That's the idea of free markets. The basic princible on which they are supposed to operate: Set things up so that each person, by acting in their own selfish interests, nontheless acts for the good of society as a whole. It doesn't always work.
Because it devalues the brand. The purpose of brand-name clothing is a conspiculous display of wealth: You wear it to show everyone else that you have money to burn on fashion. If everyone starts wearing cheap knocks-offs that are indistinguishable from the real thing, how can you show everyone else how rich you are?
It's a more serious issue with counterfeit drugs and unsafe toys, but in the case of sneakers the only consumers to suffer are the smugly wealthy.
You could almost use Freenet - it wouldn't need much modification to run over a non-IP network, or even an ad-hoc network, and it'd remain entirely compatible. You'd need to put a huge amount of storage in the routers to get decent retention, but that's doable these days... a 2TB hard drive should do it.
Actually, that could be quite practical. Those sneakers can carry a huge amount of data now. Eight gig on a USB stick, two terabytes on a portable hard drive... a couple of those could hold the entire collection of even the most obcesssive pirate. I can easily imagine the return of the Knock-Off Nigel, that coworker or fellow student who is happy to supply friends with pirate media. One Nigel with the knowledge to access darknets and contacts with other Nigels could supply many, many people, who would in turn supply more, who would supply more... a p2p network in the offline world. Latency would be no good for grabbing the latest blockbuster movie, but perfect for back-catalog piracy.
SOPA is making pirates feel a lot less guilty. I'm waiting for some activists to start burning DVDs full of pirate movies and leaving them scattered around public spaces.
Just need to raise a few tens of millions of dollars then! Easy.
A lot of slashdot types would dislike the idea on princible too, as it outright admits that the US is now an outright plutocracy where laws may be purchased.
If Obama were to oppose SOPA, expect to see a huge amount of negative news coverage of him come the election, and plenty of glowing stories about his opponent. The electorate may choose the president, but it is the media that really tells them who to vote for, and the media wants SOPA badly.
A lot of those on the list aren't interested in copyright so much as they are in branding, like the National Confectioners Association and Nike. They couldn't care less about internet piracy - they just want a way to shut down overseas-run websites selling counterfeit products with their logo on.
Indeed. The majority of citizens don't know about SOPA and won't know until it's too late, because there has been a sort of informal media blackout. Mainstream news coverage is nonexistant.
I doubt many cellphones in the USA have backdoors for the government. Why would they need to, when the FBI, CIA and NSA all have access to direct fiber taps into the network backbone and presumably have been given the keys to go along with it? Backdoors in phones might be detected, but just getting the carriers to cooperate in permitting decryption and monitoring of network traffic is much safer - plus it lets them intercept the traffic of travelers who bring a phone purchased outside the US too.
Now all they need to do is extend it to cover every TV show and movie ever made. Don't worry about fair use: Allowing that would just be a liability to them.
"Are you saying that cars have not improved and will not due to laws of physics? "
Yes, he is. To get a mass of car from zero to some new velocity needs an amount of energy, which needs a set amount of fuel. Even assuming perfect efficiency, zero friction, and everything as optimal as physics allows, there is still an upper limit on fuel efficiency which can only by subverted through the use of regenerative breaking. Cars have gotten closer, but right now they are about as efficient as they are going to get without reducing that M - and there isn't much of a market in the US for lightweight cars. They tend to have safety issues, in that they get squished into a little pancake of aluminium and steel in the event of a collision with a built-like-a-tank SUV.
It isn't feasible for youtube to prevent all infringing uploads, in a purely technological sense. Video is video - computers can't tell what is copyright infringing and what isn't, and manual evaluation would be both expensive and prone to errors too. That is why they currently rely on the DMCA system: All uploads are initially permitted, but those later reported as infringing are taken down. Were SOPA around, then it is certainly plausible that one of the studios, tireing of the need to constantly police this upstart new video site and constantly send out takedowns, would take action to instead have the entire site shut down. From their point of view it's a lot cheaper and more convenient than having to send takedowns for every single time someone uploads their property, espicially given the rate at which determined users can repost from new accounts.
Youtube has money. Such laws are rarely used against companies with that much money. I imagine though that, were SOPA around when youtube was founded, the site would have been killed before it ever became popular enough for you to know the name.
It still needs an order from a judge to pull a domain. The judge just doesn't need to see any evidence.
Not that much evidence will be needed in most cases. I imagine the first site to come down will be TBP... and SOPA should keep them offline for at least a couple of hours before they have a hundred additional mirrors.
People get into piracy for the free stuff. Then they turn political. It isn't the first time a movement for reform had its origins in criminal activity.
The situation with copyright isn't unique to that field. It is just an example of a law for which mass-enforcement is near-impossible: Violation occurs with such frequency that even with all the efforts of interests public and private it is impossible to prosecute more than a tiny proportion of even the obviously guilty. This is further compounded by how lightly the law is regarded by the public.
