Actually, paper ballots and manual counting are *great* for television, you get results coming through in a trickle at first then more then more and more, and as the night goes on they get statistically relevant sample sizes that they can begin "calling" results for specific ridings ahead of the final tally while places where the race is close have to go on and can flip flop. And then there is the whole deal with doing the statistics to try and predict which party will win, with differing networks having different statasticians and software helping them do that and thus the "race" to call things first. An election where final results are tallied inside of half an hour and announced all at once would be boooring.
What I hate are the what-if's in life that haunt you
(you may need to right click save as - stupid webserver - stupid IE - I've tried setting the mime type, and IE can't simply refer to the OS file extension setting or do something intelligent itself)
- sigh -... Yeah, I must have been in a bad mood or something.
BTW: I've started using Firebird. Last week with IE I clicked on a torrent info link that lead to some other site (instead of an IMDB page) that launched an infinite popup stream. Had to do the three fingered salute to kill IE, then spend an hour cleaning auto-installed spyware off my PC.
Only drawback with Firebird is it's not FCS yet, still beta, and is a resource hog. But I do love the user-control features such as "ask and disallow all future cookies" and "on demand inline-context-menu block images from site" and no popups and tabs.
I'm actually happy that my brother has Windows XP and it auto-downloads updates a bit at a time when he connects to the internet over modem, and my cousin has AOL - otherwise I'd be doing a ton of free phone support for them.
It was an indirect affilliate link, it's a valid criticism. We can't tell if it's an honest recommendation or some a**h*le making money. Welcome to my enemies list boys and girls.
Hee hee, good point. And that hay would just be decomposing on the ground anyways, just like fallen trees decompose in the woods.
So instead of microbes eating the trees, we have cows eating the trees and us eating the cows!
So I guess PETA is in fact a "pro microbe" lobby. They value the existence of a bunch of microbes over that of cows. (Yeah yeah, I'm getting out there, and at least the microbes don't mind their lives one way or the other:)
Anyways, unless you model the entire cycle in all of the relevant cases, how do you know what is good and what is not, never mind how good or how bad?
That means one cow requires 41,000 pounds of feed over it's life, that's 20 tons. The amount of usable meat is around 700 pounds (although only 100 pounds or so is used for hamburger meat, but that's just the typing of the meat).
So for every single pound of (hamburger) meat, you need 58 pounds of hay. (Fair deal if you ask me.)
. We haven't added in the transportation and processing costs, which if we used current plant matter instead of 10,000,000 year old refined plant matter, would increase it by how much? (Sorry, I'm not going to do that calculation).
Sorry, I haven't previewed this - there's just too much here:)
Physical property laws are based upon the premise that originally, way way back before we evolved into any kind of real society, everything in the world belonged equally to everyone.
The idea of "ownership" of physical objects is useful in a society's attempts to make use of the world around us. If someone cuts down a tree and makes a chair, isn't it fair that the chair is now "owned" by them? If someone clears a field and begins sowing it, isn't it fair that the land is now theirs?
Of course it didn't happen quite like that, we were a bit more savage back in the day, and there were hundreds of little civilizations developing and dying here and there, and things developed "organically". But philosophically speaking, this makes sense.
At some point "everyone" (the government, society) decided/or-whatever that everything that wasn't yet owned by someone, was owned by everyone (the government), and any further "dispersal" of ownership of said things would have to be by agreement of "everyone" (the government) - hence you get things like stumpage fees and mineral claims and on and on.
Ok, so how does intellectual property fit in?
Here's the thing. Intellectual property, ideas, information - can all be represented by a string of numbers. What's the difference between this number - 8372792994 - and the numbers necessary to represent the song "Happy Birthday"? Not much, if you compress the words to the song Happy Birthday, it takes up about 78 numbers. If you index a dictionary and use the index numbers to represent the song, you can get down to as little as 20 numbers. For a song whose "ownership" is worth millions per year.
Pretty ridiculous, eh?
Somewhere out there is a string of atoms arranged in a manner that it spells out the song happy birthday.(*) It can be proven by any 3rd year statistical physics studen. So why is anyone allowed to "own" something that did/could-have already existed long before they "discovered" it?
Because it's good for us. It benefits us all if we give a small monopoly to someone whose efforts resulted in their "discovering" (as far as known recorded human history) a tiny bit of numbers or information.
But information can be copied without cost. Information can enrich the lives of an infinite number of people and yet cost us nothing to "discover" it other than what it took the original "discoverer" to discover/create it.
So 150 or so years ago we as a society decided to allow people who "create/discover" a particular set of information/knowledge - which could already exist somewhere in the universe but in a place inaccessible to us - which probably would eventually be "discovered/created" by someone else, maybe even an alien species - we decided that it's quite natural to allow them a significant portion of their life (I think it was originally 20 years) to try and "profit" from their "work".
