Indeed, this is the fundamental methodology of passive resistance. It's not enough to ignore the law, you have to break it right in front of the cops and demand that they arrest you.
However! We must really ask ourselves what 'The System' would consider to be overwhelming. Bear in mind we already have half a million people behind bars for selling and consuming plants and various interesting chemicals; and The Powers That Be seem quite happy with that arrangement. If it gave them power over your computer as well, would our Beloved Leaders (and their campaign contributors) really feel all that bad about doubling the prison population with perpetrators of what is no doubt the least offensive of white-collar crimes?
Recall Sun's case against Kevin Mitnick. Steal something that is either $100 or free, depending on the customer, and get charged with $8,000,000 in damages. Lawyer math, man. It's a secret class colleges only let you into after you fail every single mathematics course they offer.
I have a computer, a large hard drive, a cd burner, and a high-speed internet connection. Guilt by incriminating paraphernalia. Works for the War on Drugs, right? Why not the upcoming War on Copying Bits?
Explain to me how a piece of software in which you are totally, utterly, and in every way dependent on the ingenuity and foresight of its authors can possibly be more configurable than one whose source code you may read, modify, and use however you see fit? More configurable than software that allows you to remake the entire program to the limits of your programmers' abilities? C'mon, even the configurability of OSS is configurable!
I think the problem the parent was going after was not that the experiment was done, but that the people doing it had to go through a government agency that has zero interest in doing anything else. NASA's track record for experiments and missions that are fascinating, wonderful, even awe-inspiring, but in the end not really utilized one bit, is rapidly approaching parity. As long as any activity in space has to go through NASA (either by government fiat or persistently high launch costs), nothing will ever happen. When it comes to conquering space, the biggest weapon in our arsenal is entrepreneurial spirit and the sheer curiosity of tinkerers (yes, and entomologists). NASA has spent 40 years working on all the wrong problems and as a result a few million people who would colonize space for nothing more than potential of profit can do nothing.
Thanks. Saved me the trouble of pointing out that without a frame of reference, this info is essentially useless. I seem to recall hearing that it takes a few thousand gallons of water (and god only knows what else) to get a steak to your table.
On the upside, we've gotten very good at recycling all our used electrons.
Hmmm, I posted just about the exact same thing a few minutes ago. Gotta remember to skim the whole tree beforehand next time.
But you missed the problem of inflation. If Disney and friends are willing to extend copyright lengths past the 100-year mark, what qualms would they have about trying to induce hyperinflation that would allow them to keep their investments for comparative pennies? Such has been done before, and for much lower margins than this would entail. It'd have to be $10 the first year, then $20.80 the second, $43.26 the third, etc (assumes 4% annual inflation rate). Not much, but by year 20 you're paying $23 million instead of $10.5.
I was always intrigued by the idea of exponentially increasing copyright registration costs. You get some length of copyright on your work for free. Say 10 years. On the beginning of the 11th year, you must pay some trivial amount, like $10. 12th year it's $20. Then $40, $80, $160, and so on. It is imperative that the figure be adjusted for inflation each year lest the copyright giants see hyper-inflation as their way out. This way, if you've got a money-maker, you can easily afford to keep the thing for an additional 10 years, by which point the costs have only amounted to $20,470. If it's really raking in the dough, the holder could even get it for 10 years beyond that. Total cost by year 30 is $20,971,510. But not even the most successful piece of work imaginable could justify paying for copyrights for 5 years or so past that. Probably 90% of all copyrights would last for just the 10 years.
Best of all, Congress would see it as a source of income and might not dismiss it out of hand.
There is no amount of protection you can build into a bill that would prevent it from being altered, ignored, or simply interpreted in a ludicrous manner in the 28 years following its passage. If we give media giants everything they want now in exchange for stuff we want in 3 decades, I guarantee you they will spend every day of those 28 years trying to find a way to cheat us out of our share of the deal. Everything we've seen from copyright giants is that they simply cannot be trusted to uphold their end of the copyright 'bargain'.
If Rosen, Valenti, Hollings, and Eisner got on national primetime TV and promised to the world, in no uncertain terms, that they, their families, friends, co-workers, shareholders, indeed everyone who works for their companies, would commit sepuku if the length of copyright changed in the next 50 years, then I might just give them the benefit of the doubt. Short of that, not a chance.
I like it. It's the copyright equivalent of Patents vs Trade Secrets. You can have legal protections for a limited time or you can have technological protections of your own devising forever, but you don't get to use both.
