Which is not surprising at all. If you use raw measurements for anything, you're doing it wrong. There's this cool thing called "calibration table" or "calibration curve" which allows you to compensate for this kind of deterministic measurement error. When somebody builds a heat source next to the measurement station or the sorrounding area gets paved and the measurements suddenly jump up by a few degrees, the person in charge of the station is supposed to recalibrate it so the measurements can be compared against historical values from before the change.
You don't even need to physically visit the station in order to do that. You can recalibrate the station well enough just by comparing the raw measurements against expected values calculated from other stations in the area. Measurement errors introduced by urban development have the nice quality that they don't happen everywhere at the exact same time across a 30 mile radius.
They can't even create models that reliably track with the little climate data we have for the last several thousand years.
Now you expect them to predict to a much more precise degree climate across a mere thousand years or less? That's the equivalent in geological-climate-cycle terms to the argument that short term weather has nothing to do with long term climate.
Would you care to explain how this quote relates to my previous post? I think you should read my post again and much more carefully.
There are many major contributors to climate change that we simply don't understand sufficiently nor have enough data about to be able to calculate their influences with sufficient accuracy and reliability to make it something that should be cause for inflicting by government force major hardships and condemnation to poverty and suffering for billions, and the stagnation of the progress of human civilization.
Actually, we CAN estimate the effect of unidentified influences from how well the simulation of known influences matches observed reality. The better the match between simulation and reality, the less space there is for as yet unknown major contributor. And so far the result is this: Models without man-made greenhouse gases don't match reality no matter what input parameters you use. Models with man-made greenhouse gases can match reality pretty closely for certain values of input parameters.
One thing I'm not aware that any of the models have accounted for is "wobble" in the Earth's orbital axis-tilt, nor, come to think of it, slight variations in the Earth's orbit around the sun. The slowly-enlarging orbit of the moon and the accompanying lessening of tidal forces would also have to play some role as well.
There's no point accounting for Milankovitch cycles unless you're simulating climate across at least several thousand years. The cycles are so long that they have negligible impact on simulations of less than a thousand years.
You must have missed that whole no warming in 17 years thing.
You must have fallen for the climate deniers' play on public ignorance. The full and correct statement is this: "There has been no statistically significant warming in the past 15 years."
Notice that the word "statistically" is emphasized because it makes all the difference. If you remove it, the statement will be about plain average temperature. But as it is written above with the word "statistically" in place, the statement is about error bars around the average. The longer timespan you measure, the smaller the error bars become. 15 years timespan is just barely too short to make definite conclusions. But 16 years or more is enough and the conclusion is that warming is still ongoing.
Those words "made with a decent budget" are where I have trouble with this argument. Of course the supporting staff are paid out of an overall project budget, but if anyone is free to copy and redistribute a work as soon as it's available, do you really think it's going to be worth investing the same scale of money in making it? I just don't think that is a credible position to take.
Consider an alternative legal framework (payright) instead of copyright: When a movie (or any other work currently eligible for copyright) is released to the public, anybody would be completely free to copy and distribute it under the condition that he pays an unspecified share of revenue to the creator (production company etc.).
In such system, it's impossible to stop somebody from distributing the work as long as he pays what he owes to the creator. In effect, big distribution companies will lose their power over production and the framework will spawn lots of distribution services competing among themselves. This will give end users much better products and creators will get money that the current copyright industry can't be bothered to even ask for (because they'd have to give up their fascist control of content in order to do so).
Works like feature films could still make some money, of course, for example via cinematic release where your customers are paying for the experience and never have direct control of the material. But things like DVD/Blu-Ray and on-line distribution are dead, and those increasingly represent the bulk of the profits in the movie industry.
As it is, if a movie doesn't break even on production costs during its opening weekend in cinema, it's already considered a failure by the entire movie industry. So I don't really see your point.
Do you realize that the existence of current copyright-backed content industry leaves very little space for evolution of any alternative economic model?
