It is a load of shameless and deceptive nonsense; and does make it better that it is wrapped up in florid language, if you will excuse the pun, hur, hur. "Create a new species"? Even highly educated plant breeders haven't been able to do that, but a car manufacturer manages to do it with a gesture and a lorry-load of hype?
I'm not so sure that 'species' is so well defined a concept when it comes to plants and hybrids that everyone agrees on what is and isn't a new species. However, I distinctly suspect that 'hybrid' got turned in to 'species' somewhere between the grower's mouth and journalist's article. Science journalists in particular seem to love writing complete bollocks that sometimes even flatly contradicts their only source.
For a plant species to work well as carbon-capturer,
No-one has said anything about them capturing carbon. They were chosen to capture and degrade other pollutants. Plants/do/ degrade pollutants like formaldehyde and some people buy particular pot plants specifically to reduce volatile organic compounds in their indoor air. (Though you're probably better off buying a proper filter). It sounds like Toyota's gardener has heard of the idea and though 'hmm, maybe I could do that, too' and then made the mistake of allowing their PR department to catch on.
I mean, do you really expect ahmed the farmer in pakistan to learn how to use a condom ? or his wife to take the pill daily ?
Ermm....yes? It'll take a long time, but farmers in the west have, so why couldn't this happen everywhere else?
Two things must happen first, though. They need to be available, at reasonable cost. And it needs to be in their interests to use them. At a minimum, people need to know they won't starve to death in old age if they only have two children, and that they aren't going to see most of their children die. (And that the state/aid won't take care of them on their behalf, there seem to be a number of large benefit-dependent families here in the UK). There'll need to be a cultural change, too, of course - but that'll come, slowly, once people find that their own and their children's lives are improved when they have slightly fewer than the average number of children, so that the cultural norms change little bit by little bit.
But where does the value come from? Ultimately from the efforts somebody puts in to them - ie. the use of limited resources. "Doing more with fewer resources" only means shifting the focus to using some other resources instead - if not oil, then wind or sunlight, with potentially harmful consequences for the environment.
No, it doesn't. Moving 10000 tons of iron ore can be done with fewer resource now then 30 years ago. The same level of resources used to make a TV 15 years ago can make a better one today. Power generation is more efficient, we have better insulation materials for buildings, we have the capacity to make more efficient computers that can do much more than 20 years ago, someone has invented the post-it note, etc.
I'm not saying that we are doing more with less. We're undoubtedly doing more with more. I'm saying that technological progress, improvements in management and manufacturing techniques, scale through reduced trade barriers, capital accumulation, knowledge and skill diffusion and so on mean that even if we stopped increasing our overall resource use today we could still continue to increase economic output. It'd be a lower rate of growth, but it wouldn't be zero.
Well, your premise was that you could increase the money supply without inflation when "everyone decides to hang on to their money more tightly". The response that should be to drop prices, so people will buy more. Not sure what else you were referring to - if people are holding on to money, they are not buying goods, yes? So maybe because prices are too high?
Yes. Precisely my point is that prices do not drop when they ought to. Contracts and mortgages lock people in to prices, people suffer from money illusion or haven't noticed yet that the price level is falling and so don't realize or don't believe that their real income isn't falling, etc. The adjustment is protracted and difficult and slow, and people hold on to their money even tighter when they see that it'll be worth more in a year. In the mean time prices stay too high, demand too low and there is unemployment. If prices did just drop as you are hoping they would then there wouldn't be a recession for us to worry about in the first place.
You're making a preconceived assumption that everything has to be centrally planned. BTW: when industries do this it's considered price-fixing and is illegal. Somehow government or the Fed should do it instead?
Yes, central banks and governments should involve themselves in the money supply. They should do it because it has the potentially to alleviate enormous levels of suffering and make life better, which is the whole purpose of the economy and the government. They should not, of course, involve themselves in relative prices without a further reason. Just the overall price level.
Why not just let the prices correct themselves. If people aren't buying buggy whips, maybe the buggy whip factory should just shut down. If people aren't buying much wheat, farms should cut back on production. If a labour union won't allow a business to lower wages or layoff workers even when people are buying less of their product, the company should go out of business. Yes, that means some will go through hard times. But that's better than putting everybody through hard times to keep a business going that is doomed to failure anyway.
Why is the business doomed to failure anyway? People want the wheat, the wheat farmers want things that those who want the wheat could produce. The problem is that the economy is not letting that exchange happen....destroying your physical infrastructure is not an appropriate response to a breakdown of the control mechanism. Fix the control mechanism instead.
Whether it's a fixed money supply or not is not the issue. The issue is that millions of people are better at deciding where that level should be is orders of magnitude better than letting a small group make that guess. They are far more likely to be wrong.
Millions of people are not deciding where the price level should be. Millions of people are making billions of little decisions about what to buy, what to sell, and so on. The price level emerges from the interaction of all of these people. Even if all of these millions agree they want the price level to fall by 40% that doesn't mean 40% falls will be the result of their interactions. And you most definitely don't want to be the only person to cut your price level by 40%, and then go out of business because you can't pay your ten year farm lease which hasn't changed. That farm lease price will fall sooner or later, once enough farmers have gone bust and enough land and people left idle. But that really is doing it the hard way.
The prices do fall, eventually. They fall because people are gradually, a few people at a time, forced in to it by unemployment, bankruptcy, hardship and misery. It involves huge waste of resources while this happens - labour is unused, houses are left empty, companies and their capital are destroyed. The process of price adjustment you're asking for is the recession.
But isn't indebtedness at the very basis of Capitalism, at least as we know it?
Indebtedness is the basis of pretty much any system involving money. (Capitalism is different, I don't think there's any reason why you couldn't have capitalism without money). Suppose I, say, wash your car and you give me $10. What does that $10 represent? The fact that I've done something for the rest of the economy and it hasn't yet returned the favour. ie, my ownership of it represents a debt, in a very plain and old fashioned way. Since the whole point of money is to represent debts of this sort I don't think you should be scared that money is constituted as debt. It's getting the amounts wrong - people getting in to obligations they can't keep - that's the potential problem, not that money represents debt.
Capitalism as it is known now, will never be sustainable, because sustainable means, in the long run, zero growth.
