I don't know what you're doing to your myth installation, but mine has been pretty much zero maintenance between upgrades. The only glitches I've had for the last two years have been due to changes in digital broadcast MUX'es and the, eh, slight problems in the distributions audio subsystem.
Before that it was mostly issues with the TV cards and drivers, but I cant really blame Myth for that either. Going further back than that tho, (pre-0.20), yes, it was rather painful. I think I spent two months compiling (and recompiling in cases of circular dependencies) stuff back in the days before there were good repos for it.
Anyone trying to make a high quality product is undercut by someone making a low quality knockoff
Except there are very few companies ever competing on specific quality. Usually it's about the perception of quality rather than any actual quality, so the only 'quality' may be the actual label, the rest is from the same production lines as those 'low quality knockoffs'. After all, profits are made by selling cheap stuff for a lot more than it's worth.
If quality is what you want out of branding, you should try to get quality labelling or product equivalence labelling, because all trademarks will give you is bottled tap water made toxic. But with a brand.
This makes it hard to compete globally.
Their export surplus would indicate otherwise.
or to compete with a company like Caterpillar.
They don't need to compete with a company like Caterpillar. Either they can buy it outright, or more likely, replace the supply chain, then buy the brand when that's all that's left.
The fact it, intellectual 'property' is, from a macroeconomic point of view, pretty much equivalent to a form of taxation. The effect of it is to make the subjected country far less competitive on the global scale; it creates no new wealth, it merely extracts funds from consumers and the economy as a whole and redistributes it, and with all redistribution systems the most important factor is efficiency. Efficiency is rarely better than free market competition, and in the case of ip monopoly protections, all the forms are less efficient than any other reallocation system ever demonstrated.
And the foundation of TFA is that it's possible to change what the customer wants.
Still, the success of that approach has been abysmal, and it will most likely continue to be so. The anti-copyright case is simply too convincing and too coherent with other ethical positions that the propaganda succeeds merely with the utterly uninformed or those with a related agenda. Sharing is simply a fundamentally good natural aspect of human behaviour.
To be fair, reading TFA linked to in TFA, I'm not entirely sure that the Comcast exec was actually talking about trying expand attempts at copyright brainwashing. He might have been talking about producing reasonable alternatives that would have consumers paying by simply being palatable enough, the quotes picked were easily the most incendiary, and the context of the original article rather mixed.
Frankly, I'm disappointed that 'diy' doesn't seem to suggest 'surgery' in the top list. The results of that query I think says more about humanity than google suggests suggestions.
I bet you good money that when copyright protection was first introduced
Actually, when copyright protection was first introduced, writers were not even allowed to publish their own works (unless they were stationers), nor were they regarded as owners of such works. The stationers guild was, and the stationers member who printed a book became 'owner' of it.
Letting the creators have the right was mostly a propaganda move when the stationers risked losing the whole deal. Most authors, after all, have a crap bargaining position compared to the owners of the presses and controllers of distribution, so it was a fairly cheap way to attempt to purchase some form of support.
ISP's should be legally obliged to advertise only what they actually offer. If you can only use half, then they can only advertise half with any burst capability added as a possible extra.
Even with de-duplication you need to strip the VM images if you want to maximize savings; the more software you have the more rapidly and thoroughly you'll get desynchronization on patch levels and such.
because dedup also delivers other advantages by reducing physical disk IO
That is an interesting consideration, yes. Have you seen any thorough review of such benefits in various situations (gains vs. simply adding cache memory in other parts of the chain, etc)?
Thirdly, because enterprise storage costs a lot more than that
Yep. Many enterprise storage architectures I've seen aren't exactly optimized for customer cost, but rather for maximizing the storage vendors sales revenue.
NetApp have quite a few white papers and blogs
Mmm, I'll have to take a look at some of them. I'm sure it makes sense when, as it often is, you have the worst-case scenario in storage, but I'm not sure it still makes sense if there's even an effort at improving the baseline instead.
Yup, but competent ISP's that run such instances usually already share those files either by using higher level virtualization basically only has one instance of OS files, or by using overlay filesystems. Backup drives are an option, but again, large places don't often back up actual PC's, it's easier to wipe-and-install, and the user documents are stored centrally.
The last few years have shown that boycotts are nowhere near enough. First of all they'll only get counted as 'piracy' anyway, second, the corruption caused in the wake of media corporation lobbying is so damaging that one needs to move to total denial of funding to protect the citizens freedom.
