I seem to also hear arguments about how we pay the tax on gas already
Ah, but that money gets spent elsewhere, so we obviously need a new tax to collect the funds needed for the things the fuel taxes were intended for. At least, that seems to be the reasoning the article mentions.
I thought the purpose of taxes nowadays is to have money to funnel into something beneficial.
This is beneficial. Just not for you and me. Earl Blumenauer and the corporations he represents certainly seem to benefit tho. The modern snake oil salesmen in the tech business know how to dazzle their ways into the public wallet, and in the long run, tricking governments into paying for overly complicated solutions that cost as much in maintenance as they generate in revenue is a very lucrative prospect.
That's fundamental economics; reduce competition and prices will rise. And with protected monopoly rights, unauthorized copying is what passes for 'competition'.
Do you know if there is/have any links to any concrete evidence for that besides the obvious feelgood factor?
Theoretically the genetic component of fear of death should be similar for most more developed animals, simply because it's a genetic survival trait. Humans certainly have a vastly superior ability to express their feelings about it, and that, perhaps more unique, ability to carry knowledge between generations over centuries has left us with some rather extensive expressions and various more or less sane behaviour patterns. (How obvious would 'awareness of death' seem if we examined the first humans, without all that baggage?)
Still, many animals demonstrate rudimentary awareness of 'death' in situations when it strikes social relations or family, when they cause it themselves and when faced with some dangers causing death (as opposed to just causing pain), such as most not wandering randomly off cliffs, into water, avoiding predators and poisonous dangers, etc.
If we raised a group of free-range homo sapiens in a similar way to cattle, how would awareness of death express itself?
Personally, I suspect that most animals have much more self-awareness than we generally like to pretend. That we like to ignore it isn't strange, considering most humans can reject even human emotional and cognitive similarities if they're 'the enemy' in war, and so.
I'm not going to turn vegan or so, but neither am I going to kid myself. And I would prefer vat-grown and/or other variants of brainless meat, if available. But painless meat still wouldn't make much of an ethical difference; animals shouldn't be handled in such a way that they would experience significant pain, whether they can feel it or not.
Flash memory is at present growing in capacity much faster than magnetic drives.
If magnetic drives really push the capacity growth that might not hold; magnetic drives have shrunk in size and increased rotational speeds to decrease latency during that time as well. If they just simply give up the performance race and go for vast capacity they could move back to 5 1/4 full height disks. Can you imagine the amount of data you could stick on that surface area with modern technology? I wouldn't be surprised if a 25TB disk could be produced today, at a price not much higher than the cost of current high capacity disks.
Sure, latency would stink, but it's still faster to wait for those 20ms extra for any HD video you'd ever recorded to start than getting out of the sofa and locating some physical media.
Using SSD's for latency sensitive stuff and slower magnetic media for bulk storage is one possible way it can play out. It may change in the future, but (outside my professional capacity) I've found that not having enough storage has beaten not having fast enough storage every single time.
Still, when we're talking about writing data through an SSD IO cache, does that mean the system's finished writing the data to the IO cache or to the disk? With non-volatile caches it could be a major speed improvement to return as soon as it's committed to the SSD, but if you suffer a serious failure on the motherboard, how do you flush the SSD IO cache to the appropriate disks? Add in various more complex configurations like SAN storage and clustered disks and a large local cache could create serious problems.
Personally I'd like a generic device-mapper based hierarchial storage manager layer. If you could just overlay any block device and have it act as a cache for the lower storage layer that would be a very useful type of flexibility.
Price rarely equates to value and with monopoly protected products far less so. The whole point monopoly rights lies in the ability to control price without competition, and avoiding market discovery of the equilibrium point of value, when the price of non-scarce goods like the MPAA products would otherwise fall towards zero. The value to individual buyers on the other hand may lie anywhere above the sale price for the deals that do happen and anyway below the sale price for the deals that are foregone.
Of course, with an artificially scarce good, that means the value the good would hold for everyone who refrains from purchasing (due to price being higher than value) will be lost to the economy (as the marginal cost per reproduction approaches zero).
Either way the MPAA would be more accurate saying 'high price' content.
It will also be completely pointless in most of the world which uses first-to-file/publish and doesn't particularly care what's in somebody's drawer, no matter how notarized it is.
Publishing it yourself might perhaps be enough to avoid infringment claims, but IIRC, some places even have requirements for the notability of the publication to qualify something as being unpatentable due to prior knowledge.