Nonsense. There is absolutely nothing about today's copyright landscape stopping someone from funding a new work via pre-copyright mechanisms like patronage. With the ability to crowdsource on the Internet, there are potentially interesting new options as well. And yet so far, the biggest successes from the likes of Kickstarter are still orders of magnitude smaller than Hollywood blockbusters or AAA games, and the closest example we have to major patronage is probably big commercial contributors to Open Source in the software world, which usually have self-interest as a significant motivation and then share the results because they have no reason not to.
You didn't get my point. Creating the work in question is the easy part. The hard part is getting it to the audience and that's where the copyright-backed industry stands in the way. They control all the mainstream distribution channels and they get to say who gets distributed through them and under what conditions. This leaves independent creators locked out and fighting for tiny niche audiences. How do you suppose they get paid if they don't have an audience in the first place? For solution see payright proposal above.
For mainstream business use, I contend that no Open Source software exists today that is widely used in business environments, and that the Open Source software that is used in small parts of the business world outside of geekdom is rarely of the same quality as traditional commercial alternatives and is chosen for other reasons. I hate coughing up for Office and Creative Suite as much as the next business owner, and I have a pretty low opinion of both Microsoft's and Adobe's recent offerings compared to what they've made in the past. Even so, the idea that LibreOffice and the GIMP are credible replacements for general business use is still as absurd today as it always has been.
I agree that GIMP is still waaay behind Photoshop but I don't see any problem with LibreOffice ot
IMHO, the biggest advantage of economic incentives is that it creates a motivation for the editors and the sound technicians and the fact checkers and the typesetters and the hair and make-up people and the guy who drives all the props to today's set.
All of them are hired by the production company. They don't get any share of the copyright. As long as the film is made with decent budget, they'll get hired whether or not copyright exists.
Writers will always write and people who love music will always play, and plenty of them would do it even if they never got paid at all, and the good ones wouldn't need to worry because they'd get paid somehow anyway being the recognisable face of their work. However, there wouldn't be nearly as many good works without everyone else who works behind the scenes, and those are the people who would really lose out if copyright disappeared before some other economic model evolved to replace it.
Do you realize that the existence of current copyright-backed content industry leaves very little space for evolution of any alternative economic model? The copyright industry gets to set the rules for everybody else. Do you really expect that the challengers can win a game that's been rigged against them from the very beginning? Or is this just your way of saying "I want copyright to stay here forever"?
To me, Open Source represents the perfect example of what happens when you take away the major commercial incentives. Lots of geeks still write software for fun and/or the satisfaction of solving some problem. Some of that software is technically very good, because it's written by geeks who care about that sort of thing. On the other hand, poor to non-existent documentation is almost universal, user interfaces are often unpolished, many of the most successful OSS projects are merely imitations of successful commercial products rather than truly innovative alternatives, and ultimately the software is more driven by the needs or wishes of its creators than anyone else who might use it. There's nothing wrong with that, of course -- the world doesn't owe anyone their perfect software -- but the wider market isn't generally as well served by this model as by traditional commercial development where there is a direct financial incentive to give the market what it wants.
And now, here's the kicker. The exceptions, the big success story OSS projects that are run more professionally and do produce more polished results on par with other commercial offerings, are mostly developed by people whose funding comes from other sources (often backed by commercial IP) and then shared with GPL-style licences that prevent others from taking advantage in certain ways (also protected by IP).
Any open-source software that's widely used in business environment reaches commercial quality pretty quickly. Simply because bigger companies that use it as mission-critical software usually assign somebody on full-time development, bug fixes and internal support. All the rest of open-source software suffers from very small adoption by the general public. Lots of independent open-source developers also don't even try raising money for developing their software which doesn't help either.
But software world will be taken over by open-source software anyway because current proprietary software giants don't have the same power over the entire software market as Hollywood does over culture. Though the change will happen on office workstations before it comes to consumer desktops.
I'd love to see how politicians and government officials react when confronted with this kind of survey data.
All you'll hear will be the crickets chirping. Politicians an government officials only react to surveys presented in the form of small green papers with pictures of former presidents on them.
Copyright law today is a corruption of copyright, plain and simple.
The idea of copyright itself is a corruption of how the process of creativity and innovation actually works. You can never create anything new without building on the past. And the newest past everybody can freely build upon is over a century old. Anything newer is in the middle of copyright minefield.
