Chess may be a bit too single track to make a significant impact on socially perceivable neural degeneration either way;
Still, the nature of the game might make it somewhat appealing to autism-spectrum affected personalities. A predisposition that would also match up fairly well with the, eh, eccentric behaviour of some well known players.
Of course, the survey you cite has close to nothing to do with the GP's point, as it's fundamentally mostly concerned with citations in English language publications. Basically you could have mail-order degrees and still score well, as long as you had decent researchers (or the reputation, friends or money needed to get published anyway).
As a measure of the quality of education it certainly lacks a level of scientific rigour and seems to lack relevance for that subject.
I have yet to see anyone present objective evidence that the existence of copyright... helps the economy
You're not going to see that. To obtain such scientific objective evidence would require a certain level of intellectual honesty and rigour, and any intellectually honest assessment of IPR from a macroeconomic perspective would equate it with any other taxation/benefit system and analyse it compared to other such systems. IPR isn't magic, it takes money from one place in the economy and hands it out elsewhere, ie, a tax-benefit transfer system.
So the statement is fundamentally equivalent to: "I have yet to see anyone present objective evidence that the existence of taxes... helps the economy".
But at least that has quite a bit more analysis and various schools of thoughts. Of course, copyright and patent lobbyists aren't interested in such analysis as that'd cost them large parts of the US political caste, with it's distaste for taxes, as well.
If we accepted that mentality we would now need to employ more telephone operators in the U.S. than the entire population.
Indeed. Jobs are not an end to themselves; the whole point of a competitive economy is to create more wealth from less work, making everything more affordable, which will ultimately result in more free time; at the end of scarcity, quite a lot of free time.
Getting more free time in the economy is not a problem. Inequitable division of it can be. But taking away free time by 'creating jobs' that are fundamentally not demanded actually decreases total perceived wealth in the economy if you account for the value people place on that free time (which is lost twice by 'created jobs', once for the worker doing useless work and once for everyone paying for it). The most optimal solution would be to decrease standard working hours and divide the wealth gain that way, but even just outright paying the unemployed would be less economically damaging than make-work.
If the problem is middle-man connectivity, 6to4 tunnelling works fine in a lot of cases.
If the system is actually unable to use intermediate methods, then there are proxies that can forward requests to ipv6 space.
So I'll have to agree with the GP, for most people who care it's not that hard to get one or another form of v6 connectivity any more, a lot of equipment supports it to reasonable levels, and if it doesn't, it's old enough to get rotated out of use within a reasonable time frame.
Once requests start getting rejected and people are forced to use alternate methods to provide connectivity, the migration will simply not be that painful. More like a y2k situation again; lots of consultancy hours sold to corporations who have no long term planning and are easily parted from their money when confronted with a panic headline or two.
I'd argue it's better to implement as HSM (Hierarchial Storage Management), with least recently used things getting delegated to more archival storage. It would be nice with a device-mapper-hsm layer that would let you simply stack one device upon the other and obtain the best distribution of desireable characteristics they could offer.
IIRC, there was an intern at IBM who did a project like that some years ago, but I don't think much became of it.
If Steve goes on like this, the iPhone will soon bear the same relation to gadget 'coolness' as a Fisher Price stethoscope does to being a doctor. Playing nanny for your customers works fairly well within the field of protecting them from product breakage, but when you stop treating them like adults you're treading a very fine line between 'safe for kids' and 'for kids'. And even a lot of kids don't think the 'for kids' things are cool...
Further, such numbers, whatever they are, don't even support their derived claims about jobs or taxes; copyright is fundamentally a taxation form, and as such it does not create jobs but merely redistributes resources. Jobs gained from IPR are lost elsewhere in the economy.
Arguing about the numbers is merely a smokescreen and by even playing that game one supports the even more flawed premise. More taxes don't necessarily lead to more jobs. Neither does more copyright levies and revenue.
You have to have the backing of a government federal, state, local.
Which in this case is called 'copyright'. Which of course is the root of the problem in both this case and with Microsoft. Without it you would be able to buy a multitude of equivalent and competing options from other companies. With it you'll end up with state-derived monopoly control in many markets.
ensured that only someone else with equally deep pockets has the time and money to engineer something so clearly better that they can recoup the time investment by surpassing VP8.