I'm sure others with more familiarity with EU politics could name other examples.
There are examples both ways; for example, the Volvo/Scania merger that was rejected. European companies get their fair share of spankings, and I haven't seen any exceedingly obvious bias, just a bit more commitment to the 'competition' part of the free market. That in itself might create an appearance of a bias if US companies have a stronger desire to grow to larger market share through acquisitions, but it might not be a reflection of preferential treatment. I'm not saying it's not possible, but I'd have to see some more thorough statistics to agree there's an actual bias.
There are various ways to accomplish that, ranging from exporting the whole node-as-a-disk over iSCSI and use RAID on the importing system to overlay the appropriate level of redundancy and synchronization, to using things like DRBD to manage node-node sync (which could even give you site redundancy).
I'm not so sure; the feeling could simply be due to the sample interval of information becoming much, much shorter.
Innovation has never really been 'revolutionary', it just may have seemed so due to the slow propagation of information in earlier centuries, pretty much the same error in thinking that's behind the idea of patents. Innovations seem 'revolutionary' for those who had little insight in the fields, but were and are natural incremental advances on other incremental advances (for example, look at the number of 'lightbulbs' suddenly appearing during the two decades before and around it got 'invented').
As incremental steps are taken, eventually enough advances come together to create an economically useful and viable product. The step where advances turn possible, but unprofitable, technology into profitable technology is also one of the factors making things seem 'revolutionary'. Many of the things like flying 'cars' are possible but utterly uneconomical.
Tubes, transistors, cars, none of them could have come into existence as a 'revolutionary' invention much earlier; the prerequisites weren't there. Nor would they have come into existence much later; once the prerequisites were there technologically and economically, and the need existed, the opportunity was there.
The article also mentions 'cancer' as something which still hasn't got a cure; an obvious information problem. Both because 'cancer' isn't one disease, and also because there are various kinds that can be pretty much 'cured' or even prevented depending on their cause (for example, cancer caused by HPV, which can be vaccinated against). The fact that various vectors can screw with DNA isn't something that's going to have a revolutionary 'cure', but many incremental steps will reduce the mortality of many of them over time.
Still, DNA damage related mortality, whether in the form of cancers, or in the form of wear on the cell replacement and repair ability (which will result in eventual deadly events like strokes), which are basically two sides of the same coin, will still remain a large factor in causes of death. Especially since when you cure most other things, those are simply the ones that are going to put the nail in your coffin no matter what. Until incremental advances in various technologies come together to allow us to either replace specific cells in a perfectly targeted fashion or we can replace complete bodies.
you would miss it if it went away (and I'm not talking about the money part)
A job you'd miss is generally known as a 'hobby'. I certainly agree it's nice when your hobbies have such a level of demand that you can get paid even tho you'd do the work for free anyway, but for most people the best they can get is applying a skill they enjoy using, but doing it for someone else in some way that they wouldn't be doing for free.
One such area where this is obvious is fusion research, another is space exploration.
The energy density of fusion is such that it'd probably wipe out most other energy production related jobs. The wide availability of cheap electric energy would be great for replacing a lot of high-maintenance fossil fuel powered vehicles, replacing them with much more durable electric variants, wiping out a lot of maintenance related work. Great, but I doubt the net result will be more jobs.
And space exploration is certainly also nice, but again, most likely it'll be largely unmanned and even should it take off to unimaginable heights, it still simply isn't going to require huge amounts of manual labour.
Both will be critical to the continued employment and improvement of the standard of living of mankind.
Ah, see, those two things are, in the end, mutually exclusive. Improving the standard of living means creating more wealth for less work. It's the opposite of creating demand for work, a function that becomes more obvious and prevalent as we approach the end of scarcity.
Vent-with-flame seems to be pretty standard for lithium batteries, and as far as I've seen it's one of the safety features to prevent an actual real explosion. So (hopefully) I wouldn't put much stock in Dell working to prevent a recurrence; the alternative would be having it explode like a grenade and shredding the user with laptop (or iphone) shrapnel.
I'm glad all my laptops use NiMH
Personally I'd like to see consumer safety regulations to require any lithium battery equipped products to have readily available NiMH or other non-incendiary battery replacements. Personally I can live with shorter battery life for many things (which a li battery will have after a few months anyway), particularly if I can just exchange it for another if it runs out.
Disgustingly, this is also true of big pharmaceuticals.
