It doesn't really make sense to decrease the cost due to decreased media costs.
So the amount of stuff it is economical to store rises no further on the say-so of a bunch of rich execs who have nothing to do with data storage? I sure hope we'll never need anything more than 100 or 200 GB, since nobody'll be able to afford the taxes on it. Kindly imagine what would have happened if they'd tried this when Napster started up. As I recall, 20GB was a good sized drive at the time, so to get an equivalent tax on a 100GB drive today, you'd have to tax $5 per gig. Which means that you wouldn't be able to get a 100GB drive today for less than $500. Swell. Let's shaft IBM, Maxtor, Seagate, Western Digital, and everyone else in that business to protect people from copying bits. How noble. And you don't need to point out that this tax is only on Tivo's and whatnot. It's only a matter of time before they try to apply this to computer storage in general.
Terabyte hard drives/able to download entire movies in minutes
Are you implying that this will never happen? Lemme guess, 5 years ago you said that 56k was the fastest Internet connection the population would ever be able to have. And 10 years ago you said that we'd never ever have affordable 100GB hard drives. For your information, the technology to store a terabyte or move an entire DVD over the Internet in minutes already exists. It is simply too expensive to succeed in the market. To look at the past 50 years in computers and say with complete and total confidence, "Oh _that_ will never ever happen" is hubristic in the extreme.
What's the alternative?
Uh, well, gee, maybe you could actually not tax a product on the grounds that it might be used inappropriately and cause a potential loss of income to someone? They don't do it for any other product, even ones with anti-IP potential, I fail to see why hard drives and CD's should be any different.
Do we start door-to-door FBI raids?
Why not? If it's illegal to copy bits, then go after the people doing it. This tax is not unlike giving everyone a year in prison on the basis that some of them would end up there anyway and by doing it this way you save the trouble and expense of actually trying and prosecuting them.
Do we just let them go out of business?
And since when is it my responsibility to keep potentially doomed businesses alive? Or the government's? Since when is it anybody's responsibility but the business in question?
the media companies will come up with their own solution to the problem
They already have. They buy legislation that gets them money for nothing and convince suckers like you that it's good for you.
if not, the government likely is going to be forced to do something
Explain the logic underlying that conclusion, please. Music and movie conglomerates are not critical industries. They do not employ vast amounts of workforce whose skills are useless without them. They are not irreplacable. Dollar-wise, they do not even count for much. Why on earth is it absolutely imperative that these companies continue to make a profit?
As long as citizens are given immunity from copyright lawsuits using hard drives
Indeed. Such is the current situation up in Canada, I believe. But I have to wonder how long it would be before the -AA's start demanding you pay for your cake and for eating it as well.
Furthermore, Moore's Law dictates that the dollar value (or rather, Euro value) of this tax will very soon become wildly out of proportion to the cost of the drive itself. When terabyte drives reach the price of today's 100GB drives (4, _maybe_ 5 years?), this current tax would increase the cost of the drive by 900% ($1000 tax on a $125 drive). How often are they going to adjust it to reflect the decreased cost of media, if at all? Canada's CD-R tax is going up, despite the ever-decreasing price of the discs.
So while it might be convenient today, it certainly won't be tomorrow.
Except the content is irrevocably burned onto the CD. The structure of the media is altered so as to represent the content. How can I own the media but not the pits or even lack thereof on it? That's like saying I own only the paper and binding of a book, not the ink. Or better yet, I own a hard drive but not the magnetic fields on it.
even the North Korean state-run press [kcna.co.jp].
I've read that one on occasion. Most of the time it's utter bosh, but occasionally there's some gems. My all-time favorites are when they reflect on how the DPRK won the Korean War which was started by the evil United States in an unprovoked attack. Great stuff...
This is not suprising since Marx was one of the first economists to really explain how capitalism worked and he was not completely against it.
