At one company I worked for, upper level managment (bypassing everybody behind the scenes) got into a very expensive long term IT outsourcing contract with EDS that required them to take over all IT opperations. (kickbacks anyone?)
Anyhow, what happened was that once EDS was locked in, they went off and hired a bunch of hamburger flippers and called them "Senor IT insert_speciality_here". While the existing IT staff tried their best to train them, the results were rather predictable. I've herd EDS has dome something similar in a bunch of big government contracts too.
I've had friends in Europe claim that EDS are very respectable and professional experts, so perhaps there is something different in the US. But here, I was really unimpressed.
In business 101, they teach that there are several ways for a business to guarantee a high profit. One way is to have high barriers to entry, and one way to achieve that is to create a bunch of safety and enviromental regulations that act like a one time cost for the billionaires, but act like an impossible barrier for small efficient competitors.
The bottom line is that nanotech is positioned to threaten a lot of big industrial powers, and become a trillion dollar industry in it's own rite. Contrary to popular belief, these concerns are not being pushed for safety sake, or to protect the world.... they are being pushed to controll the marketplace and lock in monopolies. The sooner people understand that, the better.
In all fairness, it all came from the same tradition - but when AT&T took back the copyright on their original UNIX implementation - that's when it started to seriously fragment into AIX, HPUX, APUX, DGUX, Solaris, and BSD's. Evolution slowed down drastically and left the UNIX community wide open enough for Microsoft to drive a train thru. To compensate, the UNIX community tried to force thru all these standards initiatives (renember CDE?, Motif), but they always failed to stem the tide.
Then Linux came along, and started to undo the damage that the copyright fragmenting caused to begin with because it was under the GPL, and ever since then it has been the beginning of the end for Microsoft and Linux has taken off in the server space and now it's getting ready to attack the desktop. Moral: free markets are about freedoms and not markets. When you have freedoms the markets will take care of themselves, but when you sacrifice freedoms for markets - you will eventually loose both.
Like first off, from what I've seen out there most VC's wouldn't recognize a free market if it ripped them a new one. How about skipping the VC's.
Second off, copyrights are dead. Anything that approaches that cause will be a worthy endeavor.
Third off, government backed moneys are going to die over the next few years (and all the programs, bonds, and promises that go along with it). Position yourselves to deal with that, and especially position yourselves in those old "barbaric" precious metals. How Ironic... good ole fasioned Gold is disruptive!
Fourth off, "ownership" of the spectrum is also going to die. Anything that approaches that will also be a good endeavour.
Fith off, university and public education is going to die (probably arround the time the government money systems die). Get ready to deal with it.
Sixth off, while patents won't die as soon as copyrights, and their death will likely be much more violent, anything that moves assembly, invention, and manufacturing out of the corporate world and into the home will be a good thing in that direction.
Yes IP is a farce designed to restrict the flow of knowledge. It only spurs hoarding and speculation for the benefit of very few people.
Copyrights are designed to restrict the flow of knowledge, patents are designed to restrict it's application. That's why patents are soo dangerous - you can't stop information with a tank, but you can stop it's application. Patnets brought to their logical conclusion will result in nothing but violence. For history we can look at the plantation era and the emergence into the industrial revolution which forced the commoditisation of the labor force and the death of the plantation system. Controlling the labor force as a property right required physical violence, and so will patents eventually.
The Civil War was the bloodiest war in history, and cost more American lives than WW1, WW2, Viet Nam, Korea, and Iraq combined. Why was it the most bloody? because we were just learning how to create new technologies to kill people (machine guns, gas, etc...), but hadn't evolved to learn any defenses yet. If we are smart, we will learn from that and kill patents now before they blow up in our faces. The wealth of the plantaion system didn't matter, the fact that they called slaves property didn't matter, and all those well educated business men who thought they knew what business and property and commerce were about - they were wrong........ well, the same is true with patnets today.
Do I know for a fact that things will end up that violent? well no. But considering their track record with AIDS in Africa the prospects do not look good.
Pharmaceutical research would pretty much grind to a halt without IP laws. It can take up to a billion dollars to push a single drug from discovery, to lab testing, past regulation, and into production. No one is going to drop a billion dollars just to have their closest competitor copy what they just achieved at not cost to themselves. It simply would not happen.
