Yeah, that's because every President in the past thirty years except Clinton has done its best to spend more money each previous year than the year before. People keep going on about Obama spending too much, but this is a recession; this is when you are supposed to be spending money! Cutting back right now will be exactly like when the Republicans tried to cut back in 1937: we immediately went into a double dip Depression, and didn't get out until World War II.
Do you know when we were supposed to be cutting back? 2003-2007, just like we cut back from 1993-1999. Bush decided he didn't want to do that, that he'd rather borrow billions from China to give billionaires so many tax breaks that Warren Buffet pays less in taxes than his secretary. He's the first President who's ever lowered taxes during wartime, and he did it during the most costly war in history.
Don't blame Obama for doing what he is supposed to be doing, just because Bush Jr, Bush Sr, and Reagan couldn't figure out how to follow their own party's supposed creedo and cut spending, rather than cutting taxes to the rich.
The equilibrium point for hospitals is a few small, overworked hospitals in dense urban areas treating the masses who can't afford the services of a concierge doctor, and who are forced to let many people die when an unexpected situation arises, like a natural disaster, epidemic, terrorist attack, etc.
We build in an overabundance in the hospital system for exactly this reason, and keep them around even if they're not needed at that moment, so nobody dies from a lack of doctors when they are needed. It's the same reason we build in an overabundance of policemen or firefighters or public utility workers (what was the first thing that happened when California privatized electricity? Rolling blackouts).
What we really need is public healthcare, just like we need public roads, public firefighters, and public police officers. The current healthcare bill is a stopgap measure, just like mandatory health insurance was in Europe a hundred years ago, before it got replaced by public healthcare. The only reason we've gotten away without it for so long is our standout economy; we've succeeded in spite of, not because of, our outdated model of private healthcare fiefdoms.
Read Democracy in America to see how American government used to work and see how far we have moved away from the system of government that made us prosperous and allowed great individual freedom.
That wasn't the part of government that made us prosperous. Over the past 50 years, what's made us the economic engine of the world are a highway, waterway, and port system that, until very recently, were unrivaled in the world. We became an international hub for trade because, despite the fact that we are a huge country, you can get in a car or a truck and go to nearly any part of it in a comparatively short amount of time. That's how cars from Detroit, and beef from Chicago, and textiles from New England could get sent throughout the world, quickly and cheaply.
You know how we got there? It's because Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Republican and one of the last universally loved presidents, raised taxes to 90% and used the proceeds to build that international highway system, and those ports, and then let business compete openly on that publicly-owned infrastructure, to build new things and spread new ideas. This is exactly what everyone else is doing with the internet, and is why we, the country who came up with the idea in the first place, is in 17th place in internet speed and dropping.
No what's "wrong" is that I am being forced to pay a $950 Fine because I exercised my Pro-Choice right not to buy hospital insurance.
Oh, so you want me to pay to keep the emergency rooms open, so you can use them when you get in a car accident and need them? That "fine" is a fee to keep the hospitals open, so that when you need them they'll still be there. The current situation is that you, and people like you, are opting out of the health insurance market but still expect the emergency rooms to remain on standby, which is why hospitals are going out of business and health insurance companies keep having to raise rates.
It's just like the police or fire department, except that 100 years ago we decided to lump those services together and make them publicly owned--taking the market away from private security firms and fire deparments--while leaving doctors to the tender mercies of the insurance companies. Doctors at the time just didn't have good enough unions to do the same, at least in this country.
Er, actually it hasn't; it's been returned to the Treasury. In fact, the bank bailout is projected to return a profit; the part that's a massive loss is the bailout of AIG and all the other CDO providers (collaterallized debt obligations, basically people buying insurance on assets they don't have).
They (as in the Wall Street Journal, Fox News, etc) only have a "hard-on" for anything that fits in with the Murdoch agenda. In this case, the goal is to criticize the Chinese government's growing favoritism for local, government-owned business (Baidu) over legitimate foreign competitors (Google). They're not even necessarily wrong; at least, this is one of the few places where I'm not immediately dismissing the article as blatant right-wing shilling just because it's coming from a News Corp property.
The fact is, China is freer than the UK, about as free as Canada on the civil liberties front
Oh, so I suppose that in the UK there are so many black jails (that is, secret jails where provincial and national governments can "disappear" people to) that it's literally a cottage industry? Or that entire provinces of Canada are barred from journalists, so the international community can't see the human rights abuses? I guess you think that in the US you are required to have registration papers before you can migrate from the poor inland villages into the city? Maybe you think Australia executes nearly 2,000 people a year?
And I can gaurantee that you did not, "proclaim, 'I disagree with Islam. Let me quote the koran to make my point,'" anywhere in China, or you'd be posting from the inside of a windowless cell. If you had tried it in Tibet, you'd be dead, because the Chinese government has posted snipers throughout the region to ensure that nobody questions Chinese rule there.
