Granted, neither "The Hero with a thousand faces" nor "Hidden Fortress" had been around for > 50 years when Lucas wrote the screenplay for Star Wars, but they had been around > 35 and > 25 years respectively, and neither was written by Lucas.
Have you seen Hidden Fortress? There is a slight resemblance but it is fairly vague. It's not like anyone is going to notice Lucas "messing with the story" because it was already so badly messed up.
Now, I know some movies play around with this sequence. Take the latest Dawn of the Dead where the movie continued during the credit sequence and brought closure to the story. That is a case where you'd be correct. Otherwise, you come off sounding pretentious.
I often sit through the credits at the end of the film. Noting cast, director and screenwriter can be useful information to know (for when you see their names cropping up advertsising a new film), but the reason I tend to stay to the end is song and soundtrack information - if I particularly enjoyed the score, or noted a song used that i liked, or was familiar its always nice to be able to see exactly what it was and who it was by, and whether a soundtrack is available. All of that information is in the credits, but it is almost always at the end.
I agree the "but you must stay for the artistic integrity" is kind of pretentious, but the credits do contain information worth knowing.
Heh, I notice I got bad Karma for my last comment, because people don't like to take resoponsabiltiy, they like to blame it on the president, the government. Its not, its overpaid workers. Simple fact of the matter.
Mostly it is the high cost of living in the US, partly driven by a reasonably extravagant lifestyle, but mostly driven the high cost of housing.
A while ago my brother and I both had reasonably well paying jobs, his in the US, mine in New Zealand. We were earning the same amount in local currency, but when converted by the exchange rate (the NZ dollar wasn't doing so well at the time) I was earning almost half as much as my brother. In terms of standard of living however, I was actually slightly better of because the cost of living in New Zealand was just that much cheaper. Compare that to India and we're talking another order of magnitude.
That sort of situation is always going to have a huge impact on low skill tech jobs because
(1) Tech jobs are more easily relocatable than most, because for a lot of it you're just pushing information around, so with global communication, the physical locality is just not important. (2) There is a base minimum that you're going to have to pay someone if they're going to have any sort of standard of living in the US. If we're talking about low skill jobs that are not paying not far above that minimum level, it looks awfully expensive.
This situation is changing - the US dollar is dropping significantly against world currencies (but that in itself entails problems for the economy), but it still has a very long way to go before any kind of equilibrium is struck.
Jedidiah
Re:low unemployment compared to europe
on
The Jobs Crunch
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· Score: 1, Interesting
Since it's so fashionable to compare our policy to the European powers, let's look at some of the numbers. In France, unemployment was 9.3% as of last year. Germany's unemployment rate was 9.7% as of 2 years ago.
Unemployment rates are calculated differently around the world, as the "defintion" of unemployed changes from country to country. In the US I gather "unemployed" means you are actively drawing unemployment insurance. If you weren't working long enough prior to losing your job, have been on unemployment insurance too long and have stopped receiving it (someone in this thread claimed that could be as little as 6 months, I don't know), or collect disability instead, then you don't count as unemployed.
I've seen the defintion game in action when New Zealand redefined "unemployed" and the unemployment rate shifted by several percentage points - so yes it can make a significant difference.
Which is not to say that you aren't perfectly correct. It could well be that unemployment is a far more serious problem in France and Germany. But it might in fact be less of a problem. The definitons, and resulting figures can vary sufficiently that without knowing how those numbers are derived its all rather meaningless.
You;re comparing a couple of fruit without telling whether they're both apples, or apples and oranges. As such, the comparison is meaningless.
I've always been mildly curious as to why God seems unable to dictate religious texts (in pretty much any religion) that are somewhat less open to wild and varied interpretation of exactly what is "meant". Apparently God can indeed create laws so complicated that even he himself cannot describe them.
For those of you who like this sort of software, check out Celestia. It is a 3D space simulator, and lets you visit objects in our solar system and a bunch of stars. It's really amazing, and it's open source! My sister uses it for teaching astronomy to the neighborhood kids in their home-schooling class.
I was thinking of Celestia too, but more specifically, I was thinking that, as we speak, someone will be busy downloading and putting together new even higher detail virtual texture sets.
Celestia allowed you to zoom to remarkable detail, but was limited by the amount of freely available data - the BluMarble NASA image of the earth was about the best there was. This will provide the opportunity to go to those extra levels of detail - I look forward to the results for Celestia.
Now, if Enron was a not a corporation, and if Enron did not have all of the protection it had, would it still have been able to pool in so much money? Of course people could do it anytime, but I'm talking about scale, here. I've stated that several times.
I don't really see the scale issue. A company does not require incorporation to become vast - we only associate vast companies with corporations because whenever a company gets very large it pays to incorporate because the added legal protections are beneficial (why would they not take advantage of convenient extra legal protections?) What made Enron possible on the scale it occurred was pooling a massive amount of wealth into the control of a heirarchical organisation. There are extremely wealthy individuals who are not coporations. The MPAA seems to have remarkably far reaching control, and vast sums of money, yet they are merely an association not a corporation.
Are you saying that we simply will not have any large companies if we eliminate the abilities for companies to incorporate?
Are you just trying to complicate things for the sake of it, playing the Devil's Advocate, or do we hold such greatly varied views on corporations, mixed markets, and free markets?