If you really want to fix the copyright mess, the only way is to get rid of copyright completely and replace it with [compulsory licensing].
This is already the law for a few specific uses of works, such as recording cover versions of musical works.
Payright is not the same thing as compulsory licensing. Compulsory licensing is an exception to universal monopoly. The existence of the monopoly itself causes lots of problems without actually solving all that much. Also, whenever the original artist is supposed to be paid for uses covered by the compulsory licence, the money has to go through a government-appointed third party that usually gets to set the licence fees.
If we look at compulsory licensing as one possible implementation of payright, it's a really bad one. Rather, the need for existence of compulsory licensing is a proof that payright is the right way to go.
And therein lies the difference: producers of "premium" works would BAWW that distribution without charge "cheapens" their works.
Note: do not confuse distribution without charge and distribution without revenue. Distribution without charge can still generate revenue and the artist should get a generous slice of that.
You people think copyrights only job is to make material open?
It says so in Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of US Constitution: To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
You could have it written in the law that the original holder can nullify said agreement at will if it is beyond, say, 5 years.
That seems to fix everything I think. Can't see much of it being used for wrong. Admittedly I only spent 12 seconds thinking about possible scenarios.
Good idea (US copyright law currently allows the author to unilaterally terminate the copyright assignment after 35 years with a notice 2 years in advance) but it doesn't fix everything by a long shot. If you really want to fix the copyright mess, the only way is to get rid of copyright completely and replace it with payrights. (When somebody makes money off your work which would be eligible for copyright at this moment, he owes you an unspecified cut of his revenue. You can sue for money but you can't shut his business down. And of course zero revenue means zero cut to be paid.)
By voting for which party in our political duopoly? The whole American political system is a mess because with the two entrenched parties, there is almost no ballot space for new ideas.
Do something to create that ballot space then! We're working hard to create ballot space for Pirate Parties here in Europe so you're not alone in the fight.
There will always be people who take a class, take notes on the ports and vendor-specific procedures who will always be a paper tiger, but people who actually get something out of classes can take broad concepts away from even specific classes (like vendor specific identity management products).
Do you really think that high school students have the knowledge and motivation to look for general concepts?
Because you can navigate the command prompt and write batch scripts,
Even after all those years, DOS command line is still so pitiful that I have to install Cygwin whenever I need to do any serious scripting on Windows. Knowing DOS command line won't help you understand Unix shells simply because the most useful Unix shell features don't exist in DOS and things like variables and pipes are so limited in DOS that they're almost useless.
are familiar with driver configuration concepts (still relevant today if you're developing them, admittedly pretty useless just as a user of PnP hardware),
What driver configuration concepts?
know what Windows binaries look like inside (assuming you used the debug program available at the time),
We didn't, I don't and I don't see the relevance of such knowledge. Those who really need to know that can look up the documentation and learn it in a week tops.
understand hierarchical file systems and the Windows registry, are familiar with Windows shortcuts files,
Most of that knowledge is so trivial that anybody with half a brain can learn it in five minutes. Except Windows registry (we didn't learn that at school BTW) which is a nightmare.
are familiar with Windows' built-in programs (really, many of them haven't changed that much since 98),
Like Minesweeper and Solitaire? Because those built-in programs were by far the most used at our school.
probably have pretty good keyboarding skills (that was one of the main things I learned in elementary school computer classes, and I'm probably within five years of your age),
I have but school had nothing to do with it. I'm writing this on Linux with a custom Dvorak keyboard layout BTW.
and plenty of other things, both vendor-specific and not? Computer skills don't just evaporate with each new OS release, or even switching between completely different systems (although it sometimes feels that way when I use a Mac, and yes, I use both Linux and FreeBSD...)
Lots of my fellow elementary school students probably still think that if you change filename extension of an Excel spreadsheet from XLS to CSV, you'll be able to open it in a program which only supports CSV files. Other basic concepts of using a computer that they probably don't understand: When one program doesn't have all the functions you need, you can combine multiple programs supporting the same file formats to do the job. Solving repetitive tasks using loops and conditions. Using styles in word processor documents/HTML pages/other formatted text.
No it isn't that at all, this idea of "millions of new jobs" is baseless, if you provably can make the case for it then obviously that will get significant attention...so the question is: did you?