Actually the facts show that just the opposite happens. http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/papers/ip.ch.9.m1004 .pdf Both Germany and then later Italy, and now India have/had thriving pharmacutcial R&D industries right up till patent systems got put in place. What you say sounds nice in theory, but in practice it punishes people who collaberate on R&D between companies and researchers, but on the bright side it does benefit lawyers and marketing departments.
This is the case in a lot of leading edge fields. In a lot of fields you need to create something that is amazing complex and capital intensive. You need to drop millions or billions of dollars on developing a product before it becomes viable. IP protection is the only thing that gives you any sort of assurance that if you find something, someone just can't steal it.
Once again, you don't know what you're talking about. There is a reason why the non proprietary x86 architecture took over the market place, and the better designed motorolla one didn't. There is a reason why we use ethernet networks today, and not token-ring, there is a reason why the IP protocool took off and the novell networks protocool didn't, there is a reason why the Mac's didn't seize the market place even though it was a better GUI and came before Microsoft. And today there is a reason why Microsoft is getting their butt kicked in the server space today by Linux. There is a reason why biotech stagnated for 10 years till they started to apply open-source ideas to DNA. How come the innovation in boitech has increased in the last 3 years while the number of patent submissions has gone down? It just amazes me the people who wouldn't recognize a free market - even when it rpis them a new one.
If you follow the money, and you follow the industry: It says the message loud and clear that patents and copyrights are shit, and it greatly rewards any industry and company that figures out new ways to bypass the proprietary crap of someone else.
It remids me of the people who said "well Marxisim is good, it was just implemented bad" - while blowing off the 100 million people who were murdered because of it over the last 50 years. Bullshit. Facts mean something, and when they don't back up theories than it is the theories are shit not the facts.
The fact here is that patents are violent, patents are evil, and there are millions of dead people in Africa to prove it, and hundreds and thousands of dead companies that "had" good implementations to prove it here.
All to often, people have a tendancy to look at the goals and desires behind a system and not the nature of a system. The nature of the patent system is very simple --- "if you benefit from something that seems like seems like a copy of something we invented, then we reserve the right to beat you down" --- that's all there is to it. Everything else is just fluff added on to make it sound nice.
Maybe they're beating them down to promote invention, maybe they're beating them down to destroy invention, maybe they're even beating them down to create a master race. It doesn't matter. I just hope people understand that for every invention that they create and reserve the right to "beat everyone else down", that there are probably billions of other inventions out there that they rely on in their everyday lives. If push comes to shove, it will all come back at them 1000 fold.
IMHO, copyrights can't survive the information age, but patents are far more evil. The imposition of patents in most cases is nothing short of plain physical coercion. The fact is that 99% of invention is progressive, just another stage built upon the countless other layers of understanding and invention already out there. The only competition that patents promote is trying to lock out new inventions that might allow new technology to bypass your patent portfolio. But patents have a far more evil side effect....
How would you feel if you were a slave on the plantation, and told that slavery was a property right, that they had no incentive to grow cotton unless they had the right to whip you, that the great wealth and prosperity of America rested upon others being able to beat you down. Well, this is how millions of Africans who are dead from AIDS felt - because when their countries tried to bypass patents and make generics, they were sued my American pharmaceuticals in the world court. And the criminals who caused this - instead of being ashamed, they act proud and proclaim that no decent medications would exist without patents, which is an outright lie. In fact, patents slow down medicine development in every country they touch.
The "it's a property" argument is bullshit, the "it's an incentive" argument is a fraud, the "it creates wealth" argument is a lie. Like the plantation system, it is evil at the core, and the day we get rid of the patent systen can not come too soon.
Finally, one more thing. If you want to understand how patents are going to unfold - all that has to be done is to look at copyrights today. Eventually, technology will come about so that people can "print up objects" in the home, or "replicate" stuff. The patent people will demand royalties for this stuff, and they will try to impose physical coercion to get them. By that time, there will likely be quadrillions of dollars worth of pressure to enslave every man woman and child on the planet to keep the patent revenue streams flowing. Patnets brought to their logical conclusion will likely lead to the murderous death of billions. IMHO, Africa is just the start.
In all fairness, I really don't have a fundamental problem with DRM, what I have a problem with is when someone figures out how to bypass or hack a DRM scheme and goes to jail. I think the GPL needs to protect people from that just as it protects people from going to jail and being fined if they copy and add to other peoples modifications of GPL'd code.
I have confidence that GPL3 would protect me from that, I'm not so sure about GPL2. My world really does have room for DRM and the GPL, just not DRM backed by government thugs.
