Corporations has rights like humans. The problem is that corporations do not have responsibilities like humans. When a corporation creates a faulty product that kills people and they know it and don't fix it for financial reasons, that's murder for monetary gain. In some US states, as far as I know, that draws the death penalty. Now the corporation as an entity shields all of its C*O-s from responsibility but then the corporation itself is not punished according to its crime: it gets fined at most. Why not execute it? That is, end its physical existence, meaning that it just closes down and all its property (the physical body of the corporation) gets taken with no compensation whatsoever. For lesser charges, like fraud, theft and alike, it could get jailed: banned from operating for X years, but it is not killed, i.e. it still has its assets and, if it can survive the jail, it can open shop in a couple years again.
Humans have human rights *and* human responsibilities. Corporations have human rights but no human responsibility, plus they are shielding the real people who form the corporation from the consequences of their actions if they commit them in the name of the corporation (while of course getting a *personal* gain).
> Well here's a little food for thought. If all the incandescents were changed to compact > florescents not only could every home in amercia charge their electric cars without needing > more plants and their electric bills would actually go down. Electric lights are still the > biggest single use of electricity in this country.
Well... I assume that most offices are already use some sort of fluorescent, so does street lighting and so on. So, let's see how much the public consumes.
There are about 3E8 people in the US, if we assume that the average family is 3 people, that's 1E8 families. If the average family is running 1kW of light for 5 hours every day (which seems reasonable) that's then 5E10 kWh per day or ~1.8E11 kWh a year. The US electricity consumption is about 4E12 kWh a year, i.e. the household lighting consumption is about 4.5% of the total electricity usage of the US. Even if they run the 1kW for 10hours a day, it is still less than 10%. The 1kW seems to be adequate, if the 3 people live in a 3 bedroom + kitchen + family room and they run 200W in each in the same time, that's 1kW for you.
> To give a specific example, the law of property ownership is a product of the mind. > The natural state of things is that if I see something and it isn't tied down or guarded, > it is mine if I want to take it. I always find it odd that people trot out the same tired > arguments about how "intellectual property" and "real property" aren't at all the same > thing, when in fact they are more similar than different. Both are artificial concepts > created by the law. The consequences of taking someone else's property are different in the > two cases of course, but they are not zero in either case.
They are very different. If, as a caveman, I have the great idea that it's easier to kill some critter using a stick propelled towards the critter by an other stick and a piece of bowel, that's my "intellectual property". The actual bow and arrow is my "physical property". Now, if you try to take my bow and arrow from me, that's theft or robbery. If you see me using my bow and arrow and you make your own bow and arrow, that's patent violation. If you come to my cave and see my cool pictures of critters on my wall that I painted and then you go home and paint the same pictures because looking at them pleases you, that's copyright violation.
If you take my bow and arrow you actually deprived me from the result of my work. If I want to shoot critters I'll have to go and obtain wood, string, stone chips and spend a lot of time to make a new bow and arrow. If you make your own bow and arrow, you, at most, took my advantage over you in killing critters. If you copy my pictures in my cave, you did absolutely nothing wrong. It should be noted that in the second two cases it was *you* who actually did the work to create the objects (your bow and arrow and you pictures), while in the first case you obtained an artifact without putting the effort into its creation.
If we live in a tribe (as we do, because we very early figured out that a group is more efficient than an individual and slight personal sacrifices to help other group members in distress are worth it when it's you who happen to be in distress and then you can expect the group to help you) I will obviously share my bow and arrow idea with everyone - it is our collective interest that we can whack critters for dinner easier. If I have lots of ideas which need time for testing (varios arrowhead shapes, feathers for stabilisers and so on) I might say to my group that it'd be more advantageous for *all of us* if I spent my time testing better arrows and the others would just give me food anyway, because they all know that my arrows will make it easier for them to get them critters in the pot. Now to protect this privileged position of mine (which so far was based on mutual trust: ther trust me to invent new weapons and I trust them to feed me adequately) I lobby the Chief to create a new rule: when I come up with a new weapon, for ten moons everybody who wants to make a weapon like that *must* pay me a critter. Which is an incentive for me to create newer and better weapons, so that the critter train keeps rolling and an incentive for them, because if they have the new weapon, that extra critter is quite reasonable considering the gain. Thus, we invented the patent system. Now if I can then do sexual favours for the Chief's best friends to convince them that even a certain way of scratching can be considered as invention or that giving critters for inventions in itself is an invention or that if I found out that eating the Big Furry Animal's heart makes you strong, then the heart itself is my invention, then we are in the current patent regime with algoritms, business models and genes being patentable.
Let's now see my paintings. I painted them because I like to paing animals. Other people like them. So they try to paint them in their cave. Not all of them are clever enough, so they ask me to paint a picture in their cave. They, of course, offer me dinner for the time I paint these pictures, which is fine by me. There
Chances are, M$, instead of seeing the light and lobby against the patentability of algorithms/math/shapes of clouds/ways of combing hair/etc will just hire more patent lawyers and patent everything remotely connected to computers to build a very thick patent armor and a large caliber cannon too.
At the end of the day Lucent and Microsoft and all those behemoths will sort it out between themselves and the small players get eliminated. The IP lobby gets multiple orgasms, extends patent expiry terms to that of copyright, then extends the copyright to be ahead of patents and generates a new class of IP, the 'unpublished thought'. Since that latter can not be effectively monitored (yet), they introduce a levy (indexed by the education level) to be paid by any cognitive being to the TCAA (Thought Control Association of America); those who can't pay can instead sell themselves to the TCAA, which will export them to Chinese sweatshops as extra cheap slave labour. Persons trying to hide their being educated will be prosecuted as thought terrorist and will be sent to secret CIA torture centres where they will be used for testing new methods of extracting one's innermost thoughts. Skipping school is considered a federal offense and offenders are sent to re-education camps (these can be cheaply leased from Gulag, Inc. a company run by the Russian maffia). People in coma (and thus with no income) but with measurable brain activity will have their organs removed and sold to pay for their thoughts, however, as soon as their EEG goes flat, no more organs can be extracted in lieu of the thought levy. Rather, all remaining organs can be taken by the TCAA as payment of punitive damages for depriving the TCAA of its income by the old trick of being dead.
Then the ants all go to the Père Lachaise cemetery and spit on La Fontaine's grave.
> I think that a total ban, as all total bans, is really arrogant and short-sighted.
Don't forget, you're talking about the Australian government. Short sighted and arrogant all the way. Great step forward with the lights, but on the same token when a report was commissioned about the energy production in Australia, the PM said that he wouldn't accept any recommendations that jeopradise the coal industry. Coal must stay, as well as oil and preferably some nuclear as well, for there's big money there too.
