Anybody notice this service is only for Mac and iPod owners? No way will this do enough volume to turn a profit. If Apple was smart, they'd make it platform neutral and increase their potential customer base 30 fold.
What?! Enough volume to turn a profit? All they have to cover are some servers, and a decent pipe. This doesn't need to be a volume business to do well.
Thats the thing people seem to miss here. The outlay for this kind of project isn't really very big compared to creating and then distributing a physical object like a CD.
I think you've got to admit that a business model which financially rewards the creators of content is likely to be more sustainable in the long term than one based on 'everybody gets the content for free'.
Agreed.
If you want to see the continued creation of music, you've got to consider how you can fund artists
Again, good point.
Options like this one just might provide a better solution for that than the current publishing/distribution model.
Not so good here. This option isn't really a change at all in artist reimbursement. It isn't as if artists are going to get any more money from an on-line sale than they do from a CD sale (approximately fuckall). The major labels are still going to screw the artists, just now they can do it online as well.
The problem is that the existence of 'free' (modulo the long term social cost of killing the creation of future music) alternatives could prevent this potentially sustainable model from catching hold.
I don't know if I agree. I think what might prevent this model from being sustainable will be in its application. A dollar a song still does not seem to be an appropriate value to many. That is basically what you pay now, only you get more (a physical object, liner notes, etc etc). Additionally, the cost of delivery to the producer has drastically decreased, and it is not unreasonable for the consumer to expect some of that to be reflected in a decrease in the purchase cost.
Anyway, I do not believe music will cease to be created for any business reason, ever. Music production existed long before, and will continue long after gigantic multinationals stop making money through it. As doonesburydiscusses, there are other valid models for the the financial support of creation of music.
Normally, when a society wants to proscribe some activity which is destructive to its long term health (such as the widespread freeloading of music), it uses social norms and, in extreme cases, laws to prevent them. Hmm - maybe copying music without giving anything back to the artist ought to be socially unacceptable, or maybe even illegal?
Thing is, kazaa'ing seems more the social norm than not.
I think perhaps the big 5 are experiencing exactly that type of normative action: People see that musicians get shafted by the industry, so it becomes socially acceptable to shaft the industry. As for the basis of legality for things...that is such another barrel of worms.
When Apple sued MS, it was because of MS's marketing of a similar product. Apple thought they could patent 'look and feel' of the interface. MS never tried to make people believe their product was compatible with Apples, let alone deliberately mislead them into thinking it was somehow sanctioned by Apple.
So what? The point is, legal documents in that case are going to be available in this one. In those legal documents is evidence of how generic the term windows is with regards to computer display systems.
Their website is deliberately designed to look like MS's marketing material, and is completely misleading as to what Lindows is, costs, and is capable of.
I don't buy that. The lindows site looks nothing like Microsoft.com or what windows.com resolves to. In fact if anything, it looks like they are ripping off Apple.
As for misleading, the big tab for 'lindows os' gives you a big fat price as the first text on the page, and says in the first paragraph
'LindowsOS is a new, fun and exciting operating system that delivers the power, stability and cost-savings of Linux with the ease of a windows environment.'
If you object to the use of 'windows environment,' you are proving the fact that Microsoft has tried to appropriate the word windows when it is obviously a generic term. It goes on to describe the product in terms you can hardly call deceptive.
IMHO, Lindows is a sleazy company. I've had enough of get-rich-quick startups and scams, and could give a crap who their in court with. The enemy of my enemy is not my friend. I hope the judge rules that Lindows is in fault, because they are seeking to deliberately trick consumers into buying their product.
Sleazy or not, lindows is not a scam. Regardless of whether you care about them, this case is of interest if for no other reason than to see if the government will let microsoft get away with trademarking a generic term. The enemy of your enemy might not be your friend, but if they bring down your enemy a bit, your enemy is still weaker.
And since when has tricking customers been illegal? In fact, I'd submit it is a mainstay of marketing, period (moral or not).