Not at all. The cheapest and easiest way to surpass VP8 is simply to take VP8 and improve it. Minor investment, not that much to recoup that it's a problem. If you have a problem that needs a better codec, it might even pay for itself.
It's the restrictions of patents and copyrights that make that difficult; they make it harder to engage in mass reuse, necessitating the massive investment of rewriting things from scratch. Copyleft ameliorates the problem, but nowhere near as effectively as outright abolishing intellectual monopoly rights would.
mainly because nobody (and I mean nobody) wants to be seen as being against the children.
I'm not certain that's really as clear cut as one might want. There's a fairly high level of tolerance for various forms of child abuse if it's done under the auspices of religion, including permanent body modifications that would be assault if done against an non-consenting adult.
With CP there's less of a drawback for the power hungry, there is very little PR risk as most religions at least don't actively promote diddling the choirboys.
and the filling of this demand results in child abuse.
Banning distribution of such items also creates a much stronger economic incentive; providing illicit controlled goods is immensely profitable as every other black market proves. This is a fundamental economic function, as long as there is a demand the price curve will adjust upwards the more difficult it is to fulfill. So if the idea was to turn a highly risky, unprofitable and abhorrent business into a highly lucrative one, then I'm sure the current approach is working fine.
Perhaps as a next step the US can apply the same tactics as against the Colombian coca farmers; bomb east European villages with sterilizing agents so they cant produce kids that can get abused...
Perhaps some do, but I would suggest they're in a minority, and certainly not historically significant.
Works ranging from the Christian bible through every fable to Alice in Wonderland exist in multitudes of versions. Whoever may have once been an early author of the work simply is of very little interest to most people; the versions are easily differentiated between by prefixes such as 'King James', 'H.C. Andersens' or 'Tim Burtons'. As long as there is no deliberate deception on who is the author or what the parameters of the relation to some original work, these are all considered perfectly acceptable and are usually judged, accepted or rejected, on their own merits.
Those who think the Tolkien estate are doing a good job of guardianship will simply regard only those works with 'approved by the Tolkien estate' as being associated with the work, most who do not accept a sequel to Gone With the Wind simply would not consider such a sequel as being valid and ignore it.
Personally I get more annoyed when there are actual 'approved' sequels that obviously have nothing to do with the original work or author, as this appears to confer an 'officialdom' which shouldn't be there, ie, a kind of deception. And copyright certainly doesn't protect any work from bad stewardship; we'd be better off with anyone able to write, modify and extend the works and pick the better ones ourselves, than left to the chances that one single heritage or business deal turns out to be a good one.
Still, it's the prisoners dilemma; all big content won't band together, as if some of it does, the ad revenue of the remainder will go up, making it more profitable to defect.
The fundamental problem is simply that news media is unprofitable in many cases today as it is vastly overproduced. Once enough of it is gone, which (yay!) appears to include Murdochs media, the rest will become more profitable again.
Most measures of inflation are highly politicised; what may be a somewhat useful simplification in a local economy is far from reality in a situation with global wage arbitrage.
The largest deficiency IMO is the failure to account for asset price inflation, a failure which is inherently connected to the boom/bust cycles (most politicians don't want to see interest rates raised, which the central bank would be force to if any of the more 'real' inflation measurements were used or non-fractional banking/market set interest rates were used, with the end result that we get basically uncovered money creation and financial crisis when loan expansion turns to contraction).
On the positive side, last year had a 'real' deflation of between 1-4%. So you got a great wage increase. On the negative side, that would be after a decade of 5-15% 'actual' inflation per year. A bit ahead of most peoples wage increases.
Re:Prosecuting corporations for crimes is asinine.
on
The Short Arm of the Law
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Why shouldn't you lose your money if you've invested in a company with insufficient internal controls and ethics to prevent such behaviour? Stocks are not bonds, they confer control and responsibility; perhaps not much, but you have the option to sell them if you disagree with the board and executive over the running of the company.
Such might perhaps encourage more active boards and engagement even from the most lazy institutional owners. Losing significant parts of your customers holdings because you were at best asleep at the wheel or more commonly buddies with the exec or complicit in the violation wouldn't look so good.
