A simple turing test for accepting email from unknown senders wouldn't stop spam, but would prevent people sending out millions at a time. That's really all we need, require a person to be behind the scenes.
Infact, all that would be needed is a website anywhere that could issue a test and return a digitally signed tag that could be cut and pasted into any email.
All very true, but measuring the volume of toxic waste is not really the point. The kind of stuff we have to deal with from nuclear power plants is nasty. WAY nastier than anything which comes out of a traditional power plant. Stuff which is so nasty we have no idea how to deal with it safely.
That't not true, even things like coal have trace amounts of radioactive elements. At least with nuclear power, we have the opportunity to contain the radioactive waste rather than spew it out into the environment.
( see Coal Combustion )
And I quote...How does the amount of nuclear material released by coal combustion compare to the amount consumed as fuel by the U.S. nuclear power industry? According to 1982 figures, 111 American nuclear plants consumed about 540 tons of nuclear fuel, generating almost 1.1 x 10E12 kWh of electricity. During the same year, about 801 tons of uranium alone were released from American coal-fired plants. Add 1971 tons of thorium, and the release of nuclear components from coal combustion far exceeds the entire U.S. consumption of nuclear fuels. The same conclusion applies for worldwide nuclear fuel and coal combustion.
I repeat, we don't have a radioactive waste problem - we have a public stupidity problem. Solve that, and the other ones will take care of themselves.
IMHO, what we really have forgotten, or never accepted to begin with, is that ALL copyrights are wrong, ALL copyrights are bad, and ALL copyrights are an unethical restriction on what other people can copy that may be a right under the Law - but have no moral justification at all. In a way SCO has already won, because they've taken our focus off of wether it's right to restrict copying to begin with and reset it on technical details of law and code that noone will really understand till it's all over.
ok, as an earlier poster pointed out, i should be talking about Trolltech and not KDE, but the point still stands. If you use their libraries in non free software, you half to pay out the nose to use it you cant tell me that this doesn't hold them accountable to different market forces.
WTF are you talking about? KDE is free. Maybe you should specifically state what leads you to say something like the above.
Well maybe I missed somthing, but last time I checked, it's free only if you use it in free software. For other software, they are just like any other commecrial software company.
I think the real problem with integrating KDE and Gnome isn't with the GUI, but is that with closed software you hold yourself accountable to different forces than with open software. While KDE isn't technically closed, it seems to me that they still hold themselves more financially accountable to the closed software model of doing business. Unlike Gnome, this diverts some of their talent, focus, and resources into gaining revenue from controlling people's copying behavior rather than thru more efficient services and support, or business models more accountable to the free (as in freedom) software paradigm.
IMHO, the closed method is a dead end, and KDE isn't doing themselves a long term favor by being so split brained. They'll never win on one end, because they can't compete againse Microsoft, and they never lead on the other because they cant keep their focus like gnome.
One big distinction between the information age and the railroad/canal/lighthouse examples is that there is a huge difference between information and other comodities. Unlike with physical comodities, information can be coppied without depriving the originator of that information and it is extremely easy to change form and type at any given instant. In addition it is always independent of the medium. For those reasons alone, the price discrimination, that he discussed at length (for content, at least) will not be workable in the information age unless you literally become a police state.
I think alot of people don't understand that free software is more accountable to market forces than closed software. If the government microregulated the supply and demand of stocks, commodities, services, or most other items - most people could easially see how this government intervention is less efficient and effective than open markets. But when they microregulate the supply and demand of certain types of information by imposing copyright laws - then all of a sudden people don't even question it.
If the government gave a farmer a monopoly on growing oranges, and then called it free market because other farmers could buy and sell shares of that monopoly - i think most people would see it as a lie and a farce. But this is exactly what they do with companies like Microsoft, who are the only ones legally allowed to copy Microsoft software. Asserting the right to restrict what others copy that is freely at their disposal is bullshit morality and bullshit markets.
