You're paying for what other people can't afford, mate. Other (many more) people are paying their share of 20% taxes (and keeping 80% for themselves) in exchange for services that are worth slightly more than what they pay for them. Do you know what bribes are, maybe you mean extortion. But maybe also you mean a progressive tax schedule.
Detained without charges, yes, and questioned without an attorney, his property seized without a court order. We've already spent almost a whole millennium trying to get rid of that bullshit, and we thought we had succeeded. We had due process, we had habeas corpus. Now we have laws that allow some people to ignore those things, and those laws do not make the abduction legitimate.
the privacy question is far more mature than in the USA. It's not a government vs peoples fight,
Yeah, Switzerland is the mature one, what with all your banning of minarets. The rest of our republics certainly have their faults, but rarely can they be compared unfavourably to a racist homeowners association.
But back to the topic. An important thing to note is that in Switzerland there is a very large and much more obvious commercial interest in privacy protection: the banking secret. Those who find it most important to keep their affairs secret, and can afford it, are already banking in Panama, and Luxembrah, and yes, Switzerland. Thanks to those guys, your privacy matters more, as it is associated with a powerful and historic interest which the government will find much harder to fight. As for the rest of the world, we had to forget about about our banking secrecy some years ago already. Much as today, seven years ago the press exposed a secret government program that was scrutinising our private matters under the guise of tracking terrorists. And much as it happened then, this NYT editorial seems appropriate.
The UK requires all bills to be debated, at least once in each chamber. Here is the debate that followed the second reading, I don't know exactly what you mean by closed doors or public debate.
It's hard to see how they could get yours keys without someone noticing.
RTFA, they're using server-side encryption. If they don't get your keys, nothing is encrypted. They also say that if you like, you can manage your own keys. But obviously there's nothing stopping you from doing that anyway.
Is that just like the time we created an artificial abundance in foods by inventing agriculture and domesticating animals? Or the time we created an artificial abundance of manufactured clothing by inventing the loom?
You either have direct democracy inscribed in your constitution or you don't.
And we don't, mostly because otherwise we'd end up banning minarets or something ridiculous like that. But Finland is a prosperous country of only 5 million people. They have a better chance than anyone of implementing a reasonable law that is more popular with its citizens than foreign industries. Not that it's a huge chance, just better.
It does, yes. But this is why you should never do any work before signing a good employment contract. Information does not work like that because anyone can copy it and many people can enjoy it. You can't make a contract with everyone in the world before you produce your art. But this does not mean that you can force them to pay for something that is intrinsically free.
Also, it is definitely intrinsically free. The only reason you can charge for it is because an artificial monopoly (copyright) has been legally created so that an artificial shortage can be introduced into the market. This is not necessarily a bad thing - but we should certainly be clear about where natural rights are.
Yeah, but maybe they couldn't make back their costs pricing them at $300. They were not going for $700 or whatever because MS wanted them to be perceived as high-end, but because they were expensive machines to produce.
I use vimperator at work because Windows sucks three balls on having choice of software. I much rather have one that was built with keyboard interface. I'm currently using dwb at home and quite pleased.
Even if you're forced to use IE with no extensions,
you (the sysadmin) can still block your ads, for example, in a DNS basis. Heck, you already have the fanboy list, so you don't even need to compile it. Alternatively, see adsuck. Great thing about computers is that you can usually work around problems.
It is such a huge undertaking to remove anything from the internet that it doesn't make sense to have a right to be forgotten. How can you expect a search engine to filter its results from anything anyone ever hoped to remove from the web while still accurately indexing it? On top of that, even if you managed to get Google, or Bing, or whatever to stop indexing any page with personal information, what keeps them from being remembered? You cannot tell google to search imgur for pictures of cats, or airplanes, or naked girls, but there are other sites that index them. You cannot ask google to find you a free episode of The Sopranos and it won't, but there are other sites that index them; when these are taken down no-one has any difficult finding a replacement. It is simply impossible, technically impossible to be forgotten if there is someone out there that wants to keep the information.