Just look at the ridiculous amount of money spent every year on patent litigation. When you take away the ability to harass competition through patent trolling, tech companies will need to put most of it into innovating in order to stay relevant, with the biggest threats coming from small startups. I rest my case.
...and learning how to use SMS or SCCM or App-V gives you skills that translate to HP or BMC. Learning Hyper-V gives you skills that translate to Citrix and VMWare.
You can't be a certified Ford mechanic without picking up some of the skills to be ACE certified...
Not really. Vendor-specific certification courses mix up the common basics with vendor-specific crap and focus a lot on the latter in exams. The point is to rush students to mastery of the one tools covered in the course. As a result, students don't know what to look for in other tools because they can't tell the difference between the basics and vendor-specific crap from the certification course.
An MCSE certification is only useful in one particular field, under very particular circumstances.
And those circumstances won't exist anymore by the time they graduate. Way back in 6th grade, we were first taught DOS and Windows 3.11. By 8th grade, my elementary school upgraded to Windows 98. At high school, we were mostly taught programming and basic system administration on Windows 2000 and Windows XP. While I went to university, Vista wooshed by without leaving much of a trace. Before I graduated, even the biggest and most conservative corporations started switching from XP to Windows 7. And shortly after I got my first job, Microsoft released Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012, the latter of which drives me crazy every time I have to touch it at work. Now tell me, how exactly is my knowledge of DOS, Windows 3.11 and Windows 98 relevant today?
No, democracy depends on everybody having the same freedoms as everybody else, including unrestrained freedom of speech. Somebody who is a gifted communicator or a clever graphic designer may have a greater voice than others in a sense, because they can craft a really compelling statement of their opinions and convince a bunch of people of their view. Whereas nobody cares what Joe Blow in the bar has to say, because he's a flunkie. Should the government take steps to reduce the voice of the gifted communicator or the graphic designer? No. It doesn't hurt Joe Blow that others are better communicators than he is. He has less of a voice because he just happens to. The government isn't censoring him just because somebody else is better at communicating.
If you read my previous post again more carefully, you'll notice that the part that says "the exact same voice as everybody else" is about a private person speaking directly to an elected representative. Anybody is absolutely free to present his ideas to the public by whatever means he has. But elected representatives must not be allowed to listen to Steve Balmer or any other private person any more than they listen to Joe Blow. Even if there's no provable corruption involved. Elected representatives represent the millions of people who voted for them and not Microsoft's shareholders.
Look at it from the perspective of those running the country, IBM and MS support the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of their employees, they contribute billions to the economy and have hundreds of thousands of shareholders which includes active traders, long term investors and retirement funds. It isn't 4 "persons" involved because corporations are not people, but they are often representative of many people.
In other words, let's sacrifice millions of new jobs so that a handful of megacorporations with a few hundred thousand employees can keep their ridiculously huge profits. "Too big to fail" at its finest.
The cool thing about a free democracy is that neither you nor the government gets to decide who "deserves amplification". If the speaker spends his own money to get his message out, then only he gets to decide whether it's a worthwhile exercise or not. Isn't freedom great?
Democracy depends on everybody having the exact same voice as everybody else. The democratic way to get the laws you want is to spend money trying to make the general public see the world your way and have them tell the representatives to pass the laws you want. When a handful of individuals can go straight to the representatives and get them to do something disregarding the voters, the democracy is dead.
Same problem, different technology. Once you eliminate most of the need for skilled labor except to service the machines and then get rid of many ways of making profit from invention, you're down to the person who owns the capital of the CNC mill & printers vs. a bunch of people who have nothing to offer in exchange for using them. Just on a more local scale. That is, unless the technologies become cheap enough to be ubiquitous, that is.
I see the perfect solution fallacy is still popular. Decentralizing production to county and city level is good enough for now and also a necessary step to make those technologies cheap and ubiquitous, if that becomes necessary later on.
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Which is not surprising at all. If you use raw measurements for anything, you're doing it wrong. There's this cool thing called "calibration table" or "calibration curve" which allows you to compensate for this kind of deterministic measurement error. When somebody builds a heat source next to the measurement station or the sorrounding area gets paved and the measurements suddenly jump up by a few degrees, the person in charge of the station is supposed to recalibrate it so the measurements can be compared against historical values from before the change.