Real Estate does out perform the stock market, because it is lower risk and people give you money at lower rates...
Yeah, but the main thing that is driving real-estate is inflation (which BTW, is greatly understated). That is a very dangerous game to be betting on right now. People have always done well investing in realestate because the fed always pushes more money into the economy, which always creates inflation that drives up the value and also eventually drives up peoples pay. But today with wage pressures overseas, and information technology forcing "technology deflation" and driving down margin (eg, a 10 gb hard drive 20 years ago cost well over 10K) - that is an extremely dangerous bet to be making at this time - we are just comming off the internet boom.
I could very easially see a scenaro that the current deflationary pressures make it impossible to pay down debts, so the Fed puts more liquidity in the economy, and that in turn drives up prices to record levels, but not pay. That would make it harder for people to pay on their already over-leveraged debts, it would dry up refinancing, and force the fed to put more liquidity into the economy - causing a snowball effect of out of controll inflation and massive defaulting debts.
The bottom line is still, the US economy has more debt than it has capacity to pay off, and printing up money/adding liquidity to counter the deflationary forces will make things worse. It just kills me to see people debating between stocks, bonds, and housing when the dollar's very existence is at stake. IMHO, anyone who doesn't have a precious metals backup plan is just plain insane.
In the long run, stocks beat real estate, bonds and commodities.
I don't dispute that, but when a country has more debt than it can pay off at face value, it's stock and bond markets are not the place to be. This is way beyond trying to pick the next quarter, it is about fundamental structural problems that present a real danger until resolved.
In all fairness, the US economy has more debt than it can pay off, and is very nicely positioned for a currency collapse, not to mention a recession at mininum. Google isn't the only company under attack, but is the most noticible because of it's very high P/E. The dollar, bonds, housing, and the stock market are in very high risk of a breakdown. The only safe sector left is commodities.
Re:Silly Libertarian, your assertions mean jack
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The government createth property, the government taketh it away.
No it doesn't. People have rights, government or not, but typically they organize in the form of government to secure those rights. By that understanding, a successfull government protects rights of individuals inspite of the mob - a failed one "decides that the expense of health care should be shared" and that "that is its prerogative".
Individual rights are not arbitrary, they are measurable learnable, and understandable. They exist with or without governments, and societies are always more prosperuos and happy when they successfully identify and respect them. Maybe the mob votes to gang-bang you too? It is still woudn't be acceptable, no matter what "society" agreed to.
I'm sorry you got modded down so much. IMHO it is plus 5 content, and the other insulting replies to your post are way out of line. The response saddens me, but is not unexpected. You see, the politicians now know that they need to get their propaganda out online or they're never gonna make it, but when it comes to arguing on merrits and facts they just can't, so instead they try to insult, silence, and gang up on you.
The real story is not how technology is transforming democracy, it's how it's bypassing it. People are more and more able to secure their rights and freedoms without needing to fight the popular mob.
I only RTF'd the first fiew PP's, but I thought it was important to point out. Democracy is not an end in itself, it is a means, a means to preserve liberties and freedoms that people are entitled to from birth. It is a tool, and like any tool can be used constructively or destructively.
Freedoms do not mean free room, borad, health care, eduction, and (insert good cause here) coerced at every one elses expense by the popular mob. Anyone can do grand feats when done with other peoples money.
Freedoms mean free, as in free will, as in your right to controll, allocate, and use opportunities, money, and resources honestly gained without the government coercing it away. All to often people act like the government taking money from one group of people to give to another has consequences so neglable that it isn't even worth mentioning. Well, the truth is that it is that the consequences are more harmfull for government to take from people, than if individuals had gotten it by stealing it all by themselves.
Finally, in 1994, I was introduced to Linus Torvalds, and my life was changed forever. I came back from that meeting and told my fellow workers "Linux is inevitable". I even put that message in a slide presentation, in 1994.
I figured it out in 95, and let me tell you it was hell, so I can only imagine what he went thru. The thing that killed me the most was trying to tell this to managers and corporate types, and getting blown off like I didn't know what I was talking about. It was a real eye opener about how 90% of the corporate world are followers who couldn't recoginize a free market force if it ripped them a new one. In my career I have been told phrases like "the internet is a passing fad" (92), "linux is a toy os, not for the enterprise" (97), "the x86 won't work for the data center" (2001). Thankfully I ignored all of them, which is why I'm still in IT today.