Economic growth doesn't equate to the exploitation of more and more resources, or the creation of more and more physical stuff (although doing so can cause growth). Economic growth means growth in the value that we all extract from our economic activity. Doing more and better things with fewer resources represents growth, just as much as doing more by using more resources does. Obviously the heat death of the universe will get in the way eventually, but there's no reason in principle that the economy can't go on creating more and more value for a very long time.
(That's not necessarily the right thing, of course. It's conceivable that less value but more leisure time for everyone would turn out better, for example).
Here, you are just talking about some of the mechanisms of inflation. A better way to describe it is the amount of capital in the system.
Capital is something you can use to create a stream of (real) goods and services - a factory, a shop, a train, a house. You can't (directly) change the amount of capital there is in an economy by creating and destroying money. Money is, in essence, no more than an assignment of abstract numbers to people. It's pure information.
If, as you suggest, the response to reduced spending is for a central planner to increase the amount of fake money, then prices are propped up when they should naturally be falling.
Firstly, why should they be falling? What does having the price of everything fall or rise achieve that an increase in the money supply with constant prices does not?
Secondly, price falls are a very difficult process to a point where this process doesn't really work. This is really the nub of it, if prices were not sticky the gold standard would work. Workers and unions defend wages, firms may need their input prices to fall before they can fully reduce their output prices, competitors wait for someone else to move first, homeowners hold out for house prices which are months or years out of date, etc. Prices stay high for months or years and resources get underused, including labour. If everyone could agree to reduce their prices together there'd be no problem, but it's a coordination nightmare compounded by money illusion. Why bother when the state can adjust the money supply? It's like changing the clocks to do daylight saving....we/could/ have the same effect by all agreeing to adjust all of our schedules, opening times, etc. all at once on the same day whilst keeping the time the same. But it's much easier to change the defined time of day.
Eventually this will catch up with you when people start spending, and you'll have to raise interest rates and inflation will take off.
Which is just saying that the other side of increasing the supply when the velocity of money falls is that you have to reduce it again when it rises. That can be done. It won't be done perfectly, I'm sure, so there'll be too little or too much inflation; but that doesn't mean that a fixed money supply is better.
This "potentially valuable policy response" that you advocate is simply a way to interfere with the ability of people to make rational decisions about spending and saving, and prevent any corrections in resource allocation from occurring where they should.
The policy response is a response to irrational decision making. I'm sure that amongst the 25% unemployed in the depression there were butchers who wanted bread, bakers who wanted meat, farmers who wanted tractors, engineers who wanted corn, etc. There must have been many valuable trades which just didn't happen because the normal economic decision making systems were broken. Even if the individual spending and saving decisions were rational the systemic decisions were not, and there was clearly nothing even approaching a correct resource allocation.
Yes, you are correct. But inflation should be driven by the resources available, demand for various goods, and the level of labor available, not by some central planning facility trying to manage everybody's decision-making.
Why should it be driven by those things? Relative prices should (in the absence of specific market failures, etc, of course), but why the absolute price level? It's only an arbitrary number, it doesn't represent anything. And managing certain aspects of the decision making in a system-wide way is the whole point. Sometimes the system makes utterly terrible and tragic decisions even as individuals act rationally. It's foolish not to mitigate this.
The natural level of inflation in a gold-backed monetary
Inflation is too much money chasing too few goods. Prices go up because there's more money in the system and production of goods is either stagnant or declining.
Prices depend on the velocity of money, too. If everyone decides to hang on to their money more tightly, so that each piece of it changes hands half as often, say, then the amount of money in the system can be increased without causing inflation. Making it impossible to adjust your money supply (which is all the gold standard really achieves) doesn't eliminate inflation and deflation, it just removes a potentially valuable policy response to changes in things like consumer confidence and the savings rate. That's why economies that took longer to leave the gold standard took longer to come out of the great depression - they couldn't respond to the fall in the velocity of money by creating more.
You also shouldn't just assume that inflation is always and necessarily evil. Especially not in the presence of price and wage stickiness - in some areas of some economies it's as near to impossible as makes no difference to reduce wages in nominal terms. A low level of inflation is quite possibly a good thing.
I find it somewhat strange that US guards could operate on Canadian soil.
IIRC, at both the port of Dover and Channel Tunnel the French frontier control is in the UK and the UK border control in France, so it's hardly unheard of. But they do it that way here so that the traffic queue clogs the approach roads and not the port/terminal, which hardly applies at the US/Canada border.
The UK border control still send you through a concrete maze full of people in yellow jackets paid to look threatening and vehicle immobilisers ready to pop up when you arrive, though. The French don't, of course.
Pessimistic locking is backed by the db, so in some instances it does nothing. On mysql, using their innodb engine, as an example, all threads trying to access a locked record will actually block until the lock is released. The latter is often problematic in web apps, but is sometimes desireable.
Holding a DB row/table lock for longer than a single server call is usually a bad idea. Consider:
The effect on your backup software. (It might work fine with the old data, it might block).
The effect on a DBA trying to, say, add a column.
The effect on other software updating columns unrelated to the edit (a last customer website login field for a customer locked by someone in a call centre, say).
The increased potential for deadlocks in the server.
The effect on the database engine itself (you may run in to performance problems with lots of locks, lots of open transactions or lots of waiting transactions).
How you would tell your second user that the record is locked by , rather than just letting his web browser time-out.
How the 'Save changes' web server request will resume the same DB transaction as the 'Start edit' web server request, which may have been sent to an entirely different computer.
Don't use database-level row/table/index/whatever locks for this.
The questioner didn't make clear if he meant 'my users are complaining about conflicting edits, what system behaviour can I introduce which will solve their problem?' or 'I want (pessimistic) locking, how can I do it?'. Either way he (and we) should start with the first question, not the second.
It's a simple, effective and elegant technique which fails to solve the problem. Yes, it stops a second user throwing away a first user's changes....by throwing away the second user's changes. You can write and the user can negotiate some sort of conflict resolution, but in terms of your software's behaviour as presented to your users that's really a whole other option (there are four: 1. first user wins; 2. second user wins; 3. locks; 4. tell the user and let him merge or choose, eg like Subversion).
HTTP may be stateless, but the world and people's view of it is not. Locking is a readily understood concept and it prevents users doing work which needs to be thrown away or repaired, or which is duplicating what someone else is doing. It may not be appropriate to the (real-world) situation, but if your customer does demand it don't try to explain that his world-view is wrong. Optimistic locking might be an acceptable flaw in some cases, especially if the granularity is done carefully (one user changes a customer's address, another gives him some loyalty points - there need not be a conflict), but good luck convincing your users it's anything other than a flaw.