If you ban incasdescents you only upset some non-name Chinese manufacturer (and please Phillips), while it has minimal impact on the energy consumption of the country. You may have maybe 1-2kW worth of lightbulbs in a house alltogether and only a fraction of them is running at any given moment. Due to the houses here being built on the cheap, their thermal efficiency is junk and thus you run your 2kW heater *in each room* in winter or the 2-10kW air conditioner in summer. Plus you have the big TV on as soon as anyone steps in the house, computers running 24/7 together with the set-top box, the DVD and the game console (who bothers turning these off? - actually you should *not* turn off your set top at all, according to the cable company), handful of fridges and freezers and so on.
This whole stuff is just a stunt, global warming is hot topic now and it is election year. The freshly minted environmental minister has to show how environmentally friendly he is while avoiding to upset the industry the slightest bit. We don't sign up to Kyoto because that would 'negatively impact our coal industry' (although more likely because the US didn't so we shouldn't), same reason for not indroducing carbon tax. Alternative energy research was reasonably advanced here maybe a decade ago, now even if someone is interested, they move overseas very quickly.
As per using CFLs, I have a handful of them installed (have had for years) and I hate their light. Very unnatural. Whatever they say, the blackbody radiation of a 3000K body approximates the visible radiation of a 6000K body much better that excited Hg emitting UV photons exciting various phosphors emitting light in a few narrow bands trying to excite your photoreceptors the same way as normal light would. Especially when the objects around you do not know that they supposed to absorb/reflect these specific wavelengths such that they look to have the same colour as if a full-bandwidth light was shone on them.
Nevertheless, it seems that car bulbs and fridge bulbs will be exempt, so you still can build a closer-to-natural light if you want:-)
Hm, 'classical' slavery was in operation for about 2-3000 years, then feudalism ran for about 8-900 years and capitalism, depending on the details of your definition, maybe 200-350 years. So, if the trend continues (each system lasts about 1/3 ~ 1/4 of its predecessor) we'll see some change soon...
> The US government gives way too much leeway to China in general. They screw with exchange rates,
No, they don't - they keep their currency pegged to yours. Nothing illegal in that and lots of currencies are pegged against an other. The only problem is that China keeping hers solid against the greenback hurts the US, so what? Nothing says that China has to help the US economy - it's a free world and they can do whatever legally doable to help *themselves*.
> make it difficult for outsiders to do business inside China (Donald Trump even complained),
So? How different is from farm subsidies, compulsory 'buy American' for goverbnment procurement, forcing your IP laws on others and so on? You can do the same, you can build a big barrier in front of Chinese business coming your way. Why don't you?
> give weapons to our enemies,
while you give weapons to their enemies, your enemies and in general anyone who either pays the price or seems momentarily useful for you. Don't forget, Saddam's weaponry was stamped "Made in USA" all around.
> take our jobs,
no, they do not take your jobs. Your corporations are giving them your jobs because they can do it cheaper and you told your corporations that they must make as much money as they can, no matter what. It is the US who is the biggest promoter of 'globalisation', now that's globalisation for you. If the Segate, Maxtor, IBM, Quantum etc harddrives are all made in China, that's not China's fault: ask the companies or your globalisation touting industry groups. Or yourself, how much more would your HD cost if it was made in the US.
> have crappy human rights record,
Indeed. Interesting, though, that say the human records of Saudi Arabia are not much on the agenda. By the way, China has not attacked a single country in the past few decades, unlike the US...
> use mass pollution to take shortcuts and undercut prices,
Um, China's greenhouse polution is the same as that of the US, except that they have 4+ times as many people, so their per-capita emission is actually 1/4 of the American.
> and are not a democracy.
No, they are not. Should they be? Why? Because the US said so? The US that herself is very, very far from being a democracy? Or do you think that what goes around in the US and what the US does is indeed the will of the people?
> The theory is that free trade will turn them into a democracy.
No, that's never the theory behind a free trade agreement with the US. The idea is that the agreement will open a large market to the US with no protection againts US goods. See the Australian FTA, for a recent example. With the Chinese this didn't work - their economy is in par with the US (their GDP is about 84% that of the US) and thus you can't really push them around as you can smaller countries. By the way, the FTA didn't turn Australia into a democracy either.
> So far its proven to be hooey. Are we going to allow this shit to keep going on decade after decade with the delusion that eating KFC will make them democracy?
What is that about them being a democracy? They are having their own system. Yes, they execute even more people that you do (mind you, they have a lot more to choose from). People can't say that the government is bad. You can walk in a T-shirt that says that the government is stupid. So? If you think that that's democracy, that's really sad. I think democracy starts somewhere along the lines of not trying to force your ideology on others but let them decide what they want for themselves? As in not spreading "democracy" with bombs? Or by putting the interest of the *people* (that's the 'demo-' bit in democracy) in front of the interest of businesses or a selected few? Making the people control the government (now that's the -cracy bit) rather than industry lobby groups? They just use a different form or level of oppression, that's all.
When you want to bomb a country (which, accidentally, has lots of oil for example) you don't need to rely on bogus reports of secret stashes of WMDs, satellite photos of firetrucks described as mobile bioweapon labs and all that stuff that becomes embarrassing later. You simply claim that there was a cyber attack and fire the nukes. The traffic logs of the target country are dispersed as ionised vapour, the logs on your side are whatever files you can put on your drive and nobody in between keeps track of every TCP packet getting through. You can say whatever you want - it's your word against a plasma cloud and a big lake of molten earth. Even if you miss the target and bomb some other place (Budapest, Bucharest, Iraq, Iran, Geneva, Genova, Delhi, Dili, who knows the difference, them terrorists speak funny all the time and they are everywhere anyway), it's just a question of running a 's/old_ip/new_ip/' over your "log" files.
> especially in SE Asia where those countries seem hell bent on destroying the environment in just about every way
Hm, isn't the USA responsible 25% of all the greenhouse gas emissions while representing only about 5% of the world's population? If China spews the same amount but they are ~22% of the population, then maybe from an humanitarian and environmental point of view it would be much better a flu pandemic to wipe out the USA?
For the same gain in greenhouse gases and with almost the same loss in (economic) production you have to kill about a billion less people. Not to mention the associated gain due to the loss of heavy-duty push on ultra hard IP enforcement, the loss of the world's largest spending on weapons and so on.
> I don't have faith in humanity to reel itself in when it comes to development and consuming more and more in the future
Again, the largest consumers per capita are not the people in SE Asia...
OK, let's the artist have a right to earn money with each copy (s)he makes. How about the right of not giving you a copy? If you want market forces everywhere, then how come that you give monopoly rights for a product to an entity and in the same time you also give right to that entity to not supply the product (while stopping everybody else to produce the product)? Doesn't seem much like the "invisible hand".
The horrible thought of being an artist on salary is actually more real than imaginary. If you are an artist and you are working for the government, then by law all your products are in the public domain and you can not claim anything on them apart from your salary. Furthermore, if you are a performing artist you do your work for a salary and noone gives a damn about your many years of training and investment to said training because you get a paid for your work. Quite a lot of artists being employed by the entertainment industry are on salary, from back-up musicians to backdrop and scenery artist. You single out some artists and give them copyright and let the rest live on salary. It is interesting that the copyright to most DVDs I can see in the shop belongs to a corporate entity. Not an artist, not even a natural person but an artifically created legal concept that has no interest in art, only in making money.