So what's the next technology that the business types haven't figured out yet. Well, I would say p2p and the death of the copyright system, but I think the real but kicker this time is not technology, but economics. The US economy has too much debt (esp in housing), too much taxes, too many unfunded obligations (like social security) that can and never will be paid off at face value. The same information technology forces that are predestining the death of copyrights are also pre-destining the death of paper and government "backed" currencies. The global transition will be very very painfull.
Bullshit, all the papers I read are claiming bursts of up to 20 times input, after weeks worth of constant current going into the apparatus - that's way beyond "barely measurable" energy. Is it being implied that they can't even get 1 freakin miliwatt extra out of it? FYI, they went way beyond claiming fusion - people can even create fusion with ultra sound, they claimed fusion that's putting out more energy than was put in. A working closed system is not an unreasonable request here. Sheesh, even a working system that was just more efficient at heating than anything out there would be enough. Ignorance?? I'm not the one that has something to prove here.
At home and at work, a nice multi-homed Linux box with iptables, shapecfg, openvpn, ipsec, and iproute already does a nice job of firewalling, vpn-ing and routing traffic. IMHO, handles loads and traffic flow pretty nicely - and it's a lot easier to upgrade and do traffic analysis than on those closed off-the-shelf boxes.
Everytime I hear about cold fusion, my BS alarm just rings like wild. If they're getting such real results, then why not hook up an array of these to a small generator that feeds back into itself and give themselves some free energy. Any competent physicist/chemist would know how to convert heat to electricity with an acceptable loss rate - especially at the 4x output that's being claimed in some cases.
If I had a portable fusion generator, the first thing I would do is hook one up to my house and disconnect myself from the electric company so I wouldn't need to pay electric or heating bills anymore. The next thing I would so is start selling "long life" battery systems, or "super duper efficient" heating systems to fund my research. Considering that this is the last thing they are doing, even after having 8 years to study it - my BS alarm is ringing like wild. They wouldn't happen to be seeking big government funding would they? Hmmmm.
Let me get this straight, people are spending big money to buy up open source companies left and right and because of that we should be concerned about the future of open source?????
How about an alternative view..... once people figure out that they can make companies that are pratically guaranteed to get bought out at over valued prices or become profitable open-source ventures if they dont. And even better, chances are that 90% of the of the software they start their base off of is likely already developed. I wouldn't be supprised to see a nuclear explosion in the open source software industry bigger than the dot.com and the PC boom and the integtrated circuit boom combined.
What are you talking about. Just because people can use substitute goods and can't get any price they want, doesn't mean that there isn't price fixing and anti-trust behavior.
If the RIAA manage to extract $20 for a CD or $.99 a song from your neighbor despite the fact that you can put your own music for free or for $.10c on the net then MORE POWER TO THE RIAA. It's called MARKET POWER. It means that they have invested the time and effort to make their product worth what the market is willing to pay. You and I may not like sylvia browne's shite books or britney's shite music, but they have managed to convince the market that they are worth paying over the odds for them.
Well the problem is that the RIAA can't extract that much, so instead they try to kill alternate distribution chanels while screaming bloody murder about incentives and property rights. Well bullshit. Alot of people make it investing their time and effort without a little personalized government monopoly, in fact most artists do, because only 1% of 1% benefit from the way the copyright system is set up now.
The basic economic phenomenon here has NOTHING to do with copyrights....
If I artifically restricted the natural supply of food to people arround the world because "I had no incentive", most people would see that as the pure economic evil that it is. But when they restrict the natural flow of information, then oh my God "It's a RIGHT !!! "... Well bullshit, it's not a right and has everything to do with economics.
I think the reality is that anti-trust problems and pricefixing problems are pretty much pre-destined anytime you have a monopoly, and when you have a government granted monopoly on copying and distribution (copyrights) it is a money back guarantee.
It always amazes me to see all these people who are in-dignified about this when it's their own belief system in copyrights that pre-destined this to begin with.
They might be doing it to get leverage over the Chineese government, saying look, if you don't get off our back will make your private search records vulnerable to US sovriengty. In addition, it might be a good way to get the powerfull political forces to back them up in their privacy fight against the US government. Or perhaps the US government wanted googles records for things other than fighting porn, and protecting children was just an excuse.