Indeed. When compared to what preceded it, a fuedal economy, Marx observed that capitalism was superior in pretty much every way.
the bits about the communist system to replace it are little more than an afterthought in comparison
I read some of Marx's work and thought that exact same thing. He goes on and on about the pros and cons of capitalism, but the extent of his descriptions of how Communism would work were rather broad and vague. The Workers will do this and Society will do that. Very little about how exactly the whole thing is supposed to hang together, which I thought to be kinda important for a command economy. It's all well and good to say that we should "abolish competition and replace it with association" and have "communal ownership of goods", but you might as well say that the Golden Rule is the only law a country should have. Just how is this vague Society supposed to fairly and equally dole out scarse resources?
Compare that with capitalism, in which anyone with capital makes his own best decisions on how to use it. It not only works better when the 'rules' are vague, it pretty much requires it. Of course, so often you end up with monopolies and it's downhill from there...
Well, fascism includes a lot of the racial superiority complexes you find in Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and to a much lesser extent Musolini's Italy. A better example would be Pre-WW1 Germany, the Second Reich. A centralized monarchy but great control over the economy in the hands of independent industry magnates. And while it was not something I'd have liked to have lived under, it was nowhere near as repellent as the Third.
The logic of making a profit out of spending vast sums of money to lift stuff out of Earth's gravity well, ship it to Mars, only to then dump it down another gravity well escapes me right now.
Now the asteroids, that's where the money's to be made!
Step One: Snag any handy Apollo asteroid.
Step Two: Mine the hell out of it! Drop the gold, iridium, platinum, and other insanely valuable materials down to the planet and sell it!
Step Three: Profit!
Yeah. Anyone rich enough to be able to have electric lighting at night is a counter-revolutionary and gets put to work looking for landmines. Great policy...:)
But does this mean that a good place for astronomers to work would be N. Korea? Tat would be wierd.
This one's easy. C did. Regardless of what B did, A would have died anyway through C's actions. As far as anyone who isn't B knows, A would have surived if C hadn't screwed with his canteen.
Real life applications of quantum mechanics metaphilosophy! I love it!
And it can apply to other physical items, too. If I steal the jewels from your house which, before you notice anything amiss, burns down through actions totally unrelated to my own, did I really steal them?
Events have to have ripples to be real
Hmmm, how about: A cause by itself cannot exist. Both it and the effect spring into awareness/existence at the exact same moment.
Huh? I'm intolerant of people who insult me, demean me, are condescending and rude to me, knowingly ignore logic and reason and evidence, and threaten me with imaginary punishments by imaginary third parties, all in the name of trying to convince me to blindly believe in a cult more bizarre than anything you'll find in a National Enquirer. Gee, I can't imagine why.
Intolerance is human based not religion based
I'm well aware of that. But while the use of reason strives for less intolerance, religions constantly seem to strive for more. The very first commandment demands that you not even consider a 'heretical' idea. The Koran has whole sections devoted to the treatment of nonbelievers. Some of it is quite idealistic, but an awful lot is just inhuman cruelty. The list goes on and on.
I know why because they are judging American Christianity not real Christianity
Do tell. And what exactly is this gaping theological difference between the True Christianity you evidently practice and the evil heretic Christianity practiced in my homeland? The false faiths I find around here obviously need to be stamped out of existence, right? Though I seem to have forgotten why. Perhaps you can refresh my memory?
it is typical of Americans to never think outside the box
Oh bullshit. Show me one shred of proof that everyone on this side of the pond is a totally unimaginative drone compared to the ubiquitous creative geniuses you live with. Enough with the ad hominem attacks.
What are the odds of intelligent life developing on a planet that has developed a stable biosphere of mega-cellular life? Evolutionary history shows that it was a number of dumb luck environmental factors that happened to line up around the right proto-primates that pushed them on the path towards tool-using sapience. Suffice it to say, it's probably not an everyday occurance.
Now, if life of any kind is in fact an extreme rarity, to the point where this rock is the only one like it in the cosmos, how amazing is it that it also managed to develop intelligent life as well? If life were common as dirt but intelligence a rarity, then the fairly undeniable fact of our existence is reasonable; it was likely to happen somewhere. But for the coin to land on its edge in the one place in the universe where life existed is stupendous.
A good analogy would be, what are the odds of someone winning the lottery (i.e., a planet developing intelligence) a) if a zillion people bought tickets (had life already) or b) if one person bought a single ticket? Neither is impossible, and the winner would still have his cash, but one is far, far more likely to be the case than the other.
