...that's still too expensive for Joe Shiftworker. Doesn't it just give you a warm fuzzy to see people driving past you in cars that you can't afford to buy because the Government gouged you so hard in order to give your tax money to the people who can afford to buy them?
It might to see them driving American cars, produced by American workers*, to know that the car is a first-of-it's-kind, that will inevitably drop in price, and to know that a product we really need won't face the same slow meandering struggle for acceptance that new technology often faces.
* especially if the car is being exported to other countries.
The government already differentiates between income, capital gains, inheritance, and money made from the sale of large items, such as houses or cars. So, trust me, if a politician ever said, with a straight face, that taxes on rich people should exceed 40%, the bill would be worded well enough to avoid this, and most other scenarios.
Would you want to do business with someone who just sued you? They are using this to encourage people to test drive the 2010 beta, and have no reason to throw any more money at i4i.
Everyone benefits from an informed society, but where do you stop?
See...Slippery slope argument. You stop when it makes sense to do so. If a $300 PC could encourage children in trailer parks and housing projects to get an education and become a productive member of society, then I would pay the $300.
But we're not even talking about that. Obama isn't going to give away free internet, and you'd have to be batshit insane to think he was. The best we can hope for is some small regulation that MAY result in lines being run to houses that they were never run to before. Then, these lines will be handed over to some cable company, to exploit for profit. The cable company gets a few bucks they didn't earn, and people living in areas where they can't get coverage, now have a new option. It's not perfect, but it is an improvement.
Broadband is worthless without a computer, and nearly worthless without a *contemporary* PC that can keep up with the inane software requirements of the Adobe Flash/Javascript/IE8 world.
Not really. Install noscript. Most educational and productivity sites still have html only versions.
And what about college/post-secondary education? That is not free, either.
None of this shit is free, it comes out of the pockets of people who (still) earn a living.
Living in a society where jobs exist has its costs. Somehow, the roads have to get paved. Power plants and water filtration facilities have to be built, and children have to become educated. The government does not necessarily have to do that, but somebody does.
Maybe if you woke up and realized that Goldmine Sachs was paying bonuses earned with YOUR MONEY
Oh, I know they are. I personally think that the regulations that have been stripped away in the past twenty years should be reconsidered, and that the government should have been more interested in letting those businesses fail gracefully, than in bailouts that prolong the current situation.
But, I think the libertarian answer of just letting everything happen as it does would have been disastrous in that situation.
, you'd quit whining about what free luxuries you don't enjoy.
Affordable internet is not a luxury. It's a job requirement. And I enjoy it very much, thank you.
After we first make sure that everyone has access to broadband, we can give them computers to use on it. Then software.
After a while, we can make sure everyone has a pony, too.
How many people want broadband that can't get it now? Move or pay the price. No one should pay so you can live in stumblefuck and get the benefits of urban living. Sorry, I'm not buying you a pony.
Yes, many places are stuck with shitty providers and no choice. That's a different issue, and I'd like to see something done about that.
I've felt that way ever since I heard the government was delivering mail...The delivered the mail, put up police forces, fire departments, and even paid for a standing army, and I thought, "It's just a matter of time before they give everyone free ponies".
But seriously, slippery slop arguments aside, everybody benefits from an informed society. If we want to be able to compete with the rest of the industrialized world, then we need to have educated people with ambitions that extend beyond "factory moves to town. I get paid $10 an hour to load pallets".
Couldn't the same argument be made for a king or dictator?
"This guy has 90% of the money in his country, and controls a government that employs tens of thousands of people. Without him, they would have no government, no roads. They would all be poor and unemployed. Long live the King!"
A dolphin, the mammal with one of the largest brains out there, is NOT smarter then a human.
By what measure? As far as can be told, Dolphin's apply their brains to different types of activities and problems to humans. I can imagine having tests that compare dolphin intelligence levels relative to other dolphins, and of course there are tests that purport to measure human intelligence levels relative to other humans, but I doubt you could create any meaningful unified scale for comparing humans to dolphins. Where would you start?
Exactly! When I was much younger than I am now, I was constantly finding "bugs" in things. Windows was buggy because the network connectivity was broken. VB was buggy because my commands were correct, but it was doing some crazy thing that made no sense.