I also doubt it would make NASA obsolete, just as affordable terrestial transportation has not made the FAA, NOAA, and several other government agencies involved in transport and research obsolete.
Sure it would. Who would take a government orbital launch for twice as much as the private one? They'd be reduced to solely administration, for which it's harder to justify multi-billion-dollar budgets. Exactly what does the FAA do? They don't come up with new airplane designs, nor build them, nor sell them, nor fly them for public use. All they do is keep an eye on those who do. Can you imagine the state of affairs if the FAA was 'the only to fly'?
The fault, at least according to Dr. Robert Zubrin, lies with the management of Lockheed-Martin and other very large aerospace corporations. He makes a good case for it in Entering Space.
This isn't by any chance the same guy who said there was nothing worth going after in space? Send me a link or something and I'll take a look. Really, I find the whole "We can't do anything because our customers won't let us" argument very interesting. I don't see how Lockheed-Martin and the like can have control over what NASA does unless NASA lets them. The way they handled the perpetual delays and overruns from L-M with the X-33 was criminal.
NASA's entire job right from the start should have been to lower launch costs to the point where we can bring this country's greatest arsenal, free enterprise, to bear on it. Research into that sort of thing is not a sure thing, which is why is was given over to a government agency in the first place. Nobody else could afford to follow the myriad blind research paths on the way to success. But instead they've tried to do everything. Forget the spiffy unmanned probes with the pretty pictures. Forget the expensive one-time-only manned trips to the moon and the rocks. Forget the space stations that produce great IMAX movies and little else. They are all impressive as hell but were also the kinds of thing others would do if they had the means. It's quite literally a case of "If you build it they will come". But they developed it to the point where only the richest of the rich can afford to put so much as a geosynchronous satellite up and then left it at that. NASA's chiefs have explicitly stated they intend to keep using the Shuttle for another 15 or 20 years. For every dollar they spend on developing a vehicle that doesn't suck they spend 10 on fluff projects with lots of golly-gee-ness.
He said you cannot make a rational case for sending people rather than robots on scientific or economic grounds
He's full of shit. As long as it costs its weight in gold to put a payload in orbit, it might be true. But get it down to something reasonable and 'rational cases for sending people' would show him reality. Remember that dinky little asteroid NASA landed a probe on? Well it, Eros, has more metals, especially rare ones like iridium and platinum that are damn near impossible to find around here, just sitting there than the human race has pulled out of the ground in its entire history. There are simply too many things in the big black beyond that cannot be trusted to automation that would make people wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice.
You also can't beat the inspirational value of the Apollo program
It was very inspirational. It was, without a doubt, the single most amazing endeavor in the history of the human race. And that was where its usefulness ended. Our space program re: Luna was been the epitome of "We came, we saw, we turned around and went back home".
Within the next few decades, launch costs will decline by an order of magnitude
Where do you get that idea? Not only haven't they gone down in the past 30 years, they've gone rather upward. Low launch costs would make NASA irrelevant as anyone with a few million (instead of a many billion) dollars could go do their own thing. We wouldn't need NASA to study the effects of zero-g on bones or fermentation, we've got hundreds of universities who would love to do it. We wouldn't need NASA to do feasibility studies on manufacturing and smelting in space as we have entrepreneurs slavering at the thought. NASA, therefore, can be counted on never to do any such thing. And given their job of 'administering aeronautics and space' they will almost certainly be complicate things for anyone else trying to open space to the masses.
Your assertion that after a certain length of time the people will own a work is more like you build a house and 30 years later a bunch of strangers show up at the door saying that the house now belongs to everyone.
Except they are not 'a bunch of strangers'. It is their land you built the house on and their lumber you built it with, both of which you got essentially for free (i.e., Disney mines the public domain for ideas). And when construction got started, you did so with the explicit understanding that you get to live in the house for a certain interval and then when time was up, the people got the house. Except Congress steps in and tells the people, who have given up unrestricted use of their land and lumber for 50 years, that they will have to do without for another 20 because Eisner likes the mansion he's built with other peoples' stuff. It's pure hypocritical selfishness to a ridiculous extreme.
That would work if you could tell the difference between the gravitional pull of the sun now versus eight minutes ago. The elliptical nature of our orbit could do it (we'd be closer or further away gravitationally than we were visually), but the change over 8 minutes is so ridiculously small. And as the sun is a moving and changing target itself, can that really be done today?