It's a natural result of monopoly rights. In market segments where you have competition there's a reasonable natural limit on the value of marketing; raise your costs and prices too much and your customers will buy the competitors product instead. With monopoly rights there is nobody else to buy an equivalent product from. The price point at which your customers drop off is where they can no longer afford the product at all, which places the marketing ROI equilibrium far, far higher.
That's one of the fundamental efficiency problems with IP; use 'intellectual property' to transfer X dollars from the rest of the economy to the desired area and most of it will get lost in waste, such as marketing.
So it's not really marketing that needs extra regulation, it's monopoly rights that need to be scrapped. There are few methods of redistributing funds within the economy that are as wasteful and damaging as the monopoly.
What the BW article misses is that even a 'huge pay out' isn't going to translate into huge numbers of jobs. In fact, the whole purpose of most 'breakthroughs' is to reduce the amount of human labour needed to reach desirable goals.
There aren't going to be any breakthroughs that create industrial jobs; robots and Chinese do that now. There aren't going to be any breakthroughs that create information work; computers do that now. Nanotech, biotech, AI tech, they're not going to create a demand for labour, they're going to reduce it.
Of course, that may seem like a problem if one is stuck in the belief that 'jobs' are desirable in themselves. They're not, of course, jobs are what you don't want to do. The whole point of the free market economy is to reduce the amount of undesirable work needed to produce the desirable wealth; the ideal state and end-game of economy would be that no more work would need to be undertaken to obtain any particular expression of desire: the economy where all undesirable work is fully automated. The fact that jobs are disappearing means that we're approaching the goal; production capacity starts to outpace demand (in relation to the value of free time).
The fact that we have an uneven distribution of the actual labour that does still need to be accomplished, now, that is a different thing. But the problem that some sit on their asses while others work too much isn't productively solved by trying to find pointless work for the ones sitting on their asses, but by biting the bullet and doing some basic science research in the field of economics and working out how to play out the end of the era of scarcity.
The artists, the songwriters and the (tax)payers. Both those to whom the money is given, and those from who the money is taken through the state action should be represented. The former to explain why economic resources should be diverted to them instead of all the other possible expenditures, and those paying for it to decide whether it's a reasonable expenditure.
Unfortunately it appears that few politicians can serve the paying parties interest in this case as most appear to believe the money diverted through copyright comes into existence out of nowhere, instead of being taken from other economic activities, just because it's not accounted for in the state budget.
Just because they don't call it a tax doesn't mean it isn't.
Rather like copyright. Which is also government enforced. And rather damaging to a competitive free market.
The difficulty of getting paid for producing news is due to the simple fact that there is a vast overproduction of it, far more than the readers can consume. The artificial segmentation done by dividing it into 'channels' or 'papers' is undesirable in itself, and Murdoch probably realizes that he's trapped in a completely obsolete niche, and would do anything to get out of there.
You'd have to do quite a lot of work with the surface; you have to deal with water accumulation too, so you'd have to structure the surface to allow run off and rapid displacement to avoid causing hydroplaning.
Still, there are some interesting possibilities. Instead of just glass you could use a silicone/glass hybrid, which could possibly obtain characteristics similar to asphalt, while still retaining translucency.
I wouldn't expect the translucency to last tho; however you build it it's going to get covered with a serious amount dirt in a short time. The engineering issues are, perhaps, not insurmountable, but they are bad enough that you'd be better off simply sticking the solar panels on the sides of the road instead and avoiding the most intractable parts of the problem.
If one necessarily wants to use the actual road surface as energy collector I'd explore the possibilities of simply running tubing below it to gather heat instead (which could also still be used to de-ice it). I'm not sure it'd gather enough energy to be worth it, but it'd certainly be a whole lot easier and more feasible than the photovoltaic option.
US presidents and other political representatives tend to range around 25% of eligible voters. During the previous, or if it was two terms ago, if I remember correctly, the congressional majority had the votes of about 18% of the eligible voters. Some systems are easier to game than others.
Perhaps one could automatically regard all non-voters as votes for reformation of the election system, and assign independent trustees who would be allowed to vote only on such reforms. A built in tendency to fix disenfranchisement, so to speak.
I'm just telling that the intention counts in courts aswell.
With a corrupt judge it doesn't really matter either way. Once you pass that point and accept such blatant corruption in the legal system, the actual sentencing says less about guilt than about who wants what.