I hold rather complex views, but if you want some statements of my personally held opinions:
I think removing the legal protections for coporations would be a very good thing.
I lean toward more free market solutions, but I don't see free markets as a utopian or even a complete answer.
You're absolutely correct on it being a well executed fraud, but the fact that it was done by a corporation [or the heads of the corporation], is what allows it to be done on such a wide scale.
Corporations have alot of power and influence, and are usually well protected by the laws that put them into place [or by the politicians that kept them there].
A large company, not incorporated, a cooperative, or any other similar means or organising a group to collective directed action (preferably with some heirarchical structure - that lets the top defraud the bottom) is all that would be required for an Enron style fraud scheme. There is, I repeat, no requirement to have government support for corporations involved - all that is required is an ability to collect and manage a large pool of money. It is not corporations that make this possible, rather coroporations simply provide an extra layer of very handy legal protections for large companies.
"Yeah, but it was a corporation and we won't have corporations" is not an excuse, its a half assed cop-out. removing coprorate protections would, indeed, be a good thing, but the lack of them would not have stopped Enron doing what they did.
Or perhaps you could explain, quite specifically, how government support was a requirement for Enron. That is, pretend Enron was a non incoroporated company - now explain why they couldn't do the same thing.
That one falls on its face before it gets away from the starting blocks. Corporate scandal. Corporation. Modern corporation. Intentional government constructs. Market socialism. Corporations do not exist in free markets [or the private sector, if by definition you take it as free markets]. Almost a good try though. Almost.
Removing the government granted benefits to a corporation is not a get out of jail free card. A large part of Enron's success was in misreporting earnings through creative accounting to fool investors. What part did government granted rights or support for Enron as a corporate entity play in that? Not a lot really. It was, when you get down to it, simply a very well executed fraud that used the markets as the sucker. Lack of government support for coporations wouldn't have made much difference.
Ummm, please name another cable TV network besides FoxNews that you would consider conservative? CNN? Given that two of their commentators (James Carville and Paul Bevala) are official advisers of the Kerry campaign I don't think they quite fit the bill! Given that no news source has talked about this gross violation of journalistic ethics, how can you claim that there is this massive conservative media bias?
See, the thing is, by global standards CNN is very conservative. When Americans complain about their "liberal media" they are complaining about media that in unashamedly biased toward the Democrats. That's not a liberal media, that's just supporting the other partisan side of a debate that ignores a wide variety of issues.
In general the US media, in its politcal reporting, has a very narrow focus. There is a lot of argument over Republicans and Democrats, but not much real discussion of issues. Ever seen many news stories about actually making a smaller federal government? How about limiting the rights, or expanding the responsibilities of corporations? How about discussions of the size of the US military? How about discussions of intellectual property? How to deal with waste disposal given the increasing amounts of waste we produce?
Several of these questions have 2 sides, and the Republicans and Democrats are on neither of them - they just blithely ignore the issue remaining with the status quo. Which is, I might point out, the very definition of conservative.
You often point out that pretty much every developed western country except the US has some form of single payer healthcare, and I think it is a valid issue, worth dicussing. However, having lived in a few countries that operate such a system I have generally found the governments involved to be having difficulties sustaining the system.
The dilemma amounts to this: as medical science continues to advance, and as we in general live longer and longer, the amount of things that can be done continues to expand, along with the costs involved with any new technologically advanced treatments. Because of this, the costs of providing complete healthcare continue to expand at a rate faster than we can pay for. With healthcare, if something is possible, people tend to demand that it be done, even if we do not have the resources to do it.
Complete provision of healthcare simply isn't a sustainable practice as the costs are not proportionally bound by population (and hence very roughly speaking, government income), but instead by the ever expanding limits of medical science.
How do you intend to deal with this dilemma? Do you only plan to provide single payer healthcare for core and emergency services only? Do you intend to allow a parallel private health system to provide the more expensive treatments?
I'm not shedding a tear. People act as if labels are the only way to do things. Don't want to sign with Universal? Don't. Publish on your own. Don't use the labels. You still have a choice.
Music labels are all about marketing. And that doesn't just mean marketing to you, it means marketing to all those up anc coming independent bands, saying that the big label is the only way to go. Have a read of Some of Your Friends are Already this Fucked by Steve Albini (a man who certanly knows the business). The big labels go to great lengths to keep the general populace, and the bands and musicians out there, as misinformed as possible about how the labels work, and what your other options are. They've managed to sell themselves to the majority of the population as the definition of success for a band. Success is when you get signed by a big label right? I wonder if there's any collusion with the MPAA on this - certainly Hollywood films are one of the major pushers of this point of view: The band has always "made it" when they get signed - not when they get popular.
Now, I admit, regardless of what big label propaganda you've had shoved down your throat, you still have a choice. To some extent I also don't have too much sympathy for those artists getting screwed. I do have a little pity for them, because they have been very expertly misguided.
I am listed as the inventor for several patents as well, though the patents are actually held (and were applied for) by the company I was woring for at the time.
I don't see the value of these patents. The patents involved were essentially an attempt to landgrab beyond the bounds of what was actually invented. A mix of copyright, and trade secrets (via closed source code) would have been entirely sufficient to protect the systems I designed from competitors.
What extra value do software patents provide beyond copyright and trade secret? It simply means if anyone else independently invents something similar, you can sue them - with copyright and trade secret you need to demonstrate that they actually stole it from you.