Re:The other side of the coin to Regulatory Captur
on
The Short Arm of the Law
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The best remedy we may have is stringent application of antitrust law (break 'em up)
The problem in this case stems directly from pro-trust law. Without patents, there wouldn't be a problem with kicking Pfizer out of Medicare (nor would they wield monopoly-level revenue that underlies issues here ranging from buying doctors to making the legal system its bitch).
There are much better, and vastly more efficient, ways to pay for research than these monopoly rights whose side effects are damaging to the free market, the political system and the legal system all at the same time.
Any company, that has the sole goal to make money (always with nobody asking why), will have exactly those priorities.
Indeed. But it's not the companies themselves that are the danger here, it's government supported monopoly rights that hands them the power to subvert and damage the market.
Without copyright or patents neither Apple nor Microsoft would have the power to engage in anti-competitive behaviour to anywhere near the extent they do.
You tried to claim that depriving someone of the economic value of something was equivalent to theft. The expiration of copyright would be the ultimate deprivation of that value.
It is due to the rule of law
Eh, no, it is due to the lobbying of the stationers company and the desire of the British crown to control publication that we have copyright in place.
That is the social norm.
According to most theories of jurisprudence, law most often has its roots in social norms and tends to be a codification of such norms, and certainly not the other way around. When law deviates from social norms, the social norms rarely change, with the result that you get mass violations of such laws instead, and the law loses any semblance of moral weight that it might have had (and eventually if the divergence continues you get conflict between the bodies imposing the law and the society it governs). Merely writing something on a piece of paper does not imbue it with a moral value so when discussing the ethical nature of laws you need to be able to support your stance from a perspective where you do not need to resort to the circular argument of 'it's the law'. If a law can't be motivated in the absence of itself, then it's a very suspect law.
lack of ability to intelligently discuss matters like these.
Mmm. I think you need to get a bit beyond 'copying is theft' before you'll get much out of any modern (or for that matter ancient) discussion regarding the various monopoly rights.
Why? It's perfectly usable with most VPN providers. Or are you moving over to the more modern darknet variants instead?
it's effective and that is why they do it.
Effective for what? Effective for convincing a lot of people that the industries in question are a significant threat to society? Sure. Effective for mobilizing a massive political blow-back? Yep. Effective for convincing consumers who'd otherwise happily provide the industries with income to go to inordinate lengths to avoid generating revenue for them? That too.
These day's I'll happily pay a premium for material that is ethically MAFIAA revenue free.
But it certainly isn't effective in creating a sustainable and socially acceptable revenue model. And it's certainly not effective at preventing uncontrolled levy-free copying, it simply results in migrations and rapid improvements in even more elusive constructs to accomplish the same thing.
But isn't a clever and non-obvious algorithm an invention that could deserve patent protection?
Arguing about patents in terms of 'deserving' tends to distort reasoning; monopoly rights ignore the cost factor of the equation, ie, why should everyone else not 'deserve' to implement the same invention freely when they come up with it?
Now, if you think certain non-obvious algorithms 'deserve' some kind of reward, then go ahead and argue we should pay the inventors rewards out of public funding or something. Or even better, argue it creates socio-economic benefits, as that's usually a better foundation for public funding than 'deserving' as well.
very few people here have any enterprise-level Solaris experience
Actually, anyone with serious enterprise level Solaris experience would remember getting stung by everything from faulty cache memory design on the E450 resulting in time between reboots measured in days to ZFS causing solid crashes quite often when it was new.
Rose coloured tint on the rear view mirror aside, things weren't always that good.
Personally I've found Linux machines to be at least as stable, but there are about ten times as many of them which will of course increase incidence of problems. And there's new untested hardware and platform changes more often than there used to be with Sun (for better or worse), so if you want to prioritize stability you'll have to take more care while shopping.
Slashdot Mirror
Chess may be a bit too single track to make a significant impact on socially perceivable neural degeneration either way;
Still, the nature of the game might make it somewhat appealing to autism-spectrum affected personalities. A predisposition that would also match up fairly well with the, eh, eccentric behaviour of some well known players.