You don't even need to physically visit the station in order to do that. You can recalibrate the station well enough just by comparing the raw measurements against expected values calculated from other stations in the area. Measurement errors introduced by urban development have the nice quality that they don't happen everywhere at the exact same time across a 30 mile radius.
They can't even create models that reliably track with the little climate data we have for the last several thousand years.
Now you expect them to predict to a much more precise degree climate across a mere thousand years or less? That's the equivalent in geological-climate-cycle terms to the argument that short term weather has nothing to do with long term climate.
Would you care to explain how this quote relates to my previous post? I think you should read my post again and much more carefully.
There are many major contributors to climate change that we simply don't understand sufficiently nor have enough data about to be able to calculate their influences with sufficient accuracy and reliability to make it something that should be cause for inflicting by government force major hardships and condemnation to poverty and suffering for billions, and the stagnation of the progress of human civilization.
Actually, we CAN estimate the effect of unidentified influences from how well the simulation of known influences matches observed reality. The better the match between simulation and reality, the less space there is for as yet unknown major contributor. And so far the result is this: Models without man-made greenhouse gases don't match reality no matter what input parameters you use. Models with man-made greenhouse gases can match reality pretty closely for certain values of input parameters.
One thing I'm not aware that any of the models have accounted for is "wobble" in the Earth's orbital axis-tilt, nor, come to think of it, slight variations in the Earth's orbit around the sun. The slowly-enlarging orbit of the moon and the accompanying lessening of tidal forces would also have to play some role as well.
There's no point accounting for Milankovitch cycles unless you're simulating climate across at least several thousand years. The cycles are so long that they have negligible impact on simulations of less than a thousand years.
You must have missed that whole no warming in 17 years thing.
You must have fallen for the climate deniers' play on public ignorance. The full and correct statement is this: "There has been no statistically significant warming in the past 15 years."
Notice that the word "statistically" is emphasized because it makes all the difference. If you remove it, the statement will be about plain average temperature. But as it is written above with the word "statistically" in place, the statement is about error bars around the average. The longer timespan you measure, the smaller the error bars become. 15 years timespan is just barely too short to make definite conclusions. But 16 years or more is enough and the conclusion is that warming is still ongoing.
Those words "made with a decent budget" are where I have trouble with this argument. Of course the supporting staff are paid out of an overall project budget, but if anyone is free to copy and redistribute a work as soon as it's available, do you really think it's going to be worth investing the same scale of money in making it? I just don't think that is a credible position to take.
Consider an alternative legal framework (payright) instead of copyright: When a movie (or any other work currently eligible for copyright) is released to the public, anybody would be completely free to copy and distribute it under the condition that he pays an unspecified share of revenue to the creator (production company etc.).
In such system, it's impossible to stop somebody from distributing the work as long as he pays what he owes to the creator. In effect, big distribution companies will lose their power over production and the framework will spawn lots of distribution services competing among themselves. This will give end users much better products and creators will get money that the current copyright industry can't be bothered to even ask for (because they'd have to give up their fascist control of content in order to do so).
Works like feature films could still make some money, of course, for example via cinematic release where your customers are paying for the experience and never have direct control of the material. But things like DVD/Blu-Ray and on-line distribution are dead, and those increasingly represent the bulk of the profits in the movie industry.
As it is, if a movie doesn't break even on production costs during its opening weekend in cinema, it's already considered a failure by the entire movie industry. So I don't really see your point.
Do you realize that the existence of current copyright-backed content industry leaves very little space for evolution of any alternative economic model?
Nonsense. There is absolutely nothing about today's copyright landscape stopping someone from funding a new work via pre-copyright mechanisms like patronage. With the ability to crowdsource on the Internet, there are potentially interesting new options as well. And yet so far, the biggest successes from the likes of Kickstarter are still orders of magnitude smaller than Hollywood blockbusters or AAA games, and the closest example we have to major patronage is probably big commercial contributors to Open Source in the software world, which usually have self-interest as a significant motivation and then share the results because they have no reason not to.