And before someone claims that patents cover the indea, while copyright covers the specific code, let me make it clear that that is not true. Have a look at the literary world, which has no patents, but does have copyright. To file a copyright suit for plaigarism you only need to find an author who has created a startlingly similar book - there's no need for any word for word copying. Want an example? J.K. Rowling sued DMitry Yemets over his "Tanya Grotter" books. The similarities were clear - both books were at wizard schools etc. - but the actual stories (plots for instance) were completely different. Equally there were rumblings of issues with "The Life of Pi" which was similar to a Brazilian book "Max and the Cats" in that they both featured someone adrift on a boat with a large cat after a shipwreck.
The simple but effective electronic voting scheme (as proposed by other slashdotters here in the past):
You select your candidate at an electronic voting machine, with cute push button screen, and whatever other whizzy technology you want. The machine responds by printing out a ticket or card with your choice clearly printed in english on the ticket so you can read an verify that it got it right.
You then deposit this ticket into the tally box to make your vote, and leave.
The tickets can be designed so that they can easily be fed through a scanning system to read and tally the votes. Correctly OCRing the ticket should be easy given:
1. The limited possible texts (only the available candidates). 2. A specific known, easily OCRable font and font size. 3. Text is in consistently exactly the same place.
With those constraints (the ticket printer produces results specifically designed to be easy to OCR correctly) OCR software performs with absolutely stunning accuracy.
The system is relatively simple, allows voters to verify they're choices, can be counted extremely quickly, and has a verifiable paper trail (all the human readable tickets) should the results be called into question.
Such a system is certainly no easier to defraud than a normal paper ballot system, yet gains all the benefits of a computer voting system. Of course, if you have monkeys write the code to do the counting and collect and aggregate the tallies, you'll be fairly screwed, but at least you'll have a paper trail to prove the results were forged.
Also you mention email worms/trojans, why do you need to be root to start a program that emails everyone in your evolution/kmail/syphleed address books? All it needs is the ability to connect outwards on port 25 and read your address book, like your email client running as your user does.
These sorts of examples are exactly why SELinux or similar technology should be pushed as standard in Linux distros. Set up properly such a system would have per process access control, so while evolution/kmail/sylpheed might have access to connect outwards on port 25, no subprocess fired off by users clicking icons would (and it would be possible to have the system warn the user that the process just tried to do so!).
A virus that spreads like like msblaster did is very easily possible, if someone discovered a flaw in a piece of popular software that runs on most linux machines
Again, this is where SELinux would kick in. even if you got a buffer overflow in a piece of software, under SELinux there's no "global authority to do everything" root account, so anything you tried to kick of via the overflow would be denied access from doing pretty much anything. Worst case it might knock over whatever process it exploited to get it. That means you could DoS servers with a hole, but you couldn't write an msblaster style worm.
And SELinux is coming. It didn't make Fedora Core 2 (issues with getting the security policy just right I gather - no easy task I admit), but they're still working on it. Hopefully they'll get it working, because then, finally, Linux will start being almost as secure as all the fanboys like to pretend that it is (but isn't currently).
Actually the cable seems quite safe even if part of it "falls". Please read the FAQ before such wild speculation.
Certainly a better answer than most I've seen. As someone else said, space elevator technology has come a long way (a cable that weighs a few kilos per kilometre!)
They do seem to want the best of all possible worlds though. It's convenient, but it's also located in the middle of the ocean near no major shipping or flight lanes - so not that convenient. And then there's the fact that the cable will mostly burn up, and what's left is very light and small - true, except elsewhere they say "The required eastward force on the ascending elevator would have to be provided by a corresponding westward force on the ribbon, possibly requiring rockets at intervals along the cable." Now surely rockets (and fuel for them) distributed at regular intervals along the cable are (a) less likely to burn up and (b) the ones lower on the cable are surely likely to cause a lot more mess if and when they come down.
Finally, the ribbon itself may be incredibly light, and perhaps the rockets are small, and never have much fuel in them, but you've still got the actual elevator itself climbing the ribbon, which they claim is dumptruck sized. Once again, not so nice when that comes down.
Of course, none of this is unassailable - mostly it means locating it somwhere in the middle of the ocean that's hard to get to, and being willing to suffer some damage if bad things happen (Hell, we've had a variety of satellites etc. crash and burn into the ocean with no serious ill effects, this wouldn't be that much worse).
I don't see how. They adjust the payoff so that even with perfect play the house comes out ahead. They'd have to or they'd lose money on average. Bots might cause a reduction in profits, though.
Quite correct. There is a significant difference between poker, as played by a group of people (and, for instacne at poker tournaments) and poker as played against the casino. It doesn't take very much skill at statistics to quickly see you'll lose against the house in casino poker.
I think any of these sorts of programs are only useful for fleecing other people playing online with you, you won't beat the house (not on average anyway). I would guess you could win good money with this sort of thing, but it won't really pout too much of a dent in casino profits.
Equally, this isn't going to be cheating in other online games - it won't be obvious to other players. A person using such a system will only win on average, which is what the house does all the time, and the people that gamble at these places don't seem to mind or notice that. Given that such "cheating" will be largely undetected by other players, it isn't going to discourage people from playing, and so, once again, the casinos aren't really going to care.
I don't see this as a problem for the casino industry. At worst their margins might get a touch slimmer if everyone started using such things, but if you've seen casino margins (I have) you'll know they really aren't going to be all that disturbed.