What do we know of the rest of the galaxy, really?
Pretty much zilch. What say we go exploring! I hear Mars is nice this time of year...
If it were the "preferred" method a country like the US would probably be currently involved in a bloody civil war. And if you were to take the statistics on this page, http://www.religioustolerance.org/worldrel.htm [religioustolerance.org], to be even close to the truth there would probably be few humans left alive.
Would you care to clarify those statements in any way or just let us assume that you are spouting nonsense? I for one cannot see how you got 'Religion' == 'Peace and good will towards greater numbers of men and women' from the statistics on that page. But by all means, do explain.
While religion has occasionally been used as an excuse for horrible acts
Not religion per se. Just blind faith. Important guy says we need to kill all of these people, so we go and do it and don't dare ask any questions. And by 'occasionally', you really mean 'most of human history', right?
it is much more often provides hope, stability and ethical values to work from
Hope, perhaps. IMO it's the same kind of hope one gets by playing the lottery, but hey... Stability is partly the problem. Religions must be very stable indeed and cannot survive major changes nor doubt of any kind. The very thing that science thrives and advances on. Ethics? Hogwash. I am really sick and tired of being told that I cannot be ethical, moral, or even just a nice guy without accepting the baggage of some crazy cult like Christianity. I happily accept the concept of being kind to my fellow man without needing the imaginary carrot and stick of heaven and hell.
Is there any reason you think any self respecting court would actually go along with this?
Even with some of the more ludicrous judgements in the past, why would a court believe that something retailing for $80 could suddenly be worth $100,000?
Kevin Mitnick had this exact tactic used against him. Regardless of what opinion one might have of him, the damages claimed against him were ridiculously extravagant.
In the most extreme case, he stole the source for Solaris OS and Sun initially claimed $80M in damages for it. Never mind the fact that the same exact source is given for free to schools and sold to developers for $100. Just about every single claim against him went along these lines. He stole credit card numbers but didn't give them to anyone. Yet somehow they still demanded punishment.
If I'm giving away free gum and instead of my putting it in your hand you simply take it from the counter, how on earth do I get to claim damages of any kind? The fact that such cases wasn't thrown out of court immediately is very disturbing. And now they want to put the final say in damages in the people who benefit most from them? Bad idea.
The only way this allows companies to "set their own damages" is if they want to set the retail price so high that no one else will buy it.
Spoken like someone who hasn't thumbed through a Staples catalog lately. Rebates are all the rage these days. I saw a digital camera for $1000, but between the 'Special Discounts!' and rebates, it was actually being sold for $600. Obviously they were planning right from the start to sell it for the smaller amount, but marked it up and then back down to make it look good. But what price do you suppose they'd use for piracy damages? Would they go through all the gimicks to merely double or triple their income from nabbing 'commercial' pirates? Well... yeah, actually, I imagine they would.
Point is, giving the software companies de facto control over setting damages rather than the logical means of actually figuring out how much they were really hurt and awarding them accordingly is a Bad Thing.
Re:hydrogen??? Be serious! [and: 20 year old news!
on
Zeppelins on Patrol?
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· Score: 2
Hydrogen??? THat hasn't been used since, ahh, the Hindenberg:)
I am really sick and tired of hearing people say "Hydrogen = Hindenberg = Bad!". If you dress yourself up in rocket fuel or thermite and then scuff around on shag carpet, which is basically what the Hindenberg was, you are just asking for it. Your blimp could be filled with cotton candy and you'd still go up in flames. Furthermore, it is really stupid of you to complain about the flamability of H2 while at the same time putting stuff that is by weight many times as energetic into your car. And may I point out that despite the spectacularity with which the Hindenberg blew up, nearly two thirds of the people on board survived. I would just love to see a landing airplane have its fuel vented right into open flames at 100 feet and crash into the ground and still boast that kind of survival rate.
One flaming arrow . . ..
