How likely is it that temporarily shutting Napster down would cost the company more than 5 million dollars?
There will never be a way to figure out what it would cost.
Anyone can provide their service. If I was willing to shell out for the servers I could be doing exactly what they're doing within a few days. Many have already done so. People only use them because they're in the habit of using them, any interruption will mean that people will find another provider and never come back.
Of course, you have to balance that against the fact that they have no income. Like ICQ, they don't get any revenue at all from people getting or using their client or connecting to their server, and if they ever try to collect, people can just move to someone else willing to do it for free.
If you ask me, Napster is just following standard IPO scam procedure: give stuff away (preferably leveraging someone else's content), become famous, vaguely imply that you'll make some money somehow in the distant future, go public, and keep afloat on money of dumb investors, all while drawing hefty salaries.
Yay for Napster! They're the Good Guys, right?
--- Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
He seems to honestly believe that he didn't tell Napster to shut down!
Telling Napster to prevent the unauthorized copying of copyrighted music is like telling a telephone to stop people from telling lies over the telephone (or, more topically, preventing people from playing copyrighted music over the telephone). Not only do they not have the resources to listen in on all of the communications, they don't have any sure way of knowing what is copyrighted (or not licenced for distribution).
They would need to listen to every file that was listed on Napter, as it was put up. You can't just go by the names. You certainly can't automate it, it would have to be people listening in.
But that wouldn't do it. How do you know who gave permission for what? How do you even tell obscure band XZY's promotional release from obscure band ZYX's CD track #7?
Sure, with some effort they could cut out a lot of really flagrant abuse, like the top 100 songs, and anything by the most popular few hundred musicians (who don't tell them otherwise), as long as people label them correctly, but the order wasn't "do the best you can without having to shut down" it was "do it perfectly, now! and I don't care about your customers".
This killed Napster. They are never going to turn a profit, whether they come back up or not. Now that it's down, people will share their music in other ways. They'll find better ways, and nobody will bother going back to Napster.
--- Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
I might start doing that, I certainly wouldn't object if other buskware writers used that slogan. However, it doesn't include the other half of the equation: disclosure of revenues. This is essential, because you're not really just trying to support the guy you're paying, you're also trying to bait the rest of the industry. Still, it's one hell of a lot better than my current "In a Nutshell".
Sometimes, I get so hung up on precision that I destroy clarity.
I've got lots of plans for more explanations, but, of course, that takes time. I'm just about finished with a "Rules of Buskware" cheat-sheet that gives donors and producers guidelines to make the system work. There's about ten for each side, and the sense of them should come through a lot more clearly than a dozen pages of solid text.
I posted an abridged version of the essay to kur5hin, and was starting to get some good debate going, but then, of course, kuro5hin died. I got several good ideas for changes to make the essay, though, as it became clear what wasn't coming through.
Thanks, it's good to know that some people are interested out there.
--- Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Go ahead, try and tell me that more than 1 out of 10 computer progammers didn't consider the later years of school to be Hell, and got along well with most of the people there. Being bright enough and interested enough to program computers practically guarantees a certain amount of abuse from others.
When people write free software, it usually isn't for the benefit of the general public, but for the free software community: mostly other hackers, the kind of people they could sit down with and have a good conversation with, not the kind whose eyes roll every time you try to bring up an interesting topic. They write for fun or for respect in the eyes of those they themselves respect, not to help people who are too dumb to help themselves.
They only do that for money.
--- Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
...but we're talking about people who consider vi and emacs the only real choices for text editing.
Real hackers learn new interfaces and languages effortlessly, so they choose the ones that are most efficient, not the ones that are most easily learned: Unix over Mac, Perl over BASIC, etc. By "dumbing it down" I mean making an easier learning curve, whether it sacrifices efficiency of use or just takes more effort to create.
Dumbing things down does benefit the majority of users, but not the hackers, who are generally writing for themselves and each other when they create free software. The kindred spirits get it already, why should they spend their efforts making it easy for the incredibly dull and stupid people who tormented them when they had the opportunity (i.e. in school)?
--- Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Are we talking about porting BSD tools to OS X so they work the same way?
Or are we talking about rewriting BSD tools so they have the friendly, consistent graphical interface that people expect from a Mac?
IMHO, they're completely different issues. Generally free software developers are willing and eager to make their code more widely useable through portability, but not too keen on spending their own effort to dumb their stuff down instead of spending it on adding functionality.
--- Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Look at how long it took to capitalize on those developments. Especially Da Vinci, who was an incredible designer, but could only afford to work in models and drawings. They were all hamstrung by lack of funding when it came to actually making things, unlike Edison and Tesla.
I won't argue that people don't have good ideas and share them without IP, but getting people to invest in developing these ideas into useful products is another matter.
There has to be a profit motive to invest the cooperative efforts of hundreds or thousands of people in building prototypes and working up to an assembly line without letting all of their competitors just grab those expensive advances and have the advantage of not having the debt from them. You could argue that without IP, the visionaries couldn't command labor to assist in their development, and had to do almost all of the grunt work themselves, slowing practical developments to a snail's pace.
--- Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
At least not that kind of absurd egalitarian/Marxist view of fairness, where everybody's effort is considered to be of equal worth, whether it takes them an hour to tie their shoes or they revolutionize another field every week. It's not about guaranteeing people a "fair" reward, it's about giving them an incentive.
For that, the mere possibility of a reward will suffice. How many Edison-wannabes were inspired to follow his example by seeing how rich he got from it? Do you really think that Edison getting it before Grey discouraged people from inventing?
Sure, only a few novelists get rich, or even make a living. But looking at those few who do tempts everyone, and draws out those who are talented enough to succeed.
Scientific and mathematical research works just fine without IP, so there's no IP available. While there are a fair number of poems, essays, and short stories written with no hope of reward, it's a very unusual person who spends months or years working full-time on a book without expecting to get paid for it. Factories started to hide how they were doing things, so patents were brought in to give them a reason to share their techniques with the world. It's all about society's benefit, and freeing information.
Arguments about how it's "unfair" are utterly irrelevant. I would, OTOH, love to hear arguments about how other things could work better. Suggestions of something perfectly "fair" but ridiculously unworkable only serve to illustrate my point: the two don't go together.
I can't prove it anymore than the pro-IP can prove their system works.
No, you see, the pro-IP people know their system works, from experience. What they can't prove is whether it works better than an IPless system. What the anti-IP people can't prove is that their "system" works at all. Pre-IP society was so radically different from modern society that it doesn't provide any real evidence about the effects of dropping IP. For all we know, society could collapse into chaos.
--- Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
How about: "Just imagine what the productivity of our farms would be if anyone could plant crops on any land or take the crops anyone else planted, and the land and crops weren't controlled by the few who benefit from farm law."
--- Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Contract law is restricted to those contracts which generally serve the public good. For example, you generally can't enforce a contract that says an employee can't go work for a competitor. It's also why you can't sell your indenture (much the same thing, really). (IANAL, TINLA)
In general, businesses keeping secrets about how they do things is bad for society. This is the premise of patent law.
Why, then, do we have these laws making this kind of contract stronger? I think it would be more appropriate to restrict this kind of contract as detrimental to commercial development and the general welfare.
IMHO, without trade secret protection, they wouldn't "have to twist themselves into pretzels to hide their secrets", they wouldn't be able to hide their secrets at all. Good ideas would only secure a temporary advantage before they spread around, and that's the way it should be.
--- Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
I've called some of my little toys buskware, but didn't explain how it was supposed to work. Most people probably thought it was just a new word for shareware.
Also, I haven't released any really good products. I've got some (hopefully) interesting stuff coming up, but all I've got on the site so far are things I hack together in a day or two. I only called it buskware because there's no reason not to (and also, because some of the things are precursors to stuff that should be worth paying for - lrnkana to lrnkanji, perpol to morph; maybe it'll make sense later on). Maybe they'll bring in a few bucks, maybe not, at least it should spread the buskware idea around.
Hell, even the essay needs a rewrite. A few things didn't come through quite right. I'm not expecting to make a fortune off of anything that's up yet. I do, however, hope to make a living off of the bigger and better projects I'm currently working on.
--- Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
All other IP issues aside, trade secret law should never have come into existence.
Patent law was made to encourage disclosure of the principle of mechanisms. Copyright was created to make it possible for authors to profitably distribute their work widely, instead of, say, memorizing their stories and knowledge and being hired to tell or teach them. Copyright was applied to software so we wouldn't all get stuck hiring computer time for running their secret programs from IBM. Trademark (the oddball of the group) was created so you can't stamp shoddy products with the name of a respectable manufacturor.
