Sentence simplicity does not a statement make:) sorry I had to
society vs individuals
on
Is IP Property?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
while 'free riding' off of someone else's land or other physical property rights is always undesirable, freely benefitting from someone else's intellectual property rights is often the best way to form a free and creative society
And therein lies the problem in his argument, I didn't even have to RTFA. He uses the word 'society'.
Of course free IP is better for society. That's why science tends to grow exponentially. (historically, at least -- lately even science seems to be greedy) Mandel didn't horde his findings and keep them to himself -- and now the whole world teaches his experiments in high school classrooms as the foundation for further work -- if his experiments were a tightly kept secret, they wouldn't have become the foundation for anything.
But people -- as individuals, not as a society -- are more interested in personal gain. They want to hold on to their IP for whatever perceived advantage they think it gives them, however brief or delusional. I doubt you'll be able to convince them otherwise. When it comes to ownership, even of ideas, people tend to resort to the five-year-old "MINE! MINE! MINE!" thinking.
Isn't that the whole point of insurance? "I'll pay you x-amount of dollars per month so that I don't have to pay xxx-amount of dollars when the shit hits the fan."
I used to think the same thing. Then I found out that when the shit does hit the fan, your rates go up. Now you're paying for the shit/fan before, and after it hit. Something just doens't add up.
What makes you think this kind of thing will lower insurance rates? The cost of producing DVDs is down to practically nothing, but are they any cheaper (for the consumer) than when they first came out? Only if you count used DVDs! I wouldn't be surprised if in the long run rates went up to "cover cost of equipment".
But there has to be some value to the consumer to counter the privacy concerns, right? (so the insurance mega-corporations will have time to get this implemented to such a wide degree that it becomes a moot point) Well, it's all about the blame game. It will settle disputes. But that's not all. What's to stop an insurance company from saying "yeah, you got t-boned at an intersection by a car that had a red light, but you were going 36.2 mph in a 35 mph zone, so we can't handle your claim"
I had a friend who got hit by another car that swerved across four lanes of interstate and slammed side-to-side into my friend's car. There was a cop right behind him, saw the whole thing. My friend had done nothing wrong, except his drivers license had expired the day before. He spent a weekend in jail, as it was now 'his fault,' because he shouldn't have been on the road in the first place. (he had just moved and the DMV notifications hadn't caught up with him -- he knew nothing about it until this happened)
Now if a state trooper can turn something like that into 'your fault' because you were also doing something wrong, I'm willing to bet that if an insurance company can get out of paying for damages because you were going 1 mph over the speed limit, they will.
And what about potential counter-suits? Does the $31 million include money lost in the inevitable counter-suits, or are they just going to "worry about that when they get there"? (read: declare bankruptcy, avoid all debts, get M$ to have BayStar send them some more money, and resume business)
Jesus christ, why would you by a new car in college?
Actually, I was making plenty of money when I got the car. I was doing freelance web development in the Chicago area, and it was necessary to drive all over the city and suburbs, so the car was definately needed. And it wasn't a new car, it was a nice "gently used" car. And for something I wound up spending three hours a day in (Chicago traffic, commuting to suburbs....), it was worth every penny to be comfortable.
It was when the bubble burst and jobs got short that finances started to go to hell and I ran up the credit card debt. I never regretted the car though.
I'll match your Amen and raise you three more. True story:
I was walking around in downtown Chicago late one night, toward the end of my college years, when a homeless man and woman stopped me and asked for money. I said something to the effect of, "Listen man, I'd like to help you out, really. But I've got $12,000 in debt right now, on top of a $19,000 car loan, $18,000 in school loans, and a few thousand I still owe my dad. I can't spare a dime." The guy turned to the woman and said, "Damn, he's worse off than we are, let's get out of here."
