"it's not theft, but it has the same effect as counterfeiting money"
Um, no, actually it's exactly the opposite. The effect of intellectual monopolies like copyright is the same as burning real money (or actually, destroying goods to keep prices up).
The supply is intentionally kept below what a free market would generate, thus creating an artificial scarcity and a higher per-unit margin, while causing a loss of wealth for the economy as a whole, as compared to the optimal outcome.
Er. No. The current system awards a monopoly; you need to be able to exploit the monopoly to obtain monetary rewards.
"The only time it goes to court is when some third party attempts to use your patent without rights."
And you know it, and you have the resources to pursue it, etc.
"Please read up on economics"
I'd suggest you do the same. Take good care to study the workings of free market competition, starting off with Adam Smith, then look over such concepts as monopoly pricing, deadweight loss, etc. Then take more than a cursory look at the history of patents.
"Perhaps you should wait until you've tried to structure a business"
Perhaps you should try to consider IP law from the perspective of what drives innovation and social advantage rather than what structure fits your idea of a business model.
That's like saying 'the product is construction materials, not concrete'. Or 'the product is meat, not a particular kind of animal meat'. Or 'the product is gases, and if you dont like our price on oxygen go buy some other gas to breathe'.
You only have competition (as in, the kind that actually creates increasing wealth as it drives efficiency in the search of profits) when you have price competition on equivalent interchangeable products.
In a competetive market for music you'd have any particular song played by any particular band, on any media, published by any media producer. The cultural wealth would mass multiply as performers were able to mix and match and create new crossover works, AV stars creating technical shows, local bands playing and supporting themselves on local plays, but with currently popular music, etc.
The economic damage caused by allowing, and even encouraging, monopolies is very real. Take a look at concepts such as deadweight loss to understand exactly how bad they are.
You know, even the most cursory readup on libertarianism tears down that strawman.
Intellectual 'property' is a coercive government granted monopoly. The issue is pretty black and white from a liberty point of view; most informed (and intellectually 'honest') arguments in favour of it are based upon utilitarian aspects (ie, (mistaken belief, imo), that it drives a higher rate of development, etc).
"the U.S. does not export much beside I.P.; if you have any sense of self preservation and desire to reduce the grotesque trade deficit,"
Here you come closer to that 'intellectual honesty', and what it's all about. However, while taxing the rest of the world sure may seem like a good idea to the US, I frankly dont see why the rest of the world should be interested in paying those taxes. There are far more deserving charity cases to help first.
You need to understand the economics of competing protected monopolies like the music industry. They're not interested in you spending $200 on 'music'. They're interested in you spending those $200 on a very specific number of albums, which they've spent enormous amounts of money 'engineering' and marketing. They are not interested in adapting a business model that has people spreading their money over more and more varied artists, and if that means cultural poverty that's perfectly acceptable for them.
Even if lower prices means you buy more music and spend _more_ money, they cant make as much profit off a wider range. They'd rather make $5 profit off one album than $0.25 off five.
Government ownership of and responsiblity for wire infrastructure and connection standards does not necessarily mean you have to have a government administration servicing or building the infrastructure. Typically you'd structure it as contract building and yearly contract maintenance (for the joint infrastructure), and for your own maintenance connection-point to house you'd be free to do whatever you wish, just like you can service your driveway yourself.
"Swapping corporate ISPs for government ISPs"
Where did you get that idea? The ISP is entirely separate from the wiring infrastructure, and any ISP would be allowed to set up at the area connection points.
'your use of the pipe is that much more at the mercy of local "community standards," etc.'
There's are no indications that would be the case, nor any indications that government owned infrastructure would be either more or less subject to such interference. Roads arent particularly limited to what is allowed to travel on them, apart from the 'interfacing' structure, such as it shouldnt actually physically damage the road or cause damage to other travellers on the road. You can carry as much porn in your car as you want, and nobody will care.
For network infrastructure, the same would apply; like the road, the physical medium specifications would be regulated (ie, dont send 110V on your network cables). What your packets carry isnt any more or less regulatable than what your car carries.