All laudable goals, whatever the practical flaws.
But trade secrets? What are those for? To protect the profits of people who invent something and hide it away so they can monopolize it?
IP laws are supposed to benefit society in general, by spreading information, not to help people hoard it for their own use. Trade secrets must go!
--- Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
I certainly think that IP law needs a lot of rewriting (for example, why should copyrights last longer than patents? why aren't patent terms tweaked from year to year?), but I don't think it should be completely abolished.
Remember, the main purpose of patent law is to get people to disclose their designs, similar to opening your source code. Without any patent law, manufacturers will keep a lot more things secret.
I think we can move toward a system where IP is not necessary, such as Mass Market Busking, but we should let people demonstrate that the system works without it before we dump it.
If we demonstrate that we can support the efforts of producers without them using IP to force us to pay them, we shouldn't have any trouble getting rid of IP. If we can't demonstrate it, then maybe it's not such a good idea to drop IP.
--- Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
I said "my morality is survival-based" not "in my morality nothing matters about an action except whether you survive its immediate results".
There are things which contribute to survival, and things which make survival less likely; there are large effects and small effects. Since we can't know the future, we have to work in probabilities and appearances. From this comes practical principles that generally hold true, but have exceptions (like "causing pain to another being will have a negative effect" A.K.A. "gentleness"; all of the classical virtues have their survival value in many situations).
A child who plays with matches has a higher probability of killing or crippling himself, his family, his friends, etc. That's obviously a bad thing from a survival point of view.
A dog which attacks people might kill or cripple them, which is, again, obviously a bad thing from a survival point of view (unless you are training a guard dog; even then, while beating is moderately effective method, there are better ones).
See, it isn't basic to my morality that it is wrong to beat your dog, it is merely practical that beating your dog will cause bad results.
When it comes down to action, rather than words, it seems to me that a lot more people follow my morality than yours (without admitting it). They don't look too closely into the ways slaughterhouses do things, they turn a blind eye on their police's interrogation methods, and (getting away from the pain issue) given a dollar they'd rather buy a snack than feed a distant starving child for a day. I'm just one of the few who's not being a hypocrite about it.
It prevents such debacles as the first amendment (Yes! Let's tell everybody the Holocaust never happened and that all Jews muct die - it's not like anybody can stop us)
OMG! I can't believe you're against free speech!
Telling people that the holocaust never happened is harmless, as long as it's false. What if it wasn't? The evidence is all there, and being forced to go look and prove it for yourself by facing the occasional denier is a good thing, IMHO.
Don't forget, there are also holocaust exaggerators: people who talk about mass produced goods made from the flesh of murdered Jews. This kind of propaganda was common and spread by the allied governments immediately after the war (and still spread in Israel). We don't need to demonize the Nazis, it clouds the mind to how such organizations gain support.
And a much more commonly, and dangerously, denied thing (even by our government) is our role in the holocaust. Concentration camps are expensive, the Nazis would have preferred to just ship their Jewish prisoners out of their conquered territory, but, to our eternal shame, we said "No thanks! We've got enough Jews here. You have to deal with them in your own way."
That should stand out in every Canadian's mind as much as the Japanese Canadian internment camps, if not more so.
My morality is founded on survival, only survival (personal, family, and species) is axiomatic, everything else is only practical. Pain is neither good nor bad, only the results are significant.
If a child burns his fingers on a match, and learns not to play with matches, the pain was a good thing because it produced a good result.
If you beat a dog to work out your frustrations, and he eventually turns vicious and attacks someone, the pain was bad because it produced a bad result.
Causing pain without reason usually produces bad results. It disrupts an animal's training, and makes him more violent. However, in the slaughterhouse, you are no longer concerned with training the animal to continue to be docile in the future, only with getting the meat, so (aside from something stupid like hurting an unrestrained animal and having him panic and run amok) avoiding causing it pain is no longer relevant.
A sadist enjoys causing pain, and a masochist enjoys feeling pain. I disregard it, and only consider the results of pain.
look at evolution. The experience of pain evolved because it was unpleasant, so animals like us would avoid it and not get burnt to death or whatever.
Many worthwhile things can only be had through accepting pain, I would go so far as to say that any expenditure of energy is painful to some degree. You have to consider the results, not the process. Sometimes pain simply has to be endured in oneself and disregarded in others.