Paying for any form of media where parts of the revenue goes to these RIAA/MPAA members is essentially supporting a move to fascism. For those with friends or family who gives money to those companies; ask them what they want and get them ethically acceptable copies instead. These companies need to get removed from existence in civilized society and quickly.
would you put up with stricter DMCA-like rules if it meant massively more purchasing options for you?
Stricter protection of monopolies always lead to fewer options, not more, just as it leads to higher prices. Piracy is essentially the only thing that acts as competition in this market, and the last few years piracy has already shifted, for example, TV shows from being broadcast two or three years after the US broadcast, to virtually synchronized release (because otherwise everyone's seen it already).
The best way to ensure rapid evolution of alternatives would be to simply discard copyright law altogether, then we'd get any number of easy and cheap delivery forms.
But in all seriousness, this seems like a deeply ingrained philosophy in the military that humans should be in charge of the technology.
Perhaps. Even considering such reluctance some future politicians might not be entirely happy with that; humans may be reluctant to, or even refuse to fire upon their own citizens, and that may be a flaw that highly automated systems can correct.
Even the nastiest warlords in history were limited in their engagement in atrocities by their ability to get their soldiers marching in their desired direction. That may no longer be true in the future.
But there is a hell to pay somewhere down the road.
I'd certainly expect that. I don't quite get what people are so desperate to de-duplicate anyway. A stripped VM os image is less than a gigabyte, you can fit 150 of them on a drive that costs less than $100. You'd have to have vast ranges of perfectly synchronized virtual machines before you'd have made back even the cost of the time spent listening to the sales pitch.
I can't really see many situations where the extra complexity and cost would end up actually saving money. The few I can see it would be where somebody's been tricked into buying such excruciatingly expensive SAN storage that they can barely afford to store anything on it any more, or situations where their storage is a complete mess and they can't use more intelligent means of not storing the same thing many times (snapshots, shared file systems, overlay devices, etc). In those cases it seems there would be more to gain by solving the actual problem than tacking another patch onto the stack. Storage, for most purposes, is dirt cheap today.
attacking an administration simply to raise advertising funding
I have nothing against attacks on administrations, but what passes for such today is largely irrelevant misdirection. Journalists with any significant insight into the subjects reported about, necessary to avoid being just a spokespuppet, are rare. Which is largely why professional 'reporters' are losing out to people with knowledge about the subject matter but with only amateurish reporting skills. If the journalist is merely a conduit, well, then frankly a blog page can do that.
But neither is really relevant. The real problem for the journalism business is there's simply too much of it. Barring the prospects of consumers suddenly getting vast amounts of new free time, it simply needs to be massively downsized. In the modern world we don't need 100 reporters at a White House press conference. The job can be done by three or four, and then aggregated and translated. We don't need one reporter per olympic sportsman. Consumers can only read that much in a day, and when output is globally available, there isn't enough time in the world to consume even a miniscule fraction of it.
Once far more of the business is dead and gone, then the remaining outlets will get many more eyeballs and much better advertising rates. Redundant work will have been eliminated, and in a functioning economy we'd all have gotten a little bit more free time as less actual work needs to be done. In this one we'll instead get a slight tax raise and get forced to subsidize work that has no demand and shouldn't be done.
The obvious solution is to make it legal instead. No more problem with illegal downloads or copyright infringing videos.
If you then want beyond free-market incentives for certain sectors, then there are any number of ways to pay out such incentives, the simplest of which is simply automatically slapping a levy on any revenue derived directly from such duplications and paying it directly to the creators.
Much easier to deal with shares of monetary transactions than attempt to prevent the unpreventable.
And the (sad, IMHO) fact is that most people support censorship of at least some things
Many people support censorship until they're the ones getting censored. Once that happens the priorities may change.
With the emergence of social networking and f2f darknets widespread anonymity becomes a function of the easiest way to 'connect and share' things with your friends online. Three strikes legislation will certainly be incentive enough and more to drive the rapid adoption of such cell structured networks; they've always been a common occurrence, whether instantiated as IRL sneakernet sharing or as ftp/ssh sites in closed friend circles. Now they're just becoming more organized, standardized and interlinked.
So personally I think MI5 and MI6 are right on. Adoption of three strikes legislation pretty much guarantees the rapid evolution of communications into totally opaque topologies. For better or worse it's the end of the snooping business as we know it.
If commerical encryption were truly unbreakable by these groups, then I'd assume that they would have outlawed their use by now.
They pretty much have. In the UK you are legally obligated to give up your keys if required.
