"I'm not so sure it would benefit anyone to join this proposed community"
In fact, chances are you'd be punished for joining as it'd leave you exposed to willful infringement claims.
The patent systems problems cant be solved within the current framework; the system itself isnt founded on a self-balancing financial structure, making it impossible to analyze, optimize and budget for.
"The big problem I see is the same one I've seen with legal music downloads"
There are a few who actually are useable; Canadian label Nettwerk for example sells real un-DRM'ed mp3's. Painless, fast, works like a charm under Linux, no hoops to jump through.
"It seems reasonable to think that a tiny microkernel built for virtualization"
The article (bad me, dont read linked articles, I know) actually mentions hypervisors as sort-of microkernels, so yes. Xen and VmWare ESX fits rather well into such a mapping, as they both have their own 'kernel', and where the controller domain is merely another virtual machine.
"If we then get minimal, very application specific kernels to run on top of it for specific needs"
You can accomplish a similar setup by just fudging your definitions a bit again. For example, a bare stripped linux kernel capable of running only on top of the Xen hypervisor isnt all that huge. Combine that with simple single-purpose OS installs doing, for example, fileserving, security services, etc, and communicate over the network for everything, and you more or less have a serverized 'microkernel' architecture. The server is the network is the server is the OS. So to speak. Postmodernistic computing.
"Granting, of course, that OS vendors go along with the idea,"
Yes, well, they can go along with it or we can run free software. Yet another indication of the advantages of adaptability.
So true. This 'next format' is a complete non-event; I already know exactly how I will be watching my media library for years to come: streamed off my mediaserver, which, among its many other qualities, doesnt _argue_ with me.
What the media is sold on I dont give a crap about except insofar as the format has to allow easy transfer to the mediaserver. And it appears neither of these obsolete-before-they-hit-the-shelves formats are going to deliver.
"... this is just the way it is with li-ion batteries."
True, which is why I generally avoid stuff that has them like the plague.
Any device with non-replaceable or non-standard-format Li-Ion batteries should at the very least have to be labeled: "This device _WILL_ break and need servicing within 18 months."
"Weren't all the commercials and marketing schemes out there to make me feel guilty"
Copyright or other intellectual 'property' has never been for the artists and creators sake. The creators have merely been the excuse, once owning a printing press and being friendly with the crown was no longer considered reason enough to get a monopoly.
Remember, copyright was created to protect publishers from cheap books, not to ensure payment to creative talent.
There are also, however, some very large differences; the first and foremost being that there is no fundamental scarcity (nor is it desireable to have such) of the virtual items in question, leaving them ultimately worthless.
I suspect the economic effects of allowing interaction between game and real economies may actually be damaging to the real economy; it opens up various speculation effects, and can create massive fraud distortions (for example, say some nasty people engage in a corporate takeover of a virtual world company and then proceeds to/create five billion trillion plat and sell them, effectively transferring all invested wealth in that virtual world to themselves). Further, you'd get the problem with the possibility of easy money laundering, etc.
And in the end; the fundamental reason free market economy works is because it shifts resources to the most efficient production of the desired goods. Channeling resources into the production of game-world items that are not in reality scarce effectively misemploys those resources (the purchaser could have _both_ the in-world item by means of a keypress _and_ something else for that money, without any loss to anyone), leading to an overall poorer economy, as the other thing will now go uncreated.
Cost to copy is the cost to produce the copies. The cost to produce the initial incarnation is a sunk cost that doesnt relate to the cost to produce the copies, except through artificial means.
"It costs potentially years of someone's life to produce an application, or piece of art or music."
In which case they should probably release early and release often, in order to keep a time advantage, or arrange their financing to pay for the actual time. The economy simply isnt served by people taking years; opensource and the other free media have already shown that the ability of others to build upon a free foundation scales better and faster.
I'm not saying we shouldnt reward creativity; I'm saying rewarding it with a monopoly is not a useful way to do it.
"At least not until we get Star Trek replicators."
In which case I'll betcha the current pro-IP crowd would try to ensure you had to pay for every rock, stick or hammer you replicate. After all, the guy chopping off the original stick has to get paid...
"Now *that* would really fuck up an economy."