There may be things wrong with the way the movie people do business, but thin margins are not one of them. "somehow the expenses almost exactly match the costs" also happens in your neighborhood grocery store. A box of cornflakes marked $0.99 costs the store about $0.98 for the product, the shipping, heat and light in the shop, and labor to put it on the shelf. In a competitive market (which is so popular here on/.) margins are driven toward zero.
That's when you're offering something at a fixed price, films have variable returns. some films bomb, some films are roaring successes. According to movie studio accounting, everything finishes below the point of actually turning a profit.
Still not convinced there's something fishy going on? Try reading about the details of exactly how how movie studio accounting works. To call it dodgy is a vast understatement.
They have very fat margins, it's just that the margins become very thin (and usually slightly negative) for accounting purposes as soon as it comes time to share those profits with contracted parties who were offered a share.
If you pick up an uncut version you find yourself in a dense thicket of philosophy, history, culture, manners, politics, geography, analysis of human motives and actions, all conveyed in data-rich periodic sentences so formidable only a determined and well-educated reader can handle it nowadays. Yet in 1818 we were a small-farm nation without colleges or universities to speak of. Could those simple folk have had more complex minds than our own?
10 million copies you say? Of conplex convoluted language and philosophy. Gosh, yes, we're really not up to that standard.
How about some figures: In 1998, eighty-one million copies of Ulysses were sold--not worldwide, but in the United States alone.
Okay, so that's maybe 8 times as many copies, sure, but as we all know Ulysses by Joyce makes for very easy reading. No, wait, its almost fucking unreadable by well, most people. It has sentences that run for an entire page just about.
But ultimately, how realistic is the Second Ammendment today, or at any point in history? Is there really any inherent human right to be armed at all? Were the writers of the Constitution living in a fantasy world, or has their thinking become obsolete at some point in the last two hundred years? Do we have any right to be armed at all?
Certainly a lot of the reasoning for the Second Amendment, when it was written, isn't as valid today. Weapons have come a long way since then, and a militia armed with rifles is nowhere near as significant in this day and age as it was when such amendments were written.
When it comes down to it, few people would argue that owning nuclear weapons is sensible, and aircraft carriers and tanks are probably on the highly dubious list for most people, so obviously some restrictions are going to apply. It's just a question of where to draw the line.
I think you are right. The Second Amendment is an achronism now. That doesn't mean that all weapons should be banned, or anything of that sort - merely that such issues should be discussed on their merits in the modern world, rather than always harking back to a historical document that, at least on this issue, is somewhat out of date.
The license analogy can be put the other way around as well.
Yeah, very true. It's a pretty loose analogy and doesn't really have any direct correlations, so it's easy to fudge it to fit either way. The point was more that you can support freedom without agreeing on how to support it.
Now, for a minority not to profit of the work of others in a society that uses BSD licensing, you need people who will not support such behaviour, people who really want to be free and won't tolerate others exploiting them
Well, the BSD license solution is to simply not care if a minority exploits you, because in the long run the software you released is still free. The political solution (running with your analogy between license and politics) is to have some means of control over the group doing any exploiting. More particularly, you have a democratic or representative democratic government, and if any minority exploits the majority enough to annoy them, the government will get booted and the system will correct itself.
As for Chomsky, he's a libertarian socialist or "anarchist", and it is these libertarian socialists that used the term "libertarian" long before the right-wingers adopted it in the US.
Indeed. The term has been somewhat coopted by more right leaning individuals, along with objectivists and others like them to mean "let the market decide everything".
That's like saying "the only thing you disagree with the NRA on is gun control." Without economic rights, we would effectively have no rights at all. If the government can take away your property and your means of earning a livelihood, what point is there any real point in having a right to privacy?
Well yes, there is. The government has that right right now (I presume you are paying taxes), yet I don't see many people saying "Fuck it, may as well let the government ban everything they decide is bad, drop free speech for government controlled censorship, and allow the government to install cameras in every room of every home, it's all the same really". It's not the same at all.
Perhaps an interesting comparison might be to BSD and GPL licenses. The BSD license is all about freedom, and it grants absolute freedom. The GPL also wants freedom, but it inserts some provisos on that freedom to attempt to ensure that everyone can enjoy that freedom and help maintain that freedom in the long term.
Similarly Chomsky is venturing a system with some provisos on freedom with the aim that those provisos will help more people to enjoy the freedom, and to help maintain that freedom.
Now, whether you think BSD or GPL is the way to go, or whether you think Badnarik or Chomsky have the right solution is moot. The question here is whether Chomsky is a libertarian. What you're suggesting is that we can say that Stallman is against software freedom because he doesn't support a license that grants absolute freedom.
So, does Stallman believe in Free software or not?
It's worth noting that Cobb for the Green Party, and I believe Nader as an independent also both support the end to protections granted to corporations. In fact, most of the small 3rd parties have this as a major platform plank - it's only the 2 major (corporate backed) parties that see it otherwise. What a surprise.
Slashdot Mirror
Granted, neither "The Hero with a thousand faces" nor "Hidden Fortress" had been around for > 50 years when Lucas wrote the screenplay for Star Wars, but they had been around > 35 and > 25 years respectively, and neither was written by Lucas.
Have you seen Hidden Fortress? There is a slight resemblance but it is fairly vague. It's not like anyone is going to notice Lucas "messing with the story" because it was already so badly messed up.