But you're right, this really is an easy experiment. It just requires either the ability to move very large masses very quickly or detect exquisitely small changes in gravitational attraction. Or some lesser combination of both.
How about this. You put synchronized clocks at some great distance from each other. One goes with your big mass, the other with the detector. At some predetermined time, after establishing the baseline gravity well, you move the big rock and see how quickly the change shows up. It is very important that your clocks take into account both special relativity (when moving them apart) and general relativity (one is closer to a big mass). Any changes would be utterly miniscule, but then so is the effect being measured.
Well, it all really is a game. It has a specific set of rules that make the game fun only so long as everyone plays by them. The President has the power to ignore Congress, but few of them do so to any great extent. Certianly nothing like ignoring an impeachment.
Why have so many other would-be democracies failed? Their chief players unilaterally changed the rules in their favor and bad things ranging from hyperinflation to genocide results.
Copyright is supposed to have a limited term. Almost 100 years can hardly be construed as "limited".
What's this 'almost 100 years' nonsense? I'm 23, heathly, and, given the pace of medical widgetry, stand every chance of living to my 100th birthday. That's 77 years on top of the 75 after I die before anything I copyright this year is forced into the public domain. A century and a half. A long-lived child prodigy (think Mozart with modern medicine) could quite possibly hit the 200-year mark. How can Congress not realize that these spans are stretching well into the Star Trek era? And you know that they're going to try this again, probably for even longer, before 2020.
It's interesting, but it really is irrelevant. If he were deriving income from some ancient copyright about to expire, then there would be a conflict. There's no author in existence who really cares whether they get money 70 years after they die rather than 50. The only copyright holders who do are clinically immortal. I.e., corporations.
Something like 40% of the prison population in the US is there on drug-related charges. Much of it marijuana. And yet our beloved leaders have yet to establish that pot is any unhealthier a habit than picking your nose. Literally millions of people use or have used it, including some of the most powerful members of the government. And yet they persist in destroying lives and crushing freedoms in an effort to wipe out a plant. Bureaucratic inertia is without a doubt the most unwavering force in the universe.
Jack Valenti said his organization still believed that "no reasonable alternative course of action should be eliminated from consideration."
Because the Internet is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone. Right Jack?
I don't know why anyone bothers to listen to this dipshit when he says something about the implications of some technology. Few prognostications have ever been as utterly wrong as his was. And that he insists that he's been proven correct is just stupid.
It's been tested twice. The case against 2600, where it won, and the case against Elcomsoft, where it failed. 2 cases, amidst dozens, if not hundreds, of legal threats.
This may have been the entire point of the thing. Large corporations now have a very powerful weapon in their arsenal which they can wield against anyone, even foreigners in foreign lands, and never actually have to go through the muss and fuss of a trial to get what they want.
Information does indeed 'want' to be free. It has this tendency to spread regardless of the wishes of its original holders. To keep it from doing so, one has to put very, very tight restrictions on who can see it. If you don't want it passed around, don't let anyone see it. Selling CD's with said information does not qualify as a practical technique for restricting access.
The House voted with a 'voice vote', so no records of who said Aye were kept. That they would do something like this steps on the face of every measure of accountability we have over 'our' representatives.
The Senate, IIRC, voted 98 in favor, one against, and one abstention. So if your state's senators haven't changed in 4 years, then it's a safe bet they voted for them.
Slashdot Mirror
However! We must really ask ourselves what 'The System' would consider to be overwhelming. Bear in mind we already have half a million people behind bars for selling and consuming plants and various interesting chemicals; and The Powers That Be seem quite happy with that arrangement. If it gave them power over your computer as well, would our Beloved Leaders (and their campaign contributors) really feel all that bad about doubling the prison population with perpetrators of what is no doubt the least offensive of white-collar crimes?
Recall Sun's case against Kevin Mitnick. Steal something that is either $100 or free, depending on the customer, and get charged with $8,000,000 in damages. Lawyer math, man. It's a secret class colleges only let you into after you fail every single mathematics course they offer.
I have a computer, a large hard drive, a cd burner, and a high-speed internet connection. Guilt by incriminating paraphernalia. Works for the War on Drugs, right? Why not the upcoming War on Copying Bits?
Does people snagging what's in my Kazaa download folder before I have a chance to move it count?
Either that or give out a 32 or 64 kbps file for free and charge a buck or two for higher quality ones.