Or not... that would be the ultimate goal of Adam Smith's free market capitalism. Many tend to get stuck on the idea of getting paid for labour; the whole point of the free market isnt to get paid, it's to pay less. Wealth is increased in the economy by _decreasing_ the amount of labour needed to produce things. You can trace it through history from the time we all had to spend 16 hours per day farming just to produce food all the way to a future star-trek society when we can replicate things at will.
The trouble isnt that the economy gets messed up, it just gets improved, the trouble is we're not very good at handling the situation when we need less labour to accomplish the same thing.
Personally I suspect that we've passed a defining point in the last decade; we've passed the point where demand can no longer keep up with the improvements in production. The infinite replication capabilities of the internet and digital media creates a situation where many people simply dont have the time to consume what gets produced.
This is a situation we will have to deal with, because no matter how much politicians talk about stimulating the economy and creating jobs (tsk), the fact remains; we simply dont have to work as much anymore.
"What's to stop that guy from turning around and giving it away..."
That's the whole point of free market capitalism; if you charge significantly more than the cost of producing something, other players will enter the market, thus increasing supply, thus causing falling prices as the production rate ramps up to meet demand.
"why would anyone buy it from me"
Why should anyone buy from you? If you're charging $100 for something that someone else can produce at cost $0, then paying you $100 would mean that $100 worth of resources were not used to produce something else, making the economy that much poorer.
"I went to school so I could have a career developing software"
Yeah, well, the relevancy of education and desires in todays economy could be debated for a long time.
That aside, one does not exclude the other. The vast majority of actual programming done is one-off custom programming anyway, which is not at all affected, except insofar as free software tends to reduce the redundant work needed to accomplish whatever job you need done.
As a general rule, progress usually means _fewer_ jobs. We simply need fewer people to do the same work that we needed more to do before, ie, things become cheaper and wealth is created. That was true even back in the day of the wheel, and it's certainly true for any particular advancement that Schwartz wants to credit McNealy with; the former bank clerks, photo-industry and warehouse workers would probably have a thing or two to say about how many jobs were 'created'.
Of course, saying 'nobody has made as many people redundant as McNealy' doesnt sound quite as nice. No matter how good it is for the economy as a whole.
Now, if we could only invent some newfangled way of distributing the remaing work so we dont have half the useful workforce unemployed and the other half overworked...
It's not that baffling. In trademarks, as in other intellectual 'property', there is a lot of so-called 'value' created through artificial scarcity. As the scarcity is artificially created through legal means, and not due to scarcity in the supply channel, this discrepancy in the market becomes exceedingly profitable. You can basically input an at-market-cost produced item, slap a zero-cost piece of paint on it, and charge more for it.
"Why not start something legitimate?"
Because then you'd have to sell the at-cost produced units at a competetive price, which means more or less at cost. The profitability comes from the legally enforced artificial undersupply of the market.
Ironically, the stronger the enforcement of intellectual monopolies becomes, the larger the discrepancy in the market becomes and the more profitable the black market will become.
"This would imply that there is a "proper" price."
In commodity markets there usually is.
"Supply and demand, remember?"
In a free market other players will be able to increase production as long as it's profitable to. In an unfree market, the providers of the supply maximize profits by artificially limiting supply. This is the greatest damage of monopolistic practices; the invisible hand of the market is prevented from reallocation production resources to fulfill consumer demand, and thus maximize the wealth of the economy. One player gets a bigger piece of a smaller pie, and the rest of us get screwed.
Wether or not Intel acts in a monopolistic fashion is debatable; one thing isnt: they have had a worse price/performance ratio than AMD since forever, which suggests they are, in fact, producing less than a market-optimal amount of CPU's.
If you're actually really interested in the supply vs demand issues, I'd suggest you read through the wikipedia article on supply and demand. It's goes through a lot of the various aspects.
"But it certainly is not the 90% that you seem to think it is."
Considering that the propaganda claims that copyright is necessary to encourage the creative arts, I can see only $1.99 that can arguably cover that claim. We're definitely paying about five times what we should be paying, and more than five times what we would be paying if we just abolished copyright and collectively financed the artists and writers outright.
"The difference between digital media and other goods..."
