You could argue with equal justice that copyright was designed to reward competition: that derivative works are of secondary merit.
You can argue anything - wrongly. Quoth the Constitution:
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
"To promote the Progress" doesn't have much in common with "To line the Wallets". From the wording of the Constitution itself, as well as the writings of the men who penned it, it's abundantly clear that patent and copyright laws were meant to benefit society and not the relatively select few content providers. After all, the prevailing undercurrent of the document is about limiting government, not enumerating the ways it could be used to make a cartel rich.
Like it or not, copyright violation is against the law.
So is drinking milk on a sidewalk every third Saturday in some place or another, but that doesn't make it wrong.
Actually, I'm not against these courses either, as long as they're taught correctly:
ethical behavior in regards to the use of information technology
"Thou shalt not kill." OK, got it.
the concept, purpose, and significance of a copyright
It was designed to encourage the creation of a large public domain with which to advance society. Check.
the implications of illegal peer-to-peer network file sharing.
It implies that the {MP,RI}AA memberships better get their collective butts in gear if they want to become relevant again. Chasing societal norms requires a little bit of work sometimes. Alright, done.
when the developers themselves explicitly use words like "nightmare" [...], re-use has definitely been taken too far.
True. I think GnuCash made some technology bets that were pretty reasonable at the time, but just didn't pan out as hoped. For example, I think they picked Scheme as an extension language because people who use it almost universally love it. Unfortunately, it never really picked up the momentum that everyone had hoped, so now there's a pretty small pool of potential developers (how many people do accounting and functional languages?) compared to Python et al.
I don't want to drag along all the KDE cruft just to run a money management app.
Good point. A well-written money management app would implement its own widget toolkit, graphing engine, database backend, network stack, C library, and floating point handler. After all, why leverage the work of thousands of others when you can re-write it all, poorly, yourself?
Don't be a jackass. No reasonable size application is written from scratch anymore. The KMyMoney folks decided to use the KDE framework, just like the GnuCash group used all the "Gnome cruft" instead. If you want something totally minimal, perhaps I could introduce you to vi, bc, and grep. Wait - scratch that - bc depends on ncurses and readline. It may not be "pure" enough for someone of your discriminating tastes.
I gave up waiting and switched to KMyMoney about a year ago. It did everything that my relatively simple personal finances require, plus supports nifty stuff like using KIO slaves to load and save its data files (so I can use sftp:// from work to view my checking account on my home machine).
Now, I have nothing bad to say about GnuCash. It's a good program and served me well when I used it. I only mention KMyMoney as an alternative worth considering.
atomic clocks at GPS orbital altitudes will tick faster by about 45,900 ns/day
atomic clocks moving at GPS orbital speeds will tick slower by about 7,200 ns/day
Nitpick: 45,900 - (-7,200) = 53,100. I'm too lazy to double-check your numbers, so I'll just go pedantic on your math. But yeah, you made an excellent point and it's abundantly obvious that 1) these effects are real, and 2) they affect our daily lives, even if they don't make any intuitive sense at all to non-physicists.
An example. The linux kernel team releases a kernel. Bluehat, the newest kernel distro, teams up with Mactel. Mactel provides a motherboard and CPU that will only run Bluehat signed binaries.
Help me out here. I'm trying to figure out under which social theory you think Bluehat has the right to take thousands of man-years of effort and lock it down into a closed product. If Microsoft were to do that, more power to 'em: they financed the whole operation and have every right to it. Bluehat, though, is taking my (figuratively) work and telling me I can't use it as I see fit.
Frankly, I have little sympathy for such dealings. Want a solid, closed-friendly OS? Pick one of the BSDs, as they explicitly encourage it. Linux isn't an appropriate choice here, and companies that want a free ride of its back can bite me.
I have found myself wondering what it is going to take before people will acknowledge the type of man that Richard Stallman truly is.
I've been wondering the same thing. The man preaches "Freedom! Freedom!", yet people are quick to judge him as some sort of a control freak.
To people who would continue to maintain such a view of the man, I ask you to look at what he is doing here.
That's excellent advice. I did exactly that and become convinced that, once again, RMS is campaigning for your freedom to use your computer as you see fit. You're right: he is a hero.
You realize that he's
nottheonlycontributor, don't you? I'm not even sure if he's the plurality author these days.
That's not saying that Linus hasn't been the main driving force all these years, but he's in no way the only one. Now, the jury's still out as to whether GPLv3 is a good thing - I haven't made up my own mind yet either - but I'll bet large chunks of the Linux kernel could be relicensed immediately if the will was there.
I guess I just don't see how the RIAA isn't a wholy owned subsidiary of the Mafia.
