In the old USSR, it was common for people to gripe "what good does it do to have freedom to say waht you want and worship the religion you want when noone guarantees you will have food on the table"
Well, the answer is A LOT, and all to oftern I see that attitude about the 3rd world express itself in ways like "well free software doesn't really do you much good when you're starving" and I find that attitude arrogant and condesending. Because what that is really saying is well "you poor souls are too stupid to learn and help yoursleves, so were just gonna worry about feeding you - and not give a shit and keep a neutral attitude about if you should have any freedom to help yourselves because you will never appreciate it"
Well bullshit! Freedom is not a means, it is an end that derives from the fact that people have free will and that demands things about how we treat people and how we run and organise our societies. That's why freedom is successfull, and not because it promises the most immediate reward.
In the information age, freedom means holding yourself accountable to the success of free software and respecting people right to copy and share information at their disposal. How can a social culture like that not lead to long term success!
The problem is that all these millionaires made the vast majority of their money, not from free market forces, but from a government imposed monopoly on the distribution of infromation called copyrights.
This is not a natural form of profit, and when it comes to free markets, I suspect that many of them probably have no clue as how to make money any more than Miscosoft has a clue of how to make money outside of it's core office/os monopoly.
MS is literally burning most of their resources on trying to become an entertainment/media company right at a time in history when that part of the industry is predestined to become worthless as society enteres the information age. (Think of the people that were in the plantation business as the industrial revolution started to explode, yeah at first they became extremely rich as the cotton gin made their slaves 1000 times more productive, then they went to satanic hell)
The worst part is, very little of this money will likely go into successfull ventures, but when it hits the fan with the free software movement, a lot will likely go into dirty hardball. (Think SCO, MPAA BSA, RIAA rolled into one magnified by over 10000.)
Well, the theory is that people have certain inherent rights and they organise in the form of government to secure those rights....... well..... well..... that was the theory anyhow.
Ok. I give, is the USA or the UK free, well no. Maybe they should be called relatively free, that is, in reference to some of the other cesspools out there.
I think what society really needs is the next-generation of liberty. The advancemnet of government over the last 200 years has been nothing compaired to other fields like the advancement of science and medicine. A society with about 1/10th to 1/20th the tax and regulatory burden and free of copyright and patent monopolies would be a nice start.
Call it "liberation" all you want, you are still violating intellectual property. Are IP laws perfect? No. But they do have a legitimate reason to exist.
Well, call it property all you want, but it's still has nothing to do with property rights and everthing to do with controll. Are copy monopoly laws perfect, no they're like the old soviet era whose time has passed.
Everybody in the world is not obligated to distribute their work for free to anyone who wants it. Sorry.
Ahem. No one ever said they were obligated to distribute copys of their creations for free. No just obligated to GTF outta the way while everyone else does it.:)
(gpl rant deleted)
PS: please quote the part of the GPL that says you can't profit from it.
Believe it or not, history is repeating itself here.
History teaches that during the 1800's there were many people who believed that the entire meaning and purpose of the industrial revolution was to leverage inventions like the cotton gin to expand their plantations for unlimited growth and profit. Ironically just the opposite was true;the industrial revolution demanded a mobile and skilled workforce.
First, they responded by making slavery last forever, and making laws so harsh you couldn't even teach a person of color how to read. Then they responded by trying to micro-regulate the northern states, then they responded by trying to break off from the Union and fence themselves off from the rest of the world causing all hell to break loose.
Today many in media circles believe that the entire meaning and purpose of the information age is to use inventions like the Internet to leverage their copyright holdings to the far reaches of the Earth for unlimited growth and profit. Ironically, just the opposite is true; the information age demands the unrestricted flow of information.
First, they responded my making copyrights last effectively forever, then they responded by making it so that illegal copying could be punished worse than rape, then they tried to micro-regulate the technology industries with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and now they are trying to fence the information they control off from the rest of the world with Digital Rights Management (DRM). We are now at the point where society must tell them to go to hell.
...is that they have content worth protecting in the first place.
The fallicy of that agrument is the implicit assumption that they even want to "protect" their content. They don't, copyrights have nothing to do with "protecting" content, and everything to do with controlling how people use and distribute information.
When you controll the distribution channels, you don't need to compete on merit against things like Linux. Instead you compete on who can garner the most controll over distribution.