Actually, that's not the difference between digital media and other goods, it's the difference between free market pricing and monopoly pricing.
Copyright and other forms of so called intellectual 'property' are monopoly rights, which, like you say, means that the producer can set the price the market can bear. Incidentally, that also means that if consumers get more disposable capital, if, for example, the price of food goes down, the price of the monopoly products will go up.
As the only 'competition' that the owners of the monopoly have are illicit copying, this further means two things;
A) you're creating a strong foundation for a highly profitable black market (with associated consequences, see drugs, prohibition, etc)
B) if, for any reason, there were to be less illicit copying (drm, etc), prices would go _up_.
"We could use a new, inexpensive, ultra-high-capacity data disc format,"
At the current rate of progress it appears that the next actual format we'll be using is neither blu-ray nor HD-DVD, but bog standard IDE/SATA disks in USB enclosures.
Probably not what the market would have chosen had there been a more palatable option, but with the DRM and format crap, no way in hell am I going to be buying either kind of disks or players for the forseeable future.
"Focus instead on the real problems with the current parent system"
Assuming you mean the patent system (freudian slip, eh?), you dont regard such things like the ever growing costs of medicines to the health system to be a problem? Or various other problems like making western labour less competetive due to costs?
Patents arent free to the economy. If we want medical research, we'd get FIVE TIMES the amount of R&D for the money we're spending today if we abolished pharmaceutical patents and paid for the R&D outright. Or the same amount for a fifth of the cost we have today.
The problems of the patent system arent 'fixable', they're built into the system. The problems are inherent in their construction as delegated taxation rights; their lack of budget and constraints create a constant pressure to grant more and more, without any balance. Granting a patent doesnt make money out of nothing, it effectively takes money from the population and other areas of the economy, giving it to the holder of the patent.
In general we require budget decisions of our elect personell for such taxation and public spending, but in this case it's delegated to civil servants who have no accountability, nor even a budget for how much their spending is allowed to cost the economy.
All the problems you mention inevitably stem from this construction. It simply isnt a system designed to foster and encourage innovation and disclosure, it's a system that from the very beginning was intended to reward the friends of the crown.
Re:Some artists just want to be heard...
on
CRIA Falling Apart?
·
· Score: 1
"if you invest money in property"
If you _buy_ property. There's a large difference between the economic concepts of investment and the economic concept of ownership.
Again, I'd really suggest you read up on the concept of rent-seeking.
"so who cares?"
Unfortunately, as the indirect taxation properties of intellectual property is essentially equivalent to a very high sales tax, anyone who is interested in everything from the levels of employment to economic growth cares. They might just not understand enough of the economics to know they care.
"raising the cost of discs"
Competetively produced and distributed material should fall to a fraction of todays prices, so for a CD costing $1 I think we could stand a tax of quite a few cents.
HP and SGI instead got screwed in the opposite direction (possibly due to R. Belluzzo).
Bottom line, let your competition define you and you become predictable and easily manipulated.
"Unless the Schwartz gets this"
Judging from Schwartz' various diatribes (whose lack of contact with reality sometimes leaves one embarrased on Sun's behalf), that, unfortunately, seems unlikely.
If the average lifetime and cost of Li-Ion batteries in laptops and cellphones is an indicator, it wont be that much compared to what you'll have to pay for your bi-yearly replacement batteries.
Re:Some artists just want to be heard...
on
CRIA Falling Apart?
·
· Score: 1
"you'd have to make it illegal for bands to sign contracts."
Without copyright there wouldnt be anything to sign away.
"what company is going to want to invest in making an artist well known"
Nobody. The idea isnt to make it profitable to sink a million dollar investment into a particular artist, that gains society as a whole nothing. That money is effectively thrown away, lost to the economy as the resources are used in producing undesired byproducts, and most definitely lost to any creative talent. We dont need there to be reasons to invest millions in marketing artists, something the internet and p2p use should have made painfully obvious by now. Again, look at classical music and orchestras; that genre survives, and even prospers, without exclusive rights.
"Investments -need- protecting"
Um... no. And this is market capitalism fundamentals; investments are in their essense risk, the reward comes from risking your accrued capital. If you put more capital into your product than you can extract in profits, then, well, you probably were less efficient than your competition, and you will not reap any profits, if you invest less than the competition, ie, come up with a cheaper way to do something you reap more profits. That's what drives the whole efficiency of capitalism.