Great grandpa went to the war because he was sent to. There was that issue with conscription. He was told that he had to do that to save the nation. He had no choice on the contract to be signed. No market forces, just sheer coercion.
As per the Soviet Union collapsing, I don't think that it was because their artists didn't receive copyright. There seemed to be a few rather talented artist, despite the lack of copyright as well as damned good scientists. Art and science, at least basic science, IMHO, can not rely on market forces alone. If nothing is being subject to market forces, like in the USSR is an extreme, everything being a product on a market is the other extreme. Basic research is very risky because quite often many decades of work produces nothing, at least nothing that can directly be turned to money. No sane investor puts money into basic research - the investment is huge, the return unpredictable and the chance of failure is very high. Yet, without basic research we wouldn't have much progress because all practical research is based on the basic science. Now most societies realise that and provide money for basic scientific research by government run institutions or through grants/funds. The basic research is then done by salaried (pretty badly salaried, actually) people who do it because they have a personal, strongly non-financial motivation of doing it. That seemed to successfully drive science through many centuries. Similarly, in the past few thousand years most of the art was created without the benefit of copyright income and it did pretty well. The "market forces are king" is just one mentality or social model. It has no inherent superiority over any other system, except that it hasn't yet failed. There's no guarantee that it won't fail. We went through lots of models and the one size fits all doesn't seem to work that well. The USSR may have collapsed but interestingly enough South America seems to be steadily moving towards the less market driven model despite that, and the IMF is also surprised that an increasing number of third world countries say no thans to the IMF money if it comes with condition of building a market forces only system.
While the current copyright system certainly helps *some* artists, it has its drawbacks (such as discriminating between art forms and artists, serving the financial interest of investors rather than society and artists in general etc). The more and more stringent copyright legistlations were not initiated by artists or the general public - they were introduced by the industries who make their profit from the explitation of artist.
I don't know if you are aware but there are scientific papers out there in whi
I guess we are talking about two different things. I do not oppose your right to reap money off of your work. I do not oppose you to control who benefits from your work.
However, the copyright law was created because WE as the society realised that we like art / entertainment and that artists need to make a living. Thus we gave the artists a limited monopoly over the duplication of their work, i.e. a legal framework through which they can make money and sustain their living, in particular, because we want them to create more work that we can enjoy. It is actually spelled out along the lines of "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." or something like that.
Now the fact that the current copyright is a) transferrable, that is, the beneficary of the monopoly powers is not the artist but any unrelated third party and b) it is practically perpetual, that is, when there is no chance that the artist will ever create anything simply because they are just a lump of fertiliser, to me at least, seems to defeat the purpose.
You claim that the copyright's purpose is to create income after the creation of the work. I don't think so. The copyright's purpose is to make it possible to create further work. The copyright law has not been created to benefit the artist, it was created to benefit society. Imagine that artists are employed just like most of the people. Your job is writing a nice novel. You draw a salary and in X years time you give me the novel. That's it. You have been paid for your work. Sounds terrible, doesn't it? That's, however, exactly the way researchers, engineers and in fact employed artists (like the designers of your household gadgets and so on) work. In fact, when a studio makes a film, there are very many talented people, artists, if you like, working on the creation of that film. Not just the actors for their 10-mil-a-pop salary but all the sound and image and backdrop people and doubles and stuntmen and so on. They get paid for their work and that's it. So how about their creation? How about the performing artists? You don't seem to care too much about, say, ballet dancers. It is art and requires many years of investment to get to the point when you can perform. Yet, apart from getting paid for their performance (possibly quite well paid, if they are good) there's no promise that their art will pay for the life of their children, grandchildren and so on, through about a century after they're gone. So why is the Terminator so much more useful for society than Anna Pavlova was or Nurayev is? It must be, because the former is heavily protected while the latter isn't. By the way, when your kid is performing on stage, you are *not* allowed to take a photo of him/her, but you have a right to purchase the photo from the photographer who is paid to make pictures at the event. Guess what, the copyright of the picture belongs to the photographer. Not your kid, who is the artist on the photo. Not to the people who organised the performance or paid the photographer. Nope, it belongs to the photographer and if he wants, he can refuse to sell you a copy. Note again, you *can not* take a photo, only the photographer. And he and his estate has the right to that photo, from your point of view, forever. So what was *his* investment that deserves all the rights of the picture showing *your* kid's artistic expression of something written by an other artist centuries ago?
Why do I care who gets the money after a Lennon song? Let's look at it from the other way: who is the artist? Lennon. Does he has any say in who gets money after his work? No. Does he have a say in where and when and how his work is performed? No. Can he control any of his work? Of course not, he's dead. Whatever entity owns the rights for his stuff has unlimited and practically perpetual power over his work. They can ban its performance, copy it if they want, can sell all these rights to other parties a
No, I did not mean one generation ago. A generation is roughly equivalent to 20 years. Mickey Mouse was created kind of before 1987, I guess.
> His daughter, for example, is in the middle of building a museum around her Dad's works. She, for example, is very much alive, and very > much enjoying the work her Dad did, and the proceeds from the business he started and passed along. Just like when a guy leaves any other > business to his child... or are you the sort that says a store's brand name is something that the founder of that store shouldn't be able > to leave to his kids? After all, good old Bob Smithsonovitch is dead, so "Bob Smithsonovitch's Sporting Goods," which stays in business > because of its recognizable brand and reputation, is making money for Bob's decendents, rather than Dead Bob, right? So, are you advocating > that the various creative works, concepts, business tactics that make Bob's legacy business what is should also be stripped from the kids > he intended to leave it to (or people he chooses to sell it to, etc)?
Well, do you pay Bob's family every time you put on the runnings shoes you purchased 50 years ago? No. Bob's business is still running because it produces sporting goods. I don't know who gets the money when a John Lennon song is played, but I am almost certain that that entity is not a songwriter or a musician who is actively producing more music/lyrics.
> You may not personally be able to grapple with it, but some people are actually inspired to create a business or a life's > work specifically so that his family will have it to work with, and to grow.
How, exactly, is the Walt Disney Corporation "works" with Mickey Mouse to "make it grow"? We are not talking about Disney creating the corporation and let it grow, we are talking about him creating a cartoon mouse and the fact that a century after his death that mouse will still be making money for a corporation even though chances are that there would not be a single person on this Earth who actually will have known Walt Disney. You would still not be permitted to draw that mouse and show it to a bunch of people.
You shall not mix a competing business with a goverment granted monopoly on an idea, nor shall you think that the right to have a business is the same as the right to have a profit.