Of course, then comes the question of how they're going to determine if the keys were the real keys... or just to the first layer... or just to the first and second layer... or...
The intelligence agencies would do well to object quite a lot; we still haven't the final mass migration to rubber hose protected encryption and f2f darknets, but it's well on the way. If three-strikes regulation becomes popular, then most of the internet will become pretty opaque to any form of snooping, and any real threats will happily tag along on the mass of ordinary citizens just out to protect their privacy from whatever lobbyist it tugging at the puppet strings of the politicians for the moment.
Removing the oxygen won't do the trick. IIRC, lithium will happily react with, for example, co2, halon or nitrogen. Perhaps a vacuum, but then I'd bet it'd just go on and react with anything else stored in the hold. Or just react with the fuselage.
Lithium is really, really, really reactive. Really.
Personally I'm beginning to doubt it'll be possible to actually make safe Li based batteries, and I'd like to see requirements that equipment with non-standard form li-batteries should provide alternate batteries based on less incendiary technology. I can live with the shorter battery time of NiMH. With most li batteries having a 18-24 month life span it's not as if they have that long battery time for long anyway...
You're missing the really good part of using CFLs; they make it practical to quadruple indoors lighting. Go from 1 60W bulb to 3 20W CFL's and you get significantly more light, making for a nice change in darker climates. And compared to using 400W, 60W actually becomes a significant saving. Of course, it doesn't actually reduce electricity use...
The warm up time is also less of a problem if you use multiple CFL's. With enough powerful ones you quickly get more light than the 60W would give you anyway.
The quality issue seems to be mostly with the ultracheap ones. The cheapest useful ones I've found (brand Flair) come with a 5 year warranty and cost about $3, and this far most of them have at least survived 3-4 years.
And yes, any dimmable ones are crap. Even the quality dimmable ones can't be 'dimmed'. They might not break immediately, and they might sortof just go weak and maybe flicker a bit, but they're certainly not happy with the dimming and I can't imagine the person doing the dimming being happy either. As is, I'd go with (again) either multiple CFLs, or a combination of CFLs and LEDs if you can find a reasonable fixture or combination of fixtures that would give you the effect you're after.
You have to strike a balance between ensuring that drug development is profitable, but not excessively so - not an easy thing to do.
It's actually not hard at all to do. When you hand out monopoly rights expenses tend to rise until they take any available revenue, which means that you can basically hand them any amount of money and their expenses will rise until you obtain that balance.
Drug research doesn't need protection because it's expensive, it is expensive because it has protection. Only free market competition holds down prices in any sector, which is fairly obvious when you compare various protected to unprotected sectors.
Actually their actions would fall in line with sociopaths
Actually they fall under neither as state granted monopoly rights have very little sociological acceptance. Creating copies of things simply isn't considered 'wrong' by most people, nor are there sound arguments for why it should be wrong. Quite the opposite, most human behaviour is based upon copying, repetition and replication.
The original creator simply doesn't figure in to the social equation, any more than the original cook of a dish when you're making dinner or the original teller of a story if you're telling a bedtime story.
So attempting to explain behaviour towards copyright as any form of deviation from social norms is futile, as is, ultimately, trying to enforce it.
If anyone actually cared about original authors getting paid beyond ordinary free market rates, it'd be much better to simply scrap the monopoly right concept and just go for attribution rights and automatic revenue shares. Much easier to track and trace when there are economic transactions related to the copying and much easier to gain social acceptance for entitlements to parts of actual revenue.
The concept of "author's moral rights" may not be as old as the concept
The claim of authors morals right certainly has a few centuries on it's neck, but the age of a claim does not make it a valid concept. As a claim of loss or denial of use cannot be demonstrated without resorting to legal constructs, there simply is no moral property right.
I suggest that this is the only actual point that is worth debating.
I'd certainly agree. But to reach the point where that debate can be held, it may often be necessary to rule out the concept of intellectual 'property' being in any way similar to physical property. As long as people think about it as 'property' it's very hard to have a rational discussion aimed at reforming the system.
it's not the concept of intellectual property itself that is damaging, but rather the existing implementation of it
Yes and no. The concept of creating economic rewards for creativity beyond what the free market would give isn't in itself damaging (that's merely reallocation of wealth and prioritization). Implementing it as monopoly rights is (as monopoly rights result in dead-weight loss, prevention of combined and refined works, etc).
Ultimately it's not hard to find better systems; the efficiency even disregarding the monopoly losses is atrocious even compared to the average government scheme.