Jedidiah.
Now, I know some movies play around with this sequence. Take the latest Dawn of the Dead where the movie continued during the credit sequence and brought closure to the story. That is a case where you'd be correct. Otherwise, you come off sounding pretentious.
I often sit through the credits at the end of the film. Noting cast, director and screenwriter can be useful information to know (for when you see their names cropping up advertsising a new film), but the reason I tend to stay to the end is song and soundtrack information - if I particularly enjoyed the score, or noted a song used that i liked, or was familiar its always nice to be able to see exactly what it was and who it was by, and whether a soundtrack is available. All of that information is in the credits, but it is almost always at the end.
I agree the "but you must stay for the artistic integrity" is kind of pretentious, but the credits do contain information worth knowing.
Jedidiah.
Heh, I notice I got bad Karma for my last comment, because people don't like to take resoponsabiltiy, they like to blame it on the president, the government. Its not, its overpaid workers. Simple fact of the matter.
Mostly it is the high cost of living in the US, partly driven by a reasonably extravagant lifestyle, but mostly driven the high cost of housing.
A while ago my brother and I both had reasonably well paying jobs, his in the US, mine in New Zealand. We were earning the same amount in local currency, but when converted by the exchange rate (the NZ dollar wasn't doing so well at the time) I was earning almost half as much as my brother. In terms of standard of living however, I was actually slightly better of because the cost of living in New Zealand was just that much cheaper. Compare that to India and we're talking another order of magnitude.
That sort of situation is always going to have a huge impact on low skill tech jobs because
(1) Tech jobs are more easily relocatable than most, because for a lot of it you're just pushing information around, so with global communication, the physical locality is just not important.
(2) There is a base minimum that you're going to have to pay someone if they're going to have any sort of standard of living in the US. If we're talking about low skill jobs that are not paying not far above that minimum level, it looks awfully expensive.
This situation is changing - the US dollar is dropping significantly against world currencies (but that in itself entails problems for the economy), but it still has a very long way to go before any kind of equilibrium is struck.
Jedidiah
Since it's so fashionable to compare our policy to the European powers, let's look at some of the numbers. In France, unemployment was 9.3% as of last year. Germany's unemployment rate was 9.7% as of 2 years ago.
Unemployment rates are calculated differently around the world, as the "defintion" of unemployed changes from country to country. In the US I gather "unemployed" means you are actively drawing unemployment insurance. If you weren't working long enough prior to losing your job, have been on unemployment insurance too long and have stopped receiving it (someone in this thread claimed that could be as little as 6 months, I don't know), or collect disability instead, then you don't count as unemployed.
I've seen the defintion game in action when New Zealand redefined "unemployed" and the unemployment rate shifted by several percentage points - so yes it can make a significant difference.
Which is not to say that you aren't perfectly correct. It could well be that unemployment is a far more serious problem in France and Germany. But it might in fact be less of a problem. The definitons, and resulting figures can vary sufficiently that without knowing how those numbers are derived its all rather meaningless.
You;re comparing a couple of fruit without telling whether they're both apples, or apples and oranges. As such, the comparison is meaningless.
Jedidiah.
I've always been mildly curious as to why God seems unable to dictate religious texts (in pretty much any religion) that are somewhat less open to wild and varied interpretation of exactly what is "meant". Apparently God can indeed create laws so complicated that even he himself cannot describe them.
Jedidiah.
Oddly I thought Leviticus was Old Testament law, and Christ's position was rather more defined by "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone".
Jedidiah
For those of you who like this sort of software, check out Celestia. It is a 3D space simulator, and lets you visit objects in our solar system and a bunch of stars. It's really amazing, and it's open source! My sister uses it for teaching astronomy to the neighborhood kids in their home-schooling class.
I was thinking of Celestia too, but more specifically, I was thinking that, as we speak, someone will be busy downloading and putting together new even higher detail virtual texture sets.
Celestia allowed you to zoom to remarkable detail, but was limited by the amount of freely available data - the BluMarble NASA image of the earth was about the best there was. This will provide the opportunity to go to those extra levels of detail - I look forward to the results for Celestia.
Jedidiah.
Now, if Enron was a not a corporation, and if Enron did not have all of the protection it had, would it still have been able to pool in so much money? Of course people could do it anytime, but I'm talking about scale, here. I've stated that several times.
I don't really see the scale issue. A company does not require incorporation to become vast - we only associate vast companies with corporations because whenever a company gets very large it pays to incorporate because the added legal protections are beneficial (why would they not take advantage of convenient extra legal protections?) What made Enron possible on the scale it occurred was pooling a massive amount of wealth into the control of a heirarchical organisation. There are extremely wealthy individuals who are not coporations. The MPAA seems to have remarkably far reaching control, and vast sums of money, yet they are merely an association not a corporation.
Are you saying that we simply will not have any large companies if we eliminate the abilities for companies to incorporate?
Are you just trying to complicate things for the sake of it, playing the Devil's Advocate, or do we hold such greatly varied views on corporations, mixed markets, and free markets?
I hold rather complex views, but if you want some statements of my personally held opinions:
I think removing the legal protections for coporations would be a very good thing.
I lean toward more free market solutions, but I don't see free markets as a utopian or even a complete answer.
Does that help?
Jedidiah.