Actually, I have alot of problems with copyright laws. Instead of reposting, you can read an essay I wrote called "bitter protest against copyrights" - for starters.
http://www.societyofbabel.org/show_story.php?sto ry _id=16
Wehn will people start to understand that Microsoft does not free market principles for it's success - it relies on a government granted monopoly called copyrights. There is a difference.
Sun servers scale from 1U/1CPU lower cost servers (5K) and developer stations to clusters of over 300 CPU servers, all with full binary compatiblity. I have yet to not be able to take software off a 1CPU low-end sun box and not be able to run it on the top-of-the-line servers without any recompiling.
This provides the capability to develop on low-end boxes without the headaches associated with recompiling on production servers and shortens our development cycle.
Most datacenters I've been in could not ignore the x86 and could not risk being locked into one vendor - so the benefits of scalability sorta wiped themselves out by the simple fact that Sun was too closed and forced companies to have multiple vendors. In addition, nobody can be cost competitive unless they can be farmable as well be scaleable... Sun never could compete with the x86/BSD/Linux in that area. In theory scaleability sounded nice, but in reality I've never seen a truely scalable datacenter. Finally, now linux works on a wide variety of IBM, HP, Sun, and x86 boxes all the way from pda's to supercomputers. Ironically, it has delivered virtual "scalability" benefits that Sun could have never imagined.
IMHO, java still has too much overhead. We havent got the efficiency and equality that has been promised yet, but I assume we will get there someday.
I know I'm gonna get nailed for this, but the fact is that Sun should have never bought them. In a way, Sun was unworthy - Sun's CEO was too jealous of Microsoft to ever make a service based approach work, or at least be competitive price wise.
From a data center perspective, yeah its true that Sun boxes can do some things better than x86 boxes running Linux, but I can't tell you how many times I've seen companies buy 100K worth of Sun servers to do services that I know darn well could just as well by an x86 box or two. It always amazed me to see the salesman talk "scalable" for systems that were really farmable. Yeah, experience with high end Sun boxes was great for my resume, thanks, but I wanted my career to have meaning too - and having a bunch of overpriced toys just for the sake of ego seems a little shallow, don't you think. (Sorta like Sun's CEO,:)
IMHO, the Sun just needs to set. Now that 64 bit Opetrons are out, they will have almost nothing to offer in the midrange. The lost the lowrange a long time ago, but are still in denial. And in the high range, the IBM and HP can beat them out in all categorises.
And probes have been sent to Venus in the past, guess what happens when you put a probe in sulpheric acid? It lasts about 23 minutes before being destroyed
That article was ambiguious, but other information I read indicated that the reason that the probe immediately failed was becasue of the 400C temperature on the surface. I would not recommend a presence on the surface either.
I myself am a fan of going to Venus instead - one advantage is that it would be alot softer to land a balloon in the upper atmosphere of venus than on mars. But my main motivation is that I think Venus would be more suitable for human habitation.
Venus (in the upper atmosphere) has nearly the same temperature, air pressure, gravity, and light as earth. Even though it has a lot of sulfuric acid (and CO2) - that is a lot easier to deal with than the cold hard vacume rock of Mars. With enough energy - lots of water, air, and carbon byproducts would be readially available. In addition, it is my understanding that a balloon of regular air would float on its own weight.
I think part of the problem is that most of us enjoy nature, the outdoors and the environment and most of us dislike some of the unethcial practices persued by industrialists in the previous century or so.
The knee-jerk reaction is to cry out that we need the government micro-regulate every aspect of industry to "save" the environment. However, this is just plain wrong and has hurt society greatly.
1) It has led to an entrenched system of government funded and institutional research that has little measurable accountability.
2) The regulations that have resulted from this have often made the problem worse.
#1) is the reason why Lomborg had such an easy time nailing them, and their response has been so hostile.
#2) is the reason that so many people instantly embraced his book (even without reading it in many cases.)