In time, I realized that it was usually a mistake on my part. I'm not saying there are no bugs in Visual Studio, or Windows (I seem to remember the C++ STL library having one or two), but I have become a much better programmer, because the first thing I ask is "what did I do wrong". And that is exactly why most of these scientists are throwing their data away.
"The probability of me revolutionizing my field is low. The probability of me being a twit is much higher."
... what does this mean for the famous "liberal media bias"? Will these systems have a variable that can be used to "adjust" this so-called bias? If so, who gets to set it?
The bias would be pro-corporation and pro-politician, as this system would only be able to parse press releases, sports scores, and other pre-formatted data. I don't know what you would call that. Would it be hyperbolic to call it a facist bias?
I'm not saying it is a bad thing, as it will free up reporters to concentrate on real news, and it may encourage them to take the mindset that their job is to dig for the other side to the stories that "Microsoft Reporter!" comes up with. But, it may result in Newspapers needing fewer reporters, and finding that they can get cheap content by regurgitating information that someone wants to advertise to the world.
The decided that "Global Warming" changed to "Global Climate Change" you know in case it started cooling. They should just change it to "Global scary thing that affects everything you do and you need to give us money to protect you from it."
Right, because it is soooo much better to form an opinion based on little knowledge and then fight to keep from changing it based on any new information.
This is why Disney are doing the world a favour by repeatedly buying copyright extensions. It forces people to come up with their own creative original stories - you know, like Disney did
"Did", being the operative word. In the 1920s, Disney did some creative stuff. Now they don't have to. They can keep coming up with remakes of their old accomplishments. The problem is that if you want to write something original, you either have to go the indie route, which goes out of its way to distance itself from Hollywood (which is a mixed blessing), or you have to convince one of these key players that an original new work is more valuable than a way to leverage a proven money-maker. Granted, with less stringent copyright laws, the low budget section would be full of bad remakes of old movies. You'd probably be seeing NC-17 versions of Star Wars, by now, with bad jokes, pop music, and gratuitous sex scenes added to provide that "added value" that could hopefully boost sales, but isn't that what the major studios do now? The difference is, that if they had to compete, they would probably bring something new to the table, and they would either do it well, or go out of business.
rather than ripping off other people's stories that just happen to be old enough to no longer be protected
Do those people own those stories? You seem to be arguing that an expression of an idea is a piece of property that belongs to its creator. That was not the intent of copyright law. The intent of copyright law was to encourage the arts and sciences, not to protect the notion that someone can own an abstract concept.
Thanks to Disney, creative artists now have the kind of long-term protection that Hans Christian Andersen, Rudyard Kipling and Lewis Carroll never enjoyed
No. Under the old system, they had long term protection. 28 years is a long time to capitalize on a single piece of work. Can you think of a single physical product that would be considered unreliable if it only lasted 28 years?
Under the 1909 copyright law, how many people would live long enough to see their works enter the public domain? If you write your first book at 20, then you would be 76, when the copyright expires. Disney just assured that someone who never had a thing to do with the original work can capitalize on it for decades after the original author's death.
I would argue to reduce the cost for a couple of reasons.
$50-100 per work would be unreasonable for songwriters who may end up writing ten or more songs per year.
If the charge is not directly related to the cost to keep the copyright office going, then it will become just another tax that can be jacked up every year. Because most copyrights are owned by huge businesses with deep pockets, I would be concerned that the end result would be that copyright costs becoming so incredibly high that only huge labels could afford to have them. (yes, this may sound like a slippery slope argument, but my point is that having the cost be related to the cost it incurs to the government, we would have a safeguard against this)
SCOTUS responded "On paper, it is limited - we don't care if Congress keeps changing the limit."
While I disagree with the decision, it's not QUITE the same thing as "[we] couldn't give a shit what the constitution says."
Agreed. Essentially, our argument is based on the observation of a pattern and the prediction that the pattern will continue. There is a world of difference between "we don't care about your predictions" and "it's illegal as hell and we don't care"
IANAL, but if I understood that ruling, the argument was that, by continually extending copyrights, congress is creating a perpetual copyright. The courts were not saying that perpetual copyrights are OK. They were saying that "I predict this pattern will continue forever" does not constitute a perpetual copyright.