If you don't want to do full locking or it's not acceptable then it may be better to use most-recent-wins. Only save changes (don't save stored information which the user didn't change, treating logical blocks of data like address fields as a unit) and try to make your fields inherently concurrent first, though. This is probably more intuitive behaviour than first-user-wins (why should an older edit take precedence over a newer one?).
Agreed. With many clients, dealing with hundreds of open locks at a time, as well as those same hundreds of rows being updated by ajax every 10s seems like a nightmare to manage.
You don't actually need ACID semantics for the 10s heartbeats....what you need is a repository somewhere that tells you whether user/session/lock [x] is still alive. The database is a convenient but expensive one. If you really have a load problem and need locks then you can put all of this in a server/some servers somewhere, accessed by, say, CORBA or RMI. You quite possibly have an application server or somesuch handy already anyway. If a server crashes just restart it; it'll be up to date again in ten seconds. Such a thing can be useful elsewhere, too - such as for caching login cookies or rarely changed data.
Unless US law is very different to English law, having one party to a contract break it doesn't mean the other is automatically allowed to break it in any way they please in response. They might be if it's the right kind of breach, or the contract might say what they can do explicitly, but this doesn't sound to me to be likely to be that kind of breach.
You'd have to be a complete idiot of a cleaning company to sue, though, so I doubt anyone cared.
But those weren't the stated reasons. There may be some effect as people move to it, but not because the people will properly self-assess their driving skill and properly put themselves in the correct groups. I stated that was wrong, and you seem to be agreeing.
Even if you don't self-assess well your current insurer's assessment is presumably a good prediction of another insurer's assessment. Unless insurers share this data (and I'm sure they'd like to, but there'd be problems standardizing it and the prospect may put people off) then you can use this as a basis for self-selection when choosing a new insurer and policy.
I also disagreed that self-assessing driving skill was necessary. You're assessing your insurance companies likely opinion of your driving - you don't need to believe your unsafe driving habits are unsafe, you merely need to believe that your insurance company will dislike them. That's easier still if, as you suggest, insurance companies would use well defined metrics. Those metrics are likely to become publicly known, even if only through consumers comparing notes. It's easier still if assessments become computer generated. The metrics needn't be entirely related to driving style, either - day vs night driving, road types, congestion levels and so on might be easier to self-assess.
Go read some 1900s literature and you are going to find out you're making exactly the same arguments against capitalism and for centralised planning that "some people" made 100 years ago when they were advocating the "perfect system" to allocate the worlds resources and industrial output according to societies needs without the dreadful waste and boom bust cycles that capitalism suffers.
I haven't made any arguments against capitalism, nor have I argued that a committee would make these decisions better than a market. I'm merely arguing that systematic cognitive biases in market participants are likely to lead to systematically biased market outcomes and that research in to those biases may reduce them. (And the same applies to other human behaviour, like moral behaviour, which is not a bias). Take the availability heuristic, for example. Humans tend to overestimate the probability of events that are more 'available' in their memory - things like terrorist attacks - and underestimate those which are not. Merely revealing the existence of this bias can reduce it because market participants (or anyone else, for that matter) can take care to avoid it or exploit it in others, removing some of the effect of the bias from pricing. Other biases could conceivably be reduced by, for example, changes to rules on information provision or presentation. Or there might be biases which could catch out regulators, auditors or credit raters. Or it might simply be that modellers are ignoring the biases which are already known (there are lots) and that they need more awareness and more knowledge of how biases should be incorporated in to models and how important they are.
Don't assume I advocate replacing markets with committees just because I advocate research in to their failures and their effects!
Thankfully, that's not how it works. People can't self-assess their driving skill.
That's part of classic adverse selection, but is it really required? People can assess whether their premiums have gone up or down and what quotes they're being given. Is that enough? I'm not sure, but I don't see why not. Obviously, an insurance company could be expected to be more suspicious of someone who wants to switch from having a camera to not having one than someone who's never had one. That might reduce the advantage to someone who's a new-adopter and may trap those who've somewhat overestimated their driving's appeal to the insurance company in to the position of having a camera. I doubt that it would eliminate the effect completely.
I also suspect that even those who 'know' that their driving is excellent, finely judged, carefully balanced and a highly efficient use of road space also know that it's the kind of driving that the fuddy-duddy retired driving instructor working for the insurance company is going to disapprove of.
If nothing else, it will reduce fraud and litigation costs.
Which will actually accelerate the process - at each stage a bigger chunk of the next-safest drivers would have a good reason to switch, because the reduction in premium would be increased. To gain from staying without one your driving not only has to be a little bit worse than the threshold, but so much worse that the reduction in premium from the lower costs can't compensate.
Worse than that, they assume that our primary goal is to maximize our money. I can tell you for me it's not.......my goal economically is to make sure I have enough money to supply my needs; after that, I'd rather spend my time posting on slashdot.
I don't know about financial models, but economic models quite comfortably include leisure vs work time decisions - at it's most simplistic (first year undergraduate, say) level by pretending you work 168 hours a week and spend some of your money on leisure.
And they don't assume you maximize money, they assume you maximize utility and are fully aware that money isn't a goal in itself. This still leaves out an enormous amount of important human behaviour, like moral behaviour, and I think is become more and more accepted as inadequate. However your statement is still wrong. One flaw (of many) in basic economic models is that they take too LITTLE account of people's tendency to maximize money by, for example, failing to account for money illusion - a common tendency to fail to consider inflation.
I hate to break it to you, but no one actually believes this. No one cares whether the market "prices things correctly" as long as the losers are allowed to fail.
I care. One of the fundamental social purposes of financial markets is to price things correctly. These financial markets, by deciding how much it costs for a particular company to invest or be bought, have huge impacts on the real economy by helping to choose which investment projects in which industries go ahead. There's an irrationally large risk premium for oil refiners? We'll have too few oil refineries in a decade. Dot-com shares overpriced? We'll waste huge amounts of economic output creating websites nobody needs. Risk of a housing market crash underestimated in lenders' shares? We'll build lots of houses nobody is living in. Doing this badly has huge economic impact. Occasionally dumping some of that cost on unfortunate creditors and shareholders doesn't help one bit when the causes are common to all humans or to the financial or social structures they operate in. All the creditors and shareholders can do in the face of market problems they don't know how to or can't solve is to make less money available for investment, which only makes the misallocation worse and reduces growth. REAL growth, not stock market growth. Research in to human cognitive biases or the effect of principal-agent problems, for example, CAN make a difference.