That's a very good point, using the actual terms is both more accurate and less confusing; I've noticed how the acronym seems to fit into conversations like a square peg in a round hole already. I'll probably end up doing the same.
Piracy is illegal, yes. Is it wrong? Well, that's a bit more of a nuanced question.
Now, before you get back to your "Piracy is stealing" bit, that's simply inaccurate. CPTs (Copyrights, Trademarks, and Patents) are not property, whatever the media companies like to say: they're fundamentally different objects which exist in fundamentally different spaces (CPTs exist largely in our own minds, at least that's where the main value lies, whereas property exists in the physical world), and they are governed by different laws. Conflating the two is, in a very real sense, like saying an apple to the same as a picture of an apple.
As to whether breaking CPT laws are morally justifiable, that's far more nuanced than the simplistic notion that "Piracy is stealing" as well. For many people--maybe a majority of the people who actually understand what the laws say--copyright and (software) patent laws are themselves immoral (trademarks probably less so, as they tend to deal more with identification, but I digress). For such people, following these laws requires them to betray their own morals, because once you start following an immoral law you are effectively endorsing it and giving it more validity. Breaking copyright then becomes a moral imperative: it's civil disobedience, though I hesitate ascribing a term with such lofty connotations to an act which is nowhere near as heroic.
But it is kinda true. I mean, think about what the current DMCA does: it allows a copyright holder to, in essence, own a piece of your own thoughts, and charge you for using them, essentially in perpetuity. And yes, they are your thoughts: they're in your head, after all, and in the decades since you've first experienced them they've grown beyond what was expressed by the content's original creator. Sure, the nation's founders decided that a short term version of this was an acceptable compromise to encourage people to add to the public domain, but over the past two centuries things have gone so far out of hand that most people alive today have never actually seen any significant amount of work enter the public domain in their lifetimes, and if trends continue the way they have then nobody ever will. It's an unconscionable expansion of corporate power over the public mind and the public good, and I can fully understand the people who have simply decided to rebel against the whole thing.
Okay, how about the Humble Indie Bundle then? They made over a million dollars in a month, with basically no advertising other than word of mouth (which turned into news coverage), despite the fact that the games have no DRM and were--and still are--easily pirated.
"Information wants to be free." That's a fine statement to make if you already know what's being discussed--that is, you know the difference between free-as-in-speech and free-as-in-beer, but it's not a statement that is at all productive when speaking to an adversarial or even a divided crowd. Part of the problem is that the default meaning of "free" to most people is the "free beer" version. Put quite simply, most people spend far more people in their day to day lives thinking about money than they do about abstract legal concepts like free speech, and so whenever a well-meaning debater says, "Information wants to be free," that translates into most people's heads, by default, into: "I don't want to pay for information;" that is, you want to get everything for free. Yes, yes, I know that's not what the statement means, but it's a statement so easily misconstrued that it should really never be mentioned in a persuasive argument about copyrights, patents and trademarks if you want to actually try to persuade someone.
Similarly, I don't like to use the words "Intellectual Property," as that confuses the concepts of copyrights, trademarks, and patents with those of actual property, For the same reason I don't like the new mindset of calling such things "Imaginary Property," which in my mind is as juvenile as those people using M$ to denote Microsoft. Instead I try to use the acronym "CPT"--for Copyrights, Patents, and Trademarks--as a more accurate, and shorter, qualifier.
Yes, these word choices are a bit overly pedantic, but we need to be more diplomatic in our speech if we don't want discussions on CPT law to devolve into the same partisan shouting matches that everything else falls into.
How would you apply an evidence-based method to what's fundamentally a subjective debate like law?
Dueling peer-reviewed journal articles, followed by a review by an informed electorate. The pro side and the con side each get one article to state their case, then one more to counter the arguments made by the other side. People who have read both sides vote to decide which is correct.
Note that this is what the Senate was supposed to be: a debating society of informed, deliberative statesmen elected by the states to hammer out weighty issues in an informed, dignified fashion. These days it's become a circus for two reasons: 1) nobody bothers to read the bills or hear the arguments anymore, instead choosing to decide whichever way the money and political winds are blowing, and 2) a sizeable chunk of Senators have settled on a strategy of saying "no" to everything, in hopes that voters will be fooled into voting more of their party into office (sadly, it seems to be working).
When Paul Williams is complaining about being potentially "silenced," he doesn't mean in the sense of being censored, or black-bagged or something. What he means is that Lessig, by offering to debate him and disprove his incoherent ramblings point by point, is preventing him from freely engaging the modern US press.