Significantly reduced copyright terms are often mentioned in that context, and are probably a good start.
Perhaps. Personally I favour simply recognizing it as a taxation method, calling it 'intellectual levy' and implementing it as a straight percentage (say, 50-70%) off any sales going to the author. Let authors opt in over a transition period (either you can be stuck in your crap contracts and keep your 10% off sales, or you can let anyone copy in exchange for 70% of any revenue derived from that copying). At that point it becomes much simpler to have productive discussions and to research efficiencies; is 70% best, more, less? Should the revenue max out and get redistributed towards the long tail? Should revenue shares last 5, 10, years, what creates most incentive?
But fundamentally, once it's recognized as simply yet another form of economic redistribution with specific socioeconomic goals it's much easier to carry on a rational debate. Calling it property fundamentally precludes that, which was pretty much the whole purpose of doing just that.
Sun may still be in business next year, or maybe they won't be.
And with Oracle, they may be committed to their current lines, or they wont, and the prices may skyrocket, or maybe they wont. Maybe you'll get some support. Or maybe any support will be fired (but hey, here's a metalink account).
For any customers that want reassurance, Oracle simply isn't it. Ellisons sales pitches don't really help, either he's not that up to speed on what he's buying, or he's being less than forthcoming. I'd bet the latter (especially in light of his calculations for turning a profit in a year), but neither is very reassuring. Words are cheap and nobody's going to commit to buying computers today on the promise of future investments in R&D.
So personally I don't really think it affects the loss of customers either way. Uncertain owner or uncertain future, both are equally good reasons to opt out of going along for the ride.
You bitch, but its better than what you have now. Right now they don't have to even tell you.
Frankly, I must say I don't quite understand what happened in the network neutrality debate. IIRC, it began several years ago when some US ISP's wanted to blackmail content providers or just companies that could afford to be blackmailed by threatening to throttle their own customers access to specific sites (like Google) unless they paid.
That should have resulted in a quick and simple 'no-no' against discriminating against certain sites or not in exchange for blackmail money.
But somehow, through what seems to be misunderstandings and/or pure misinformation, it got expanded to include everything up to even normal (and often reasonable) traffic management practices that have basically always been around (they can, of course, can be discriminatory and completely unreasonable as well (like throttling without congestion reasons, throttling protocols that compete with your own services, etc), but tends to be far from as asinine as site discrimination as they're generally easier to bypass and make pointless if they becomes really intrusive).
I think the whole debate could do with a complete reset and a clean restatement of what the discussion is about. Or split into several discussions.
Oh, well. At least the blackmail plans seem to have been shelved for the moment.
All property rights are legal fictions enforced by governments.
Real property rights often have some justification even without the legal fiction, and they have reflections in social codes.
That taking a piece of property deprives someone of that property can be demonstrated even without any law. There's a strong social code against it, even beside the law. Borrowing on the other hand is much less clear-cut which is also reflected in social code, where refusing to lend something may be frowned upon, even while the ownership is clearly established.
In the case of land there's a wide variation of law; many countries do not have any restriction against crossing someone's land, and more countries seem to be moving towards roaming rights. In some countries you're free to pick all the berries and mushrooms you want on private land; if they want it, they should indicate it through fencing or signs (which is a demonstrable economic gain; unused resources get utilized at no loss to anyone else). Again, a reflection of demonstrable natural situations valid even without the presence of law.
Intellectual 'property' on the other hand, has no such natural expression. Without the actual law there is no demonstrable harm. In fact, the law itself contradicts natural social rules as it prevents maximization of both freedom and experienced wealth, causing demonstrable harm to everyone who is prevented to perform, copy or display things that would cause nobody else harm.
Ultimately intellectual 'property' laws are counter productive and damaging to the economy. Without being founded in social codes they have no real justification and ignoring them is never 'wrong', it may even be a moral duty, even if it may be 'illegal'.
Intellectual property rights are just an extension of that.
The propaganda purpose of calling it 'property' is exactly to trick people into falling for that fallacy. In reality it is nothing like property, even diametrically opposed in some aspects.
Property rights do not prevent production of copies, they do not enforce scarcity and they do not interfere with other peoples ownership of their property.
Intellectual 'property' on the other hand is essentially a time limited taxation right, a monopolistic right that gives someone the governments blessing to tax and control any copies made. It enforces scarcity, and it takes away the right of everyone else to do what they wish with their property, including copying, modifying and displaying it.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know what you're doing to your myth installation, but mine has been pretty much zero maintenance between upgrades. The only glitches I've had for the last two years have been due to changes in digital broadcast MUX'es and the, eh, slight problems in the distributions audio subsystem.