What the fuck, just because it's highly visible and currently kills 100% of it's victims,
Somewhat off-topic, but that's not entirely true. There are people who have been HIV positive for tens of years and are still alive. The thing that is kind of fucked up is that nearly 100% of people who test positive for HIV will be counted as AIDS deaths, simply because they have the virus (whether it played a part in the actual cause of death or not).
Just the whole premise of the show is a turn-off for me. Why do so many folks watch it?
Because many folks are able to get past a silly premise. Many people actually give it a shot before judging it.
The thing is, its a very intelligent, well-written show, though lots of people don't take time to actually find that out. It's just too easy to dismiss as a stupid show because it has a stupid name. A pity.
Its good, however, to see that Google aren't resting on their laurels, as Google Labs [google.com] amply demonstrate. I like Google sets [google.com], which makes good use of list markup, like when the shuttle crashed last week I was trying to remember the names of all the space shuttles, so entering Colombia, Challenger and Enterprise into Google Sets gave me the names of the other three shuttles, Discovery, Endeavour and Atlantis -- a useful tool indeed
Please note it was mod'ed +*, Funny. The comparison is not saying copying music = killing Americans, it is saying the Bush administration has a penchant for being extreme...
In fact, the humor is that such things are obviously not even close to being equivalent, but the Bush handlers wouldn't care.
Well, according to this, very few manufacturers actually pay these CAFE fines (Fiat, VW, Porsche, BMW, Lotus), certainly not Honda or Toyota.
I don't doubt that certain behemoth makers dump small/alt power cars for this reason, I still am not convinced Honda, Toyota, Nissan, much less *all* manufacturers operate at a loss on the majority of their fleets. That still doesn't pass the smell test.
The only divisions of car companies that make money are light trucks (incl. SUVs) and financing. The rest are sold at a loss.
Oh come on, that seems a big exaggerated. Any data to back this up?
Are you really suggesting that Honda takes a hit on every Accord & Civic it sells only to made up by profit from the Passport? Did car companies not make a profit prior to 10 years ago? If this were true, it would make no sense for a car company to be a car company, it should just be a finance company.
Now just suppose that the "junk DNA" in the human genome is the documentation package for the machine code.
On a more realistic note, that junk DNA is probably more like a revision history of life. Many scientists are of the opinion that a significant portion of the junk DNA is really the product of virus infection way back in the evolutionary tree. Many viruses can copy their DNA into the host's genome where it will be propagated throughout life, and potentially into offspring. If this infection happens in the wrong section of a host's genome, the DNA is never read and while the virus doesn't propagate, its DNA will. Do this over a time scale of millions to billions of years and you get a lot of leftover virus DNA hanging around silent.
So basically, some large percentage of your DNA is really just virus turds.
1. Amazon.com. The lists linked to at the bottom of their pages are very good. Pick a band you like, check out the lists, then check out lists related to those lists. Fire up kazaa or your favorite gnutellia to check out the new stuff then buy.
2. Somewebcaster +
Streamripper.Grab a stream overnight, and skip over the stuff you don't like.
IIRC, Moore's law says computing power compared to cost will double every so-and-so. This doesn't have anything to do with the specific technology used to generate that power.
You don't RC. Moore's Law is solely about logic circuit density.
This is why profiling does not work. The problem with profiling is that it attempts to pigeonhole you into a category. And that may not reflect what you are actually doing.
Define "does not work." I think profiling often does work, not with 100% accuracy, but it does work. The more data you give it, the better the output you get. Profiling with a very low n is bound to be silly, but as you increase it the results get better.
Profiling is just a statistical correlation (or probably a more complicated type of factor analysis) that says people who like X,Y,Z also tend to like A,B,C. Yes, aberrant data (buying a needlepoint kit for my aunt) can skew the results, but again as the amount of info goes up, the ability of such outlying points to skew decreases. I am more and more impressed with both tivo and amazon's picks as the amount of data it uses increases (even more by tivo, as it is getting a rather split personality input between my picks & my gf's).
point out what people really want is contextual information at the moment
Sometimes. Somtimes people want a list related only to the current action, such as when buying presents. On other occasions, they want a recommendation based on previous likes as well.