Explain to me how a piece of software in which you are totally, utterly, and in every way dependent on the ingenuity and foresight of its authors can possibly be more configurable than one whose source code you may read, modify, and use however you see fit? More configurable than software that allows you to remake the entire program to the limits of your programmers' abilities? C'mon, even the configurability of OSS is configurable!
My question is, and I'm almost afraid to find out, what happens if you hit 'Decline'?
I think the problem the parent was going after was not that the experiment was done, but that the people doing it had to go through a government agency that has zero interest in doing anything else. NASA's track record for experiments and missions that are fascinating, wonderful, even awe-inspiring, but in the end not really utilized one bit, is rapidly approaching parity. As long as any activity in space has to go through NASA (either by government fiat or persistently high launch costs), nothing will ever happen. When it comes to conquering space, the biggest weapon in our arsenal is entrepreneurial spirit and the sheer curiosity of tinkerers (yes, and entomologists). NASA has spent 40 years working on all the wrong problems and as a result a few million people who would colonize space for nothing more than potential of profit can do nothing.
On the upside, we've gotten very good at recycling all our used electrons.
But you missed the problem of inflation. If Disney and friends are willing to extend copyright lengths past the 100-year mark, what qualms would they have about trying to induce hyperinflation that would allow them to keep their investments for comparative pennies? Such has been done before, and for much lower margins than this would entail. It'd have to be $10 the first year, then $20.80 the second, $43.26 the third, etc (assumes 4% annual inflation rate). Not much, but by year 20 you're paying $23 million instead of $10.5.
Best of all, Congress would see it as a source of income and might not dismiss it out of hand.
If Rosen, Valenti, Hollings, and Eisner got on national primetime TV and promised to the world, in no uncertain terms, that they, their families, friends, co-workers, shareholders, indeed everyone who works for their companies, would commit sepuku if the length of copyright changed in the next 50 years, then I might just give them the benefit of the doubt. Short of that, not a chance.
I like it. It's the copyright equivalent of Patents vs Trade Secrets. You can have legal protections for a limited time or you can have technological protections of your own devising forever, but you don't get to use both.
Sure it would. Who would take a government orbital launch for twice as much as the private one? They'd be reduced to solely administration, for which it's harder to justify multi-billion-dollar budgets. Exactly what does the FAA do? They don't come up with new airplane designs, nor build them, nor sell them, nor fly them for public use. All they do is keep an eye on those who do. Can you imagine the state of affairs if the FAA was 'the only to fly'?
The fault, at least according to Dr. Robert Zubrin, lies with the management of Lockheed-Martin and other very large aerospace corporations. He makes a good case for it in Entering Space.
This isn't by any chance the same guy who said there was nothing worth going after in space? Send me a link or something and I'll take a look. Really, I find the whole "We can't do anything because our customers won't let us" argument very interesting. I don't see how Lockheed-Martin and the like can have control over what NASA does unless NASA lets them. The way they handled the perpetual delays and overruns from L-M with the X-33 was criminal.
NASA's entire job right from the start should have been to lower launch costs to the point where we can bring this country's greatest arsenal, free enterprise, to bear on it. Research into that sort of thing is not a sure thing, which is why is was given over to a government agency in the first place. Nobody else could afford to follow the myriad blind research paths on the way to success. But instead they've tried to do everything. Forget the spiffy unmanned probes with the pretty pictures. Forget the expensive one-time-only manned trips to the moon and the rocks. Forget the space stations that produce great IMAX movies and little else. They are all impressive as hell but were also the kinds of thing others would do if they had the means. It's quite literally a case of "If you build it they will come". But they developed it to the point where only the richest of the rich can afford to put so much as a geosynchronous satellite up and then left it at that. NASA's chiefs have explicitly stated they intend to keep using the Shuttle for another 15 or 20 years. For every dollar they spend on developing a vehicle that doesn't suck they spend 10 on fluff projects with lots of golly-gee-ness.
He's full of shit. As long as it costs its weight in gold to put a payload in orbit, it might be true. But get it down to something reasonable and 'rational cases for sending people' would show him reality. Remember that dinky little asteroid NASA landed a probe on? Well it, Eros, has more metals, especially rare ones like iridium and platinum that are damn near impossible to find around here, just sitting there than the human race has pulled out of the ground in its entire history. There are simply too many things in the big black beyond that cannot be trusted to automation that would make people wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice.
You also can't beat the inspirational value of the Apollo program
It was very inspirational. It was, without a doubt, the single most amazing endeavor in the history of the human race. And that was where its usefulness ended. Our space program re: Luna was been the epitome of "We came, we saw, we turned around and went back home".