That's really not fair. You're comparing a group of terroristic thugs who sell protection rackets and shady distribution channels with a group of Italian-American businessmen. When was the last time you heard of the mafia putting the beatdown on a single mom, or an old lady with no telephone who lives with a bunch of cats?
No, I'd much rather pay the mafia than the RIAA; the odds are a lot better of actually getting something for your money.
Firefox has a huge amount of marketing and hype behind it. That's why it's more popular that Opera.
Oh, and there's that whole closed source thing that keeps many of us from looking at Opera as anything more than a novelty. I mean, I acknowledge that they've done a nice job, but I don't need another proprietary browser when the F/OSS competitors are so evenly matched.
Yes, but if it costs 6.0 billion dollars a year to produce, that still may not be so hot. I don't know if that's the case, but it's possible.
The economies of scale I'm talking about are the fact that they can't just stock the stuff in every pharmacy in North America, since not every pharmacy will be filling that prescription, so you have to have a separate distribution system for it from the one you'd use for more "popular" medicines. Also, the relatively tiny volume probably means that they can't justify spending billions of dollars to find more efficient ways of making it. It makes sense to build a goat that squirts Claritin milk, but perhaps not so much for this one.
Again, I have no particular love for pharmaceutical companies. Still, they spend mind-boggling amounts of money to do stuff that we never have to think about.
Outrageous prices are reserved for "orphan deseases," like MS. My sister takes Avonex once a week, at a price of about $400/shot.
You've got to understand the economies of scale behind that, though. There's an estimated 250,000 to 350,000 MS cases in the US. Those prices really suck, and I'd hate to be paying them myself, but the reality is that there aren't very many patients to spread the R&D and manufacturing costs across. Contrast with something like Aleve, where you can expect to find a bottle in every other medicine cabinet in the country.
But if you consider that the existence of poor people infected with a deadly disease they cannot afford to cure IS A THREAT TO ME AND YOU AND OUR LOVED ONES (ie. blood transfusions, etc.) then this is clearly a matter of public health and safety.
But here's the problem: if you put the smackdown on the inventor of the cure for AIDS, then the company that was investing $15B on the cure for cancer may decide there's a better return on investment in building casinos. If I knew AIDS were the last great disease left on Earth, and that only a piece of paper with a patent stamp on it were standing between death for millions and life for all, then I'd be a pretty easy sell for your position. However, there's still a lot of things that I want cured, and I don't want the incentive to find those cures ripped out from under the people capable of finding them.
It has nothing to do with charity for the poor unfortunate (immoral gays/johns/perverts/etc.).
I wholeheartedly agree. I'm not particularly interested in how someone contracts an infectious disease other than for academic purposes.
Necessity is the mother of invention. Not "Make $$$ Fast!!!"
And companies need to make money on their investments, so they invent things on which to profit.
I am in no way opposed to an organization research a cure for some illness and then distributing it at cost. I think that's a noble and worthy pursuit, and I'd be the first to commend anyone who does that. However, I don't hold the profit motive against someone, either.
Being the company that made 'the cure' could be good for PR.
Which is just! wonderful! because we know how so many people know and care who makes MiracleTreat(tm) that they saw on TV. I'm married to a doctor, but I can't name more than 3 or 4 major drug companies, let alone which one makes any given drug.
And the 'obscene profits' lost from it being socialized would be inconsequential to the good will by the people.
I didn't major in economics, so please clarify for me the exchange rate of good will units per dollar. Can you pay your employees in good will, or is it the sort of thing you'd distribute as a dividend instead?
OK, yeah, I know I'm being a smartass. However, I still have yet to hear an explanation for how socializing medical patents would support continued R&D. This isn't like a software patent where you get to write "$common_process, on a computer!" and start suing people - this stuff takes some real investment.
And no, I don't work for a pharmaceutical company, nor do I own stock in any (that I know of). I just think that people who advocate this approach are likely to get steamrolled by the Law Of Unintended Consequences, and I don't want to see that happen.
Another thing though, is this drug patented, or will this be cheaply available for everyone who needs it, especially AIDS ravaged countried in Africa.
Yeah, because nothing encourages billions in R&D investment like socializing the results. I don't know about you, but I like seeing new cures for dangerous illnesses. I'd like to think that our rush to end one particular scourge didn't destroy our ability to fight others.
And to those who would suggest "fairly compensating" them for the stolen patent: isn't that the whole purpose of the market? Any pharma company who expects to make $X from their research, but only gets $X/5 because the government decides to "liberate" the work, will not make the same mistake again.
Whether you think medicine-for-profit is right or wrong is immaterial; that's what we have under the current system. Take away the profit and you take away the medicine as well, and I think that's the far worse crime.
