"Even if only one in a thousand comes up with a great idea it'll all pay off."
The trouble is, as a company solidifies, those coming up with great ideas may not congregate towards positions of power, and those with positions of power may not appreciate new ideas.
Sortof like Ballmers own company...
Google might not have solidified and incurred the usual management problems yet, so maybe a random strategy might work for them. Still, personally I'm sceptical of any company that does the massive hires in all direction thing. We've seen it so many times before, and I (sadly) dont see Google as being that different.
Monsanto has knowingly poisoned people several times before. The company is pretty much the poster boy for corporate death penalty.
To quote the wikipedia entry: 'On February 22 2002, Monsanto was found guilty of "negligence, wantonness, suppression of truth, nuisance, trespass, and outrage" Under Alabama law the rare claim of outrage requires "conduct so outrageous in character and extreme in degree as to go beyond all possible bounds of decency so as to be regarded as atrocious and intolerable in civilized society".'
I dont see Greenpeace being beyond being manipulative, but Monsanto is in a whole different league. In fact, I have a hard time understanding why the company isnt permanently terminated and its governors banned from conducting any business anywhere.
"Could these human beings genuinely believe that copyright infringement is actually a problem?"
If you genuinely believe that copyright infringement is a problem you've either failed to sufficiently research the issue or you're more interested in the growth of the percentage of wealth in certain pockets than the growth of wealth in the economy as a whole.
If you need the enterprise support and certification with all sorts of enterprise applications and hardware, you dont have that many choices, it usually comes down to SuSE or Redhat (with the rest of the contenders being too young and unproven or too small).
If you also want a credible commitment to Free software and both the letter and spirit of the GPL, which your debian leanings may indicate, that pretty much leaves Redhat.
Personally I use it for enterprise stuff. And a combination of CentOS and Fedora takes care of the stable but free as in beer and bleeding edge aspects, while remaining relevant to the work situation.
Were there no professional considerations, I might very well be using debian too tho.
Of course I wont be using a Dell provided install, it'll probably be outdated by the time it ships anyway, so what would be the point?
Personally I'm interested in Dell shipping linux because of two things: first, if they ship _one_ working Linux version, any version, the nature of the GPL makes sure that any other Linux version will also work, or easy to get to work.
Second: For ethical reasons I prefer not to give money to Microsoft, which means I'm through with buying products which entail payment to them.
In the end, any fussiness regarding Linux distributions simply doesnt impact Dell any more than Windows users fussiness about games, applications or desktop backgrounds. I dont care what they ship on it; I want the assurance that the fundamental product will work as expected. Ensure the hardware is supported by available open drivers, ship something reasonably (not too new, not too old) mainstream, and leave the users themselves to deal with their own fussiness.
"and use their considerable legal and financial resources to try to ensure that they get a favorable ruling."
I doubt there's any point to that; the courts basically cannot resolve this issue in any useful way within the current legal framework. The idea of handing out monopolies might have been useful when the point was to keep the kings friends rich and happy and the content controlled, but they simply cannot be reconciled with a free market economy and todays rate of technological and content evolution. As long as the system is tied to monopoly rights you only have the choice of who you're going to allow to screw everyone else (which fundamentally means, the more 'IP' we have, the more all of us are going to get screwed (and in slightly more economical terms, the more waste we'll get in the system due to monopoly inefficiency)).
It would be more useful to engage in actively trying to fundamentally restructure the 'IP' incentive system to a fundamentally non-confrontational incentive system. Look over the foundation.
Some say we need an incentive to be creative. While I personally disagree to a fair extent (and things like free software indicates otherwise), ok, I'll buy that maybe some people do need an incentive, and that some creative talent could be more creatively productive if they had a certain economic security. As the point of an intellectual incentive system would be to maximize creativity, that leads to the conclusion that we somehow may need to finance creativity beyond what a fully competetive market would do. So, say, a popular creative work of value to many people should conceivably generate enough revenue for the creator/participants to live off for a certain time (too short would be bad and an insufficient incentive, too long and there would be no (again, claimed) economic incentive to create further works (and spend too much on a single creative work, and you get fewer works for total economic resources spent instead).
So, how do we determine what works merit incentive? Let the free market handle it; works that get copied the most, ie, are most highly desired should probably be the first to receive incentives (until their useful payout is exceeded, the authors et. al die, etc, and the incentive no longer serves the creative purpose). As there would be no right to prevent copying anymore, there would be no particular reason to avoid reporting the numbers of copies being made, ie, it would free up anything from p2p networks through youtube, IPTV broadcasters, network radio broadcasters, etc, to record popularity of works and lay the foundation of who gets paid.
Then the final question becomes, how does one finance the system? First, realize that the current system is essentially a tax. The costs to the economy are very real and altho the copyright holders have a strong incentive to shut up about the actual costs to the economy, the billions they collect are as real as the billions the IRS collect. The difference is, with the billions the IRS collect, there's actually some theoretical and nominal responsibility and accounting of the costs to the economy and what they're used for.
As responsibility, accounting and some form of democratic control over incentive systems is generally regarded as a good thing, I'd say moving the collection of revenue and responsibility for the system over to the state agencies usually responsible for such things to be fairly reasonable. So where in the economy would it be most equitable to collect the funding? Personally, I'd say, where the money's made. IE, slap a tax on youtube ad revenue. Slap a tax on movie theatres. Slap a tax on IPTV revenues. In fact, slap a tax right over anyone who makes money off selling, distributing, or performing the works in question. As the works being played is recorded and accounted for (something which is already done in most cases), the funds gathered from display of that work will primarily be going to the creators of the work, making sure the incentive generated is both as equitably gathered and a
"shrewd buyer of pre-made systems to get a much better deal"
Take a look around for the cheapest-ass components you can find (the ones you wouldnt actually buy), and you'll find you get about the same price as Dell prebuilts. And they often appear to use those same cheap-ass components in their low-end systems (in fact, look at the low end pre-made systems and often you'll find they include components that arent even sold as parts anymore (motherboards without Gbit lan? Are they buying up RMA returns?)).