Before that it was mostly issues with the TV cards and drivers, but I cant really blame Myth for that either. Going further back than that tho, (pre-0.20), yes, it was rather painful. I think I spent two months compiling (and recompiling in cases of circular dependencies) stuff back in the days before there were good repos for it.
Anyone trying to make a high quality product is undercut by someone making a low quality knockoff
Except there are very few companies ever competing on specific quality. Usually it's about the perception of quality rather than any actual quality, so the only 'quality' may be the actual label, the rest is from the same production lines as those 'low quality knockoffs'. After all, profits are made by selling cheap stuff for a lot more than it's worth.
If quality is what you want out of branding, you should try to get quality labelling or product equivalence labelling, because all trademarks will give you is bottled tap water made toxic. But with a brand.
This makes it hard to compete globally.
Their export surplus would indicate otherwise.
or to compete with a company like Caterpillar.
They don't need to compete with a company like Caterpillar. Either they can buy it outright, or more likely, replace the supply chain, then buy the brand when that's all that's left.
The fact it, intellectual 'property' is, from a macroeconomic point of view, pretty much equivalent to a form of taxation. The effect of it is to make the subjected country far less competitive on the global scale; it creates no new wealth, it merely extracts funds from consumers and the economy as a whole and redistributes it, and with all redistribution systems the most important factor is efficiency. Efficiency is rarely better than free market competition, and in the case of ip monopoly protections, all the forms are less efficient than any other reallocation system ever demonstrated.
And the foundation of TFA is that it's possible to change what the customer wants.
Still, the success of that approach has been abysmal, and it will most likely continue to be so. The anti-copyright case is simply too convincing and too coherent with other ethical positions that the propaganda succeeds merely with the utterly uninformed or those with a related agenda. Sharing is simply a fundamentally good natural aspect of human behaviour.
To be fair, reading TFA linked to in TFA, I'm not entirely sure that the Comcast exec was actually talking about trying expand attempts at copyright brainwashing. He might have been talking about producing reasonable alternatives that would have consumers paying by simply being palatable enough, the quotes picked were easily the most incendiary, and the context of the original article rather mixed.
Frankly, I'm disappointed that 'diy' doesn't seem to suggest 'surgery' in the top list. The results of that query I think says more about humanity than google suggests suggestions.
I bet you good money that when copyright protection was first introduced
Actually, when copyright protection was first introduced, writers were not even allowed to publish their own works (unless they were stationers), nor were they regarded as owners of such works. The stationers guild was, and the stationers member who printed a book became 'owner' of it.
Letting the creators have the right was mostly a propaganda move when the stationers risked losing the whole deal. Most authors, after all, have a crap bargaining position compared to the owners of the presses and controllers of distribution, so it was a fairly cheap way to attempt to purchase some form of support.
ISP's should be legally obliged to advertise only what they actually offer. If you can only use half, then they can only advertise half with any burst capability added as a possible extra.
without the hassle of "stripping" the VM image.
Even with de-duplication you need to strip the VM images if you want to maximize savings; the more software you have the more rapidly and thoroughly you'll get desynchronization on patch levels and such.
because dedup also delivers other advantages by reducing physical disk IO
That is an interesting consideration, yes. Have you seen any thorough review of such benefits in various situations (gains vs. simply adding cache memory in other parts of the chain, etc)?
Thirdly, because enterprise storage costs a lot more than that
Yep. Many enterprise storage architectures I've seen aren't exactly optimized for customer cost, but rather for maximizing the storage vendors sales revenue.
NetApp have quite a few white papers and blogs
Mmm, I'll have to take a look at some of them. I'm sure it makes sense when, as it often is, you have the worst-case scenario in storage, but I'm not sure it still makes sense if there's even an effort at improving the baseline instead.
Yup, but competent ISP's that run such instances usually already share those files either by using higher level virtualization basically only has one instance of OS files, or by using overlay filesystems. Backup drives are an option, but again, large places don't often back up actual PC's, it's easier to wipe-and-install, and the user documents are stored centrally.
Boycott media not provided on your terms
The last few years have shown that boycotts are nowhere near enough. First of all they'll only get counted as 'piracy' anyway, second, the corruption caused in the wake of media corporation lobbying is so damaging that one needs to move to total denial of funding to protect the citizens freedom.
