"Think about this: if the cumulative value of everything in the world were expressed in measures of gold, which theoretically backs the majority of world currencies, does enough gold physically exist to back the paper money value, or has the paper money itself become valuable?
Huh? What kind of a nonsensical question is this?
Never mind the fact that paper money is obviously valuable, the first part of the question makes no sense.
Of course enough physical gold existed to back the paper money value back when countries were on the gold standard. That's what being backed by gold meant... that they had the gold. -otherwise the gold standard would have been no different than the current paper standards.-
(Which is why, at least here in Canada, the 'fine print' on the bills didn't say "This note is legal tender" like it does now, but instead said "Will pay to the bearer on demand". You could theoretically at any time go in to a bank and exchange your cash for it's gold equivalent.)
Gold no longer backs the majority of the world's currencies, though, theoretically or any other way.
If you are so anti-Microsoft that you feel the need to create a site against it, isn't it a touch hypocrtical to be using a Microsoft product to do that?
This is a very narrow interpretation of both the EULA and particularly of Microsoft. It's not just about using frontpage to criticize frontpage, (not that would be a bad thing either, IMHO), but using frontpage to criticize anything Microsoft.
Microsoft has a market cap, even now, of more than $$1/4 trillion. The list of companies they own is huge, and only bound to grow. How many things ought you not to criticize?
MSNBC bills itself as providing "the highest quality news and information, anytime, anywhere" but you find their reporting shoddy or biased. You tell me you see nothing wrong with forbidding people to use frontpage in the creation of a site which criticized MSNBC's coverage of an event?
How about if they forbid you to use all of the Office apps? That means Word too, remember. Or Windows? The meaning of monopoly starts to take on a whole new signficance.
You can't think of anything they could buy that you're not uncomfortable with forbidding 95% of the computer-using population to criticize?
And seeing CBC (the national broadcaster and far-and-away the most popular television news here)coverage of Code Red was particularly painful.
In the entire lead story on Code Red all that was mentioned was that there was a computer virus about to take down the internet. No mention of IIS, of course, or Win2K, or Macintosh or linux....
EXCEPT TO SAY that "for users running Microsoft Windows there is a patch available."
The impression given (to anyone who knows that there are other computers out there besides ones running Microsoft Windows) was that windows owners were the only safe ones out there. (at least MS was on-the-ball enough to have a patch out, you see. No other company was nearly as up-to-date or concerned with internet security.)
One of the core reasons that IP law is breaking down so much is the level that it has been subverted by corporations, the very thing it was invented to stop! The orignal idea was that invetors and creative people would be protected from theft from corporations.
I think this might more accurately be described as the core reasons you believe IP law should have been invented to stop. It wasn't.
The moral desire to protect author's rights may date from Roman times, but the actual legal mechanisms for enforcing copyright aren't really seen until printers guilds in England demanded them, (back in the 16th century), as a means of keeping control and monopolizing profits.
American copyright law is purportedly based on the incentive system for advancing society's good, not the authors.
The French, though, and some others too, do place an emphasis on author's rights, and the original authors in some places (Canada and others?) have rights which cannot be transfered to corporations or subsequent owners.
(ie: artists can place limits on how works are displayed, no matter who winds up owning the original. Something about some fellow and his geese statues at the shopping centre I vaguely remember).
These original author's rights are the only thing approaching your anti-corporate proposal that are even remotely tenable in today's world, and even in their case there are two things you should remember.
1) they're threatened under the increasing ubiquity of Berne and WIPO, and
2) part of the reason they're threatened is because countries use them as shields to achieve national political objectives and not to protect authors.
Of course, if you could get "them" to banish corporations, then you might get somewhere. But that's a whole new conspiracy/impossible dream, Quixote.
Not sure, but there might be a bit of ambiguity in the phrase 'setting the price'. The government sets the price could mean, (as in compulsory licensing), the government says that the price paid will be xx/pill or yy/song.
Saying "You, as the consumer, set the price. If I write a bad novel, you set the price by not buying it. If I write a great novel, you set the price by buying it" seems more like describing the intersection of the demand curve and the supply curve.