Will what? Blow up an airship? Not likely! And these things will be running higher up than any private, commercial, and most military planes can reach. And why not 'one stick of dynamite planted on a railroad track'? Or 'one carbomb on a suspension bridge'? Or 'one heat-seeking missile outside an airport'? Name one activity that can't be made fatal by some trivial attack at just the right time and place. Get some perspective, people.
Bear in mind that these things aren't balloons. The hydrogen inside is at a pressure not very different from the surrounding air. If you put a hole in it, sure, it leaks. But it's not like a balloon with a large pressure difference that causes it to rapidly deflate.
Slashdot Mirror
So the amount of stuff it is economical to store rises no further on the say-so of a bunch of rich execs who have nothing to do with data storage? I sure hope we'll never need anything more than 100 or 200 GB, since nobody'll be able to afford the taxes on it. Kindly imagine what would have happened if they'd tried this when Napster started up. As I recall, 20GB was a good sized drive at the time, so to get an equivalent tax on a 100GB drive today, you'd have to tax $5 per gig. Which means that you wouldn't be able to get a 100GB drive today for less than $500. Swell. Let's shaft IBM, Maxtor, Seagate, Western Digital, and everyone else in that business to protect people from copying bits. How noble. And you don't need to point out that this tax is only on Tivo's and whatnot. It's only a matter of time before they try to apply this to computer storage in general.
Terabyte hard drives/able to download entire movies in minutes
Are you implying that this will never happen? Lemme guess, 5 years ago you said that 56k was the fastest Internet connection the population would ever be able to have. And 10 years ago you said that we'd never ever have affordable 100GB hard drives. For your information, the technology to store a terabyte or move an entire DVD over the Internet in minutes already exists. It is simply too expensive to succeed in the market. To look at the past 50 years in computers and say with complete and total confidence, "Oh _that_ will never ever happen" is hubristic in the extreme.
What's the alternative?
Uh, well, gee, maybe you could actually not tax a product on the grounds that it might be used inappropriately and cause a potential loss of income to someone? They don't do it for any other product, even ones with anti-IP potential, I fail to see why hard drives and CD's should be any different.
Do we start door-to-door FBI raids?
Why not? If it's illegal to copy bits, then go after the people doing it. This tax is not unlike giving everyone a year in prison on the basis that some of them would end up there anyway and by doing it this way you save the trouble and expense of actually trying and prosecuting them.
Do we just let them go out of business?
And since when is it my responsibility to keep potentially doomed businesses alive? Or the government's? Since when is it anybody's responsibility but the business in question?
the media companies will come up with their own solution to the problem
They already have. They buy legislation that gets them money for nothing and convince suckers like you that it's good for you.
if not, the government likely is going to be forced to do something
Explain the logic underlying that conclusion, please. Music and movie conglomerates are not critical industries. They do not employ vast amounts of workforce whose skills are useless without them. They are not irreplacable. Dollar-wise, they do not even count for much. Why on earth is it absolutely imperative that these companies continue to make a profit?
Indeed. Such is the current situation up in Canada, I believe. But I have to wonder how long it would be before the -AA's start demanding you pay for your cake and for eating it as well.
Furthermore, Moore's Law dictates that the dollar value (or rather, Euro value) of this tax will very soon become wildly out of proportion to the cost of the drive itself. When terabyte drives reach the price of today's 100GB drives (4, _maybe_ 5 years?), this current tax would increase the cost of the drive by 900% ($1000 tax on a $125 drive). How often are they going to adjust it to reflect the decreased cost of media, if at all? Canada's CD-R tax is going up, despite the ever-decreasing price of the discs.
So while it might be convenient today, it certainly won't be tomorrow.
Except the content is irrevocably burned onto the CD. The structure of the media is altered so as to represent the content. How can I own the media but not the pits or even lack thereof on it? That's like saying I own only the paper and binding of a book, not the ink. Or better yet, I own a hard drive but not the magnetic fields on it.
And how is that solar power generated? By gravitational compression in the Sun which heats up the core to the point where fusion can take place.
And eating the fairy cake you had been using in your Total Perspective Vortex.
I've read that one on occasion. Most of the time it's utter bosh, but occasionally there's some gems. My all-time favorites are when they reflect on how the DPRK won the Korean War which was started by the evil United States in an unprovoked attack. Great stuff...
a fuedal economy
Seriously need to start spellchecking my work. A feudal economy. Dunno what a fuedal economy is...