I personally disagree, but could not make a strong argument about where the line should be drawn.
And, Fedora's designers have assumed that its users are wiser than the general run of users. 'For example, in earlier versions, ordinary (non-admin) users could install software on Fedora without access to the root password.
So according to this "logic", Microsoft assumes that its users are wiser than the general run of users too? Nice way to spin Fedora finally addressing this security issue, dude.
In a manner of speaking, yes. If they assumed that 50% of their users are below average, and that a significant enough percentage of them will click anything you stick in front of them, then they probably would have designed windows to be much more secure. Sure, they would have solved the problem in some cutesy way, like changing the "administrator" to "grown up", and popping up error messages saying things like "You need a grown up to install this application", but they would have fixed it.
Microsoft's downfall, if you can call it that, is the perception that end-users are godlike in their ability to perform regular maintenance and avoid stupid flash ads.
Surely at some point the judge/judges in that small corner of Texas should, if they're not idiots or in league with these trolls, realize that the reason they're getting so many patent lawsuits filed in their jurisdiction is because they're considered to be overly in favor of the people who are suing?
But maybe I'm just living in some sort of dreamworld where judges aren't incompetent or evil..
Or maybe they do not consider politics. I cannot say either way whether these judges are right or wrong on any case, but, if a judge were to just wake up one morning and say "too many people are suing for x...From now on, I'm going to make it much harder to win for x", I'd want the guy disbarred. The law simply doesn't work that way.
Slashdot Mirror
...that's still too expensive for Joe Shiftworker. Doesn't it just give you a warm fuzzy to see people driving past you in cars that you can't afford to buy because the Government gouged you so hard in order to give your tax money to the people who can afford to buy them?
It might to see them driving American cars, produced by American workers*, to know that the car is a first-of-it's-kind, that will inevitably drop in price, and to know that a product we really need won't face the same slow meandering struggle for acceptance that new technology often faces.
* especially if the car is being exported to other countries.
The government already differentiates between income, capital gains, inheritance, and money made from the sale of large items, such as houses or cars. So, trust me, if a politician ever said, with a straight face, that taxes on rich people should exceed 40%, the bill would be worded well enough to avoid this, and most other scenarios.
Would you want to do business with someone who just sued you? They are using this to encourage people to test drive the 2010 beta, and have no reason to throw any more money at i4i.
Everyone benefits from an informed society, but where do you stop?
See...Slippery slope argument. You stop when it makes sense to do so. If a $300 PC could encourage children in trailer parks and housing projects to get an education and become a productive member of society, then I would pay the $300.
But we're not even talking about that. Obama isn't going to give away free internet, and you'd have to be batshit insane to think he was. The best we can hope for is some small regulation that MAY result in lines being run to houses that they were never run to before. Then, these lines will be handed over to some cable company, to exploit for profit. The cable company gets a few bucks they didn't earn, and people living in areas where they can't get coverage, now have a new option. It's not perfect, but it is an improvement.
Broadband is worthless without a computer, and nearly worthless without a *contemporary* PC that can keep up with the inane software requirements of the Adobe Flash/Javascript/IE8 world.
Not really. Install noscript. Most educational and productivity sites still have html only versions.
And what about college/post-secondary education? That is not free, either.
None of this shit is free, it comes out of the pockets of people who (still) earn a living.
Living in a society where jobs exist has its costs. Somehow, the roads have to get paved. Power plants and water filtration facilities have to be built, and children have to become educated. The government does not necessarily have to do that, but somebody does.
Maybe if you woke up and realized that Goldmine Sachs was paying bonuses earned with YOUR MONEY
Oh, I know they are. I personally think that the regulations that have been stripped away in the past twenty years should be reconsidered, and that the government should have been more interested in letting those businesses fail gracefully, than in bailouts that prolong the current situation.
But, I think the libertarian answer of just letting everything happen as it does would have been disastrous in that situation.
, you'd quit whining about what free luxuries you don't enjoy.
Affordable internet is not a luxury. It's a job requirement. And I enjoy it very much, thank you.
After we first make sure that everyone has access to broadband, we can give them computers to use on it. Then software.