I dont really call that a good deal. A cheap deal perhaps, but you're not getting best price/performance, nor are you getting quality parts.
Then you start adding up the actual real benefits of building your own systems; standardized formats, easy upgrades, and if you keep architectures down, you can easily move parts around so upgrading your game machine lets your server inherit the CPU, your wifes desktop inherits the GFX card, etc, so every upgrade becomes a cascade improvement that pays several times the value invested. Further, once you have a few machines you no longer have to invest in new cases when you need a new PC. Then go even further, consolidate storage, and use diskless clients PXE booting off iSCSI (well, ok, some of us may be going a bit far, but you get the point...), and you can cut costs of a new desktop down to motherboard, CPU and RAM. At that point, it's not even a contest anymore.
If you buy a new PC every five years tho, I'd have to agree, you're probably better off getting a Dell and throwing it in the trash when you get the next one. But hey, this is Slashdot, and there may actually be a nerd or two here for whom the economics look a bit different.
"Does is mean authoritarian/libertarian, or socialist/capitalist?"
These days it means pretty much fascist/socio-fascist.
Both generalized political leanings have become corrupted with authoritarianism to the extent that neither can be associated with either civil liberties or free market capitalism.
Um, that's just the point, you _dont_ have to replace your routers or IPv4 specific software. You can run IPv6 encapsulated in IPv4 over incapable network segments, you can use gateways and proxies in the cases where v4-only services need access to v6-only service (altho I cant really see why your AD servers would need to surf v6 only websites).
"Eats up about 5 years of your IT budget"
In that case I pity your IT budget. If your IT staff actually knows what they're doing it doesnt need to cost much. Or anything. The difficult part isnt rolling out IPv6, it's ending IPv4. And you can let that take care of itself by letting the unsupported things die of old age.
"they don't run servers"
Server in the realm of networking isnt the hardware you put in a big room somewhere. Client software like netmeeting is a 'server'. Backup software, configuration software, etc, etc.
Put your company behind a NAT. Then explain to your boss why he cant connect with netmeeting to the CEO of a newly acquired company. Try to integrate networks after mergers. Put your network behind a nat, and eventually you'll need to do the IPv6 installation _anyway_ to get some new functionality.
NAT doesnt solve the same problems that IPv6 does; it's at best a temporary stopgap measure.
Not really that much change. You can do a transitional rollout and simply use IPv6 for new functionality (over 6to4 to avoid having to upgrade too much network infrastructure).
Dont look at it as a change, it's an addition. And a very nice one actually.
Continue the current trend with virtualization and ready-to-run service vm images, and in a few years you'll be thinking about a vm like you do a process today. Imagine the advantages, each service a self-contained unit, no upgrade woes, you get process migration capabilities, etc.
But then, you'd need an ip-adress per 'process'.
Get a bit imaginative and I think we can use up those addresses if we really want to...
Well, while native support might be nice, you dont actually need it. 6to4 works nicely.
I've been running IPv6 over 6to4 for several months (once you start using Xen and get a lot of machines and/or have friends machines you have access to, it's quite nice to be able to ssh straight into your destination without multi-stage jumps). I was surprised at how far it had come and how easy it was to set up these days.
To set up a linux firewall/nat box as a 6to4 router, you basically just have to install radvd, configure it to use your external v4 address as your v6 prefix, turn on v6 forwarding, add the route to the magic 192.88.99.1 (automagic 'nearest v6 gateway address') through sit0, add the network route on your internal interface (v6 prefix plus your choice of network address) and you're good to go. The machines on the inside simply autoconfigured themselves once radvd broadcast the route availability.
The only part still lagging was firewall support, as most GUI's dont support v6 rules. Still, writing firewall rules by hand is a _lot_ less painful when you dont have to deal with nat and port forwarding.
"Dell, of course, doesn't want to start selling PCs with Linux preinstalled..."... because they'd lose 'marketing incentives' and kickbacks, ie, get a price hike for Windows but called something else to make it less illegal, from Microsoft if they did.
Frankly, the rest is just bullshit excuses. Dell knows the rest isnt a problem; they could easily sell a laptop without OS and support, and publish a detailed hardware listing or simply test-load a modern dist on the hardware to evaluate compatibility.
This is the good old Microsoft relationship mindgame again. You sell what they tell you to sell, or they'll cut off your airsupply and throw a chair at you.
"So we would only have access to music that the government approves of?"
Ugh, no. Maybe I was unclear on that, but the money should of course be divided out in a similar way it is now; the works generating the revenues gets the payout. Pete Seeger gets a CD sold, he gets money, Dixie Chicks play on the radio, they get money. John Doe gets downloaded five thousand times, he gets points for that.
It might be useful to modify the payout to a curve, as there probably exists a point where the artists dont actually get more creative the more money they get, and probably a date cutoff as well so you have to keep creating to keep getting paid, and have the overflow finance a larger part of the long tail (according to consumer demand, of course). That would be where the actual measurable statistics get used.
The government doesnt figure in to the 'choice' part at all, it just collects the revenues and pays it to the appropriate recepient according to the rules set up.
"Who has the authority to decide what is "valuable"?"
Adam Smiths invisible hand? Value is an economic concept, in a free market, most 'valuable' is what, given a choice, consumers choose.
"they're spending money incentivising the wrong thing."
As the incentivicing would be tied to distribution levels, the money would be spent incentivicing exactly what people want (modulo with the extent to which incentives are needed; it's questionable wether X millions makes Britney more creative, so a ceiling on payouts may get us more McKee's/long tail paid for the total spending, ie maximizing the benefit we're getting from what it costs the economy).
"And what if I don't listen to music?"
Um, as the taxes/royalties would be collected directly off revenue generating activities tied to the material in question, if you're not paying for any music, nor listening to any music for which someone else is paying (commercials, etc), then you're not paying anything at all.
Basically, pay $10 for a CD with Britney, Britney gets a point, $5 is collected as incentive, Britney gets a payout for the point, unless she's at the hypothetical max ceiling at which point the payout passes to next most desired creator. (Sums are, of course, arbitrary examples, Britney in this case is a representative for the stakeholders in that CD, including writers, and other artists).