Indeed. When compared to what preceded it, a fuedal economy, Marx observed that capitalism was superior in pretty much every way.
the bits about the communist system to replace it are little more than an afterthought in comparison
I read some of Marx's work and thought that exact same thing. He goes on and on about the pros and cons of capitalism, but the extent of his descriptions of how Communism would work were rather broad and vague. The Workers will do this and Society will do that. Very little about how exactly the whole thing is supposed to hang together, which I thought to be kinda important for a command economy. It's all well and good to say that we should "abolish competition and replace it with association" and have "communal ownership of goods", but you might as well say that the Golden Rule is the only law a country should have. Just how is this vague Society supposed to fairly and equally dole out scarse resources?
Compare that with capitalism, in which anyone with capital makes his own best decisions on how to use it. It not only works better when the 'rules' are vague, it pretty much requires it. Of course, so often you end up with monopolies and it's downhill from there...
Well, fascism includes a lot of the racial superiority complexes you find in Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and to a much lesser extent Musolini's Italy. A better example would be Pre-WW1 Germany, the Second Reich. A centralized monarchy but great control over the economy in the hands of independent industry magnates. And while it was not something I'd have liked to have lived under, it was nowhere near as repellent as the Third.
California represents about 12%. Who is the other 4%?
Now the asteroids, that's where the money's to be made!
Step One: Snag any handy Apollo asteroid.
Step Two: Mine the hell out of it! Drop the gold, iridium, platinum, and other insanely valuable materials down to the planet and sell it!
Step Three: Profit!
Or really big semaphores...
But does this mean that a good place for astronomers to work would be N. Korea? Tat would be wierd.
Gives you something to do while your elected representative is filibustering on C-SPAN.
To be sure, that's a fine strategy if you can survive more stupidity than they can. Which, lucky for us, turned out to have been the case.
This one's easy. C did. Regardless of what B did, A would have died anyway through C's actions. As far as anyone who isn't B knows, A would have surived if C hadn't screwed with his canteen.
And it can apply to other physical items, too. If I steal the jewels from your house which, before you notice anything amiss, burns down through actions totally unrelated to my own, did I really steal them?
Events have to have ripples to be real
Hmmm, how about: A cause by itself cannot exist. Both it and the effect spring into awareness/existence at the exact same moment.
A very insightful post. I wish I had mod points.
Huh? I'm intolerant of people who insult me, demean me, are condescending and rude to me, knowingly ignore logic and reason and evidence, and threaten me with imaginary punishments by imaginary third parties, all in the name of trying to convince me to blindly believe in a cult more bizarre than anything you'll find in a National Enquirer. Gee, I can't imagine why.
Intolerance is human based not religion based
I'm well aware of that. But while the use of reason strives for less intolerance, religions constantly seem to strive for more. The very first commandment demands that you not even consider a 'heretical' idea. The Koran has whole sections devoted to the treatment of nonbelievers. Some of it is quite idealistic, but an awful lot is just inhuman cruelty. The list goes on and on.
I know why because they are judging American Christianity not real Christianity
Do tell. And what exactly is this gaping theological difference between the True Christianity you evidently practice and the evil heretic Christianity practiced in my homeland? The false faiths I find around here obviously need to be stamped out of existence, right? Though I seem to have forgotten why. Perhaps you can refresh my memory?
it is typical of Americans to never think outside the box
Oh bullshit. Show me one shred of proof that everyone on this side of the pond is a totally unimaginative drone compared to the ubiquitous creative geniuses you live with. Enough with the ad hominem attacks.
Now, if life of any kind is in fact an extreme rarity, to the point where this rock is the only one like it in the cosmos, how amazing is it that it also managed to develop intelligent life as well? If life were common as dirt but intelligence a rarity, then the fairly undeniable fact of our existence is reasonable; it was likely to happen somewhere. But for the coin to land on its edge in the one place in the universe where life existed is stupendous.