Thus there is an incentive to discover and create, and we as a society will "discover and create" information and knowledge at an optimal rate.
There is no reason to grant someone a perpetual monopoly on a tiny bit of information that someone else could have just as easily created in the past or the future. Nor do many of us really think that our great-great-great grandchildren should get a free ride and not have to work. Heck, we *can't* do that even if we wanted to - Imagine if everyone in the world tried to retire right now this instant. Prices would rise 100,000 percent and people would be forced back to work, no matter how much "intellectual property" they have.
But corporations - they have no such limited lifespans. They are the only things on this earth that would desire perpetual infinite monopolies on information. But what would that do for society? What would that do for us? Absolutely nothing. Eventually there would be so much intellectual property owned by corporations that the net value
Nothing in the world beats having millions of people testing your product in the real world.
And in the real world, we have had 3 seperate cases of cellphones "blowing up" this year (malfunctioning severely enough to emit sparks/hot-carbon-bits).
What if they had been holding their phone in their left hand at their waist while pulling the nozzle from their gas tank when it happened?
Leave the statistics and probabilities to the experts (except when the experts have a financial incentive to ignore safety, of course;)
Now to figure out how to get real-time access to this mesh of sensors and create a really cool screensaver...
Hmmm, you know, p2p would be the perfect way to distribute said data among all the people who need access to it (if it was a screensaver and so popular and contained realtime feed...)
. Hmmmmm, I should get a 1-900 number and re-imburse my friends and family for their calls.
Does anyone know of a GOOD ip only voice-chat phone/voicemail work-alike PC software? (To hell with integration with the POTS, everyone I know has high-speed internet, let's do IP to IP only "phone calls".)
I'd use teamspeak or something similar, but the lack of voicemail for when I'm not in and the fact that I can't be guaranteed that the microphone is shut off and the manual "connect/disconnect" to indicate that I'm home instead of a "ring" makes it's use as a phone substitute problematic.
And don't worry, it won't be long until some standards body (or ingenious group of techies working on sendmail or whatever) approves pgp-certificate based authenticated servers and clients with rings of trust or whatever. The question is what will be the impetus to spread it into common use so everyone with e-mail uses it... and how to make it easy to use for lusers and individhuals...
[bling bling] [bling bling] ( 3d tactical map flickers ) Computer voice of Saddam: "Comin' to getcha... comin' to getcha" [bling bling] [bling bling] ( general opens hatch and begins playing with controls, failure continues ) General: "Fucking windows 98!" (kicks machine, machie goes dead) General: "Get Bill Gates in here!" (door opens, Gill Gates walks in followed closely by two M16 toting soldiers) General: "You told us Windows 98 would be faster and more stable, with a better connection to the internet!!!" Gates: "It is faster, by over 98 percent f..." BANG! (Bill Gates fall to the floor dead) General: "Get some rest men, for tomorrow we go to war!"
But then again, I haven't been lurking at the easy to find chat rooms that morons like Microsoft and the like have been making available. Maybe there are chat rooms out there that are all dressed up and easy to find for children (like at disney or the cartoon network) that have no controls and that are simply just too easy for predators to infiltrate (unlike IRC where ops and network admins prevent spamming, and the technology isn't as exploitable as Microsoft's crap, and you have to be pretty clue'd to find the place anyways as opposed to an 8 year old neophyte on a web board).
There's also a "child exploitation conference" going on in Toronto this week, the Toronto Police probably just spouted that crap off to look good.
Nope, ideas and words on paper are one and the same. Information. I can memorize the words you wrote on paper as easily as I can a poem. There was even one guy who memorized the entire Illiad and could quote it sentence by sentence.
If I write your words down on my own piece of paper, who owns my piece of paper. You or me?
> I'm not asserting that I own the thoughts and the ideas; I am stating that I own the words and the medium on which they are written.
I agree that you own the medium on which they are written (the paper, the ink), but you don't own the words. Society grants you a temporary right to derive economic benefit from that particular arrangement of words, as an incentive for you to arrange those words. And as a result, I am not allowed to write down that particular arrangement of words on my own piece of paper for 100 years or so, not without your permission. This "temporary right" did not exist as little as 250 years ago (8 generations ago, you in your lifetime will know 5 generations of people, from your grandparents to your grandchildren, so 250 years is in fact a small snippet of time).
It is not "juvenile political ranting" to wonder whether or not this temporary monopoly is still in our best interests, considering just how easily it is to infinitely duplicate and distribute "your words that you own". . . . . . Shoot, I just took a look at your profile. I think I've been trolled. Go away troll, I have better things to do than argue with someone who is actually arguing for the fun of it because they're unemployed and lonely or something. .