Consider the example of companies like Ford that promoted enviromental regulations to force used cars out of the marketplace, or other industries that when met with new and innovative competition cried out for environmental regulations that significantly increased the cost of starting a business in their industry. One of the worst examples of all is DOW chemichal - where Freon was outlawed the month after their patent expired, but DOW still held a new patent on the only known replacement that is scientifically speaking more harmfull than Freon was which scientifically speaking wasn't nearly as harmfull as it was portrayed to be when outlawed.
Ironically, the best solution is a free market solution. For example, in Communist Russia - they had a horrible toxic waste problem (compaired to the US) because industries had no motivation reprocess industrial waste into other products. Where in the US a large amount of waste was being resold to other industries for other specialized uses.
Allowing freedom includes allowing people to do things you don't necessarily agree with. I used to defend the GPL consistently, but I'm starting to feel like "Free as in Speech" should also include unpopular speech, and that's what the BSD license protects that the GPL does not.
I think you're working off the false premise that copyrights are not an inherent restriction of peoples freedom. The GPL solves this problem by "fighting fire with fire" the FreeBSD license doesn't.
The logic is sorta similar to..."I think people should be free to own slaves".
The FreeBSD license disreguards that copyrights "the right to restrict what other people copy that is at their disposal" is inherently biased as anti freedom to begin with.
OK, It's so much that it's dying.... it's that all these companies like SCO are able to keep living by forking off endless proprietaty code for themselves because the FreeBSD license allows it. Do a "strings" command on any SCO binary and you'd be amazed how much similar stuff they have to the FreeBSD equivalents. (what's even more amazing is that for all that copying you'd think they'd be able to make SCO stable)
After all is said and done, all that may happen is that SCO's stock price may suffer ? Really, is this Just enough ? Will Justice have been served after all the mayhem that has been created ?
I do not know if it will be enough, but I do think it is important to understand the difference between justice and revenge here.
Justice does not undo wrongs that already happen, but rather makes sure (however you do it) that the chances of that wrong happening again are appropiately minimized.
Where revenge implies that if you suffer, then whoever else is (in your opinion) responsible for it has to suffer to.
Sometimes they imply the same consequence, other times they do not. But the reason why I wanted to say this is becasue Justice will never be done until copyrights are dead - the very nature of deriving profit by restricting how people freely copy things that come their way is unethical, and was bound to lead to problems like this one way or another.
Now we are in the information age and copying things is no longer just about xerox machines and cassette tapes. And content is no longer different from code, free speech, and political expression in the eyes of the internet. We half to get rid of copyrights, or freedom will suffer.
Sure lot of commies out there. Can you imagine a world without IP? You write a book, someone else publishes it without your permission or sharing the profits with you, maybe even putting their own name on it. You establish a sound and respected brandname, someone else uses it, trashes it, and makes a lot of money off of it. You write a nice piece of software that you license so that you can pay your bills and feed your family, someone rips it off and distributes it free to however wants it, and you (and your employees) get to flip hamburgers.
Yeah, and those million or so people who downloaded Madonna are claiming to be the author of "Like a Virgin" and trashing her good name.
The simple truth is that for every creator that makes a good living from copyrights, there are thousands who they haven't helped a bit, hindered, or even destroyed. Today it is celarly not about talent, but rather how far you can stick your nose up a record company executives back end.
As for software, don't even go there, people who develop GNU/Linux software are getting sick of hearing it. Closed software has done far more to help M$ screw us over than help the little guy make a living.
Once you stop falling for the propaganda and start looking at copyrights like an overbearing government regulation, and not some type of free market property right - you might just get it.
First off, you take it on faith that "intellectual property" is a usefull construct, and that innovation/cures/whatever will come to a screatching halt without them. I really doubt that, especially considering that the entire renissance happened either patents or copyrights. Perhaps the great wealth of America and the massive financial success of the plantation system was a justification for slavery as well. I don't care, if that was all there is to it, then you just don't get it.