Now, _investors_ may want protection and security, a phenomenon which is known as rent-seeking and is fundamentally at odds with capitalism. I sympathize, I want a 10-20% yield off my investments without risk too, but to be frank, my personal desire for risk free profit without working might not be entirely relevant.
"(look at why the patent system was originally developed)."
Um... actually, I'd suggest you do that, and look at the actual reasons, not the propaganda. Originally the patent system was developed to reward friends and supporters of the crown by giving them a monopoly (thus further indirectly taxing the population without generating as much irritation as pure taxes). Eventually it got out of hand, and patents on things like, for example, salt, were one of the reasons of one of the british civil wars, IIRC. After the war, the letters of patent were curtailed even if not wholly abolished.
"we need regional representation more than we need political diversity to that extreme..."
Actually, that's a question of decentralization. Regionality based representation in a body that is overly centralized just results in pork-barrel politics (ie, I'll support your law on social security and you give my brother in law, I mean, region a 50 million dollar bridge project).
If there are issues that are so different among regions, having regional representation serves no purpose; the representatives cannot decide on such an issue in any meaningful and honest way, except to decide to make it a local issue instead.
So, I'd suggest that a california libertarian has more in common with an eastern libertarian than he has with a californian democrat, and for issues that cannot be (and/or arent) dealt with locally, the representation would serve better as a representation for political opinions rather than as representation for regionality.
You guys really need to get rid of the winner takes all system and get proportional representation. The vulnerability and failings of two-party democratic systems have become obvious; it's damn cheap to buy two candidates, and the purchasers know they wont have to buy anyone else.
Slashdot Mirror
"I'm not so sure it would benefit anyone to join this proposed community"
In fact, chances are you'd be punished for joining as it'd leave you exposed to willful infringement claims.
The patent systems problems cant be solved within the current framework; the system itself isnt founded on a self-balancing financial structure, making it impossible to analyze, optimize and budget for.
"The big problem I see is the same one I've seen with legal music downloads"
There are a few who actually are useable; Canadian label Nettwerk for example sells real un-DRM'ed mp3's. Painless, fast, works like a charm under Linux, no hoops to jump through.
Wish there were more like them.
"It seems reasonable to think that a tiny microkernel built for virtualization"
The article (bad me, dont read linked articles, I know) actually mentions hypervisors as sort-of microkernels, so yes. Xen and VmWare ESX fits rather well into such a mapping, as they both have their own 'kernel', and where the controller domain is merely another virtual machine.
"If we then get minimal, very application specific kernels to run on top of it for specific needs"
You can accomplish a similar setup by just fudging your definitions a bit again. For example, a bare stripped linux kernel capable of running only on top of the Xen hypervisor isnt all that huge. Combine that with simple single-purpose OS installs doing, for example, fileserving, security services, etc, and communicate over the network for everything, and you more or less have a serverized 'microkernel' architecture. The server is the network is the server is the OS. So to speak. Postmodernistic computing.
"Granting, of course, that OS vendors go along with the idea,"
Yes, well, they can go along with it or we can run free software. Yet another indication of the advantages of adaptability.
So true. This 'next format' is a complete non-event; I already know exactly how I will be watching my media library for years to come: streamed off my mediaserver, which, among its many other qualities, doesnt _argue_ with me.
What the media is sold on I dont give a crap about except insofar as the format has to allow easy transfer to the mediaserver. And it appears neither of these obsolete-before-they-hit-the-shelves formats are going to deliver.
Just do with your password like you do with your fingerprints:
Attach it written on a postit note to every cup of coffee you touch.
I'll bet that you (or some random stranger being 'you') will get that first post soon enough.
6.1 billion lost to the movie industry means 6.1 billions more earned in other areas of the economy.
Hard to see the downside.
"... this is just the way it is with li-ion batteries."
True, which is why I generally avoid stuff that has them like the plague.
Any device with non-replaceable or non-standard-format Li-Ion batteries should at the very least have to be labeled: "This device _WILL_ break and need servicing within 18 months."
