I don't like Reagan at all, but honestly he was fairly smart, though not posessed of a wide breadth of knowledge (the difference between intelligence and wisdom). But everything got hidden by his personality, which was the real winner.
Bush, aside from being dumber than a sack of hammers, has a much greater failing. He's very much a puppet, and every time he's gotten in trouble in the past, he's been bailed out. I sincerely doubt that it was ever his idea to run for any political office, ever. (And it's really too bad that Ann Richards lost - she's a great woman, I liked her a lot)
At any rate, this has been a really crappy election so far. There's a rather good comic that I like to that effect.
Personally I'm an independent (I can think for myself - no parties for me, thanks) but my favorite candidate was McCain, because he was honest, despite my disliking a lot of his proposals. All the rest strike me as the sorts of politicians where you want to buy extra locks for your house when you hear they're in town.
Oh sure. I'll agree that in the old days of microcomputers there were a zillion different (largely) incompatable standards.
But sooner or later people have to learn to live with their neighbors. Computers have generally gotten to work together better as time has gone on. The internet is a great embodiment of this. The idea from day one was to have a plethora of different machines that could still be different, as long as they could talk to each other.
MS has taken the approach of killing neighbors instead of letting the kids play together.
Phones would ended up the same way if a similar situation hadn't been allowed to go down. IIRC (been a long time since I read about it) there had already been some telcos working on this as ATT started their giant buying spree.
Welllll... I kind of doubt that they'd get a great reception in Canada after pulling something like that, but it would actually work out rather well.
For some reason (it makes a *little* sense, but not much) international treaties trump the constitution, IIRC. This is really bad when, as has been happening for some time now, the US enters into a crapload of treaties that it can't get out of easily. Talk about a portion of the Constitution that could use an amendment....
It's not how many competitors you have, it's the relative amounts of control. Are you telling me that Be can speak with an equal voice as MS can? Without your nose significantly altering your center of gravity?
Be can't leverage their OS in favor of their browser. Neither one is an even vaguely dominant player. MS controls microcomputing, and I don't think anyone here can deny that. The various Linux companies are growing but they can't make demands of Intel, or Apple, or anyone else right now.
But when they can, and if they do, then hell yeah we'd go after them too. I'd gladly encourage taking Red Hat to ask if they monopolized Linux and abused their monopoly.
No precedents being set, my friend. The govt. has left personal computers alone because no one got out of line on this scale before MS did. It's good old fashioned antitrust, which dates back a hundred years or so.
But if MS was pruned back into a smaller company we'd see: *64 companies starting up every day to your 32 *Microsoft no longer feared - people would be willing to work with it w/o fearing for their immortal souls *And Microsoft might actually be able to develop *GOOD* products again. And people might buy them on their own merits, rather than because of the name. I liked MS Word 4. They haven't written anything that good in about a decade. There's no incentive.
The industry today is great, yeah. But if MS is holding it back, just imagine how much better the industry would be. Good Enough is a crappy argument from MS, and it's a crappy argument from you too. I want better.
Well all that you're seeing here is that nature abhors a vacuum (which would explain the tornado that got my wet 'n dry;)
If MS goes down then there will be a lot of companies angling for their spot. What's best is when they can be kept stuck in the 'angling' phase, without anyone actually succeeding. Nor the biggest competitors forming a cartel (in which case there's no longer the competition).
You've got to remember that MS != Competition. And competition in this business is a great thing.
i'd just like to take this time to say that I've never had a useless, idiotic post appended to one of mine before. Particularly one that borrowed from (among other sources) my post.
Wow. It's like I truly belong;)
obCopyright: I don't care if he messes about, with one condition. Don't act fraudulently by claiming to have created this from nothing. Personally I thought it was rather dumb, but I don't get a lot of art either, and I'm an artist. Meh.
1)Sure, but how do the arts and sciences progress if you have to constantly dole out usage fees to people. Or worse, are prevented from making even incremental, but improving changes to work that has been created elsewhere? If there was no reason for works and inventions to enter the public domain, the monopolies might as well last forever. The language of the clause isn't even vague on that point: the time MUST be limited. Given that copyrights were a pretty new idea at the time (and that their copyrights were originally IIRC 14 years long) I suspect that they too felt that progress comes about through building on a public foundation of ideas, works, inventions, etc.