"The free market _can_ work here,"
It would be the closest you can get to a free market in this case; the whole problem is that people keep insisting that we need incentives for creativity (which I personally find dubious, but I'm willing to play along... until we can get solid data).
This is one way we'd get a fairly non-destructive system. Collect taxes off revenue generating activities tied to the material (IMO, most equitable collection form), pay them out according to market demand (most equitable division system, and the closest to a real free market), modulate it by maximizing desired factor (as many most desired artists as possible can get sustained), and dont prevent copying (thus allowing free market rules to apply to maximize efficiency in distribution etc.)
I dont have that much against mandatory royalties on revenue generating activities. If we truly need an 'incentive' for creativity they're more compatible with a free market than monopoly rights. And they're far easier to measure and manage for the least damage/most benefit to the economy.
The first problem with the current setup is that it's put under industry administration (whose interests are vastly divergent with both most musicians and the public, witness the current example), when in fact it's a tax and should be under government administration. That way it'd be subject to the same constraints as other taxation forms; is it reasonably equitably collected, do we get our money's worth from the spending (ie, does it finance as many artists and creators as possible for the money we're willing to spend?), is this a reasonable level of expenditure? What's more, we could actually measure the number of new works and how they change depending on the level of spending so we could finally get real data rather than imaginary numbers made up to support organized con men.
The second problem is that the RIAA corps are excluded. If we need an incentive for creative endeavors, _any_ revenue generating activity using 'copyrighted' material should be subject to the same taxation, wether plays on the radio, sales over the internet or the printing of CD's. Remove the 'copy' aspect of 'copyright' and replace it with a generalized non-transferrable 'incentiveright'. Allow free copying, printing and distribution of materials, let anyone from your local supermarket to online shops freely copy the material, as long as they pay a percentage of any revenue as 'incentive tax'/'royalty', and make sure the incentive actually goes to the creators. And make sure it goes to them in appropriate portions to maximise creativity.
Imagine the possibilities; you could go to the local supermarket and print a CD with whatever tracks you want on it. You could buy an USB disk of the nights music at a club. You could get a complete recording of the show when you exit a concert. Without copyright but with a simple levy on the revenue, whole hosts of new business and value opportunities would open up, while still maintaining a (more measurable) incentive for creativity.
"There's not much you can do to avoid these issues"
Sure there is. How about next time someone comes up with the idea to change 'time' we just stick'em in the loony bin with the rest of their fellow 'timetravellers' and tell anyone who wants to 'save daylight' they can get up an hour earlier. Which is what they're doing anyway.
"Enforcing such a system that you describe would be difficult at best."
First, dont underestimate the cost of the effort of enforcing the current system. While many of the costs are distributed around everything from the writer who as to spend time negotiating rather than writing through courts and corporate lawyers, the costs are still there. Personally, I think administration of a consolidated system would probably cost the economy as a whole less than the current one.
"At least there's constitutional support (and common law) support for copyrights,"
There's constitutional support for securing exclusive rights for authors. What nature those rights take isnt explicitly specified; I dont think it's too far of a stretch to modernize it as exclusive rights to recieve monetary incentives for their work rather than exclusive rights to prevent copying.
And remember, for both these points; in many countries such mandatory licensing fees are already collected from everything from shopping malls to radio stations and distributed according to plays. Moving that function over to the government and extending it to serve for books and video, as well as audio, and for physical incarnations as well as broadcasting and public performance isnt really that far from what is already done in some segments.
The main goals if restructuring intellectual incentives would be to simplify the process, remove the blocks in distribution and derivative evolution of creative works, and ensure a larger part of the total economic expenditures goes directly to the creators of works (as well as remove incentives for non-related activities like marketing and sales channel control, instead leaving that to competetive equilibrium).
Essentially, the paradigm of publishers owning the presses and the distribution would end (in a less chaotic fashion than is currently the case), while still maintaining the economic incentive to the authors/creators. For someone with your business savvy at searching out attractive content you might very well go even better. And for the long tail of less successful authors they might at least get paid for the distribution their works merit, rather than a blank rejection.
Of course, that depends on how the system is balanced (having an incentive which pays you enough to retire on your first publication might not necessarily be in our civilizations creativitys best interest (particularly if it means twenty other writers dont get paid at all). Nor one that has you starving.) But the point is that it's possible to structure incentives in different ways than exclusive copying rights.
"I believe your assumptions that copyrights protect publishers more than writers would cause an absolute shit storm among the writers I know."
Go into a more careful analysis of the market; the technology exists today that could easily accomodate print-on-demand services. Technically we could see any bookstore printing books for the end-consumer. Were such a system legally feasible, we would see an even more rapid advancement in printing tech.
Imagine, no more out of print books, no more expensive transportation and storage costs, consumers could decide what format they wanted the books in, etc.
Instead of copyright we could have incentive legislation merely requireing recording of copies printed and sold, where the authors get paid as their works get sold.
Under such a system the authors could easily get more of the end-price than they do today. Of course the publishers would get to know a new meaning of cutthroat competition. So I stand by that claim that the current copyright regime protects the publishers from competition more than it protects authors.
"It's the asset value that they deal with in negotiations, unless they're under captive contract to a publisher, and even then, there's still an asset value to the copyright."
Traditionally, and in many cases even today, the publisher has had the upper hand in negotiations, both from owning the actual presses and access to sales channels, and from actually being in 'business', and thus tending to be much more skilled in negotiating.
With a mandatory licensing/creative incentive system you wouldnt have to bother with negotiation at all; anyone could take it, print it and sell it, and you'd still get paid. Heck, technically, you could even get paid for blogs and your slashdot comments, if someone else made money off them.
Intellectual 'property' isnt ownership rights, it's monopoly rights. It's a limitation in _everyone elses_ actual ownership and property rights. The owner of a CD is deprived of his property right to do what he wishes with that CD, including copying it. An independent inventor is denied the right to produce what he himself made because someone else holds a paper saying they're the only ones who have the right to produce that thing.