"Weren't all the commercials and marketing schemes out there to make me feel guilty"
Copyright or other intellectual 'property' has never been for the artists and creators sake. The creators have merely been the excuse, once owning a printing press and being friendly with the crown was no longer considered reason enough to get a monopoly.
Remember, copyright was created to protect publishers from cheap books, not to ensure payment to creative talent.
"There are certainly parallels..."
/create five billion trillion plat and sell them, effectively transferring all invested wealth in that virtual world to themselves). Further, you'd get the problem with the possibility of easy money laundering, etc.
There are also, however, some very large differences; the first and foremost being that there is no fundamental scarcity (nor is it desireable to have such) of the virtual items in question, leaving them ultimately worthless.
I suspect the economic effects of allowing interaction between game and real economies may actually be damaging to the real economy; it opens up various speculation effects, and can create massive fraud distortions (for example, say some nasty people engage in a corporate takeover of a virtual world company and then proceeds to
And in the end; the fundamental reason free market economy works is because it shifts resources to the most efficient production of the desired goods. Channeling resources into the production of game-world items that are not in reality scarce effectively misemploys those resources (the purchaser could have _both_ the in-world item by means of a keypress _and_ something else for that money, without any loss to anyone), leading to an overall poorer economy, as the other thing will now go uncreated.
"Yes, but Cost To Copy != Cost To Produce."
Cost to copy is the cost to produce the copies. The cost to produce the initial incarnation is a sunk cost that doesnt relate to the cost to produce the copies, except through artificial means.
"It costs potentially years of someone's life to produce an application, or piece of art or music."
In which case they should probably release early and release often, in order to keep a time advantage, or arrange their financing to pay for the actual time. The economy simply isnt served by people taking years; opensource and the other free media have already shown that the ability of others to build upon a free foundation scales better and faster.
I'm not saying we shouldnt reward creativity; I'm saying rewarding it with a monopoly is not a useful way to do it.
"At least not until we get Star Trek replicators."
In which case I'll betcha the current pro-IP crowd would try to ensure you had to pay for every rock, stick or hammer you replicate. After all, the guy chopping off the original stick has to get paid...
"Now *that* would really fuck up an economy."
Or not... that would be the ultimate goal of Adam Smith's free market capitalism. Many tend to get stuck on the idea of getting paid for labour; the whole point of the free market isnt to get paid, it's to pay less. Wealth is increased in the economy by _decreasing_ the amount of labour needed to produce things. You can trace it through history from the time we all had to spend 16 hours per day farming just to produce food all the way to a future star-trek society when we can replicate things at will.
The trouble isnt that the economy gets messed up, it just gets improved, the trouble is we're not very good at handling the situation when we need less labour to accomplish the same thing.
Personally I suspect that we've passed a defining point in the last decade; we've passed the point where demand can no longer keep up with the improvements in production. The infinite replication capabilities of the internet and digital media creates a situation where many people simply dont have the time to consume what gets produced.
This is a situation we will have to deal with, because no matter how much politicians talk about stimulating the economy and creating jobs (tsk), the fact remains; we simply dont have to work as much anymore.
"What's to stop that guy from turning around and giving it away..."
That's the whole point of free market capitalism; if you charge significantly more than the cost of producing something, other players will enter the market, thus increasing supply, thus causing falling prices as the production rate ramps up to meet demand.
"why would anyone buy it from me"
Why should anyone buy from you? If you're charging $100 for something that someone else can produce at cost $0, then paying you $100 would mean that $100 worth of resources were not used to produce something else, making the economy that much poorer.
"I went to school so I could have a career developing software"
Yeah, well, the relevancy of education and desires in todays economy could be debated for a long time.
That aside, one does not exclude the other. The vast majority of actual programming done is one-off custom programming anyway, which is not at all affected, except insofar as free software tends to reduce the redundant work needed to accomplish whatever job you need done.
As a general rule, progress usually means _fewer_ jobs. We simply need fewer people to do the same work that we needed more to do before, ie, things become cheaper and wealth is created. That was true even back in the day of the wheel, and it's certainly true for any particular advancement that Schwartz wants to credit McNealy with; the former bank clerks, photo-industry and warehouse workers would probably have a thing or two to say about how many jobs were 'created'.