> Intellectual property is as real as the chair I'm sitting on. If someone makes something, they own it until they decide otherwise.
No it is not.
Information can exist without an act of creation by a sentient being. Somewhere in the universe there are literally thousands of different patches of atoms and lines of sand which in morse code spell out this very sentence. Information can be posessed by every single sentient being in the universe, and yet not deprive the original "creator" (if there is one) of anything.
How can I "OWN" the sentence I typed above, when inanimate objects all over the universe already exist with that "information" embedded into them? Who "created" that sentence first?
The difference between a short story and a single sentence is only the *amount* of information needed to formulate it. Who owns the following? - 00101101011010010100010111001010 ?
Do you even understand the fundamental philosophical origin of physical property itself?
Who owns the earth and all the things on it? You or me? What about the guy over there? Who owns the wood you used to create the chair? The origin of the "ownership" of physical property is entirely based upon the premise that "ownership" only happens once a person has used physical effort to change a raw material (say that tree over there that currently belongs to all of us) into something useful. We as a society grant them "ownership" of that physical object because it is useful for us as a society to do that.
There is no innanimate right for you to own anything. If we as a society decided to abolish "ownership" of physical things, we could.
Of course we won't, because we know that human beings are too selfless to create a proper society with something to motivate them, such as ownership. Remember all the little kids fighting over shit? Yeah, "ownership" is a social concept we use to channel that selfish desire into something that helps us be civilized and create great things.
The concept of "Intellectual property" as you call it, was created for similar reasons, but does not have nearly the fundamental underpinnings that ownership of physical objects have.
God help us if we let mooks like you continue to make laws about complicated matters like this.
Here's an idea. It's the people who appreciate actors and basketball players that decide they would like more of "that thing" and as such divert their money to those people. If we want kids like this to become "scientific rock stars", then we the people that appreciate their accomplishments should be the first to divert *our* money to these people. Now the question is, how do we set that up? Send this kid and his thingie on a science-museum tour where we techies can pay $5 each to get a look at it?
Or do you just want to take away the tens of millions of dollars that some actors and sports-stars make, seeing as there really is no good reason that Michael Jackson should have control of a half billion dollars worth of society's resources? AKA cap what they can gross?
You can get 1Mbit DSL in most small towns in Saskatchewan now for $40-$50 CDN per month.
FYI: For the Americans bitching about "population density", rural Saskatchewan has one small town of 1000 people every 20 miles. Saskatchewan is also the birthplace of Medicare and is the most "Commie" of Canadian provinces, currently has a "CANADIAN-LEFT" provincial government that subsidised this DSL rollout.
It's not just the federal initiative, that's only really responsible in the rural areas.
In the urban areas it's the competition between cable and the DSL broadband providers, combined with the incumbent Bells' fore-sight and willingness to invest but tempered with the lack of interest in screwing over their customers or engaging in dirty tricks against other DSL sub-providers.
These latter two seems to be a US thing that really holds them back - Bells playing dirty tricks and whining to congress and bitching about how much it costs to roll DSL out and on and on. On the other hand in South Korea, Japan, and Canada where they were willing to invest, the result has been greater revenue.
There is one other thing that the report notes. There was already greater telecom spending by consumers in these countries.
Maybe Americans consumers are just too cheap - and as such their telecom companies couldn't roll it out as fast as they want even if they wanted to, they don't have enough revenue from all their other business!??
That's exactly what they told me about physics in 1989 when I got out of high school.
BOY OH BOY WERE THEY WRONG.
Dumbasses didn't have any solid data, just one old badly done "survey" from 5 years earlier, predicting what would happen in 10-15 years. What they forgot to do was count how many people were *already* in the physics pipeline, how many postdocs were *already* waiting to replace the profs. And no-one saw the end of the cold war's effects coming until the cold war ended.
They said the same thing for teachers back then. And the same for nurses.
On and on and on.
Re:Spill coffee, get rich.
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They most certainly are not! This whole argument is utter bullshit. The patron should be responsible for themselves! Blaming everyone else who is nearby for your own actions is a complete cop-out.
You missed his use of the word "partly". The world is not black and white, it's pretty rare that one single human being is 100 percent responsible for anything.
You also completely forgot that we KNOW that human beings - including yourself - are not capable of perfection. Eventually, they make simple mistakes. WE KNOW THIS 100 PERCENT. As a society we can greatly reduce the death and physical harm that comes to one another if we react appropriately to reduce these probabilities. It is valid to discuss what level of reactions are worth the expense or make sense morally. But to ignore the issue completely is irresponsible.
Not allowing people who are stone blind drunk to drive is #1, and not only are bar owners responsible, so are you.