You're absolutely correct on it being a well executed fraud, but the fact that it was done by a corporation [or the heads of the corporation], is what allows it to be done on such a wide scale.
Corporations have alot of power and influence, and are usually well protected by the laws that put them into place [or by the politicians that kept them there].
A large company, not incorporated, a cooperative, or any other similar means or organising a group to collective directed action (preferably with some heirarchical structure - that lets the top defraud the bottom) is all that would be required for an Enron style fraud scheme. There is, I repeat, no requirement to have government support for corporations involved - all that is required is an ability to collect and manage a large pool of money. It is not corporations that make this possible, rather coroporations simply provide an extra layer of very handy legal protections for large companies.
"Yeah, but it was a corporation and we won't have corporations" is not an excuse, its a half assed cop-out. removing coprorate protections would, indeed, be a good thing, but the lack of them would not have stopped Enron doing what they did.
Or perhaps you could explain, quite specifically, how government support was a requirement for Enron. That is, pretend Enron was a non incoroporated company - now explain why they couldn't do the same thing.
Jedidiah.
That one falls on its face before it gets away from the starting blocks. Corporate scandal. Corporation. Modern corporation. Intentional government constructs. Market socialism. Corporations do not exist in free markets [or the private sector, if by definition you take it as free markets]. Almost a good try though. Almost.
Removing the government granted benefits to a corporation is not a get out of jail free card. A large part of Enron's success was in misreporting earnings through creative accounting to fool investors. What part did government granted rights or support for Enron as a corporate entity play in that? Not a lot really. It was, when you get down to it, simply a very well executed fraud that used the markets as the sucker. Lack of government support for coporations wouldn't have made much difference.
Jedidiah.
Ummm, please name another cable TV network besides FoxNews that you would consider conservative? CNN? Given that two of their commentators (James Carville and Paul Bevala) are official advisers of the Kerry campaign I don't think they quite fit the bill! Given that no news source has talked about this gross violation of journalistic ethics, how can you claim that there is this massive conservative media bias?
See, the thing is, by global standards CNN is very conservative. When Americans complain about their "liberal media" they are complaining about media that in unashamedly biased toward the Democrats. That's not a liberal media, that's just supporting the other partisan side of a debate that ignores a wide variety of issues.
In general the US media, in its politcal reporting, has a very narrow focus. There is a lot of argument over Republicans and Democrats, but not much real discussion of issues. Ever seen many news stories about actually making a smaller federal government? How about limiting the rights, or expanding the responsibilities of corporations? How about discussions of the size of the US military? How about discussions of intellectual property? How to deal with waste disposal given the increasing amounts of waste we produce?
Several of these questions have 2 sides, and the Republicans and Democrats are on neither of them - they just blithely ignore the issue remaining with the status quo. Which is, I might point out, the very definition of conservative.
Jedidiah.
You often point out that pretty much every developed western country except the US has some form of single payer healthcare, and I think it is a valid issue, worth dicussing. However, having lived in a few countries that operate such a system I have generally found the governments involved to be having difficulties sustaining the system.
The dilemma amounts to this: as medical science continues to advance, and as we in general live longer and longer, the amount of things that can be done continues to expand, along with the costs involved with any new technologically advanced treatments. Because of this, the costs of providing complete healthcare continue to expand at a rate faster than we can pay for. With healthcare, if something is possible, people tend to demand that it be done, even if we do not have the resources to do it.
Complete provision of healthcare simply isn't a sustainable practice as the costs are not proportionally bound by population (and hence very roughly speaking, government income), but instead by the ever expanding limits of medical science.
How do you intend to deal with this dilemma? Do you only plan to provide single payer healthcare for core and emergency services only? Do you intend to allow a parallel private health system to provide the more expensive treatments?
Thank you.
Jedidiah.
I'm not shedding a tear. People act as if labels are the only way to do things. Don't want to sign with Universal? Don't. Publish on your own. Don't use the labels. You still have a choice.
Music labels are all about marketing. And that doesn't just mean marketing to you, it means marketing to all those up anc coming independent bands, saying that the big label is the only way to go. Have a read of Some of Your Friends are Already this Fucked by Steve Albini (a man who certanly knows the business). The big labels go to great lengths to keep the general populace, and the bands and musicians out there, as misinformed as possible about how the labels work, and what your other options are. They've managed to sell themselves to the majority of the population as the definition of success for a band. Success is when you get signed by a big label right? I wonder if there's any collusion with the MPAA on this - certainly Hollywood films are one of the major pushers of this point of view: The band has always "made it" when they get signed - not when they get popular.
Now, I admit, regardless of what big label propaganda you've had shoved down your throat, you still have a choice. To some extent I also don't have too much sympathy for those artists getting screwed. I do have a little pity for them, because they have been very expertly misguided.
Jedidiah.
I am listed as the inventor for several patents as well, though the patents are actually held (and were applied for) by the company I was woring for at the time.
I don't see the value of these patents. The patents involved were essentially an attempt to landgrab beyond the bounds of what was actually invented. A mix of copyright, and trade secrets (via closed source code) would have been entirely sufficient to protect the systems I designed from competitors.
What extra value do software patents provide beyond copyright and trade secret? It simply means if anyone else independently invents something similar, you can sue them - with copyright and trade secret you need to demonstrate that they actually stole it from you.