For anyone who hasn't been paying attention the past fifteen years, there are basically three different, slightly overlapping, journalistic spheres, all of whom I label by their derogatory names: -The "liberal" media -The "mainstream" media, and -The "conservative" media
The "conservative" media consists of everything owned by Rupert Murdoch, a nationwide network of conservative talk radio hosts (Limbaugh, etc), and a few attack websites, like the one that posted that doctored video that got that poor woman fired last week. The "liberal" media consists of MSNBC, a few liberal talk show hosts, and a large network of liberal websites like MoveOn.org.
The liberal media basically exists to demonize and attack everything said by a Republican or by a member of the "conservative" media, and vice versa. Neither one cares about honest debate, or constructive discourse, or anything like that; all they care about is filtering out the facts that their audience doesn't want to hear, and only giving out the information that their audience does want to hear. This is why, for instance, every Republican congressman knew about that one case in Philadelphia where the New Black Panthers were accused of trying to keep a white man from voting through threat of violence, and being let off the hook by the Obama Justice Department, but none of them knew about the Minutemen trying to prevent Latino voters from voting by pointing guns at them, and being let off by the Bush Justice Department. Democrat congressmen, on the other hand, were all familiar with the Minutemen incident, but none at all knew about the New Black Panthers.
Given this climate, it's obvious why Paul Williams would be horrified about an invitation to debate: nobody would know about it! The "liberal" media wouldn't cover it, because it would risk their audience knowing who Paul Williams is, and the "conservative" media wouldn't cover it, because it would risk letting their audience know who Larry Lessig is. That's two-thirds of the press, gone, right off the bat.
Now, you ask, what about the "mainstream" media? Unfortunately, the "mainstream" media has, somehow, decided that journalists can't--or maybe shouldn't--influence the national discussion by injecting pesky things like facts or logic. Their job is to simply report on what the liberal talking heads are saying, then report on what the conservative talking heads are saying, and then try to tie them both into some kind of "narrative". Note how "facts" or "truth" don't come into play here; that's not the point. The mainstream media is "balanced," which to them means it doesn't matter if one side is right and the other side is wrong, or one side is lying and the other side is telling the truth. Their job is to simply report, to tell the story, not to inform anyone.
These are the people who told the story about WMDs in Iraq, and kept the story going until we were embroiled in a two-front war and ignoring the front that had Bin Laden in it. These are the people who told the story about Obama's rise to power, and kept it going until he won in a landslide. These are the people who talked about the health care "debate"--note the lack of any details about what was in the bill--and kept it going until we lost all hope of true reform. And these are the people who are telling the story about how Republicans are resurgent this year, and will keep telling it until they've taken over Congress, passed huge austerity measures, and, just like in 1937 when the Republicans started cutting spending in a big recession, plunge us into a double-dip, which last time we didn't really get out of (WWII was a weird situation all around economically speaking)
...isn't usually a problem; in fact it's usually a benefit. Maybe in other countries it is impossible to hate someone who never showed his face, but in the US it actually makes things easier. Whatever your political affiliation, one of the easiest and cheapest ways to disparage a group is to attach the words "big" or "faceless" to it. "Big" government, "faceless" corporations, "big" labor, etc. People don't trust you unless you can show them your face; that why for example BP was so eager to get a spokesman in front of cameras (too bad for them he made a douche of himself, but the point stands.)
The problem with the ASCAP/RIAA et al. is that they simply don't have anyone they can trot out in front of a camera without it looking like a South Park cartoon. "Look, there's Lars now. [...] This month he was looking to have a gold-plated shark tank bar installed right next to his pool, but thanks to people downloading his music for free, he must now wait a few months before he can afford it." Hollywood has spent decades highlighting the rich and glamorous lives that their stars lead, with huge houses, fast cars, and all of that; now they've got to try to work against all their own marketing to tell us that these same artists are starving and they have to put ordinary blue collar workers into debt for the rest of their lives to support them.
What they really need to do is put it in a place like the Sahara, or Death Valley, where you're assured of bright sunshine practically year round. Who in the world decided an island was the best place to put a solar plant?
You can talk about them, copy them, repeat them, etc. You just can't do* what is described without permission from the patent holder.
* the definition of "do" varies by jurisdiction.
The problem is exactly because of your disclaimer. It used to be that patents covered physical processes to produce goods. The Singer sewing machine, the cotton gin: these were innovative machines which were worthy of patent protection, to encourage that kind of "giant leap" technology that moves the world forward.
Nowadays patents cover obvious, often trivial actions like double clicks and common business strategies that have existed for decades (oh, but now they're on the internet, so they have to be new!) Patents these days are used by trolls and large corporations not to protect new innovations, but to starve other companies of old, established best practices, effectively cutting off access to what by rights should belong to the public domain with an army of lawyers and complicit court districts. While other countries are moving forward, developing technologies that will advance clean energy, computing and aerospace, US corporations are busily enriching themselves by leeching off of the public good, sending the country into a downward spiral of intellectual decay.