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At one company I worked for, upper level managment (bypassing everybody behind the scenes) got into a very expensive long term IT outsourcing contract with EDS that required them to take over all IT opperations. (kickbacks anyone?)
Anyhow, what happened was that once EDS was locked in, they went off and hired a bunch of hamburger flippers and called them "Senor IT insert_speciality_here". While the existing IT staff tried their best to train them, the results were rather predictable. I've herd EDS has dome something similar in a bunch of big government contracts too.
I've had friends in Europe claim that EDS are very respectable and professional experts, so perhaps there is something different in the US. But here, I was really unimpressed.
In business 101, they teach that there are several ways for a business to guarantee a high profit. One way is to have high barriers to entry, and one way to achieve that is to create a bunch of safety and enviromental regulations that act like a one time cost for the billionaires, but act like an impossible barrier for small efficient competitors.
.... they are being pushed to controll the marketplace and lock in monopolies. The sooner people understand that, the better.
The bottom line is that nanotech is positioned to threaten a lot of big industrial powers, and become a trillion dollar industry in it's own rite. Contrary to popular belief, these concerns are not being pushed for safety sake, or to protect the world
In all fairness, it all came from the same tradition - but when AT&T took back the copyright on their original UNIX implementation - that's when it started to seriously fragment into AIX, HPUX, APUX, DGUX, Solaris, and BSD's. Evolution slowed down drastically and left the UNIX community wide open enough for Microsoft to drive a train thru. To compensate, the UNIX community tried to force thru all these standards initiatives (renember CDE?, Motif), but they always failed to stem the tide.
Then Linux came along, and started to undo the damage that the copyright fragmenting caused to begin with because it was under the GPL, and ever since then it has been the beginning of the end for Microsoft and Linux has taken off in the server space and now it's getting ready to attack the desktop. Moral: free markets are about freedoms and not markets. When you have freedoms the markets will take care of themselves, but when you sacrifice freedoms for markets - you will eventually loose both.
Like first off, from what I've seen out there most VC's wouldn't recognize a free market if it ripped them a new one. How about skipping the VC's.
... good ole fasioned Gold is disruptive!
Second off, copyrights are dead. Anything that approaches that cause will be a worthy endeavor.
Third off, government backed moneys are going to die over the next few years (and all the programs, bonds, and promises that go along with it). Position yourselves to deal with that, and especially position yourselves in those old "barbaric" precious metals. How Ironic
Fourth off, "ownership" of the spectrum is also going to die. Anything that approaches that will also be a good endeavour.
Fith off, university and public education is going to die (probably arround the time the government money systems die). Get ready to deal with it.
Sixth off, while patents won't die as soon as copyrights, and their death will likely be much more violent, anything that moves assembly, invention, and manufacturing out of the corporate world and into the home will be a good thing in that direction.
Yes IP is a farce designed to restrict the flow of knowledge. It only spurs hoarding and speculation for the benefit of very few people.
Copyrights are designed to restrict the flow of knowledge, patents are designed to restrict it's application. That's why patents are soo dangerous - you can't stop information with a tank, but you can stop it's application. Patnets brought to their logical conclusion will result in nothing but violence. For history we can look at the plantation era and the emergence into the industrial revolution which forced the commoditisation of the labor force and the death of the plantation system. Controlling the labor force as a property right required physical violence, and so will patents eventually.
The Civil War was the bloodiest war in history, and cost more American lives than WW1, WW2, Viet Nam, Korea, and Iraq combined. Why was it the most bloody? because we were just learning how to create new technologies to kill people (machine guns, gas, etc ...), but hadn't evolved to learn any defenses yet. If we are smart, we will learn from that and kill patents now before they blow up in our faces. The wealth of the plantaion system didn't matter, the fact that they called slaves property didn't matter, and all those well educated business men who thought they knew what business and property and commerce were about - they were wrong ........ well, the same is true with patnets today.
Do I know for a fact that things will end up that violent? well no. But considering their track record with AIDS in Africa the prospects do not look good.
Pharmaceutical research would pretty much grind to a halt without IP laws. It can take up to a billion dollars to push a single drug from discovery, to lab testing, past regulation, and into production. No one is going to drop a billion dollars just to have their closest competitor copy what they just achieved at not cost to themselves. It simply would not happen.
Actually the facts show that just the opposite happens. http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/papers/ip.ch.9.m1004 .pdf Both Germany and then later Italy, and now India have/had thriving pharmacutcial R&D industries right up till patent systems got put in place. What you say sounds nice in theory, but in practice it punishes people who collaberate on R&D between companies and researchers, but on the bright side it does benefit lawyers and marketing departments.