Without a functioning legal system one is left with only the option of considering the ethics of the situation, in which case TPB has done no wrong.
But hey, had it been 2k years ago, and the fishery and baking industry getting pissed off because someone cut into their profits by sharing copied fish and bread, they'd have gotten nailed to a cross. So it could've been worse.
I think generally the powerful have more to gain from anonymity then the poor.
The rich and powerful may lose their positions, but the poor may lose their means of sustenance or face other, worse, forms of persecution.
We might wish we had a world where nobody would have to fear persecution for their political views, their religion or their sexual preferences and one that would always remain so tolerant. But we don't. We might wish we'd have a world where all your friends, co workers and relatives would be happy to know your intimate details. But we don't. And while we might wish we could choose the beliefs and preferences of everyone we know and everyone we have to work with, the fact is, many can't.
Some things we keep from people because those facets of ones life is none of their business. Sometimes to protect them, as not to offend them, sometimes to protect ourselves.
If it was ever possible to air everyone's dirty laundry I think I would welcome it.
Perhaps. A lot of deserving people would get what's coming to them. But so would a lot of undeserving ones.
On balance I think it would harm more than help; the loss of free dialogue and speech from many who fear persecution would by far outweigh any gain of fewer hurt feelings by people who don't know how to ignore assholes.
Having a uni-polar world where google is king is in staunch opposition to the spirit of the free market
Copyrighted works have nothing to do with a free market; any and all 'monopoly' power that Google obtains here is directly derived from copyright.
In a free market anyone would be free to scan and publish anything, any way they like. If there was social desire to fund authors beyond the free market, the easiest and probably most efficient way to be to slap a per-revenue levy off sales/copies/whatever going directly to the authors in question.
The perception of the population has been changed.
I doubt it, most (online) polls I've seen show very little acceptance for the ip lobbyist view.
Further, vpns and f2f networks are already getting wider deployments all the time. VPNs bypasses the snooping, and once the move to f2f becomes prevalent it'll all just be encrypted friend-copies-to-friend which is basically untracable and unmonitorable.
start again with something sensible.
Without a doubt. It's not very hard to construct sensible systems of reward for creativity, as long as one starts out with clearly defined goals of getting appropriate rewards to the creators. The IP system was always intended as a means of having the middle men support the crown by handing them indirect taxation right, so it's no wonder it tends to be inequitable and draconian.
If you want candy you have to pay the "chocolate bar tax."
Chocolate doesn't have government supported monopolies. The monopoly rights are what allow beyond free market extraction of funds, and any state supported method that drives prices beyond their competitive equilibrium is functionally equivalent to a tax (from a transfer point of view).
Copyright doesn't make the economy better or worse
No, but efficiency does.
It's like trying to argue which is better, a 99-cent hula hoop or a 99-cent song.
A 99 cent competitively produced hula hoop cannot be produced and sold for less than 99 cents. A 99 cent song on the other hand could, but for the government intervention, be produced for, say, 5 cents (if we use 5% efficiency, which seems on par for the music industry). That means that the wealth generated as consumer value for the song between 5 cents and 99 vents is lost to the economy with copyright (someone for whom the song is worth 98 cents wont buy it for 99 cents, while if it cost 5 cents, the added value to the economy would be 98-5 cents for that purchase, and the same effect for every purchase that would be made at valuepoints between 5 to 98 cents).
Copyright doesn't prevent such a system
Actually, by distorting the competitive rules and encouraging waste, it pretty much does.
Imagine any other government run scheme wasting 95% of the earmarked funding before the money gets to the intended recipients. It's rare with economic areas that make government programs look efficient, but the various IP types actually do.
Copyright (and other IP forms) are functionally equivalent to a form of taxation. It's transfer of money from one sector of the economy to another, and as such it does not affect the strength of the economy outside its comparative efficiency at generating value for the spent resources.
Perhaps you wish to claim that the copyright industries are extremely efficient at generating value for their consumers, much more than the value the consumer would have gotten from the alternate products he would have bought for those funds, but frankly, most breakdowns of where the money goes indicate otherwise. Which would suggest that copyright damages the wealth generation of an economy as a whole.
And of course, compared to a really optimized system of IP creation without monopoly effects and middleman funding, the economic outcome if utterly atrocious.
Slashdot Mirror
I seem to also hear arguments about how we pay the tax on gas already
Ah, but that money gets spent elsewhere, so we obviously need a new tax to collect the funds needed for the things the fuel taxes were intended for. At least, that seems to be the reasoning the article mentions.