2)You Bet
3)Well it's very easy in terms of the property rights that you have on any explicit work's container (e.g. the recording of a song).
At best I'd say that there should be (and this ties into part 4 of your comments) something like squatter's rights for copyrighted/patented material.
That is, if you can 'improve' something, and do so before that improvement is also done by the original owner, then you should have the right to do that. Highly derivative works can in fact be considered to be more than just novelties.
How many people here think that they could have written a better Star Wars I than George Lucas did? Or other stories that are plainly set in that 'universe.' I suspect that a fair number of fans could. I'd like to try my hand at 'C3PO and R2D2 are Dead';)
But seriously, I think that it's possible to make a derivative work that furthers the progress of the arts. I've seen tons of fanfics which rely on well-known characters, settings, plots, etc. which other people wrote. A lot are much better than their sources. But you can't change the names to something original and expect people to respond to it, because it relies on other people's foundations.
Waiting a hundred years to use a wheel is just as bad as having to reinvent it. Particularly if you wanted to write about *that* wheel.
I suspect that a model like this, which expands fair use infringements greatly would serve to expand the total amount of material being generated. It would very likely even expand the amount of original material that's created as new talents are discovered in the 'minors' of derivative works, and encouraged to write on their own merits. Plus sales of works infringed upon may increase as even more people need to understand the basis of the derivative works than before.
A second idea which might serve to promote the arts and sciences might be to treat copyrights like patents and require them to be registered to exist. The revenues from copyrights and patents could be used by the government to fund works which would go directly into the public domain. But presently everything gets copyrighted for free.
5)I'm still on the fence as to whether or not software patents are even good at all. It's a tricky idea.
6)Like I said, I don't think that copyrights need to last for a lifetime. Artists who are highly successful are probably likely to coast on their successful work, rather than create even more stuff. A flat length of time for copyrights seems better. Add in the requirement that copyrights have to be registered and paid for (so that not every stupid little thing gets copyrighted, much like patents) along with some form of the squatter's rights I discussed, and we might have something really good.
There are annoying ways around this. Poke around the QT site and you can find licensing arrangements by which you can get the real installer and not the stupid dl application.
Well we had an economy before. And it seemed fairly robust. I don't see how middlemen are so easily considered to be vital. I'd much rather support the creators directly and let the MPAA et al get real jobs.
The vital parts of the 'system' are the public domain and discourse (to supply some ideas), the authors (to turn supplied and their own ideas into new works), and the audience (to interpret those ideas and move them back into the realm of discourse and the public domain).
I don't see the need for mass marketing campaigns (if an idea can't stand on its own merit it has problems) nor middlemen who do nothing but collect money to do something that was done directly in the past.
Pirates do not break ancient laws of copyright. Copyright is quite new (a couple hundred years).
What they sometimes break are laws regarding fraud. But if a pirate is upfront about their copies having been made themselves, then I don't see any other ancient laws being broken.
Books and music existed before the notion of copyrights. Suprisingly enough, they were quite popular. I suspect that if movies and software had been around at that time too, they would have also been commonplace forms of expression.
Furthermore, you are shortsighted in your appraisal of copyrights/patents in general.
Copyrights and patents DO NOT exist with the intention that the creators of given work or invention will make money. That's entirely secondary. The point, as you'd know just by looking in the relevant part of the Constitution (Article I, Section 8, Clause 8) is to increase the amount of works that enter into the public domain.
In order to encourage the creation of works which are not controlled in their use, Congress can grant monopolies of limited time to the creator. But the intent is clearly not in favor of the creator, and there must be a time limit which additionally favors the public over the creator.
Well suprisingly enough, virtually no copyrighted material has entered the public domain in recent years. This clearly indicates a breakdown in the existing copyright law.