Paying for any form of media where parts of the revenue goes to these RIAA/MPAA members is essentially supporting a move to fascism. For those with friends or family who gives money to those companies; ask them what they want and get them ethically acceptable copies instead. These companies need to get removed from existence in civilized society and quickly.
would you put up with stricter DMCA-like rules if it meant massively more purchasing options for you?
Stricter protection of monopolies always lead to fewer options, not more, just as it leads to higher prices. Piracy is essentially the only thing that acts as competition in this market, and the last few years piracy has already shifted, for example, TV shows from being broadcast two or three years after the US broadcast, to virtually synchronized release (because otherwise everyone's seen it already).
The best way to ensure rapid evolution of alternatives would be to simply discard copyright law altogether, then we'd get any number of easy and cheap delivery forms.
But in all seriousness, this seems like a deeply ingrained philosophy in the military that humans should be in charge of the technology.
Perhaps. Even considering such reluctance some future politicians might not be entirely happy with that; humans may be reluctant to, or even refuse to fire upon their own citizens, and that may be a flaw that highly automated systems can correct.
Even the nastiest warlords in history were limited in their engagement in atrocities by their ability to get their soldiers marching in their desired direction. That may no longer be true in the future.
But there is a hell to pay somewhere down the road.
I'd certainly expect that. I don't quite get what people are so desperate to de-duplicate anyway. A stripped VM os image is less than a gigabyte, you can fit 150 of them on a drive that costs less than $100. You'd have to have vast ranges of perfectly synchronized virtual machines before you'd have made back even the cost of the time spent listening to the sales pitch.
I can't really see many situations where the extra complexity and cost would end up actually saving money. The few I can see it would be where somebody's been tricked into buying such excruciatingly expensive SAN storage that they can barely afford to store anything on it any more, or situations where their storage is a complete mess and they can't use more intelligent means of not storing the same thing many times (snapshots, shared file systems, overlay devices, etc). In those cases it seems there would be more to gain by solving the actual problem than tacking another patch onto the stack. Storage, for most purposes, is dirt cheap today.
They have run journalism into the ground...
Without a doubt.
attacking an administration simply to raise advertising funding
I have nothing against attacks on administrations, but what passes for such today is largely irrelevant misdirection. Journalists with any significant insight into the subjects reported about, necessary to avoid being just a spokespuppet, are rare. Which is largely why professional 'reporters' are losing out to people with knowledge about the subject matter but with only amateurish reporting skills. If the journalist is merely a conduit, well, then frankly a blog page can do that.
But neither is really relevant. The real problem for the journalism business is there's simply too much of it. Barring the prospects of consumers suddenly getting vast amounts of new free time, it simply needs to be massively downsized. In the modern world we don't need 100 reporters at a White House press conference. The job can be done by three or four, and then aggregated and translated. We don't need one reporter per olympic sportsman. Consumers can only read that much in a day, and when output is globally available, there isn't enough time in the world to consume even a miniscule fraction of it.
Once far more of the business is dead and gone, then the remaining outlets will get many more eyeballs and much better advertising rates. Redundant work will have been eliminated, and in a functioning economy we'd all have gotten a little bit more free time as less actual work needs to be done. In this one we'll instead get a slight tax raise and get forced to subsidize work that has no demand and shouldn't be done.
The obvious solution is to make it legal instead. No more problem with illegal downloads or copyright infringing videos.
If you then want beyond free-market incentives for certain sectors, then there are any number of ways to pay out such incentives, the simplest of which is simply automatically slapping a levy on any revenue derived directly from such duplications and paying it directly to the creators.
Much easier to deal with shares of monetary transactions than attempt to prevent the unpreventable.
And the (sad, IMHO) fact is that most people support censorship of at least some things
Many people support censorship until they're the ones getting censored. Once that happens the priorities may change.
With the emergence of social networking and f2f darknets widespread anonymity becomes a function of the easiest way to 'connect and share' things with your friends online. Three strikes legislation will certainly be incentive enough and more to drive the rapid adoption of such cell structured networks; they've always been a common occurrence, whether instantiated as IRL sneakernet sharing or as ftp/ssh sites in closed friend circles. Now they're just becoming more organized, standardized and interlinked.
So personally I think MI5 and MI6 are right on. Adoption of three strikes legislation pretty much guarantees the rapid evolution of communications into totally opaque topologies. For better or worse it's the end of the snooping business as we know it.
If commerical encryption were truly unbreakable by these groups, then I'd assume that they would have outlawed their use by now.
They pretty much have. In the UK you are legally obligated to give up your keys if required.