Profiling could be used to predict what you want when you ask for it. For example if you are making a query for children's books then the top 10 could be presented. Or a couple of questions could be asked and then a top 10 is presented. But in either case the background of the user is not taken into account.
But why not use the background? Why should I have to repeatedly answer questions to give it information that could be obtained passively?
For different situations, different methods will work better. For things that tend to be more personal (tivo), profiling is great. For things that aren't (gifts from amazon), context would be better. But to say 'profiling doesnt work.' is just wrong. [evidence, look at the ultimate profiling: car insurance...]
I am assuming you are not using social darwinism in the social justification meaning, so perhaps we should use the term natural selection. [Social Darwinism: "Social Darwinism is a quasi-philosophical, quasi-religious, quasi-sociological view that came from the mind of Herbert Spencer, an English philosopher in the 19th century."]
Exactly. And this is an obvious, pointless statement.
As often is the case, something is obvious only after being pointed out. Natural selection is a perfect example.
Anyone who proposes that social Darwinism provides some kind of insight into the future or even into present conditions is simply selling snake oil. If you analyze the "selective causes" of the present or future, you're merely analyzing things which either haven't died yet or haven't survived yet -- and you don't know which until it's all over! To draw any conclusions about survivability in the middle of the game using the selective model is at best a precarious task
I partially agree, though the caveats are important. Who is to say when it's all over? You can see trends through the past to the current point and though it may not be over, there is still information there. Say you lived long ago before the tiger had stripes. Say you notice some tigers started having stripes and the ones with more stripes tended to be healthier and better killers. Say you noticed the unstripped tigers were looking more and more lean, more lethargic, etc. Do you have to wait till all tigers have stripes to draw a conclusion? No you don't. Your conclusion might be wrong, and you will have a better chance of
being right the more information for have, but that does not preclude a reasonable analysis of the trends. Yes, there are assumptions that may be wrong, and yes, things may take a wild swing but that does not mean you can not or should not attempt analysis.
To use another example, say you are a business that needs money to survive. Say you have relied on a source that is getting more and more difficult to come by. You notice that many other businesses with similar circumstances have failed. Do you ignore these trends?
But be careful -- the uses of social Darwinism are as a model for explaining the past, not as a policy matter for guiding the future. There is a huge difference.
Yes, there is a difference. However, I would submit that when you must deal with an uncertain future, the past often gives you the best guess. If it is either an examination of trends you currently see or asking a magic eight ball, the choice should be clear.
If Salon.com "survives" due to charity, then it has survived, period. You can't say "But it didn't survive in the 'fair' way -- the way that I wanted it to!" because in Darwinism, the context is the environment -- all of it -- not just the parts you want to look at.
I have made no claims of survival in a fair or unfair way. If salon survives due ignorant VC giving money, then it survives. If it survives because space aliens shoot beams of pure money into the salon.com offices, it survives. I agree fairness is an irrelevant term. The likelihood of either of those, though, is minimal. My point was that for most businesses, need to earn money to be viable. Yes, this is not always true, and there are also tigers without stripes. Those that do not find a business model that provides money (usually earned, sometimes stolen, rarely given) tend to fail. A look at the past ten or a hundred or a thousand years of business history will support this. Those businesses that don't have financial support don't survive. Natural selection means those that have a better system for getting financial support are more apt to survive.
If a firm manages to get handouts, they have managed to survive somehow, showing that they are adept at something useful for survival (i.e. getting handouts), and that is all that social Darwinism implies.