Ditto. And if you discover the insurance company raised your rates after you install the camera, then just switch companies. That's one of the advantages of not having a monopoly-based system.
Ultimately you'll run in to adverse selection if this becomes widespread. Here's the simplistic version: Drivers start off all paying x, but some are safer than others and the camera picks this up. The safest drivers install the camera and save money. The average safety of those without a camera falls, so the non-camera premium rises. The safest without one install the camera and save money. The average safety of the remainder falls again. And so on.
You have to expect that someday saying no to a camera implies you are almost certainly a high accident risk, so all of the insurance companies will charge you very considerably more.
It's also going to become about all the extra crap we have to deal with whenever the card has to be updated. Dealing with government beaurocrats is never much fun, but compulsion, systems of fines and the need to attend centres to have biometrics taken makes it much worse. I don't think many people have thought much about the practicalities of actually getting a card yet...
How many female sex offenders do you think there is anyway?
Everyone knows that sex offences by women don't count - and that older men sleeping with teenage girls is disgusting, but older women sleeping with teenage boys means 'wayheyhey, I wish it had happened to me'. (IIRC, there was a news article here (the UK) about male victims of female paedophiles having problems getting the police to take them seriously). And if two fifteen year olds have sex, who gets the conviction? I think I can guess....unless they both get convicted of raping each other. (Though it wouldn't be rape here, it'd be something like 'sex with a minor'). And how about two people who are both too drunk to properly consent?
That's exactly what I've been saying. Any "thing" in the photographs did not originate from the photographer, but was copied from the painting and the painter.
The thing in the photograph doesn't need to have originated from the photographer. I could take a picture of a bear eating a salmon and I'd still get copyright, even though nothing in the picture originated from me. The photograph itself was originated by me and I am its origin. The photographs of paintings did not exist until the photographer created them - setting up lights, dealing with odd reflections and funny pigments, turning a 3D object in to a 2D one and so on. The photographer originated the photographs in a way that a photocopier mechanically copying his original photographs would not.
The second half of your point is quite bizarre. Maybe I'm not understanding you, but I get the impression that something is not original merely because the amount of skill, judgment or labor that went into creating it was not different.
I was talking about makes something worthy of copyright (in my opinion), rather than what makes it original.
I was trying to find a way to codify the economically important difference. When I say 'between the first copy and the next' I mean something more like this:
Case 1: I put a lot of effort in to writing a book. What I've written is the first copy. I then send the file to a publisher, over the Internet. What he has is the second copy. Creating the first copy required a totally different level of skill, judgement and labour than creating the second (or a subsequent) copy. This difference of effort is what makes the text of books worthy of copyright.
Case 2: I put a lot of work in to laying bricks to make a wall. Then someone else wants a wall, too, and so lays bricks in order to make a second identical wall. The amount of work involved in laying the first and second walls (in an efficient way) is not far different, and my creation of the first wall does not reduce the work involved in making the second. This means walls are not worthy of copyright.
I also have no problem saying that the origin of a wall was the laying of its bricks, or that its bricklayer was its originator. If some sort of sci-fi automated matter-copying device existed and made a copy I'd have no problem calling the man-laid bricks the 'original wall'. Walls aren't something subject to copyright (it's not a photograph, literary work, play, etc.), so fitting this definition of 'original' in to the actual legislation doesn't create a problem for me.
So a song writer such as Tom Petty (Do you guys know of him in the UK) who writes every song around 1/4/5 chords would not be able to obtain copyrights because there is not a "great difference" in the skill, judgment, or labor that went into each song. Under your theory, only songs where there is a "great difference" in skill/judgment/labor levels would there be "originality" leading to copyright protection. Maybe you can explain that to me.
There's still a great difference between creating the first copy of song A and (efficiently, adding pointless complication wouldn't count) creating the second. I don't mean that song B shouldn't get copyright because it didn't require more skill than creating song A, I mean that both A and B are worthy of copyright because creating the first, original, copy of each requires much more than efficiently creating any other copy of either. That's the essential feature that makes copyright useful: without it the incentive to create originals is far below the benefits gained by the holders of the later copies which depended on that origination, resulting in economically beneficial origination not occurring.
The purpose was not to create or add any new originallity.
This doesn't appear to matter legally. From my first link:
The word ``original' does not in this connection mean that the work must be the expression of original or inventive thought. Copyright Acts are not concerned with the originality of ideas, but with the expression of thought, and, in the case of ``literary work', with the expression of thought in print or writing. The originality which is required relates to the expression of the thought. But the Act does not require that the expression must be in an original or novel form, but that the work must not be copied from another work that it should originate from the author.
Whether it should is a different question. I don't think there's a reason to limit copyright to your notion of originality, for the reason I've argued already: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1305967&cid=28733109. ie, the economic reasons for protecting intellectually novel works also apply to non-intellectually-novel works (but not exact replicas) which share certain features - including a significant cost to the initial creation of the first copy and the non-rivalry and non-excludability (in the absence of copyright) of the underlying intellectual artifact in the sense of a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good.
Personally, I'd propose a distinction something like this: The photographers work is original and copyright because (i) photographs are subject to copyright and (ii) a degree of skill, judgement and labour far beyond that required for producing essentially identical later copies was a prerequisite for the existence of any of the future copies of the photograph. Photocopying a printout of his photograph would not produce a new copyright because the existence of the photocopy is not a prerequisite for the existence of other essentially identical copies. Imperfections in the copy/could/ produce an additional copyright if you'd expended a sufficient degree of skill, judgement or labour specifically on creating those imperfections (but your copyright would probably be worth very little unless the result was especially artistic).
Under those interpretations of skill, judgment, and labour, a surgeon, a brick layer, and an automobile repairman, could all have their work copyrighted. All of those tasks take great skill, judgment, and labour. But in and of themselves, originality is not created.
Legally those aren't copyright because they're not in the list of things subject to it according to the law (but that's not a reason for it to be that way). My opinion is that they shouldn't be because none of those things are expressions of an intellectual or artistic creation in the way that paintings, photographs, books or source code might be, nor are they something for which there is a great difference of required skill, judgement or labour between the first copy and the next. That latter point means there's just no utility in making them subject to copyright, so copyright law is right to just exclude them by definition.