Of course, saying 'nobody has made as many people redundant as McNealy' doesnt sound quite as nice. No matter how good it is for the economy as a whole.
Now, if we could only invent some newfangled way of distributing the remaing work so we dont have half the useful workforce unemployed and the other half overworked...
"I'm baffled by it, to be honest."
It's not that baffling. In trademarks, as in other intellectual 'property', there is a lot of so-called 'value' created through artificial scarcity. As the scarcity is artificially created through legal means, and not due to scarcity in the supply channel, this discrepancy in the market becomes exceedingly profitable. You can basically input an at-market-cost produced item, slap a zero-cost piece of paint on it, and charge more for it.
"Why not start something legitimate?"
Because then you'd have to sell the at-cost produced units at a competetive price, which means more or less at cost. The profitability comes from the legally enforced artificial undersupply of the market.
Ironically, the stronger the enforcement of intellectual monopolies becomes, the larger the discrepancy in the market becomes and the more profitable the black market will become.
"This would imply that there is a "proper" price."
In commodity markets there usually is.
"Supply and demand, remember?"
In a free market other players will be able to increase production as long as it's profitable to. In an unfree market, the providers of the supply maximize profits by artificially limiting supply. This is the greatest damage of monopolistic practices; the invisible hand of the market is prevented from reallocation production resources to fulfill consumer demand, and thus maximize the wealth of the economy. One player gets a bigger piece of a smaller pie, and the rest of us get screwed.
Wether or not Intel acts in a monopolistic fashion is debatable; one thing isnt: they have had a worse price/performance ratio than AMD since forever, which suggests they are, in fact, producing less than a market-optimal amount of CPU's.
If you're actually really interested in the supply vs demand issues, I'd suggest you read through the wikipedia article on supply and demand. It's goes through a lot of the various aspects.
"But it certainly is not the 90% that you seem to think it is."
Considering that the propaganda claims that copyright is necessary to encourage the creative arts, I can see only $1.99 that can arguably cover that claim. We're definitely paying about five times what we should be paying, and more than five times what we would be paying if we just abolished copyright and collectively financed the artists and writers outright.
"The difference between digital media and other goods..."
Actually, that's not the difference between digital media and other goods, it's the difference between free market pricing and monopoly pricing.
Copyright and other forms of so called intellectual 'property' are monopoly rights, which, like you say, means that the producer can set the price the market can bear. Incidentally, that also means that if consumers get more disposable capital, if, for example, the price of food goes down, the price of the monopoly products will go up.
As the only 'competition' that the owners of the monopoly have are illicit copying, this further means two things;
A) you're creating a strong foundation for a highly profitable black market (with associated consequences, see drugs, prohibition, etc)
B) if, for any reason, there were to be less illicit copying (drm, etc), prices would go _up_.
"We could use a new, inexpensive, ultra-high-capacity data disc format,"
At the current rate of progress it appears that the next actual format we'll be using is neither blu-ray nor HD-DVD, but bog standard IDE/SATA disks in USB enclosures.
Probably not what the market would have chosen had there been a more palatable option, but with the DRM and format crap, no way in hell am I going to be buying either kind of disks or players for the forseeable future.
Way to bicker yourselves into uselessness.
"Focus instead on the real problems with the current parent system"
Assuming you mean the patent system (freudian slip, eh?), you dont regard such things like the ever growing costs of medicines to the health system to be a problem? Or various other problems like making western labour less competetive due to costs?
Patents arent free to the economy. If we want medical research, we'd get FIVE TIMES the amount of R&D for the money we're spending today if we abolished pharmaceutical patents and paid for the R&D outright. Or the same amount for a fifth of the cost we have today.
The problems of the patent system arent 'fixable', they're built into the system. The problems are inherent in their construction as delegated taxation rights; their lack of budget and constraints create a constant pressure to grant more and more, without any balance. Granting a patent doesnt make money out of nothing, it effectively takes money from the population and other areas of the economy, giving it to the holder of the patent.
In general we require budget decisions of our elect personell for such taxation and public spending, but in this case it's delegated to civil servants who have no accountability, nor even a budget for how much their spending is allowed to cost the economy.