When the government assigns a maximum price or sets a contract length (copyright term, patent term) to a piece of ip it affects the value of that ip to the producer, which changes the supply curve and the intersection point. If it seems too precise to describe this as setting the price, perhaps we could call it adjusting the price?
Life-saving medication is emotionally and dare we say morally in a different category than pop music. No doubt. But you're right about the grey areas.
It seems wrong to you that the government can force you to give something away. I understand the impulse, but isn't it more nuanced than that? The government already sets the price on some copyrightable ip: the price for fair use ip is set at zero. And by defining what 'copyright' is, it materially affects prices in other ways too.
I'm not sure 'work' is the proper measure here. You build a chair and sell it to me, I get the chair, nobody else does. You fix my chair, I get the benefits of your repairs, nobody else does. Presumably in both cases you charge me more than you would if you could get reimbursed by many others for the same amount of effort.
Copyright and patents are government constructions that, in the American case at least, are set to encourage creativity and progress. They weren't natural rights, they were constructed deliberately. It doesn't seem wholly consistent to turn around and argue pure market freedom for something that isn't purely a market phenomenon. (And to be fair, you didn't argue for pure market freedom. It's just at some level the rhetoric seemed to point in that direction.)
When the government grants monopoly rights of exclusion (copyright, patents) on information goods, (where one person's use of the good does not diminish anyone else's ability to use it, aka: text file or mp3), it is implicitly setting prices already.
If you think about it, it is acknowledged by all sides that the government already "sets the prices" for people's intellectual property work. (or why did Disney lobby for the Mickey Mouse copyright extension? Because Disney knows that the length of copyright materially affects the value of its copyrights.)
The "Fair Use" principle is essentially a compulsory license, too. We're talking about degree here, that's all.
One thing I'm curious about is what the release timeline is like for openoffice.
I'm all for the standard open source 'release it when it's ready' approach, but it would be nice for the countless minions waiting to ditch MS Office to have at least a vague idea of when the promised revamping (with the xml file formats) is coming out.
On the openoffice.org site, they have a roadmap that has no mention of a schedule other than a cover date of 'through dec. 2001'.
Anyone have any approximate idea of a release schedule?
"What I'd rather see is some stripped-down hardware (like P2's with 64M and 4G) shipped over for this kind of use."
Just for the record, there are people in the developing world both interested in low-cost computing and open source. They understand the hardware limitations and the realities of the cost infrastructure.
And as far as I can tell, they're not in it for the money.
Tell me sending a ps2 doesn't seem ridiculously inappropriate compared to this.
There's a fairly amusing article about hacking together a long-range (up to 14km) broadband connection using 802.11b at The Pulpit.
It turns out that the trickiest part is not technical. It is buying the right telescope to let you see a house 10km away, then convincing the people in that house, whom you've discovered with your telescope, that you're not some crazy stalker, just a broadband-deprived net-addict willing to buy them dsl if they're willing to beam it to your house.
Funny and clever. (Of course, I don't know about the geography in your neck of the woods. Do you have line-of-sight to that town 8km away?)
The 10Mbps fellow is clearly living in an alternate reality, no question, but you should know better than to write "All @home providers cap uploads at 128Kbps". Comments like that always come back to bite you in the ass.
I routinely get 400Kbps upload speeds with @home. Sorry.:-)
Now, I'm all for protecting the fine reputation of the Chinese and lampooning dullards and bigots, but before another do-gooder makes a comment chastizing the original poster for saying the Chinese have no manners, please read the post again!
The 'they' with no manners is not the Chinese, it's the "Westerners who claim to be working in [everyone's] best interests".
There might be over a billion westerners, but somehow I doubt that's what you meant.
Once you reconcile yourself to the fact that the 'hypothetical Chinese' of the posting also have the right to speak in the first person, perhaps you could read the original comment again?
The service you're thinking of was called icravetv. Not only the nfl sued the guy... a massive group of folks, did. (Though, with the superbowl right around the corner, I think the NFL got the most attention).