> Regardless, I'm a little amused by people who fixate so intensely on why people other than its creators and designated heirs should be able to make money > off of knock-off Mickey Mouse merchandise, rather than those other people creating something of their own (to do with as they please - give away, or > not). Well, parasites are as old as time, I suppose.
I think the parasites are those who are making money *today* from the work of a person long dead by means of *monopolising* that person's creation based on a law which supposed to provide incentive to the artist to create more. Since the artist is dead, it is unlikely that he would create anything like that any more. Those people who suck in the money after the mouse create nothing at all (unless you can tell me that the shareholders of the Walt Disney Corporation are all creative artists and the Mickey Mouse income helps them to provide society with further art).
Considering that we're on/. chances are that your opponents are actually creating something useful and give away for free (e.g. SW), so I would not try to stick 'leach' and 'parasite' on them so easily. In fact, unless you do not use any free software at all, you might be benefitting from their work without compensating them whatsoever. I refrain from the theatrical use of adjectives...
> [..] they are a religion and must be respected as one.
Why? Why shall I respect something that a lot of people believe but I don't, just because it involves a 'god'? I can respect a *person* and accept the fact that (s)he believes in something that I don't, but why should I respect what she believes in but what I consider nonsense?
> If a filmaker wants you seek inspiration from her creative works, rather than pay for it as entertainment, > she has all sorts of ways to make that work available without DRM, and without charging her audience. > More likely, though, she hopes you will be inspired, but also that you'll actually pay what she's asking - so > that she can eat, pay her production team, hire talent, invest in new projects, and inspire other creative > people by doing things like giving them jobs with paychecks to work in the field, etc., rather than looking > for a pirated copy of what she just spent three years and all of her investors' money making.
Could you tell me how is exactly Walt Disney is doing all this just right now? Or how Bela Bartok is getting ever more inspired by the Bela Bartok Estate controlling who and when and where can perform the music he wrote?
I agree with you, probably most filmmakers in Hollywood don't want to inspire you to anything, they just want to make money. Terminator 1, 2,.. N, the zillions of vampire slayer films and all that are not art, they are just cheap entertainment - I hope their creators do not think that they have any connection to art and culture.Quite often they don't even have an original idea, just remake old or foreign entertainment (badly) and re-sell it.
Anyway, many generations ago Walt Disney drew a mouse and people loved that mouse. Walt Disney should be rewarded. How, exactly, is he rewarded now by the fact that every time a China made plastic pencilcase with Mickey Mouse on it (what children today don't even recognise) is sold the till rings at the Walt Disney Corporation? I have the sinking feeling that being a skeleton in hole dug in the dirt kind of limits the value of financial reward. Not to mention that it would be rather hard to ask him if he still wants money for Mickey Mouse or he thinks that now he has as much as he believes is a fair compensation for his efforts.
> There's still room for improvement, but the complaint that "it's hard to set up devices under Linux" is diminishing.
*If* they are standard devices. Network cards, discs and alike are OK. However, I can connect my USB mobile phone to my Linux box, but I can't do anything with it because it uses some proprietary rubbish over USB and the SW that comes with it is naturally strictly Windows only. Which is a pity, because I wanted to re-flash the phone (to have accented characters in the SMS) and I do not have (and never had) a Windows machine around. So no, not all devices work under Linux.
Don't get me wrong, I've been on Linux since '95 and Solaris before that; the last MS product I used was DOS but unfortunately very few gadget companies care about anything but Windows. So, if you are into connectivity and are a gizmo freak, you need Windows. Oh yes, you can write to the companies and if you are lucky they reply telling you that the non-Windows market is negligible and is not worth investing into and they do not publish protocols because they do not want "to compromise the customer's experience with questionable quality third party software". The MS monopoly doesn't end at the PC, it extends to anything that can be connected to a PC and requires some program running on the PC. Alas, that includes many devices too. Some people can cope with it (all in all, it is just inconvenience for me) but there are some who simply can't and are vulnerable to MS's practices.
> Like I said I cannot send Mark Shuttleworth a bill for my time. Linux is free > as in speech and maybe avaialble free as in beer but the cost of drinking that > beer isn't being fully factored in here.
Um, can you send Bill Gates a bill for your time to solve your Windows problems or hunting solutions on forums? I don't think so. The difference might be that if the software doesn't work the way you want, with a closed source thing you know that you have to change you expectations while with a free as in every way program you expect that someone else had had the same problem and the solution has already been worked out. You just get very frustrated when it turns out that that's not the case.
Of course, when the computer verifies at boot time that it is going to boot an unchanged, trusted and most importantly licenced OS, the user has the choice not to use anything but Windows since that's the only licenced system to run on PC HW. The sad thing is that it isn't as far-fetched as it sounds.
Where do you draw the line? I guess food companies are free to sell GM food, you are free not to buy it. But what if there's nothing else left?
> We aren't at war, we've invaded some random country for no good reason.
And as per the reason, there were reasons. Mostly of economic nature - and not just the oil. Nothing to do with the nonexistent WMDs and alike of course but hey, advertisement has to sell the product, not the truth. Just think about it: the US spends some 400 billion tax dollars a year on military. If you could divert only 0.1% of that into your companies' direction and all it costs is maybe the life of a few thousand nameless American soldiers and the destruction of a far-away country, now that's a business plan. If you can in the same time get your hands on the natural resources of that far away country, even better. If you can also get more taxpayers' money to give it to the destroyed country's pupet government as aid to buy reconstruction services from *you* then it's at least as clever as what Enron did with California's electricity, except that that was a shameful fraud while this is PATRIOTISM, with all capitals and we could also throw in LIBERATION and DEMOCRACY! Which is good, for the more we tell the plebs how we deliver democracy to that whatsisname country, the less they realise how little they have left of it at home...
You forgot: - China has both the nukes and the missiles - loads of them - Israel has nukes and they are arguably the most militant nation in the Middle East - India has nukes and did *not* sign the Non-Prolifration Treaty; they can also take stuff to space - Pakistan has nukes - India and Pakistan are US-friendly *now*, but so was Saddam ~20 years ago - The Australian government wants to export as much uranium as possible and also toying with the thought of setting up enrichment facilities - There were rumours of the US examining the use of "tactical nukes" in "local conflict" - France and the UK have their toys too, although they are possibly the only ones who don't rattle their sabres these days - The US seem to have this "only remaining superpower" superiority complex, loads of nukes, and is trigger-happy (although Iraq should be sobering)
I was born - well, long before '79. I am *much* more worried now than I was in the 80s or 70s.
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Corporations has rights like humans. The problem is that corporations do not have responsibilities like humans. When a corporation creates a faulty product that kills people and they know it and don't fix it for financial reasons, that's murder for monetary gain. In some US states, as far as I know, that draws the death penalty. Now the corporation as an entity shields all of its C*O-s from responsibility but then the corporation itself is not punished according to its crime: it gets fined at most. Why not execute it? That is, end its physical existence, meaning that it just closes down and all its property (the physical body of the corporation) gets taken with no compensation whatsoever. For lesser charges, like fraud, theft and alike, it could get jailed: banned from operating for X years, but it is not killed, i.e. it still has its assets and, if it can survive the jail, it can open shop in a couple years again.