A good analogy would be, what are the odds of someone winning the lottery (i.e., a planet developing intelligence) a) if a zillion people bought tickets (had life already) or b) if one person bought a single ticket? Neither is impossible, and the winner would still have his cash, but one is far, far more likely to be the case than the other.
What do we know of the rest of the galaxy, really?
Pretty much zilch. What say we go exploring! I hear Mars is nice this time of year...
Would you care to clarify those statements in any way or just let us assume that you are spouting nonsense? I for one cannot see how you got 'Religion' == 'Peace and good will towards greater numbers of men and women' from the statistics on that page. But by all means, do explain.
While religion has occasionally been used as an excuse for horrible acts
Not religion per se. Just blind faith. Important guy says we need to kill all of these people, so we go and do it and don't dare ask any questions. And by 'occasionally', you really mean 'most of human history', right?
it is much more often provides hope, stability and ethical values to work from
Hope, perhaps. IMO it's the same kind of hope one gets by playing the lottery, but hey... Stability is partly the problem. Religions must be very stable indeed and cannot survive major changes nor doubt of any kind. The very thing that science thrives and advances on. Ethics? Hogwash. I am really sick and tired of being told that I cannot be ethical, moral, or even just a nice guy without accepting the baggage of some crazy cult like Christianity. I happily accept the concept of being kind to my fellow man without needing the imaginary carrot and stick of heaven and hell.
Not necessarily. There's those $20k laser turntables. No needle to scratch up the vinyl, just a beam of light.
Even with some of the more ludicrous judgements in the past, why would a court believe that something retailing for $80 could suddenly be worth $100,000?
Kevin Mitnick had this exact tactic used against him. Regardless of what opinion one might have of him, the damages claimed against him were ridiculously extravagant.
In the most extreme case, he stole the source for Solaris OS and Sun initially claimed $80M in damages for it. Never mind the fact that the same exact source is given for free to schools and sold to developers for $100. Just about every single claim against him went along these lines. He stole credit card numbers but didn't give them to anyone. Yet somehow they still demanded punishment.
If I'm giving away free gum and instead of my putting it in your hand you simply take it from the counter, how on earth do I get to claim damages of any kind? The fact that such cases wasn't thrown out of court immediately is very disturbing. And now they want to put the final say in damages in the people who benefit most from them? Bad idea.
Spoken like someone who hasn't thumbed through a Staples catalog lately. Rebates are all the rage these days. I saw a digital camera for $1000, but between the 'Special Discounts!' and rebates, it was actually being sold for $600. Obviously they were planning right from the start to sell it for the smaller amount, but marked it up and then back down to make it look good. But what price do you suppose they'd use for piracy damages? Would they go through all the gimicks to merely double or triple their income from nabbing 'commercial' pirates? Well... yeah, actually, I imagine they would.
Point is, giving the software companies de facto control over setting damages rather than the logical means of actually figuring out how much they were really hurt and awarding them accordingly is a Bad Thing.
I am really sick and tired of hearing people say "Hydrogen = Hindenberg = Bad!". If you dress yourself up in rocket fuel or thermite and then scuff around on shag carpet, which is basically what the Hindenberg was, you are just asking for it. Your blimp could be filled with cotton candy and you'd still go up in flames. Furthermore, it is really stupid of you to complain about the flamability of H2 while at the same time putting stuff that is by weight many times as energetic into your car. And may I point out that despite the spectacularity with which the Hindenberg blew up, nearly two thirds of the people on board survived. I would just love to see a landing airplane have its fuel vented right into open flames at 100 feet and crash into the ground and still boast that kind of survival rate.
One flaming arrow . . . .
Will what? Blow up an airship? Not likely! And these things will be running higher up than any private, commercial, and most military planes can reach. And why not 'one stick of dynamite planted on a railroad track'? Or 'one carbomb on a suspension bridge'? Or 'one heat-seeking missile outside an airport'? Name one activity that can't be made fatal by some trivial attack at just the right time and place. Get some perspective, people.
Bear in mind that these things aren't balloons. The hydrogen inside is at a pressure not very different from the surrounding air. If you put a hole in it, sure, it leaks. But it's not like a balloon with a large pressure difference that causes it to rapidly deflate.