Of course, then comes the question of how they're going to determine if the keys were the real keys... or just to the first layer... or just to the first and second layer... or...
The intelligence agencies would do well to object quite a lot; we still haven't the final mass migration to rubber hose protected encryption and f2f darknets, but it's well on the way. If three-strikes regulation becomes popular, then most of the internet will become pretty opaque to any form of snooping, and any real threats will happily tag along on the mass of ordinary citizens just out to protect their privacy from whatever lobbyist it tugging at the puppet strings of the politicians for the moment.
Removing the oxygen won't do the trick. IIRC, lithium will happily react with, for example, co2, halon or nitrogen. Perhaps a vacuum, but then I'd bet it'd just go on and react with anything else stored in the hold. Or just react with the fuselage.
Lithium is really, really, really reactive. Really.
Personally I'm beginning to doubt it'll be possible to actually make safe Li based batteries, and I'd like to see requirements that equipment with non-standard form li-batteries should provide alternate batteries based on less incendiary technology. I can live with the shorter battery time of NiMH. With most li batteries having a 18-24 month life span it's not as if they have that long battery time for long anyway...
- The savings on CFLs is trivial.
You're missing the really good part of using CFLs; they make it practical to quadruple indoors lighting. Go from 1 60W bulb to 3 20W CFL's and you get significantly more light, making for a nice change in darker climates. And compared to using 400W, 60W actually becomes a significant saving. Of course, it doesn't actually reduce electricity use...
The warm up time is also less of a problem if you use multiple CFL's. With enough powerful ones you quickly get more light than the 60W would give you anyway.
The quality issue seems to be mostly with the ultracheap ones. The cheapest useful ones I've found (brand Flair) come with a 5 year warranty and cost about $3, and this far most of them have at least survived 3-4 years.
And yes, any dimmable ones are crap. Even the quality dimmable ones can't be 'dimmed'. They might not break immediately, and they might sortof just go weak and maybe flicker a bit, but they're certainly not happy with the dimming and I can't imagine the person doing the dimming being happy either. As is, I'd go with (again) either multiple CFLs, or a combination of CFLs and LEDs if you can find a reasonable fixture or combination of fixtures that would give you the effect you're after.
You have to strike a balance between ensuring that drug development is profitable, but not excessively so - not an easy thing to do.
It's actually not hard at all to do. When you hand out monopoly rights expenses tend to rise until they take any available revenue, which means that you can basically hand them any amount of money and their expenses will rise until you obtain that balance.
Drug research doesn't need protection because it's expensive, it is expensive because it has protection. Only free market competition holds down prices in any sector, which is fairly obvious when you compare various protected to unprotected sectors.
Actually their actions would fall in line with sociopaths
Actually they fall under neither as state granted monopoly rights have very little sociological acceptance. Creating copies of things simply isn't considered 'wrong' by most people, nor are there sound arguments for why it should be wrong. Quite the opposite, most human behaviour is based upon copying, repetition and replication.
The original creator simply doesn't figure in to the social equation, any more than the original cook of a dish when you're making dinner or the original teller of a story if you're telling a bedtime story.
So attempting to explain behaviour towards copyright as any form of deviation from social norms is futile, as is, ultimately, trying to enforce it.
If anyone actually cared about original authors getting paid beyond ordinary free market rates, it'd be much better to simply scrap the monopoly right concept and just go for attribution rights and automatic revenue shares. Much easier to track and trace when there are economic transactions related to the copying and much easier to gain social acceptance for entitlements to parts of actual revenue.
The concept of "author's moral rights" may not be as old as the concept
The claim of authors morals right certainly has a few centuries on it's neck, but the age of a claim does not make it a valid concept. As a claim of loss or denial of use cannot be demonstrated without resorting to legal constructs, there simply is no moral property right.
I suggest that this is the only actual point that is worth debating.
I'd certainly agree. But to reach the point where that debate can be held, it may often be necessary to rule out the concept of intellectual 'property' being in any way similar to physical property. As long as people think about it as 'property' it's very hard to have a rational discussion aimed at reforming the system.
it's not the concept of intellectual property itself that is damaging, but rather the existing implementation of it
Yes and no. The concept of creating economic rewards for creativity beyond what the free market would give isn't in itself damaging (that's merely reallocation of wealth and prioritization). Implementing it as monopoly rights is (as monopoly rights result in dead-weight loss, prevention of combined and refined works, etc).