This is the case in a lot of leading edge fields. In a lot of fields you need to create something that is amazing complex and capital intensive. You need to drop millions or billions of dollars on developing a product before it becomes viable. IP protection is the only thing that gives you any sort of assurance that if you find something, someone just can't steal it.
Once again, you don't know what you're talking about. There is a reason why the non proprietary x86 architecture took over the market place, and the better designed motorolla one didn't. There is a reason why we use ethernet networks today, and not token-ring, there is a reason why the IP protocool took off and the novell networks protocool didn't, there is a reason why the Mac's didn't seize the market place even though it was a better GUI and came before Microsoft. And today there is a reason why Microsoft is getting their butt kicked in the server space today by Linux. There is a reason why biotech stagnated for 10 years till they started to apply open-source ideas to DNA. How come the innovation in boitech has increased in the last 3 years while the number of patent submissions has gone down? It just amazes me the people who wouldn't recognize a free market - even when it rpis them a new one.
If you follow the money, and you follow the industry: It says the message loud and clear that patents and copyrights are shit, and it greatly rewards any industry and company that figures out new ways to bypass the proprietary crap of someone else.
It remids me of the people who said "well Marxisim is good, it was just implemented bad" - while blowing off the 100 million people who were murdered because of it over the last 50 years. Bullshit. Facts mean something, and when they don't back up theories than it is the theories are shit not the facts.
The fact here is that patents are violent, patents are evil, and there are millions of dead people in Africa to prove it, and hundreds and thousands of dead companies that "had" good implementations to prove it here.
Well, isn't that the point though. How can you rip something off, when the person you supposedly ripped off still has the original copy?
All to often, people have a tendancy to look at the goals and desires behind a system and not the nature of a system. The nature of the patent system is very simple --- "if you benefit from something that seems like seems like a copy of something we invented, then we reserve the right to beat you down" --- that's all there is to it. Everything else is just fluff added on to make it sound nice.
Maybe they're beating them down to promote invention, maybe they're beating them down to destroy invention, maybe they're even beating them down to create a master race. It doesn't matter. I just hope people understand that for every invention that they create and reserve the right to "beat everyone else down", that there are probably billions of other inventions out there that they rely on in their everyday lives. If push comes to shove, it will all come back at them 1000 fold.
IMHO, copyrights can't survive the information age, but patents are far more evil. The imposition of patents in most cases is nothing short of plain physical coercion. The fact is that 99% of invention is progressive, just another stage built upon the countless other layers of understanding and invention already out there. The only competition that patents promote is trying to lock out new inventions that might allow new technology to bypass your patent portfolio. But patents have a far more evil side effect....
How would you feel if you were a slave on the plantation, and told that slavery was a property right, that they had no incentive to grow cotton unless they had the right to whip you, that the great wealth and prosperity of America rested upon others being able to beat you down. Well, this is how millions of Africans who are dead from AIDS felt - because when their countries tried to bypass patents and make generics, they were sued my American pharmaceuticals in the world court. And the criminals who caused this - instead of being ashamed, they act proud and proclaim that no decent medications would exist without patents, which is an outright lie. In fact, patents slow down medicine development in every country they touch.
The "it's a property" argument is bullshit, the "it's an incentive" argument is a fraud, the "it creates wealth" argument is a lie. Like the plantation system, it is evil at the core, and the day we get rid of the patent systen can not come too soon.
Finally, one more thing. If you want to understand how patents are going to unfold - all that has to be done is to look at copyrights today. Eventually, technology will come about so that people can "print up objects" in the home, or "replicate" stuff. The patent people will demand royalties for this stuff, and they will try to impose physical coercion to get them. By that time, there will likely be quadrillions of dollars worth of pressure to enslave every man woman and child on the planet to keep the patent revenue streams flowing. Patnets brought to their logical conclusion will likely lead to the murderous death of billions. IMHO, Africa is just the start.
In all fairness, I really don't have a fundamental problem with DRM, what I have a problem with is when someone figures out how to bypass or hack a DRM scheme and goes to jail. I think the GPL needs to protect people from that just as it protects people from going to jail and being fined if they copy and add to other peoples modifications of GPL'd code.
I have confidence that GPL3 would protect me from that, I'm not so sure about GPL2. My world really does have room for DRM and the GPL, just not DRM backed by government thugs.