But is there any law which holds that a photograph of a painting is protected by copyright, even when the photograph has no original content? Thanks.
Yes, the one he quoted - potentially, anyway. It's the definition of 'original' which is important. I think this is one of the big precedents: http://leftleftupup.com/cases/university_of_london_press_ltd_v_university_tutorial_press_ltd_1916_2_ch_601. Pretty much everything I can find about it gives a 'a degree of skill, judgement or labour' requirement for originality - including http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow, and as far as I can find that seems to be the one actually used. I can't find an obvious single simple precedent, though, except for one specifically covering compilation. IANAL, though.
Slashdot Mirror
It is a load of shameless and deceptive nonsense; and does make it better that it is wrapped up in florid language, if you will excuse the pun, hur, hur. "Create a new species"? Even highly educated plant breeders haven't been able to do that, but a car manufacturer manages to do it with a gesture and a lorry-load of hype?
I'm not so sure that 'species' is so well defined a concept when it comes to plants and hybrids that everyone agrees on what is and isn't a new species. However, I distinctly suspect that 'hybrid' got turned in to 'species' somewhere between the grower's mouth and journalist's article. Science journalists in particular seem to love writing complete bollocks that sometimes even flatly contradicts their only source.
For a plant species to work well as carbon-capturer,
No-one has said anything about them capturing carbon. They were chosen to capture and degrade other pollutants. Plants /do/ degrade pollutants like formaldehyde and some people buy particular pot plants specifically to reduce volatile organic compounds in their indoor air. (Though you're probably better off buying a proper filter). It sounds like Toyota's gardener has heard of the idea and though 'hmm, maybe I could do that, too' and then made the mistake of allowing their PR department to catch on.
I mean, do you really expect ahmed the farmer in pakistan to learn how to use a condom ? or his wife to take the pill daily ?
Ermm....yes? It'll take a long time, but farmers in the west have, so why couldn't this happen everywhere else?
Two things must happen first, though. They need to be available, at reasonable cost. And it needs to be in their interests to use them. At a minimum, people need to know they won't starve to death in old age if they only have two children, and that they aren't going to see most of their children die. (And that the state/aid won't take care of them on their behalf, there seem to be a number of large benefit-dependent families here in the UK). There'll need to be a cultural change, too, of course - but that'll come, slowly, once people find that their own and their children's lives are improved when they have slightly fewer than the average number of children, so that the cultural norms change little bit by little bit.
But where does the value come from? Ultimately from the efforts somebody puts in to them - ie. the use of limited resources. "Doing more with fewer resources" only means shifting the focus to using some other resources instead - if not oil, then wind or sunlight, with potentially harmful consequences for the environment.
No, it doesn't. Moving 10000 tons of iron ore can be done with fewer resource now then 30 years ago. The same level of resources used to make a TV 15 years ago can make a better one today. Power generation is more efficient, we have better insulation materials for buildings, we have the capacity to make more efficient computers that can do much more than 20 years ago, someone has invented the post-it note, etc.
I'm not saying that we are doing more with less. We're undoubtedly doing more with more. I'm saying that technological progress, improvements in management and manufacturing techniques, scale through reduced trade barriers, capital accumulation, knowledge and skill diffusion and so on mean that even if we stopped increasing our overall resource use today we could still continue to increase economic output. It'd be a lower rate of growth, but it wouldn't be zero.
Well, your premise was that you could increase the money supply without inflation when "everyone decides to hang on to their money more tightly". The response that should be to drop prices, so people will buy more. Not sure what else you were referring to - if people are holding on to money, they are not buying goods, yes? So maybe because prices are too high?
Yes. Precisely my point is that prices do not drop when they ought to. Contracts and mortgages lock people in to prices, people suffer from money illusion or haven't noticed yet that the price level is falling and so don't realize or don't believe that their real income isn't falling, etc. The adjustment is protracted and difficult and slow, and people hold on to their money even tighter when they see that it'll be worth more in a year. In the mean time prices stay too high, demand too low and there is unemployment. If prices did just drop as you are hoping they would then there wouldn't be a recession for us to worry about in the first place.
You're making a preconceived assumption that everything has to be centrally planned. BTW: when industries do this it's considered price-fixing and is illegal. Somehow government or the Fed should do it instead?
Yes, central banks and governments should involve themselves in the money supply. They should do it because it has the potentially to alleviate enormous levels of suffering and make life better, which is the whole purpose of the economy and the government. They should not, of course, involve themselves in relative prices without a further reason. Just the overall price level.
Why not just let the prices correct themselves. If people aren't buying buggy whips, maybe the buggy whip factory should just shut down. If people aren't buying much wheat, farms should cut back on production. If a labour union won't allow a business to lower wages or layoff workers even when people are buying less of their product, the company should go out of business. Yes, that means some will go through hard times. But that's better than putting everybody through hard times to keep a business going that is doomed to failure anyway.
Why is the business doomed to failure anyway? People want the wheat, the wheat farmers want things that those who want the wheat could produce. The problem is that the economy is not letting that exchange happen....destroying your physical infrastructure is not an appropriate response to a breakdown of the control mechanism. Fix the control mechanism instead.
Whether it's a fixed money supply or not is not the issue. The issue is that millions of people are better at deciding where that level should be is orders of magnitude better than letting a small group make that guess. They are far more likely to be wrong.
Millions of people are not deciding where the price level should be. Millions of people are making billions of little decisions about what to buy, what to sell, and so on. The price level emerges from the interaction of all of these people. Even if all of these millions agree they want the price level to fall by 40% that doesn't mean 40% falls will be the result of their interactions. And you most definitely don't want to be the only person to cut your price level by 40%, and then go out of business because you can't pay your ten year farm lease which hasn't changed. That farm lease price will fall sooner or later, once enough farmers have gone bust and enough land and people left idle. But that really is doing it the hard way.
The prices do fall, eventually. They fall because people are gradually, a few people at a time, forced in to it by unemployment, bankruptcy, hardship and misery. It involves huge waste of resources while this happens - labour is unused, houses are left empty, companies and their capital are destroyed. The process of price adjustment you're asking for is the recession.
Yes
But isn't indebtedness at the very basis of Capitalism, at least as we know it?