Within the next few decades, launch costs will decline by an order of magnitude
Where do you get that idea? Not only haven't they gone down in the past 30 years, they've gone rather upward. Low launch costs would make NASA irrelevant as anyone with a few million (instead of a many billion) dollars could go do their own thing. We wouldn't need NASA to study the effects of zero-g on bones or fermentation, we've got hundreds of universities who would love to do it. We wouldn't need NASA to do feasibility studies on manufacturing and smelting in space as we have entrepreneurs slavering at the thought. NASA, therefore, can be counted on never to do any such thing. And given their job of 'administering aeronautics and space' they will almost certainly be complicate things for anyone else trying to open space to the masses.
Except they are not 'a bunch of strangers'. It is their land you built the house on and their lumber you built it with, both of which you got essentially for free (i.e., Disney mines the public domain for ideas). And when construction got started, you did so with the explicit understanding that you get to live in the house for a certain interval and then when time was up, the people got the house. Except Congress steps in and tells the people, who have given up unrestricted use of their land and lumber for 50 years, that they will have to do without for another 20 because Eisner likes the mansion he's built with other peoples' stuff. It's pure hypocritical selfishness to a ridiculous extreme.
That would work if you could tell the difference between the gravitional pull of the sun now versus eight minutes ago. The elliptical nature of our orbit could do it (we'd be closer or further away gravitationally than we were visually), but the change over 8 minutes is so ridiculously small. And as the sun is a moving and changing target itself, can that really be done today?
But you're right, this really is an easy experiment. It just requires either the ability to move very large masses very quickly or detect exquisitely small changes in gravitational attraction. Or some lesser combination of both.
How about this. You put synchronized clocks at some great distance from each other. One goes with your big mass, the other with the detector. At some predetermined time, after establishing the baseline gravity well, you move the big rock and see how quickly the change shows up. It is very important that your clocks take into account both special relativity (when moving them apart) and general relativity (one is closer to a big mass). Any changes would be utterly miniscule, but then so is the effect being measured.
Well, it all really is a game. It has a specific set of rules that make the game fun only so long as everyone plays by them. The President has the power to ignore Congress, but few of them do so to any great extent. Certianly nothing like ignoring an impeachment.
Why have so many other would-be democracies failed? Their chief players unilaterally changed the rules in their favor and bad things ranging from hyperinflation to genocide results.
What's this 'almost 100 years' nonsense? I'm 23, heathly, and, given the pace of medical widgetry, stand every chance of living to my 100th birthday. That's 77 years on top of the 75 after I die before anything I copyright this year is forced into the public domain. A century and a half. A long-lived child prodigy (think Mozart with modern medicine) could quite possibly hit the 200-year mark. How can Congress not realize that these spans are stretching well into the Star Trek era? And you know that they're going to try this again, probably for even longer, before 2020.
It's interesting, but it really is irrelevant. If he were deriving income from some ancient copyright about to expire, then there would be a conflict. There's no author in existence who really cares whether they get money 70 years after they die rather than 50. The only copyright holders who do are clinically immortal. I.e., corporations.
And even if they went so far as to 'execute' a corporation, whoopty do. Some legal fiction disappears and justice is served?
Something like 40% of the prison population in the US is there on drug-related charges. Much of it marijuana. And yet our beloved leaders have yet to establish that pot is any unhealthier a habit than picking your nose. Literally millions of people use or have used it, including some of the most powerful members of the government. And yet they persist in destroying lives and crushing freedoms in an effort to wipe out a plant. Bureaucratic inertia is without a doubt the most unwavering force in the universe.
Because the Internet is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone. Right Jack?
I don't know why anyone bothers to listen to this dipshit when he says something about the implications of some technology. Few prognostications have ever been as utterly wrong as his was. And that he insists that he's been proven correct is just stupid.
This may have been the entire point of the thing. Large corporations now have a very powerful weapon in their arsenal which they can wield against anyone, even foreigners in foreign lands, and never actually have to go through the muss and fuss of a trial to get what they want.
Information does indeed 'want' to be free. It has this tendency to spread regardless of the wishes of its original holders. To keep it from doing so, one has to put very, very tight restrictions on who can see it. If you don't want it passed around, don't let anyone see it. Selling CD's with said information does not qualify as a practical technique for restricting access.
The Senate, IIRC, voted 98 in favor, one against, and one abstention. So if your state's senators haven't changed in 4 years, then it's a safe bet they voted for them.