Why did he get shut down? Well, for one thing, I think his company had been incorporated in the States. Very bad call, when you're trying to avoid American laws... it gave the US courts legitimate jurisdiction over his business.
What he was doing was (possibly) legal in Canada. (picking up the signals off the airwaves and rebroadcasting them unmodified.) He was in a grey area on the unmodified point, though, since his tv-frame would have banner-type ads along the top or bottom of the screen, and that didn't help his case.
In the end, he was sued into oblivion, not wholly because of the merits of the case, (whatever they may have been), but b/c of the deep pockets of those he was up against and their ability to keep on with the lawsuits until he was bankrupted.
It's a funny thing, reading over these comments, seeing all the outrage that U.S. sites might be forced to be censored to comply with corrupt or narrow-minded laws from Morocco or China.
Reading about this Convention from somewhere outside the States, I couldn't care less about the theoretically-possible Chinese conspiracy to deprive the world of truth and goodness. It will never happen. The villain ain't gonna be China.
Let's think... what country's legislators and judiciary have both the clout and the audacity to effectively pursue extraterritorial legislation and censorship? (Hint... ask Jon Johanassen.)
The Convention scares me alright, but not because of China.
One thing I never realized until I tried to teach my grandparents how to use the mouse, is that it can be tricky for folks with shaky hands to double-click.
(click-shake-click winds up as 'drag and reselect' and not as 'open/launch'.)
Adjusting the double-click speed helped a bit, but the best thing was getting them a trackball. Much easier to isolate the movement from the clicking. They never looked back.
of the link right next to Dan Gillmor's headline made me smile, in a sad sort of way.
"Save this link to idrive."
Anyone care to guess which free online storage provider emailed me last week to say they are shutting down the service? -at least they gave _two months_ notice, mind you.
I don't think it's a question of "God forbid hackers should eat" as much as "God forbid free software hackers should eat."
There seems to be a double standard that once a company dabbles in Linux or anything else good or righteous, it must suddenly be held to a different standard.
It does make the world a bit neater, dividing it only into white hats for good and black hats for evil, but is it helpful or mature?
It happens on Slashdot often enough to be disturbing. I remember *Michael* emailing me with a refusal to announce Safeweb's distributed anti-censorship redirector Triangle Boy, in large part because Safeweb isn't free (speech). Yet five minutes later he posted something earth-shattering about a Nintendo colour gameboy.
Two un-free (speech) companies, two product launches, one for a global anti-censorship initiative, one for a toy, and a whopping double-standard.
If you're going go near anything worthwhile, you better go all the way. Else, watch out!
?? Maybe we're reading different posts, but are you sure that post was using it in a positive way?
Dude, information wants to be free, they can't charge $30 a year for something which is free to provide. You can encode any Salon article as a number. So it's like they're charging for numbers! What a scam! We can just put the articles on Freenet and remove the ads - they won't be able to catch us that way.
Seems like sarcasm to me, and presumably to whoever modded it up to (3, funny).
I'm thinking this is a troll, but I'll bite. Guess I'm bored.
DIVX that you refer to is of couse universally hated. It's also long dead.
DivX;-) is different kettle of fish. It started as a hacked mpeg-4 format, but has been open sourced and gone 'legit'. (maybe also renamed to DivX? OpenDivX?)
I suspect most/.ers are fine with the encoding format.
(Call it a hunch.)
Slashdot Mirror
Try this linke _monopoly/print.html [salon.com]
http://www.salon.com/tech/col/rose/2001/10/08/fil
should do the trick
And if that doesn't do it, try:
https://premium.salon.com/sub/do_register.jsp
(Worked for me...then again, I like Salon.)
Ok, computer crime should be crime.
But crime punishable by life in prison? With no statute of limitations? Doesn't murder have no statute of limitations and get you life?
There's a difference between 'crime is crime' and having some sense of proportion. geez.
"Think about this: if the cumulative value of everything in the world were expressed in measures of gold, which theoretically backs the majority of world currencies, does enough gold physically exist to back the paper money value, or has the paper money itself become valuable?
