This reminds me of Woody's Second Lone Gunman theory about the JFK assassination -- that Kennedy was shot by two guys who had nothing to do with each other, just an incredible coincidence.
There are historical precedents for this sort of thing. According to one of my old high school teachers, when the Japanese were building up their war fleet in the years before WWII, they approached an American shipbuilding company about buying plans for old military ships. Smelling trouble, the company alerted the US government ahead of time and the plans were carefully changed. When the first ship was launched it immediately rolled over due to a deliberate weight imbalance in the bogus plans.
Owners of Everything Decide to Indenture the Rest of Us for Life
Ungrateful sods and copyright pirates to be imprisoned, executed. "You're lucky to have those jobs we provide you with," says spokesperson for owners of everything.
That's a great insight. A lot of things are presented in the media as if they were fundamental laws of the universe rather than mere recent customs. The idea of holding the rights to material has morphed into the idea of owning the material itself, making it seem natural to replicate in cyberspace the physical walls and fences we take for granted in the real world.
But the driving force that dates back to the mud hut is the custom of turning the wilderness into the Royal Forest. Certain people have always been able to convince others to treat them like kings and queens, and coerce everybody else into following suit. As long as the public plays along, hunting becomes poaching and building upon history becomes infringement.
Pioneers who blaze trails into the wilderness, the settlers who follow them to establish communities, and the civilians who later live in the settled areas all need different things from a legal system. You couldn't tame a continent if you had teams of safety inspectors and liability lawyers riding along in the wagons.
The Internet is in the Settlement phase. What we're seeing now is a lot of bickering between vested interests, mostly over who gets what. Like when the railroads were buying up land. I don't think today's legislators are in a position to dictate restrictions that will affect people fifty years from now. But that's their job.
Legal minds seem to be waking up to the fact that information exchange, and to some extent information itself, is cheap now. Copyright artificially imposes value on it. We continue to maintain the copyright system because 1) it's traditional and 2) we're afraid not to.
Paradigms have short lifespans. Jack Valenti can whine all day about movies costing $50-60 million. But some of those movies would have cost a billion without digital technology. When he's able to make an equivalent movie for $1 million using synthesized sets, music and actors, he'll be as sympathetic to the complaints of all the defunct show business unions as someone downloading a LOTR torrent.
Everything looks different from every point of view, including those of one person at different points in time. Anyway, just a lot of blabbing, I don't really have anything constructive to suggest.
On my morning commute route is a school crosswalk with a uniformed crossing guard. After years doing that job she STILL slaps the walk button at least 7 or 8 times whenever a kid approaches. I have often wondered if she really thinks it accomplishes anything, or if she's just bored.
I've never understood these things. When I was a kid, in the pre-button 1960's, the Walk signs just turned on when the traffic light turned green, regardless of whether anybody was standing there. With the buttons, the Walk sign turns on when someone is there and doesn't turn on when no one is there, but other than that I don't see the difference. Why the extra hardware?
Re:Photos are Archived Here
on
Borg Cube Case
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· Score: 1
Swedish?? I thought it was James Brown. Iiiaaaaooww!
Before you wave the no-gubmint flag, consider that one function of government is to finance and run operations that are socially valuable and yet commercially unworkable. There isn't big profit in highways, fire departments and sewage treatment plants. It's hard to deny that we need it. If it becomes impossible to make money running pipes, they could become regulated. Or the government could buy up whole systems and contract out the maintenance at an acceptable profit. If things change, deregulation is always an option down the road (look at telcos).
Those are well thought out comments, but why is it a given that musicians (or anybody) should make money from copies of sounds? The notion that people should pay for copies of sounds isn't a basic fact of nature, it's a custom that grew out of 20th-Century copying technology and related economics. Before 1900, due to lack of technology, musicians made a living only by performing. After 1900, due to record company business practices, musicians still made a living only by performing. Now that physical media is becoming obsolete and distribution is becoming trivial, why is there suddenly a moral imperative for musicians to profit from copies?
The reason I'm against ANY scheme to pay for copies is that any law, no matter how it's written, has to be enforced. In the case of copyright, that enforcement WILL take the form of search and seizure, presumption of guilt, and restrictions on any technology that could possibly be used for copyright infringement. We're seeing that already, and I don't feel any better about it just because a different group of people stand to make money. The smallness of the fee is irrelevant, as is the niceness of the sentiment to pay musicians. As technology continues to make copyright enforcement more and more difficult without infringing on basic rights of citizens, we have to find an alternative to metering the consumption and possession of information.