Using the curve he presents, we could easily argue that zero strength patents yield the same amount of innovation as we see today (draw a horizontal line from the "we are here" point to the Y axis),
ooh, yeah... no. A drawing like that means he thinks the curve is concave with a local maximum above zero. And 'we are here' means he thinks we're to the right of the maximum. Talking about actual levels of innovation is way beyond his argument.
If we factor in the side industry of patent litigation...
This is precisely what he argues is the cost of patent law. It's already taken into account.
It also assumes that there is only one point on the curve with a global maximum value for innovation, yet is see no argument from him as to why that would be the case.
It is in fact there. Note a couple of things, both said in the article:
(1) Knowledge (innovations, invention) is a public good - it is non-exclusive and non-subtractable-, so in an unregulated market it will be under-supplied;
(2) patents make knowledge exclusive, at least for a limited amount of time - whoever holds a patent may charge others for the use of his knowledge.
The idea, following the logic of the Laffer curve (people hate the Laffer curve because of its association with supply side economics, but the argument is very old and generally not contested), is that as we introduce a small amount of patenting, innovation will increase drastically as we take from where there is the most surplus: the great innovations with high cost and difficulty of discovery will be patented. There certainly will be some cost, and some litigation to prevent copying, but the existence of these new innovations greatly outweighs it. As we introduce more and more patents (or increase their length), lesser innovations will be patented, those whose research costs are not so high, and those which are a little bit more obvious. The costs of protecting these patents will be proportionally higher, and society will benefit less from the patent system being applied to them. Eventually, the cost will be so high that it is equal to the value of the new innovation. This is the maximum, the tip of the curve; this is the most innovation that we can get before it stops being worthwhile.
Now if we continue patenting more and more liberally, or extending the length of the state monopoly granted by the patent, we get to the point where trivialities are being patented, and parties are arguing over who deserves the credit (and the state monopoly) for a small incremental innovation that should have been obvious to everybody. The cost of litigation in this case will greatly exceed the value of the innovation introduced by the patent. This means that at this point, we would be better off reducing the amount of patents available; the cost of assigning the rights of the patent and.
This is his basic argument about the shape of the curve. He further argues that we're to the right of the maximum. Much like with the Laffer curve, this is not to suggest that the maximum amount of innovation is where we should be either.
So you are saying that gold has few industrial applications and that the high price of gold is due to its use as a store of value. Similarly a banknote such as a dollar has no industrial applications and its value is derived entirely from the fact that people accept it in exchange for goods. This is all true, but it does not mean that gold is a fiat currency.
Gold is an effective store of value for the following reasons:
It is easily divisible, which means you have precisely as much as you need.
It is heterogenous - this diminishes the transaction costs of turning gold back into other assets.
Its future value is predictable (you might disagree on this topic, but thousands of people invest in gold, and it is no more volatile than other investments)
It is scrace
As long as we need to store wealth for the future, an asset with the properties above will be a good way to do it. A fiat currency, at first sight might also be a good way to store value, and indeed some people keep current accounts and cash under their mattresses. But the important distinction is in its scarcity - gold's limited plysical supply against the dollar's regulated minting. While gold needs to be mined from the earth at a large cost (under ideal market conditions, the marginal cost of extracting a gram of gold from the earth would be equal to its market price), the government can (and routinely does) produce more currency for pennies on the dollar. This does not only enrich the state, but also erodes the value of each unit of currency, making it a worse store of value. The most basic difference between fiat currencies and commodities is not whether or not they have any industrial uses, but whether or not their value depends on real or artificial scarcity.
So I disagree that gold (and silver, and other such commodities) are comparable to fiat currency. And further, I agree with (g^n)p that bitcoin (with its limited supply) is more similar to a commodity than to a fiat currency, much in the same way that gold is not considered a currency any more, not because it is not used as a medium of exchange or store of value, but because governments do not accept it as payment for taxes.