You didn't get my point. Creating the work in question is the easy part. The hard part is getting it to the audience and that's where the copyright-backed industry stands in the way. They control all the mainstream distribution channels and they get to say who gets distributed through them and under what conditions. This leaves independent creators locked out and fighting for tiny niche audiences. How do you suppose they get paid if they don't have an audience in the first place? For solution see payright proposal above.
For mainstream business use, I contend that no Open Source software exists today that is widely used in business environments, and that the Open Source software that is used in small parts of the business world outside of geekdom is rarely of the same quality as traditional commercial alternatives and is chosen for other reasons. I hate coughing up for Office and Creative Suite as much as the next business owner, and I have a pretty low opinion of both Microsoft's and Adobe's recent offerings compared to what they've made in the past. Even so, the idea that LibreOffice and the GIMP are credible replacements for general business use is still as absurd today as it always has been.
I agree that GIMP is still waaay behind Photoshop but I don't see any problem with LibreOffice ot
IMHO, the biggest advantage of economic incentives is that it creates a motivation for the editors and the sound technicians and the fact checkers and the typesetters and the hair and make-up people and the guy who drives all the props to today's set.
All of them are hired by the production company. They don't get any share of the copyright. As long as the film is made with decent budget, they'll get hired whether or not copyright exists.
Writers will always write and people who love music will always play, and plenty of them would do it even if they never got paid at all, and the good ones wouldn't need to worry because they'd get paid somehow anyway being the recognisable face of their work. However, there wouldn't be nearly as many good works without everyone else who works behind the scenes, and those are the people who would really lose out if copyright disappeared before some other economic model evolved to replace it.
Do you realize that the existence of current copyright-backed content industry leaves very little space for evolution of any alternative economic model? The copyright industry gets to set the rules for everybody else. Do you really expect that the challengers can win a game that's been rigged against them from the very beginning? Or is this just your way of saying "I want copyright to stay here forever"?
To me, Open Source represents the perfect example of what happens when you take away the major commercial incentives. Lots of geeks still write software for fun and/or the satisfaction of solving some problem. Some of that software is technically very good, because it's written by geeks who care about that sort of thing. On the other hand, poor to non-existent documentation is almost universal, user interfaces are often unpolished, many of the most successful OSS projects are merely imitations of successful commercial products rather than truly innovative alternatives, and ultimately the software is more driven by the needs or wishes of its creators than anyone else who might use it. There's nothing wrong with that, of course -- the world doesn't owe anyone their perfect software -- but the wider market isn't generally as well served by this model as by traditional commercial development where there is a direct financial incentive to give the market what it wants.
And now, here's the kicker. The exceptions, the big success story OSS projects that are run more professionally and do produce more polished results on par with other commercial offerings, are mostly developed by people whose funding comes from other sources (often backed by commercial IP) and then shared with GPL-style licences that prevent others from taking advantage in certain ways (also protected by IP).
Any open-source software that's widely used in business environment reaches commercial quality pretty quickly. Simply because bigger companies that use it as mission-critical software usually assign somebody on full-time development, bug fixes and internal support. All the rest of open-source software suffers from very small adoption by the general public. Lots of independent open-source developers also don't even try raising money for developing their software which doesn't help either.
But software world will be taken over by open-source software anyway because current proprietary software giants don't have the same power over the entire software market as Hollywood does over culture. Though the change will happen on office workstations before it comes to consumer desktops.
Those things weren't important *to them* in their business, not that they thought those things weren't important. Big difference.
They actually asked the correct question to measure overall importance of intellectual monopolies to the economy.
I'd love to see how politicians and government officials react when confronted with this kind of survey data.
All you'll hear will be the crickets chirping. Politicians an government officials only react to surveys presented in the form of small green papers with pictures of former presidents on them.
I think he means spoilers as in telling how a film/book/game ends to somebody who didn't see/read/play it yet.
Copyright law today is a corruption of copyright, plain and simple.
The idea of copyright itself is a corruption of how the process of creativity and innovation actually works. You can never create anything new without building on the past. And the newest past everybody can freely build upon is over a century old. Anything newer is in the middle of copyright minefield.