I thought the purpose of taxes nowadays is to have money to funnel into something beneficial.
This is beneficial. Just not for you and me. Earl Blumenauer and the corporations he represents certainly seem to benefit tho. The modern snake oil salesmen in the tech business know how to dazzle their ways into the public wallet, and in the long run, tricking governments into paying for overly complicated solutions that cost as much in maintenance as they generate in revenue is a very lucrative prospect.
If piracy ended tomorrow, prices would NOT drop.
That's fundamental economics; reduce competition and prices will rise. And with protected monopoly rights, unauthorized copying is what passes for 'competition'.
Cows really aren't aware there going to die
Do you know if there is/have any links to any concrete evidence for that besides the obvious feelgood factor?
Theoretically the genetic component of fear of death should be similar for most more developed animals, simply because it's a genetic survival trait. Humans certainly have a vastly superior ability to express their feelings about it, and that, perhaps more unique, ability to carry knowledge between generations over centuries has left us with some rather extensive expressions and various more or less sane behaviour patterns. (How obvious would 'awareness of death' seem if we examined the first humans, without all that baggage?)
Still, many animals demonstrate rudimentary awareness of 'death' in situations when it strikes social relations or family, when they cause it themselves and when faced with some dangers causing death (as opposed to just causing pain), such as most not wandering randomly off cliffs, into water, avoiding predators and poisonous dangers, etc.
If we raised a group of free-range homo sapiens in a similar way to cattle, how would awareness of death express itself?
Personally, I suspect that most animals have much more self-awareness than we generally like to pretend. That we like to ignore it isn't strange, considering most humans can reject even human emotional and cognitive similarities if they're 'the enemy' in war, and so.
I'm not going to turn vegan or so, but neither am I going to kid myself. And I would prefer vat-grown and/or other variants of brainless meat, if available. But painless meat still wouldn't make much of an ethical difference; animals shouldn't be handled in such a way that they would experience significant pain, whether they can feel it or not.
Flash memory is at present growing in capacity much faster than magnetic drives.
If magnetic drives really push the capacity growth that might not hold; magnetic drives have shrunk in size and increased rotational speeds to decrease latency during that time as well. If they just simply give up the performance race and go for vast capacity they could move back to 5 1/4 full height disks. Can you imagine the amount of data you could stick on that surface area with modern technology? I wouldn't be surprised if a 25TB disk could be produced today, at a price not much higher than the cost of current high capacity disks.
Sure, latency would stink, but it's still faster to wait for those 20ms extra for any HD video you'd ever recorded to start than getting out of the sofa and locating some physical media.
Using SSD's for latency sensitive stuff and slower magnetic media for bulk storage is one possible way it can play out. It may change in the future, but (outside my professional capacity) I've found that not having enough storage has beaten not having fast enough storage every single time.
until the system has completed [writing data]
Still, when we're talking about writing data through an SSD IO cache, does that mean the system's finished writing the data to the IO cache or to the disk? With non-volatile caches it could be a major speed improvement to return as soon as it's committed to the SSD, but if you suffer a serious failure on the motherboard, how do you flush the SSD IO cache to the appropriate disks? Add in various more complex configurations like SAN storage and clustered disks and a large local cache could create serious problems.
Personally I'd like a generic device-mapper based hierarchial storage manager layer. If you could just overlay any block device and have it act as a cache for the lower storage layer that would be a very useful type of flexibility.
Price rarely equates to value and with monopoly protected products far less so. The whole point monopoly rights lies in the ability to control price without competition, and avoiding market discovery of the equilibrium point of value, when the price of non-scarce goods like the MPAA products would otherwise fall towards zero. The value to individual buyers on the other hand may lie anywhere above the sale price for the deals that do happen and anyway below the sale price for the deals that are foregone.
Of course, with an artificially scarce good, that means the value the good would hold for everyone who refrains from purchasing (due to price being higher than value) will be lost to the economy (as the marginal cost per reproduction approaches zero).
Either way the MPAA would be more accurate saying 'high price' content.
however I can see it failing just as often.
It will also be completely pointless in most of the world which uses first-to-file/publish and doesn't particularly care what's in somebody's drawer, no matter how notarized it is.
Publishing it yourself might perhaps be enough to avoid infringment claims, but IIRC, some places even have requirements for the notability of the publication to qualify something as being unpatentable due to prior knowledge.