Um, I think social darwinism is more about trying to rationalize social inequality using the theory of natural selection (and it has generally been discredited as a reasonable philosophy)
Darwinism itself is a kind of useless null concept outside the bounds of history (i.e. evolutionary history). It basically states that those things which have survived... did, and those things which haven't... didn't.
Sort of...it's more of a "those which were better suited for the environment survived due to the qualities that made it better suited." It is certainly not a null concept outside of evolutionary history. The theory is visible in all ranges of history, long-term evolution or short-term sociological. People have proposed you explain cultural information by the same mechanism. Memes are created, evolve, and are left behind much like dinosaurs. The application of natural selection is used widely in many areas, biomedical research (phage display, directed evolution) to software (genetic programming). To limit the thoery to a useless historical adjective is rather short-sighted.
What you've argued is that charity isn't beneficial to society. Whether or not that is true, it has little to do with Darwinism or natural selection.
No, what was argued is that if you can't survive in a context (ie as a business you cant make money), then you are going to be left behind. The argument had nothing to do with charity or its benefit (or lack thereof) to society, rather it was saying that businesses, like nearly everything, are subject to natural selection.
I wonder if they've thought about the performance hit
Dude, this isn't some little backwater ecommerce site, this is the most hit site in the world. I think it's safe to say they considered the performance. (BTW check slides 30-34 of the link for that exact info)
Sure, that is an alternative for the small population with the skills to set this up, and the even (much) smaller set who actually do do it.
You could also watch a lot of hometime and build your own house, but 99.99% of the population wouldn't. You can convert time into Tivo either buy working to get the money to pay someone do sell you one, or by not working and spending the time to put together a likely inferior product.
This technique uses enzymes that soften the cornea, along with the ortho-K lenses to mold it. A hardener is then put in the cornea & your vision is set. No cutting, and the ability to reverse the modification. Sounds good to me.
I was at a lecture given by Leslie Orgel (a very famous biochemist known for work on the molecular origin of life) and he made a very nice point when asked about the genome project. He likened the sequencing of it to deciphering the white pages of a phone book for a large city. If we ever work out the proteome (the collection of proteins that the genome codes for, along with post-translational modifications, binding partners, etc...which is much beyond what is specified in the genome), then we will have the equivalent of the yellow pages. Yet, even with both of these references, you could only begin to try and understand how the city (and by comparison, the cell) functions.
So while having your personal genome might be cool in the uber-rich kind of way, the usefulness is still quite limited.
But I disagree that the only benefit coming to me "for being first" as a creator of a product is the ability to sell my expertise in that product. If I create something, I do not give up my ownership, and relinquish all rights and interests implied by ownership, the first time I sell or give away a copy of my work.
See thats the thing, without the artificial creation of a copyright system, you do.
Rather, if the creation is an 'idea,' then once you tell it, the someone else has ownership of the same idea. If you create a physical thing, say an axe, then only one of you can have that axe and sole ownership makes sense. The propagation of an idea means ownership is somewhat meaningless term. The lack of similar propagation of your axe means is is not.
Here is where the digital aspect of things make it interesting. You can now have propagation of exact copies of really big complex ideas or creations (music, images, etc etc) wherein you do not lose your copy. Copyright is meant to try and solve the problem of having a thing that can be infinitely copied. So, while under current laws, you do have certain extra rights of your creation, this is only due to the creation of non-natural (and admittedly, good) laws.
Slashdot Mirror
What?! Enough volume to turn a profit? All they have to cover are some servers, and a decent pipe. This doesn't need to be a volume business to do well.
Thats the thing people seem to miss here. The outlay for this kind of project isn't really very big compared to creating and then distributing a physical object like a CD.
-Ted
Agreed.
If you want to see the continued creation of music, you've got to consider how you can fund artists
Again, good point.
Options like this one just might provide a better solution for that than the current publishing/distribution model.
Not so good here. This option isn't really a change at all in artist reimbursement. It isn't as if artists are going to get any more money from an on-line sale than they do from a CD sale (approximately fuckall). The major labels are still going to screw the artists, just now they can do it online as well.