In such a situation, there are a few options available:
1. Give up. Dont' do anything, just don't bother enforcing the law, and it it fall into obscurity.
2. Make it enforceable via draconian measures - get rid of the difficulties of fair trials and the need to gather evidence for the minor cases, and make the enforcement process as quick and cheap as possible. This does run the risk of punishing some innocent people, but that is the cost of catching all of the guilty.. That was the purpose of the DMCA: It wasn't practical to sue every site hosting a pirated file, so the DMCA allowed copyright holders to achieve much the same with nothing more than a quick email. SOPA takes the same approach a step further.
3. Decriminalisation. If everyone is breaking a law, and the government can't stop them, then accept that perhaps the law itsself is at fault and needs to be abandoned - possibly to be replaced with something more workable.
The currently popular approach with politicians around the world is option two.
1. There is a significant number of single-issue voters supporting a position
2. None of the more mainstream parties will support that position.
This is a clear case of both of those conditions being met. So long as both are true, a party will exist in one form or another.
It's the same basic process that lets the BNP exist: Plenty of strongly anti-immigration voters, but none of the main parties willing to risk losing the minority votes or being branded as racist by even acknowledging the issue.
Plus this is a media lobby - they can offer discounted TV slots, or better slots, or favorable news coverage. It doesn't even have to be a shady under-the-table deal - any politician can work out that the media will be on good terms with him if he is with them.
Depends how you define 'gender.' Do you want an organism that is genetically male but anatomically female, or vice versa? That's easily done, certainly in any species that uses the XY chromosome system like humans. If no scientist has done it yet, it is only because there is no reason to. One tiny little genetic change to disable the TDF gene and you get a genetically male female, or one tiny adjustment to hormone levels in utero for a genetically female male. Humans don't start to develop gender-specific features until well into the fetus stage - they all start developing as a female. That is why men have nipples.
It shouldn't be that important. The only gene that determines gender is TFT, and all that does is make the testes form... everything else gender-specific is a consequence of the hormone produced there. So long as the gonads are of matching gender, the organisism as a whole should present as one gender anatomically. It's only if the chimeric line happens to run between the gonads that you'd get weird hermaphroditic outcomes.
Slashdot Mirror
That's the idea of free markets. The basic princible on which they are supposed to operate: Set things up so that each person, by acting in their own selfish interests, nontheless acts for the good of society as a whole. It doesn't always work.
Because it devalues the brand. The purpose of brand-name clothing is a conspiculous display of wealth: You wear it to show everyone else that you have money to burn on fashion. If everyone starts wearing cheap knocks-offs that are indistinguishable from the real thing, how can you show everyone else how rich you are?
It's a more serious issue with counterfeit drugs and unsafe toys, but in the case of sneakers the only consumers to suffer are the smugly wealthy.
You could almost use Freenet - it wouldn't need much modification to run over a non-IP network, or even an ad-hoc network, and it'd remain entirely compatible. You'd need to put a huge amount of storage in the routers to get decent retention, but that's doable these days... a 2TB hard drive should do it.
Actually, that could be quite practical. Those sneakers can carry a huge amount of data now. Eight gig on a USB stick, two terabytes on a portable hard drive... a couple of those could hold the entire collection of even the most obcesssive pirate. I can easily imagine the return of the Knock-Off Nigel, that coworker or fellow student who is happy to supply friends with pirate media. One Nigel with the knowledge to access darknets and contacts with other Nigels could supply many, many people, who would in turn supply more, who would supply more... a p2p network in the offline world. Latency would be no good for grabbing the latest blockbuster movie, but perfect for back-catalog piracy.
By continuing to pirate after SOPA, and helping those in America to the same, to demonstrate that the law is utterly useless at its stated purpose.
Then in five years the MPAA can write SOPA2, which will ban all encryption software and VPNs.
SOPA is making pirates feel a lot less guilty. I'm waiting for some activists to start burning DVDs full of pirate movies and leaving them scattered around public spaces.
Just need to raise a few tens of millions of dollars then! Easy.
A lot of slashdot types would dislike the idea on princible too, as it outright admits that the US is now an outright plutocracy where laws may be purchased.
If Obama were to oppose SOPA, expect to see a huge amount of negative news coverage of him come the election, and plenty of glowing stories about his opponent. The electorate may choose the president, but it is the media that really tells them who to vote for, and the media wants SOPA badly.
A lot of those on the list aren't interested in copyright so much as they are in branding, like the National Confectioners Association and Nike. They couldn't care less about internet piracy - they just want a way to shut down overseas-run websites selling counterfeit products with their logo on.
Indeed. The majority of citizens don't know about SOPA and won't know until it's too late, because there has been a sort of informal media blackout. Mainstream news coverage is nonexistant.
