See, that's where the aforementioned social engineering aspect comes in, the text file contains instructions to save it as funcatscript.sh, type chmod +x funcatscript.sh and then run./funcatscript.sh to see some fun kittens happen. Of course, that will just mail the script to all mail addresses found in the users mailbox followed by a cat/bin/cat which, to the consternation of the user, simply isn't a very funny cat.
Monopoly rights are a bad way to compensate people for creations. With limited attention available and tightly controlled channels you are close to guaranteed not get jack, while the dominant players take both attention and revenue by having the channel control. Publisher deals become a prerequisite for even having a chance, and to make a good deal you need leverage. Which you have none. Even if you threaten to take your demo and go home.
If copyright was actually about compensation for creators then it would be formulated to actually give compensation to creators. It could just as well take the form of a guaranteed 50% of the proceeds of sales of any copies, like a VAT going directly to the creator while allowing anyone to copy, for example.
Any compromise that has a chance of working has to separate the monetary compensation from the right to control copying. Without that there simply will be no solution.
And RMS stance on that issue is that in the absence of copyright there would not be as significant a need for the GPL. The GPL is a way to mitigate the damage of copyright, it's not a substitute for abolishing it.
Of course not. But most likely they will mainly be used to detect what taxpayers carry any residue of money, at which point they'll get a 'pat down' to remove any excess cash burdening the traveller.
Time to cut out the middle man; these machines are expensive and the producers have to be paid.
Religion is unsafe at any dosage. Sure, some can handle it, but you never know in advance who's going to go psychotic on the first exposure.
So if we're going to get mandatory filters I certainly hope any and all religions will be among the pages filtered. After all, we must protect the children.
Indeed. The only way to actually solve the issues with monopoly rights like patents is to turn them into non-confrontational compensation rights where a third party (such as the patent office) provides compensation due based on usage. Such a system would reasonably have a limited budget, ensuring that the system players have an interest in keeping the quality of compensation rights high as if more rights get granted everyone would get less per use.
But a non-confrontational system would require and support far fewer lawyers, so like you say it's unlikely to happen.
Which is why some p2p software, such as WASTE, has modes where it will always load links wether or not there is real traffic.
If the arms race goes on, we'll end up with a constantly saturated internet with only random connections sending apparent random data, leaving any actual signal indistinguishable and drowned out by the massive amounts of random noise.
The sleazebags in the white house seem to claim that it's a 'trade agreement' that doesn't change law so it needs no ratification. And they try to claim the same in Europe, altho they have not gotten around the need for ratification.
Of course, that's ignoring the point that signing even an agreement that doesn't change current law will still prevent a scaling back of IP law and thus bind congress and senate.
This corruption seems prevalent throughout various government arms in many countries. 'Special' IP enforcement police (with frequent trips to Hollywood), 'special' courts, 'special' judges, etc. This is outright bribery and corruption and these 'special' people need to be put in a very 'special' jail and forced to watch alternating bad cams of dubbed films with foreign subtitles and originals with the wrong region code that won't play in their player.
But no, I don't think the recent electoral successes have done that much to influence. However, the Swedish Pirate MEP's, Christian Engström and Amelia Andersdotter, have most certainly done a lot of work in the European Parliament. And I would wager that a lot of pirate party activists have been encouraged enough to actually mail various MEP's simply by having gotten somewhat organized.
But the proponents of ACTA have certainly made it easier as well; by acting as such utter douchebags throughout the process they've certainly made sure that nobody with the least knowledge of it could support it without looking like an utter tool. Having the first official parliament rapporteur on the treaty quit in disgust over the process and his replacement turning from positive to negative sent strong signals prior to committee votes.
Indeed. Well, burying wooden things may not be that useful as they're prone to decomposing which would just release the CO2 again. And deep burials would probably be quite energy intensive.
However, as compulsive hoarding is essentially a form of carbon sequestration we should provide economic compensations or other encouragement for people storing things (Yes, those things are useful, in case the Zombie apocalypse comes. And they're useful as carbon sinks!)