After a while, we can make sure everyone has a pony, too.
How many people want broadband that can't get it now? Move or pay the price. No one should pay so you can live in stumblefuck and get the benefits of urban living. Sorry, I'm not buying you a pony.
Yes, many places are stuck with shitty providers and no choice. That's a different issue, and I'd like to see something done about that.
I've felt that way ever since I heard the government was delivering mail...The delivered the mail, put up police forces, fire departments, and even paid for a standing army, and I thought, "It's just a matter of time before they give everyone free ponies".
But seriously, slippery slop arguments aside, everybody benefits from an informed society. If we want to be able to compete with the rest of the industrialized world, then we need to have educated people with ambitions that extend beyond "factory moves to town. I get paid $10 an hour to load pallets".
For some reason when the problems are really hard changing your approach can help.
Another way of looking at that is to say that when your usual approach isn't working, changing your approach can help.
</pedantic>
Also I imagine that 30% figure would be a bit lower if we didn't have to pay an average of $10,000 a kid per year for a sub-par education.
Only if the parent who had to quit his or her job was getting paid less than $10,000 per year.
Couldn't the same argument be made for a king or dictator?
"This guy has 90% of the money in his country, and controls a government that employs tens of thousands of people. Without him, they would have no government, no roads. They would all be poor and unemployed. Long live the King!"
Power!=Philanthropy
A dolphin, the mammal with one of the largest brains out there, is NOT smarter then a human.
By what measure? As far as can be told, Dolphin's apply their brains to different types of activities and problems to humans. I can imagine having tests that compare dolphin intelligence levels relative to other dolphins, and of course there are tests that purport to measure human intelligence levels relative to other humans, but I doubt you could create any meaningful unified scale for comparing humans to dolphins. Where would you start?
With a crossword?
Exactly! When I was much younger than I am now, I was constantly finding "bugs" in things. Windows was buggy because the network connectivity was broken. VB was buggy because my commands were correct, but it was doing some crazy thing that made no sense.
In time, I realized that it was usually a mistake on my part. I'm not saying there are no bugs in Visual Studio, or Windows (I seem to remember the C++ STL library having one or two), but I have become a much better programmer, because the first thing I ask is "what did I do wrong". And that is exactly why most of these scientists are throwing their data away.
"The probability of me revolutionizing my field is low. The probability of me being a twit is much higher."
... what does this mean for the famous "liberal media bias"? Will these systems have a variable that can be used to "adjust" this so-called bias? If so, who gets to set it?
The bias would be pro-corporation and pro-politician, as this system would only be able to parse press releases, sports scores, and other pre-formatted data. I don't know what you would call that. Would it be hyperbolic to call it a facist bias?
I'm not saying it is a bad thing, as it will free up reporters to concentrate on real news, and it may encourage them to take the mindset that their job is to dig for the other side to the stories that "Microsoft Reporter!" comes up with. But, it may result in Newspapers needing fewer reporters, and finding that they can get cheap content by regurgitating information that someone wants to advertise to the world.
"I straight-up-gangsta'ed photoshop!"
That's why we shouldn't invite twenty somethings to make up new words.
The matrix is coming......
Only if you think that the care and maintenance of a human is the most efficient way to power a wristwatch.
The decided that "Global Warming" changed to "Global Climate Change" you know in case it started cooling. They should just change it to "Global scary thing that affects everything you do and you need to give us money to protect you from it."
Right, because it is soooo much better to form an opinion based on little knowledge and then fight to keep from changing it based on any new information.
This is why Disney are doing the world a favour by repeatedly buying copyright extensions. It forces people to come up with their own creative original stories - you know, like Disney did
"Did", being the operative word. In the 1920s, Disney did some creative stuff. Now they don't have to. They can keep coming up with remakes of their old accomplishments. The problem is that if you want to write something original, you either have to go the indie route, which goes out of its way to distance itself from Hollywood (which is a mixed blessing), or you have to convince one of these key players that an original new work is more valuable than a way to leverage a proven money-maker. Granted, with less stringent copyright laws, the low budget section would be full of bad remakes of old movies. You'd probably be seeing NC-17 versions of Star Wars, by now, with bad jokes, pop music, and gratuitous sex scenes added to provide that "added value" that could hopefully boost sales, but isn't that what the major studios do now? The difference is, that if they had to compete, they would probably bring something new to the table, and they would either do it well, or go out of business.
rather than ripping off other people's stories that just happen to be old enough to no longer be protected
Do those people own those stories? You seem to be arguing that an expression of an idea is a piece of property that belongs to its creator. That was not the intent of copyright law. The intent of copyright law was to encourage the arts and sciences, not to protect the notion that someone can own an abstract concept.