Calling it intellectual 'property' is a recent development, with an intended propaganda component, and it's certainly not the name used in many other languages. 'Immaterial rights' is an alternative name used in some other languages.
But that, of course, would be far less confusing and likely to trick people into thinking it's property.
"But if you're opposed to the general notion of ownership rights, then your arguments are 220 years overdue."
Monopolies are irreconcileable with property rights, so I'm afraid you can only argue one side. And if you're arguing _for_ monopoly rights, then you're arguing _against_ free market capitalism.
Which, incidentally, I'd tend to agree, is the most efficient economic system yet devised. Which is why monopoly rights _have_ to go.
"used to create insane amounts of marketing, world-wide."
And, of course, the insane amount of marketing is needed to counter the insane amount of marketing that other makers get. Essentially making sure a large part of the capital available from the end-consumer goes, not to fund more movies, but to maintain a pointless marketing war that neither consumers nor creators want or benefit from.
Of course, copyright doesnt actually mean you get paid for your work, it just means you have a legal basis for paying a lawyer to drag someone to court (which in most cases is rather unlikely to generate revenue for anyone but the lawyer).
If you wanted to get paid for the work, you'd be far better off with a system where you'd automatically get credited and/or paid if and when your work is used in revenue creating activities.
Of course, as we all know, copyright was never intended to get the writers paid anyway, so it's hardly surprising it doesnt work very well for that.
"just like the baker down the street, the cop at the corner"
The baker cant prevent anyone else from making the same breads he's making, nor can the cop demand protection money for security at his corner and beat up anyone else offering the same security (well, in theory at least.). One job is competetive and little regulated, the other is socially financed, regulated and with a budget. Neither gets exclusive monopoly rights.
"If they had, we'd be likely to want to stop them for the theft they made of our hard work."
Wouldnt it be slightly more constructive if you simply got paid if they made money off your work? Basically, skip the whole copy-prevention part and replace it with a mandatory licensing fee for any and all revenue generating reproduction, wether radio, CD's or internet downloads?
"not just from the northern hemisphere to the south."
Not only that, the effect it has would vary with the direction you put the TV, so actually 'manufacturing' them to compensate would require having different models depending on which way it's going to face...
Still, my 32 inch CRT TV actually has a geomagnetic correction setting. And I recall that when I moved the tv from one end of the living room to the other I actually had to use that one as the display had changed tilt a few millimeters (noticable in a MythTV gui, where a previously straight line across the bottom now tilted slightly, otherwise I'd never have noticed it).
Wether it was actually geomagnetic causes for the tilt or changing distance to nearby power installations or something else I cant say tho.
"Many of the people expressing these views were just average people2
And people who have, apparently, not studied the issues. The idea that copyright creates an incentive to create is proving dubious (both judging from the amount of entirely unpaid work that goes on without incentives and above all, there are far better ways to direct an incentive to the actual creators if desired), nor does copyright hinder the exploitation of creators who get a miniscule breadcrumb of the total resources paid by the consumers.
A real incentive and protective from exploitation would guarantee payment of sales revenue to the authors and creators, not to the holder of a particular monopoly.
But then again, look at the history of IP and you realize it never was about the creators, it was always about the friends of the crown. The authors were just an excuse.
'"intellectual property" and "real property" aren't at all the same thing, when in fact they are more similar than different.'
They're entirely different things. Intellectual property is more aptly named 'intellectual monopoly'. It's not ownership of a specific piece of property, it's a monopoly preventing anyone else from duplicating that piece of property.
On the other hand, you're not prevented from copying 'real property'. In fact, it's highly encouraged, as cheap and efficient creation of more valuable items is the very foundation of increasing wealth within the free market economy.
"And tell me, how are you "scientifically" going to justify a "correct" copyright period? "
Once you drop the industry-imposed propaganda blinders about 'property' it's not that hard. Realize it's a specific point-taxation system where we hand out monopoly-profit (ie, a taxation form) as the payout in a social incentive system instead.
Lets skip the history lesson and go to the actual purposes your friends claimed earlier and go from them.
We want to create an incentive for creative talent. Ok. We want to make sure that when money's made, a part goes to the creators. Ok. We want to make sure recognition remains. Ok.
And 'the correct period'? That's just a distraction derived from the deficient monopoly construct. There is no correct period, there's (possibly) a correct amount of _money_ that maximizes the level of creative talent we support for what we're willing to pay.
In the current system we might as well be burning the money; the vast majority of the money the consumers are spending never makes it to the creators. Monopoly rights shifts incentive to channel control and marketing as revenue maximizers and has a built in incentive to have _as few_ as possible 'hits', marginalizing the rest. Preventing entry into the controlled channels maximises revenue for the remaining corporate owners, adding more creators merely dilutes the stream and increases per-work costs as a percentage of revenue. IE, it nowhere near serves the purpose you claimed you wanted.
There are many alternative possible systems; personally I tend to favour entirely skipping the 'copy' aspect of copyright and replacing it with recognition rights and revenue incentive rights. As we're already paying a form of taxation on IP works, change that over to an official form of incentive tax. IE, any revenue activity tied to recognized works pays a percentage of sales price to the incentive funds, which then pay out to authors and artists. For example, for a CD, you'd simply have a 50% incentive tax/royalty on the sales price (which would fall towards actual manufacturing price, so prices would be far lower than today, while still shifting more money towards artists and creators). The incentive would automatically pay out to the artists and creators, essentially replacing the 'contract' aspect of current creator/publisher relations with a mediated system where the creators will automatically get paid when revenue is generated off their works.
Such a system would also have the advantage that we can actually budget for it, we can scientifically me
Slashdot Mirror
"Even if only one in a thousand comes up with a great idea it'll all pay off."
The trouble is, as a company solidifies, those coming up with great ideas may not congregate towards positions of power, and those with positions of power may not appreciate new ideas.
Sortof like Ballmers own company...