Second off, societies have "enforced" a wide variety of rules, some have even rounded up 6 million people and exterminated them in concentration camps. The question is how efficiently and effectively they uphold rights you already have, not how they enforce things for "greater causes"
The Cypherpunks never went around suing people (that is, actually costing them money) who weren't using encryption to mask their illegal activities. The RIAA is.
Am I the only one here who thinks that it is really sad that we are changing for the better not because of how we grow personally, but rather because we half to - to avoid having our freedoms being taken away? It just seems so wrong - I really feel sorry for those who won't be able to keep up.
I'm guessing you'd say that the idea that physical objects can belong to somebody is a "natural" concept, since you draw the contrast (apparently) between natural limits and artificial limits. But when you really get down to it, the truth is that it takes a lot of "artificial" coercion to enforce property rights on physical goods. Specifically, it takes the cooperation of governments, police, society and mutual trust to enforce our so-called "natural" property rights. So. Property rights on physical goods is an artificial construct. Now riddle me this: how is it any different to set artificial limits on intellectual property?
That's the whole point though. It is a "natural" concept, not because it's easy or intuitive to apply in every case, but because it's the only equitable way of dealing with the fact that not everybody can use somthing at the same time. What you are basically saying is that property is subjective, based off the opinions of human institutions - it is not, people have property rights even if no government existed at all, but they typically organize in the form of government to secure those rights.
.... As bullshit concepts go, however, it's a damn mighty useful one. For example, how do you think we'd have useful drugs like antiretrovirals if it wasn't for patent law?
I'm glad you mentioned that, because people who do medical research have notorious problems collaberating because of patents. The inventor of insulin for diabeeties, nearly got into a fight to the death because they wanted to hold back his discovery untill they secured key patents. Maybe I don't have an incentive to create AIDS drugs unless I can lock out children in Africa dying of AIDS from getting generics? maybe I don't have an incentive to grow cotton unless I can own slaves on the plantation? - The notion that incentive or systems define property rights is really screwed up.
Are you for real, so let me get this straight... for somthing that doesn't have natural limits in supply and demand, you want to attach artificial limits on supply and demand for the sake of markets.
Bullshit, there plenty of things things like services, support, patronage, consulting, attached hardware, and hourly time that DO have natural limints in supply and demand. As I said, it's a bullshit regulation, and not a free market property right - there are plenty of limits in the world without creating artificial ones buddy. BTW, Did you even notice RedHat's and VA-Linux's IPO.
In addition, those smart people back then didn't have the ability to copy information to the other side of the planet in 2 seconds, and likely would have had a different attitude if they could - after all copyrights wern't made for compensation, but for geting stuff out into the public domain. Right?
Finally, society never decided that "sacrifice" was necissary... copyrights started out when kings granted publishers a monopoly for not publishing bad things about the monarchy. Regretfully it carried over to the US.... I guess they couldn't get rid of them, but could at least guarantee that the powers that be couldn't grant them as special favors.
Hey, while we're at it, can I get a copy of your house key? What do you mean, 'no'? Why not? Isn't restricting what people copy an inherent burden that is no longer workable in the information age?
Yeah, but if I sent a 100 million coppies of my house key all over the world, and then attached a license to it saying that you are not allowed to copy it - that would be pretty stupid way of controlling who has access to my house wouldn't it. Then if I got the taxpayers to fund the government to search the streets and alleys for every soul who dared to make a copy, that would even be worse. But then if they wanted the ability to tag every single key you owned (think DRM) to prove that you din't have one of my keys - that would be like a police state. Shall I go on?
Microsoft will not win over linux in the market place, because they believe their own propaganda - that copyrights are some type of free market property right and not an overbearing government regulation. The GPL accounts for that, the MS EULA doesn't.
Once they understand that restricting what people copy is not some kind of inherent right, but an inherent burdon that is no longer workable in the informaiton age - it will probably be too late for them.