Humans have human rights *and* human responsibilities.
Corporations have human rights but no human responsibility, plus they are shielding the real people who form the corporation from the consequences of their actions if they commit them in the name of the corporation (while of course getting a *personal* gain).
> Well here's a little food for thought. If all the incandescents were changed to compact
> florescents not only could every home in amercia charge their electric cars without needing
> more plants and their electric bills would actually go down. Electric lights are still the
> biggest single use of electricity in this country.
Well... I assume that most offices are already use some sort of fluorescent, so does street lighting and so on. So, let's see how much the public consumes.
There are about 3E8 people in the US, if we assume that the average family is 3 people, that's 1E8 families. If the average family is running 1kW of light for 5 hours every day (which seems reasonable) that's then 5E10 kWh per day or ~1.8E11 kWh a year. The US electricity consumption is about 4E12 kWh a year, i.e. the household lighting consumption is about 4.5% of the total electricity usage of the US. Even if they run the 1kW for 10hours a day, it is still less than 10%. The 1kW seems to be adequate, if the 3 people live in a 3 bedroom + kitchen + family room and they run 200W in each in the same time, that's 1kW for you.
> To give a specific example, the law of property ownership is a product of the mind.
> The natural state of things is that if I see something and it isn't tied down or guarded,
> it is mine if I want to take it. I always find it odd that people trot out the same tired
> arguments about how "intellectual property" and "real property" aren't at all the same
> thing, when in fact they are more similar than different. Both are artificial concepts
> created by the law. The consequences of taking someone else's property are different in the
> two cases of course, but they are not zero in either case.
They are very different. If, as a caveman, I have the great idea that it's easier to kill some critter using a stick propelled towards the critter by an other stick and a piece of bowel, that's my "intellectual property". The actual bow and arrow is my "physical property". Now, if you try to take my bow and arrow from me, that's theft or robbery. If you see me using my bow and arrow and you make your own bow and arrow, that's patent violation. If you come to my cave and see my cool pictures of critters on my wall that I painted and then you go home and paint the same pictures because looking at them pleases you, that's copyright violation.
If you take my bow and arrow you actually deprived me from the result of my work. If I want to shoot critters I'll have to go and obtain wood, string, stone chips and spend a lot of time to make a new bow and arrow. If you make your own bow and arrow, you, at most, took my advantage over you in killing critters. If you copy my pictures in my cave, you did absolutely nothing wrong. It should be noted that in the second two cases it was *you* who actually did the work to create the objects (your bow and arrow and you pictures), while in the first case you obtained an artifact without putting the effort into its creation.
If we live in a tribe (as we do, because we very early figured out that a group is more efficient than an individual and slight personal sacrifices to help other group members in distress are worth it when it's you who happen to be in distress and then you can expect the group to help you) I will obviously share my bow and arrow idea with everyone - it is our collective interest that we can whack critters for dinner easier. If I have lots of ideas which need time for testing (varios arrowhead shapes, feathers for stabilisers and so on) I might say to my group that it'd be more advantageous for *all of us* if I spent my time testing better arrows and the others would just give me food anyway, because they all know that my arrows will make it easier for them to get them critters in the pot. Now to protect this privileged position of mine (which so far was based on mutual trust: ther trust me to invent new weapons and I trust them to feed me adequately) I lobby the Chief to create a new rule: when I come up with a new weapon, for ten moons everybody who wants to make a weapon like that *must* pay me a critter. Which is an incentive for me to create newer and better weapons, so that the critter train keeps rolling and an incentive for them, because if they have the new weapon, that extra critter is quite reasonable considering the gain. Thus, we invented the patent system. Now if I can then do sexual favours for the Chief's best friends to convince them that even a certain way of scratching can be considered as invention or that giving critters for inventions in itself is an invention or that if I found out that eating the Big Furry Animal's heart makes you strong, then the heart itself is my invention, then we are in the current patent regime with algoritms, business models and genes being patentable.
Let's now see my paintings. I painted them because I like to paing animals. Other people like them. So they try to paint them in their cave. Not all of them are clever enough, so they ask me to paint a picture in their cave. They, of course, offer me dinner for the time I paint these pictures, which is fine by me. There
Point taken. Still, come on, this is slashdot... :-)
Chances are, M$, instead of seeing the light and lobby against the patentability of algorithms/math/shapes of clouds/ways of combing hair/etc will just hire more patent lawyers and patent everything remotely connected to computers to build a very thick patent armor and a large caliber cannon too.
At the end of the day Lucent and Microsoft and all those behemoths will sort it out between themselves and the small players get eliminated.
The IP lobby gets multiple orgasms, extends patent expiry terms to that of copyright, then extends the copyright to be ahead of patents and generates a new class of IP, the 'unpublished thought'. Since that latter can not be effectively monitored (yet), they introduce a levy (indexed by the education level) to be paid by any cognitive being to the TCAA (Thought Control Association of America); those who can't pay can instead sell themselves to the TCAA, which will export them to Chinese sweatshops as extra cheap slave labour. Persons trying to hide their being educated will be prosecuted as thought terrorist and will be sent to secret CIA torture centres where they will be used for testing new methods of extracting one's innermost thoughts. Skipping school is considered a federal offense and offenders are sent to re-education camps (these can be cheaply leased from Gulag, Inc. a company run by the Russian maffia). People in coma (and thus with no income) but with measurable brain activity will have their organs removed and sold to pay for their thoughts, however, as soon as their EEG goes flat, no more organs can be extracted in lieu of the thought levy. Rather, all remaining organs can be taken by the TCAA as payment of punitive damages for depriving the TCAA of its income by the old trick of being dead.
Then the ants all go to the Père Lachaise cemetery and spit on La Fontaine's grave.
> I think that a total ban, as all total bans, is really arrogant and short-sighted.
:-)
Don't forget, you're talking about the Australian government. Short sighted and arrogant all the way. Great step forward with the lights, but on the same token when a report was commissioned about the energy production in Australia, the PM said that he wouldn't accept any recommendations that jeopradise the coal industry. Coal must stay, as well as oil and preferably some nuclear as well, for there's big money there too.
If you ban incasdescents you only upset some non-name Chinese manufacturer (and please Phillips), while it has minimal impact on the energy consumption of the country. You may have maybe 1-2kW worth of lightbulbs in a house alltogether and only a fraction of them is running at any given moment. Due to the houses here being built on the cheap, their thermal efficiency is junk and thus you run your 2kW heater *in each room* in winter or the 2-10kW air conditioner in summer. Plus you have the big TV on as soon as anyone steps in the house, computers running 24/7 together with the set-top box, the DVD and the game console (who bothers turning these off? - actually you should *not* turn off your set top at all, according to the cable company), handful of fridges and freezers and so on.