Google might not have solidified and incurred the usual management problems yet, so maybe a random strategy might work for them. Still, personally I'm sceptical of any company that does the massive hires in all direction thing. We've seen it so many times before, and I (sadly) dont see Google as being that different.
Monsanto has knowingly poisoned people several times before. The company is pretty much the poster boy for corporate death penalty.
To quote the wikipedia entry: 'On February 22 2002, Monsanto was found guilty of "negligence, wantonness, suppression of truth, nuisance, trespass, and outrage" Under Alabama law the rare claim of outrage requires "conduct so outrageous in character and extreme in degree as to go beyond all possible bounds of decency so as to be regarded as atrocious and intolerable in civilized society".'
I dont see Greenpeace being beyond being manipulative, but Monsanto is in a whole different league. In fact, I have a hard time understanding why the company isnt permanently terminated and its governors banned from conducting any business anywhere.
"Could these human beings genuinely believe that copyright infringement is actually a problem?"
If you genuinely believe that copyright infringement is a problem you've either failed to sufficiently research the issue or you're more interested in the growth of the percentage of wealth in certain pockets than the growth of wealth in the economy as a whole.
IE, brainwashing or corruption.
"Anything I should be enthralled by"
If you need the enterprise support and certification with all sorts of enterprise applications and hardware, you dont have that many choices, it usually comes down to SuSE or Redhat (with the rest of the contenders being too young and unproven or too small).
If you also want a credible commitment to Free software and both the letter and spirit of the GPL, which your debian leanings may indicate, that pretty much leaves Redhat.
Personally I use it for enterprise stuff. And a combination of CentOS and Fedora takes care of the stable but free as in beer and bleeding edge aspects, while remaining relevant to the work situation.
Were there no professional considerations, I might very well be using debian too tho.
Of course I wont be using a Dell provided install, it'll probably be outdated by the time it ships anyway, so what would be the point?
Personally I'm interested in Dell shipping linux because of two things: first, if they ship _one_ working Linux version, any version, the nature of the GPL makes sure that any other Linux version will also work, or easy to get to work.
Second: For ethical reasons I prefer not to give money to Microsoft, which means I'm through with buying products which entail payment to them.
In the end, any fussiness regarding Linux distributions simply doesnt impact Dell any more than Windows users fussiness about games, applications or desktop backgrounds. I dont care what they ship on it; I want the assurance that the fundamental product will work as expected. Ensure the hardware is supported by available open drivers, ship something reasonably (not too new, not too old) mainstream, and leave the users themselves to deal with their own fussiness.
"and use their considerable legal and financial resources to try to ensure that they get a favorable ruling."
I doubt there's any point to that; the courts basically cannot resolve this issue in any useful way within the current legal framework. The idea of handing out monopolies might have been useful when the point was to keep the kings friends rich and happy and the content controlled, but they simply cannot be reconciled with a free market economy and todays rate of technological and content evolution. As long as the system is tied to monopoly rights you only have the choice of who you're going to allow to screw everyone else (which fundamentally means, the more 'IP' we have, the more all of us are going to get screwed (and in slightly more economical terms, the more waste we'll get in the system due to monopoly inefficiency)).
It would be more useful to engage in actively trying to fundamentally restructure the 'IP' incentive system to a fundamentally non-confrontational incentive system. Look over the foundation.
Some say we need an incentive to be creative. While I personally disagree to a fair extent (and things like free software indicates otherwise), ok, I'll buy that maybe some people do need an incentive, and that some creative talent could be more creatively productive if they had a certain economic security. As the point of an intellectual incentive system would be to maximize creativity, that leads to the conclusion that we somehow may need to finance creativity beyond what a fully competetive market would do. So, say, a popular creative work of value to many people should conceivably generate enough revenue for the creator/participants to live off for a certain time (too short would be bad and an insufficient incentive, too long and there would be no (again, claimed) economic incentive to create further works (and spend too much on a single creative work, and you get fewer works for total economic resources spent instead).
So, how do we determine what works merit incentive? Let the free market handle it; works that get copied the most, ie, are most highly desired should probably be the first to receive incentives (until their useful payout is exceeded, the authors et. al die, etc, and the incentive no longer serves the creative purpose). As there would be no right to prevent copying anymore, there would be no particular reason to avoid reporting the numbers of copies being made, ie, it would free up anything from p2p networks through youtube, IPTV broadcasters, network radio broadcasters, etc, to record popularity of works and lay the foundation of who gets paid.
Then the final question becomes, how does one finance the system? First, realize that the current system is essentially a tax. The costs to the economy are very real and altho the copyright holders have a strong incentive to shut up about the actual costs to the economy, the billions they collect are as real as the billions the IRS collect. The difference is, with the billions the IRS collect, there's actually some theoretical and nominal responsibility and accounting of the costs to the economy and what they're used for.
As responsibility, accounting and some form of democratic control over incentive systems is generally regarded as a good thing, I'd say moving the collection of revenue and responsibility for the system over to the state agencies usually responsible for such things to be fairly reasonable. So where in the economy would it be most equitable to collect the funding? Personally, I'd say, where the money's made. IE, slap a tax on youtube ad revenue. Slap a tax on movie theatres. Slap a tax on IPTV revenues. In fact, slap a tax right over anyone who makes money off selling, distributing, or performing the works in question. As the works being played is recorded and accounted for (something which is already done in most cases), the funds gathered from display of that work will primarily be going to the creators of the work, making sure the incentive generated is both as equitably gathered and a
"shrewd buyer of pre-made systems to get a much better deal"
Take a look around for the cheapest-ass components you can find (the ones you wouldnt actually buy), and you'll find you get about the same price as Dell prebuilts. And they often appear to use those same cheap-ass components in their low-end systems (in fact, look at the low end pre-made systems and often you'll find they include components that arent even sold as parts anymore (motherboards without Gbit lan? Are they buying up RMA returns?)).
I dont really call that a good deal. A cheap deal perhaps, but you're not getting best price/performance, nor are you getting quality parts.