Huh? What kind of a nonsensical question is this? Never mind the fact that paper money is obviously valuable, the first part of the question makes no sense.
Of course enough physical gold existed to back the paper money value back when countries were on the gold standard. That's what being backed by gold meant... that they had the gold. -otherwise the gold standard would have been no different than the current paper standards.-
(Which is why, at least here in Canada, the 'fine print' on the bills didn't say "This note is legal tender" like it does now, but instead said "Will pay to the bearer on demand". You could theoretically at any time go in to a bank and exchange your cash for it's gold equivalent.)
Gold no longer backs the majority of the world's currencies, though, theoretically or any other way.
If you are so anti-Microsoft that you feel the need to create a site against it, isn't it a touch hypocrtical to be using a Microsoft product to do that?
This is a very narrow interpretation of both the EULA and particularly of Microsoft. It's not just about using frontpage to criticize frontpage, (not that would be a bad thing either, IMHO), but using frontpage to criticize anything Microsoft.
Microsoft has a market cap, even now, of more than $$1/4 trillion. The list of companies they own is huge, and only bound to grow. How many things ought you not to criticize?
MSNBC bills itself as providing "the highest quality news and information, anytime, anywhere" but you find their reporting shoddy or biased. You tell me you see nothing wrong with forbidding people to use frontpage in the creation of a site which criticized MSNBC's coverage of an event? How about if they forbid you to use all of the Office apps? That means Word too, remember. Or Windows? The meaning of monopoly starts to take on a whole new signficance.
You can't think of anything they could buy that you're not uncomfortable with forbidding 95% of the computer-using population to criticize?
It's outrageous.
And seeing CBC (the national broadcaster and far-and-away the most popular television news here)coverage of Code Red was particularly painful.
In the entire lead story on Code Red all that was mentioned was that there was a computer virus about to take down the internet. No mention of IIS, of course, or Win2K, or Macintosh or linux....
EXCEPT TO SAY that "for users running Microsoft Windows there is a patch available."
The impression given (to anyone who knows that there are other computers out there besides ones running Microsoft Windows) was that windows owners were the only safe ones out there. (at least MS was on-the-ball enough to have a patch out, you see. No other company was nearly as up-to-date or concerned with internet security.)
It was almost painful to watch.
Good one.
800 users, 1 server.
Call up the sysadmins and ask them to install your new, sexy app so it's available to everyone. I'm sure they'd *love* to do it.
Go on, do it. It'll be funny.
One of the core reasons that IP law is breaking down so much is the level that it has been subverted by corporations, the very thing it was invented to stop! The orignal idea was that invetors and creative people would be protected from theft from corporations.
I think this might more accurately be described as the core reasons you believe IP law should have been invented to stop. It wasn't.
The moral desire to protect author's rights may date from Roman times, but the actual legal mechanisms for enforcing copyright aren't really seen until printers guilds in England demanded them, (back in the 16th century), as a means of keeping control and monopolizing profits.
American copyright law is purportedly based on the incentive system for advancing society's good, not the authors.
The French, though, and some others too, do place an emphasis on author's rights, and the original authors in some places (Canada and others?) have rights which cannot be transfered to corporations or subsequent owners.
(ie: artists can place limits on how works are displayed, no matter who winds up owning the original. Something about some fellow and his geese statues at the shopping centre I vaguely remember).
These original author's rights are the only thing approaching your anti-corporate proposal that are even remotely tenable in today's world, and even in their case there are two things you should remember.
1) they're threatened under the increasing ubiquity of Berne and WIPO, and
2) part of the reason they're threatened is because countries use them as shields to achieve national political objectives and not to protect authors.
Of course, if you could get "them" to banish corporations, then you might get somewhere. But that's a whole new conspiracy/impossible dream, Quixote.
Hmmn. Interesting points.
Not sure, but there might be a bit of ambiguity in the phrase 'setting the price'. The government sets the price could mean, (as in compulsory licensing), the government says that the price paid will be xx/pill or yy/song.