And before someone claims that patents cover the indea, while copyright covers the specific code, let me make it clear that that is not true. Have a look at the literary world, which has no patents, but does have copyright. To file a copyright suit for plaigarism you only need to find an author who has created a startlingly similar book - there's no need for any word for word copying. Want an example? J.K. Rowling sued DMitry Yemets over his "Tanya Grotter" books. The similarities were clear - both books were at wizard schools etc. - but the actual stories (plots for instance) were completely different. Equally there were rumblings of issues with "The Life of Pi" which was similar to a Brazilian book "Max and the Cats" in that they both featured someone adrift on a boat with a large cat after a shipwreck.
Jedidiah
The simple but effective electronic voting scheme (as proposed by other slashdotters here in the past):
You select your candidate at an electronic voting machine, with cute push button screen, and whatever other whizzy technology you want. The machine responds by printing out a ticket or card with your choice clearly printed in english on the ticket so you can read an verify that it got it right.
You then deposit this ticket into the tally box to make your vote, and leave.
The tickets can be designed so that they can easily be fed through a scanning system to read and tally the votes. Correctly OCRing the ticket should be easy given:
1. The limited possible texts (only the available candidates).
2. A specific known, easily OCRable font and font size.
3. Text is in consistently exactly the same place.
With those constraints (the ticket printer produces results specifically designed to be easy to OCR correctly) OCR software performs with absolutely stunning accuracy.
The system is relatively simple, allows voters to verify they're choices, can be counted extremely quickly, and has a verifiable paper trail (all the human readable tickets) should the results be called into question.
Such a system is certainly no easier to defraud than a normal paper ballot system, yet gains all the benefits of a computer voting system. Of course, if you have monkeys write the code to do the counting and collect and aggregate the tallies, you'll be fairly screwed, but at least you'll have a paper trail to prove the results were forged.
Jedidiah
Also you mention email worms/trojans, why do you need to be root to start a program that emails everyone in your evolution/kmail/syphleed address books?
All it needs is the ability to connect outwards on port 25 and read your address book, like your email client running as your user does.
These sorts of examples are exactly why SELinux or similar technology should be pushed as standard in Linux distros. Set up properly such a system would have per process access control, so while evolution/kmail/sylpheed might have access to connect outwards on port 25, no subprocess fired off by users clicking icons would (and it would be possible to have the system warn the user that the process just tried to do so!).
A virus that spreads like like msblaster did is very easily possible, if someone discovered a flaw in a piece of popular software that runs on most linux machines
Again, this is where SELinux would kick in. even if you got a buffer overflow in a piece of software, under SELinux there's no "global authority to do everything" root account, so anything you tried to kick of via the overflow would be denied access from doing pretty much anything. Worst case it might knock over whatever process it exploited to get it. That means you could DoS servers with a hole, but you couldn't write an msblaster style worm.
And SELinux is coming. It didn't make Fedora Core 2 (issues with getting the security policy just right I gather - no easy task I admit), but they're still working on it. Hopefully they'll get it working, because then, finally, Linux will start being almost as secure as all the fanboys like to pretend that it is (but isn't currently).
Jedidiah.
...spacecraft from the elevator without a 29B/6 form that's been stamped.
Surely that should be 27B/6, or are you not making cunning subtle references to Brazil.
Jedidiah.
Actually the cable seems quite safe even if part of it "falls". Please read the FAQ before such wild speculation.
Certainly a better answer than most I've seen. As someone else said, space elevator technology has come a long way (a cable that weighs a few kilos per kilometre!)
They do seem to want the best of all possible worlds though. It's convenient, but it's also located in the middle of the ocean near no major shipping or flight lanes - so not that convenient. And then there's the fact that the cable will mostly burn up, and what's left is very light and small - true, except elsewhere they say
"The required eastward force on the ascending elevator would have to be provided by a corresponding westward force on the ribbon, possibly requiring rockets at intervals along the cable."
Now surely rockets (and fuel for them) distributed at regular intervals along the cable are (a) less likely to burn up and (b) the ones lower on the cable are surely likely to cause a lot more mess if and when they come down.
Finally, the ribbon itself may be incredibly light, and perhaps the rockets are small, and never have much fuel in them, but you've still got the actual elevator itself climbing the ribbon, which they claim is dumptruck sized. Once again, not so nice when that comes down.
Of course, none of this is unassailable - mostly it means locating it somwhere in the middle of the ocean that's hard to get to, and being willing to suffer some damage if bad things happen (Hell, we've had a variety of satellites etc. crash and burn into the ocean with no serious ill effects, this wouldn't be that much worse).
Jedidiah
I don't see how. They adjust the payoff so that even with perfect play the house comes out ahead. They'd have to or they'd lose money on average. Bots might cause a reduction in profits, though.
Quite correct. There is a significant difference between poker, as played by a group of people (and, for instacne at poker tournaments) and poker as played against the casino. It doesn't take very much skill at statistics to quickly see you'll lose against the house in casino poker.
I think any of these sorts of programs are only useful for fleecing other people playing online with you, you won't beat the house (not on average anyway). I would guess you could win good money with this sort of thing, but it won't really pout too much of a dent in casino profits.
Equally, this isn't going to be cheating in other online games - it won't be obvious to other players. A person using such a system will only win on average, which is what the house does all the time, and the people that gamble at these places don't seem to mind or notice that. Given that such "cheating" will be largely undetected by other players, it isn't going to discourage people from playing, and so, once again, the casinos aren't really going to care.