This whole stuff is just a stunt, global warming is hot topic now and it is election year. The freshly minted environmental minister has to show how environmentally friendly he is while avoiding to upset the industry the slightest bit. We don't sign up to Kyoto because that would 'negatively impact our coal industry' (although more likely because the US didn't so we shouldn't), same reason for not indroducing carbon tax. Alternative energy research was reasonably advanced here maybe a decade ago, now even if someone is interested, they move overseas very quickly.
As per using CFLs, I have a handful of them installed (have had for years) and I hate their light. Very unnatural. Whatever they say, the blackbody radiation of a 3000K body approximates the visible radiation of a 6000K body much better that excited Hg emitting UV photons exciting various phosphors emitting light in a few narrow bands trying to excite your photoreceptors the same way as normal light would. Especially when the objects around you do not know that they supposed to absorb/reflect these specific wavelengths such that they look to have the same colour as if a full-bandwidth light was shone on them.
Nevertheless, it seems that car bulbs and fridge bulbs will be exempt, so you still can build a closer-to-natural light if you want
Hm, 'classical' slavery was in operation for about 2-3000 years, then feudalism ran for about 8-900 years and capitalism, depending on the details of your definition, maybe 200-350 years. So, if the trend continues (each system lasts about 1/3 ~ 1/4 of its predecessor) we'll see some change soon...
> The US government gives way too much leeway to China in general. They screw with exchange rates,
No, they don't - they keep their currency pegged to yours. Nothing illegal in that and lots of currencies are pegged against an other. The only problem is that China keeping hers solid against the greenback hurts the US, so what? Nothing says that China has to help the US economy - it's a free world and they can do whatever legally doable to help *themselves*.
> make it difficult for outsiders to do business inside China (Donald Trump even complained),
So? How different is from farm subsidies, compulsory 'buy American' for goverbnment procurement, forcing your IP laws on others and so on? You can do the same, you can build a big barrier in front of Chinese business coming your way. Why don't you?
> give weapons to our enemies,
while you give weapons to their enemies, your enemies and in general anyone who either pays the price or seems momentarily useful for you. Don't forget, Saddam's weaponry was stamped "Made in USA" all around.
> take our jobs,
no, they do not take your jobs. Your corporations are giving them your jobs because they can do it cheaper and you told your corporations that they must make as much money as they can, no matter what. It is the US who is the biggest promoter of 'globalisation', now that's globalisation for you. If the Segate, Maxtor, IBM, Quantum etc harddrives are all made in China, that's not China's fault: ask the companies or your globalisation touting industry groups. Or yourself, how much more would your HD cost if it was made in the US.
> have crappy human rights record,
Indeed. Interesting, though, that say the human records of Saudi Arabia are not much on the agenda. By the way, China has not attacked a single country in the past few decades, unlike the US...
> use mass pollution to take shortcuts and undercut prices,
Um, China's greenhouse polution is the same as that of the US, except that they have 4+ times as many people, so their per-capita emission is actually 1/4 of the American.
> and are not a democracy.
No, they are not. Should they be? Why? Because the US said so? The US that herself is very, very far from being a democracy? Or do you think that what goes around in the US and what the US does is indeed the will of the people?
> The theory is that free trade will turn them into a democracy.
No, that's never the theory behind a free trade agreement with the US. The idea is that the agreement will open a large market to the US with no protection againts US goods. See the Australian FTA, for a recent example. With the Chinese this didn't work - their economy is in par with the US (their GDP is about 84% that of the US) and thus you can't really push them around as you can smaller countries. By the way, the FTA didn't turn Australia into a democracy either.
> So far its proven to be hooey. Are we going to allow this shit to keep going on decade after decade with the delusion that eating KFC will make them democracy?
What is that about them being a democracy? They are having their own system. Yes, they execute even more people that you do (mind you, they have a lot more to choose from). People can't say that the government is bad. You can walk in a T-shirt that says that the government is stupid. So? If you think that that's democracy, that's really sad. I think democracy starts somewhere along the lines of not trying to force your ideology on others but let them decide what they want for themselves? As in not spreading "democracy" with bombs? Or by putting the interest of the *people* (that's the 'demo-' bit in democracy) in front of the interest of businesses or a selected few? Making the people control the government (now that's the -cracy bit) rather than industry lobby groups? They just use a different form or level of oppression, that's all.
> and it's just a matter of making it not worth the rest of the human population's time to break their stuff
Hollywood is trying that angle with their film offerings...
When you want to bomb a country (which, accidentally, has lots of oil for example) you don't need to rely on bogus reports of secret stashes of WMDs, satellite photos of firetrucks described as mobile bioweapon labs and all that stuff that becomes embarrassing later. You simply claim that there was a cyber attack and fire the nukes. The traffic logs of the target country are dispersed as ionised vapour, the logs on your side are whatever files you can put on your drive and nobody in between keeps track of every TCP packet getting through. You can say whatever you want - it's your word against a plasma cloud and a big lake of molten earth. Even if you miss the target and bomb some other place (Budapest, Bucharest, Iraq, Iran, Geneva, Genova, Delhi, Dili, who knows the difference, them terrorists speak funny all the time and they are everywhere anyway), it's just a question of running a 's/old_ip/new_ip/' over your "log" files.
Ingenious!
> especially in SE Asia where those countries seem hell bent on destroying the environment in just about every way
Hm, isn't the USA responsible 25% of all the greenhouse gas emissions while representing only about 5% of the world's population? If China spews the same amount but they are ~22% of the population, then maybe from an humanitarian and environmental point of view it would be much better a flu pandemic to wipe out the USA?
For the same gain in greenhouse gases and with almost the same loss in (economic) production you have to kill about a billion less people. Not to mention the associated gain due to the loss of heavy-duty push on ultra hard IP enforcement, the loss of the world's largest spending on weapons and so on.
> I don't have faith in humanity to reel itself in when it comes to development and consuming more and more in the future
Again, the largest consumers per capita are not the people in SE Asia...
OK, let's the artist have a right to earn money with each copy (s)he makes. How about the right of not giving you a copy? If you want market forces everywhere, then how come that you give monopoly rights for a product to an entity and in the same time you also give right to that entity to not supply the product (while stopping everybody else to produce the product)? Doesn't seem much like the "invisible hand".
The horrible thought of being an artist on salary is actually more real than imaginary. If you are an artist and you are working for the government, then by law all your products are in the public domain and you can not claim anything on them apart from your salary. Furthermore, if you are a performing artist you do your work for a salary and noone gives a damn about your many years of training and investment to said training because you get a paid for your work. Quite a lot of artists being employed by the entertainment industry are on salary, from back-up musicians to backdrop and scenery artist. You single out some artists and give them copyright and let the rest live on salary. It is interesting that the copyright to most DVDs I can see in the shop belongs to a corporate entity. Not an artist, not even a natural person but an artifically created legal concept that has no interest in art, only in making money.