The biggest problem being my overuse of four (4!) credit cards. I was stupid. Extremely stupid. This was four years ago, and I've been doing debt management the whole time on the $12,000 credit card debt. I'm finally just a few months away from paying off the first two of the four cards, but I've got a few years left before I get the rest paid off.
Get one tiny credit card for emergencies, but never use it except emergencies. For all the rest of the bazillion credit card offers you will get in the mail, always, always, always tear them up. Get a checking account with a debit card that can be used as a visa card, and use this whenever you need a credit card.
If only somebody had told me this, or I hadn't been dumbass enough to figure it out on my own....
Don't leave them on a bench in the library while you go look for books
And if you used the library like I did, for naps, don't forget to stow all your stuff away in your backpack before falling asleep, and then loop an arm or leg into one of the shoulder straps. If nothing else, you'll wake up when somebody tries to grab your bag and run.
I guess you've never been in the situation where some faceless company decided you owed them money for no reason
This happened to me earlier this year. I got a $3,000 bill from a collection agency saying that I owe Virginia state tax money for the year 2000. I live in Kansas now, and I lived in Illinois in the year 2000. But I lived in Virginia for three months in 1999. So when the Virginia tax dept. saw that I had paid VA state and federal taxes in 1999, and had paid federal taxes but not VA state taxes in 2000, they assumed I was skipping out.
They did this check three years after the year 2000 taxes were due, and added $2,000 in late fees and collection fees, and sent a collection agency after me because they "couldn't reach me". The collection agency was happy to rattle of every address I've had in the last eight years to try and intimidate me.
And you're right, this is no fun to be hit like this out of the blue. Not to mention that in order to 'fix' the 'problem,' I had to synchronize efforts with (heavy bureaucratic) organizations in three states, and I had my credit rating at stake, and we were in the process of applying for a new mortgage during all this!
So why should these places have even more opportunity and leverage against me? The ONLY possible scenario that I can think of where it would be morally correct to use this type of service would be law inforcement, after a warrant has been issued.
I'm getting too much noise trying to search for it, but wasn't there some kid (young guy) that placed pretty high in a science fair by building a working solar oven out of AOL cds?
Can somebody please answer a little question for me? IANAP, although physics phascinates me.
Now, I know about Heisenburg's principle, where you can't observe particles without (possibly) altering them. But what about entanglement? Can you entagle particles, and then be able to measure one of the entagled particles, only to disrupt that one and not the first one?
I agree, graffiti is a crime. But in the case of graffiti you are making a long-term change to a surface. Graffiti is there until it's cleaned or fades away. I do consider that kind of change to be malicious destruction.
But this guy wasn't doing the equivalent of a young girl drawing a hopscotch grid on the sidewalk with chalk. Just on a different scale.
One would hope that this guy has some possibility of defending himself, if the charge is for vandalism. IANAL, but as far as I know a charge of vandalism needs proof of the intent to damage property. By using water-soluable chalk this guy has shown that he's not interested in damaging the property, only in showing his messages.
If the CEO took a 50% pay cut, we could add another 2000 jobs in my company right now
True story: Once upon a time I worked at a large energy trading company. Not Enron, but a competitor that got hit hard when Enron screwed the market. Not that my company did not have its share of problems!
I was one of 500 people that were laid off in a single day (I think the layoffs eventually totalled about 1000). The execs announced that the layoffs were necessary to save $25 Million. Three weeks earlier the top five execs in the company awarded themselves an additional $25 Million bonus. In addition to their existing salary, and on top of the 'normal' bonus they had already awarded themselves. This was just extra money being distributed among only five people.
The article seems to suggest that this will make insurance cheaper
Yeah, right. Just like all the technology that makes cd duplication cheaper, that has pulled the cost of creating cds down to mere pennies apiece? Think the customer is ever going to see this? No way. This will create higher profits for the insurance companies, but consumers won't be effected in their monthly bills.