Saying "You, as the consumer, set the price. If I write a bad novel, you set the price by not buying it. If I write a great novel, you set the price by buying it" seems more like describing the intersection of the demand curve and the supply curve.
When the government assigns a maximum price or sets a contract length (copyright term, patent term) to a piece of ip it affects the value of that ip to the producer, which changes the supply curve and the intersection point. If it seems too precise to describe this as setting the price, perhaps we could call it adjusting the price?
Life-saving medication is emotionally and dare we say morally in a different category than pop music. No doubt. But you're right about the grey areas.
It seems wrong to you that the government can force you to give something away. I understand the impulse, but isn't it more nuanced than that? The government already sets the price on some copyrightable ip: the price for fair use ip is set at zero. And by defining what 'copyright' is, it materially affects prices in other ways too.
I'm not sure 'work' is the proper measure here. You build a chair and sell it to me, I get the chair, nobody else does. You fix my chair, I get the benefits of your repairs, nobody else does. Presumably in both cases you charge me more than you would if you could get reimbursed by many others for the same amount of effort.
Copyright and patents are government constructions that, in the American case at least, are set to encourage creativity and progress. They weren't natural rights, they were constructed deliberately. It doesn't seem wholly consistent to turn around and argue pure market freedom for something that isn't purely a market phenomenon. (And to be fair, you didn't argue for pure market freedom. It's just at some level the rhetoric seemed to point in that direction.)
When the government grants monopoly rights of exclusion (copyright, patents) on information goods, (where one person's use of the good does not diminish anyone else's ability to use it, aka: text file or mp3), it is implicitly setting prices already.
If you think about it, it is acknowledged by all sides that the government already "sets the prices" for people's intellectual property work. (or why did Disney lobby for the Mickey Mouse copyright extension? Because Disney knows that the length of copyright materially affects the value of its copyrights.)
The "Fair Use" principle is essentially a compulsory license, too. We're talking about degree here, that's all.
One thing I'm curious about is what the release timeline is like for openoffice.
I'm all for the standard open source 'release it when it's ready' approach, but it would be nice for the countless minions waiting to ditch MS Office to have at least a vague idea of when the promised revamping (with the xml file formats) is coming out.
On the openoffice.org site, they have a roadmap that has no mention of a schedule other than a cover date of 'through dec. 2001'.
Anyone have any approximate idea of a release schedule?
"What I'd rather see is some stripped-down hardware (like P2's with 64M and 4G) shipped over for this kind of use."
Just for the record, there are people in the developing world both interested in low-cost computing and open source. They understand the hardware limitations and the realities of the cost infrastructure.
And as far as I can tell, they're not in it for the money.
Tell me sending a ps2 doesn't seem ridiculously inappropriate compared to this.
There's a fairly amusing article about hacking together a long-range (up to 14km) broadband connection using 802.11b at The Pulpit.
It turns out that the trickiest part is not technical. It is buying the right telescope to let you see a house 10km away, then convincing the people in that house, whom you've discovered with your telescope, that you're not some crazy stalker, just a broadband-deprived net-addict willing to buy them dsl if they're willing to beam it to your house.
Funny and clever. (Of course, I don't know about the geography in your neck of the woods. Do you have line-of-sight to that town 8km away?)
The 10Mbps fellow is clearly living in an alternate reality, no question, but you should know better than to write "All @home providers cap uploads at 128Kbps". Comments like that always come back to bite you in the ass.
:-)
I routinely get 400Kbps upload speeds with @home. Sorry.
Now, I'm all for protecting the fine reputation of the Chinese and lampooning dullards and bigots, but before another do-gooder makes a comment chastizing the original poster for saying the Chinese have no manners, please read the post again!
The 'they' with no manners is not the Chinese, it's the "Westerners who claim to be working in [everyone's] best interests".
geez.
There might be over a billion westerners, but somehow I doubt that's what you meant.
Once you reconcile yourself to the fact that the 'hypothetical Chinese' of the posting also have the right to speak in the first person, perhaps you could read the original comment again?