And we're idiots for doing it. The Chinese have no intention of letting American companies profit from their investments in China. Now that they've dragged themselves out of the impoverished, subsistence farming society that they've been stuck in as recently as the 1970s, they're going to do their damndest to ensure that the only people who profit from the newly emergent Chinese middle class are Chinese businesses.
It's already started. Look at the recent news: Google getting kicked out of China (inch by inch, but it's happening) in favor of Baidu; Westerners being arrested on trumped-up or even outright faked charges; Chinese hackers stealing billions of dollars worth of company secrets.
"Goodbye, American businesses! Hope the door hitting you on the way out didn't hurt too much! Don't worry about the factories or newly educated workforce you created in this country; we'll take good care of them, creating products to compete with you!"
I'll probably get labeled a flamebaiter for this, but if I were interested in virtualization I'd be looking exclusively at AMD anyway:
-You don't have to worry about whether the processor supports virtualization, as all AMD processors have included support for years (Intel has a bad habit of cutting these kinds of features to differentiate their products) -You tend to get more physical cores for your money with AMD, which tends to aid virtualization efforts (I don't remember where I read it, but IIRC Intel's hyperthreading didn't work so well for virtualization, but I could be wrong about that as I can't quote an actual article).
I used to be all Intel, but my last two boxes were AMD, just because I could understand the numbering conventions more easily. Intel's got a bunch of incompatible sockets and several different naming conventions, while AMD's (for now) seems much more consistent and easier to figure out.
That's why I bought AMD for my last two builds; I can't understand Intel's naming scheme, so I don't bother to try. Both the red and blue CPU teams are fast enough now unless I'm building for a very specific need, so I just go with the one that requires the least brainpower to know what I'm getting......that way I can spend all my time figuring out what the different GPU numbers mean.:)
Especially since the technology to actually build one doesn't exist yet, and won't for decades. Even the strongest carbon nanotubes that we can theoretically construct in laboratories today don't have the strength to keep a space elevator tethered to the Earth.
A launch loop, on the other hand, can be constructed with building materials available today; we just haven't done the necessary research to ensure the physics of a giant spinning chain are stable enough to work at that scale.
...Hell I think the whole "foremost mission of NASA is to make Muslims feel like they are smart"...
Oh come on, you don't really think that's what was said, do you? Have you even heard the interview? What the guy was saying was that Obama tasked NASA with doing more joint research projects with other nations, including the Muslim world. NASA--and indeed, America's general commitment to scientific research and advanced technology--is one of the few things that every nation in the world respects America for, even nations like Turkey who have begun over the past decade to lose respect for everything else we do. It's perfectly reasonable to say that it would be a good idea to promote that side of America to the rest of the world, rather than sending in the troops all the time.
How many more intractable wars in distant countries do we need to get involved in before we start to realize you earn more goodwill from peaceful cooperation than from military encroachment? Note that I'm not talking about appeasement--evil still needs to be fought--but it wouldn't hurt to have a few allies along the way.
It's not a "government granted" monopoly; that was outlawed in the 90s. The problem is that broadband is a natural monopoly: there is a huge fixed cost in infrastructure to run cables to every home, which means there's only room for 1 or 2 stable players in a region, and the startup costs for any new players make it cost-prohibitive to set up a competitor. Combine this with rampant consolidation under the corporate-friendly Bush administration, and you have single players holding each region hostage, with not enough incentive to move into other regions to compete with entrenched de-facto monopolies.
There are two solutions to this: 1) Municipal broadband: get the government to foot the startup costs. This basically results in a different de-facto monopoly (the muni broadband) in a few years, though one which is probably more likely to at least listen to its customers. 2) Mandated line sharing. This is the solution that Congress came up with for the telcos back in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. What it amounts to is that broadband providers with existing infrastructure are required to make their lines available at-cost to anyone who wants to start up a business to compete with them. It's worked in countries around the world with both denser and less dense populations to drastically lower broadband prices and improve service and speed--every country that has leapfrogged us in the last decade has done something similar--so naturally the broadband providers (and their paid Congressional shills) are fighting tooth and nail against it. And they're winning, because the Democrats are too weak-willed to put their foot down.
Apparently they already did: the Supreme Court now considers corporations to be individuals, but with superior rights (cannot be given jail time or the death penalty, unrestricted spending on political ads, no draft or jury duty, lower tax rates than individuals, etc). About the only thing they can't do yet is vote or hold political office, though that may change too.