I don't know about you, but between all the nuances in the javascript, and all the newances in the DOM, and trying to figure out where one starts and the other begins, and have you ever tried to figure out which functions/properties work correctly for which object, and have you ever tried to figure out which DOM to use and how to make DOM's of different browsers compatable, or even simply trying to figure out which objects are really on your web page, and then trying to deal with things like XML parsing on top of that, and then now asynchronous communication, not to mention new things in the pipe like XUL, and franlky....
Forget the toilets, AJAX is kicking my ASS and I can't imagine that other people who want to do more than copy cutie javascript tidbits aren't having the same problem. What am I missing here?
by the same argument the corporation could "suck it up" and deal with the unions. Nobody owes a corporation individual negotiations.
But by the same argument again, if all the corporations "group negotiated" (translation acted as a cartel) for a locked in high price for the products they made, even if it was legal, most people would still see it as a crappy way to do business.
Re:It's not about capacity, but non determinisim
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Download Your Brain
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There is compelling reason to believe that quantum effects are dominant in the brain, and there is just as compelling reason to believe that they are not random.
Since existence being deterministic and inherently intelligent are both questions outside the scope of science - it takes just as much "faith" to believe one or the other either way.
What doesn't make sense about this study, is that it is my understanding that gender is determined randomly in the males genes. The females genes determine other things, but not that.
It's not about capacity, but non determinisim
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Download Your Brain
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· Score: 1
I think the problem here is that it's not just a matter of matching the massive calculation and storage capacity of the human brain, but it's also about the underlying mechanisims that make humans intelligently non deterministic.
HEY MODERATORS - was "Privatize NASA"
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New NASA Budget Woes
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Hey moderators! The parent of this comment may piss people off, but is not a troll. The simple truth is that if you love space you should hate NASA.
In fact most people don't renember back in the 70's when an invenstor wanted to pull together some capital and buy some old Atlas missle shells and turn it into a pivate satellite launch program. Only to have the whole thing administratively killed by NASA.
Also, other countries are building very profitable space programs while the US lingers - even though the US was the first to the moon. This is not an accident, it is because NASA is accountable to non market forces and has gotten in the way of true market solutions or even hybrid solutions.
Do I even need to mention two blown up shuttles, confusing meters with feet on a mars mission, well over a $100 million calibation error on the hubble because no one bothered to check the mirror. Not to mention all the pork in NASA, and how they've underperformed promises by nearly 100% - and no it's not because they're under funded, that might be an excuse for not doing projects, but not one for doing them crappy because of political failures - which ironically happen to be behind most all their major disasters!
If you love space, you should hate NASA, not only because they've constantly underperformed at the taxpayers expense, or because they've made so many deadly billion dollar screwups, but most importantly, they are getting in the way of better solutions. They have been for the last 30 years, think how good things would be now if "space-ship one" type ventures were considered back then and not now! Nobody's going to finance exploring the last frontieer, untill they can first make it the profitable frontier. Space is simply toooooo big to conquer as a cost burden, NASA is more incapable and incompentent of doing space for profit than almost any other orginisation on the planet (or off).
I love science and space, and some of the things NASA has proposed and done are very exciting to me. But please, in the name of God, why are we wasting our resources and hearts trying to fix something that is inherently borken by the very political nature of it's accountabilities. It never ceases to amaze me how desperately people cling to things that simply don't work for the sake of a fantasy that politicians and administrators can somehow work a miracle and fix it. Well WTF! noone ever got into space with an attitude like that!
Yes, this freedom has been celebrated for 150 years. The freedom to steal slaves from the plantation, that is. Funny thing was, slavery wasn't about stealing property, nor free markets or commerce, nor incentive, nor rewarding people for their efforts, or even profit, it was about controlling and manipulating other people for greed.
Funny, you'd think that after 150 years people would learn a thing or two about bullshit rights, like the "right" to own slaves, or more recently the right to coericevely restrict what people copy.
Well, save your anger for God or something - I didn't make the universe the way it is giving information completely different characteristics than physical property. And in all truth, I'm not even the one who is creating the consequences for those who are too foolish or stupid to accept that there is a very notable difference and that means something in the real world.