I also find it extremely irrational to consider causing physical pain absolutely unacceptable, but causing mental anguish acceptable (it's "wrong" to flog a criminal, but "right" to lock him up an make him watch his affairs fall to pieces and then treat him as a social leper). Pain is pain, whether caused directly or indirectly.
I wouldn't go out of my way to cause pain to an animal (or a human), and it is almost always preferable in practical terms to avoid causing pain (if for no other reason, just to keep in the habit), but you have to ask how far you are willing to go out of your way to avoid it.
Are you willing to risk fouling the meat and poisoning humans? Are you willing to reduce the quality of the meat and take a lower price? How much time of trained technicians are you willing to pay for to ensure a totally painless kill?
To me, the question isn't "What is the most humane way to end this being's life?" but "Which is the cheapest and most efficient way to convert this livestock to meat?"
What it boils down to me (for the specific case of slaughter) is: if the animal isn't just an object, you've got no business killing it; if it is just an object, why should you care about one particular signal in its control mechanism?
It is a private transfer between privately owned machines, using privately hired connections, just like a telephone conversation.
It is especially not broadcasting because there is no limit to the number of people who can offer content in this manner (though there may be a limited number who can receive at any one time). Anyone can do it, and it doesn't push anyone else out their spot.
It's a lot more like renting videos than watching television.
potentatial: being like, or having the qualities of, a potentate (a powerful person, like a king or emperor)
Titan has mighty, mighty organic make-up. The beautiful Titanian women who wear it are treated with great respect and deference, but even they are but slaves to the gunk on their face.
Slashdot Mirror
...they did it. On a CMOS chip.
ENIAC-on-a-chip
I salute their magnificent insanity!
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
How likely is it that temporarily shutting Napster down would cost the company more than 5 million dollars?
There will never be a way to figure out what it would cost.
Anyone can provide their service. If I was willing to shell out for the servers I could be doing exactly what they're doing within a few days. Many have already done so. People only use them because they're in the habit of using them, any interruption will mean that people will find another provider and never come back.
Of course, you have to balance that against the fact that they have no income. Like ICQ, they don't get any revenue at all from people getting or using their client or connecting to their server, and if they ever try to collect, people can just move to someone else willing to do it for free.
If you ask me, Napster is just following standard IPO scam procedure: give stuff away (preferably leveraging someone else's content), become famous, vaguely imply that you'll make some money somehow in the distant future, go public, and keep afloat on money of dumb investors, all while drawing hefty salaries.
Yay for Napster! They're the Good Guys, right?
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
He seems to honestly believe that he didn't tell Napster to shut down!
Telling Napster to prevent the unauthorized copying of copyrighted music is like telling a telephone to stop people from telling lies over the telephone (or, more topically, preventing people from playing copyrighted music over the telephone). Not only do they not have the resources to listen in on all of the communications, they don't have any sure way of knowing what is copyrighted (or not licenced for distribution).
They would need to listen to every file that was listed on Napter, as it was put up. You can't just go by the names. You certainly can't automate it, it would have to be people listening in.
But that wouldn't do it. How do you know who gave permission for what? How do you even tell obscure band XZY's promotional release from obscure band ZYX's CD track #7?
Sure, with some effort they could cut out a lot of really flagrant abuse, like the top 100 songs, and anything by the most popular few hundred musicians (who don't tell them otherwise), as long as people label them correctly, but the order wasn't "do the best you can without having to shut down" it was "do it perfectly, now! and I don't care about your customers".
This killed Napster. They are never going to turn a profit, whether they come back up or not. Now that it's down, people will share their music in other ways. They'll find better ways, and nobody will bother going back to Napster.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
I might start doing that, I certainly wouldn't object if other buskware writers used that slogan. However, it doesn't include the other half of the equation: disclosure of revenues. This is essential, because you're not really just trying to support the guy you're paying, you're also trying to bait the rest of the industry. Still, it's one hell of a lot better than my current "In a Nutshell".
Sometimes, I get so hung up on precision that I destroy clarity.
I've got lots of plans for more explanations, but, of course, that takes time. I'm just about finished with a "Rules of Buskware" cheat-sheet that gives donors and producers guidelines to make the system work. There's about ten for each side, and the sense of them should come through a lot more clearly than a dozen pages of solid text.