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Yeah, that's because every President in the past thirty years except Clinton has done its best to spend more money each previous year than the year before. People keep going on about Obama spending too much, but this is a recession; this is when you are supposed to be spending money! Cutting back right now will be exactly like when the Republicans tried to cut back in 1937: we immediately went into a double dip Depression, and didn't get out until World War II.
Do you know when we were supposed to be cutting back? 2003-2007, just like we cut back from 1993-1999. Bush decided he didn't want to do that, that he'd rather borrow billions from China to give billionaires so many tax breaks that Warren Buffet pays less in taxes than his secretary. He's the first President who's ever lowered taxes during wartime, and he did it during the most costly war in history.
Don't blame Obama for doing what he is supposed to be doing, just because Bush Jr, Bush Sr, and Reagan couldn't figure out how to follow their own party's supposed creedo and cut spending, rather than cutting taxes to the rich.
The equilibrium point for hospitals is a few small, overworked hospitals in dense urban areas treating the masses who can't afford the services of a concierge doctor, and who are forced to let many people die when an unexpected situation arises, like a natural disaster, epidemic, terrorist attack, etc.
We build in an overabundance in the hospital system for exactly this reason, and keep them around even if they're not needed at that moment, so nobody dies from a lack of doctors when they are needed. It's the same reason we build in an overabundance of policemen or firefighters or public utility workers (what was the first thing that happened when California privatized electricity? Rolling blackouts).
What we really need is public healthcare, just like we need public roads, public firefighters, and public police officers. The current healthcare bill is a stopgap measure, just like mandatory health insurance was in Europe a hundred years ago, before it got replaced by public healthcare. The only reason we've gotten away without it for so long is our standout economy; we've succeeded in spite of, not because of, our outdated model of private healthcare fiefdoms.
I just assumed he was talking about yet another fight between the Debian and Ubuntu people.
Or the Gnome and KDE people.
Or the Red Hat and the Debian people.
Or the Democrats and the Republicans.
Or the Trekkies and the Jedi.
Read Democracy in America to see how American government used to work and see how far we have moved away from the system of government that made us prosperous and allowed great individual freedom.
That wasn't the part of government that made us prosperous. Over the past 50 years, what's made us the economic engine of the world are a highway, waterway, and port system that, until very recently, were unrivaled in the world. We became an international hub for trade because, despite the fact that we are a huge country, you can get in a car or a truck and go to nearly any part of it in a comparatively short amount of time. That's how cars from Detroit, and beef from Chicago, and textiles from New England could get sent throughout the world, quickly and cheaply.
You know how we got there? It's because Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Republican and one of the last universally loved presidents, raised taxes to 90% and used the proceeds to build that international highway system, and those ports, and then let business compete openly on that publicly-owned infrastructure, to build new things and spread new ideas. This is exactly what everyone else is doing with the internet, and is why we, the country who came up with the idea in the first place, is in 17th place in internet speed and dropping.
No what's "wrong" is that I am being forced to pay a $950 Fine because I exercised my Pro-Choice right not to buy hospital insurance.
Oh, so you want me to pay to keep the emergency rooms open, so you can use them when you get in a car accident and need them? That "fine" is a fee to keep the hospitals open, so that when you need them they'll still be there. The current situation is that you, and people like you, are opting out of the health insurance market but still expect the emergency rooms to remain on standby, which is why hospitals are going out of business and health insurance companies keep having to raise rates.
It's just like the police or fire department, except that 100 years ago we decided to lump those services together and make them publicly owned--taking the market away from private security firms and fire deparments--while leaving doctors to the tender mercies of the insurance companies. Doctors at the time just didn't have good enough unions to do the same, at least in this country.
Er, actually it hasn't; it's been returned to the Treasury. In fact, the bank bailout is projected to return a profit; the part that's a massive loss is the bailout of AIG and all the other CDO providers (collaterallized debt obligations, basically people buying insurance on assets they don't have).
They (as in the Wall Street Journal, Fox News, etc) only have a "hard-on" for anything that fits in with the Murdoch agenda. In this case, the goal is to criticize the Chinese government's growing favoritism for local, government-owned business (Baidu) over legitimate foreign competitors (Google). They're not even necessarily wrong; at least, this is one of the few places where I'm not immediately dismissing the article as blatant right-wing shilling just because it's coming from a News Corp property.
The fact is, China is freer than the UK, about as free as Canada on the civil liberties front
Oh, so I suppose that in the UK there are so many black jails (that is, secret jails where provincial and national governments can "disappear" people to) that it's literally a cottage industry? Or that entire provinces of Canada are barred from journalists, so the international community can't see the human rights abuses? I guess you think that in the US you are required to have registration papers before you can migrate from the poor inland villages into the city? Maybe you think Australia executes nearly 2,000 people a year?