Re:Why EXT4 ?
on
EXT4 Is Coming
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· Score: 3, Informative
"ZFS (Sun) are very well proven in the field"
Um, I have yet to see a production installation of ZFS in an enterprise environment, and it hasn't been out as an actual release for even a year yet. You probably mean UFS. HTH.
Re:Modularizable filesystem
on
EXT4 Is Coming
·
· Score: 1
Take a look at the device mapper and associated stuff like EVMS, LVM2, dm-crypt, etc.
Arbitrary block device layering is the way forward.
"A completely new pipe to your house, provided by someone else (including yourself) is very, very expensive"
Yet we manage to accomplish more or less exactly the same thing with road infrastructure, without having five companies running their own roads to every house, then charging the house owners for access.
It's not that hard to design a system after that model, with specific interchange points on a local level.
"Let's see some more studies and conclusive evidence."
There have been many studies. I recall one from just about a year ago, with a base of, IIRC, 1000 drivers monitored with cameras for five years.
It had a conclusion that about 80% of accidents happened when the driver was distracted and busy with something else. Phone, fiddling with radio, talking and glancing at passengers, etc. Things that normally dont interfere with keeping the car on the road, but cause just enough distraction that you dont react fast enough when some other distracted guy runs a red light.
But hey, lets have mandatory rectal cavity searches in airport checkins instead. Requiring that drivers only pay attention to the damn road and traffic would only save 40000 american lives per year, while those pesky frequent fliers can cause god knows what.
Because the profits in industries like pharmaceuticals arent free market profits, they're derived from artificial government granted monopolies. As a citizen and consumer of such goods, it's therefore entirely reasonable to complain about the level of profit derived from such monopoly legislation, just as it's reasonable to complain about tax money being misused, without wanting to be part of the misuse.
And do take a care to note that about 80% of the patent derived income of the pharmaceuticals is wasted in non R&D activity; that means we'd get _five times_ the current R&D levels for the same money if we simply revoked patent legislation and paid for the R&D outright.
"who want to avoid anything that they think is in some way capitalist"
The GPL essentially restores free market capitalism to a field mired in government granted monopoly legislation.
The success and accomplishments of GPL'ed and other free software with limited resources, compared to commercial enterprises with monopoly rights and vast resources, is an abject lesson in how much more efficient a true free market is.
And as free software is about protecting your freedom to actually write software, that's sortof a prerequisite, eh?
"EU couldnt put MS software in the public domain."
Copyright is a state-granted temporary monopoly. Saying it couln't revoke that monopoly right is like saying it couldnt pay out lower welfare benefits.
In my opinion, the law as it is is unfixable. The very structure of monopoly rights is inherently unbalanced and is an aberration in a free market, one whose costs are huge but unaccounted for, while the benefits in terms of innovation and rewards to actual inventors are dubious.
Redesign the system as stipend rights instead, conferring, in exchange for disclosure, the right to an actual monetary payout upon a certain level of use of the invention in question. That way the system is automatically balanced; with a standard government budget the costs are controllable (government spending tendencies aside), if too many 'patent stipends' are granted, the rewards for each shrink so all involved parties have an interest in only valid ones being granted. Companies would not need fear litigation; they could browse the patent databases as they please and just note which ones they include, combine and mix and match, etc. The litigation burden would go down; the inventor would not need to sue anyone for using their invention; the more the better, as their payout would increase.
Financing such a system isnt really that hard, once you accept that the current system isnt as 'free' as it seems, but is actually more or less equivalent to a taxation on new technology (which is _not_ a good thing, as it slows adoption rates even more). A flat 'innovation VAT' rate would be a large improvement, or even better, rates geared towards phasing out undesireable old technology. But above all, it should be accounted for, with measurable economic impact, not the current 'more or less years that does something or the other that we cant really tell to innovation and costs but you dont see it as it's in the price of goods and insurances'.