Raise your hand if you've seen unsold 360's lying around unsold at your local retailer.
I admit that I don't have a "1337 Gam0rz B00t33k" in my town, but the local Wal-Mart has a stack of 360s available for sale. I personally don't care one way or another - I don't dislike MS any more than I dislike Sony - but your implication that the 360 is flying off shelves doesn't jibe with what I've personally seen.
For instance, a VoIP connection is a very consistent stream of data to one host, where anything file sharing related will be far from smooth, and will be talking to many hosts.
Yeah? How well does it dig through the IPv6-over-IPv4 between my router and HE.net? What patterns is your magic software able to discern from my IPSEC packets that only go between my router and a friendly peering point in another state?
No, I think I'll go along with the people who believe that random data is darn near impossible to distinguish from encrypted data.
Slashdot Mirror
And the preferred term for their vehicles: "donorcycles".
You can argue anything - wrongly. Quoth the Constitution:
"To promote the Progress" doesn't have much in common with "To line the Wallets". From the wording of the Constitution itself, as well as the writings of the men who penned it, it's abundantly clear that patent and copyright laws were meant to benefit society and not the relatively select few content providers. After all, the prevailing undercurrent of the document is about limiting government, not enumerating the ways it could be used to make a cartel rich.
Oh, shoot - you're right. Make that Prohibition 3.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Darn straight. I think one day we'll look back on Prohibition 2 and wonder what on Earth we were thinking.
So is drinking milk on a sidewalk every third Saturday in some place or another, but that doesn't make it wrong.
Actually, I'm not against these courses either, as long as they're taught correctly:
"Thou shalt not kill." OK, got it.
It was designed to encourage the creation of a large public domain with which to advance society. Check.
It implies that the {MP,RI}AA memberships better get their collective butts in gear if they want to become relevant again. Chasing societal norms requires a little bit of work sometimes. Alright, done.
Yeah, because nothing says "unobtainable" like being able to buy it from Wal-Mart.
True. I think GnuCash made some technology bets that were pretty reasonable at the time, but just didn't pan out as hoped. For example, I think they picked Scheme as an extension language because people who use it almost universally love it. Unfortunately, it never really picked up the momentum that everyone had hoped, so now there's a pretty small pool of potential developers (how many people do accounting and functional languages?) compared to Python et al.
Good point. A well-written money management app would implement its own widget toolkit, graphing engine, database backend, network stack, C library, and floating point handler. After all, why leverage the work of thousands of others when you can re-write it all, poorly, yourself?
Don't be a jackass. No reasonable size application is written from scratch anymore. The KMyMoney folks decided to use the KDE framework, just like the GnuCash group used all the "Gnome cruft" instead. If you want something totally minimal, perhaps I could introduce you to vi, bc, and grep. Wait - scratch that - bc depends on ncurses and readline. It may not be "pure" enough for someone of your discriminating tastes.
Now, I have nothing bad to say about GnuCash. It's a good program and served me well when I used it. I only mention KMyMoney as an alternative worth considering.
Nitpick: 45,900 - (-7,200) = 53,100. I'm too lazy to double-check your numbers, so I'll just go pedantic on your math. But yeah, you made an excellent point and it's abundantly obvious that 1) these effects are real, and 2) they affect our daily lives, even if they don't make any intuitive sense at all to non-physicists.
Help me out here. I'm trying to figure out under which social theory you think Bluehat has the right to take thousands of man-years of effort and lock it down into a closed product. If Microsoft were to do that, more power to 'em: they financed the whole operation and have every right to it. Bluehat, though, is taking my (figuratively) work and telling me I can't use it as I see fit.
Frankly, I have little sympathy for such dealings. Want a solid, closed-friendly OS? Pick one of the BSDs, as they explicitly encourage it. Linux isn't an appropriate choice here, and companies that want a free ride of its back can bite me.
I've been wondering the same thing. The man preaches "Freedom! Freedom!", yet people are quick to judge him as some sort of a control freak.
To people who would continue to maintain such a view of the man, I ask you to look at what he is doing here.
That's excellent advice. I did exactly that and become convinced that, once again, RMS is campaigning for your freedom to use your computer as you see fit. You're right: he is a hero.
That's not saying that Linus hasn't been the main driving force all these years, but he's in no way the only one. Now, the jury's still out as to whether GPLv3 is a good thing - I haven't made up my own mind yet either - but I'll bet large chunks of the Linux kernel could be relicensed immediately if the will was there.
That's really not fair. You're comparing a group of terroristic thugs who sell protection rackets and shady distribution channels with a group of Italian-American businessmen. When was the last time you heard of the mafia putting the beatdown on a single mom, or an old lady with no telephone who lives with a bunch of cats?