I'm sure others with more familiarity with EU politics could name other examples.
There are examples both ways; for example, the Volvo/Scania merger that was rejected. European companies get their fair share of spankings, and I haven't seen any exceedingly obvious bias, just a bit more commitment to the 'competition' part of the free market. That in itself might create an appearance of a bias if US companies have a stronger desire to grow to larger market share through acquisitions, but it might not be a reflection of preferential treatment. I'm not saying it's not possible, but I'd have to see some more thorough statistics to agree there's an actual bias.
There are various ways to accomplish that, ranging from exporting the whole node-as-a-disk over iSCSI and use RAID on the importing system to overlay the appropriate level of redundancy and synchronization, to using things like DRBD to manage node-node sync (which could even give you site redundancy).
I'm not so sure; the feeling could simply be due to the sample interval of information becoming much, much shorter.
Innovation has never really been 'revolutionary', it just may have seemed so due to the slow propagation of information in earlier centuries, pretty much the same error in thinking that's behind the idea of patents. Innovations seem 'revolutionary' for those who had little insight in the fields, but were and are natural incremental advances on other incremental advances (for example, look at the number of 'lightbulbs' suddenly appearing during the two decades before and around it got 'invented').
As incremental steps are taken, eventually enough advances come together to create an economically useful and viable product. The step where advances turn possible, but unprofitable, technology into profitable technology is also one of the factors making things seem 'revolutionary'. Many of the things like flying 'cars' are possible but utterly uneconomical.
Tubes, transistors, cars, none of them could have come into existence as a 'revolutionary' invention much earlier; the prerequisites weren't there. Nor would they have come into existence much later; once the prerequisites were there technologically and economically, and the need existed, the opportunity was there.
The article also mentions 'cancer' as something which still hasn't got a cure; an obvious information problem. Both because 'cancer' isn't one disease, and also because there are various kinds that can be pretty much 'cured' or even prevented depending on their cause (for example, cancer caused by HPV, which can be vaccinated against). The fact that various vectors can screw with DNA isn't something that's going to have a revolutionary 'cure', but many incremental steps will reduce the mortality of many of them over time.
Still, DNA damage related mortality, whether in the form of cancers, or in the form of wear on the cell replacement and repair ability (which will result in eventual deadly events like strokes), which are basically two sides of the same coin, will still remain a large factor in causes of death. Especially since when you cure most other things, those are simply the ones that are going to put the nail in your coffin no matter what. Until incremental advances in various technologies come together to allow us to either replace specific cells in a perfectly targeted fashion or we can replace complete bodies.
you would miss it if it went away (and I'm not talking about the money part)
A job you'd miss is generally known as a 'hobby'. I certainly agree it's nice when your hobbies have such a level of demand that you can get paid even tho you'd do the work for free anyway, but for most people the best they can get is applying a skill they enjoy using, but doing it for someone else in some way that they wouldn't be doing for free.
One such area where this is obvious is fusion research, another is space exploration.
The energy density of fusion is such that it'd probably wipe out most other energy production related jobs. The wide availability of cheap electric energy would be great for replacing a lot of high-maintenance fossil fuel powered vehicles, replacing them with much more durable electric variants, wiping out a lot of maintenance related work. Great, but I doubt the net result will be more jobs.
And space exploration is certainly also nice, but again, most likely it'll be largely unmanned and even should it take off to unimaginable heights, it still simply isn't going to require huge amounts of manual labour.
Both will be critical to the continued employment and improvement of the standard of living of mankind.
Ah, see, those two things are, in the end, mutually exclusive. Improving the standard of living means creating more wealth for less work. It's the opposite of creating demand for work, a function that becomes more obvious and prevalent as we approach the end of scarcity.
When a production chain no longer needs human work the price falls to zero in a free market. Think air.
I think it's clear the flaw lies in the Lithium
Vent-with-flame seems to be pretty standard for lithium batteries, and as far as I've seen it's one of the safety features to prevent an actual real explosion. So (hopefully) I wouldn't put much stock in Dell working to prevent a recurrence; the alternative would be having it explode like a grenade and shredding the user with laptop (or iphone) shrapnel.
I'm glad all my laptops use NiMH
Personally I'd like to see consumer safety regulations to require any lithium battery equipped products to have readily available NiMH or other non-incendiary battery replacements. Personally I can live with shorter battery life for many things (which a li battery will have after a few months anyway), particularly if I can just exchange it for another if it runs out.