The problem is that the existence of 'free' (modulo the long term social cost of killing the creation of future music) alternatives could prevent this potentially sustainable model from catching hold.
I don't know if I agree. I think what might prevent this model from being sustainable will be in its application. A dollar a song still does not seem to be an appropriate value to many. That is basically what you pay now, only you get more (a physical object, liner notes, etc etc). Additionally, the cost of delivery to the producer has drastically decreased, and it is not unreasonable for the consumer to expect some of that to be reflected in a decrease in the purchase cost.
Anyway, I do not believe music will cease to be created for any business reason, ever. Music production existed long before, and will continue long after gigantic multinationals stop making money through it. As doonesbury discusses, there are other valid models for the the financial support of creation of music.
Normally, when a society wants to proscribe some activity which is destructive to its long term health (such as the widespread freeloading of music), it uses social norms and, in extreme cases, laws to prevent them. Hmm - maybe copying music without giving anything back to the artist ought to be socially unacceptable, or maybe even illegal?
Thing is, kazaa'ing seems more the social norm than not.
I think perhaps the big 5 are experiencing exactly that type of normative action: People see that musicians get shafted by the industry, so it becomes socially acceptable to shaft the industry. As for the basis of legality for things...that is such another barrel of worms.
-Ted
So what? The point is, legal documents in that case are going to be available in this one. In those legal documents is evidence of how generic the term windows is with regards to computer display systems.
Their website is deliberately designed to look like MS's marketing material, and is completely misleading as to what Lindows is, costs, and is capable of.
I don't buy that. The lindows site looks nothing like Microsoft.com or what windows.com resolves to. In fact if anything, it looks like they are ripping off Apple.
As for misleading, the big tab for 'lindows os' gives you a big fat price as the first text on the page, and says in the first paragraph
'LindowsOS is a new, fun and exciting operating system that delivers the power, stability and cost-savings of Linux with the ease of a windows environment.'
If you object to the use of 'windows environment,' you are proving the fact that Microsoft has tried to appropriate the word windows when it is obviously a generic term. It goes on to describe the product in terms you can hardly call deceptive.
IMHO, Lindows is a sleazy company. I've had enough of get-rich-quick startups and scams, and could give a crap who their in court with. The enemy of my enemy is not my friend. I hope the judge rules that Lindows is in fault, because they are seeking to deliberately trick consumers into buying their product.
Sleazy or not, lindows is not a scam. Regardless of whether you care about them, this case is of interest if for no other reason than to see if the government will let microsoft get away with trademarking a generic term. The enemy of your enemy might not be your friend, but if they bring down your enemy a bit, your enemy is still weaker.
And since when has tricking customers been illegal? In fact, I'd submit it is a mainstay of marketing, period (moral or not).
-Ted
Somewhat off-topic, but that's not entirely true. There are people who have been HIV positive for tens of years and are still alive. The thing that is kind of fucked up is that nearly 100% of people who test positive for HIV will be counted as AIDS deaths, simply because they have the virus (whether it played a part in the actual cause of death or not).
-Ted
Why do so many folks watch it?
Because many folks are able to get past a silly premise. Many people actually give it a shot before judging it.
The thing is, its a very intelligent, well-written show, though lots of people don't take time to actually find that out. It's just too easy to dismiss as a stupid show because it has a stupid name. A pity.
-Ted
C'mon dude, a simple google search for space shuttle names is even more useful.
-Ted
In fact, the humor is that such things are obviously not even close to being equivalent, but the Bush handlers wouldn't care.
-Ted
I don't doubt that certain behemoth makers dump small/alt power cars for this reason, I still am not convinced Honda, Toyota, Nissan, much less *all* manufacturers operate at a loss on the majority of their fleets. That still doesn't pass the smell test.
-Ted
Oh come on, that seems a big exaggerated. Any data to back this up?