"so out of control that domestic industries can no longer compete"
As you're handing out the criticism, dont forget to mention the other side of the coin. How about 'intellectual property legislation so out of control that domestic workers can no longer compete'.
Unions arent alone in driving spiralling costs. Rent-seeking is rife in the whole economy.
"You want to get more oxygen to your brain; apparently the shallow breathing of anxiety increases anxiety."
Actually, IIRC, what happens is the body stress system prepares for fight/flight response, which increases breathing rate as the body _thinks_ it will need more oxygen. As there usually is no strong physical exertion, the blood CO2 level falls, leading to pH changes, the end result being dizziness, faintness and tingling in the extremities, etc.
So, unless doing calisthenetics or running laps (or you have, for example, a boar to wrestle with) seem like a good idea, you need to normalize the breathing, as the bodys response systems isnt set at the correct level for sitting still. Learning basic rules like square breathing (4 seconds inhale, 4 seconds hold, 4 seconds exhale, 4 seconds hold) can help, as it should be closer to the usual balance. The old paper bag technique can also work (partially re-inhaling your exhaled air will allow CO2 to remain balanced even when overbreathing).
It's quite frightening (as it's more or less raw fear), but it's a perfectly natural response to excessive stress that's just not very adapted to modern life.
Of course, with fingerprints the problem is that everyone from the police to the bum in the park picking up your discarded soda can has that info. Period.
And the real bitch is that as idiots like this company and politicians and law-enforcement yearning for easy solutions start making biometrics like DNA and fingerprints prevalent in society, the incidence and ease of forgeries will make the current card skimming frauds look like a fart in a shitstorm.
Fedora is an early integrator of many things; as those things sometimes havent had as many testers yet, you're bound to run into some issues. As some features get integrated into the base of the system, for example, Xen, you cant get a super-stable base either.
Dont worry tho, yum update shouldnt upgrade you, you'd have to run yum _upgrade_ for that, as far as I know. Live upgrades of that sort are not recommended tho.
"but it is not a monopoly in the sense that the word is typically used."
If a coercive, government granted monopoly preventing, through law, anyone else from producing an equivalent product doesnt fit your definition of monopoly, I'd suggest you need to update your definition. While you're at it, I'd suggest you look over concepts such as dead-weight loss to gain some insight in just how damaging monopolies are to the free market.
"But be careful about using the m-word around an economist"
How about trying this economist out for size:
"The problem of the prevention of monopoly and the prevention of competition is raised much more acutely in certain other fields to which the concept of property has been extended only in recent times. I am thinking here of the extension of the concept of property to such rights and privileges as patents for inventions, copyright, trade-marks, and the like. It seems to me beyond doubt that in these fields a slavish application of the concept of property as it has been developed for material things has done a great deal to foster the growth of monopoly and that here drastic reforms may be required if competition is to be made to work." - F. A. von Hayek
Any piece of intellectual 'property' is by definition a state protected monopoly.
State protected monopolies are not reconcilable with free market capitalism. They prevent the competetive drive for efficiency, sapping the wealth of the economy as a whole.
If you want to espouse the 'beauty' of state protected monopolies, I'd suggest you do it under a some more appropriate economic label.
An expensive backup service might be expensive because it's buying shiny crap at exorbitant rates. Which makes it even more likely to fail than the cheap one. The price tells you nothing about either what equipment they're using, the failure rates of said equipment, their redundancy level, or their solvency.
"Backup is one service where you don't want to go to the lowest bidder."
Yep, that's one of those typical backup salesman lines to watch out for.
Backup is, in the end, about this: redundancy, redundancy and redundancy.
For backup purposes, you'd be better off buying cheap pieces of USB drives off two different guys in their basement than a single expensive service.
You _do_ want to go for the lowest bidder. Several of them, in fact. Redundant array of inexpensive backup solutions, as it were.
Slashdot Mirror
"it's not theft, but it has the same effect as counterfeiting money"
Um, no, actually it's exactly the opposite. The effect of intellectual monopolies like copyright is the same as burning real money (or actually, destroying goods to keep prices up).