This sort of booby-trap business model wouldn't happen if patent holders were required to take anti-infringement action within a limited time. If alleged infringement goes on in plain view for say, 2 years without any claim against it, then there should be no infringement claim. If Sovrain tried to victimize my company in this way, I would seriously look for a way to prosecute them as terrorists.
Aucsmith must live in the same self-delusional world as Jack Valenti and various record company execs. Maybe they should all go to an island somewhere. Make yourselves comfortable, gentlemen. Mr. Rorke will be along shortly. Here's a drink with an umbrella in it.
Yeah, the word "Lindows" infringes on Microsoft's intellectual property, but "XP Reloaded" doesn't infringe on anybody else's ideas. It's a totally original concept. Right.
Because no matter how reliable technology is, anything can break. Complex technology tends to fail from obscure problems that ordinary people can't fix or even understand. Our ancestors dealt mostly with things they could see and understand. No matter how reliable your technology is, putting your confidence in a collection of black boxes that you have no idea how to fix is fundamentally different from having confidence in your own ability to cope with problems that you can see.
I just got one of these. When Wesley walked out of the holodeck, some of the fake snow on his shoulders fell right out of the monitor and melted on my floor!
First, Free Choice is the classic head-in-the-sand argument for people who really don't want to understand the problem. If smoking, drinking, overeating and so forth were simple matters of Free Choice, then we wouldn't have multibillion dollar industries built around helping people quit smoking, quit drinking, quit overeating, etc. There wouldn't be any demand.
Secondly, getting killed by a drunken idiot on your way home from work isn't a matter of choice, any more than getting blown up in your office by an airliner.
Thirdly, I was defining Liberty in terms of what I think it means to the people who make the rules. They want the American public to be free enough to run through the maze and look for the cheese, but not so free as to be able to move the walls around.
Some people don't see the Internet (or anywhere else) as a place for free expression. They see the Internet (and everywhere else) as a place for making money and perpetuating standard values. Such people usually get their way. The days of free expression on the Internet are numbered, as they are everywhere else. By consolidating control of the Internet into entities whose primary interests are making money and avoiding problems, we are moving it toward a self-regulated sales and entertainment (with education as an occasional side-effect, like on television and radio) driven by conformity and propriety.
From the perspective of the people who actually run America -- the ones whose money determines which politicians get elected and which laws get written -- Liberty means uninterrupted consumption and business activity. It means freedom from distracting influences that might discourage people from buying things they don't need with money they don't have. It means freedom from the ravages of common sense.
People do have fundamental common sense, at least at an instinctive level. When they feel insecure they don't spend as much money. When they feel safe they are more willing to go into credit debt. The virtues of Self Reliance and Common Sense, once held in high esteem in America, have been the enemies of Commerce since about 1950, when the Advertising Industry came of age and discovered that it could get people to spend money like idiots. Anything (terrorism, environmentalism) that disrupts buying habits is automatically evil.
The WTC destruction was much less deadly than various processes of product-induced death and suffering that we've learned to ignore. 3000+ people got killed. That's how many people have been getting killed by drunk drivers every couple months since about 1960. Alcohol's a big industry, so the government doles out enough money and PR to placate the vocal minority that really gives a shit, never really doing anything that will fix the problem. Same routine with tobacco. Money and PR for lung cancer. Business as usual. Same for artery-clogging fast food. Money and PR for heart disease. Business as usual.
What made the WTC destruction a threat to Liberty was that it scared the shit out of people in a way that they couldn't be soothed to ignore. Something that could reawaken their normal instinct to stock up on canned food, stay home this vacation and maybe put off buying that 42-inch TV for a while, because You Never Know.
Loss of consumption = loss of Liberty. Even the President routinely refers to the American public as "consumers" rather than "citizens." Liberty means easy access to lots of shiny new stuff, and gracious companies willing to let you get in debt to them for the rest of your life, so you can't afford to quit your job. So STFU and get back to work.
Slashdot Mirror
I hear dead people.
I don't hate them for being slippery, I hate them for their slipperier-than-thou attitude.
This reminds me of Woody's Second Lone Gunman theory about the JFK assassination -- that Kennedy was shot by two guys who had nothing to do with each other, just an incredible coincidence.