Indebtedness is the basis of pretty much any system involving money. (Capitalism is different, I don't think there's any reason why you couldn't have capitalism without money). Suppose I, say, wash your car and you give me $10. What does that $10 represent? The fact that I've done something for the rest of the economy and it hasn't yet returned the favour. ie, my ownership of it represents a debt, in a very plain and old fashioned way. Since the whole point of money is to represent debts of this sort I don't think you should be scared that money is constituted as debt. It's getting the amounts wrong - people getting in to obligations they can't keep - that's the potential problem, not that money represents debt.
Capitalism as it is known now, will never be sustainable, because sustainable means, in the long run, zero growth.
Economic growth doesn't equate to the exploitation of more and more resources, or the creation of more and more physical stuff (although doing so can cause growth). Economic growth means growth in the value that we all extract from our economic activity. Doing more and better things with fewer resources represents growth, just as much as doing more by using more resources does. Obviously the heat death of the universe will get in the way eventually, but there's no reason in principle that the economy can't go on creating more and more value for a very long time.
(That's not necessarily the right thing, of course. It's conceivable that less value but more leisure time for everyone would turn out better, for example).
Here, you are just talking about some of the mechanisms of inflation. A better way to describe it is the amount of capital in the system.
Capital is something you can use to create a stream of (real) goods and services - a factory, a shop, a train, a house. You can't (directly) change the amount of capital there is in an economy by creating and destroying money. Money is, in essence, no more than an assignment of abstract numbers to people. It's pure information.
If, as you suggest, the response to reduced spending is for a central planner to increase the amount of fake money, then prices are propped up when they should naturally be falling.
Firstly, why should they be falling? What does having the price of everything fall or rise achieve that an increase in the money supply with constant prices does not?
Secondly, price falls are a very difficult process to a point where this process doesn't really work. This is really the nub of it, if prices were not sticky the gold standard would work. Workers and unions defend wages, firms may need their input prices to fall before they can fully reduce their output prices, competitors wait for someone else to move first, homeowners hold out for house prices which are months or years out of date, etc. Prices stay high for months or years and resources get underused, including labour. If everyone could agree to reduce their prices together there'd be no problem, but it's a coordination nightmare compounded by money illusion. Why bother when the state can adjust the money supply? It's like changing the clocks to do daylight saving....we /could/ have the same effect by all agreeing to adjust all of our schedules, opening times, etc. all at once on the same day whilst keeping the time the same. But it's much easier to change the defined time of day.
Eventually this will catch up with you when people start spending, and you'll have to raise interest rates and inflation will take off.
Which is just saying that the other side of increasing the supply when the velocity of money falls is that you have to reduce it again when it rises. That can be done. It won't be done perfectly, I'm sure, so there'll be too little or too much inflation; but that doesn't mean that a fixed money supply is better.
This "potentially valuable policy response" that you advocate is simply a way to interfere with the ability of people to make rational decisions about spending and saving, and prevent any corrections in resource allocation from occurring where they should.
The policy response is a response to irrational decision making. I'm sure that amongst the 25% unemployed in the depression there were butchers who wanted bread, bakers who wanted meat, farmers who wanted tractors, engineers who wanted corn, etc. There must have been many valuable trades which just didn't happen because the normal economic decision making systems were broken. Even if the individual spending and saving decisions were rational the systemic decisions were not, and there was clearly nothing even approaching a correct resource allocation.
Yes, you are correct. But inflation should be driven by the resources available, demand for various goods, and the level of labor available, not by some central planning facility trying to manage everybody's decision-making.
Why should it be driven by those things? Relative prices should (in the absence of specific market failures, etc, of course), but why the absolute price level? It's only an arbitrary number, it doesn't represent anything. And managing certain aspects of the decision making in a system-wide way is the whole point. Sometimes the system makes utterly terrible and tragic decisions even as individuals act rationally. It's foolish not to mitigate this.
The natural level of inflation in a gold-backed monetary
Inflation is too much money chasing too few goods. Prices go up because there's more money in the system and production of goods is either stagnant or declining.
Prices depend on the velocity of money, too. If everyone decides to hang on to their money more tightly, so that each piece of it changes hands half as often, say, then the amount of money in the system can be increased without causing inflation. Making it impossible to adjust your money supply (which is all the gold standard really achieves) doesn't eliminate inflation and deflation, it just removes a potentially valuable policy response to changes in things like consumer confidence and the savings rate. That's why economies that took longer to leave the gold standard took longer to come out of the great depression - they couldn't respond to the fall in the velocity of money by creating more.
You also shouldn't just assume that inflation is always and necessarily evil. Especially not in the presence of price and wage stickiness - in some areas of some economies it's as near to impossible as makes no difference to reduce wages in nominal terms. A low level of inflation is quite possibly a good thing.
I find it somewhat strange that US guards could operate on Canadian soil.
IIRC, at both the port of Dover and Channel Tunnel the French frontier control is in the UK and the UK border control in France, so it's hardly unheard of. But they do it that way here so that the traffic queue clogs the approach roads and not the port/terminal, which hardly applies at the US/Canada border.
The UK border control still send you through a concrete maze full of people in yellow jackets paid to look threatening and vehicle immobilisers ready to pop up when you arrive, though. The French don't, of course.
Pessimistic locking is backed by the db, so in some instances it does nothing. On mysql, using their innodb engine, as an example, all threads trying to access a locked record will actually block until the lock is released. The latter is often problematic in web apps, but is sometimes desireable.
Holding a DB row/table lock for longer than a single server call is usually a bad idea. Consider:
Don't use database-level row/table/index/whatever locks for this.
The questioner didn't make clear if he meant 'my users are complaining about conflicting edits, what system behaviour can I introduce which will solve their problem?' or 'I want (pessimistic) locking, how can I do it?'. Either way he (and we) should start with the first question, not the second.
It's a simple, effective and elegant technique which fails to solve the problem. Yes, it stops a second user throwing away a first user's changes....by throwing away the second user's changes. You can write and the user can negotiate some sort of conflict resolution, but in terms of your software's behaviour as presented to your users that's really a whole other option (there are four: 1. first user wins; 2. second user wins; 3. locks; 4. tell the user and let him merge or choose, eg like Subversion).
