[...] I see what kind of people get A's and realize that they are completely meaningless.
You had me up to here. I would have worded it: "I see the work produced by the students who get A's [...]". Or are you really upset at the types of people getting the grades, as opposed to the differential between their output and yours, and their grades and yours?
[...] not to mention what a horribly pathetic and downright destructive ethic that is encouraged by taking things without permission [...]
Did you get permission from the plants and animals that you ground up to power your body with? That's very much "taking things without permission"; after all, the animal certainly would have preferred to continue living.
Soon we will be able to copy not only digital goods like books, music, and movies, but also any physical goods. Very soon; within 20 years we will have developed nanotechnology to the point where this will be possible.
What are you going to rail at then? We shouldn't all have Corvettes because GM has a piece of paper saying they're the only commercial concern which can sell cars shaped like Corvettes? Well, it's not a commercial concern when I connect my matter transformer to the Internet, download a GPL design, and convert dirt and sunlight into a Corvette. That was pretty much all done in my household, and no money changed hands: not commercial. And the same applies to the current situation: home users' downloading is not commercial. ISPs advertising "download music faster with high-speed Internet" should be getting hit by **AA organizations, not home users!
Copyright is an invention that hinders progress and appeared on the scene a couple hundred years ago ("the modern concept of copyright originated in 1710 with the British Statute of Anne", from here). Since it's such a young idea, perhaps it hasn't had adequate time to wreak havoc and be abolished, just as communism is currently wreaking? I would even add that all of the posturing and word-redefining and lawsuits that are being done by the **AA organizations are the beginning of copyright's end, because they sure are wreaking havoc with our society.
Technology is speeding up, and is currently moving much faster than law. So I'm positive that we'll all be gods and off this rock before copyright law is changed. And you know what? You can have your laws, Dave. Whether I agree with them or not is entirely beside the point; and even if the law puts copyright violators to death, it still won't stop the inevitable engineering accomplishment of nanotechnology (not a science accomplishment, like splitting the atom; this is relatively simple, like building a bridge) and immediately after that people will be leaving the planet in droves. There's no way to govern when people are that far-flung, and besides, a government wouldn't need to collect taxes when any thing could be created for the cost of dirt and sunlight--so the government would have whatever material goods it needed to continue doing the jobs it needed doing. It wouldn't need taxes or fees or anything of the sort from its citizens.
I'm waxing into the pipe dream speach but the point is, I may agree with you that the law is good and valid, but it will still be made obsolete by technology. Given that as the outcome, why should I waste time and energy trying to prop up something that cannot survive naturally, and which only serves to hinder progress and reward producers at the expense of consumers' natural rights? It just doesn't make sense, and similarly, this is where I stop talking about it.
Two cool coincidences: first, as I was reading your post I was thinking "Terry Pratchett" (it helps that I'm currently on book 23 of the Discworld series and have been reading them from book 1 since about 9 months ago!). Your quote came from the title to book 3, "Equal Rites".;-)
Second, the fortune at the bottom of the page says: "Behind every great computer sits a skinny little geek." Quite appropriate for the topic!
Under a communist system, you (and most other people) would try to get away with working as little as possible.
Yes, and I do the same under a capitalist system. Or any other system. Why would I want to expend more effort on a task once my goals have been achieved?
The less emotional way to state the above is: "People tend to be efficient."
This correct, but I have seen strange issues on a LAN with more than say 5 computers. Such never occurs on XP Pro.
No, not until you get to 10 computers with XP Pro. (There's a 5-network-connection limit on XP Home, 10-network-connection limit on XP Pro.)
Back in NT 3.51, Server and Workstation differed only by a couple settings which you could make and then have a Server. Microsoft got smarter about that as the years went on, and now you can't make the low-cost version look/act like the high-cost. And you're right, Linux is the way to go here because you get full functionality from the get-go (for Free as well).
Oh yeahhh shudder, because someone might come and make a COPY of a car...
This is not a current problem, but you have hit the nail on the head. Within 20 years we'll have full-blown nanotechnology and copying any physical good will be trivial.
The coolest part is to be able to keep inventory in its original form: dirt and sunlight. When you need a new part (or hamburger), just load the appropriate blueprint, and the device will pull in enough dirt and sunlight (and perhaps resize itself, if the object is a car or a house or something), and produce it for you. For free.
GM and Ford will be up in arms when people start trading exact blueprints for cars over P2P networks. But they will be powerless to stop it.
I think it's very interesting to be watching **AA et al go through the same issues, just a few years earlier.
And it really doesn't matter how they screw up the law, morality, economy, country, world; we'll be going off-planet soon enough and "they" won't be able to control us. (I liked the idea posted here a few days ago about taking apart the planets, because it's much more difficult to move around the solar system when you have large gravity wells.)
That's what it's billed as. It's obviously a play for thought control.