You're perfectly free to criticize the evidence your opponents presented, but when you present none at all in support of yours
The evidence is the same article so linking it again would be slightly superfluous. But fair enough, the link was to the table, so here is the link to the top of the article. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Times_Higher_Education-QS_World_University_Rankings
It's not a ranking of the quality of education of students, it's a ranking of academic performance of the faculty and associated researchers.
Of course, the survey you cite has close to nothing to do with the GP's point, as it's fundamentally mostly concerned with citations in English language publications. Basically you could have mail-order degrees and still score well, as long as you had decent researchers (or the reputation, friends or money needed to get published anyway).
As a measure of the quality of education it certainly lacks a level of scientific rigour and seems to lack relevance for that subject.
I have yet to see anyone present objective evidence that the existence of copyright ... helps the economy
You're not going to see that. To obtain such scientific objective evidence would require a certain level of intellectual honesty and rigour, and any intellectually honest assessment of IPR from a macroeconomic perspective would equate it with any other taxation/benefit system and analyse it compared to other such systems. IPR isn't magic, it takes money from one place in the economy and hands it out elsewhere, ie, a tax-benefit transfer system.
So the statement is fundamentally equivalent to: "I have yet to see anyone present objective evidence that the existence of taxes ... helps the economy".
But at least that has quite a bit more analysis and various schools of thoughts. Of course, copyright and patent lobbyists aren't interested in such analysis as that'd cost them large parts of the US political caste, with it's distaste for taxes, as well.
If we accepted that mentality we would now need to employ more telephone operators in the U.S. than the entire population.
Indeed. Jobs are not an end to themselves; the whole point of a competitive economy is to create more wealth from less work, making everything more affordable, which will ultimately result in more free time; at the end of scarcity, quite a lot of free time.
Getting more free time in the economy is not a problem. Inequitable division of it can be. But taking away free time by 'creating jobs' that are fundamentally not demanded actually decreases total perceived wealth in the economy if you account for the value people place on that free time (which is lost twice by 'created jobs', once for the worker doing useless work and once for everyone paying for it). The most optimal solution would be to decrease standard working hours and divide the wealth gain that way, but even just outright paying the unemployed would be less economically damaging than make-work.
If the problem is middle-man connectivity, 6to4 tunnelling works fine in a lot of cases.
If the system is actually unable to use intermediate methods, then there are proxies that can forward requests to ipv6 space.
So I'll have to agree with the GP, for most people who care it's not that hard to get one or another form of v6 connectivity any more, a lot of equipment supports it to reasonable levels, and if it doesn't, it's old enough to get rotated out of use within a reasonable time frame.
Once requests start getting rejected and people are forced to use alternate methods to provide connectivity, the migration will simply not be that painful. More like a y2k situation again; lots of consultancy hours sold to corporations who have no long term planning and are easily parted from their money when confronted with a panic headline or two.
I'd argue it's better to implement as HSM (Hierarchial Storage Management), with least recently used things getting delegated to more archival storage. It would be nice with a device-mapper-hsm layer that would let you simply stack one device upon the other and obtain the best distribution of desireable characteristics they could offer.
IIRC, there was an intern at IBM who did a project like that some years ago, but I don't think much became of it.
If Steve goes on like this, the iPhone will soon bear the same relation to gadget 'coolness' as a Fisher Price stethoscope does to being a doctor. Playing nanny for your customers works fairly well within the field of protecting them from product breakage, but when you stop treating them like adults you're treading a very fine line between 'safe for kids' and 'for kids'. And even a lot of kids don't think the 'for kids' things are cool...
Further, such numbers, whatever they are, don't even support their derived claims about jobs or taxes; copyright is fundamentally a taxation form, and as such it does not create jobs but merely redistributes resources. Jobs gained from IPR are lost elsewhere in the economy.
Arguing about the numbers is merely a smokescreen and by even playing that game one supports the even more flawed premise. More taxes don't necessarily lead to more jobs. Neither does more copyright levies and revenue.
It is much easier to build dense, effective infrastructure to support such bandwidth in such a small area
So compare it to Sweden or Finland. Which also have rates around $35/month for 20Mbit connections. And even lower population density than the US.
Which I guess is what the free market is telling us is the cost of delivering
Rather what a fairly closed market tells us the market will bear if they don't have significant competition.
with a population as widely-dispersed as the USA.