HTTP may be stateless, but the world and people's view of it is not. Locking is a readily understood concept and it prevents users doing work which needs to be thrown away or repaired, or which is duplicating what someone else is doing. It may not be appropriate to the (real-world) situation, but if your customer does demand it don't try to explain that his world-view is wrong. Optimistic locking might be an acceptable flaw in some cases, especially if the granularity is done carefully (one user changes a customer's address, another gives him some loyalty points - there need not be a conflict), but good luck convincing your users it's anything other than a flaw.
If you don't want to do full locking or it's not acceptable then it may be better to use most-recent-wins. Only save changes (don't save stored information which the user didn't change, treating logical blocks of data like address fields as a unit) and try to make your fields inherently concurrent first, though. This is probably more intuitive behaviour than first-user-wins (why should an older edit take precedence over a newer one?).
Agreed. With many clients, dealing with hundreds of open locks at a time, as well as those same hundreds of rows being updated by ajax every 10s seems like a nightmare to manage.
You don't actually need ACID semantics for the 10s heartbeats....what you need is a repository somewhere that tells you whether user/session/lock [x] is still alive. The database is a convenient but expensive one. If you really have a load problem and need locks then you can put all of this in a server/some servers somewhere, accessed by, say, CORBA or RMI. You quite possibly have an application server or somesuch handy already anyway. If a server crashes just restart it; it'll be up to date again in ten seconds. Such a thing can be useful elsewhere, too - such as for caching login cookies or rarely changed data.
Unless US law is very different to English law, having one party to a contract break it doesn't mean the other is automatically allowed to break it in any way they please in response. They might be if it's the right kind of breach, or the contract might say what they can do explicitly, but this doesn't sound to me to be likely to be that kind of breach.
You'd have to be a complete idiot of a cleaning company to sue, though, so I doubt anyone cared.
How about this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rehabilitation_of_Offenders_Act#Rehabilitation_Act_and_actions_for_libel_under_British_law. That's a very special case, of course.
But those weren't the stated reasons. There may be some effect as people move to it, but not because the people will properly self-assess their driving skill and properly put themselves in the correct groups. I stated that was wrong, and you seem to be agreeing.
Even if you don't self-assess well your current insurer's assessment is presumably a good prediction of another insurer's assessment. Unless insurers share this data (and I'm sure they'd like to, but there'd be problems standardizing it and the prospect may put people off) then you can use this as a basis for self-selection when choosing a new insurer and policy.
I also disagreed that self-assessing driving skill was necessary. You're assessing your insurance companies likely opinion of your driving - you don't need to believe your unsafe driving habits are unsafe, you merely need to believe that your insurance company will dislike them. That's easier still if, as you suggest, insurance companies would use well defined metrics. Those metrics are likely to become publicly known, even if only through consumers comparing notes. It's easier still if assessments become computer generated. The metrics needn't be entirely related to driving style, either - day vs night driving, road types, congestion levels and so on might be easier to self-assess.
Go read some 1900s literature and you are going to find out you're making exactly the same arguments against capitalism and for centralised planning that "some people" made 100 years ago when they were advocating the "perfect system" to allocate the worlds resources and industrial output according to societies needs without the dreadful waste and boom bust cycles that capitalism suffers.
I haven't made any arguments against capitalism, nor have I argued that a committee would make these decisions better than a market. I'm merely arguing that systematic cognitive biases in market participants are likely to lead to systematically biased market outcomes and that research in to those biases may reduce them. (And the same applies to other human behaviour, like moral behaviour, which is not a bias). Take the availability heuristic, for example. Humans tend to overestimate the probability of events that are more 'available' in their memory - things like terrorist attacks - and underestimate those which are not. Merely revealing the existence of this bias can reduce it because market participants (or anyone else, for that matter) can take care to avoid it or exploit it in others, removing some of the effect of the bias from pricing. Other biases could conceivably be reduced by, for example, changes to rules on information provision or presentation. Or there might be biases which could catch out regulators, auditors or credit raters. Or it might simply be that modellers are ignoring the biases which are already known (there are lots) and that they need more awareness and more knowledge of how biases should be incorporated in to models and how important they are.
Don't assume I advocate replacing markets with committees just because I advocate research in to their failures and their effects!
Thankfully, that's not how it works. People can't self-assess their driving skill.
That's part of classic adverse selection, but is it really required? People can assess whether their premiums have gone up or down and what quotes they're being given. Is that enough? I'm not sure, but I don't see why not. Obviously, an insurance company could be expected to be more suspicious of someone who wants to switch from having a camera to not having one than someone who's never had one. That might reduce the advantage to someone who's a new-adopter and may trap those who've somewhat overestimated their driving's appeal to the insurance company in to the position of having a camera. I doubt that it would eliminate the effect completely.
I also suspect that even those who 'know' that their driving is excellent, finely judged, carefully balanced and a highly efficient use of road space also know that it's the kind of driving that the fuddy-duddy retired driving instructor working for the insurance company is going to disapprove of.
If nothing else, it will reduce fraud and litigation costs.
Which will actually accelerate the process - at each stage a bigger chunk of the next-safest drivers would have a good reason to switch, because the reduction in premium would be increased. To gain from staying without one your driving not only has to be a little bit worse than the threshold, but so much worse that the reduction in premium from the lower costs can't compensate.
Worse than that, they assume that our primary goal is to maximize our money. I can tell you for me it's not.......my goal economically is to make sure I have enough money to supply my needs; after that, I'd rather spend my time posting on slashdot.
I don't know about financial models, but economic models quite comfortably include leisure vs work time decisions - at it's most simplistic (first year undergraduate, say) level by pretending you work 168 hours a week and spend some of your money on leisure.
And they don't assume you maximize money, they assume you maximize utility and are fully aware that money isn't a goal in itself. This still leaves out an enormous amount of important human behaviour, like moral behaviour, and I think is become more and more accepted as inadequate. However your statement is still wrong. One flaw (of many) in basic economic models is that they take too LITTLE account of people's tendency to maximize money by, for example, failing to account for money illusion - a common tendency to fail to consider inflation.
I hate to break it to you, but no one actually believes this. No one cares whether the market "prices things correctly" as long as the losers are allowed to fail.
