEE magazine, written by an MPAA lawyer, in which he explains why without the DMCA there would be no art or entertainment and that the only thing standing between humanity and universal happiness is the analog hole.
I wonder how long will it go on and escalate before the whole thing will just crush and burn? Alternatively, we the people, also known as "the sheep" will just slowly succumb to the thought police and will learn to love Big Brother...
> when the police start realizing that they can't do anything with anyone's
> data without their permission, they might just give up?
Nope, they stamp you as a 'terrorist' and from that on you can more or less just disappear (sedition laws by Ruddock & Friends) never to be seen again. As the above named individual pointed out sleep deprivation, for example, is not torture, sooner or later you will tell them the passphrase. Or you won't, because you can't talk any more or can't remember it any more. But they won't give up, no.
> First, there is a difference between proven and provable. "Provable" means that, given sufficient data
> (which could exist, but is not required to), the theory could be proven if the data were applied to it.
> "Proven" means that the theory in question is not only provable but also that the required data actually
> does exist, has been found, and has been applied to the theory. To be scientific, a thing has to be
> provable but not necessarily proven.
Not even that. By the Popperian definition of scientific it only has to be DISprovable. That is, if you have
a theory and you can come up with an experiment (whether it can actually be performed in practice or not is irrelevant) that could prove that the theory is wrong, then your theory is scientific. A nice, and related, example is Pasteur's experiment. He had the theory that living creatures come from other living creatures (in particular, that the microorganisms that spoil food get there from the air) and they do not pop into exsitence by divine interaction or due to some life-force. So he brew broth in two flasks and boiled it until he knew all living things were dead in the soup. Then he let the broth cool. He let one flash open to the air and the other also open, but through a U-bend so microorganisms could not get into it (but divine power and life force, both or which should be weightless could). Of course the open flask broth will get spoiled in a few days. Here's why his theory was scientific: if the soup gets spoiled in the flask with the U-bend, that DISproves his theory that living comes only from living. It does NOT prove that it was due to God or due to the life-force, it just proves that it was NOT by a biological process, i.e. Pasteur's theory is wrong (which it wasn't - at least so far it has not been proven wrong).
In case of the evolution it is scientific, because you can find things that would disprove the theory. ID and Creationism and the question of existence of God and all that religious stuff is not science beacuse you have no way of disprove them. You can not come up with an experiment that can succeed (or fail) only if God does not exist, simply because if God is omnipotent then he/she/it can make your experiment to succeed (or fail) despite of his/her/its existence.
> Do you find it morally objectionable to remove morally objectionable content from movies?
:-)
Yes. What's morally objectionable to you might not be that to me. If we'd remove everything that is morally objectionable to someone, there would be nothing left. I guess if you are a really good person, you do not like to watch violence. You can still like Arnie, so here you go, this is Terminator for you, with all violence deleted. It is pretty much the opening and closing credits plus that scene with the empty street, but hey, it is still the Terminator, with morally objectionable scenes deleted! Do you think the gist of the film is still preserved? Does it have the same entertainment value (I think we can skip the "artistic integrity" in this case...)? In cultures where it is morally objectionable that women show their face publicly, should we sell versions of films where all scenes with a female actress with uncovered face are deleted? Queen Elisabeth would make an interesting viewing
There is the rating system. If you do not like to look at naked bodies, then do not watch films with 'nudity' and 'sex scenes' tags and by all means try to avoid any museum that hosts stuff from the great ancient places or from Europe during the Renaissance or later (the XI-XIV century period should be safe). But please do not demand museums to remove all the pictures by, say, Rubens just because they amorally show naked women, do not demand the chiselling off the penises of ancient statues (it was in vogue once, though, about 800 years ago). If Gauguin wanted all Tahitian women being painted in bikinis, probably he would have painted them that way. He didn't, there are half naked and fully naked women on a lot of his paintings. Yes, you could paint a bikini over every naked girl on his pictures, but that would not really be Gauguin any more, would it?
Deleting scenes that *you* don't like is dangerously close to declaring that they should not be available to *anyone* because it is our duty to save our fellow human beings from immoral temptation, then we can start burning books, then burning people...
> When Democrats spend tax dollars propping up "unsuccessful" citizens its called welfare-state communism.
> When Republicans spend tax dollars propping up "unsuccessful" corporations its called...what exactly?
Freedom and democracy are the fashionable terms, I think.
The problem with that is that when there's a law that almost everybody routinely breaks, then you gave your government a weapon that they can turn against you. You have a right to protest even if they don't like it. But if you *do* protest, you will be one of those whose home is searched and computers and other equipment seized to check copyrigth infringement, and if they find say deCSS on your drive anywhere or an MP3 that you can't produce the CD for, then you are going to be squashed.
This is the same stuff as locking up Al Capone for tax evasion, except that if you make tax evasion virtually unavoidable, then you can lock up anyone you wish.
The problem is that politicians do not represent the interest of the people, they represent the interests of the highest bidder, and it seems that people can't pay as much as huge industries can. Until the people get to the point that they decide to "re-educate" politicians by some effective (albeit drastic) means, things are not going to get better.
I think when "V for Vendetta" gets banned in the movies and 1984 is no longer on sale in the bookstores you can start to seriously worry. We're getting there...
> In a world driven by money and commerce, the injection of money into artistic works is
> NOT artifical. It's the natural product of the way the world works.
>
> I'd rather have enforced copyright of reasonable length than be reduced to crap
> packed to the gills with advertising, or more American Idol type trash. Which is
> largely what you'd get if what you want were to happen.
Um, American Idol and adware ridden rubbish *is* the result of money driven "art". If you could not make money out of American Idol, it would not be on show.
Also, don't forget that the whole film industry is using the copyright the same way they fight so vehemently. You make a play on stage, pay the actors, the theatre, all the other artists (painters, designers, whatever) and people come and pay to see it. Now here comes Hollywood: Make the same play, but store it on a medium that is very easy to copy (i.e. film). Then you can cash in from that single performance many, many times because the copying costs are very low. Since you have eneromous profits, you can afford to build your custom theatre, pay obscene salaries to your actors and so on. What's more, you have enough money to get the entire lawmaking and enforcing on your budget to guarantee that you and only you can copy the material, thus quaranteeing the profit level. Naturally, you go for the lowest common denominator, that being the largest market, that is, you generate crap. There's nothing about "art" anywhere near the whole thing. (As a side issue, if you manage to push the general level of expectation aka dumb people down as much as possible, they became a better target for advertisements, increasing your revenue and they will become more controllable, to the pleasure of your governmental pals).
Hollywood and music studios now face the problem that copying became not just extremely cheap and available for everyone, but it is pretty technically feasible for a layman to create perfect copies, you need neither equipment (apart from that is already available in the household) nor sophistication to download MP3-s or MPEG4-s from the 'Web.
Nevertheless, art is what you get when the motivation is *not* money. American Idol, the soap operas, the run-of-the-mill bands, Rocky-XXXVIII and alike is what you get if the motivation *is* money - if it didn't make money it simply would not be made/aired.