Slashdot Mirror
A simple turing test for accepting email from unknown senders wouldn't stop spam, but would prevent people sending out millions at a time. That's really all we need, require a person to be behind the scenes.
Infact, all that would be needed is a website anywhere that could issue a test and return a digitally signed tag that could be cut and pasted into any email.
All very true, but measuring the volume of toxic waste is not really the point. The kind of stuff we have to deal with from nuclear power plants is nasty. WAY nastier than anything which comes out of a traditional power plant. Stuff which is so nasty we have no idea how to deal with it safely.
That't not true, even things like coal have trace amounts of radioactive elements. At least with nuclear power, we have the opportunity to contain the radioactive waste rather than spew it out into the environment. ( see Coal Combustion ) And I quote ...How does the amount of nuclear material released by coal combustion compare to the amount consumed as fuel by the U.S. nuclear power industry? According to 1982 figures, 111 American nuclear plants consumed about 540 tons of nuclear fuel, generating almost 1.1 x 10E12 kWh of electricity. During the same year, about 801 tons of uranium alone were released from American coal-fired plants. Add 1971 tons of thorium, and the release of nuclear components from coal combustion far exceeds the entire U.S. consumption of nuclear fuels. The same conclusion applies for worldwide nuclear fuel and coal combustion.
I repeat, we don't have a radioactive waste problem - we have a public stupidity problem. Solve that, and the other ones will take care of themselves.
IMHO, what we really have forgotten, or never accepted to begin with, is that ALL copyrights are wrong, ALL copyrights are bad, and ALL copyrights are an unethical restriction on what other people can copy that may be a right under the Law - but have no moral justification at all. In a way SCO has already won, because they've taken our focus off of wether it's right to restrict copying to begin with and reset it on technical details of law and code that noone will really understand till it's all over.
ok, as an earlier poster pointed out, i should be talking about Trolltech and not KDE, but the point still stands. If you use their libraries in non free software, you half to pay out the nose to use it you cant tell me that this doesn't hold them accountable to different market forces.
WTF are you talking about? KDE is free. Maybe you should specifically state what leads you to say something like the above.
Well maybe I missed somthing, but last time I checked, it's free only if you use it in free software. For other software, they are just like any other commecrial software company.
I think the real problem with integrating KDE and Gnome isn't with the GUI, but is that with closed software you hold yourself accountable to different forces than with open software. While KDE isn't technically closed, it seems to me that they still hold themselves more financially accountable to the closed software model of doing business. Unlike Gnome, this diverts some of their talent, focus, and resources into gaining revenue from controlling people's copying behavior rather than thru more efficient services and support, or business models more accountable to the free (as in freedom) software paradigm.
IMHO, the closed method is a dead end, and KDE isn't doing themselves a long term favor by being so split brained. They'll never win on one end, because they can't compete againse Microsoft, and they never lead on the other because they cant keep their focus like gnome.
One big distinction between the information age and the railroad/canal/lighthouse examples is that there is a huge difference between information and other comodities. Unlike with physical comodities, information can be coppied without depriving the originator of that information and it is extremely easy to change form and type at any given instant. In addition it is always independent of the medium. For those reasons alone, the price discrimination, that he discussed at length (for content, at least) will not be workable in the information age unless you literally become a police state.
I think alot of people don't understand that free software is more accountable to market forces than closed software. If the government microregulated the supply and demand of stocks, commodities, services, or most other items - most people could easially see how this government intervention is less efficient and effective than open markets. But when they microregulate the supply and demand of certain types of information by imposing copyright laws - then all of a sudden people don't even question it.
If the government gave a farmer a monopoly on growing oranges, and then called it free market because other farmers could buy and sell shares of that monopoly - i think most people would see it as a lie and a farce. But this is exactly what they do with companies like Microsoft, who are the only ones legally allowed to copy Microsoft software. Asserting the right to restrict what others copy that is freely at their disposal is bullshit morality and bullshit markets.