I care. One of the fundamental social purposes of financial markets is to price things correctly. These financial markets, by deciding how much it costs for a particular company to invest or be bought, have huge impacts on the real economy by helping to choose which investment projects in which industries go ahead. There's an irrationally large risk premium for oil refiners? We'll have too few oil refineries in a decade. Dot-com shares overpriced? We'll waste huge amounts of economic output creating websites nobody needs. Risk of a housing market crash underestimated in lenders' shares? We'll build lots of houses nobody is living in. Doing this badly has huge economic impact. Occasionally dumping some of that cost on unfortunate creditors and shareholders doesn't help one bit when the causes are common to all humans or to the financial or social structures they operate in. All the creditors and shareholders can do in the face of market problems they don't know how to or can't solve is to make less money available for investment, which only makes the misallocation worse and reduces growth. REAL growth, not stock market growth. Research in to human cognitive biases or the effect of principal-agent problems, for example, CAN make a difference.
Ditto. And if you discover the insurance company raised your rates after you install the camera, then just switch companies. That's one of the advantages of not having a monopoly-based system.
Ultimately you'll run in to adverse selection if this becomes widespread. Here's the simplistic version: Drivers start off all paying x, but some are safer than others and the camera picks this up. The safest drivers install the camera and save money. The average safety of those without a camera falls, so the non-camera premium rises. The safest without one install the camera and save money. The average safety of the remainder falls again. And so on.
You have to expect that someday saying no to a camera implies you are almost certainly a high accident risk, so all of the insurance companies will charge you very considerably more.
It's also going to become about all the extra crap we have to deal with whenever the card has to be updated. Dealing with government beaurocrats is never much fun, but compulsion, systems of fines and the need to attend centres to have biometrics taken makes it much worse. I don't think many people have thought much about the practicalities of actually getting a card yet...
How many female sex offenders do you think there is anyway?
Everyone knows that sex offences by women don't count - and that older men sleeping with teenage girls is disgusting, but older women sleeping with teenage boys means 'wayheyhey, I wish it had happened to me'. (IIRC, there was a news article here (the UK) about male victims of female paedophiles having problems getting the police to take them seriously). And if two fifteen year olds have sex, who gets the conviction? I think I can guess....unless they both get convicted of raping each other. (Though it wouldn't be rape here, it'd be something like 'sex with a minor'). And how about two people who are both too drunk to properly consent?
That's exactly what I've been saying. Any "thing" in the photographs did not originate from the photographer, but was copied from the painting and the painter.
The thing in the photograph doesn't need to have originated from the photographer. I could take a picture of a bear eating a salmon and I'd still get copyright, even though nothing in the picture originated from me. The photograph itself was originated by me and I am its origin. The photographs of paintings did not exist until the photographer created them - setting up lights, dealing with odd reflections and funny pigments, turning a 3D object in to a 2D one and so on. The photographer originated the photographs in a way that a photocopier mechanically copying his original photographs would not.
The second half of your point is quite bizarre. Maybe I'm not understanding you, but I get the impression that something is not original merely because the amount of skill, judgment or labor that went into creating it was not different.
I was talking about makes something worthy of copyright (in my opinion), rather than what makes it original.
I was trying to find a way to codify the economically important difference. When I say 'between the first copy and the next' I mean something more like this:
I also have no problem saying that the origin of a wall was the laying of its bricks, or that its bricklayer was its originator. If some sort of sci-fi automated matter-copying device existed and made a copy I'd have no problem calling the man-laid bricks the 'original wall'. Walls aren't something subject to copyright (it's not a photograph, literary work, play, etc.), so fitting this definition of 'original' in to the actual legislation doesn't create a problem for me.
So a song writer such as Tom Petty (Do you guys know of him in the UK) who writes every song around 1/4/5 chords would not be able to obtain copyrights because there is not a "great difference" in the skill, judgment, or labor that went into each song. Under your theory, only songs where there is a "great difference" in skill/judgment/labor levels would there be "originality" leading to copyright protection. Maybe you can explain that to me.
There's still a great difference between creating the first copy of song A and (efficiently, adding pointless complication wouldn't count) creating the second. I don't mean that song B shouldn't get copyright because it didn't require more skill than creating song A, I mean that both A and B are worthy of copyright because creating the first, original, copy of each requires much more than efficiently creating any other copy of either. That's the essential feature that makes copyright useful: without it the incentive to create originals is far below the benefits gained by the holders of the later copies which depended on that origination, resulting in economically beneficial origination not occurring.
The purpose was not to create or add any new originallity.
This doesn't appear to matter legally. From my first link:
Whether it should is a different question. I don't think there's a reason to limit copyright to your notion of originality, for the reason I've argued already: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1305967&cid=28733109. ie, the economic reasons for protecting intellectually novel works also apply to non-intellectually-novel works (but not exact replicas) which share certain features - including a significant cost to the initial creation of the first copy and the non-rivalry and non-excludability (in the absence of copyright) of the underlying intellectual artifact in the sense of a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good.
Personally, I'd propose a distinction something like this: The photographers work is original and copyright because (i) photographs are subject to copyright and (ii) a degree of skill, judgement and labour far beyond that required for producing essentially identical later copies was a prerequisite for the existence of any of the future copies of the photograph. Photocopying a printout of his photograph would not produce a new copyright because the existence of the photocopy is not a prerequisite for the existence of other essentially identical copies. Imperfections in the copy /could/ produce an additional copyright if you'd expended a sufficient degree of skill, judgement or labour specifically on creating those imperfections (but your copyright would probably be worth very little unless the result was especially artistic).
Under those interpretations of skill, judgment, and labour, a surgeon, a brick layer, and an automobile repairman, could all have their work copyrighted. All of those tasks take great skill, judgment, and labour. But in and of themselves, originality is not created.
Legally those aren't copyright because they're not in the list of things subject to it according to the law (but that's not a reason for it to be that way). My opinion is that they shouldn't be because none of those things are expressions of an intellectual or artistic creation in the way that paintings, photographs, books or source code might be, nor are they something for which there is a great difference of required skill, judgement or labour between the first copy and the next. That latter point means there's just no utility in making them subject to copyright, so copyright law is right to just exclude them by definition.
But is there any law which holds that a photograph of a painting is protected by copyright, even when the photograph has no original content? Thanks.
Yes, the one he quoted - potentially, anyway. It's the definition of 'original' which is important. I think this is one of the big precedents: http://leftleftupup.com/cases/university_of_london_press_ltd_v_university_tutorial_press_ltd_1916_2_ch_601. Pretty much everything I can find about it gives a 'a degree of skill, judgement or labour' requirement for originality - including http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow, and as far as I can find that seems to be the one actually used. I can't find an obvious single simple precedent, though, except for one specifically covering compilation. IANAL, though.