Great grandpa went to the war because he was sent to. There was that issue with conscription. He was told that he had to do that to save the nation. He had no choice on the contract to be signed. No market forces, just sheer coercion.
As per the Soviet Union collapsing, I don't think that it was because their artists didn't receive copyright. There seemed to be a few rather talented artist, despite the lack of copyright as well as damned good scientists.
Art and science, at least basic science, IMHO, can not rely on market forces alone. If nothing is being subject to market forces, like in the USSR is an extreme, everything being a product on a market is the other extreme. Basic research is very risky because quite often many decades of work produces nothing, at least nothing that can directly be turned to money. No sane investor puts money into basic research - the investment is huge, the return unpredictable and the chance of failure is very high. Yet, without basic research we wouldn't have much progress because all practical research is based on the basic science. Now most societies realise that and provide money for basic scientific research by government run institutions or through grants/funds. The basic research is then done by salaried (pretty badly salaried, actually) people who do it because they have a personal, strongly non-financial motivation of doing it. That seemed to successfully drive science through many centuries. Similarly, in the past few thousand years most of the art was created without the benefit of copyright income and it did pretty well. The "market forces are king" is just one mentality or social model. It has no inherent superiority over any other system, except that it hasn't yet failed. There's no guarantee that it won't fail. We went through lots of models and the one size fits all doesn't seem to work that well. The USSR may have collapsed but interestingly enough South America seems to be steadily moving towards the less market driven model despite that, and the IMF is also surprised that an increasing number of third world countries say no thans to the IMF money if it comes with condition of building a market forces only system.
While the current copyright system certainly helps *some* artists, it has its drawbacks (such as discriminating between art forms and artists, serving the financial interest of investors rather than society and artists in general etc). The more and more stringent copyright legistlations were not initiated by artists or the general public - they were introduced by the industries who make their profit from the explitation of artist.
I don't know if you are aware but there are scientific papers out there in whi
I guess we are talking about two different things. I do not oppose your right to reap money off of your work. I do not oppose you to control who benefits from your work.
However, the copyright law was created because WE as the society realised that we like art / entertainment and that artists need to make a living. Thus we gave the artists a limited monopoly over the duplication of their work, i.e. a legal framework through which they can make money and sustain their living, in particular, because we want them to create more work that we can enjoy. It is actually spelled out along the lines of "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." or something like that.
Now the fact that the current copyright is a) transferrable, that is, the beneficary of the monopoly powers is not the artist but any unrelated third party and b) it is practically perpetual, that is, when there is no chance that the artist will ever create anything simply because they are just a lump of fertiliser, to me at least, seems to defeat the purpose.
You claim that the copyright's purpose is to create income after the creation of the work. I don't think so. The copyright's purpose is to make it possible to create further work. The copyright law has not been created to benefit the artist, it was created to benefit society. Imagine that artists are employed just like most of the people. Your job is writing a nice novel. You draw a salary and in X years time you give me the novel. That's it. You have been paid for your work. Sounds terrible, doesn't it? That's, however, exactly the way researchers, engineers and in fact employed artists (like the designers of your household gadgets and so on) work. In fact, when a studio makes a film, there are very many talented people, artists, if you like, working on the creation of that film. Not just the actors for their 10-mil-a-pop salary but all the sound and image and backdrop people and doubles and stuntmen and so on. They get paid for their work and that's it. So how about their creation? How about the performing artists? You don't seem to care too much about, say, ballet dancers. It is art and requires many years of investment to get to the point when you can perform. Yet, apart from getting paid for their performance (possibly quite well paid, if they are good) there's no promise that their art will pay for the life of their children, grandchildren and so on, through about a century after they're gone. So why is the Terminator so much more useful for society than Anna Pavlova was or Nurayev is? It must be, because the former is heavily protected while the latter isn't. By the way, when your kid is performing on stage, you are *not* allowed to take a photo of him/her, but you have a right to purchase the photo from the photographer who is paid to make pictures at the event. Guess what, the copyright of the picture belongs to the photographer. Not your kid, who is the artist on the photo. Not to the people who organised the performance or paid the photographer. Nope, it belongs to the photographer and if he wants, he can refuse to sell you a copy. Note again, you *can not* take a photo, only the photographer. And he and his estate has the right to that photo, from your point of view, forever. So what was *his* investment that deserves all the rights of the picture showing *your* kid's artistic expression of something written by an other artist centuries ago?
Why do I care who gets the money after a Lennon song? Let's look at it from the other way: who is the artist? Lennon. Does he has any say in who gets money after his work? No. Does he have a say in where and when and how his work is performed? No. Can he control any of his work? Of course not, he's dead. Whatever entity owns the rights for his stuff has unlimited and practically perpetual power over his work. They can ban its performance, copy it if they want, can sell all these rights to other parties a
many generations ago
/. chances are that your opponents are actually creating something useful and give away for free (e.g. SW), so I would
> You mean, one generation ago?
No, I did not mean one generation ago. A generation is roughly equivalent to 20 years. Mickey Mouse was created kind of before 1987, I guess.
> His daughter, for example, is in the middle of building a museum around her Dad's works. She, for example, is very much alive, and very
> much enjoying the work her Dad did, and the proceeds from the business he started and passed along. Just like when a guy leaves any other
> business to his child... or are you the sort that says a store's brand name is something that the founder of that store shouldn't be able
> to leave to his kids? After all, good old Bob Smithsonovitch is dead, so "Bob Smithsonovitch's Sporting Goods," which stays in business
> because of its recognizable brand and reputation, is making money for Bob's decendents, rather than Dead Bob, right? So, are you advocating
> that the various creative works, concepts, business tactics that make Bob's legacy business what is should also be stripped from the kids
> he intended to leave it to (or people he chooses to sell it to, etc)?
Well, do you pay Bob's family every time you put on the runnings shoes you purchased 50 years ago? No. Bob's business is still running
because it produces sporting goods. I don't know who gets the money when a John Lennon song is played, but I am almost certain that that
entity is not a songwriter or a musician who is actively producing more music/lyrics.
> You may not personally be able to grapple with it, but some people are actually inspired to create a business or a life's
> work specifically so that his family will have it to work with, and to grow.
How, exactly, is the Walt Disney Corporation "works" with Mickey Mouse to "make it grow"? We are not talking about Disney creating
the corporation and let it grow, we are talking about him creating a cartoon mouse and the fact that a century after his death
that mouse will still be making money for a corporation even though chances are that there would not be a single person on this
Earth who actually will have known Walt Disney. You would still not be permitted to draw that mouse and show it to a bunch of people.
You shall not mix a competing business with a goverment granted monopoly on an idea, nor shall you think that the right to have
a business is the same as the right to have a profit.