Slashdot Mirror
You're paying for what other people can't afford, mate. Other (many more) people are paying their share of 20% taxes (and keeping 80% for themselves) in exchange for services that are worth slightly more than what they pay for them. Do you know what bribes are, maybe you mean extortion. But maybe also you mean a progressive tax schedule.
Detained without charges, yes, and questioned without an attorney, his property seized without a court order. We've already spent almost a whole millennium trying to get rid of that bullshit, and we thought we had succeeded. We had due process, we had habeas corpus. Now we have laws that allow some people to ignore those things, and those laws do not make the abduction legitimate.
Seriously though, you can select your App's logo from a set of available ones, or use your own!
the privacy question is far more mature than in the USA. It's not a government vs peoples fight,
Yeah, Switzerland is the mature one, what with all your banning of minarets. The rest of our republics certainly have their faults, but rarely can they be compared unfavourably to a racist homeowners association.
But back to the topic. An important thing to note is that in Switzerland there is a very large and much more obvious commercial interest in privacy protection: the banking secret. Those who find it most important to keep their affairs secret, and can afford it, are already banking in Panama, and Luxembrah, and yes, Switzerland. Thanks to those guys, your privacy matters more, as it is associated with a powerful and historic interest which the government will find much harder to fight. As for the rest of the world, we had to forget about about our banking secrecy some years ago already. Much as today, seven years ago the press exposed a secret government program that was scrutinising our private matters under the guise of tracking terrorists. And much as it happened then, this NYT editorial seems appropriate.
I'm pretty sure the gp was just being coy.
The UK requires all bills to be debated, at least once in each chamber. Here is the debate that followed the second reading, I don't know exactly what you mean by closed doors or public debate.
It's hard to see how they could get yours keys without someone noticing.
RTFA, they're using server-side encryption. If they don't get your keys, nothing is encrypted. They also say that if you like, you can manage your own keys. But obviously there's nothing stopping you from doing that anyway.
At what point do westerners say enough is enough and overthrow governments [?]
We haven't done this for hundreds of years, we are rusty. I don't think anyone even remembers how to do it.
America has many talents.
Artificial abundance
Is that just like the time we created an artificial abundance in foods by inventing agriculture and domesticating animals? Or the time we created an artificial abundance of manufactured clothing by inventing the loom?
of whom.
You either have direct democracy inscribed in your constitution or you don't.
And we don't, mostly because otherwise we'd end up banning minarets or something ridiculous like that. But Finland is a prosperous country of only 5 million people. They have a better chance than anyone of implementing a reasonable law that is more popular with its citizens than foreign industries. Not that it's a huge chance, just better.
Duh, honouring IP agreements is a requirement to be in the WTO and therefore the European Union. The relevant agreement is TRIPS.
It does, yes. But this is why you should never do any work before signing a good employment contract. Information does not work like that because anyone can copy it and many people can enjoy it. You can't make a contract with everyone in the world before you produce your art. But this does not mean that you can force them to pay for something that is intrinsically free.
Also, it is definitely intrinsically free. The only reason you can charge for it is because an artificial monopoly (copyright) has been legally created so that an artificial shortage can be introduced into the market. This is not necessarily a bad thing - but we should certainly be clear about where natural rights are.
Yeah, but maybe they couldn't make back their costs pricing them at $300. They were not going for $700 or whatever because MS wanted them to be perceived as high-end, but because they were expensive machines to produce.
I'm pretty sure the GP was being coy.
I use vimperator at work because Windows sucks three balls on having choice of software. I much rather have one that was built with keyboard interface. I'm currently using dwb at home and quite pleased.
Millions of kids work, cook, and clean every day. They still mostly find time to enjoy themselves.
You mean we read the blueprints and didn't take them seriously?
This is how we solve global warming!
Even if you're forced to use IE with no extensions, you (the sysadmin) can still block your ads, for example, in a DNS basis. Heck, you already have the fanboy list, so you don't even need to compile it. Alternatively, see adsuck. Great thing about computers is that you can usually work around problems.