The other benefit for the insurance companies is that they will be able to put everybody at fault for everything. Were you t-boned by a car that had a red light? Sorry, you were going 36.2 mph in a 35 zone, so both drivers will be considered at fault. Premiums go up even higher, again boosting profit for the insurance companies.
65000 ports should be enough for all the devices in your home.
And "640Kb of ram will be more than enough for anyone", right? Sometimes innovation is important, even when it's not obviously needed, to make way for future innovations that have yet to be imagined.
While there's nothing spectacular about the calendar tool it does do the job
Two words: custom forms. I can't get my wife to move away from Office because Outlook lets users create events with customizable data fields, and design custom forms for data input. She uses that at her office all the time.
One last thing though - when (if ever) will Mozilla mail change away from using.mbx/mailbox files and move to something like what Sylpheed uses (1 file per email).
Wouldn't that create a ton of overhead with searches -- having to open, read, and close thousands of individual files instead of dumping one file into memory (at least with bigger chunks) and going through that?
I think they should use SQLite for their mailbox files. I'd love to be able to type a SQL query into a search box to find my emails...
Now, storing each *attachment* as a seperate file... now that idea has merit. I'm a designer that works from home, so my mailboxes are full of email with 12MB photoshop file attachments. Moving these attachments to external files should really speed up searches (and probably other things like junk filtering). Also, granted there was a nonobtrusive method of handling duplicate names, it would be nice to be able to browse through a folder of easily identifiable attachments without having to use the email client as an interface to access the files -- and essentially creating an unneccessary duplicate at the same time.
Slashdot Mirror
Programming simplicity does not a success make
:) sorry I had to
Sentence simplicity does not a statement make
while 'free riding' off of someone else's land or other physical property rights is always undesirable, freely benefitting from someone else's intellectual property rights is often the best way to form a free and creative society
And therein lies the problem in his argument, I didn't even have to RTFA. He uses the word 'society'.
Of course free IP is better for society. That's why science tends to grow exponentially. (historically, at least -- lately even science seems to be greedy) Mandel didn't horde his findings and keep them to himself -- and now the whole world teaches his experiments in high school classrooms as the foundation for further work -- if his experiments were a tightly kept secret, they wouldn't have become the foundation for anything.
But people -- as individuals, not as a society -- are more interested in personal gain. They want to hold on to their IP for whatever perceived advantage they think it gives them, however brief or delusional. I doubt you'll be able to convince them otherwise. When it comes to ownership, even of ideas, people tend to resort to the five-year-old "MINE! MINE! MINE!" thinking.
Bunsen and Beaker ... have been nominated favorite TV scientist ... soundly beating other contenders such as Mr. Spock, and Agent Scully.
Sounds like they won, instead of just being nominated.
Isn't that the whole point of insurance? "I'll pay you x-amount of dollars per month so that I don't have to pay xxx-amount of dollars when the shit hits the fan."
I used to think the same thing. Then I found out that when the shit does hit the fan, your rates go up. Now you're paying for the shit/fan before, and after it hit. Something just doens't add up.
What makes you think this kind of thing will lower insurance rates? The cost of producing DVDs is down to practically nothing, but are they any cheaper (for the consumer) than when they first came out? Only if you count used DVDs! I wouldn't be surprised if in the long run rates went up to "cover cost of equipment".
But there has to be some value to the consumer to counter the privacy concerns, right? (so the insurance mega-corporations will have time to get this implemented to such a wide degree that it becomes a moot point) Well, it's all about the blame game. It will settle disputes. But that's not all. What's to stop an insurance company from saying "yeah, you got t-boned at an intersection by a car that had a red light, but you were going 36.2 mph in a 35 mph zone, so we can't handle your claim"
I had a friend who got hit by another car that swerved across four lanes of interstate and slammed side-to-side into my friend's car. There was a cop right behind him, saw the whole thing. My friend had done nothing wrong, except his drivers license had expired the day before. He spent a weekend in jail, as it was now 'his fault,' because he shouldn't have been on the road in the first place. (he had just moved and the DMV notifications hadn't caught up with him -- he knew nothing about it until this happened)
Now if a state trooper can turn something like that into 'your fault' because you were also doing something wrong, I'm willing to bet that if an insurance company can get out of paying for damages because you were going 1 mph over the speed limit, they will.