We will keep having these kinds of issues for as long as some people who fail to understand that time of day is an arbitrary number whose main utility lies in it being composed of predictable periods and divided into homogenous units. It should have no relation whatsoever to whatever time the sun happens to rise or set at any particular location and above all it should not be changed to accomodate fluctuations in the orbit of a rock circling an arbitrary star. Abominations like leap seconds or daylight savings make the whole system less useful by merely existing.
But personally I wouldn't be surprised if people off the equator were to get summer minutes composed of 120 seconds during daytime (or even better, a scale!) to ensure the sun rises and sets at the same time year around. Or, hey, why not simply make the seconds longer? Or a combination of both plus we can define pi to be 3 to make things simpler.
As a matter of fact, the jobs do get moved to China and India so it's time the monopoly rights industries join in and smell the roses. If we're going to have a market economy based on competition that applies to everyone and nobody gets a monopoly, especially as the prevalence of rentseeking monopolists are part of the reason western workers are expensive. Paying for patents and copyrights isn't free, and the extra costs means jobs lost in other economic sectors.
As for your suggestion, if we desire to support creative endeavors beyond what the free market will bear, then paying authors an hourly wage, perhaps based on the number of downloads their works get, perhaps modulated by some max limits to be able to spread the graces to support as many as we wish from the desired funding rate, certainly wouldn't be worse than copyright. We might end up with fewer super-rich creators, but judging by the current efficiency rates of copyright we could easily fund ten times as many creators for the same money that gets spent today.
And attempting to support oneself on creative endeavours would probably be a bit more predictable than today, when you're more likely to win big serving fries with that and playing the lottery.
Why do you think politicians are drooling over drones?
A drone pilot with a gun to his head may not have the option to refuse to fire on his own civilians. That is, unless they opt to go completely autonomous to get rid of any arguing at all.
Ignoring the monopoly right sleight of hand patents are just another transfer method. Like any tax and spend system, of course they're beneficial for the recepient and if the recipient was the only party to the equation we could just hike taxes and spend on everyone and everything.
But patents and taxes are not free. They already do harm to everyone else by the funds they transfer to the beneficiaries. So the question becomes, do we gain as a whole by taking from everyone else and giving to the patent holders? Do we gain more by giving monopoly rights than we would by outright state funding?
There are strong indications that IP rights are far less efficient than even the absolutely worst run government programs in existence. For the money transferred to pharmaceuticals not even 20% are spent on actual R&D, while twice that falls under their marketing budgets. That suggests we'd get far more R&D if we junked patents and created research funds tied to actual research. Basically any system would beat patents. In any and all industries.
If you're hiring someone you feel you need to make 'immune to luring away (or bribing)' you're hiring someone you already know is bribable and who you know would leave you for a larger salary. That rather sounds like a mistake.
Frankly I'd wager it's more a case of paying him enough that he'll pay you or your friends more when he's a member on the board of the company in which you're applying for the CEO position.
Most high paying corporate jobs have less to do with skills than with membership in the boys club. Loyalty towards company or stockholders seems to come far down the priority list.
Paying for music does not require artificial scarcity; there are many methods by which creators could be compensated that do not require control over duplication. And frankly I doubt even wiping out monetary compensation from the music industry would affect it negatively, considering the vast majority of music, with or without functioning copyright, gets produced without any reasonable expectation of significant compensation at all.
Fundamentally there is no ethical wrong with copying; copying is what humans do and it's what keeps humanity moving forward instead of standing still and starting over each generation. Preventing copying on the other hand is unethical as it is an intrusion into others freedom to do something that does not affect the complainer (in the absence of copyright it would be hard to argue harm done due to copying, indicating there is no natural law foundation for harm caused). Whether that unethical limit (a limit whose harm can actually be shown ouside law) on peoples rights leads to a tradeoff that is more valuable or not is the question.
Simply stated, preventing copying is not 'the right thing to do', and the question is if it should be done, and the only reason it should conceivably be done is if it is in the majorities interest. If it isn't, allowing such unethical laws to stand in the interest of a few would be the wrong thing to do.
And on that point it's simply an economic question where creating artificial scarcity destroys vast amounts of wealth due to the marginal value of most duplicatable objects for most people fall below the market clearing price on the demand curve. Ie, the 10 people for which object A is worth more than the sales price of 10 dollars buy object A, but the several thousand for which it is worth less but non-zero go unpurchased and unduplicated, which in total is far more potential wealth that is lost to the economy.