Then you start adding up the actual real benefits of building your own systems; standardized formats, easy upgrades, and if you keep architectures down, you can easily move parts around so upgrading your game machine lets your server inherit the CPU, your wifes desktop inherits the GFX card, etc, so every upgrade becomes a cascade improvement that pays several times the value invested. Further, once you have a few machines you no longer have to invest in new cases when you need a new PC. Then go even further, consolidate storage, and use diskless clients PXE booting off iSCSI (well, ok, some of us may be going a bit far, but you get the point...), and you can cut costs of a new desktop down to motherboard, CPU and RAM. At that point, it's not even a contest anymore.
If you buy a new PC every five years tho, I'd have to agree, you're probably better off getting a Dell and throwing it in the trash when you get the next one. But hey, this is Slashdot, and there may actually be a nerd or two here for whom the economics look a bit different.
"Does is mean authoritarian/libertarian, or socialist/capitalist?"
These days it means pretty much fascist/socio-fascist.
Both generalized political leanings have become corrupted with authoritarianism to the extent that neither can be associated with either civil liberties or free market capitalism.
"If I was pro-... make me left- or right-wing?"
It'd make you a dangerous terrorist suspect.
Do not question Authority.
Um, that's just the point, you _dont_ have to replace your routers or IPv4 specific software. You can run IPv6 encapsulated in IPv4 over incapable network segments, you can use gateways and proxies in the cases where v4-only services need access to v6-only service (altho I cant really see why your AD servers would need to surf v6 only websites).
"Eats up about 5 years of your IT budget"
In that case I pity your IT budget. If your IT staff actually knows what they're doing it doesnt need to cost much. Or anything. The difficult part isnt rolling out IPv6, it's ending IPv4. And you can let that take care of itself by letting the unsupported things die of old age.
"they don't run servers"
Server in the realm of networking isnt the hardware you put in a big room somewhere. Client software like netmeeting is a 'server'. Backup software, configuration software, etc, etc.
Put your company behind a NAT. Then explain to your boss why he cant connect with netmeeting to the CEO of a newly acquired company. Try to integrate networks after mergers. Put your network behind a nat, and eventually you'll need to do the IPv6 installation _anyway_ to get some new functionality.
NAT doesnt solve the same problems that IPv6 does; it's at best a temporary stopgap measure.
Not really that much change. You can do a transitional rollout and simply use IPv6 for new functionality (over 6to4 to avoid having to upgrade too much network infrastructure).
Dont look at it as a change, it's an addition. And a very nice one actually.
Continue the current trend with virtualization and ready-to-run service vm images, and in a few years you'll be thinking about a vm like you do a process today. Imagine the advantages, each service a self-contained unit, no upgrade woes, you get process migration capabilities, etc.
But then, you'd need an ip-adress per 'process'.
Get a bit imaginative and I think we can use up those addresses if we really want to...
Well, while native support might be nice, you dont actually need it. 6to4 works nicely.
I've been running IPv6 over 6to4 for several months (once you start using Xen and get a lot of machines and/or have friends machines you have access to, it's quite nice to be able to ssh straight into your destination without multi-stage jumps). I was surprised at how far it had come and how easy it was to set up these days.
To set up a linux firewall/nat box as a 6to4 router, you basically just have to install radvd, configure it to use your external v4 address as your v6 prefix, turn on v6 forwarding, add the route to the magic 192.88.99.1 (automagic 'nearest v6 gateway address') through sit0, add the network route on your internal interface (v6 prefix plus your choice of network address) and you're good to go. The machines on the inside simply autoconfigured themselves once radvd broadcast the route availability.
The only part still lagging was firewall support, as most GUI's dont support v6 rules. Still, writing firewall rules by hand is a _lot_ less painful when you dont have to deal with nat and port forwarding.
"Dell, of course, doesn't want to start selling PCs with Linux preinstalled..." ... because they'd lose 'marketing incentives' and kickbacks, ie, get a price hike for Windows but called something else to make it less illegal, from Microsoft if they did.
Frankly, the rest is just bullshit excuses. Dell knows the rest isnt a problem; they could easily sell a laptop without OS and support, and publish a detailed hardware listing or simply test-load a modern dist on the hardware to evaluate compatibility.
This is the good old Microsoft relationship mindgame again. You sell what they tell you to sell, or they'll cut off your airsupply and throw a chair at you.
"While if the money is spent on Canadian based items, or investments, it actually benefots the Canadian economy more than anything else."
Not only that; a shift of money out of the country of that magnitude would probably mean quite a lot of jobs lost.
I fail to see how it benefits Canada to allow a foreign nation to impose what amounts to a tax on them.
"So we would only have access to music that the government approves of?"
Ugh, no. Maybe I was unclear on that, but the money should of course be divided out in a similar way it is now; the works generating the revenues gets the payout. Pete Seeger gets a CD sold, he gets money, Dixie Chicks play on the radio, they get money. John Doe gets downloaded five thousand times, he gets points for that.
It might be useful to modify the payout to a curve, as there probably exists a point where the artists dont actually get more creative the more money they get, and probably a date cutoff as well so you have to keep creating to keep getting paid, and have the overflow finance a larger part of the long tail (according to consumer demand, of course). That would be where the actual measurable statistics get used.
The government doesnt figure in to the 'choice' part at all, it just collects the revenues and pays it to the appropriate recepient according to the rules set up.
"Who has the authority to decide what is "valuable"?"
Adam Smiths invisible hand? Value is an economic concept, in a free market, most 'valuable' is what, given a choice, consumers choose.
"they're spending money incentivising the wrong thing."
As the incentivicing would be tied to distribution levels, the money would be spent incentivicing exactly what people want (modulo with the extent to which incentives are needed; it's questionable wether X millions makes Britney more creative, so a ceiling on payouts may get us more McKee's/long tail paid for the total spending, ie maximizing the benefit we're getting from what it costs the economy).
"And what if I don't listen to music?"
Um, as the taxes/royalties would be collected directly off revenue generating activities tied to the material in question, if you're not paying for any music, nor listening to any music for which someone else is paying (commercials, etc), then you're not paying anything at all.