Real Estate does out perform the stock market, because it is lower risk and people give you money at lower rates...
Yeah, but the main thing that is driving real-estate is inflation (which BTW, is greatly understated). That is a very dangerous game to be betting on right now. People have always done well investing in realestate because the fed always pushes more money into the economy, which always creates inflation that drives up the value and also eventually drives up peoples pay. But today with wage pressures overseas, and information technology forcing "technology deflation" and driving down margin (eg, a 10 gb hard drive 20 years ago cost well over 10K) - that is an extremely dangerous bet to be making at this time - we are just comming off the internet boom.
I could very easially see a scenaro that the current deflationary pressures make it impossible to pay down debts, so the Fed puts more liquidity in the economy, and that in turn drives up prices to record levels, but not pay. That would make it harder for people to pay on their already over-leveraged debts, it would dry up refinancing, and force the fed to put more liquidity into the economy - causing a snowball effect of out of controll inflation and massive defaulting debts.
The bottom line is still, the US economy has more debt than it has capacity to pay off, and printing up money/adding liquidity to counter the deflationary forces will make things worse. It just kills me to see people debating between stocks, bonds, and housing when the dollar's very existence is at stake. IMHO, anyone who doesn't have a precious metals backup plan is just plain insane.
In the long run, stocks beat real estate, bonds and commodities.
I don't dispute that, but when a country has more debt than it can pay off at face value, it's stock and bond markets are not the place to be. This is way beyond trying to pick the next quarter, it is about fundamental structural problems that present a real danger until resolved.
In all fairness, the US economy has more debt than it can pay off, and is very nicely positioned for a currency collapse, not to mention a recession at mininum. Google isn't the only company under attack, but is the most noticible because of it's very high P/E. The dollar, bonds, housing, and the stock market are in very high risk of a breakdown. The only safe sector left is commodities.
The government createth property, the government taketh it away.
No it doesn't. People have rights, government or not, but typically they organize in the form of government to secure those rights. By that understanding, a successfull government protects rights of individuals inspite of the mob - a failed one "decides that the expense of health care should be shared" and that "that is its prerogative".
Individual rights are not arbitrary, they are measurable learnable, and understandable. They exist with or without governments, and societies are always more prosperuos and happy when they successfully identify and respect them. Maybe the mob votes to gang-bang you too? It is still woudn't be acceptable, no matter what "society" agreed to.
I'm sorry you got modded down so much. IMHO it is plus 5 content, and the other insulting replies to your post are way out of line. The response saddens me, but is not unexpected. You see, the politicians now know that they need to get their propaganda out online or they're never gonna make it, but when it comes to arguing on merrits and facts they just can't, so instead they try to insult, silence, and gang up on you.
The real story is not how technology is transforming democracy, it's how it's bypassing it. People are more and more able to secure their rights and freedoms without needing to fight the popular mob.
I only RTF'd the first fiew PP's, but I thought it was important to point out. Democracy is not an end in itself, it is a means, a means to preserve liberties and freedoms that people are entitled to from birth. It is a tool, and like any tool can be used constructively or destructively.
Freedoms do not mean free room, borad, health care, eduction, and (insert good cause here) coerced at every one elses expense by the popular mob. Anyone can do grand feats when done with other peoples money.
Freedoms mean free, as in free will, as in your right to controll, allocate, and use opportunities, money, and resources honestly gained without the government coercing it away. All to often people act like the government taking money from one group of people to give to another has consequences so neglable that it isn't even worth mentioning. Well, the truth is that it is that the consequences are more harmfull for government to take from people, than if individuals had gotten it by stealing it all by themselves.
The part that impressed me was this ....
Finally, in 1994, I was introduced to Linus Torvalds, and my life was changed forever. I came back from that meeting and told my fellow workers "Linux is inevitable". I even put that message in a slide presentation, in 1994.
I figured it out in 95, and let me tell you it was hell, so I can only imagine what he went thru. The thing that killed me the most was trying to tell this to managers and corporate types, and getting blown off like I didn't know what I was talking about. It was a real eye opener about how 90% of the corporate world are followers who couldn't recoginize a free market force if it ripped them a new one. In my career I have been told phrases like "the internet is a passing fad" (92), "linux is a toy os, not for the enterprise" (97), "the x86 won't work for the data center" (2001). Thankfully I ignored all of them, which is why I'm still in IT today.