Thanks to Disney, creative artists now have the kind of long-term protection that Hans Christian Andersen, Rudyard Kipling and Lewis Carroll never enjoyed
No. Under the old system, they had long term protection. 28 years is a long time to capitalize on a single piece of work. Can you think of a single physical product that would be considered unreliable if it only lasted 28 years?
Under the 1909 copyright law, how many people would live long enough to see their works enter the public domain? If you write your first book at 20, then you would be 76, when the copyright expires. Disney just assured that someone who never had a thing to do with the original work can capitalize on it for decades after the original author's death.
The law can be as unreasonable as it wants. We don't care because we're all criminals...
When applied on the broader scale, isn't this how civilizations collapse?
I would argue to reduce the cost for a couple of reasons.
$50-100 per work would be unreasonable for songwriters who may end up writing ten or more songs per year.
If the charge is not directly related to the cost to keep the copyright office going, then it will become just another tax that can be jacked up every year. Because most copyrights are owned by huge businesses with deep pockets, I would be concerned that the end result would be that copyright costs becoming so incredibly high that only huge labels could afford to have them. (yes, this may sound like a slippery slope argument, but my point is that having the cost be related to the cost it incurs to the government, we would have a safeguard against this)
SCOTUS responded "On paper, it is limited - we don't care if Congress keeps changing the limit."
While I disagree with the decision, it's not QUITE the same thing as "[we] couldn't give a shit what the constitution says."
Agreed. Essentially, our argument is based on the observation of a pattern and the prediction that the pattern will continue. There is a world of difference between "we don't care about your predictions" and "it's illegal as hell and we don't care"
IANAL, but if I understood that ruling, the argument was that, by continually extending copyrights, congress is creating a perpetual copyright. The courts were not saying that perpetual copyrights are OK. They were saying that "I predict this pattern will continue forever" does not constitute a perpetual copyright.
I personally disagree, but could not make a strong argument about where the line should be drawn.
I have an idea for a few other things I'd like to see copyrighted. Please, someone, copyright these phrases and forbid any public performances:
1900 years later...
--
The cake is a lie.
I have never seen a tagline fit in so well with a post, before.
It is the pro-abortion folks who need to be dragged into the "century of the fruitbat".
As a pro-abortion folk, I'm pretty sure I got dragged into the "century of the fruitbat" nine years ago...
antitrust laws.
And, Fedora's designers have assumed that its users are wiser than the general run of users. 'For example, in earlier versions, ordinary (non-admin) users could install software on Fedora without access to the root password.
So according to this "logic", Microsoft assumes that its users are wiser than the general run of users too? Nice way to spin Fedora finally addressing this security issue, dude.
In a manner of speaking, yes. If they assumed that 50% of their users are below average, and that a significant enough percentage of them will click anything you stick in front of them, then they probably would have designed windows to be much more secure. Sure, they would have solved the problem in some cutesy way, like changing the "administrator" to "grown up", and popping up error messages saying things like "You need a grown up to install this application", but they would have fixed it.
Microsoft's downfall, if you can call it that, is the perception that end-users are godlike in their ability to perform regular maintenance and avoid stupid flash ads.
Surely at some point the judge/judges in that small corner of Texas should, if they're not idiots or in league with these trolls, realize that the reason they're getting so many patent lawsuits filed in their jurisdiction is because they're considered to be overly in favor of the people who are suing?
But maybe I'm just living in some sort of dreamworld where judges aren't incompetent or evil..
Or maybe they do not consider politics. I cannot say either way whether these judges are right or wrong on any case, but, if a judge were to just wake up one morning and say "too many people are suing for x...From now on, I'm going to make it much harder to win for x", I'd want the guy disbarred. The law simply doesn't work that way.