Actually, I have alot of problems with copyright laws. Instead of reposting, you can read an essay I wrote called "bitter protest against copyrights" - for starters.
o ry _id=16
http://www.societyofbabel.org/show_story.php?st
Wehn will people start to understand that Microsoft does not free market principles for it's success - it relies on a government granted monopoly called copyrights. There is a difference.
Sun servers scale from 1U/1CPU lower cost servers (5K) and developer stations to clusters of over 300 CPU servers, all with full binary compatiblity. I have yet to not be able to take software off a 1CPU low-end sun box and not be able to run it on the top-of-the-line servers without any recompiling.
This provides the capability to develop on low-end boxes without the headaches associated with recompiling on production servers and shortens our development cycle.
Most datacenters I've been in could not ignore the x86 and could not risk being locked into one vendor - so the benefits of scalability sorta wiped themselves out by the simple fact that Sun was too closed and forced companies to have multiple vendors. In addition, nobody can be cost competitive unless they can be farmable as well be scaleable ... Sun never could compete with the x86/BSD/Linux in that area. In theory scaleability sounded nice, but in reality I've never seen a truely scalable datacenter. Finally, now linux works on a wide variety of IBM, HP, Sun, and x86 boxes all the way from pda's to supercomputers. Ironically, it has delivered virtual "scalability" benefits that Sun could have never imagined.
IMHO, java still has too much overhead. We havent got the efficiency and equality that has been promised yet, but I assume we will get there someday.
I know I'm gonna get nailed for this, but the fact is that Sun should have never bought them. In a way, Sun was unworthy - Sun's CEO was too jealous of Microsoft to ever make a service based approach work, or at least be competitive price wise.
:)
From a data center perspective, yeah its true that Sun boxes can do some things better than x86 boxes running Linux, but I can't tell you how many times I've seen companies buy 100K worth of Sun servers to do services that I know darn well could just as well by an x86 box or two. It always amazed me to see the salesman talk "scalable" for systems that were really farmable. Yeah, experience with high end Sun boxes was great for my resume, thanks, but I wanted my career to have meaning too - and having a bunch of overpriced toys just for the sake of ego seems a little shallow, don't you think. (Sorta like Sun's CEO,
IMHO, the Sun just needs to set. Now that 64 bit Opetrons are out, they will have almost nothing to offer in the midrange. The lost the lowrange a long time ago, but are still in denial. And in the high range, the IBM and HP can beat them out in all categorises.
And probes have been sent to Venus in the past, guess what happens when you put a probe in sulpheric acid? It lasts about 23 minutes before being destroyed
That article was ambiguious, but other information I read indicated that the reason that the probe immediately failed was becasue of the 400C temperature on the surface. I would not recommend a presence on the surface either.
I myself am a fan of going to Venus instead - one advantage is that it would be alot softer to land a balloon in the upper atmosphere of venus than on mars. But my main motivation is that I think Venus would be more suitable for human habitation.
Venus (in the upper atmosphere) has nearly the same temperature, air pressure, gravity, and light as earth. Even though it has a lot of sulfuric acid (and CO2) - that is a lot easier to deal with than the cold hard vacume rock of Mars. With enough energy - lots of water, air, and carbon byproducts would be readially available. In addition, it is my understanding that a balloon of regular air would float on its own weight.
I think part of the problem is that most of us enjoy nature, the outdoors and the environment and most of us dislike some of the unethcial practices persued by industrialists in the previous century or so.
The knee-jerk reaction is to cry out that we need the government micro-regulate every aspect of industry to "save" the environment. However, this is just plain wrong and has hurt society greatly.
1) It has led to an entrenched system of government funded and institutional research that has little measurable accountability.
2) The regulations that have resulted from this have often made the problem worse.
#1) is the reason why Lomborg had such an easy time nailing them, and their response has been so hostile.