First fact, I make heavy use of Linux and open source and my skills are way way more in demand than my MS counterparts. And that reflects in my pay, and the fact that people are always coming to me for solutions.
Second Fact, I can often provide all the IT infrastructure my company needs without even requesting a PO. In fact, while ohter people get haggled every time they make a purchase, I rarely even get questioned - which I think is because I do way more with way less then my counterparts do.
Third fact, I really have few worries about an unwelcome visit from the BSA, and I don't mean boy scounts of america.
Frouth fact, I rarely need to deal with all the license headaches, and the annual renew crap and forced upgrades that my counterparts do. In fact, upgrades and improvements are not a chore, and I am not terrorized that every upgrade will break everything.
Fith fact, I get the pleasure of doing more RnD, because I don't need financial approval from a bean counter everytime I do something.
Sixth fact, I rarely pay extra for things like compilers, office productivity stuff, graphics programs, and visus scanning is't even a worry accept for scanning linux SMB servers for others.
Seventh fact, things like paravirtualisation, parallel clusters, email, databases, dns, web servers, and remore access to programs come standard in Linux.
Eight fact, I can literally rip a Linux box out of one x86 box and place it in another and run kudzu and it recovers ausomely. Have you ever tried this with Microsoft?
Ninth fact, those are all red herrings. What makes Linux vavuable is that it's not about technology, but freedom. People who talk about business and not freedom are cowards and ingrates to the culture and attitudes that made them successfull to begin with and over the long term they will certainly get what they deserve.
Would we ever expect an organization who profits from piracy to proclaim that the rate of piracy might be decreasing?
Well, I agree with you in spirit, but in all fairness, piracy is where one boards a ship to beat, rape, pillage, and murder people. I think the term everyone here intends to use is "illegal copying".
Why should we accept their categorisations of us and use their descriptions to define us? Descriptions for us like "copy monopoly busters", or "information liberators" and terms like the "information plantation masters" for them would be much more fair and accurate.
I don't know how related this is to the subject at hand, but I think it is important to point out that Intellectual Property restrictions, while harmfull in the USA, are extremely dangerous in China. The USA should be doing everything possible NOT to pressure China to impose copyright and patent monopolies.
For example, as US society has entered the information age, the *AA has responded in an extreme backlash. But even at it's worse, it is likely to go no further than a few jail terms and load of lawsuits.
China will have it's backlash too, but they do not have the political infrastructure or culture of freedom in place to effectively resist it. The consequences will likely be murderous or worse if they have a strong IP system in place while it happens.
1: Offer fast TV downloads for free, or offer legal torrents.
2: Include the advertisements in the shows, and track how many people download them.
3: Profit!!!
The problem with this theory is that it assumes that the *AA are pro business. They are not, they do not want business opportunity, what they want is business monopoly granted to them by the government in the form of copyrights, with infinite force behind them.
The truth and the problem is that copyrights are not free market. If the government gave Ford a monopoly on making cars, because they don't have an "incentive" to make them unless they could lock out everyone else - most people would see this as interference in free markets and overbearing government regulation.
Well that is exactly the problem with copyright distribution monopolies. They are more like a massive overbearing government regulation on how people can share information than a "intellectual" property right. Here, the word "property" is just a label to hide unjust coercion of people, and has nothing to do with real property at all.
I said no such thing. I PAID for my education. I PAID for my training. I PAID for the books and magazines and periodicals I read to keep up.
HOLY SHIT!!! You paid for information AS A SERVICE! Get with it hypocrite!
Again, why are you entitled to steal the results and harvest the value of other people's work?
Why are entitled to charge for the same service twice? thrice? 100 times? With any other service or property that'd be fraud. Answer: because copy distribution monopolies are a fraud.
Answer
The answer is that you are not entitled to a distribution monopoly... figure out ANOTHER model for making MONEY!... that is *YOUR* problem, not mine! If you don't want me having a piece of information you created for free, then please, don't make it to begin with. You'll get left behind, and we'll do fine without you! And I'll get use of free information, and you'll obsess in jealousy that I get lots of free coppies while you get nowhere in life.
BTW, you sound like a fool to me because I probably illegally copy stuff less than 99.9% of the people out there. I'm an RCHE (which cost allot of my own money BTW), and most the styles of music I like are distributed by authors freely on the internet.