In the ideal situation the producer would get paid that $100 value while still allowing the unrealized $thousands to get duplicated into existence. But that would require a system far different than copyright.
You don't need any protracted analysis to evaluate the effect of IPR on jobs. As it's taking resources from other segments of the economy to provide them to the beneficiaries it's equivalent to taxation (most like VAT in implementation).
So it's equivalent of asking if higher taxes create more jobs, which is questionable at best.
If they can pass the test using only google, then they're certainly what in the eyes of that test passes for a good programmer. Of course, one might question the reliability and usefulness of a test that can be passed using only google, but the test was as useless before as it would pass 'crammers' who may have as little understanding of the subject as the 'googler'.
I suspect that a lot of complaints about 'internet assisted' cheating are partly due to the educators getting caught with easy but low value methods of testing and assessment.
Copyrighted works (well, some of them at least) are not particularly fungible so they do not compete against eachother to any large extent.
Yes, retail price cooperation is illegal, but short term collaboration on prices isn't the driving price factor on monopoly goods. For the pricing curve It doesn't really matter if they sit in the same room or not; they'll see the same demand curve and decide on similar revenue maximization points over the longer term, and you'll still get the same rising price until demand fails (through falling disposable income, lack of interest or time, etc).
For a real in-your-face example, note Sony's action on Whitney Houstons death. An expected increase in demand leads to practically real-time raising of prices. The players in the field know exactly how to set prices to exact maximum revenue, and competitive pressure has nothing to do with it.
That's entirely possible, but in that case it's because Apple brought a higher end market with them. Revenue with monopoly pricing is maximized by setting prices in relation to what the market can bear. Copyright is not a free market and filing antitrust suits over pricing or price collusion is specious; there is no free market pricing, there is no competition and that is by design.
If the DOJ was at all interested in competition they'd work to abolish copyright and let the Pirate Bay put some competetive pressure on the market.
Actually, the pesticide that currently seems to be most strongly implicated in colony collapse disorder is imidacloprid, which is not the same as the bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) GMO corn toxin. Unless you have seen something even newer? Still, that of course doesn't preclude BT damaging other parts of the ecosystem.
Considering Monstantos corporate ethics, if they could create a corn variety that causes cancer in anyone eating it, I would bet they would. The company has such a history that trusting it with food is grossly negligent.
Even knowing the markets won't do you much good anymore as the decisions on the direction of the stock market are pretty much set between the Fed, the ECB and algos. You need to know the right people to know when to bail or when to double up because fundamentals have nothing to do with it anymore (or there would barely be a bank left in europe, for example).
Gold might remain a viable hedge, but even there you have a strong effect driven by central bank currency devaluation, which means that again, you need to be in the know to time your entrypoint. And unless you're of the physical-gold, backed by lead persuasion, you're probably better off in a broad commodity index for countering inflation as that somewhat negates speculative bubbles.
If anything, invalidating intellectual property laws is a good way to increase competitiveness, something that Greece needs badly. It's also a very cheap and painless way to go about it.
It's not random chance that economies like China or India that don't cater as much to the monopoly damage of IPR tend to grow much faster. The odd thing is that many supposedly free-market proponents actually seem to believe that implementing what is in effect a significant private taxation system on the economy is somehow going be beneficial.
As most software incorporates many functions, any of which may or may not be patented, patents are a net liability for any startup. Even if they may have one or two, chances are high that their idea cannot be usefully brought to market without infringing on tens to hundreds of other patents.
As an investor I'd worry a lot about any of the owners of any of those patents deciding to end my investment.
It would be possible to build a non-confrontational system that accomplishes what some want the patent system to do, but the monopoly aspect has to go. Something non-damaging like the 'patent office' paying a certain amount for every use of a 'patent' like registration would be much more palatable and create an incentive for all stakeholders to grant only the good 'patents' (as the total funding would be limited and overgranting would mean miniscule payouts).