And I can gaurantee that you did not, "proclaim, 'I disagree with Islam. Let me quote the koran to make my point,'" anywhere in China, or you'd be posting from the inside of a windowless cell. If you had tried it in Tibet, you'd be dead, because the Chinese government has posted snipers throughout the region to ensure that nobody questions Chinese rule there.
That's a very good point, using the actual terms is both more accurate and less confusing; I've noticed how the acronym seems to fit into conversations like a square peg in a round hole already. I'll probably end up doing the same.
Piracy is illegal, yes. Is it wrong? Well, that's a bit more of a nuanced question.
Now, before you get back to your "Piracy is stealing" bit, that's simply inaccurate. CPTs (Copyrights, Trademarks, and Patents) are not property, whatever the media companies like to say: they're fundamentally different objects which exist in fundamentally different spaces (CPTs exist largely in our own minds, at least that's where the main value lies, whereas property exists in the physical world), and they are governed by different laws. Conflating the two is, in a very real sense, like saying an apple to the same as a picture of an apple.
As to whether breaking CPT laws are morally justifiable, that's far more nuanced than the simplistic notion that "Piracy is stealing" as well. For many people--maybe a majority of the people who actually understand what the laws say--copyright and (software) patent laws are themselves immoral (trademarks probably less so, as they tend to deal more with identification, but I digress). For such people, following these laws requires them to betray their own morals, because once you start following an immoral law you are effectively endorsing it and giving it more validity. Breaking copyright then becomes a moral imperative: it's civil disobedience, though I hesitate ascribing a term with such lofty connotations to an act which is nowhere near as heroic.
But it is kinda true. I mean, think about what the current DMCA does: it allows a copyright holder to, in essence, own a piece of your own thoughts, and charge you for using them, essentially in perpetuity. And yes, they are your thoughts: they're in your head, after all, and in the decades since you've first experienced them they've grown beyond what was expressed by the content's original creator. Sure, the nation's founders decided that a short term version of this was an acceptable compromise to encourage people to add to the public domain, but over the past two centuries things have gone so far out of hand that most people alive today have never actually seen any significant amount of work enter the public domain in their lifetimes, and if trends continue the way they have then nobody ever will. It's an unconscionable expansion of corporate power over the public mind and the public good, and I can fully understand the people who have simply decided to rebel against the whole thing.
Okay, how about the Humble Indie Bundle then? They made over a million dollars in a month, with basically no advertising other than word of mouth (which turned into news coverage), despite the fact that the games have no DRM and were--and still are--easily pirated.
"Information wants to be free." That's a fine statement to make if you already know what's being discussed--that is, you know the difference between free-as-in-speech and free-as-in-beer, but it's not a statement that is at all productive when speaking to an adversarial or even a divided crowd. Part of the problem is that the default meaning of "free" to most people is the "free beer" version. Put quite simply, most people spend far more people in their day to day lives thinking about money than they do about abstract legal concepts like free speech, and so whenever a well-meaning debater says, "Information wants to be free," that translates into most people's heads, by default, into: "I don't want to pay for information;" that is, you want to get everything for free. Yes, yes, I know that's not what the statement means, but it's a statement so easily misconstrued that it should really never be mentioned in a persuasive argument about copyrights, patents and trademarks if you want to actually try to persuade someone.
Similarly, I don't like to use the words "Intellectual Property," as that confuses the concepts of copyrights, trademarks, and patents with those of actual property, For the same reason I don't like the new mindset of calling such things "Imaginary Property," which in my mind is as juvenile as those people using M$ to denote Microsoft. Instead I try to use the acronym "CPT"--for Copyrights, Patents, and Trademarks--as a more accurate, and shorter, qualifier.
Yes, these word choices are a bit overly pedantic, but we need to be more diplomatic in our speech if we don't want discussions on CPT law to devolve into the same partisan shouting matches that everything else falls into.
How would you apply an evidence-based method to what's fundamentally a subjective debate like law?
Dueling peer-reviewed journal articles, followed by a review by an informed electorate. The pro side and the con side each get one article to state their case, then one more to counter the arguments made by the other side. People who have read both sides vote to decide which is correct.
Note that this is what the Senate was supposed to be: a debating society of informed, deliberative statesmen elected by the states to hammer out weighty issues in an informed, dignified fashion. These days it's become a circus for two reasons: 1) nobody bothers to read the bills or hear the arguments anymore, instead choosing to decide whichever way the money and political winds are blowing, and 2) a sizeable chunk of Senators have settled on a strategy of saying "no" to everything, in hopes that voters will be fooled into voting more of their party into office (sadly, it seems to be working).
When Paul Williams is complaining about being potentially "silenced," he doesn't mean in the sense of being censored, or black-bagged or something. What he means is that Lessig, by offering to debate him and disprove his incoherent ramblings point by point, is preventing him from freely engaging the modern US press.