It's people like me that hate copyrights the most, because we can see more clearly than anyone that the free market "property" analogy is a lie, it has nothing to do with property and everything to do with controll.
The thinking behing slavery is that it costs allot of money to import slaves from affrica, and the plantation masters need to be insured that they can recoop their investment before the slave leaves.
Well my point is the thinking is irrelavent, and just because someone calls something a property doesn't mean that it is. It's not about thinking, it's about controll and boundaries, and how were entitled to controll our own lives and domain but not the lives and domain of others. Once the cats out of the bag with information, that boundary has been crossed then it is no longer about our controll over our information, but insead of controlling everyone else.
If you ADD to that public knowledge, then you admit that it has value, and you admit that you got that value freely. Why are you so special, why do you deserve the distribution monopoly. Answer, you don't.
You said "Put up, or shut up", my thoughts exactly.
Well, that's exactly what human rights are. There are no "natural limiting factors" that limit us from killing all the blacks or Jews or what have you. Human rights are not a "natural law creation." I know comparing copyright to genocide is dumb, but I think it fits your view on copyrights.
Actually I wish I could comment more on this, because when the pressure of the information age hits the US full force, the worst case damage will likely be limited to a few lawsuits and a few jail terms, but when the full force of the information age hits countries like China, the consequences of a strong IP system could be very very evil.
No, it (information) doesn't. The only real difference is that the method of delivery of is different.
WTF, would you listen to yourself? Then fine, make 10 coppies of my car, you can sell all ten of them and have the profits... my permission.
information, goods, and services ALL require an investment of time, effort, and money to create and produce.
Information, goods, and services ALL have value to those that would use them.
Good, then charge by the hour for to provide that service, and quit sitting on your ass thinking you're entitled to a distribution monopoly at the expense of controlling how everyone else uses information.
You sole argument is that because information is easier to steal (for the moment) you and everyone else is entitled to do so. In fact, you're in favor of demolishing copyright and patent law because you think you and everyone else is somehow automatically entitled to the work of others.
Once again, quit sitting on your ass thinking you're entitled to a distribution monopoly at the expense of everyone else and charge by the hour to create information as a service. I'm not entitled to your work any more than you are entitled to controll information once the cat is out of the bag. Get it.
All I hear is a rant, and no solutions. Who in their right mind is going to spend 8 years of their life and hundreds of millions of dollars creating a LOTR if everyone is simply "entitled" to steal it the second it's produced?
All *I* hear is a rant, and no solutions. It sounds something like this "Who in their right mind will import slaves from africa unless they can be assured that they will work on the plantation for the next 30 years, if everyone thinks there entitles to 'steal' them away by freeing them." Well, if a free system wont work for you, then it's your f**king problem and you will likely get what you deserve.
Who it going to spend a billion dollars developing a cure for cancer or aids if every other drug company in the world can rip them off for free the second it's placed on the market?
The same people who put billions of dollars worth of development effort into open source projects because copyright controlls didn't inhibit them from collaberation.
How many people are going to be able to create that which you and others would instantly steal when they can no longer make a living doing so? Who are the parasites going to feed on when the host dies?
Yeah, Linus is dead because everybody keeps copying his work while not paying him a royality. Hey buddy, why don't you do us all a favor and get with the information age.
But as long as thieves like yourself (admittedly) steal their work, they're going to continue to do so, AND promote stiffer legislation, AND impose ever more draconian restrictions and limits on fair use.
Yeah, and as long as "thiefs keep freeing^H^H^H^H^H^H^H oops I mean stealing slaves from the plantation, they will continue to make harsher laws restricting how black people read, travel, and work."
So you're not only screwing them, you're screwing us all. Thanks a lot.
Don't thank me, you're screwing yourself, but that you are trying to screw everyone else as well is going to ensure you get what you deserve.
The problem with this line of thinking is that there is not so much of a difference between "physical" property and "intellectual" property as we imagine.
It is insane to think that property rights and law would have evolved the way they have if not for that simple truth that not everybody can use something at the same time. Half the issue is that it's not about what people think or feel should be property, it is about certain realities that are just not subjective.