Is there such a thing as a free lunch? YES. Thoughts are not chattel. Any minute amount of 'intellectual property' is not only not real property, but it is not natural in the least. For millenia there have been no significant restrictions on people's abilities to think or create (aside from cultural clashes - religion being a biggie, but that's a whole different kettle of fish)
Given as how a lot of great works were created in times when there were no protections, I sincerely doubt that you're correct in believing that in the absence of copyright the media would dry up. I think that it would just get bigger.
By your standard it is unfair for Disney to make a movie version (a bad one too) of Hans Christian Anderson's "The Little Mermaid."
By your standard it is unfair for Microsoft to make mice and keyboards without paying the creators of those devices, who you must think ought to still hold the patents on them.
By your standard it is unfair for the RIAA to be associated with a recording of "The Star Spangled Banner" seeing as how Francis Scott Key's descendants didn't get a penny.
Or for Mattel to make jigsaw puzzles that weren't licensed from the original creator. Or use games involving dice, which they didn't invent either.
So are you getting the picture? All of the companies involved in extending copyright and hiding behind it are both: *Unable to compete on a level playing field *Themselves guilty of building upon other people's works.
Strikes me that things are generally improved when you have the freedom to use other people's ideas. I'd be in favor of limiting copyrights and patents to somewhere between 10-20 years and never extending them. The lack of a never-ending supply of money actually gives people MORE incentive to create. The current system lets creators coast on one or two works, and is itself plainly defeating the purpose for which it exists.
Johnson's Dictionary had only come out in the 1750's IIRC, and the very idea that there could BE a standardized spelling of English words was pretty new. Before no one had cared; it wasn't important.
But the Americans had no problems with English save for a couple of them like Webster (who was also big on dictionaries) Adams and Franklin. They briefly messed around with significant changes to English, in the hopes of creating the American language which would distinguish them culturally from England. It went over like a lead balloon.
As for changing everything to German, that was actually a proposal to help accomodate immigrants, many of whom were German at that time. It was also not recieved well.
Webster did have a significant impact on spelling through his dictionary, but by the 1820's had more or less given up the cause of creating a new language or even significantly standardizing it.
It still took a while for spellings to really become standard. Improving literacy rates helped a lot. Nowadays, no thanks to radio and tv, we're even losing regional accents. Everyone sounds like a frickin' midwesterner more and more all the time.
My life has improved since the DOJ's antitrust actions against IBM.
Do you honestly think that any of the following would exist in a world where IBM dominated computing: *Microcomputers *Microsoft *The Internet
No, because all of those things (along with many more) were developments that IBM would have squished given half a chance. You simply are not free when there's a dictator, even if he's benevolent. Having one giant company in a field will impair competition even if it is not hostile. But oddly enough, they are always hostile.
Maybe it's just me, but I'm rather fond of having some safety regulations on cars, foods, drugs, etc.
For those of you naieve enough to put all your trust into the market (about as bad as putting it all into the govt.) do bear in mind that hardly any cars _used_ to have seat belts, because it was thought that consumers would feel unsafe. Turns out that safety features are a big selling point, but the car companies never would have tried if they hadn't been forced.
(Doesn't anyone read "The Jungle" anymore? Or "Unsafe at Any Speed"?)
Well I think that weather satellites have improved things. I'm from Florida, and before they had these things, you didn't know if a hurricane was coming until it got there. Now people can get ready days ahead of time.
Telecom sats are also beneficial. And while there may not be immediate payoffs from pure science, it's ultimately a good idea.
IIRC (it's been a long time since i read this) LSD was developed in Switzerland. The chemist working on it accidently got some on him and pretty rapidly discovered the more interesting properties of the stuff. Anyone know more about the origins of LSD?
Re:you make the same mistake!
on
The Mind of God
·
· Score: 1
well if *I* were god, I sure wouldn't be fond of people who only believed in me because of pascal's wager.
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Bush, aside from being dumber than a sack of hammers, has a much greater failing. He's very much a puppet, and every time he's gotten in trouble in the past, he's been bailed out. I sincerely doubt that it was ever his idea to run for any political office, ever. (And it's really too bad that Ann Richards lost - she's a great woman, I liked her a lot)
At any rate, this has been a really crappy election so far. There's a rather good comic that I like to that effect.