#2) is the reason that so many people instantly embraced his book (even without reading it in many cases.)
Consider the example of companies like Ford that promoted enviromental regulations to force used cars out of the marketplace, or other industries that when met with new and innovative competition cried out for environmental regulations that significantly increased the cost of starting a business in their industry. One of the worst examples of all is DOW chemichal - where Freon was outlawed the month after their patent expired, but DOW still held a new patent on the only known replacement that is scientifically speaking more harmfull than Freon was which scientifically speaking wasn't nearly as harmfull as it was portrayed to be when outlawed.
Ironically, the best solution is a free market solution. For example, in Communist Russia - they had a horrible toxic waste problem (compaired to the US) because industries had no motivation reprocess industrial waste into other products. Where in the US a large amount of waste was being resold to other industries for other specialized uses.
Allowing freedom includes allowing people to do things you don't necessarily agree with. I used to defend the GPL consistently, but I'm starting to feel like "Free as in Speech" should also include unpopular speech, and that's what the BSD license protects that the GPL does not.
I think you're working off the false premise that copyrights are not an inherent restriction of peoples freedom. The GPL solves this problem by "fighting fire with fire" the FreeBSD license doesn't.
The logic is sorta similar to ..."I think people should be free to own slaves".
The FreeBSD license disreguards that copyrights "the right to restrict what other people copy that is at their disposal" is inherently biased as anti freedom to begin with.
It's dying!
OK, It's so much that it's dying .... it's that all these companies like SCO are able to keep living by forking off endless proprietaty code for themselves because the FreeBSD license allows it. Do a "strings" command on any SCO binary and you'd be amazed how much similar stuff they have to the FreeBSD equivalents. (what's even more amazing is that for all that copying you'd think they'd be able to make SCO stable)
After all is said and done, all that may happen is that SCO's stock price may suffer ? Really, is this Just enough ? Will Justice have been served after all the mayhem that has been created ?
I do not know if it will be enough, but I do think it is important to understand the difference between justice and revenge here.
Justice does not undo wrongs that already happen, but rather makes sure (however you do it) that the chances of that wrong happening again are appropiately minimized.
Where revenge implies that if you suffer, then whoever else is (in your opinion) responsible for it has to suffer to.
Sometimes they imply the same consequence, other times they do not. But the reason why I wanted to say this is becasue Justice will never be done until copyrights are dead - the very nature of deriving profit by restricting how people freely copy things that come their way is unethical, and was bound to lead to problems like this one way or another.
Now we are in the information age and copying things is no longer just about xerox machines and cassette tapes. And content is no longer different from code, free speech, and political expression in the eyes of the internet. We half to get rid of copyrights, or freedom will suffer.
Sure lot of commies out there. Can you imagine a world without IP? You write a book, someone else publishes it without your permission or sharing the profits with you, maybe even putting their own name on it. You establish a sound and respected brandname, someone else uses it, trashes it, and makes a lot of money off of it. You write a nice piece of software that you license so that you can pay your bills and feed your family, someone rips it off and distributes it free to however wants it, and you (and your employees) get to flip hamburgers.
Yeah, and those million or so people who downloaded Madonna are claiming to be the author of "Like a Virgin" and trashing her good name.
The simple truth is that for every creator that makes a good living from copyrights, there are thousands who they haven't helped a bit, hindered, or even destroyed. Today it is celarly not about talent, but rather how far you can stick your nose up a record company executives back end.
As for software, don't even go there, people who develop GNU/Linux software are getting sick of hearing it. Closed software has done far more to help M$ screw us over than help the little guy make a living.
Once you stop falling for the propaganda and start looking at copyrights like an overbearing government regulation, and not some type of free market property right - you might just get it.
First off, you take it on faith that "intellectual property" is a usefull construct, and that innovation/cures/whatever will come to a screatching halt without them. I really doubt that, especially considering that the entire renissance happened either patents or copyrights. Perhaps the great wealth of America and the massive financial success of the plantation system was a justification for slavery as well. I don't care, if that was all there is to it, then you just don't get it.