So what's the next technology that the business types haven't figured out yet. Well, I would say p2p and the death of the copyright system, but I think the real but kicker this time is not technology, but economics. The US economy has too much debt (esp in housing), too much taxes, too many unfunded obligations (like social security) that can and never will be paid off at face value. The same information technology forces that are predestining the death of copyrights are also pre-destining the death of paper and government "backed" currencies. The global transition will be very very painfull.
Bullshit, all the papers I read are claiming bursts of up to 20 times input, after weeks worth of constant current going into the apparatus - that's way beyond "barely measurable" energy. Is it being implied that they can't even get 1 freakin miliwatt extra out of it? FYI, they went way beyond claiming fusion - people can even create fusion with ultra sound, they claimed fusion that's putting out more energy than was put in. A working closed system is not an unreasonable request here. Sheesh, even a working system that was just more efficient at heating than anything out there would be enough. Ignorance?? I'm not the one that has something to prove here.
At home and at work, a nice multi-homed Linux box with iptables, shapecfg, openvpn, ipsec, and iproute already does a nice job of firewalling, vpn-ing and routing traffic. IMHO, handles loads and traffic flow pretty nicely - and it's a lot easier to upgrade and do traffic analysis than on those closed off-the-shelf boxes.
Everytime I hear about cold fusion, my BS alarm just rings like wild. If they're getting such real results, then why not hook up an array of these to a small generator that feeds back into itself and give themselves some free energy. Any competent physicist/chemist would know how to convert heat to electricity with an acceptable loss rate - especially at the 4x output that's being claimed in some cases.
If I had a portable fusion generator, the first thing I would do is hook one up to my house and disconnect myself from the electric company so I wouldn't need to pay electric or heating bills anymore. The next thing I would so is start selling "long life" battery systems, or "super duper efficient" heating systems to fund my research. Considering that this is the last thing they are doing, even after having 8 years to study it - my BS alarm is ringing like wild. They wouldn't happen to be seeking big government funding would they? Hmmmm.
Let me get this straight, people are spending big money to buy up open source companies left and right and because of that we should be concerned about the future of open source?????
..... once people figure out that they can make companies that are pratically guaranteed to get bought out at over valued prices or become profitable open-source ventures if they dont. And even better, chances are that 90% of the of the software they start their base off of is likely already developed. I wouldn't be supprised to see a nuclear explosion in the open source software industry bigger than the dot.com and the PC boom and the integtrated circuit boom combined.
How about an alternative view
What are you talking about. Just because people can use substitute goods and can't get any price they want, doesn't mean that there isn't price fixing and anti-trust behavior.
If the RIAA manage to extract $20 for a CD or $.99 a song from your neighbor despite the fact that you can put your own music for free or for $.10c on the net then MORE POWER TO THE RIAA. It's called MARKET POWER. It means that they have invested the time and effort to make their product worth what the market is willing to pay. You and I may not like sylvia browne's shite books or britney's shite music, but they have managed to convince the market that they are worth paying over the odds for them.
Well the problem is that the RIAA can't extract that much, so instead they try to kill alternate distribution chanels while screaming bloody murder about incentives and property rights. Well bullshit. Alot of people make it investing their time and effort without a little personalized government monopoly, in fact most artists do, because only 1% of 1% benefit from the way the copyright system is set up now.
The basic economic phenomenon here has NOTHING to do with copyrights ....
If I artifically restricted the natural supply of food to people arround the world because "I had no incentive", most people would see that as the pure economic evil that it is. But when they restrict the natural flow of information, then oh my God "It's a RIGHT !!! " ... Well bullshit, it's not a right and has everything to do with economics.
I think the reality is that anti-trust problems and pricefixing problems are pretty much pre-destined anytime you have a monopoly, and when you have a government granted monopoly on copying and distribution (copyrights) it is a money back guarantee.
It always amazes me to see all these people who are in-dignified about this when it's their own belief system in copyrights that pre-destined this to begin with.
Not to mention, that bills in the USA have this oddbal tendancy to be named the exact opposite of what they do.
They might be doing it to get leverage over the Chineese government, saying look, if you don't get off our back will make your private search records vulnerable to US sovriengty. In addition, it might be a good way to get the powerfull political forces to back them up in their privacy fight against the US government. Or perhaps the US government wanted googles records for things other than fighting porn, and protecting children was just an excuse.