> Regardless, I'm a little amused by people who fixate so intensely on why people other than its creators and designated heirs should be able to make money
> off of knock-off Mickey Mouse merchandise, rather than those other people creating something of their own (to do with as they please - give away, or
> not). Well, parasites are as old as time, I suppose.
I think the parasites are those who are making money *today* from the work of a person long dead by means of *monopolising* that person's
creation based on a law which supposed to provide incentive to the artist to create more. Since the artist is dead, it is unlikely that he
would create anything like that any more. Those people who suck in the money after the mouse create nothing at all (unless you can tell me
that the shareholders of the Walt Disney Corporation are all creative artists and the Mickey Mouse income helps them to provide society with
further art).
Considering that we're on
not try to stick 'leach' and 'parasite' on them so easily. In fact, unless you do not use any free software at all, you might be benefitting
from their work without compensating them whatsoever. I refrain from the theatrical use of adjectives...
> [..] they are a religion and must be respected as one.
Why?
Why shall I respect something that a lot of people believe but I don't,
just because it involves a 'god'? I can respect a *person* and accept
the fact that (s)he believes in something that I don't, but why should
I respect what she believes in but what I consider nonsense?
> If a filmaker wants you seek inspiration from her creative works, rather than pay for it as entertainment,
.. N, the zillions of vampire slayer films and all that are not art, they are just cheap
> she has all sorts of ways to make that work available without DRM, and without charging her audience.
> More likely, though, she hopes you will be inspired, but also that you'll actually pay what she's asking - so
> that she can eat, pay her production team, hire talent, invest in new projects, and inspire other creative
> people by doing things like giving them jobs with paychecks to work in the field, etc., rather than looking
> for a pirated copy of what she just spent three years and all of her investors' money making.
Could you tell me how is exactly Walt Disney is doing all this just right now? Or how Bela Bartok is getting
ever more inspired by the Bela Bartok Estate controlling who and when and where can perform the music he
wrote?
I agree with you, probably most filmmakers in Hollywood don't want to inspire you to anything, they just want to make
money. Terminator 1, 2,
entertainment - I hope their creators do not think that they have any connection to art and culture.Quite often
they don't even have an original idea, just remake old or foreign entertainment (badly) and re-sell it.
Anyway, many generations ago Walt Disney drew a mouse and people loved that mouse. Walt Disney should be rewarded.
How, exactly, is he rewarded now by the fact that every time a China made plastic pencilcase with Mickey Mouse on
it (what children today don't even recognise) is sold the till rings at the Walt Disney Corporation? I have the
sinking feeling that being a skeleton in hole dug in the dirt kind of limits the value of financial reward.
Not to mention that it would be rather hard to ask him if he still wants money for Mickey Mouse or he thinks
that now he has as much as he believes is a fair compensation for his efforts.
> BBC [...] I'm pretty sure it's still supposed to be run essentially in the public interest.
So is the government. Until *that* is fixed one shall not be surprised if other institutions take the "business friendly" approach.
> There's still room for improvement, but the complaint that "it's hard to set up devices under Linux" is diminishing.
*If* they are standard devices. Network cards, discs and alike are OK. However, I can connect my USB mobile phone to my Linux box, but I can't do anything with it because it uses some proprietary rubbish over USB and the SW that comes with it is naturally strictly Windows only. Which is a pity, because I wanted to re-flash the phone (to have accented characters in the SMS) and I do not have (and never had) a Windows machine around. So no, not all devices work under Linux.
Don't get me wrong, I've been on Linux since '95 and Solaris before that; the last MS product I used was DOS but unfortunately very few gadget companies care about anything but Windows. So, if you are into connectivity and are a gizmo freak, you need Windows. Oh yes, you can write to the companies and if you are lucky they reply telling you that the non-Windows market is negligible and is not worth investing into and they do not publish protocols because they do not want "to compromise the customer's experience with questionable quality third party software". The MS monopoly doesn't end at the PC, it extends to anything that can be connected to a PC and requires some program running on the PC. Alas, that includes many devices too. Some people can cope with it (all in all, it is just inconvenience for me) but there are some who simply can't and are vulnerable to MS's practices.
> It has its flaws, but yes. On the whole I'd rather be here than anywhere else.
Been anywhere else much?
I loved when the ads were put together back in that time:
:-)
Amiga: "The computer for the creative mind"
Mac: "The computer for the rest of us"
> Like I said I cannot send Mark Shuttleworth a bill for my time. Linux is free
> as in speech and maybe avaialble free as in beer but the cost of drinking that
> beer isn't being fully factored in here.
Um, can you send Bill Gates a bill for your time to solve your Windows problems or hunting solutions on forums? I don't think so.
The difference might be that if the software doesn't work the way you want, with a closed source thing you know that you have to change you expectations while with a free as in every way program you expect that someone else had had the same problem and the solution has already been worked out. You just get very frustrated when it turns out that that's not the case.
Of course, when the computer verifies at boot time that it is going to boot an unchanged, trusted and most importantly licenced OS, the user has the choice not to use anything but Windows since that's the only licenced system to run on PC HW. The sad thing is that it isn't as far-fetched as it sounds.
Where do you draw the line? I guess food companies are free to sell GM food, you are free not to buy it. But what if there's nothing else left?
> We aren't at war, we've invaded some random country for no good reason.
And as per the reason, there were reasons. Mostly of economic nature - and not just the oil. Nothing to do with the nonexistent WMDs and alike of course but hey, advertisement has to sell the product, not the truth. Just think about it: the US spends some 400 billion tax dollars a year on military. If you could divert only 0.1% of that into your companies' direction and all it costs is maybe the life of a few thousand nameless American soldiers and the destruction of a far-away country, now that's a business plan. If you can in the same time get your hands on the natural resources of that far away country, even better. If you can also get more taxpayers' money to give it to the destroyed country's pupet government as aid to buy reconstruction services from *you* then it's at least as clever as what Enron did with California's electricity, except that that was a shameful fraud while this is PATRIOTISM, with all capitals and we could also throw in LIBERATION and DEMOCRACY! Which is good, for the more we tell the plebs how we deliver democracy to that whatsisname country, the less they realise how little they have left of it at home...
1640... 1789...
You forgot:
- China has both the nukes and the missiles - loads of them
- Israel has nukes and they are arguably the most militant nation in the Middle East
- India has nukes and did *not* sign the Non-Prolifration Treaty; they can also take stuff to space
- Pakistan has nukes
- India and Pakistan are US-friendly *now*, but so was Saddam ~20 years ago
- The Australian government wants to export as much uranium as possible and also toying with the thought of setting up enrichment facilities
- There were rumours of the US examining the use of "tactical nukes" in "local conflict"
- France and the UK have their toys too, although they are possibly the only ones who don't rattle their sabres these days
- The US seem to have this "only remaining superpower" superiority complex, loads of nukes, and is trigger-happy (although Iraq should be sobering)
I was born - well, long before '79. I am *much* more worried now than I was in the 80s or 70s.