There are historical precedents for this sort of thing. According to one of my old high school teachers, when the Japanese were building up their war fleet in the years before WWII, they approached an American shipbuilding company about buying plans for old military ships. Smelling trouble, the company alerted the US government ahead of time and the plans were carefully changed. When the first ship was launched it immediately rolled over due to a deliberate weight imbalance in the bogus plans.
I've never been able to verify this story.
Owners of Everything Decide to Indenture the Rest of Us for Life
Ungrateful sods and copyright pirates to be imprisoned, executed. "You're lucky to have those jobs we provide you with," says spokesperson for owners of everything.
... a kid who sets off those scanners ... because his body happens to generate the precise frequency of electromagnetic energy they're keyed to.
Like hell. That's a stolen kid! Put his parents under arrest!
That's a great insight. A lot of things are presented in the media as if they were fundamental laws of the universe rather than mere recent customs. The idea of holding the rights to material has morphed into the idea of owning the material itself, making it seem natural to replicate in cyberspace the physical walls and fences we take for granted in the real world.
But the driving force that dates back to the mud hut is the custom of turning the wilderness into the Royal Forest. Certain people have always been able to convince others to treat them like kings and queens, and coerce everybody else into following suit. As long as the public plays along, hunting becomes poaching and building upon history becomes infringement.
Pioneers who blaze trails into the wilderness, the settlers who follow them to establish communities, and the civilians who later live in the settled areas all need different things from a legal system. You couldn't tame a continent if you had teams of safety inspectors and liability lawyers riding along in the wagons.
The Internet is in the Settlement phase. What we're seeing now is a lot of bickering between vested interests, mostly over who gets what. Like when the railroads were buying up land. I don't think today's legislators are in a position to dictate restrictions that will affect people fifty years from now. But that's their job.
Legal minds seem to be waking up to the fact that information exchange, and to some extent information itself, is cheap now. Copyright artificially imposes value on it. We continue to maintain the copyright system because 1) it's traditional and 2) we're afraid not to.
Paradigms have short lifespans. Jack Valenti can whine all day about movies costing $50-60 million. But some of those movies would have cost a billion without digital technology. When he's able to make an equivalent movie for $1 million using synthesized sets, music and actors, he'll be as sympathetic to the complaints of all the defunct show business unions as someone downloading a LOTR torrent.
Everything looks different from every point of view, including those of one person at different points in time. Anyway, just a lot of blabbing, I don't really have anything constructive to suggest.
Sorry, I was upgrading the embedded Forth interpreter in my pocket protector. What was it you wanted?
On my morning commute route is a school crosswalk with a uniformed crossing guard. After years doing that job she STILL slaps the walk button at least 7 or 8 times whenever a kid approaches. I have often wondered if she really thinks it accomplishes anything, or if she's just bored.
I've never understood these things. When I was a kid, in the pre-button 1960's, the Walk signs just turned on when the traffic light turned green, regardless of whether anybody was standing there. With the buttons, the Walk sign turns on when someone is there and doesn't turn on when no one is there, but other than that I don't see the difference. Why the extra hardware?
Swedish?? I thought it was James Brown.
Iiiaaaaooww!
Before you wave the no-gubmint flag, consider that one function of government is to finance and run operations that are socially valuable and yet commercially unworkable. There isn't big profit in highways, fire departments and sewage treatment plants. It's hard to deny that we need it. If it becomes impossible to make money running pipes, they could become regulated. Or the government could buy up whole systems and contract out the maintenance at an acceptable profit. If things change, deregulation is always an option down the road (look at telcos).
Those are well thought out comments, but why is it a given that musicians (or anybody) should make money from copies of sounds? The notion that people should pay for copies of sounds isn't a basic fact of nature, it's a custom that grew out of 20th-Century copying technology and related economics. Before 1900, due to lack of technology, musicians made a living only by performing. After 1900, due to record company business practices, musicians still made a living only by performing. Now that physical media is becoming obsolete and distribution is becoming trivial, why is there suddenly a moral imperative for musicians to profit from copies?
The reason I'm against ANY scheme to pay for copies is that any law, no matter how it's written, has to be enforced. In the case of copyright, that enforcement WILL take the form of search and seizure, presumption of guilt, and restrictions on any technology that could possibly be used for copyright infringement. We're seeing that already, and I don't feel any better about it just because a different group of people stand to make money. The smallness of the fee is irrelevant, as is the niceness of the sentiment to pay musicians. As technology continues to make copyright enforcement more and more difficult without infringing on basic rights of citizens, we have to find an alternative to metering the consumption and possession of information.