Slashdot Mirror
See, that's where the aforementioned social engineering aspect comes in, the text file contains instructions to save it as funcatscript.sh, type chmod +x funcatscript.sh and then run ./funcatscript.sh to see some fun kittens happen. Of course, that will just mail the script to all mail addresses found in the users mailbox followed by a cat /bin/cat which, to the consternation of the user, simply isn't a very funny cat.
Monopoly rights are a bad way to compensate people for creations. With limited attention available and tightly controlled channels you are close to guaranteed not get jack, while the dominant players take both attention and revenue by having the channel control. Publisher deals become a prerequisite for even having a chance, and to make a good deal you need leverage. Which you have none. Even if you threaten to take your demo and go home.
If copyright was actually about compensation for creators then it would be formulated to actually give compensation to creators. It could just as well take the form of a guaranteed 50% of the proceeds of sales of any copies, like a VAT going directly to the creator while allowing anyone to copy, for example.
Any compromise that has a chance of working has to separate the monetary compensation from the right to control copying. Without that there simply will be no solution.
And RMS stance on that issue is that in the absence of copyright there would not be as significant a need for the GPL. The GPL is a way to mitigate the damage of copyright, it's not a substitute for abolishing it.
Of course not. But most likely they will mainly be used to detect what taxpayers carry any residue of money, at which point they'll get a 'pat down' to remove any excess cash burdening the traveller.
Time to cut out the middle man; these machines are expensive and the producers have to be paid.
Religion is unsafe at any dosage. Sure, some can handle it, but you never know in advance who's going to go psychotic on the first exposure.
So if we're going to get mandatory filters I certainly hope any and all religions will be among the pages filtered. After all, we must protect the children.
Indeed. The only way to actually solve the issues with monopoly rights like patents is to turn them into non-confrontational compensation rights where a third party (such as the patent office) provides compensation due based on usage. Such a system would reasonably have a limited budget, ensuring that the system players have an interest in keeping the quality of compensation rights high as if more rights get granted everyone would get less per use.
But a non-confrontational system would require and support far fewer lawyers, so like you say it's unlikely to happen.
What, I thought it was a burning platform? At least once Elop got done with his thermite plans.
Which is why some p2p software, such as WASTE, has modes where it will always load links wether or not there is real traffic.
If the arms race goes on, we'll end up with a constantly saturated internet with only random connections sending apparent random data, leaving any actual signal indistinguishable and drowned out by the massive amounts of random noise.
The sleazebags in the white house seem to claim that it's a 'trade agreement' that doesn't change law so it needs no ratification. And they try to claim the same in Europe, altho they have not gotten around the need for ratification.
Of course, that's ignoring the point that signing even an agreement that doesn't change current law will still prevent a scaling back of IP law and thus bind congress and senate.
This corruption seems prevalent throughout various government arms in many countries. 'Special' IP enforcement police (with frequent trips to Hollywood), 'special' courts, 'special' judges, etc. This is outright bribery and corruption and these 'special' people need to be put in a very 'special' jail and forced to watch alternating bad cams of dubbed films with foreign subtitles and originals with the wrong region code that won't play in their player.
Well, if you look at the picture here http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/9346957/MEPs-reject-ACTA-piracy-treaty.html he might have meant what he said...
But no, I don't think the recent electoral successes have done that much to influence. However, the Swedish Pirate MEP's, Christian Engström and Amelia Andersdotter, have most certainly done a lot of work in the European Parliament. And I would wager that a lot of pirate party activists have been encouraged enough to actually mail various MEP's simply by having gotten somewhat organized.
But the proponents of ACTA have certainly made it easier as well; by acting as such utter douchebags throughout the process they've certainly made sure that nobody with the least knowledge of it could support it without looking like an utter tool. Having the first official parliament rapporteur on the treaty quit in disgust over the process and his replacement turning from positive to negative sent strong signals prior to committee votes.
Indeed. Well, burying wooden things may not be that useful as they're prone to decomposing which would just release the CO2 again. And deep burials would probably be quite energy intensive.
However, as compulsive hoarding is essentially a form of carbon sequestration we should provide economic compensations or other encouragement for people storing things (Yes, those things are useful, in case the Zombie apocalypse comes. And they're useful as carbon sinks!)