Basically, pay $10 for a CD with Britney, Britney gets a point, $5 is collected as incentive, Britney gets a payout for the point, unless she's at the hypothetical max ceiling at which point the payout passes to next most desired creator. (Sums are, of course, arbitrary examples, Britney in this case is a representative for the stakeholders in that CD, including writers, and other artists).
"The free market _can_ work here,"
It would be the closest you can get to a free market in this case; the whole problem is that people keep insisting that we need incentives for creativity (which I personally find dubious, but I'm willing to play along... until we can get solid data).
This is one way we'd get a fairly non-destructive system. Collect taxes off revenue generating activities tied to the material (IMO, most equitable collection form), pay them out according to market demand (most equitable division system, and the closest to a real free market), modulate it by maximizing desired factor (as many most desired artists as possible can get sustained), and dont prevent copying (thus allowing free market rules to apply to maximize efficiency in distribution etc.)
I dont have that much against mandatory royalties on revenue generating activities. If we truly need an 'incentive' for creativity they're more compatible with a free market than monopoly rights. And they're far easier to measure and manage for the least damage/most benefit to the economy.
The first problem with the current setup is that it's put under industry administration (whose interests are vastly divergent with both most musicians and the public, witness the current example), when in fact it's a tax and should be under government administration. That way it'd be subject to the same constraints as other taxation forms; is it reasonably equitably collected, do we get our money's worth from the spending (ie, does it finance as many artists and creators as possible for the money we're willing to spend?), is this a reasonable level of expenditure? What's more, we could actually measure the number of new works and how they change depending on the level of spending so we could finally get real data rather than imaginary numbers made up to support organized con men.
The second problem is that the RIAA corps are excluded. If we need an incentive for creative endeavors, _any_ revenue generating activity using 'copyrighted' material should be subject to the same taxation, wether plays on the radio, sales over the internet or the printing of CD's. Remove the 'copy' aspect of 'copyright' and replace it with a generalized non-transferrable 'incentiveright'. Allow free copying, printing and distribution of materials, let anyone from your local supermarket to online shops freely copy the material, as long as they pay a percentage of any revenue as 'incentive tax'/'royalty', and make sure the incentive actually goes to the creators. And make sure it goes to them in appropriate portions to maximise creativity.
Imagine the possibilities; you could go to the local supermarket and print a CD with whatever tracks you want on it. You could buy an USB disk of the nights music at a club. You could get a complete recording of the show when you exit a concert. Without copyright but with a simple levy on the revenue, whole hosts of new business and value opportunities would open up, while still maintaining a (more measurable) incentive for creativity.
"There's not much you can do to avoid these issues"
Sure there is. How about next time someone comes up with the idea to change 'time' we just stick'em in the loony bin with the rest of their fellow 'timetravellers' and tell anyone who wants to 'save daylight' they can get up an hour earlier. Which is what they're doing anyway.
"Enforcing such a system that you describe would be difficult at best."
First, dont underestimate the cost of the effort of enforcing the current system. While many of the costs are distributed around everything from the writer who as to spend time negotiating rather than writing through courts and corporate lawyers, the costs are still there. Personally, I think administration of a consolidated system would probably cost the economy as a whole less than the current one.
"At least there's constitutional support (and common law) support for copyrights,"
There's constitutional support for securing exclusive rights for authors. What nature those rights take isnt explicitly specified; I dont think it's too far of a stretch to modernize it as exclusive rights to recieve monetary incentives for their work rather than exclusive rights to prevent copying.
And remember, for both these points; in many countries such mandatory licensing fees are already collected from everything from shopping malls to radio stations and distributed according to plays. Moving that function over to the government and extending it to serve for books and video, as well as audio, and for physical incarnations as well as broadcasting and public performance isnt really that far from what is already done in some segments.
The main goals if restructuring intellectual incentives would be to simplify the process, remove the blocks in distribution and derivative evolution of creative works, and ensure a larger part of the total economic expenditures goes directly to the creators of works (as well as remove incentives for non-related activities like marketing and sales channel control, instead leaving that to competetive equilibrium).
Essentially, the paradigm of publishers owning the presses and the distribution would end (in a less chaotic fashion than is currently the case), while still maintaining the economic incentive to the authors/creators. For someone with your business savvy at searching out attractive content you might very well go even better. And for the long tail of less successful authors they might at least get paid for the distribution their works merit, rather than a blank rejection.
Of course, that depends on how the system is balanced (having an incentive which pays you enough to retire on your first publication might not necessarily be in our civilizations creativitys best interest (particularly if it means twenty other writers dont get paid at all). Nor one that has you starving.) But the point is that it's possible to structure incentives in different ways than exclusive copying rights.
"I believe your assumptions that copyrights protect publishers more than writers would cause an absolute shit storm among the writers I know."
Go into a more careful analysis of the market; the technology exists today that could easily accomodate print-on-demand services. Technically we could see any bookstore printing books for the end-consumer. Were such a system legally feasible, we would see an even more rapid advancement in printing tech.
Imagine, no more out of print books, no more expensive transportation and storage costs, consumers could decide what format they wanted the books in, etc.
Instead of copyright we could have incentive legislation merely requireing recording of copies printed and sold, where the authors get paid as their works get sold.
Under such a system the authors could easily get more of the end-price than they do today. Of course the publishers would get to know a new meaning of cutthroat competition. So I stand by that claim that the current copyright regime protects the publishers from competition more than it protects authors.
"It's the asset value that they deal with in negotiations, unless they're under captive contract to a publisher, and even then, there's still an asset value to the copyright."
Traditionally, and in many cases even today, the publisher has had the upper hand in negotiations, both from owning the actual presses and access to sales channels, and from actually being in 'business', and thus tending to be much more skilled in negotiating.
With a mandatory licensing/creative incentive system you wouldnt have to bother with negotiation at all; anyone could take it, print it and sell it, and you'd still get paid. Heck, technically, you could even get paid for blogs and your slashdot comments, if someone else made money off them.