>should use this article to pubicise our point of view.
Pendejos! All of you!
Seeing anyone lament "Why can't xxx be more like patent law" on Slashdot signals the start to an interesting day.
What's next? The imagination boggles.
Hmmmn. Do USA legislators and judiciary have both the clout and the audacity to effectively pursue extraterritorial legislation and censorship?
(Hint... ask Jon Johanassen of decss fame.)
The service you're thinking of was called icravetv. Not only the nfl sued the guy... a massive group of folks, did. (Though, with the superbowl right around the corner, I think the NFL got the most attention).
Why did he get shut down? Well, for one thing, I think his company had been incorporated in the States. Very bad call, when you're trying to avoid American laws... it gave the US courts legitimate jurisdiction over his business.
What he was doing was (possibly) legal in Canada. (picking up the signals off the airwaves and rebroadcasting them unmodified.) He was in a grey area on the unmodified point, though, since his tv-frame would have banner-type ads along the top or bottom of the screen, and that didn't help his case.
In the end, he was sued into oblivion, not wholly because of the merits of the case, (whatever they may have been), but b/c of the deep pockets of those he was up against and their ability to keep on with the lawsuits until he was bankrupted.
The legality was never categorically resolved.
It's a funny thing, reading over these comments, seeing all the outrage that U.S. sites might be forced to be censored to comply with corrupt or narrow-minded laws from Morocco or China.
Reading about this Convention from somewhere outside the States, I couldn't care less about the theoretically-possible Chinese conspiracy to deprive the world of truth and goodness. It will never happen. The villain ain't gonna be China.
Let's think... what country's legislators and judiciary have both the clout and the audacity to effectively pursue extraterritorial legislation and censorship? (Hint... ask Jon Johanassen.)
The Convention scares me alright, but not because of China.
One thing I never realized until I tried to teach my grandparents how to use the mouse, is that it can be tricky for folks with shaky hands to double-click.
(click-shake-click winds up as 'drag and reselect' and not as 'open/launch'.)
Adjusting the double-click speed helped a bit, but the best thing was getting them a trackball. Much easier to isolate the movement from the clicking. They never looked back.
of the link right next to Dan Gillmor's headline made me smile, in a sad sort of way.
"Save this link to idrive."
Anyone care to guess which free online storage provider emailed me last week to say they are shutting down the service? -at least they gave _two months_ notice, mind you.
I don't think it's a question of "God forbid hackers should eat" as much as "God forbid free software hackers should eat."
There seems to be a double standard that once a company dabbles in Linux or anything else good or righteous, it must suddenly be held to a different standard.
It does make the world a bit neater, dividing it only into white hats for good and black hats for evil, but is it helpful or mature?
It happens on Slashdot often enough to be disturbing. I remember *Michael* emailing me with a refusal to announce Safeweb's distributed anti-censorship redirector Triangle Boy, in large part because Safeweb isn't free (speech). Yet five minutes later he posted something earth-shattering about a Nintendo colour gameboy.
Two un-free (speech) companies, two product launches, one for a global anti-censorship initiative, one for a toy, and a whopping double-standard.
If you're going go near anything worthwhile, you better go all the way. Else, watch out!
?? Maybe we're reading different posts, but are you sure that post was using it in a positive way?
Dude, information wants to be free, they can't charge $30 a year for something which is free to provide. You can encode any Salon article as a number. So it's like they're charging for numbers! What a scam! We can just put the articles on Freenet and remove the ads - they won't be able to catch us that way.
Seems like sarcasm to me, and presumably to whoever modded it up to (3, funny).
I'm thinking this is a troll, but I'll bite. Guess I'm bored.
;-) is different kettle of fish. It started as a hacked mpeg-4 format, but has been open sourced and gone 'legit'. (maybe also renamed to DivX? OpenDivX?)
/.ers are fine with the encoding format.
DIVX that you refer to is of couse universally hated. It's also long dead.
DivX
I suspect most
(Call it a hunch.)