We will keep having these kinds of issues for as long as some people who fail to understand that time of day is an arbitrary number whose main utility lies in it being composed of predictable periods and divided into homogenous units. It should have no relation whatsoever to whatever time the sun happens to rise or set at any particular location and above all it should not be changed to accomodate fluctuations in the orbit of a rock circling an arbitrary star. Abominations like leap seconds or daylight savings make the whole system less useful by merely existing.
But personally I wouldn't be surprised if people off the equator were to get summer minutes composed of 120 seconds during daytime (or even better, a scale!) to ensure the sun rises and sets at the same time year around. Or, hey, why not simply make the seconds longer? Or a combination of both plus we can define pi to be 3 to make things simpler.
As a matter of fact, the jobs do get moved to China and India so it's time the monopoly rights industries join in and smell the roses. If we're going to have a market economy based on competition that applies to everyone and nobody gets a monopoly, especially as the prevalence of rentseeking monopolists are part of the reason western workers are expensive. Paying for patents and copyrights isn't free, and the extra costs means jobs lost in other economic sectors.
As for your suggestion, if we desire to support creative endeavors beyond what the free market will bear, then paying authors an hourly wage, perhaps based on the number of downloads their works get, perhaps modulated by some max limits to be able to spread the graces to support as many as we wish from the desired funding rate, certainly wouldn't be worse than copyright. We might end up with fewer super-rich creators, but judging by the current efficiency rates of copyright we could easily fund ten times as many creators for the same money that gets spent today.
And attempting to support oneself on creative endeavours would probably be a bit more predictable than today, when you're more likely to win big serving fries with that and playing the lottery.
Why do you think politicians are drooling over drones?
A drone pilot with a gun to his head may not have the option to refuse to fire on his own civilians. That is, unless they opt to go completely autonomous to get rid of any arguing at all.
Ignoring the monopoly right sleight of hand patents are just another transfer method. Like any tax and spend system, of course they're beneficial for the recepient and if the recipient was the only party to the equation we could just hike taxes and spend on everyone and everything.
But patents and taxes are not free. They already do harm to everyone else by the funds they transfer to the beneficiaries. So the question becomes, do we gain as a whole by taking from everyone else and giving to the patent holders? Do we gain more by giving monopoly rights than we would by outright state funding?
There are strong indications that IP rights are far less efficient than even the absolutely worst run government programs in existence. For the money transferred to pharmaceuticals not even 20% are spent on actual R&D, while twice that falls under their marketing budgets. That suggests we'd get far more R&D if we junked patents and created research funds tied to actual research. Basically any system would beat patents. In any and all industries.
If you're hiring someone you feel you need to make 'immune to luring away (or bribing)' you're hiring someone you already know is bribable and who you know would leave you for a larger salary. That rather sounds like a mistake.
Frankly I'd wager it's more a case of paying him enough that he'll pay you or your friends more when he's a member on the board of the company in which you're applying for the CEO position.
Most high paying corporate jobs have less to do with skills than with membership in the boys club. Loyalty towards company or stockholders seems to come far down the priority list.
Paying for music does not require artificial scarcity; there are many methods by which creators could be compensated that do not require control over duplication. And frankly I doubt even wiping out monetary compensation from the music industry would affect it negatively, considering the vast majority of music, with or without functioning copyright, gets produced without any reasonable expectation of significant compensation at all.
Fundamentally there is no ethical wrong with copying; copying is what humans do and it's what keeps humanity moving forward instead of standing still and starting over each generation. Preventing copying on the other hand is unethical as it is an intrusion into others freedom to do something that does not affect the complainer (in the absence of copyright it would be hard to argue harm done due to copying, indicating there is no natural law foundation for harm caused). Whether that unethical limit (a limit whose harm can actually be shown ouside law) on peoples rights leads to a tradeoff that is more valuable or not is the question.
Simply stated, preventing copying is not 'the right thing to do', and the question is if it should be done, and the only reason it should conceivably be done is if it is in the majorities interest. If it isn't, allowing such unethical laws to stand in the interest of a few would be the wrong thing to do.