I posted an abridged version of the essay to kur5hin, and was starting to get some good debate going, but then, of course, kuro5hin died. I got several good ideas for changes to make the essay, though, as it became clear what wasn't coming through.
Thanks, it's good to know that some people are interested out there.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Go ahead, try and tell me that more than 1 out of 10 computer progammers didn't consider the later years of school to be Hell, and got along well with most of the people there. Being bright enough and interested enough to program computers practically guarantees a certain amount of abuse from others.
When people write free software, it usually isn't for the benefit of the general public, but for the free software community: mostly other hackers, the kind of people they could sit down with and have a good conversation with, not the kind whose eyes roll every time you try to bring up an interesting topic. They write for fun or for respect in the eyes of those they themselves respect, not to help people who are too dumb to help themselves.
They only do that for money.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
...but we're talking about people who consider vi and emacs the only real choices for text editing.
Real hackers learn new interfaces and languages effortlessly, so they choose the ones that are most efficient, not the ones that are most easily learned: Unix over Mac, Perl over BASIC, etc. By "dumbing it down" I mean making an easier learning curve, whether it sacrifices efficiency of use or just takes more effort to create.
Dumbing things down does benefit the majority of users, but not the hackers, who are generally writing for themselves and each other when they create free software. The kindred spirits get it already, why should they spend their efforts making it easy for the incredibly dull and stupid people who tormented them when they had the opportunity (i.e. in school)?
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Are we talking about porting BSD tools to OS X so they work the same way?
Or are we talking about rewriting BSD tools so they have the friendly, consistent graphical interface that people expect from a Mac?
IMHO, they're completely different issues. Generally free software developers are willing and eager to make their code more widely useable through portability, but not too keen on spending their own effort to dumb their stuff down instead of spending it on adding functionality.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Da Vinci: 1452-1519
Kepler: 1571-1630
Galileo: 1564-1642
Leeuwenhoek: 1632-1723
Newton: 1642-1727
Look at how long it took to capitalize on those developments. Especially Da Vinci, who was an incredible designer, but could only afford to work in models and drawings. They were all hamstrung by lack of funding when it came to actually making things, unlike Edison and Tesla.
I won't argue that people don't have good ideas and share them without IP, but getting people to invest in developing these ideas into useful products is another matter.
There has to be a profit motive to invest the cooperative efforts of hundreds or thousands of people in building prototypes and working up to an assembly line without letting all of their competitors just grab those expensive advances and have the advantage of not having the debt from them. You could argue that without IP, the visionaries couldn't command labor to assist in their development, and had to do almost all of the grunt work themselves, slowing practical developments to a snail's pace.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
At least not that kind of absurd egalitarian/Marxist view of fairness, where everybody's effort is considered to be of equal worth, whether it takes them an hour to tie their shoes or they revolutionize another field every week. It's not about guaranteeing people a "fair" reward, it's about giving them an incentive.
For that, the mere possibility of a reward will suffice. How many Edison-wannabes were inspired to follow his example by seeing how rich he got from it? Do you really think that Edison getting it before Grey discouraged people from inventing?
Sure, only a few novelists get rich, or even make a living. But looking at those few who do tempts everyone, and draws out those who are talented enough to succeed.
Scientific and mathematical research works just fine without IP, so there's no IP available. While there are a fair number of poems, essays, and short stories written with no hope of reward, it's a very unusual person who spends months or years working full-time on a book without expecting to get paid for it. Factories started to hide how they were doing things, so patents were brought in to give them a reason to share their techniques with the world. It's all about society's benefit, and freeing information.
Arguments about how it's "unfair" are utterly irrelevant. I would, OTOH, love to hear arguments about how other things could work better. Suggestions of something perfectly "fair" but ridiculously unworkable only serve to illustrate my point: the two don't go together.
I can't prove it anymore than the pro-IP can prove their system works.
No, you see, the pro-IP people know their system works, from experience. What they can't prove is whether it works better than an IPless system. What the anti-IP people can't prove is that their "system" works at all. Pre-IP society was so radically different from modern society that it doesn't provide any real evidence about the effects of dropping IP. For all we know, society could collapse into chaos.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Anyone can just throw a wild fantasy out there.
How about: "Just imagine what the productivity of our farms would be if anyone could plant crops on any land or take the crops anyone else planted, and the land and crops weren't controlled by the few who benefit from farm law."