Except that even more widely dispersed countries like Sweden have much lower prices.
You have to have the backing of a government federal, state, local.
Which in this case is called 'copyright'. Which of course is the root of the problem in both this case and with Microsoft. Without it you would be able to buy a multitude of equivalent and competing options from other companies. With it you'll end up with state-derived monopoly control in many markets.
ensured that only someone else with equally deep pockets has the time and money to engineer something so clearly better that they can recoup the time investment by surpassing VP8.
Not at all. The cheapest and easiest way to surpass VP8 is simply to take VP8 and improve it. Minor investment, not that much to recoup that it's a problem. If you have a problem that needs a better codec, it might even pay for itself.
It's the restrictions of patents and copyrights that make that difficult; they make it harder to engage in mass reuse, necessitating the massive investment of rewriting things from scratch. Copyleft ameliorates the problem, but nowhere near as effectively as outright abolishing intellectual monopoly rights would.
mainly because nobody (and I mean nobody) wants to be seen as being against the children.
I'm not certain that's really as clear cut as one might want. There's a fairly high level of tolerance for various forms of child abuse if it's done under the auspices of religion, including permanent body modifications that would be assault if done against an non-consenting adult.
With CP there's less of a drawback for the power hungry, there is very little PR risk as most religions at least don't actively promote diddling the choirboys.
and the filling of this demand results in child abuse.
Banning distribution of such items also creates a much stronger economic incentive; providing illicit controlled goods is immensely profitable as every other black market proves. This is a fundamental economic function, as long as there is a demand the price curve will adjust upwards the more difficult it is to fulfill. So if the idea was to turn a highly risky, unprofitable and abhorrent business into a highly lucrative one, then I'm sure the current approach is working fine.
Perhaps as a next step the US can apply the same tactics as against the Colombian coca farmers; bomb east European villages with sterilizing agents so they cant produce kids that can get abused...
People like the feeling of officialness.
Perhaps some do, but I would suggest they're in a minority, and certainly not historically significant.
Works ranging from the Christian bible through every fable to Alice in Wonderland exist in multitudes of versions. Whoever may have once been an early author of the work simply is of very little interest to most people; the versions are easily differentiated between by prefixes such as 'King James', 'H.C. Andersens' or 'Tim Burtons'. As long as there is no deliberate deception on who is the author or what the parameters of the relation to some original work, these are all considered perfectly acceptable and are usually judged, accepted or rejected, on their own merits.
Those who think the Tolkien estate are doing a good job of guardianship will simply regard only those works with 'approved by the Tolkien estate' as being associated with the work, most who do not accept a sequel to Gone With the Wind simply would not consider such a sequel as being valid and ignore it.
Personally I get more annoyed when there are actual 'approved' sequels that obviously have nothing to do with the original work or author, as this appears to confer an 'officialdom' which shouldn't be there, ie, a kind of deception. And copyright certainly doesn't protect any work from bad stewardship; we'd be better off with anyone able to write, modify and extend the works and pick the better ones ourselves, than left to the chances that one single heritage or business deal turns out to be a good one.
Rather cartelism on that side of the fence.
Still, it's the prisoners dilemma; all big content won't band together, as if some of it does, the ad revenue of the remainder will go up, making it more profitable to defect.
The fundamental problem is simply that news media is unprofitable in many cases today as it is vastly overproduced. Once enough of it is gone, which (yay!) appears to include Murdochs media, the rest will become more profitable again.
What was the inflation rate last year?
Most measures of inflation are highly politicised; what may be a somewhat useful simplification in a local economy is far from reality in a situation with global wage arbitrage.
The largest deficiency IMO is the failure to account for asset price inflation, a failure which is inherently connected to the boom/bust cycles (most politicians don't want to see interest rates raised, which the central bank would be force to if any of the more 'real' inflation measurements were used or non-fractional banking/market set interest rates were used, with the end result that we get basically uncovered money creation and financial crisis when loan expansion turns to contraction).
On the positive side, last year had a 'real' deflation of between 1-4%. So you got a great wage increase. On the negative side, that would be after a decade of 5-15% 'actual' inflation per year. A bit ahead of most peoples wage increases.