If controlling kids is the question, putting a lock on the door to the TV room is a simple answer which does not involve government controls. So, the question then becomes, why do we want government controls? The answer is above, but it's not at all simple or heartwarming.
What leads you to believe that the brain does not take advantage of quantum effects?
I read an article about 5 years ago that said that the human brain does take advantage of quantum effects, so if we want to design a computer as powerful as the brain, we will have to understand not only chemical, electrical, and biological processes, but quantum as well.
Where do you get the right to ask me where I get my rights?
The answer is the same place: the Constitution.
Nowhere in the Constitution does it mention any restrictions on digital copies. Somewhere in the Constitution it states that all rights not mentioned are held by the people (or something similar, perhaps it mentions states but states are just a set of people).
I fumbled it a bit at the end there, but my main point is that you, as a citizen of the USA, have the right to do anything not specifically forbidden.
As a society, we've been losing touch with that over the last 5 or so years; now, people expect that they can't do most things, unless given permission.
But that's what happens when you go to war under false pretenses, I suppose.
XP may run headless (in fact, I recently disabled the "pause on errors" in BIOS to test a desktop machine's wireless connectivity from down the hall; the only cable going to the tower was the power cable, and I was able to RDP into it through the wireless card).
However, even when the user hasn't logged in yet, XP has still loaded all the GUI subsystems; you can't avoid loading those (or at least I'm not familiar with a way).
And the pace of technology is accelerating, so as we get closer to the Singularity you'll see the next three or seven generations of formats being developed at the same time. Someone had a graph that showed this, let's see if I can find it... nope, not after 10 minutes of searching, oh well.
The graph showed overlapping arcs. The arcs were similar to bell curves, in that there was a lead time while the technology was being developed, a sharp rise up as it was being used, a peak, and then a slide down during which that technology's successor began to rise.
The entire graph described basically an up-and-to-the-right scenario, but an exponential growth curve so that right about now on the graph it's starting to go vertical.
In my search I did find an interesting page about becoming an AI Programmer to help bring about the Singularity; it is here.
I get to meta-moderate twice a day but I *never* get mod points. What gives?
I, too, must have offended one of the Gods (without, of course, the motherfucker telling me what I did wrong and giving me a chance to make things right) because I no longer get mod points either (and, like you, am stupid enough to fall for meta-moderating at least once a day; most days like you, twice).
Do I care? Not now, although it bothered me for the first couple months. I'd love to be able to moderate again, but whatever.
I just can't wait to see what your correspondent's argument is going to be once we have assemblers/matter copiers.
"But, but, but, I spent a year of my life working my fingers to the bone to produce that unique piece of woodwork, and now you're just going to steal my design from me? There oughta be a law!"
I firmly believe that things are going to get worse before they get better, but they'll get better really quickly and we'll be off the planet before too many of us get thrown in jail for information loss.
Slashdot Mirror
You had me up to here. I would have worded it: "I see the work produced by the students who get A's [...]". Or are you really upset at the types of people getting the grades, as opposed to the differential between their output and yours, and their grades and yours?
Did you get permission from the plants and animals that you ground up to power your body with? That's very much "taking things without permission"; after all, the animal certainly would have preferred to continue living.
Soon we will be able to copy not only digital goods like books, music, and movies, but also any physical goods. Very soon; within 20 years we will have developed nanotechnology to the point where this will be possible.
What are you going to rail at then? We shouldn't all have Corvettes because GM has a piece of paper saying they're the only commercial concern which can sell cars shaped like Corvettes? Well, it's not a commercial concern when I connect my matter transformer to the Internet, download a GPL design, and convert dirt and sunlight into a Corvette. That was pretty much all done in my household, and no money changed hands: not commercial. And the same applies to the current situation: home users' downloading is not commercial. ISPs advertising "download music faster with high-speed Internet" should be getting hit by **AA organizations, not home users!
Copyright is an invention that hinders progress and appeared on the scene a couple hundred years ago ("the modern concept of copyright originated in 1710 with the British Statute of Anne", from here ). Since it's such a young idea, perhaps it hasn't had adequate time to wreak havoc and be abolished, just as communism is currently wreaking? I would even add that all of the posturing and word-redefining and lawsuits that are being done by the **AA organizations are the beginning of copyright's end, because they sure are wreaking havoc with our society.
Technology is speeding up, and is currently moving much faster than law. So I'm positive that we'll all be gods and off this rock before copyright law is changed. And you know what? You can have your laws, Dave. Whether I agree with them or not is entirely beside the point; and even if the law puts copyright violators to death, it still won't stop the inevitable engineering accomplishment of nanotechnology (not a science accomplishment, like splitting the atom; this is relatively simple, like building a bridge) and immediately after that people will be leaving the planet in droves. There's no way to govern when people are that far-flung, and besides, a government wouldn't need to collect taxes when any thing could be created for the cost of dirt and sunlight--so the government would have whatever material goods it needed to continue doing the jobs it needed doing. It wouldn't need taxes or fees or anything of the sort from its citizens.