And on that point it's simply an economic question where creating artificial scarcity destroys vast amounts of wealth due to the marginal value of most duplicatable objects for most people fall below the market clearing price on the demand curve. Ie, the 10 people for which object A is worth more than the sales price of 10 dollars buy object A, but the several thousand for which it is worth less but non-zero go unpurchased and unduplicated, which in total is far more potential wealth that is lost to the economy.
In the ideal situation the producer would get paid that $100 value while still allowing the unrealized $thousands to get duplicated into existence. But that would require a system far different than copyright.
You don't need any protracted analysis to evaluate the effect of IPR on jobs. As it's taking resources from other segments of the economy to provide them to the beneficiaries it's equivalent to taxation (most like VAT in implementation).
So it's equivalent of asking if higher taxes create more jobs, which is questionable at best.
If they can pass the test using only google, then they're certainly what in the eyes of that test passes for a good programmer. Of course, one might question the reliability and usefulness of a test that can be passed using only google, but the test was as useless before as it would pass 'crammers' who may have as little understanding of the subject as the 'googler'.
I suspect that a lot of complaints about 'internet assisted' cheating are partly due to the educators getting caught with easy but low value methods of testing and assessment.
Copyrighted works (well, some of them at least) are not particularly fungible so they do not compete against eachother to any large extent.
Yes, retail price cooperation is illegal, but short term collaboration on prices isn't the driving price factor on monopoly goods. For the pricing curve It doesn't really matter if they sit in the same room or not; they'll see the same demand curve and decide on similar revenue maximization points over the longer term, and you'll still get the same rising price until demand fails (through falling disposable income, lack of interest or time, etc).
For a real in-your-face example, note Sony's action on Whitney Houstons death. An expected increase in demand leads to practically real-time raising of prices. The players in the field know exactly how to set prices to exact maximum revenue, and competitive pressure has nothing to do with it.
That's entirely possible, but in that case it's because Apple brought a higher end market with them. Revenue with monopoly pricing is maximized by setting prices in relation to what the market can bear. Copyright is not a free market and filing antitrust suits over pricing or price collusion is specious; there is no free market pricing, there is no competition and that is by design.
If the DOJ was at all interested in competition they'd work to abolish copyright and let the Pirate Bay put some competetive pressure on the market.
Actually, the pesticide that currently seems to be most strongly implicated in colony collapse disorder is imidacloprid, which is not the same as the bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) GMO corn toxin. Unless you have seen something even newer? Still, that of course doesn't preclude BT damaging other parts of the ecosystem.
Considering Monstantos corporate ethics, if they could create a corn variety that causes cancer in anyone eating it, I would bet they would. The company has such a history that trusting it with food is grossly negligent.
Even knowing the markets won't do you much good anymore as the decisions on the direction of the stock market are pretty much set between the Fed, the ECB and algos. You need to know the right people to know when to bail or when to double up because fundamentals have nothing to do with it anymore (or there would barely be a bank left in europe, for example).
Gold might remain a viable hedge, but even there you have a strong effect driven by central bank currency devaluation, which means that again, you need to be in the know to time your entrypoint. And unless you're of the physical-gold, backed by lead persuasion, you're probably better off in a broad commodity index for countering inflation as that somewhat negates speculative bubbles.
If anything, invalidating intellectual property laws is a good way to increase competitiveness, something that Greece needs badly. It's also a very cheap and painless way to go about it.
It's not random chance that economies like China or India that don't cater as much to the monopoly damage of IPR tend to grow much faster. The odd thing is that many supposedly free-market proponents actually seem to believe that implementing what is in effect a significant private taxation system on the economy is somehow going be beneficial.
As most software incorporates many functions, any of which may or may not be patented, patents are a net liability for any startup. Even if they may have one or two, chances are high that their idea cannot be usefully brought to market without infringing on tens to hundreds of other patents.
As an investor I'd worry a lot about any of the owners of any of those patents deciding to end my investment.
It would be possible to build a non-confrontational system that accomplishes what some want the patent system to do, but the monopoly aspect has to go. Something non-damaging like the 'patent office' paying a certain amount for every use of a 'patent' like registration would be much more palatable and create an incentive for all stakeholders to grant only the good 'patents' (as the total funding would be limited and overgranting would mean miniscule payouts).