"Look, people - ownership rights = capitalism,"
Intellectual 'property' isnt ownership rights, it's monopoly rights. It's a limitation in _everyone elses_ actual ownership and property rights. The owner of a CD is deprived of his property right to do what he wishes with that CD, including copying it. An independent inventor is denied the right to produce what he himself made because someone else holds a paper saying they're the only ones who have the right to produce that thing.
Calling it intellectual 'property' is a recent development, with an intended propaganda component, and it's certainly not the name used in many other languages. 'Immaterial rights' is an alternative name used in some other languages.
But that, of course, would be far less confusing and likely to trick people into thinking it's property.
"But if you're opposed to the general notion of ownership rights, then your arguments are 220 years overdue."
Monopolies are irreconcileable with property rights, so I'm afraid you can only argue one side. And if you're arguing _for_ monopoly rights, then you're arguing _against_ free market capitalism.
Which, incidentally, I'd tend to agree, is the most efficient economic system yet devised. Which is why monopoly rights _have_ to go.
"used to create insane amounts of marketing, world-wide."
And, of course, the insane amount of marketing is needed to counter the insane amount of marketing that other makers get. Essentially making sure a large part of the capital available from the end-consumer goes, not to fund more movies, but to maintain a pointless marketing war that neither consumers nor creators want or benefit from.
"As a writer, I expect to get paid for my work"
Of course, copyright doesnt actually mean you get paid for your work, it just means you have a legal basis for paying a lawyer to drag someone to court (which in most cases is rather unlikely to generate revenue for anyone but the lawyer).
If you wanted to get paid for the work, you'd be far better off with a system where you'd automatically get credited and/or paid if and when your work is used in revenue creating activities.
Of course, as we all know, copyright was never intended to get the writers paid anyway, so it's hardly surprising it doesnt work very well for that.
"just like the baker down the street, the cop at the corner"
The baker cant prevent anyone else from making the same breads he's making, nor can the cop demand protection money for security at his corner and beat up anyone else offering the same security (well, in theory at least.). One job is competetive and little regulated, the other is socially financed, regulated and with a budget. Neither gets exclusive monopoly rights.
"If they had, we'd be likely to want to stop them for the theft they made of our hard work."
Wouldnt it be slightly more constructive if you simply got paid if they made money off your work? Basically, skip the whole copy-prevention part and replace it with a mandatory licensing fee for any and all revenue generating reproduction, wether radio, CD's or internet downloads?
"not just from the northern hemisphere to the south."
Not only that, the effect it has would vary with the direction you put the TV, so actually 'manufacturing' them to compensate would require having different models depending on which way it's going to face...
Still, my 32 inch CRT TV actually has a geomagnetic correction setting. And I recall that when I moved the tv from one end of the living room to the other I actually had to use that one as the display had changed tilt a few millimeters (noticable in a MythTV gui, where a previously straight line across the bottom now tilted slightly, otherwise I'd never have noticed it).
Wether it was actually geomagnetic causes for the tilt or changing distance to nearby power installations or something else I cant say tho.
"Many of the people expressing these views were just average people2
And people who have, apparently, not studied the issues. The idea that copyright creates an incentive to create is proving dubious (both judging from the amount of entirely unpaid work that goes on without incentives and above all, there are far better ways to direct an incentive to the actual creators if desired), nor does copyright hinder the exploitation of creators who get a miniscule breadcrumb of the total resources paid by the consumers.
A real incentive and protective from exploitation would guarantee payment of sales revenue to the authors and creators, not to the holder of a particular monopoly.
But then again, look at the history of IP and you realize it never was about the creators, it was always about the friends of the crown. The authors were just an excuse.
'"intellectual property" and "real property" aren't at all the same thing, when in fact they are more similar than different.'
They're entirely different things. Intellectual property is more aptly named 'intellectual monopoly'. It's not ownership of a specific piece of property, it's a monopoly preventing anyone else from duplicating that piece of property.
On the other hand, you're not prevented from copying 'real property'. In fact, it's highly encouraged, as cheap and efficient creation of more valuable items is the very foundation of increasing wealth within the free market economy.
"And tell me, how are you "scientifically" going to justify a "correct" copyright period? "
Once you drop the industry-imposed propaganda blinders about 'property' it's not that hard. Realize it's a specific point-taxation system where we hand out monopoly-profit (ie, a taxation form) as the payout in a social incentive system instead.
Lets skip the history lesson and go to the actual purposes your friends claimed earlier and go from them.
We want to create an incentive for creative talent. Ok. We want to make sure that when money's made, a part goes to the creators. Ok. We want to make sure recognition remains. Ok.
And 'the correct period'? That's just a distraction derived from the deficient monopoly construct. There is no correct period, there's (possibly) a correct amount of _money_ that maximizes the level of creative talent we support for what we're willing to pay.
In the current system we might as well be burning the money; the vast majority of the money the consumers are spending never makes it to the creators. Monopoly rights shifts incentive to channel control and marketing as revenue maximizers and has a built in incentive to have _as few_ as possible 'hits', marginalizing the rest. Preventing entry into the controlled channels maximises revenue for the remaining corporate owners, adding more creators merely dilutes the stream and increases per-work costs as a percentage of revenue. IE, it nowhere near serves the purpose you claimed you wanted.
There are many alternative possible systems; personally I tend to favour entirely skipping the 'copy' aspect of copyright and replacing it with recognition rights and revenue incentive rights. As we're already paying a form of taxation on IP works, change that over to an official form of incentive tax. IE, any revenue activity tied to recognized works pays a percentage of sales price to the incentive funds, which then pay out to authors and artists. For example, for a CD, you'd simply have a 50% incentive tax/royalty on the sales price (which would fall towards actual manufacturing price, so prices would be far lower than today, while still shifting more money towards artists and creators). The incentive would automatically pay out to the artists and creators, essentially replacing the 'contract' aspect of current creator/publisher relations with a mediated system where the creators will automatically get paid when revenue is generated off their works.
Such a system would also have the advantage that we can actually budget for it, we can scientifically me