Are you really suggesting that Honda takes a hit on every Accord & Civic it sells only to made up by profit from the Passport? Did car companies not make a profit prior to 10 years ago? If this were true, it would make no sense for a car company to be a car company, it should just be a finance company.
-Ted
-Ted
um, 24. Do I get modded up or down?
-Ted
On a more realistic note, that junk DNA is probably more like a revision history of life. Many scientists are of the opinion that a significant portion of the junk DNA is really the product of virus infection way back in the evolutionary tree. Many viruses can copy their DNA into the host's genome where it will be propagated throughout life, and potentially into offspring. If this infection happens in the wrong section of a host's genome, the DNA is never read and while the virus doesn't propagate, its DNA will. Do this over a time scale of millions to billions of years and you get a lot of leftover virus DNA hanging around silent.
So basically, some large percentage of your DNA is really just virus turds.
-Ted
-Ted
-Ted
You don't RC. Moore's Law is solely about logic circuit density.
-Ted
Define "does not work." I think profiling often does work, not with 100% accuracy, but it does work. The more data you give it, the better the output you get. Profiling with a very low n is bound to be silly, but as you increase it the results get better.
Profiling is just a statistical correlation (or probably a more complicated type of factor analysis) that says people who like X,Y,Z also tend to like A,B,C. Yes, aberrant data (buying a needlepoint kit for my aunt) can skew the results, but again as the amount of info goes up, the ability of such outlying points to skew decreases. I am more and more impressed with both tivo and amazon's picks as the amount of data it uses increases (even more by tivo, as it is getting a rather split personality input between my picks & my gf's).
point out what people really want is contextual information at the moment
Sometimes. Somtimes people want a list related only to the current action, such as when buying presents. On other occasions, they want a recommendation based on previous likes as well.
Profiling could be used to predict what you want when you ask for it. For example if you are making a query for children's books then the top 10 could be presented. Or a couple of questions could be asked and then a top 10 is presented. But in either case the background of the user is not taken into account.
But why not use the background? Why should I have to repeatedly answer questions to give it information that could be obtained passively?
For different situations, different methods will work better. For things that tend to be more personal (tivo), profiling is great. For things that aren't (gifts from amazon), context would be better. But to say 'profiling doesnt work.' is just wrong. [evidence, look at the ultimate profiling: car insurance...]
-Ted
Exactly. And this is an obvious, pointless statement.
As often is the case, something is obvious only after being pointed out. Natural selection is a perfect example.
Anyone who proposes that social Darwinism provides some kind of insight into the future or even into present conditions is simply selling snake oil. If you analyze the "selective causes" of the present or future, you're merely analyzing things which either haven't died yet or haven't survived yet -- and you don't know which until it's all over! To draw any conclusions about survivability in the middle of the game using the selective model is at best a precarious task
I partially agree, though the caveats are important. Who is to say when it's all over? You can see trends through the past to the current point and though it may not be over, there is still information there. Say you lived long ago before the tiger had stripes. Say you notice some tigers started having stripes and the ones with more stripes tended to be healthier and better killers. Say you noticed the unstripped tigers were looking more and more lean, more lethargic, etc. Do you have to wait till all tigers have stripes to draw a conclusion? No you don't. Your conclusion might be wrong, and you will have a better chance of being right the more information for have, but that does not preclude a reasonable analysis of the trends. Yes, there are assumptions that may be wrong, and yes, things may take a wild swing but that does not mean you can not or should not attempt analysis.
To use another example, say you are a business that needs money to survive. Say you have relied on a source that is getting more and more difficult to come by. You notice that many other businesses with similar circumstances have failed. Do you ignore these trends?
But be careful -- the uses of social Darwinism are as a model for explaining the past, not as a policy matter for guiding the future. There is a huge difference.
Yes, there is a difference. However, I would submit that when you must deal with an uncertain future, the past often gives you the best guess. If it is either an examination of trends you currently see or asking a magic eight ball, the choice should be clear.