Personally I'm an independent (I can think for myself - no parties for me, thanks) but my favorite candidate was McCain, because he was honest, despite my disliking a lot of his proposals. All the rest strike me as the sorts of politicians where you want to buy extra locks for your house when you hear they're in town.
Oh sure. I'll agree that in the old days of microcomputers there were a zillion different (largely) incompatable standards.
But sooner or later people have to learn to live with their neighbors. Computers have generally gotten to work together better as time has gone on. The internet is a great embodiment of this. The idea from day one was to have a plethora of different machines that could still be different, as long as they could talk to each other.
MS has taken the approach of killing neighbors instead of letting the kids play together.
Phones would ended up the same way if a similar situation hadn't been allowed to go down. IIRC (been a long time since I read about it) there had already been some telcos working on this as ATT started their giant buying spree.
Welllll...
I kind of doubt that they'd get a great reception in Canada after pulling something like that, but it would actually work out rather well.
For some reason (it makes a *little* sense, but not much) international treaties trump the constitution, IIRC. This is really bad when, as has been happening for some time now, the US enters into a crapload of treaties that it can't get out of easily. Talk about a portion of the Constitution that could use an amendment....
(IANAL, but I try to keep up)
MS clearly holds a monopoly buddy.
It's not how many competitors you have, it's the relative amounts of control. Are you telling me that Be can speak with an equal voice as MS can? Without your nose significantly altering your center of gravity?
Be can't leverage their OS in favor of their browser. Neither one is an even vaguely dominant player. MS controls microcomputing, and I don't think anyone here can deny that. The various Linux companies are growing but they can't make demands of Intel, or Apple, or anyone else right now.
But when they can, and if they do, then hell yeah we'd go after them too. I'd gladly encourage taking Red Hat to ask if they monopolized Linux and abused their monopoly.
No precedents being set, my friend. The govt. has left personal computers alone because no one got out of line on this scale before MS did. It's good old fashioned antitrust, which dates back a hundred years or so.
But if MS was pruned back into a smaller company we'd see:
*64 companies starting up every day to your 32
*Microsoft no longer feared - people would be willing to work with it w/o fearing for their immortal souls
*And Microsoft might actually be able to develop *GOOD* products again. And people might buy them on their own merits, rather than because of the name. I liked MS Word 4. They haven't written anything that good in about a decade. There's no incentive.
The industry today is great, yeah. But if MS is holding it back, just imagine how much better the industry would be. Good Enough is a crappy argument from MS, and it's a crappy argument from you too. I want better.
Well all that you're seeing here is that nature abhors a vacuum (which would explain the tornado that got my wet 'n dry ;)
If MS goes down then there will be a lot of companies angling for their spot. What's best is when they can be kept stuck in the 'angling' phase, without anyone actually succeeding. Nor the biggest competitors forming a cartel (in which case there's no longer the competition).
You've got to remember that MS != Competition. And competition in this business is a great thing.
ianal, but fair use *IS* infringement, but you're allowed to get away with it under the law.
so that would be following the ethernet philosophy of packet collision ;)
well the germans *do* love david hassellhoff ;)
i'd just like to take this time to say that I've never had a useless, idiotic post appended to one of mine before. Particularly one that borrowed from (among other sources) my post.
;)
Wow. It's like I truly belong
obCopyright: I don't care if he messes about, with one condition. Don't act fraudulently by claiming to have created this from nothing. Personally I thought it was rather dumb, but I don't get a lot of art either, and I'm an artist. Meh.
1)Sure, but how do the arts and sciences progress if you have to constantly dole out usage fees to people. Or worse, are prevented from making even incremental, but improving changes to work that has been created elsewhere? If there was no reason for works and inventions to enter the public domain, the monopolies might as well last forever. The language of the clause isn't even vague on that point: the time MUST be limited. Given that copyrights were a pretty new idea at the time (and that their copyrights were originally IIRC 14 years long) I suspect that they too felt that progress comes about through building on a public foundation of ideas, works, inventions, etc.