Slashdot Mirror
In the old USSR, it was common for people to gripe "what good does it do to have freedom to say waht you want and worship the religion you want when noone guarantees you will have food on the table"
Well, the answer is A LOT, and all to oftern I see that attitude about the 3rd world express itself in ways like "well free software doesn't really do you much good when you're starving" and I find that attitude arrogant and condesending. Because what that is really saying is well "you poor souls are too stupid to learn and help yoursleves, so were just gonna worry about feeding you - and not give a shit and keep a neutral attitude about if you should have any freedom to help yourselves because you will never appreciate it"
Well bullshit! Freedom is not a means, it is an end that derives from the fact that people have free will and that demands things about how we treat people and how we run and organise our societies. That's why freedom is successfull, and not because it promises the most immediate reward.
In the information age, freedom means holding yourself accountable to the success of free software and respecting people right to copy and share information at their disposal. How can a social culture like that not lead to long term success!
The problem is that all these millionaires made the vast majority of their money, not from free market forces, but from a government imposed monopoly on the distribution of infromation called copyrights.
This is not a natural form of profit, and when it comes to free markets, I suspect that many of them probably have no clue as how to make money any more than Miscosoft has a clue of how to make money outside of it's core office/os monopoly.
MS is literally burning most of their resources on trying to become an entertainment/media company right at a time in history when that part of the industry is predestined to become worthless as society enteres the information age. (Think of the people that were in the plantation business as the industrial revolution started to explode, yeah at first they became extremely rich as the cotton gin made their slaves 1000 times more productive, then they went to satanic hell)
The worst part is, very little of this money will likely go into successfull ventures, but when it hits the fan with the free software movement, a lot will likely go into dirty hardball. (Think SCO, MPAA BSA, RIAA rolled into one magnified by over 10000.)
Well, the theory is that people have certain inherent rights and they organise in the form of government to secure those rights. ...... well ..... well ..... that was the theory anyhow.
Ok. I give, is the USA or the UK free, well no. Maybe they should be called relatively free, that is, in reference to some of the other cesspools out there.
I think what society really needs is the next-generation of liberty. The advancemnet of government over the last 200 years has been nothing compaired to other fields like the advancement of science and medicine. A society with about 1/10th to 1/20th the tax and regulatory burden and free of copyright and patent monopolies would be a nice start.
They don't use violence against civilians. Sorry, they aren't terrorists.
Well, reguarding the 99.999999% of "illegal" copiers who don't use violence - that was sorta the point.
Call it "liberation" all you want, you are still violating intellectual property. Are IP laws perfect? No. But they do have a legitimate reason to exist.
Well, call it property all you want, but it's still has nothing to do with property rights and everthing to do with controll. Are copy monopoly laws perfect, no they're like the old soviet era whose time has passed.
Everybody in the world is not obligated to distribute their work for free to anyone who wants it. Sorry.
Ahem. No one ever said they were obligated to distribute copys of their creations for free. No just obligated to GTF outta the way while everyone else does it. :)
(gpl rant deleted)
PS: please quote the part of the GPL that says you can't profit from it.
Well lets see, do they attack 3rd party providers and technology infrastructure that has nothing to do with copyright violations. Well .... Yes.
.... yes
... yes.
... yes.
Do they use strong arm bullying tactics, and threats to get their way. Well
Do they hate people who love freedom. Well
Do they they try to controll society by fear instead of facts. Well
They must be talking about themselves.
PS: Lets not use "their" terms. Piracy is where you board a ship and murder people, I think the appropiate term is information liberators.
Believe it or not, history is repeating itself here.
History teaches that during the 1800's there were many people who believed that the entire meaning and purpose of the industrial revolution was to leverage inventions like the cotton gin to expand their plantations for unlimited growth and profit. Ironically just the opposite was true;the industrial revolution demanded a mobile and skilled workforce.
First, they responded by making slavery last forever, and making laws so harsh you couldn't even teach a person of color how to read. Then they responded by trying to micro-regulate the northern states, then they responded by trying to break off from the Union and fence themselves off from the rest of the world causing all hell to break loose.
Today many in media circles believe that the entire meaning and purpose of the information age is to use inventions like the Internet to leverage their copyright holdings to the far reaches of the Earth for unlimited growth and profit. Ironically, just the opposite is true; the information age demands the unrestricted flow of information.
First, they responded my making copyrights last effectively forever, then they responded by making it so that illegal copying could be punished worse than rape, then they tried to micro-regulate the technology industries with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and now they are trying to fence the information they control off from the rest of the world with Digital Rights Management (DRM). We are now at the point where society must tell them to go to hell.