Q: Is it really possiblr to win an iPod mini?
A: You're not very good at math, are you?
And what about potential counter-suits? Does the $31 million include money lost in the inevitable counter-suits, or are they just going to "worry about that when they get there"? (read: declare bankruptcy, avoid all debts, get M$ to have BayStar send them some more money, and resume business)
Virginia did the same thing to me
They are definately hard up for money. And now Richmond has got millions of dollars in flood damage from Gaston. I wonder what they'll try next year.
Jesus christ, why would you by a new car in college?
Actually, I was making plenty of money when I got the car. I was doing freelance web development in the Chicago area, and it was necessary to drive all over the city and suburbs, so the car was definately needed. And it wasn't a new car, it was a nice "gently used" car. And for something I wound up spending three hours a day in (Chicago traffic, commuting to suburbs....), it was worth every penny to be comfortable.
It was when the bubble burst and jobs got short that finances started to go to hell and I ran up the credit card debt. I never regretted the car though.
Amen on that credit card advice!!!
I'll match your Amen and raise you three more. True story:
I was walking around in downtown Chicago late one night, toward the end of my college years, when a homeless man and woman stopped me and asked for money. I said something to the effect of, "Listen man, I'd like to help you out, really. But I've got $12,000 in debt right now, on top of a $19,000 car loan, $18,000 in school loans, and a few thousand I still owe my dad. I can't spare a dime." The guy turned to the woman and said, "Damn, he's worse off than we are, let's get out of here."
The biggest problem being my overuse of four (4!) credit cards. I was stupid. Extremely stupid. This was four years ago, and I've been doing debt management the whole time on the $12,000 credit card debt. I'm finally just a few months away from paying off the first two of the four cards, but I've got a few years left before I get the rest paid off.
Get one tiny credit card for emergencies, but never use it except emergencies. For all the rest of the bazillion credit card offers you will get in the mail, always, always, always tear them up. Get a checking account with a debit card that can be used as a visa card, and use this whenever you need a credit card.
If only somebody had told me this, or I hadn't been dumbass enough to figure it out on my own....
Don't leave them on a bench in the library while you go look for books
And if you used the library like I did, for naps, don't forget to stow all your stuff away in your backpack before falling asleep, and then loop an arm or leg into one of the shoulder straps. If nothing else, you'll wake up when somebody tries to grab your bag and run.
I guess you've never been in the situation where some faceless company decided you owed them money for no reason
This happened to me earlier this year. I got a $3,000 bill from a collection agency saying that I owe Virginia state tax money for the year 2000. I live in Kansas now, and I lived in Illinois in the year 2000. But I lived in Virginia for three months in 1999. So when the Virginia tax dept. saw that I had paid VA state and federal taxes in 1999, and had paid federal taxes but not VA state taxes in 2000, they assumed I was skipping out.
They did this check three years after the year 2000 taxes were due, and added $2,000 in late fees and collection fees, and sent a collection agency after me because they "couldn't reach me". The collection agency was happy to rattle of every address I've had in the last eight years to try and intimidate me.
And you're right, this is no fun to be hit like this out of the blue. Not to mention that in order to 'fix' the 'problem,' I had to synchronize efforts with (heavy bureaucratic) organizations in three states, and I had my credit rating at stake, and we were in the process of applying for a new mortgage during all this!
So why should these places have even more opportunity and leverage against me? The ONLY possible scenario that I can think of where it would be morally correct to use this type of service would be law inforcement, after a warrant has been issued.
thanks, that's a good summary
I'm getting too much noise trying to search for it, but wasn't there some kid (young guy) that placed pretty high in a science fair by building a working solar oven out of AOL cds?