;)
2)You Bet
3)Well it's very easy in terms of the property rights that you have on any explicit work's container (e.g. the recording of a song).
At best I'd say that there should be (and this ties into part 4 of your comments) something like squatter's rights for copyrighted/patented material.
That is, if you can 'improve' something, and do so before that improvement is also done by the original owner, then you should have the right to do that. Highly derivative works can in fact be considered to be more than just novelties.
How many people here think that they could have written a better Star Wars I than George Lucas did? Or other stories that are plainly set in that 'universe.' I suspect that a fair number of fans could. I'd like to try my hand at 'C3PO and R2D2 are Dead'
But seriously, I think that it's possible to make a derivative work that furthers the progress of the arts. I've seen tons of fanfics which rely on well-known characters, settings, plots, etc. which other people wrote. A lot are much better than their sources. But you can't change the names to something original and expect people to respond to it, because it relies on other people's foundations.
Waiting a hundred years to use a wheel is just as bad as having to reinvent it. Particularly if you wanted to write about *that* wheel.
I suspect that a model like this, which expands fair use infringements greatly would serve to expand the total amount of material being generated. It would very likely even expand the amount of original material that's created as new talents are discovered in the 'minors' of derivative works, and encouraged to write on their own merits. Plus sales of works infringed upon may increase as even more people need to understand the basis of the derivative works than before.
A second idea which might serve to promote the arts and sciences might be to treat copyrights like patents and require them to be registered to exist. The revenues from copyrights and patents could be used by the government to fund works which would go directly into the public domain. But presently everything gets copyrighted for free.
5)I'm still on the fence as to whether or not software patents are even good at all. It's a tricky idea.
6)Like I said, I don't think that copyrights need to last for a lifetime. Artists who are highly successful are probably likely to coast on their successful work, rather than create even more stuff. A flat length of time for copyrights seems better. Add in the requirement that copyrights have to be registered and paid for (so that not every stupid little thing gets copyrighted, much like patents) along with some form of the squatter's rights I discussed, and we might have something really good.
Mac OS X is related to BSD and NeXT (the latter of which was bought by Apple and which then proceeded to assimilate it ;)
/. are about OS X, and there's been some good stuff on Ars as well. Just do some searches, you'll find something.
Half the Apple stories around
There are annoying ways around this. Poke around the QT site and you can find licensing arrangements by which you can get the real installer and not the stupid dl application.
not optimal, but it's something.
Well we had an economy before. And it seemed fairly robust. I don't see how middlemen are so easily considered to be vital. I'd much rather support the creators directly and let the MPAA et al get real jobs.
The vital parts of the 'system' are the public domain and discourse (to supply some ideas), the authors (to turn supplied and their own ideas into new works), and the audience (to interpret those ideas and move them back into the realm of discourse and the public domain).
I don't see the need for mass marketing campaigns (if an idea can't stand on its own merit it has problems) nor middlemen who do nothing but collect money to do something that was done directly in the past.
Pirates do not break ancient laws of copyright. Copyright is quite new (a couple hundred years).
What they sometimes break are laws regarding fraud. But if a pirate is upfront about their copies having been made themselves, then I don't see any other ancient laws being broken.
Books and music existed before the notion of copyrights. Suprisingly enough, they were quite popular. I suspect that if movies and software had been around at that time too, they would have also been commonplace forms of expression.
Furthermore, you are shortsighted in your appraisal of copyrights/patents in general.
Copyrights and patents DO NOT exist with the intention that the creators of given work or invention will make money. That's entirely secondary. The point, as you'd know just by looking in the relevant part of the Constitution (Article I, Section 8, Clause 8) is to increase the amount of works that enter into the public domain.
In order to encourage the creation of works which are not controlled in their use, Congress can grant monopolies of limited time to the creator. But the intent is clearly not in favor of the creator, and there must be a time limit which additionally favors the public over the creator.
Well suprisingly enough, virtually no copyrighted material has entered the public domain in recent years. This clearly indicates a breakdown in the existing copyright law.