All the problems you mention inevitably stem from this construction. It simply isnt a system designed to foster and encourage innovation and disclosure, it's a system that from the very beginning was intended to reward the friends of the crown.
"if you invest money in property"
If you _buy_ property. There's a large difference between the economic concepts of investment and the economic concept of ownership.
Again, I'd really suggest you read up on the concept of rent-seeking.
"so who cares?"
Unfortunately, as the indirect taxation properties of intellectual property is essentially equivalent to a very high sales tax, anyone who is interested in everything from the levels of employment to economic growth cares. They might just not understand enough of the economics to know they care.
"raising the cost of discs"
Competetively produced and distributed material should fall to a fraction of todays prices, so for a CD costing $1 I think we could stand a tax of quite a few cents.
"Red Hat gets this."
IBM get it too, to a certain extent.
HP and SGI instead got screwed in the opposite direction (possibly due to R. Belluzzo).
Bottom line, let your competition define you and you become predictable and easily manipulated.
"Unless the Schwartz gets this"
Judging from Schwartz' various diatribes (whose lack of contact with reality sometimes leaves one embarrased on Sun's behalf), that, unfortunately, seems unlikely.
"The video recording also looks fantastic"
And once you've had the phone in your pocket for a few weeks the lens is covered with scratches and dust.
"It would replace an average $150 digi cam."
Not unless you treat it like a camera. In which case it is useless as a phone.
"How much will the power cost me?"
If the average lifetime and cost of Li-Ion batteries in laptops and cellphones is an indicator, it wont be that much compared to what you'll have to pay for your bi-yearly replacement batteries.
"you'd have to make it illegal for bands to sign contracts."
Without copyright there wouldnt be anything to sign away.
"what company is going to want to invest in making an artist well known"
Nobody. The idea isnt to make it profitable to sink a million dollar investment into a particular artist, that gains society as a whole nothing. That money is effectively thrown away, lost to the economy as the resources are used in producing undesired byproducts, and most definitely lost to any creative talent. We dont need there to be reasons to invest millions in marketing artists, something the internet and p2p use should have made painfully obvious by now. Again, look at classical music and orchestras; that genre survives, and even prospers, without exclusive rights.
"Investments -need- protecting"
Um... no. And this is market capitalism fundamentals; investments are in their essense risk, the reward comes from risking your accrued capital. If you put more capital into your product than you can extract in profits, then, well, you probably were less efficient than your competition, and you will not reap any profits, if you invest less than the competition, ie, come up with a cheaper way to do something you reap more profits. That's what drives the whole efficiency of capitalism.
Now, _investors_ may want protection and security, a phenomenon which is known as rent-seeking and is fundamentally at odds with capitalism. I sympathize, I want a 10-20% yield off my investments without risk too, but to be frank, my personal desire for risk free profit without working might not be entirely relevant.
"(look at why the patent system was originally developed)."
Um... actually, I'd suggest you do that, and look at the actual reasons, not the propaganda. Originally the patent system was developed to reward friends and supporters of the crown by giving them a monopoly (thus further indirectly taxing the population without generating as much irritation as pure taxes). Eventually it got out of hand, and patents on things like, for example, salt, were one of the reasons of one of the british civil wars, IIRC. After the war, the letters of patent were curtailed even if not wholly abolished.
"we need regional representation more than we need political diversity to that extreme..."
Actually, that's a question of decentralization. Regionality based representation in a body that is overly centralized just results in pork-barrel politics (ie, I'll support your law on social security and you give my brother in law, I mean, region a 50 million dollar bridge project).
If there are issues that are so different among regions, having regional representation serves no purpose; the representatives cannot decide on such an issue in any meaningful and honest way, except to decide to make it a local issue instead.
So, I'd suggest that a california libertarian has more in common with an eastern libertarian than he has with a californian democrat, and for issues that cannot be (and/or arent) dealt with locally, the representation would serve better as a representation for political opinions rather than as representation for regionality.
You guys really need to get rid of the winner takes all system and get proportional representation. The vulnerability and failings of two-party democratic systems have become obvious; it's damn cheap to buy two candidates, and the purchasers know they wont have to buy anyone else.