No, I'd much rather pay the mafia than the RIAA; the odds are a lot better of actually getting something for your money.
Oh, and there's that whole closed source thing that keeps many of us from looking at Opera as anything more than a novelty. I mean, I acknowledge that they've done a nice job, but I don't need another proprietary browser when the F/OSS competitors are so evenly matched.
You do understand how sarcasm works, right?
Yes, but if it costs 6.0 billion dollars a year to produce, that still may not be so hot. I don't know if that's the case, but it's possible.
The economies of scale I'm talking about are the fact that they can't just stock the stuff in every pharmacy in North America, since not every pharmacy will be filling that prescription, so you have to have a separate distribution system for it from the one you'd use for more "popular" medicines. Also, the relatively tiny volume probably means that they can't justify spending billions of dollars to find more efficient ways of making it. It makes sense to build a goat that squirts Claritin milk, but perhaps not so much for this one.
Again, I have no particular love for pharmaceutical companies. Still, they spend mind-boggling amounts of money to do stuff that we never have to think about.
You've got to understand the economies of scale behind that, though. There's an estimated 250,000 to 350,000 MS cases in the US. Those prices really suck, and I'd hate to be paying them myself, but the reality is that there aren't very many patients to spread the R&D and manufacturing costs across. Contrast with something like Aleve, where you can expect to find a bottle in every other medicine cabinet in the country.
But here's the problem: if you put the smackdown on the inventor of the cure for AIDS, then the company that was investing $15B on the cure for cancer may decide there's a better return on investment in building casinos. If I knew AIDS were the last great disease left on Earth, and that only a piece of paper with a patent stamp on it were standing between death for millions and life for all, then I'd be a pretty easy sell for your position. However, there's still a lot of things that I want cured, and I don't want the incentive to find those cures ripped out from under the people capable of finding them.
It has nothing to do with charity for the poor unfortunate (immoral gays/johns/perverts/etc.).
I wholeheartedly agree. I'm not particularly interested in how someone contracts an infectious disease other than for academic purposes.
Necessity is the mother of invention. Not "Make $$$ Fast!!!"
And companies need to make money on their investments, so they invent things on which to profit.
I am in no way opposed to an organization research a cure for some illness and then distributing it at cost. I think that's a noble and worthy pursuit, and I'd be the first to commend anyone who does that. However, I don't hold the profit motive against someone, either.
Which is just! wonderful! because we know how so many people know and care who makes MiracleTreat(tm) that they saw on TV. I'm married to a doctor, but I can't name more than 3 or 4 major drug companies, let alone which one makes any given drug.
And the 'obscene profits' lost from it being socialized would be inconsequential to the good will by the people.
I didn't major in economics, so please clarify for me the exchange rate of good will units per dollar. Can you pay your employees in good will, or is it the sort of thing you'd distribute as a dividend instead?
OK, yeah, I know I'm being a smartass. However, I still have yet to hear an explanation for how socializing medical patents would support continued R&D. This isn't like a software patent where you get to write "$common_process, on a computer!" and start suing people - this stuff takes some real investment.
And no, I don't work for a pharmaceutical company, nor do I own stock in any (that I know of). I just think that people who advocate this approach are likely to get steamrolled by the Law Of Unintended Consequences, and I don't want to see that happen.
Yeah, because nothing encourages billions in R&D investment like socializing the results. I don't know about you, but I like seeing new cures for dangerous illnesses. I'd like to think that our rush to end one particular scourge didn't destroy our ability to fight others.
And to those who would suggest "fairly compensating" them for the stolen patent: isn't that the whole purpose of the market? Any pharma company who expects to make $X from their research, but only gets $X/5 because the government decides to "liberate" the work, will not make the same mistake again.
Whether you think medicine-for-profit is right or wrong is immaterial; that's what we have under the current system. Take away the profit and you take away the medicine as well, and I think that's the far worse crime.
I admit that I don't have a "1337 Gam0rz B00t33k" in my town, but the local Wal-Mart has a stack of 360s available for sale. I personally don't care one way or another - I don't dislike MS any more than I dislike Sony - but your implication that the 360 is flying off shelves doesn't jibe with what I've personally seen.
Oh mighty oracle that has privileged access to my contracts! Can you also help me find the keys to my luggage?
Yeah? How well does it dig through the IPv6-over-IPv4 between my router and HE.net? What patterns is your magic software able to discern from my IPSEC packets that only go between my router and a friendly peering point in another state?
No, I think I'll go along with the people who believe that random data is darn near impossible to distinguish from encrypted data.