The supply is intentionally kept below what a free market would generate, thus creating an artificial scarcity and a higher per-unit margin, while causing a loss of wealth for the economy as a whole, as compared to the optimal outcome.
"That's exactly what the current system does."
Er. No. The current system awards a monopoly; you need to be able to exploit the monopoly to obtain monetary rewards.
"The only time it goes to court is when some third party attempts to use your patent without rights."
And you know it, and you have the resources to pursue it, etc.
"Please read up on economics"
I'd suggest you do the same. Take good care to study the workings of free market competition, starting off with Adam Smith, then look over such concepts as monopoly pricing, deadweight loss, etc. Then take more than a cursory look at the history of patents.
"Perhaps you should wait until you've tried to structure a business"
Perhaps you should try to consider IP law from the perspective of what drives innovation and social advantage rather than what structure fits your idea of a business model.
"The product is music, not a particular song."
That's like saying 'the product is construction materials, not concrete'. Or 'the product is meat, not a particular kind of animal meat'. Or 'the product is gases, and if you dont like our price on oxygen go buy some other gas to breathe'.
You only have competition (as in, the kind that actually creates increasing wealth as it drives efficiency in the search of profits) when you have price competition on equivalent interchangeable products.
In a competetive market for music you'd have any particular song played by any particular band, on any media, published by any media producer. The cultural wealth would mass multiply as performers were able to mix and match and create new crossover works, AV stars creating technical shows, local bands playing and supporting themselves on local plays, but with currently popular music, etc.
The economic damage caused by allowing, and even encouraging, monopolies is very real. Take a look at concepts such as deadweight loss to understand exactly how bad they are.
"any issue can be framed in terms of liberty"
You know, even the most cursory readup on libertarianism tears down that strawman.
Intellectual 'property' is a coercive government granted monopoly. The issue is pretty black and white from a liberty point of view; most informed (and intellectually 'honest') arguments in favour of it are based upon utilitarian aspects (ie, (mistaken belief, imo), that it drives a higher rate of development, etc).
"the U.S. does not export much beside I.P.; if you have any sense of self preservation and desire to reduce the grotesque trade deficit,"
Here you come closer to that 'intellectual honesty', and what it's all about. However, while taxing the rest of the world sure may seem like a good idea to the US, I frankly dont see why the rest of the world should be interested in paying those taxes. There are far more deserving charity cases to help first.
They dont call it Airstrip One for nothing.
"it shouldn't be ignored by the music industry."
You need to understand the economics of competing protected monopolies like the music industry. They're not interested in you spending $200 on 'music'. They're interested in you spending those $200 on a very specific number of albums, which they've spent enormous amounts of money 'engineering' and marketing. They are not interested in adapting a business model that has people spreading their money over more and more varied artists, and if that means cultural poverty that's perfectly acceptable for them.
Even if lower prices means you buy more music and spend _more_ money, they cant make as much profit off a wider range. They'd rather make $5 profit off one album than $0.25 off five.
Government ownership of and responsiblity for wire infrastructure and connection standards does not necessarily mean you have to have a government administration servicing or building the infrastructure. Typically you'd structure it as contract building and yearly contract maintenance (for the joint infrastructure), and for your own maintenance connection-point to house you'd be free to do whatever you wish, just like you can service your driveway yourself.
"Swapping corporate ISPs for government ISPs"
Where did you get that idea? The ISP is entirely separate from the wiring infrastructure, and any ISP would be allowed to set up at the area connection points.
"Federal highways, state highways, local highways, private access roads. That's four."
You have one of those each to your house? Man, wouldnt want to live where you do, the traffic noise must be a killer.
'your use of the pipe is that much more at the mercy of local "community standards," etc.'
There's are no indications that would be the case, nor any indications that government owned infrastructure would be either more or less subject to such interference. Roads arent particularly limited to what is allowed to travel on them, apart from the 'interfacing' structure, such as it shouldnt actually physically damage the road or cause damage to other travellers on the road. You can carry as much porn in your car as you want, and nobody will care.