For anyone who hasn't been paying attention the past fifteen years, there are basically three different, slightly overlapping, journalistic spheres, all of whom I label by their derogatory names:
-The "liberal" media
-The "mainstream" media, and
-The "conservative" media
The "conservative" media consists of everything owned by Rupert Murdoch, a nationwide network of conservative talk radio hosts (Limbaugh, etc), and a few attack websites, like the one that posted that doctored video that got that poor woman fired last week. The "liberal" media consists of MSNBC, a few liberal talk show hosts, and a large network of liberal websites like MoveOn.org.
The liberal media basically exists to demonize and attack everything said by a Republican or by a member of the "conservative" media, and vice versa. Neither one cares about honest debate, or constructive discourse, or anything like that; all they care about is filtering out the facts that their audience doesn't want to hear, and only giving out the information that their audience does want to hear. This is why, for instance, every Republican congressman knew about that one case in Philadelphia where the New Black Panthers were accused of trying to keep a white man from voting through threat of violence, and being let off the hook by the Obama Justice Department, but none of them knew about the Minutemen trying to prevent Latino voters from voting by pointing guns at them, and being let off by the Bush Justice Department. Democrat congressmen, on the other hand, were all familiar with the Minutemen incident, but none at all knew about the New Black Panthers.
Given this climate, it's obvious why Paul Williams would be horrified about an invitation to debate: nobody would know about it! The "liberal" media wouldn't cover it, because it would risk their audience knowing who Paul Williams is, and the "conservative" media wouldn't cover it, because it would risk letting their audience know who Larry Lessig is. That's two-thirds of the press, gone, right off the bat.
Now, you ask, what about the "mainstream" media? Unfortunately, the "mainstream" media has, somehow, decided that journalists can't--or maybe shouldn't--influence the national discussion by injecting pesky things like facts or logic. Their job is to simply report on what the liberal talking heads are saying, then report on what the conservative talking heads are saying, and then try to tie them both into some kind of "narrative". Note how "facts" or "truth" don't come into play here; that's not the point. The mainstream media is "balanced," which to them means it doesn't matter if one side is right and the other side is wrong, or one side is lying and the other side is telling the truth. Their job is to simply report, to tell the story, not to inform anyone.
These are the people who told the story about WMDs in Iraq, and kept the story going until we were embroiled in a two-front war and ignoring the front that had Bin Laden in it. These are the people who told the story about Obama's rise to power, and kept it going until he won in a landslide. These are the people who talked about the health care "debate"--note the lack of any details about what was in the bill--and kept it going until we lost all hope of true reform. And these are the people who are telling the story about how Republicans are resurgent this year, and will keep telling it until they've taken over Congress, passed huge austerity measures, and, just like in 1937 when the Republicans started cutting spending in a big recession, plunge us into a double-dip, which last time we didn't really get out of (WWII was a weird situation all around economically speaking)
...isn't usually a problem; in fact it's usually a benefit. Maybe in other countries it is impossible to hate someone who never showed his face, but in the US it actually makes things easier. Whatever your political affiliation, one of the easiest and cheapest ways to disparage a group is to attach the words "big" or "faceless" to it. "Big" government, "faceless" corporations, "big" labor, etc. People don't trust you unless you can show them your face; that why for example BP was so eager to get a spokesman in front of cameras (too bad for them he made a douche of himself, but the point stands.)
The problem with the ASCAP/RIAA et al. is that they simply don't have anyone they can trot out in front of a camera without it looking like a South Park cartoon. "Look, there's Lars now. [...] This month he was looking to have a gold-plated shark tank bar installed right next to his pool, but thanks to people downloading his music for free, he must now wait a few months before he can afford it." Hollywood has spent decades highlighting the rich and glamorous lives that their stars lead, with huge houses, fast cars, and all of that; now they've got to try to work against all their own marketing to tell us that these same artists are starving and they have to put ordinary blue collar workers into debt for the rest of their lives to support them.
What they really need to do is put it in a place like the Sahara, or Death Valley, where you're assured of bright sunshine practically year round. Who in the world decided an island was the best place to put a solar plant?
The problem is exactly because of your disclaimer. It used to be that patents covered physical processes to produce goods. The Singer sewing machine, the cotton gin: these were innovative machines which were worthy of patent protection, to encourage that kind of "giant leap" technology that moves the world forward.
Nowadays patents cover obvious, often trivial actions like double clicks and common business strategies that have existed for decades (oh, but now they're on the internet, so they have to be new!) Patents these days are used by trolls and large corporations not to protect new innovations, but to starve other companies of old, established best practices, effectively cutting off access to what by rights should belong to the public domain with an army of lawyers and complicit court districts. While other countries are moving forward, developing technologies that will advance clean energy, computing and aerospace, US corporations are busily enriching themselves by leeching off of the public good, sending the country into a downward spiral of intellectual decay.