Why shouldn't you lose your money if you've invested in a company with insufficient internal controls and ethics to prevent such behaviour? Stocks are not bonds, they confer control and responsibility; perhaps not much, but you have the option to sell them if you disagree with the board and executive over the running of the company.
Such might perhaps encourage more active boards and engagement even from the most lazy institutional owners. Losing significant parts of your customers holdings because you were at best asleep at the wheel or more commonly buddies with the exec or complicit in the violation wouldn't look so good.
The best remedy we may have is stringent application of antitrust law (break 'em up)
The problem in this case stems directly from pro-trust law. Without patents, there wouldn't be a problem with kicking Pfizer out of Medicare (nor would they wield monopoly-level revenue that underlies issues here ranging from buying doctors to making the legal system its bitch).
There are much better, and vastly more efficient, ways to pay for research than these monopoly rights whose side effects are damaging to the free market, the political system and the legal system all at the same time.
Any company, that has the sole goal to make money (always with nobody asking why), will have exactly those priorities.
Indeed. But it's not the companies themselves that are the danger here, it's government supported monopoly rights that hands them the power to subvert and damage the market.
Without copyright or patents neither Apple nor Microsoft would have the power to engage in anti-competitive behaviour to anywhere near the extent they do.
Upon the expiration of copyright
You tried to claim that depriving someone of the economic value of something was equivalent to theft. The expiration of copyright would be the ultimate deprivation of that value.
It is due to the rule of law
Eh, no, it is due to the lobbying of the stationers company and the desire of the British crown to control publication that we have copyright in place.
That is the social norm.
According to most theories of jurisprudence, law most often has its roots in social norms and tends to be a codification of such norms, and certainly not the other way around. When law deviates from social norms, the social norms rarely change, with the result that you get mass violations of such laws instead, and the law loses any semblance of moral weight that it might have had (and eventually if the divergence continues you get conflict between the bodies imposing the law and the society it governs). Merely writing something on a piece of paper does not imbue it with a moral value so when discussing the ethical nature of laws you need to be able to support your stance from a perspective where you do not need to resort to the circular argument of 'it's the law'. If a law can't be motivated in the absence of itself, then it's a very suspect law.
lack of ability to intelligently discuss matters like these.
Mmm. I think you need to get a bit beyond 'copying is theft' before you'll get much out of any modern (or for that matter ancient) discussion regarding the various monopoly rights.
I have already uninstalled bittorrent.
Why? It's perfectly usable with most VPN providers. Or are you moving over to the more modern darknet variants instead?
it's effective and that is why they do it.
Effective for what? Effective for convincing a lot of people that the industries in question are a significant threat to society? Sure. Effective for mobilizing a massive political blow-back? Yep. Effective for convincing consumers who'd otherwise happily provide the industries with income to go to inordinate lengths to avoid generating revenue for them? That too.
These day's I'll happily pay a premium for material that is ethically MAFIAA revenue free.
But it certainly isn't effective in creating a sustainable and socially acceptable revenue model. And it's certainly not effective at preventing uncontrolled levy-free copying, it simply results in migrations and rapid improvements in even more elusive constructs to accomplish the same thing.
But isn't a clever and non-obvious algorithm an invention that could deserve patent protection?
Arguing about patents in terms of 'deserving' tends to distort reasoning; monopoly rights ignore the cost factor of the equation, ie, why should everyone else not 'deserve' to implement the same invention freely when they come up with it?
Now, if you think certain non-obvious algorithms 'deserve' some kind of reward, then go ahead and argue we should pay the inventors rewards out of public funding or something. Or even better, argue it creates socio-economic benefits, as that's usually a better foundation for public funding than 'deserving' as well.
very few people here have any enterprise-level Solaris experience
Actually, anyone with serious enterprise level Solaris experience would remember getting stung by everything from faulty cache memory design on the E450 resulting in time between reboots measured in days to ZFS causing solid crashes quite often when it was new.
Rose coloured tint on the rear view mirror aside, things weren't always that good.
Personally I've found Linux machines to be at least as stable, but there are about ten times as many of them which will of course increase incidence of problems. And there's new untested hardware and platform changes more often than there used to be with Sun (for better or worse), so if you want to prioritize stability you'll have to take more care while shopping.