Disgustingly, this is also true of big pharmaceuticals.
It's a natural result of monopoly rights. In market segments where you have competition there's a reasonable natural limit on the value of marketing; raise your costs and prices too much and your customers will buy the competitors product instead. With monopoly rights there is nobody else to buy an equivalent product from. The price point at which your customers drop off is where they can no longer afford the product at all, which places the marketing ROI equilibrium far, far higher.
That's one of the fundamental efficiency problems with IP; use 'intellectual property' to transfer X dollars from the rest of the economy to the desired area and most of it will get lost in waste, such as marketing.
So it's not really marketing that needs extra regulation, it's monopoly rights that need to be scrapped. There are few methods of redistributing funds within the economy that are as wasteful and damaging as the monopoly.
When it does pay out it can be huge.
What the BW article misses is that even a 'huge pay out' isn't going to translate into huge numbers of jobs. In fact, the whole purpose of most 'breakthroughs' is to reduce the amount of human labour needed to reach desirable goals.
There aren't going to be any breakthroughs that create industrial jobs; robots and Chinese do that now. There aren't going to be any breakthroughs that create information work; computers do that now. Nanotech, biotech, AI tech, they're not going to create a demand for labour, they're going to reduce it.
Of course, that may seem like a problem if one is stuck in the belief that 'jobs' are desirable in themselves. They're not, of course, jobs are what you don't want to do. The whole point of the free market economy is to reduce the amount of undesirable work needed to produce the desirable wealth; the ideal state and end-game of economy would be that no more work would need to be undertaken to obtain any particular expression of desire: the economy where all undesirable work is fully automated. The fact that jobs are disappearing means that we're approaching the goal; production capacity starts to outpace demand (in relation to the value of free time).
The fact that we have an uneven distribution of the actual labour that does still need to be accomplished, now, that is a different thing. But the problem that some sit on their asses while others work too much isn't productively solved by trying to find pointless work for the ones sitting on their asses, but by biting the bullet and doing some basic science research in the field of economics and working out how to play out the end of the era of scarcity.
The artists, the songwriters and the (tax)payers. Both those to whom the money is given, and those from who the money is taken through the state action should be represented. The former to explain why economic resources should be diverted to them instead of all the other possible expenditures, and those paying for it to decide whether it's a reasonable expenditure.
Unfortunately it appears that few politicians can serve the paying parties interest in this case as most appear to believe the money diverted through copyright comes into existence out of nowhere, instead of being taken from other economic activities, just because it's not accounted for in the state budget.
Just because they don't call it a tax doesn't mean it isn't.
Rather like copyright. Which is also government enforced. And rather damaging to a competitive free market.
The difficulty of getting paid for producing news is due to the simple fact that there is a vast overproduction of it, far more than the readers can consume. The artificial segmentation done by dividing it into 'channels' or 'papers' is undesirable in itself, and Murdoch probably realizes that he's trapped in a completely obsolete niche, and would do anything to get out of there.
You'd have to do quite a lot of work with the surface; you have to deal with water accumulation too, so you'd have to structure the surface to allow run off and rapid displacement to avoid causing hydroplaning.
Still, there are some interesting possibilities. Instead of just glass you could use a silicone/glass hybrid, which could possibly obtain characteristics similar to asphalt, while still retaining translucency.
I wouldn't expect the translucency to last tho; however you build it it's going to get covered with a serious amount dirt in a short time. The engineering issues are, perhaps, not insurmountable, but they are bad enough that you'd be better off simply sticking the solar panels on the sides of the road instead and avoiding the most intractable parts of the problem.
If one necessarily wants to use the actual road surface as energy collector I'd explore the possibilities of simply running tubing below it to gather heat instead (which could also still be used to de-ice it). I'm not sure it'd gather enough energy to be worth it, but it'd certainly be a whole lot easier and more feasible than the photovoltaic option.
US presidents and other political representatives tend to range around 25% of eligible voters. During the previous, or if it was two terms ago, if I remember correctly, the congressional majority had the votes of about 18% of the eligible voters. Some systems are easier to game than others.
Perhaps one could automatically regard all non-voters as votes for reformation of the election system, and assign independent trustees who would be allowed to vote only on such reforms. A built in tendency to fix disenfranchisement, so to speak.
I'm just telling that the intention counts in courts aswell.