Second off, societies have "enforced" a wide variety of rules, some have even rounded up 6 million people and exterminated them in concentration camps. The question is how efficiently and effectively they uphold rights you already have, not how they enforce things for "greater causes"
The Cypherpunks never went around suing people (that is, actually costing them money) who weren't using encryption to mask their illegal activities. The RIAA is.
Am I the only one here who thinks that it is really sad that we are changing for the better not because of how we grow personally, but rather because we half to - to avoid having our freedoms being taken away? It just seems so wrong - I really feel sorry for those who won't be able to keep up.
I'm guessing you'd say that the idea that physical objects can belong to somebody is a "natural" concept, since you draw the contrast (apparently) between natural limits and artificial limits. But when you really get down to it, the truth is that it takes a lot of "artificial" coercion to enforce property rights on physical goods. Specifically, it takes the cooperation of governments, police, society and mutual trust to enforce our so-called "natural" property rights. So. Property rights on physical goods is an artificial construct. Now riddle me this: how is it any different to set artificial limits on intellectual property?
That's the whole point though. It is a "natural" concept, not because it's easy or intuitive to apply in every case, but because it's the only equitable way of dealing with the fact that not everybody can use somthing at the same time. What you are basically saying is that property is subjective, based off the opinions of human institutions - it is not, people have property rights even if no government existed at all, but they typically organize in the form of government to secure those rights.
I'm glad you mentioned that, because people who do medical research have notorious problems collaberating because of patents. The inventor of insulin for diabeeties, nearly got into a fight to the death because they wanted to hold back his discovery untill they secured key patents. Maybe I don't have an incentive to create AIDS drugs unless I can lock out children in Africa dying of AIDS from getting generics? maybe I don't have an incentive to grow cotton unless I can own slaves on the plantation? - The notion that incentive or systems define property rights is really screwed up.
Are you for real, so let me get this straight ... for somthing that doesn't have natural limits in supply and demand, you want to attach artificial limits on supply and demand for the sake of markets.
... copyrights started out when kings granted publishers a monopoly for not publishing bad things about the monarchy. Regretfully it carried over to the US .... I guess they couldn't get rid of them, but could at least guarantee that the powers that be couldn't grant them as special favors.
Bullshit, there plenty of things things like services, support, patronage, consulting, attached hardware, and hourly time that DO have natural limints in supply and demand. As I said, it's a bullshit regulation, and not a free market property right - there are plenty of limits in the world without creating artificial ones buddy. BTW, Did you even notice RedHat's and VA-Linux's IPO.
In addition, those smart people back then didn't have the ability to copy information to the other side of the planet in 2 seconds, and likely would have had a different attitude if they could - after all copyrights wern't made for compensation, but for geting stuff out into the public domain. Right?
Finally, society never decided that "sacrifice" was necissary
Hey, while we're at it, can I get a copy of your house key? What do you mean, 'no'? Why not? Isn't restricting what people copy an inherent burden that is no longer workable in the information age?
Yeah, but if I sent a 100 million coppies of my house key all over the world, and then attached a license to it saying that you are not allowed to copy it - that would be pretty stupid way of controlling who has access to my house wouldn't it. Then if I got the taxpayers to fund the government to search the streets and alleys for every soul who dared to make a copy, that would even be worse. But then if they wanted the ability to tag every single key you owned (think DRM) to prove that you din't have one of my keys - that would be like a police state. Shall I go on?
Microsoft will not win over linux in the market place, because they believe their own propaganda - that copyrights are some type of free market property right and not an overbearing government regulation. The GPL accounts for that, the MS EULA doesn't.
Once they understand that restricting what people copy is not some kind of inherent right, but an inherent burdon that is no longer workable in the informaiton age - it will probably be too late for them.