The fallicy of that agrument is the implicit assumption that they even want to "protect" their content. They don't, copyrights have nothing to do with "protecting" content, and everything to do with controlling how people use and distribute information.
When you controll the distribution channels, you don't need to compete on merit against things like Linux. Instead you compete on who can garner the most controll over distribution.
I don't know about you, but between all the nuances in the javascript, and all the newances in the DOM, and trying to figure out where one starts and the other begins, and have you ever tried to figure out which functions/properties work correctly for which object, and have you ever tried to figure out which DOM to use and how to make DOM's of different browsers compatable, or even simply trying to figure out which objects are really on your web page, and then trying to deal with things like XML parsing on top of that, and then now asynchronous communication, not to mention new things in the pipe like XUL, and franlky ....
Forget the toilets, AJAX is kicking my ASS and I can't imagine that other people who want to do more than copy cutie javascript tidbits aren't having the same problem. What am I missing here?
by the same argument the corporation could "suck it up" and deal with the unions. Nobody owes a corporation individual negotiations.
But by the same argument again, if all the corporations "group negotiated" (translation acted as a cartel) for a locked in high price for the products they made, even if it was legal, most people would still see it as a crappy way to do business.
There is compelling reason to believe that quantum effects are dominant in the brain, and there is just as compelling reason to believe that they are not random.
Since existence being deterministic and inherently intelligent are both questions outside the scope of science - it takes just as much "faith" to believe one or the other either way.
What doesn't make sense about this study, is that it is my understanding that gender is determined randomly in the males genes. The females genes determine other things, but not that.
I think the problem here is that it's not just a matter of matching the massive calculation and storage capacity of the human brain, but it's also about the underlying mechanisims that make humans intelligently non deterministic.
Hey moderators! The parent of this comment may piss people off, but is not a troll. The simple truth is that if you love space you should hate NASA.
In fact most people don't renember back in the 70's when an invenstor wanted to pull together some capital and buy some old Atlas missle shells and turn it into a pivate satellite launch program. Only to have the whole thing administratively killed by NASA.
Also, other countries are building very profitable space programs while the US lingers - even though the US was the first to the moon. This is not an accident, it is because NASA is accountable to non market forces and has gotten in the way of true market solutions or even hybrid solutions.
Do I even need to mention two blown up shuttles, confusing meters with feet on a mars mission, well over a $100 million calibation error on the hubble because no one bothered to check the mirror. Not to mention all the pork in NASA, and how they've underperformed promises by nearly 100% - and no it's not because they're under funded, that might be an excuse for not doing projects, but not one for doing them crappy because of political failures - which ironically happen to be behind most all their major disasters!
If you love space, you should hate NASA, not only because they've constantly underperformed at the taxpayers expense, or because they've made so many deadly billion dollar screwups, but most importantly, they are getting in the way of better solutions. They have been for the last 30 years, think how good things would be now if "space-ship one" type ventures were considered back then and not now! Nobody's going to finance exploring the last frontieer, untill they can first make it the profitable frontier. Space is simply toooooo big to conquer as a cost burden, NASA is more incapable and incompentent of doing space for profit than almost any other orginisation on the planet (or off).
I love science and space, and some of the things NASA has proposed and done are very exciting to me. But please, in the name of God, why are we wasting our resources and hearts trying to fix something that is inherently borken by the very political nature of it's accountabilities. It never ceases to amaze me how desperately people cling to things that simply don't work for the sake of a fantasy that politicians and administrators can somehow work a miracle and fix it. Well WTF! noone ever got into space with an attitude like that!
Yes, this freedom has been celebrated for 150 years. The freedom to steal slaves from the plantation, that is. Funny thing was, slavery wasn't about stealing property, nor free markets or commerce, nor incentive, nor rewarding people for their efforts, or even profit, it was about controlling and manipulating other people for greed.
Funny, you'd think that after 150 years people would learn a thing or two about bullshit rights, like the "right" to own slaves, or more recently the right to coericevely restrict what people copy.
Well, save your anger for God or something - I didn't make the universe the way it is giving information completely different characteristics than physical property. And in all truth, I'm not even the one who is creating the consequences for those who are too foolish or stupid to accept that there is a very notable difference and that means something in the real world.