For network infrastructure, the same would apply; like the road, the physical medium specifications would be regulated (ie, dont send 110V on your network cables). What your packets carry isnt any more or less regulatable than what your car carries.
"ZFS (Sun) are very well proven in the field"
Um, I have yet to see a production installation of ZFS in an enterprise environment, and it hasn't been out as an actual release for even a year yet. You probably mean UFS. HTH.
Take a look at the device mapper and associated stuff like EVMS, LVM2, dm-crypt, etc.
Arbitrary block device layering is the way forward.
"A completely new pipe to your house, provided by someone else (including yourself) is very, very expensive"
Yet we manage to accomplish more or less exactly the same thing with road infrastructure, without having five companies running their own roads to every house, then charging the house owners for access.
It's not that hard to design a system after that model, with specific interchange points on a local level.
"Let's see some more studies and conclusive evidence."
There have been many studies. I recall one from just about a year ago, with a base of, IIRC, 1000 drivers monitored with cameras for five years.
It had a conclusion that about 80% of accidents happened when the driver was distracted and busy with something else. Phone, fiddling with radio, talking and glancing at passengers, etc. Things that normally dont interfere with keeping the car on the road, but cause just enough distraction that you dont react fast enough when some other distracted guy runs a red light.
But hey, lets have mandatory rectal cavity searches in airport checkins instead. Requiring that drivers only pay attention to the damn road and traffic would only save 40000 american lives per year, while those pesky frequent fliers can cause god knows what.
Because the profits in industries like pharmaceuticals arent free market profits, they're derived from artificial government granted monopolies. As a citizen and consumer of such goods, it's therefore entirely reasonable to complain about the level of profit derived from such monopoly legislation, just as it's reasonable to complain about tax money being misused, without wanting to be part of the misuse.
And do take a care to note that about 80% of the patent derived income of the pharmaceuticals is wasted in non R&D activity; that means we'd get _five times_ the current R&D levels for the same money if we simply revoked patent legislation and paid for the R&D outright.
"who want to avoid anything that they think is in some way capitalist"
The GPL essentially restores free market capitalism to a field mired in government granted monopoly legislation.
The success and accomplishments of GPL'ed and other free software with limited resources, compared to commercial enterprises with monopoly rights and vast resources, is an abject lesson in how much more efficient a true free market is.
And as free software is about protecting your freedom to actually write software, that's sortof a prerequisite, eh?
"EU couldnt put MS software in the public domain."
Copyright is a state-granted temporary monopoly. Saying it couln't revoke that monopoly right is like saying it couldnt pay out lower welfare benefits.
I'll betcha they can.
In my opinion, the law as it is is unfixable. The very structure of monopoly rights is inherently unbalanced and is an aberration in a free market, one whose costs are huge but unaccounted for, while the benefits in terms of innovation and rewards to actual inventors are dubious.
Redesign the system as stipend rights instead, conferring, in exchange for disclosure, the right to an actual monetary payout upon a certain level of use of the invention in question. That way the system is automatically balanced; with a standard government budget the costs are controllable (government spending tendencies aside), if too many 'patent stipends' are granted, the rewards for each shrink so all involved parties have an interest in only valid ones being granted. Companies would not need fear litigation; they could browse the patent databases as they please and just note which ones they include, combine and mix and match, etc. The litigation burden would go down; the inventor would not need to sue anyone for using their invention; the more the better, as their payout would increase.
Financing such a system isnt really that hard, once you accept that the current system isnt as 'free' as it seems, but is actually more or less equivalent to a taxation on new technology (which is _not_ a good thing, as it slows adoption rates even more). A flat 'innovation VAT' rate would be a large improvement, or even better, rates geared towards phasing out undesireable old technology. But above all, it should be accounted for, with measurable economic impact, not the current 'more or less years that does something or the other that we cant really tell to innovation and costs but you dont see it as it's in the price of goods and insurances'.
"so out of control that domestic industries can no longer compete"
As you're handing out the criticism, dont forget to mention the other side of the coin. How about 'intellectual property legislation so out of control that domestic workers can no longer compete'.