This sort of booby-trap business model wouldn't happen if patent holders were required to take anti-infringement action within a limited time. If alleged infringement goes on in plain view for say, 2 years without any claim against it, then there should be no infringement claim. If Sovrain tried to victimize my company in this way, I would seriously look for a way to prosecute them as terrorists.
Aucsmith must live in the same self-delusional world as Jack Valenti and various record company execs. Maybe they should all go to an island somewhere. Make yourselves comfortable, gentlemen. Mr. Rorke will be along shortly. Here's a drink with an umbrella in it.
Yeah, the word "Lindows" infringes on Microsoft's intellectual property, but "XP Reloaded" doesn't infringe on anybody else's ideas. It's a totally original concept. Right.
Because no matter how reliable technology is, anything can break. Complex technology tends to fail from obscure problems that ordinary people can't fix or even understand. Our ancestors dealt mostly with things they could see and understand. No matter how reliable your technology is, putting your confidence in a collection of black boxes that you have no idea how to fix is fundamentally different from having confidence in your own ability to cope with problems that you can see.
I just got one of these. When Wesley walked out of the holodeck, some of the fake snow on his shoulders fell right out of the monitor and melted on my floor!
I've had Naked DSL since it was installed. Isn't that why Everybody gets broadband?
First, Free Choice is the classic head-in-the-sand argument for people who really don't want to understand the problem. If smoking, drinking, overeating and so forth were simple matters of Free Choice, then we wouldn't have multibillion dollar industries built around helping people quit smoking, quit drinking, quit overeating, etc. There wouldn't be any demand.
Secondly, getting killed by a drunken idiot on your way home from work isn't a matter of choice, any more than getting blown up in your office by an airliner.
Thirdly, I was defining Liberty in terms of what I think it means to the people who make the rules. They want the American public to be free enough to run through the maze and look for the cheese, but not so free as to be able to move the walls around.
Some people don't see the Internet (or anywhere else) as a place for free expression. They see the Internet (and everywhere else) as a place for making money and perpetuating standard values. Such people usually get their way. The days of free expression on the Internet are numbered, as they are everywhere else. By consolidating control of the Internet into entities whose primary interests are making money and avoiding problems, we are moving it toward a self-regulated sales and entertainment (with education as an occasional side-effect, like on television and radio) driven by conformity and propriety.
That would explain the guys on Maui who walk by you on the street saying, "Buds."
After you've ripped the couple hundred movies that you like, you can keep those DVDs for backup and sell the other 7-800 on EBay. Sweet!
From the perspective of the people who actually run America -- the ones whose money determines which politicians get elected and which laws get written -- Liberty means uninterrupted consumption and business activity. It means freedom from distracting influences that might discourage people from buying things they don't need with money they don't have. It means freedom from the ravages of common sense.
People do have fundamental common sense, at least at an instinctive level. When they feel insecure they don't spend as much money. When they feel safe they are more willing to go into credit debt. The virtues of Self Reliance and Common Sense, once held in high esteem in America, have been the enemies of Commerce since about 1950, when the Advertising Industry came of age and discovered that it could get people to spend money like idiots. Anything (terrorism, environmentalism) that disrupts buying habits is automatically evil.
The WTC destruction was much less deadly than various processes of product-induced death and suffering that we've learned to ignore. 3000+ people got killed. That's how many people have been getting killed by drunk drivers every couple months since about 1960. Alcohol's a big industry, so the government doles out enough money and PR to placate the vocal minority that really gives a shit, never really doing anything that will fix the problem. Same routine with tobacco. Money and PR for lung cancer. Business as usual. Same for artery-clogging fast food. Money and PR for heart disease. Business as usual.
What made the WTC destruction a threat to Liberty was that it scared the shit out of people in a way that they couldn't be soothed to ignore. Something that could reawaken their normal instinct to stock up on canned food, stay home this vacation and maybe put off buying that 42-inch TV for a while, because You Never Know.
Loss of consumption = loss of Liberty. Even the President routinely refers to the American public as "consumers" rather than "citizens." Liberty means easy access to lots of shiny new stuff, and gracious companies willing to let you get in debt to them for the rest of your life, so you can't afford to quit your job. So STFU and get back to work.