First fact, I make heavy use of Linux and open source and my skills are way way more in demand than my MS counterparts. And that reflects in my pay, and the fact that people are always coming to me for solutions.
Second Fact, I can often provide all the IT infrastructure my company needs without even requesting a PO. In fact, while ohter people get haggled every time they make a purchase, I rarely even get questioned - which I think is because I do way more with way less then my counterparts do.
Third fact, I really have few worries about an unwelcome visit from the BSA, and I don't mean boy scounts of america.
Frouth fact, I rarely need to deal with all the license headaches, and the annual renew crap and forced upgrades that my counterparts do. In fact, upgrades and improvements are not a chore, and I am not terrorized that every upgrade will break everything.
Fith fact, I get the pleasure of doing more RnD, because I don't need financial approval from a bean counter everytime I do something.
Sixth fact, I rarely pay extra for things like compilers, office productivity stuff, graphics programs, and visus scanning is't even a worry accept for scanning linux SMB servers for others.
Seventh fact, things like paravirtualisation, parallel clusters, email, databases, dns, web servers, and remore access to programs come standard in Linux.
Eight fact, I can literally rip a Linux box out of one x86 box and place it in another and run kudzu and it recovers ausomely. Have you ever tried this with Microsoft?
Ninth fact, those are all red herrings. What makes Linux vavuable is that it's not about technology, but freedom. People who talk about business and not freedom are cowards and ingrates to the culture and attitudes that made them successfull to begin with and over the long term they will certainly get what they deserve.
Would we ever expect an organization who profits from piracy to proclaim that the rate of piracy might be decreasing?
Well, I agree with you in spirit, but in all fairness, piracy is where one boards a ship to beat, rape, pillage, and murder people. I think the term everyone here intends to use is "illegal copying".
Why should we accept their categorisations of us and use their descriptions to define us? Descriptions for us like "copy monopoly busters", or "information liberators" and terms like the "information plantation masters" for them would be much more fair and accurate.
I don't know how related this is to the subject at hand, but I think it is important to point out that Intellectual Property restrictions, while harmfull in the USA, are extremely dangerous in China. The USA should be doing everything possible NOT to pressure China to impose copyright and patent monopolies.
For example, as US society has entered the information age, the *AA has responded in an extreme backlash. But even at it's worse, it is likely to go no further than a few jail terms and load of lawsuits.
China will have it's backlash too, but they do not have the political infrastructure or culture of freedom in place to effectively resist it. The consequences will likely be murderous or worse if they have a strong IP system in place while it happens.
1: Offer fast TV downloads for free, or offer legal torrents.
2: Include the advertisements in the shows, and track how many people download them.
3: Profit!!!
The problem with this theory is that it assumes that the *AA are pro business. They are not, they do not want business opportunity, what they want is business monopoly granted to them by the government in the form of copyrights, with infinite force behind them.
The truth and the problem is that copyrights are not free market. If the government gave Ford a monopoly on making cars, because they don't have an "incentive" to make them unless they could lock out everyone else - most people would see this as interference in free markets and overbearing government regulation.
Well that is exactly the problem with copyright distribution monopolies. They are more like a massive overbearing government regulation on how people can share information than a "intellectual" property right. Here, the word "property" is just a label to hide unjust coercion of people, and has nothing to do with real property at all.
I said no such thing. I PAID for my education. I PAID for my training. I PAID for the books and magazines and periodicals I read to keep up.
HOLY SHIT!!! You paid for information AS A SERVICE! Get with it hypocrite!
Again, why are you entitled to steal the results and harvest the value of other people's work?
Why are entitled to charge for the same service twice? thrice? 100 times? With any other service or property that'd be fraud. Answer: because copy distribution monopolies are a fraud.
Answer
The answer is that you are not entitled to a distribution monopoly ... figure out ANOTHER model for making MONEY! ... that is *YOUR* problem, not mine! If you don't want me having a piece of information you created for free, then please, don't make it to begin with. You'll get left behind, and we'll do fine without you! And I'll get use of free information, and you'll obsess in jealousy that I get lots of free coppies while you get nowhere in life.