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Human creativity dates back at least, oh, 10,000 years. Intellectual "property"(*) and its protection date back about, oh, two hundred years or so.
So does the incredible rate of technological development.
A few overrated old artists don't compare well to the incredible diversity and quality of modern IP-protected literature.
Comparisons of pre-IP productivity to modern productivity certainly don't make a case against IP.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Contract law is restricted to those contracts which generally serve the public good. For example, you generally can't enforce a contract that says an employee can't go work for a competitor. It's also why you can't sell your indenture (much the same thing, really).
(IANAL, TINLA)
In general, businesses keeping secrets about how they do things is bad for society. This is the premise of patent law.
Why, then, do we have these laws making this kind of contract stronger? I think it would be more appropriate to restrict this kind of contract as detrimental to commercial development and the general welfare.
IMHO, without trade secret protection, they wouldn't "have to twist themselves into pretzels to hide their secrets", they wouldn't be able to hide their secrets at all. Good ideas would only secure a temporary advantage before they spread around, and that's the way it should be.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
I've called some of my little toys buskware, but didn't explain how it was supposed to work. Most people probably thought it was just a new word for shareware.
Also, I haven't released any really good products. I've got some (hopefully) interesting stuff coming up, but all I've got on the site so far are things I hack together in a day or two. I only called it buskware because there's no reason not to (and also, because some of the things are precursors to stuff that should be worth paying for - lrnkana to lrnkanji, perpol to morph; maybe it'll make sense later on). Maybe they'll bring in a few bucks, maybe not, at least it should spread the buskware idea around.
Hell, even the essay needs a rewrite. A few things didn't come through quite right. I'm not expecting to make a fortune off of anything that's up yet. I do, however, hope to make a living off of the bigger and better projects I'm currently working on.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
All other IP issues aside, trade secret law should never have come into existence.
Patent law was made to encourage disclosure of the principle of mechanisms. Copyright was created to make it possible for authors to profitably distribute their work widely, instead of, say, memorizing their stories and knowledge and being hired to tell or teach them. Copyright was applied to software so we wouldn't all get stuck hiring computer time for running their secret programs from IBM. Trademark (the oddball of the group) was created so you can't stamp shoddy products with the name of a respectable manufacturor.
All laudable goals, whatever the practical flaws.
But trade secrets? What are those for? To protect the profits of people who invent something and hide it away so they can monopolize it?
IP laws are supposed to benefit society in general, by spreading information, not to help people hoard it for their own use. Trade secrets must go!
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
I certainly think that IP law needs a lot of rewriting (for example, why should copyrights last longer than patents? why aren't patent terms tweaked from year to year?), but I don't think it should be completely abolished.
Remember, the main purpose of patent law is to get people to disclose their designs, similar to opening your source code. Without any patent law, manufacturers will keep a lot more things secret.
I think we can move toward a system where IP is not necessary, such as Mass Market Busking, but we should let people demonstrate that the system works without it before we dump it.
If we demonstrate that we can support the efforts of producers without them using IP to force us to pay them, we shouldn't have any trouble getting rid of IP. If we can't demonstrate it, then maybe it's not such a good idea to drop IP.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
I wrote an essay called, "Mass-Market Busking: The Inevitable Economics of Software", about this whole class of economic activity.
I think it is relevant to this discussion.
I said "my morality is survival-based" not "in my morality nothing matters about an action except whether you survive its immediate results".
There are things which contribute to survival, and things which make survival less likely; there are large effects and small effects. Since we can't know the future, we have to work in probabilities and appearances. From this comes practical principles that generally hold true, but have exceptions (like "causing pain to another being will have a negative effect" A.K.A. "gentleness"; all of the classical virtues have their survival value in many situations).
A child who plays with matches has a higher probability of killing or crippling himself, his family, his friends, etc. That's obviously a bad thing from a survival point of view.
A dog which attacks people might kill or cripple them, which is, again, obviously a bad thing from a survival point of view (unless you are training a guard dog; even then, while beating is moderately effective method, there are better ones).
See, it isn't basic to my morality that it is wrong to beat your dog, it is merely practical that beating your dog will cause bad results.
When it comes down to action, rather than words, it seems to me that a lot more people follow my morality than yours (without admitting it). They don't look too closely into the ways slaughterhouses do things, they turn a blind eye on their police's interrogation methods, and (getting away from the pain issue) given a dollar they'd rather buy a snack than feed a distant starving child for a day. I'm just one of the few who's not being a hypocrite about it.