Unions arent alone in driving spiralling costs. Rent-seeking is rife in the whole economy.
"You want to get more oxygen to your brain; apparently the shallow breathing of anxiety increases anxiety."
Actually, IIRC, what happens is the body stress system prepares for fight/flight response, which increases breathing rate as the body _thinks_ it will need more oxygen. As there usually is no strong physical exertion, the blood CO2 level falls, leading to pH changes, the end result being dizziness, faintness and tingling in the extremities, etc.
So, unless doing calisthenetics or running laps (or you have, for example, a boar to wrestle with) seem like a good idea, you need to normalize the breathing, as the bodys response systems isnt set at the correct level for sitting still. Learning basic rules like square breathing (4 seconds inhale, 4 seconds hold, 4 seconds exhale, 4 seconds hold) can help, as it should be closer to the usual balance. The old paper bag technique can also work (partially re-inhaling your exhaled air will allow CO2 to remain balanced even when overbreathing).
It's quite frightening (as it's more or less raw fear), but it's a perfectly natural response to excessive stress that's just not very adapted to modern life.
"I don't want them to have this info, period."
Of course, with fingerprints the problem is that everyone from the police to the bum in the park picking up your discarded soda can has that info. Period.
And the real bitch is that as idiots like this company and politicians and law-enforcement yearning for easy solutions start making biometrics like DNA and fingerprints prevalent in society, the incidence and ease of forgeries will make the current card skimming frauds look like a fart in a shitstorm.
"If someone comes in and tries to scan a finger not connected to anything, the cashier will probably suspect something."
Which is why you imprint the alternate fingerprint on a adhesive film and put it on your own finger.
Fedora is an early integrator of many things; as those things sometimes havent had as many testers yet, you're bound to run into some issues. As some features get integrated into the base of the system, for example, Xen, you cant get a super-stable base either.
Dont worry tho, yum update shouldnt upgrade you, you'd have to run yum _upgrade_ for that, as far as I know. Live upgrades of that sort are not recommended tho.
"but it is not a monopoly in the sense that the word is typically used."
If a coercive, government granted monopoly preventing, through law, anyone else from producing an equivalent product doesnt fit your definition of monopoly, I'd suggest you need to update your definition. While you're at it, I'd suggest you look over concepts such as dead-weight loss to gain some insight in just how damaging monopolies are to the free market.
"But be careful about using the m-word around an economist"
How about trying this economist out for size:
"The problem of the prevention of monopoly and the prevention of competition is raised much more acutely in certain other fields to which the concept of property has been extended only in recent times. I am thinking here of the extension of the concept of property to such rights and privileges as patents for inventions, copyright, trade-marks, and the like. It seems to me beyond doubt that in these fields a slavish application of the concept of property as it has been developed for material things has done a great deal to foster the growth of monopoly and that here drastic reforms may be required if competition is to be made to work." - F. A. von Hayek
"It's the beauty of capitalism."
Any piece of intellectual 'property' is by definition a state protected monopoly.
State protected monopolies are not reconcilable with free market capitalism. They prevent the competetive drive for efficiency, sapping the wealth of the economy as a whole.
If you want to espouse the 'beauty' of state protected monopolies, I'd suggest you do it under a some more appropriate economic label.
"A cheap backup service..."
An expensive backup service might be expensive because it's buying shiny crap at exorbitant rates. Which makes it even more likely to fail than the cheap one. The price tells you nothing about either what equipment they're using, the failure rates of said equipment, their redundancy level, or their solvency.
"Backup is one service where you don't want to go to the lowest bidder."
Yep, that's one of those typical backup salesman lines to watch out for.
Backup is, in the end, about this: redundancy, redundancy and redundancy.
For backup purposes, you'd be better off buying cheap pieces of USB drives off two different guys in their basement than a single expensive service.
You _do_ want to go for the lowest bidder. Several of them, in fact. Redundant array of inexpensive backup solutions, as it were.