I'm waxing into the pipe dream speach but the point is, I may agree with you that the law is good and valid, but it will still be made obsolete by technology. Given that as the outcome, why should I waste time and energy trying to prop up something that cannot survive naturally, and which only serves to hinder progress and reward producers at the expense of consumers' natural rights? It just doesn't make sense, and similarly, this is where I stop talking about it.
Second, the fortune at the bottom of the page says: "Behind every great computer sits a skinny little geek." Quite appropriate for the topic!
Yes, and I do the same under a capitalist system. Or any other system. Why would I want to expend more effort on a task once my goals have been achieved?
The less emotional way to state the above is: "People tend to be efficient."
Murder, yes. Rape, no. Roman Polanski has been in France for over 20 years.
Reminds me of Crow T. Robot: "I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous!" (MST3K)
No, not until you get to 10 computers with XP Pro. (There's a 5-network-connection limit on XP Home, 10-network-connection limit on XP Pro.)
Back in NT 3.51, Server and Workstation differed only by a couple settings which you could make and then have a Server. Microsoft got smarter about that as the years went on, and now you can't make the low-cost version look/act like the high-cost. And you're right, Linux is the way to go here because you get full functionality from the get-go (for Free as well).
Too much work to count, even!
Sci-Reality?
(No, not reality TV, just that the future is arriving.)
(Still awaiting flying cars though...)
Hence the same root, I suppose...
This is not a current problem, but you have hit the nail on the head. Within 20 years we'll have full-blown nanotechnology and copying any physical good will be trivial.
The coolest part is to be able to keep inventory in its original form: dirt and sunlight. When you need a new part (or hamburger), just load the appropriate blueprint, and the device will pull in enough dirt and sunlight (and perhaps resize itself, if the object is a car or a house or something), and produce it for you. For free.
GM and Ford will be up in arms when people start trading exact blueprints for cars over P2P networks. But they will be powerless to stop it.
I think it's very interesting to be watching **AA et al go through the same issues, just a few years earlier.
And it really doesn't matter how they screw up the law, morality, economy, country, world; we'll be going off-planet soon enough and "they" won't be able to control us. (I liked the idea posted here a few days ago about taking apart the planets, because it's much more difficult to move around the solar system when you have large gravity wells.)
That's what it's billed as. It's obviously a play for thought control.
If controlling kids is the question, putting a lock on the door to the TV room is a simple answer which does not involve government controls. So, the question then becomes, why do we want government controls? The answer is above, but it's not at all simple or heartwarming.
I think something is wrong with the red dress girl. She doesn't have legs, either.
I read an article about 5 years ago that said that the human brain does take advantage of quantum effects, so if we want to design a computer as powerful as the brain, we will have to understand not only chemical, electrical, and biological processes, but quantum as well.
So if you've heard differently, please share.
The answer is the same place: the Constitution.
Nowhere in the Constitution does it mention any restrictions on digital copies. Somewhere in the Constitution it states that all rights not mentioned are held by the people (or something similar, perhaps it mentions states but states are just a set of people).
I fumbled it a bit at the end there, but my main point is that you, as a citizen of the USA, have the right to do anything not specifically forbidden.
As a society, we've been losing touch with that over the last 5 or so years; now, people expect that they can't do most things, unless given permission.
But that's what happens when you go to war under false pretenses, I suppose.
Mmm, dwarf bread...
Like these:
However, even when the user hasn't logged in yet, XP has still loaded all the GUI subsystems; you can't avoid loading those (or at least I'm not familiar with a way).
The graph showed overlapping arcs. The arcs were similar to bell curves, in that there was a lead time while the technology was being developed, a sharp rise up as it was being used, a peak, and then a slide down during which that technology's successor began to rise.
The entire graph described basically an up-and-to-the-right scenario, but an exponential growth curve so that right about now on the graph it's starting to go vertical.
In my search I did find an interesting page about becoming an AI Programmer to help bring about the Singularity; it is here.
I, too, must have offended one of the Gods (without, of course, the motherfucker telling me what I did wrong and giving me a chance to make things right) because I no longer get mod points either (and, like you, am stupid enough to fall for meta-moderating at least once a day; most days like you, twice).
Do I care? Not now, although it bothered me for the first couple months. I'd love to be able to moderate again, but whatever.
I just can't wait to see what your correspondent's argument is going to be once we have assemblers/matter copiers.
"But, but, but, I spent a year of my life working my fingers to the bone to produce that unique piece of woodwork, and now you're just going to steal my design from me? There oughta be a law!"
I firmly believe that things are going to get worse before they get better, but they'll get better really quickly and we'll be off the planet before too many of us get thrown in jail for information loss.
No, mine usually has a salad.