Is there such a thing as a free lunch? YES. Thoughts are not chattel. Any minute amount of 'intellectual property' is not only not real property, but it is not natural in the least. For millenia there have been no significant restrictions on people's abilities to think or create (aside from cultural clashes - religion being a biggie, but that's a whole different kettle of fish)
Given as how a lot of great works were created in times when there were no protections, I sincerely doubt that you're correct in believing that in the absence of copyright the media would dry up. I think that it would just get bigger.
By your standard it is unfair for Disney to make a movie version (a bad one too) of Hans Christian Anderson's "The Little Mermaid."
By your standard it is unfair for Microsoft to make mice and keyboards without paying the creators of those devices, who you must think ought to still hold the patents on them.
By your standard it is unfair for the RIAA to be associated with a recording of "The Star Spangled Banner" seeing as how Francis Scott Key's descendants didn't get a penny.
Or for Mattel to make jigsaw puzzles that weren't licensed from the original creator. Or use games involving dice, which they didn't invent either.
So are you getting the picture? All of the companies involved in extending copyright and hiding behind it are both:
*Unable to compete on a level playing field
*Themselves guilty of building upon other people's works.
Strikes me that things are generally improved when you have the freedom to use other people's ideas. I'd be in favor of limiting copyrights and patents to somewhere between 10-20 years and never extending them. The lack of a never-ending supply of money actually gives people MORE incentive to create. The current system lets creators coast on one or two works, and is itself plainly defeating the purpose for which it exists.
yaright.
Johnson's Dictionary had only come out in the 1750's IIRC, and the very idea that there could BE a standardized spelling of English words was pretty new. Before no one had cared; it wasn't important.
But the Americans had no problems with English save for a couple of them like Webster (who was also big on dictionaries) Adams and Franklin. They briefly messed around with significant changes to English, in the hopes of creating the American language which would distinguish them culturally from England. It went over like a lead balloon.
As for changing everything to German, that was actually a proposal to help accomodate immigrants, many of whom were German at that time. It was also not recieved well.
Webster did have a significant impact on spelling through his dictionary, but by the 1820's had more or less given up the cause of creating a new language or even significantly standardizing it.
It still took a while for spellings to really become standard. Improving literacy rates helped a lot. Nowadays, no thanks to radio and tv, we're even losing regional accents. Everyone sounds like a frickin' midwesterner more and more all the time.
My life has improved since the DOJ's antitrust actions against IBM.
Do you honestly think that any of the following would exist in a world where IBM dominated computing:
*Microcomputers
*Microsoft
*The Internet
No, because all of those things (along with many more) were developments that IBM would have squished given half a chance. You simply are not free when there's a dictator, even if he's benevolent. Having one giant company in a field will impair competition even if it is not hostile. But oddly enough, they are always hostile.
Maybe it's just me, but I'm rather fond of having some safety regulations on cars, foods, drugs, etc.
For those of you naieve enough to put all your trust into the market (about as bad as putting it all into the govt.) do bear in mind that hardly any cars _used_ to have seat belts, because it was thought that consumers would feel unsafe. Turns out that safety features are a big selling point, but the car companies never would have tried if they hadn't been forced.
(Doesn't anyone read "The Jungle" anymore? Or "Unsafe at Any Speed"?)
of course there's a great big can of worms when it comes to works that pass into the public domain...
locking everything up on one site is not a great recipie for the public interest, imho
Well I think that weather satellites have improved things. I'm from Florida, and before they had these things, you didn't know if a hurricane was coming until it got there. Now people can get ready days ahead of time.
Telecom sats are also beneficial. And while there may not be immediate payoffs from pure science, it's ultimately a good idea.
IIRC (it's been a long time since i read this) LSD was developed in Switzerland. The chemist working on it accidently got some on him and pretty rapidly discovered the more interesting properties of the stuff. Anyone know more about the origins of LSD?
well if *I* were god, I sure wouldn't be fond of people who only believed in me because of pascal's wager.
That's a pretty good description of Berkeley ;)
(cpt - from the *right* coast)
well there probably are one or two custom chips hanging around in there someplace.
but it's nowhere near as bad as it was, agreed.