I doubt many cellphones in the USA have backdoors for the government. Why would they need to, when the FBI, CIA and NSA all have access to direct fiber taps into the network backbone and presumably have been given the keys to go along with it? Backdoors in phones might be detected, but just getting the carriers to cooperate in permitting decryption and monitoring of network traffic is much safer - plus it lets them intercept the traffic of travelers who bring a phone purchased outside the US too.
Now all they need to do is extend it to cover every TV show and movie ever made. Don't worry about fair use: Allowing that would just be a liability to them.
"Are you saying that cars have not improved and will not due to laws of physics? "
Yes, he is. To get a mass of car from zero to some new velocity needs an amount of energy, which needs a set amount of fuel. Even assuming perfect efficiency, zero friction, and everything as optimal as physics allows, there is still an upper limit on fuel efficiency which can only by subverted through the use of regenerative breaking. Cars have gotten closer, but right now they are about as efficient as they are going to get without reducing that M - and there isn't much of a market in the US for lightweight cars. They tend to have safety issues, in that they get squished into a little pancake of aluminium and steel in the event of a collision with a built-like-a-tank SUV.
It isn't feasible for youtube to prevent all infringing uploads, in a purely technological sense. Video is video - computers can't tell what is copyright infringing and what isn't, and manual evaluation would be both expensive and prone to errors too. That is why they currently rely on the DMCA system: All uploads are initially permitted, but those later reported as infringing are taken down. Were SOPA around, then it is certainly plausible that one of the studios, tireing of the need to constantly police this upstart new video site and constantly send out takedowns, would take action to instead have the entire site shut down. From their point of view it's a lot cheaper and more convenient than having to send takedowns for every single time someone uploads their property, espicially given the rate at which determined users can repost from new accounts.
Youtube has money. Such laws are rarely used against companies with that much money. I imagine though that, were SOPA around when youtube was founded, the site would have been killed before it ever became popular enough for you to know the name.
It still needs an order from a judge to pull a domain. The judge just doesn't need to see any evidence.
Not that much evidence will be needed in most cases. I imagine the first site to come down will be TBP... and SOPA should keep them offline for at least a couple of hours before they have a hundred additional mirrors.
People get into piracy for the free stuff. Then they turn political. It isn't the first time a movement for reform had its origins in criminal activity.
The situation with copyright isn't unique to that field. It is just an example of a law for which mass-enforcement is near-impossible: Violation occurs with such frequency that even with all the efforts of interests public and private it is impossible to prosecute more than a tiny proportion of even the obviously guilty. This is further compounded by how lightly the law is regarded by the public.
In such a situation, there are a few options available:
1. Give up. Dont' do anything, just don't bother enforcing the law, and it it fall into obscurity.
2. Make it enforceable via draconian measures - get rid of the difficulties of fair trials and the need to gather evidence for the minor cases, and make the enforcement process as quick and cheap as possible. This does run the risk of punishing some innocent people, but that is the cost of catching all of the guilty.. That was the purpose of the DMCA: It wasn't practical to sue every site hosting a pirated file, so the DMCA allowed copyright holders to achieve much the same with nothing more than a quick email. SOPA takes the same approach a step further.
3. Decriminalisation. If everyone is breaking a law, and the government can't stop them, then accept that perhaps the law itsself is at fault and needs to be abandoned - possibly to be replaced with something more workable.
The currently popular approach with politicians around the world is option two.
Because the ones that do have such a problem don't become federal employees, or at least don't stay as federal employees very long.
1. There is a significant number of single-issue voters supporting a position
2. None of the more mainstream parties will support that position.
This is a clear case of both of those conditions being met. So long as both are true, a party will exist in one form or another.
It's the same basic process that lets the BNP exist: Plenty of strongly anti-immigration voters, but none of the main parties willing to risk losing the minority votes or being branded as racist by even acknowledging the issue.
Plus this is a media lobby - they can offer discounted TV slots, or better slots, or favorable news coverage. It doesn't even have to be a shady under-the-table deal - any politician can work out that the media will be on good terms with him if he is with them.
Typo, sorry: Meant to say TDF.
Depends how you define 'gender.' Do you want an organism that is genetically male but anatomically female, or vice versa? That's easily done, certainly in any species that uses the XY chromosome system like humans. If no scientist has done it yet, it is only because there is no reason to. One tiny little genetic change to disable the TDF gene and you get a genetically male female, or one tiny adjustment to hormone levels in utero for a genetically female male. Humans don't start to develop gender-specific features until well into the fetus stage - they all start developing as a female. That is why men have nipples.
It shouldn't be that important. The only gene that determines gender is TFT, and all that does is make the testes form... everything else gender-specific is a consequence of the hormone produced there. So long as the gonads are of matching gender, the organisism as a whole should present as one gender anatomically. It's only if the chimeric line happens to run between the gonads that you'd get weird hermaphroditic outcomes.
The early days of 3D were plagued with the 'eye-poke' effect of objects sticking impossibly from the screen to demonstrate the technology...