...check for desert mice before sending off any space missions!
It prevents such debacles as the first amendment (Yes! Let's tell everybody the Holocaust never happened and that all Jews muct die - it's not like anybody can stop us)
OMG! I can't believe you're against free speech!
Telling people that the holocaust never happened is harmless, as long as it's false. What if it wasn't? The evidence is all there, and being forced to go look and prove it for yourself by facing the occasional denier is a good thing, IMHO.
Don't forget, there are also holocaust exaggerators: people who talk about mass produced goods made from the flesh of murdered Jews. This kind of propaganda was common and spread by the allied governments immediately after the war (and still spread in Israel). We don't need to demonize the Nazis, it clouds the mind to how such organizations gain support.
And a much more commonly, and dangerously, denied thing (even by our government) is our role in the holocaust. Concentration camps are expensive, the Nazis would have preferred to just ship their Jewish prisoners out of their conquered territory, but, to our eternal shame, we said "No thanks! We've got enough Jews here. You have to deal with them in your own way."
That should stand out in every Canadian's mind as much as the Japanese Canadian internment camps, if not more so.
My morality is founded on survival, only survival (personal, family, and species) is axiomatic, everything else is only practical. Pain is neither good nor bad, only the results are significant.
If a child burns his fingers on a match, and learns not to play with matches, the pain was a good thing because it produced a good result.
If you beat a dog to work out your frustrations, and he eventually turns vicious and attacks someone, the pain was bad because it produced a bad result.
Causing pain without reason usually produces bad results. It disrupts an animal's training, and makes him more violent. However, in the slaughterhouse, you are no longer concerned with training the animal to continue to be docile in the future, only with getting the meat, so (aside from something stupid like hurting an unrestrained animal and having him panic and run amok) avoiding causing it pain is no longer relevant.
A sadist enjoys causing pain, and a masochist enjoys feeling pain. I disregard it, and only consider the results of pain.
look at evolution. The experience of pain evolved because it was unpleasant, so animals like us would avoid it and not get burnt to death or whatever.
Many worthwhile things can only be had through accepting pain, I would go so far as to say that any expenditure of energy is painful to some degree. You have to consider the results, not the process. Sometimes pain simply has to be endured in oneself and disregarded in others.
I also find it extremely irrational to consider causing physical pain absolutely unacceptable, but causing mental anguish acceptable (it's "wrong" to flog a criminal, but "right" to lock him up an make him watch his affairs fall to pieces and then treat him as a social leper). Pain is pain, whether caused directly or indirectly.
I wouldn't go out of my way to cause pain to an animal (or a human), and it is almost always preferable in practical terms to avoid causing pain (if for no other reason, just to keep in the habit), but you have to ask how far you are willing to go out of your way to avoid it.
Are you willing to risk fouling the meat and poisoning humans? Are you willing to reduce the quality of the meat and take a lower price? How much time of trained technicians are you willing to pay for to ensure a totally painless kill?
To me, the question isn't "What is the most humane way to end this being's life?" but "Which is the cheapest and most efficient way to convert this livestock to meat?"
What it boils down to me (for the specific case of slaughter) is: if the animal isn't just an object, you've got no business killing it; if it is just an object, why should you care about one particular signal in its control mechanism?
It is a private transfer between privately owned machines, using privately hired connections, just like a telephone conversation.
It is especially not broadcasting because there is no limit to the number of people who can offer content in this manner (though there may be a limited number who can receive at any one time). Anyone can do it, and it doesn't push anyone else out their spot.
It's a lot more like renting videos than watching television.
I think wind wouldn't really matter, since without ground features to mess it up, you don't get a lot of gusting and shearing.
;) )
I wouldn't expect a balloon to plumb the depths of Jupiter, floating around up in the sunlight is the way to do it.
(actually, pressure on Jupiter would range from 0 bar at the top to hydrogen-is-a-metal at the bottom
People who make interplanetary probes are bright enough to deal with trivial details like these.
Do you have a reason behind that or is it axiomatic to your morality that pain is bad?
potentatial: being like, or having the qualities of, a potentate (a powerful person, like a king or emperor)
Titan has mighty, mighty organic make-up. The beautiful Titanian women who wear it are treated with great respect and deference, but even they are but slaves to the gunk on their face.