If you really want to fix the copyright mess, the only way is to get rid of copyright completely and replace it with [compulsory licensing].
This is already the law for a few specific uses of works, such as recording cover versions of musical works.
Payright is not the same thing as compulsory licensing. Compulsory licensing is an exception to universal monopoly. The existence of the monopoly itself causes lots of problems without actually solving all that much. Also, whenever the original artist is supposed to be paid for uses covered by the compulsory licence, the money has to go through a government-appointed third party that usually gets to set the licence fees.
If we look at compulsory licensing as one possible implementation of payright, it's a really bad one. Rather, the need for existence of compulsory licensing is a proof that payright is the right way to go.
And therein lies the difference: producers of "premium" works would BAWW that distribution without charge "cheapens" their works.
Note: do not confuse distribution without charge and distribution without revenue. Distribution without charge can still generate revenue and the artist should get a generous slice of that.
You people think copyrights only job is to make material open?
It says so in Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of US Constitution: To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
But we all know that the government doesn't care.
You could have it written in the law that the original holder can nullify said agreement at will if it is beyond, say, 5 years. That seems to fix everything I think. Can't see much of it being used for wrong. Admittedly I only spent 12 seconds thinking about possible scenarios.
Good idea (US copyright law currently allows the author to unilaterally terminate the copyright assignment after 35 years with a notice 2 years in advance) but it doesn't fix everything by a long shot. If you really want to fix the copyright mess, the only way is to get rid of copyright completely and replace it with payrights. (When somebody makes money off your work which would be eligible for copyright at this moment, he owes you an unspecified cut of his revenue. You can sue for money but you can't shut his business down. And of course zero revenue means zero cut to be paid.)
Romney.
By voting for which party in our political duopoly? The whole American political system is a mess because with the two entrenched parties, there is almost no ballot space for new ideas.
Do something to create that ballot space then! We're working hard to create ballot space for Pirate Parties here in Europe so you're not alone in the fight.
Why the MPAA would want to associate with a scumbag of that caliber is anyone's guess.
That's his perfect qualification for the job, of course.
There will always be people who take a class, take notes on the ports and vendor-specific procedures who will always be a paper tiger, but people who actually get something out of classes can take broad concepts away from even specific classes (like vendor specific identity management products).
Do you really think that high school students have the knowledge and motivation to look for general concepts?
Because you can navigate the command prompt and write batch scripts,
Even after all those years, DOS command line is still so pitiful that I have to install Cygwin whenever I need to do any serious scripting on Windows. Knowing DOS command line won't help you understand Unix shells simply because the most useful Unix shell features don't exist in DOS and things like variables and pipes are so limited in DOS that they're almost useless.
are familiar with driver configuration concepts (still relevant today if you're developing them, admittedly pretty useless just as a user of PnP hardware),
What driver configuration concepts?
know what Windows binaries look like inside (assuming you used the debug program available at the time),
We didn't, I don't and I don't see the relevance of such knowledge. Those who really need to know that can look up the documentation and learn it in a week tops.
understand hierarchical file systems and the Windows registry, are familiar with Windows shortcuts files,
Most of that knowledge is so trivial that anybody with half a brain can learn it in five minutes. Except Windows registry (we didn't learn that at school BTW) which is a nightmare.
are familiar with Windows' built-in programs (really, many of them haven't changed that much since 98),
Like Minesweeper and Solitaire? Because those built-in programs were by far the most used at our school.
probably have pretty good keyboarding skills (that was one of the main things I learned in elementary school computer classes, and I'm probably within five years of your age),
I have but school had nothing to do with it. I'm writing this on Linux with a custom Dvorak keyboard layout BTW.
and plenty of other things, both vendor-specific and not? Computer skills don't just evaporate with each new OS release, or even switching between completely different systems (although it sometimes feels that way when I use a Mac, and yes, I use both Linux and FreeBSD...)
Lots of my fellow elementary school students probably still think that if you change filename extension of an Excel spreadsheet from XLS to CSV, you'll be able to open it in a program which only supports CSV files. Other basic concepts of using a computer that they probably don't understand: When one program doesn't have all the functions you need, you can combine multiple programs supporting the same file formats to do the job. Solving repetitive tasks using loops and conditions. Using styles in word processor documents/HTML pages/other formatted text.