And we're idiots for doing it. The Chinese have no intention of letting American companies profit from their investments in China. Now that they've dragged themselves out of the impoverished, subsistence farming society that they've been stuck in as recently as the 1970s, they're going to do their damndest to ensure that the only people who profit from the newly emergent Chinese middle class are Chinese businesses.
It's already started. Look at the recent news: Google getting kicked out of China (inch by inch, but it's happening) in favor of Baidu; Westerners being arrested on trumped-up or even outright faked charges; Chinese hackers stealing billions of dollars worth of company secrets.
"Goodbye, American businesses! Hope the door hitting you on the way out didn't hurt too much! Don't worry about the factories or newly educated workforce you created in this country; we'll take good care of them, creating products to compete with you!"
I'll probably get labeled a flamebaiter for this, but if I were interested in virtualization I'd be looking exclusively at AMD anyway:
-You don't have to worry about whether the processor supports virtualization, as all AMD processors have included support for years (Intel has a bad habit of cutting these kinds of features to differentiate their products)
-You tend to get more physical cores for your money with AMD, which tends to aid virtualization efforts (I don't remember where I read it, but IIRC Intel's hyperthreading didn't work so well for virtualization, but I could be wrong about that as I can't quote an actual article).
I used to be all Intel, but my last two boxes were AMD, just because I could understand the numbering conventions more easily. Intel's got a bunch of incompatible sockets and several different naming conventions, while AMD's (for now) seems much more consistent and easier to figure out.
Isn't there a company actually doing six blades now?
That's why I bought AMD for my last two builds; I can't understand Intel's naming scheme, so I don't bother to try. Both the red and blue CPU teams are fast enough now unless I'm building for a very specific need, so I just go with the one that requires the least brainpower to know what I'm getting... ...that way I can spend all my time figuring out what the different GPU numbers mean. :)
Especially since the technology to actually build one doesn't exist yet, and won't for decades. Even the strongest carbon nanotubes that we can theoretically construct in laboratories today don't have the strength to keep a space elevator tethered to the Earth.
A launch loop, on the other hand, can be constructed with building materials available today; we just haven't done the necessary research to ensure the physics of a giant spinning chain are stable enough to work at that scale.
...Hell I think the whole "foremost mission of NASA is to make Muslims feel like they are smart"...
Oh come on, you don't really think that's what was said, do you? Have you even heard the interview? What the guy was saying was that Obama tasked NASA with doing more joint research projects with other nations, including the Muslim world. NASA--and indeed, America's general commitment to scientific research and advanced technology--is one of the few things that every nation in the world respects America for, even nations like Turkey who have begun over the past decade to lose respect for everything else we do. It's perfectly reasonable to say that it would be a good idea to promote that side of America to the rest of the world, rather than sending in the troops all the time.
How many more intractable wars in distant countries do we need to get involved in before we start to realize you earn more goodwill from peaceful cooperation than from military encroachment? Note that I'm not talking about appeasement--evil still needs to be fought--but it wouldn't hurt to have a few allies along the way.
It's not a "government granted" monopoly; that was outlawed in the 90s. The problem is that broadband is a natural monopoly: there is a huge fixed cost in infrastructure to run cables to every home, which means there's only room for 1 or 2 stable players in a region, and the startup costs for any new players make it cost-prohibitive to set up a competitor. Combine this with rampant consolidation under the corporate-friendly Bush administration, and you have single players holding each region hostage, with not enough incentive to move into other regions to compete with entrenched de-facto monopolies.
There are two solutions to this:
1) Municipal broadband: get the government to foot the startup costs. This basically results in a different de-facto monopoly (the muni broadband) in a few years, though one which is probably more likely to at least listen to its customers.
2) Mandated line sharing. This is the solution that Congress came up with for the telcos back in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. What it amounts to is that broadband providers with existing infrastructure are required to make their lines available at-cost to anyone who wants to start up a business to compete with them. It's worked in countries around the world with both denser and less dense populations to drastically lower broadband prices and improve service and speed--every country that has leapfrogged us in the last decade has done something similar--so naturally the broadband providers (and their paid Congressional shills) are fighting tooth and nail against it. And they're winning, because the Democrats are too weak-willed to put their foot down.
Apparently they already did: the Supreme Court now considers corporations to be individuals, but with superior rights (cannot be given jail time or the death penalty, unrestricted spending on political ads, no draft or jury duty, lower tax rates than individuals, etc). About the only thing they can't do yet is vote or hold political office, though that may change too.
Sure, it's a joke for now...