Can somebody please answer a little question for me? IANAP, although physics phascinates me.
Now, I know about Heisenburg's principle, where you can't observe particles without (possibly) altering them. But what about entanglement? Can you entagle particles, and then be able to measure one of the entagled particles, only to disrupt that one and not the first one?
(wrong button -- he *WAS* doing the equivalent of the hopscotch thing.... I need more coffee...)
I agree, graffiti is a crime. But in the case of graffiti you are making a long-term change to a surface. Graffiti is there until it's cleaned or fades away. I do consider that kind of change to be malicious destruction.
But this guy wasn't doing the equivalent of a young girl drawing a hopscotch grid on the sidewalk with chalk. Just on a different scale.
One would hope that this guy has some possibility of defending himself, if the charge is for vandalism. IANAL, but as far as I know a charge of vandalism needs proof of the intent to damage property. By using water-soluable chalk this guy has shown that he's not interested in damaging the property, only in showing his messages.
If the CEO took a 50% pay cut, we could add another 2000 jobs in my company right now
True story: Once upon a time I worked at a large energy trading company. Not Enron, but a competitor that got hit hard when Enron screwed the market. Not that my company did not have its share of problems!
I was one of 500 people that were laid off in a single day (I think the layoffs eventually totalled about 1000). The execs announced that the layoffs were necessary to save $25 Million. Three weeks earlier the top five execs in the company awarded themselves an additional $25 Million bonus. In addition to their existing salary, and on top of the 'normal' bonus they had already awarded themselves. This was just extra money being distributed among only five people.
The article seems to suggest that this will make insurance cheaper
Yeah, right. Just like all the technology that makes cd duplication cheaper, that has pulled the cost of creating cds down to mere pennies apiece? Think the customer is ever going to see this? No way. This will create higher profits for the insurance companies, but consumers won't be effected in their monthly bills.
The other benefit for the insurance companies is that they will be able to put everybody at fault for everything. Were you t-boned by a car that had a red light? Sorry, you were going 36.2 mph in a 35 zone, so both drivers will be considered at fault. Premiums go up even higher, again boosting profit for the insurance companies.
65000 ports should be enough for all the devices in your home.
And "640Kb of ram will be more than enough for anyone", right? Sometimes innovation is important, even when it's not obviously needed, to make way for future innovations that have yet to be imagined.
*Shameless plug* :) thanks for the link!
Isn't Mozilla just a bit to close to Godzilla for the Japanese market?
Wouldn't it have to be called Mojira?
well... not a solution to closing the tab, but you could get UndoCloseTab extension to uh, Undo the close.
A good solution for closing tabs -- but after all of the tabs are closed, Ctrl-W closes the entire application.
While there's nothing spectacular about the calendar tool it does do the job
.mbx/mailbox files and move to something like what Sylpheed uses (1 file per email).
Two words: custom forms. I can't get my wife to move away from Office because Outlook lets users create events with customizable data fields, and design custom forms for data input. She uses that at her office all the time.
One last thing though - when (if ever) will Mozilla mail change away from using
Wouldn't that create a ton of overhead with searches -- having to open, read, and close thousands of individual files instead of dumping one file into memory (at least with bigger chunks) and going through that?
I think they should use SQLite for their mailbox files. I'd love to be able to type a SQL query into a search box to find my emails...
Now, storing each *attachment* as a seperate file... now that idea has merit. I'm a designer that works from home, so my mailboxes are full of email with 12MB photoshop file attachments. Moving these attachments to external files should really speed up searches (and probably other things like junk filtering). Also, granted there was a nonobtrusive method of handling duplicate names, it would be nice to be able to browse through a folder of easily identifiable attachments without having to use the email client as an interface to access the files -- and essentially creating an unneccessary duplicate at the same time.