With a corrupt judge it doesn't really matter either way. Once you pass that point and accept such blatant corruption in the legal system, the actual sentencing says less about guilt than about who wants what.
Without a functioning legal system one is left with only the option of considering the ethics of the situation, in which case TPB has done no wrong.
But hey, had it been 2k years ago, and the fishery and baking industry getting pissed off because someone cut into their profits by sharing copied fish and bread, they'd have gotten nailed to a cross. So it could've been worse.
I think generally the powerful have more to gain from anonymity then the poor.
The rich and powerful may lose their positions, but the poor may lose their means of sustenance or face other, worse, forms of persecution.
We might wish we had a world where nobody would have to fear persecution for their political views, their religion or their sexual preferences and one that would always remain so tolerant. But we don't. We might wish we'd have a world where all your friends, co workers and relatives would be happy to know your intimate details. But we don't. And while we might wish we could choose the beliefs and preferences of everyone we know and everyone we have to work with, the fact is, many can't.
Some things we keep from people because those facets of ones life is none of their business. Sometimes to protect them, as not to offend them, sometimes to protect ourselves.
If it was ever possible to air everyone's dirty laundry I think I would welcome it.
Perhaps. A lot of deserving people would get what's coming to them. But so would a lot of undeserving ones.
On balance I think it would harm more than help; the loss of free dialogue and speech from many who fear persecution would by far outweigh any gain of fewer hurt feelings by people who don't know how to ignore assholes.
Having a uni-polar world where google is king is in staunch opposition to the spirit of the free market
Copyrighted works have nothing to do with a free market; any and all 'monopoly' power that Google obtains here is directly derived from copyright.
In a free market anyone would be free to scan and publish anything, any way they like. If there was social desire to fund authors beyond the free market, the easiest and probably most efficient way to be to slap a per-revenue levy off sales/copies/whatever going directly to the authors in question.
The perception of the population has been changed.
I doubt it, most (online) polls I've seen show very little acceptance for the ip lobbyist view.
Further, vpns and f2f networks are already getting wider deployments all the time. VPNs bypasses the snooping, and once the move to f2f becomes prevalent it'll all just be encrypted friend-copies-to-friend which is basically untracable and unmonitorable.
start again with something sensible.
Without a doubt. It's not very hard to construct sensible systems of reward for creativity, as long as one starts out with clearly defined goals of getting appropriate rewards to the creators. The IP system was always intended as a means of having the middle men support the crown by handing them indirect taxation right, so it's no wonder it tends to be inequitable and draconian.
If you want candy you have to pay the "chocolate bar tax."
Chocolate doesn't have government supported monopolies. The monopoly rights are what allow beyond free market extraction of funds, and any state supported method that drives prices beyond their competitive equilibrium is functionally equivalent to a tax (from a transfer point of view).
Copyright doesn't make the economy better or worse
No, but efficiency does.
It's like trying to argue which is better, a 99-cent hula hoop or a 99-cent song.
A 99 cent competitively produced hula hoop cannot be produced and sold for less than 99 cents. A 99 cent song on the other hand could, but for the government intervention, be produced for, say, 5 cents (if we use 5% efficiency, which seems on par for the music industry). That means that the wealth generated as consumer value for the song between 5 cents and 99 vents is lost to the economy with copyright (someone for whom the song is worth 98 cents wont buy it for 99 cents, while if it cost 5 cents, the added value to the economy would be 98-5 cents for that purchase, and the same effect for every purchase that would be made at valuepoints between 5 to 98 cents).
Copyright doesn't prevent such a system
Actually, by distorting the competitive rules and encouraging waste, it pretty much does.
Imagine any other government run scheme wasting 95% of the earmarked funding before the money gets to the intended recipients. It's rare with economic areas that make government programs look efficient, but the various IP types actually do.
and the economy will falter again.
Copyright (and other IP forms) are functionally equivalent to a form of taxation. It's transfer of money from one sector of the economy to another, and as such it does not affect the strength of the economy outside its comparative efficiency at generating value for the spent resources.
Perhaps you wish to claim that the copyright industries are extremely efficient at generating value for their consumers, much more than the value the consumer would have gotten from the alternate products he would have bought for those funds, but frankly, most breakdowns of where the money goes indicate otherwise. Which would suggest that copyright damages the wealth generation of an economy as a whole.
And of course, compared to a really optimized system of IP creation without monopoly effects and middleman funding, the economic outcome if utterly atrocious.