BTW, you sound like a fool to me because I probably illegally copy stuff less than 99.9% of the people out there. I'm an RCHE (which cost allot of my own money BTW), and most the styles of music I like are distributed by authors freely on the internet.
It's people like me that hate copyrights the most, because we can see more clearly than anyone that the free market "property" analogy is a lie, it has nothing to do with property and everything to do with controll.
The thinking behind copyright, patent, etc ...
The thinking behing slavery is that it costs allot of money to import slaves from affrica, and the plantation masters need to be insured that they can recoop their investment before the slave leaves.
Well my point is the thinking is irrelavent, and just because someone calls something a property doesn't mean that it is. It's not about thinking, it's about controll and boundaries, and how were entitled to controll our own lives and domain but not the lives and domain of others. Once the cats out of the bag with information, that boundary has been crossed then it is no longer about our controll over our information, but insead of controlling everyone else.
If you ADD to that public knowledge, then you admit that it has value, and you admit that you got that value freely. Why are you so special, why do you deserve the distribution monopoly. Answer, you don't.
You said "Put up, or shut up", my thoughts exactly.
Well, that's exactly what human rights are. There are no "natural limiting factors" that limit us from killing all the blacks or Jews or what have you. Human rights are not a "natural law creation." I know comparing copyright to genocide is dumb, but I think it fits your view on copyrights.
Actually I wish I could comment more on this, because when the pressure of the information age hits the US full force, the worst case damage will likely be limited to a few lawsuits and a few jail terms, but when the full force of the information age hits countries like China, the consequences of a strong IP system could be very very evil.
No, it (information) doesn't. The only real difference is that the method of delivery of is different.
WTF, would you listen to yourself? Then fine, make 10 coppies of my car, you can sell all ten of them and have the profits ... my permission.
information, goods, and services ALL require an investment of time, effort, and money to create and produce.
Information, goods, and services ALL have value to those that would use them.
Good, then charge by the hour for to provide that service, and quit sitting on your ass thinking you're entitled to a distribution monopoly at the expense of controlling how everyone else uses information.
You sole argument is that because information is easier to steal (for the moment) you and everyone else is entitled to do so. In fact, you're in favor of demolishing copyright and patent law because you think you and everyone else is somehow automatically entitled to the work of others.
Once again, quit sitting on your ass thinking you're entitled to a distribution monopoly at the expense of everyone else and charge by the hour to create information as a service. I'm not entitled to your work any more than you are entitled to controll information once the cat is out of the bag. Get it.
All I hear is a rant, and no solutions. Who in their right mind is going to spend 8 years of their life and hundreds of millions of dollars creating a LOTR if everyone is simply "entitled" to steal it the second it's produced?
All *I* hear is a rant, and no solutions. It sounds something like this "Who in their right mind will import slaves from africa unless they can be assured that they will work on the plantation for the next 30 years, if everyone thinks there entitles to 'steal' them away by freeing them." Well, if a free system wont work for you, then it's your f**king problem and you will likely get what you deserve.
Who it going to spend a billion dollars developing a cure for cancer or aids if every other drug company in the world can rip them off for free the second it's placed on the market?
The same people who put billions of dollars worth of development effort into open source projects because copyright controlls didn't inhibit them from collaberation.
How many people are going to be able to create that which you and others would instantly steal when they can no longer make a living doing so? Who are the parasites going to feed on when the host dies?
Yeah, Linus is dead because everybody keeps copying his work while not paying him a royality. Hey buddy, why don't you do us all a favor and get with the information age.
But as long as thieves like yourself (admittedly) steal their work, they're going to continue to do so, AND promote stiffer legislation, AND impose ever more draconian restrictions and limits on fair use.
Yeah, and as long as "thiefs keep freeing^H^H^H^H^H^H^H oops I mean stealing slaves from the plantation, they will continue to make harsher laws restricting how black people read, travel, and work."
So you're not only screwing them, you're screwing us all. Thanks a lot.
Don't thank me, you're screwing yourself, but that you are trying to screw everyone else as well is going to ensure you get what you deserve.
The problem with this line of thinking is that there is not so much of a difference between "physical" property and "intellectual" property as we imagine.
It is insane to think that property rights and law would have evolved the way they have if not for that simple truth that not everybody can use something at the same time. Half the issue is that it's not about what people think or feel should be property, it is about certain realities that are just not subjective.