Ultimately it's not hard to find better systems; the efficiency even disregarding the monopoly losses is atrocious even compared to the average government scheme.
Significantly reduced copyright terms are often mentioned in that context, and are probably a good start.
Perhaps. Personally I favour simply recognizing it as a taxation method, calling it 'intellectual levy' and implementing it as a straight percentage (say, 50-70%) off any sales going to the author. Let authors opt in over a transition period (either you can be stuck in your crap contracts and keep your 10% off sales, or you can let anyone copy in exchange for 70% of any revenue derived from that copying). At that point it becomes much simpler to have productive discussions and to research efficiencies; is 70% best, more, less? Should the revenue max out and get redistributed towards the long tail? Should revenue shares last 5, 10, years, what creates most incentive?
But fundamentally, once it's recognized as simply yet another form of economic redistribution with specific socioeconomic goals it's much easier to carry on a rational debate. Calling it property fundamentally precludes that, which was pretty much the whole purpose of doing just that.
Sun may still be in business next year, or maybe they won't be.
And with Oracle, they may be committed to their current lines, or they wont, and the prices may skyrocket, or maybe they wont. Maybe you'll get some support. Or maybe any support will be fired (but hey, here's a metalink account).
For any customers that want reassurance, Oracle simply isn't it. Ellisons sales pitches don't really help, either he's not that up to speed on what he's buying, or he's being less than forthcoming. I'd bet the latter (especially in light of his calculations for turning a profit in a year), but neither is very reassuring. Words are cheap and nobody's going to commit to buying computers today on the promise of future investments in R&D.
So personally I don't really think it affects the loss of customers either way. Uncertain owner or uncertain future, both are equally good reasons to opt out of going along for the ride.
You bitch, but its better than what you have now. Right now they don't have to even tell you.
Frankly, I must say I don't quite understand what happened in the network neutrality debate. IIRC, it began several years ago when some US ISP's wanted to blackmail content providers or just companies that could afford to be blackmailed by threatening to throttle their own customers access to specific sites (like Google) unless they paid.
That should have resulted in a quick and simple 'no-no' against discriminating against certain sites or not in exchange for blackmail money.
But somehow, through what seems to be misunderstandings and/or pure misinformation, it got expanded to include everything up to even normal (and often reasonable) traffic management practices that have basically always been around (they can, of course, can be discriminatory and completely unreasonable as well (like throttling without congestion reasons, throttling protocols that compete with your own services, etc), but tends to be far from as asinine as site discrimination as they're generally easier to bypass and make pointless if they becomes really intrusive).
I think the whole debate could do with a complete reset and a clean restatement of what the discussion is about. Or split into several discussions.
Oh, well. At least the blackmail plans seem to have been shelved for the moment.
All property rights are legal fictions enforced by governments.
Real property rights often have some justification even without the legal fiction, and they have reflections in social codes.
That taking a piece of property deprives someone of that property can be demonstrated even without any law. There's a strong social code against it, even beside the law. Borrowing on the other hand is much less clear-cut which is also reflected in social code, where refusing to lend something may be frowned upon, even while the ownership is clearly established.
In the case of land there's a wide variation of law; many countries do not have any restriction against crossing someone's land, and more countries seem to be moving towards roaming rights. In some countries you're free to pick all the berries and mushrooms you want on private land; if they want it, they should indicate it through fencing or signs (which is a demonstrable economic gain; unused resources get utilized at no loss to anyone else). Again, a reflection of demonstrable natural situations valid even without the presence of law.
Intellectual 'property' on the other hand, has no such natural expression. Without the actual law there is no demonstrable harm. In fact, the law itself contradicts natural social rules as it prevents maximization of both freedom and experienced wealth, causing demonstrable harm to everyone who is prevented to perform, copy or display things that would cause nobody else harm.
Ultimately intellectual 'property' laws are counter productive and damaging to the economy. Without being founded in social codes they have no real justification and ignoring them is never 'wrong', it may even be a moral duty, even if it may be 'illegal'.
Intellectual property rights are just an extension of that.
The propaganda purpose of calling it 'property' is exactly to trick people into falling for that fallacy. In reality it is nothing like property, even diametrically opposed in some aspects.
Property rights do not prevent production of copies, they do not enforce scarcity and they do not interfere with other peoples ownership of their property.
Intellectual 'property' on the other hand is essentially a time limited taxation right, a monopolistic right that gives someone the governments blessing to tax and control any copies made. It enforces scarcity, and it takes away the right of everyone else to do what they wish with their property, including copying, modifying and displaying it.