If Salon.com "survives" due to charity, then it has survived, period. You can't say "But it didn't survive in the 'fair' way -- the way that I wanted it to!" because in Darwinism, the context is the environment -- all of it -- not just the parts you want to look at.
I have made no claims of survival in a fair or unfair way. If salon survives due ignorant VC giving money, then it survives. If it survives because space aliens shoot beams of pure money into the salon.com offices, it survives. I agree fairness is an irrelevant term. The likelihood of either of those, though, is minimal. My point was that for most businesses, need to earn money to be viable. Yes, this is not always true, and there are also tigers without stripes. Those that do not find a business model that provides money (usually earned, sometimes stolen, rarely given) tend to fail. A look at the past ten or a hundred or a thousand years of business history will support this. Those businesses that don't have financial support don't survive. Natural selection means those that have a better system for getting financial support are more apt to survive.
-Ted
Um, I think social darwinism is more about trying to rationalize social inequality using the theory of natural selection (and it has generally been discredited as a reasonable philosophy)
Darwinism itself is a kind of useless null concept outside the bounds of history (i.e. evolutionary history). It basically states that those things which have survived... did, and those things which haven't... didn't.
Sort of...it's more of a "those which were better suited for the environment survived due to the qualities that made it better suited." It is certainly not a null concept outside of evolutionary history. The theory is visible in all ranges of history, long-term evolution or short-term sociological. People have proposed you explain cultural information by the same mechanism. Memes are created, evolve, and are left behind much like dinosaurs. The application of natural selection is used widely in many areas, biomedical research (phage display, directed evolution) to software (genetic programming). To limit the thoery to a useless historical adjective is rather short-sighted.
What you've argued is that charity isn't beneficial to society. Whether or not that is true, it has little to do with Darwinism or natural selection.
No, what was argued is that if you can't survive in a context (ie as a business you cant make money), then you are going to be left behind. The argument had nothing to do with charity or its benefit (or lack thereof) to society, rather it was saying that businesses, like nearly everything, are subject to natural selection.
-Ted
-Ted
Dude, this isn't some little backwater ecommerce site, this is the most hit site in the world. I think it's safe to say they considered the performance. (BTW check slides 30-34 of the link for that exact info)
-Ted
You could also watch a lot of hometime and build your own house, but 99.99% of the population wouldn't. You can convert time into Tivo either buy working to get the money to pay someone do sell you one, or by not working and spending the time to put together a likely inferior product.
On this tradeoff, most people opt for the former.
-Ted
-Ted
I was at a lecture given by Leslie Orgel (a very famous biochemist known for work on the molecular origin of life) and he made a very nice point when asked about the genome project. He likened the sequencing of it to deciphering the white pages of a phone book for a large city. If we ever work out the proteome (the collection of proteins that the genome codes for, along with post-translational modifications, binding partners, etc...which is much beyond what is specified in the genome), then we will have the equivalent of the yellow pages. Yet, even with both of these references, you could only begin to try and understand how the city (and by comparison, the cell) functions.
So while having your personal genome might be cool in the uber-rich kind of way, the usefulness is still quite limited.
-Ted
See thats the thing, without the artificial creation of a copyright system, you do.
Rather, if the creation is an 'idea,' then once you tell it, the someone else has ownership of the same idea. If you create a physical thing, say an axe, then only one of you can have that axe and sole ownership makes sense. The propagation of an idea means ownership is somewhat meaningless term. The lack of similar propagation of your axe means is is not.
Here is where the digital aspect of things make it interesting. You can now have propagation of exact copies of really big complex ideas or creations (music, images, etc etc) wherein you do not lose your copy. Copyright is meant to try and solve the problem of having a thing that can be infinitely copied. So, while under current laws, you do have certain extra rights of your creation, this is only due to the creation of non-natural (and admittedly, good) laws.
-Ted
*Ahem* redundant
-Ted