I don't see this as a problem for the casino industry. At worst their margins might get a touch slimmer if everyone started using such things, but if you've seen casino margins (I have) you'll know they really aren't going to be all that disturbed.
Jedidiah.
There may be things wrong with the way the movie people do business, but thin margins are not one of them. "somehow the expenses almost exactly match the costs" also happens in your neighborhood grocery store. A box of cornflakes marked $0.99 costs the store about $0.98 for the product, the shipping, heat and light in the shop, and labor to put it on the shelf. In a competitive market (which is so popular here on /.) margins are driven toward zero.
That's when you're offering something at a fixed price, films have variable returns. some films bomb, some films are roaring successes. According to movie studio accounting, everything finishes below the point of actually turning a profit.
Still not convinced there's something fishy going on? Try reading about the details of exactly how how movie studio accounting works. To call it dodgy is a vast understatement.
They have very fat margins, it's just that the margins become very thin (and usually slightly negative) for accounting purposes as soon as it comes time to share those profits with contracted parties who were offered a share.
Jedidiah.
If you pick up an uncut version you find yourself in a dense thicket of philosophy, history, culture, manners, politics, geography, analysis of human motives and actions, all conveyed in data-rich periodic sentences so formidable only a determined and well-educated reader can handle it nowadays. Yet in 1818 we were a small-farm nation without colleges or universities to speak of. Could those simple folk have had more complex minds than our own?
10 million copies you say? Of conplex convoluted language and philosophy. Gosh, yes, we're really not up to that standard.
How about some figures:
In 1998, eighty-one million copies of Ulysses were sold--not worldwide, but in the United States alone.
Okay, so that's maybe 8 times as many copies, sure, but as we all know Ulysses by Joyce makes for very easy reading. No, wait, its almost fucking unreadable by well, most people. It has sentences that run for an entire page just about.
Try again please.
Jedidiah.
But ultimately, how realistic is the Second Ammendment today, or at any point in history? Is there really any inherent human right to be armed at all? Were the writers of the Constitution living in a fantasy world, or has their thinking become obsolete at some point in the last two hundred years? Do we have any right to be armed at all?
Certainly a lot of the reasoning for the Second Amendment, when it was written, isn't as valid today. Weapons have come a long way since then, and a militia armed with rifles is nowhere near as significant in this day and age as it was when such amendments were written.
When it comes down to it, few people would argue that owning nuclear weapons is sensible, and aircraft carriers and tanks are probably on the highly dubious list for most people, so obviously some restrictions are going to apply. It's just a question of where to draw the line.
I think you are right. The Second Amendment is an achronism now. That doesn't mean that all weapons should be banned, or anything of that sort - merely that such issues should be discussed on their merits in the modern world, rather than always harking back to a historical document that, at least on this issue, is somewhat out of date.
Jedidiah.
The license analogy can be put the other way around as well.
Yeah, very true. It's a pretty loose analogy and doesn't really have any direct correlations, so it's easy to fudge it to fit either way. The point was more that you can support freedom without agreeing on how to support it.
Now, for a minority not to profit of the work of others in a society that uses BSD licensing, you need people who will not support such behaviour, people who really want to be free and won't tolerate others exploiting them
Well, the BSD license solution is to simply not care if a minority exploits you, because in the long run the software you released is still free. The political solution (running with your analogy between license and politics) is to have some means of control over the group doing any exploiting. More particularly, you have a democratic or representative democratic government, and if any minority exploits the majority enough to annoy them, the government will get booted and the system will correct itself.
As for Chomsky, he's a libertarian socialist or "anarchist", and it is these libertarian socialists that used the term "libertarian" long before the right-wingers adopted it in the US.
Indeed. The term has been somewhat coopted by more right leaning individuals, along with objectivists and others like them to mean "let the market decide everything".
Jedidiah.
That's like saying "the only thing you disagree with the NRA on is gun control." Without economic rights, we would effectively have no rights at all. If the government can take away your property and your means of earning a livelihood, what point is there any real point in having a right to privacy?
Well yes, there is. The government has that right right now (I presume you are paying taxes), yet I don't see many people saying "Fuck it, may as well let the government ban everything they decide is bad, drop free speech for government controlled censorship, and allow the government to install cameras in every room of every home, it's all the same really". It's not the same at all.
Perhaps an interesting comparison might be to BSD and GPL licenses. The BSD license is all about freedom, and it grants absolute freedom. The GPL also wants freedom, but it inserts some provisos on that freedom to attempt to ensure that everyone can enjoy that freedom and help maintain that freedom in the long term.
Similarly Chomsky is venturing a system with some provisos on freedom with the aim that those provisos will help more people to enjoy the freedom, and to help maintain that freedom.
Now, whether you think BSD or GPL is the way to go, or whether you think Badnarik or Chomsky have the right solution is moot. The question here is whether Chomsky is a libertarian. What you're suggesting is that we can say that Stallman is against software freedom because he doesn't support a license that grants absolute freedom.
So, does Stallman believe in Free software or not?
Jedidiah.
It's worth noting that Cobb for the Green Party, and I believe Nader as an independent also both support the end to protections granted to corporations. In fact, most of the small 3rd parties have this as a major platform plank - it's only the 2 major (corporate backed) parties that see it otherwise. What a surprise.
Jedidiah.