No it isn't that at all, this idea of "millions of new jobs" is baseless, if you provably can make the case for it then obviously that will get significant attention...so the question is: did you?
Just look at the ridiculous amount of money spent every year on patent litigation. When you take away the ability to harass competition through patent trolling, tech companies will need to put most of it into innovating in order to stay relevant, with the biggest threats coming from small startups. I rest my case.
...and learning how to use SMS or SCCM or App-V gives you skills that translate to HP or BMC. Learning Hyper-V gives you skills that translate to Citrix and VMWare.
You can't be a certified Ford mechanic without picking up some of the skills to be ACE certified...
Not really. Vendor-specific certification courses mix up the common basics with vendor-specific crap and focus a lot on the latter in exams. The point is to rush students to mastery of the one tools covered in the course. As a result, students don't know what to look for in other tools because they can't tell the difference between the basics and vendor-specific crap from the certification course.
An MCSE certification is only useful in one particular field, under very particular circumstances.
And those circumstances won't exist anymore by the time they graduate. Way back in 6th grade, we were first taught DOS and Windows 3.11. By 8th grade, my elementary school upgraded to Windows 98. At high school, we were mostly taught programming and basic system administration on Windows 2000 and Windows XP. While I went to university, Vista wooshed by without leaving much of a trace. Before I graduated, even the biggest and most conservative corporations started switching from XP to Windows 7. And shortly after I got my first job, Microsoft released Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012, the latter of which drives me crazy every time I have to touch it at work. Now tell me, how exactly is my knowledge of DOS, Windows 3.11 and Windows 98 relevant today?
No, democracy depends on everybody having the same freedoms as everybody else, including unrestrained freedom of speech. Somebody who is a gifted communicator or a clever graphic designer may have a greater voice than others in a sense, because they can craft a really compelling statement of their opinions and convince a bunch of people of their view. Whereas nobody cares what Joe Blow in the bar has to say, because he's a flunkie. Should the government take steps to reduce the voice of the gifted communicator or the graphic designer? No. It doesn't hurt Joe Blow that others are better communicators than he is. He has less of a voice because he just happens to. The government isn't censoring him just because somebody else is better at communicating.
If you read my previous post again more carefully, you'll notice that the part that says "the exact same voice as everybody else" is about a private person speaking directly to an elected representative. Anybody is absolutely free to present his ideas to the public by whatever means he has. But elected representatives must not be allowed to listen to Steve Balmer or any other private person any more than they listen to Joe Blow. Even if there's no provable corruption involved. Elected representatives represent the millions of people who voted for them and not Microsoft's shareholders.
Look at it from the perspective of those running the country, IBM and MS support the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of their employees, they contribute billions to the economy and have hundreds of thousands of shareholders which includes active traders, long term investors and retirement funds. It isn't 4 "persons" involved because corporations are not people, but they are often representative of many people.
In other words, let's sacrifice millions of new jobs so that a handful of megacorporations with a few hundred thousand employees can keep their ridiculously huge profits. "Too big to fail" at its finest.
The cool thing about a free democracy is that neither you nor the government gets to decide who "deserves amplification". If the speaker spends his own money to get his message out, then only he gets to decide whether it's a worthwhile exercise or not. Isn't freedom great?
Democracy depends on everybody having the exact same voice as everybody else. The democratic way to get the laws you want is to spend money trying to make the general public see the world your way and have them tell the representatives to pass the laws you want. When a handful of individuals can go straight to the representatives and get them to do something disregarding the voters, the democracy is dead.
Same problem, different technology. Once you eliminate most of the need for skilled labor except to service the machines and then get rid of many ways of making profit from invention, you're down to the person who owns the capital of the CNC mill & printers vs. a bunch of people who have nothing to offer in exchange for using them. Just on a more local scale. That is, unless the technologies become cheap enough to be ubiquitous, that is.
I see the perfect solution fallacy is still popular. Decentralizing production to county and city level is good enough for now and also a necessary step to make those technologies cheap and ubiquitous, if that becomes necessary later on.