It is such a huge undertaking to remove anything from the internet that it doesn't make sense to have a right to be forgotten. How can you expect a search engine to filter its results from anything anyone ever hoped to remove from the web while still accurately indexing it? On top of that, even if you managed to get Google, or Bing, or whatever to stop indexing any page with personal information, what keeps them from being remembered? You cannot tell google to search imgur for pictures of cats, or airplanes, or naked girls, but there are other sites that index them. You cannot ask google to find you a free episode of The Sopranos and it won't, but there are other sites that index them; when these are taken down no-one has any difficult finding a replacement. It is simply impossible, technically impossible to be forgotten if there is someone out there that wants to keep the information.
Using the curve he presents, we could easily argue that zero strength patents yield the same amount of innovation as we see today (draw a horizontal line from the "we are here" point to the Y axis),
ooh, yeah... no. A drawing like that means he thinks the curve is concave with a local maximum above zero. And 'we are here' means he thinks we're to the right of the maximum. Talking about actual levels of innovation is way beyond his argument.
If we factor in the side industry of patent litigation...
This is precisely what he argues is the cost of patent law. It's already taken into account.
It also assumes that there is only one point on the curve with a global maximum value for innovation, yet is see no argument from him as to why that would be the case.
It is in fact there. Note a couple of things, both said in the article:
The idea, following the logic of the Laffer curve (people hate the Laffer curve because of its association with supply side economics, but the argument is very old and generally not contested), is that as we introduce a small amount of patenting, innovation will increase drastically as we take from where there is the most surplus: the great innovations with high cost and difficulty of discovery will be patented. There certainly will be some cost, and some litigation to prevent copying, but the existence of these new innovations greatly outweighs it. As we introduce more and more patents (or increase their length), lesser innovations will be patented, those whose research costs are not so high, and those which are a little bit more obvious. The costs of protecting these patents will be proportionally higher, and society will benefit less from the patent system being applied to them. Eventually, the cost will be so high that it is equal to the value of the new innovation. This is the maximum, the tip of the curve; this is the most innovation that we can get before it stops being worthwhile.
Now if we continue patenting more and more liberally, or extending the length of the state monopoly granted by the patent, we get to the point where trivialities are being patented, and parties are arguing over who deserves the credit (and the state monopoly) for a small incremental innovation that should have been obvious to everybody. The cost of litigation in this case will greatly exceed the value of the innovation introduced by the patent. This means that at this point, we would be better off reducing the amount of patents available; the cost of assigning the rights of the patent and .
This is his basic argument about the shape of the curve. He further argues that we're to the right of the maximum. Much like with the Laffer curve, this is not to suggest that the maximum amount of innovation is where we should be either.
It still improves Windows immensely.
So you are saying that gold has few industrial applications and that the high price of gold is due to its use as a store of value. Similarly a banknote such as a dollar has no industrial applications and its value is derived entirely from the fact that people accept it in exchange for goods. This is all true, but it does not mean that gold is a fiat currency.
Gold is an effective store of value for the following reasons:
As long as we need to store wealth for the future, an asset with the properties above will be a good way to do it. A fiat currency, at first sight might also be a good way to store value, and indeed some people keep current accounts and cash under their mattresses. But the important distinction is in its scarcity - gold's limited plysical supply against the dollar's regulated minting. While gold needs to be mined from the earth at a large cost (under ideal market conditions, the marginal cost of extracting a gram of gold from the earth would be equal to its market price), the government can (and routinely does) produce more currency for pennies on the dollar. This does not only enrich the state, but also erodes the value of each unit of currency, making it a worse store of value. The most basic difference between fiat currencies and commodities is not whether or not they have any industrial uses, but whether or not their value depends on real or artificial scarcity.
So I disagree that gold (and silver, and other such commodities) are comparable to fiat currency. And further, I agree with (g^n)p that bitcoin (with its limited supply) is more similar to a commodity than to a fiat currency, much in the same way that gold is not considered a currency any more, not because it is not used as a medium of exchange or store of value, but because governments do not accept it as payment for taxes.