Ensuring corporations act responsibly when they are not only capable of knowing but have in almost every single case already figured out how many people their method of doing business will hurt or kill, is #2.
The razor you are talking about is already on the market, and companies making it do not get sued.
Nope, that's not an acceptable analogy.
If you showed a straight razor to anyone, they would say "yeah you'd have to be super careful with that, you could end up in the hospital for two weeks or die if you make a mistake".
If you showed any of the other non-straight-razors on the market to anyone, you know the safety razors, they'd say "that's pretty safe, it'd be almost impossible to hurt hourself really badly with it".
I'm sorry, I'm not going to continue a discussion with someone who's capability for logic is so limited and scatter-brained as to bring up a straight blade wrt my analogy.
You shave with a razor. Now razor companies make their razors nice and sharp so you can easily cut your stubble and have a nice smooth shave. You know razors are sharp, but it's common knowledge that you don't have to be *super* careful with razors to prevent yourself from slashing your jugular. Along comes a big razor manufacturer who wants to make the best razor in the world and makes lots of money. So they sell razors that are sharper than anyone else in the world. In 99.999 percent of circumstances, people shaving with them will be ok. But the company discovers that once in every 100,000 shaves, someone will press too hard and angle the blade just such that their jugular might get cut. Considering how many blades they sell every year, it's pretty good odds that someone will get badly hurt. They decide that they would rather keep selling blades than prevent someone from "hurting themselves" through a simple human mistake.
Are they liable? I mean, you should have known better than to press really hard with super sharp razor while driving down the road in your car.
A dozen people were on that coffee jury and saw all of the evidence, not one of them dissented. Every single time someone talks about the infamous "coffee case" there are a half dozen other people with greater detailed knowledge about the specifics of the case (which do count) that speak up and say that no, it wasn't an unjust or out-of-whack decision. There is lots of other details besides "coffee is hot, anyone should know better" that turn it from "innocent company doing business gets sued" into "company knew it was selling highly dangerous product, company discussed it and knew it was highly dangerous and decided to keep selling it to make money instead of protecting consumers from grotesque injury due to simple common accidents that will happen no matter how careful people are".
Remember, you are a human being. Despite "knowing better" and everything, some day you will have a brain fart and forget to look left when you are turning a corner because you were thinking about something else. Despite all of us "knowing better", we as a society or a corporation can KNOW and can predict that someday someone will do that, through almost no fault of their own. They are called accidents.
If you serve yourself coffee that hot, you're putting yourself at serious risk of third degree burns. You are a human being and someday you will make a human mistake (not being able to forsee "every" consequence or having a brain fart, admit it, you have them), and you will suffer the consequences, despite being such a smart "I should know better" type person. Some circumstance will arise where you can't get the one part of your clothes that you spilled a cup of that superheated water on off your skin within a second or two, and you'll require skin grafts and two weeks in the hospital.
The only difference between the situation in the above paragraph and the case is that a big corporation didn't discuss your injuries months ahead of time and decide that they wanted to make money more than they wanted to protect you against a human mistake with their product.
The world isn't black and white, it's amazing how wrong you can be when you look at a grey wall and scream "it's white"!!
Slashdot Mirror
if the galaxy was 100 KM wide,
within 20 meters in any direction sun would be approximately 20 other stars,
the nearest star would be 3-4 meters away,
the probe would be 1.5 mm away.
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Actually, paper ballots and manual counting are *great* for television, you get results coming through in a trickle at first then more then more and more, and as the night goes on they get statistically relevant sample sizes that they can begin "calling" results for specific ridings ahead of the final tally while places where the race is close have to go on and can flip flop. And then there is the whole deal with doing the statistics to try and predict which party will win, with differing networks having different statasticians and software helping them do that and thus the "race" to call things first. An election where final results are tallied inside of half an hour and announced all at once would be boooring.
What I hate are the what-if's in life that haunt you
(you may need to right click save as - stupid webserver - stupid IE - I've tried setting the mime type, and IE can't simply refer to the OS file extension setting or do something intelligent itself)
- sigh - ... Yeah, I must have been in a bad mood or something.
BTW: I've started using Firebird. Last week with IE I clicked on a torrent info link that lead to some other site (instead of an IMDB page) that launched an infinite popup stream. Had to do the three fingered salute to kill IE, then spend an hour cleaning auto-installed spyware off my PC.
Only drawback with Firebird is it's not FCS yet, still beta, and is a resource hog. But I do love the user-control features such as "ask and disallow all future cookies" and "on demand inline-context-menu block images from site" and no popups and tabs.
I'm actually happy that my brother has Windows XP and it auto-downloads updates a bit at a time when he connects to the internet over modem, and my cousin has AOL - otherwise I'd be doing a ton of free phone support for them.
> We have yet to build robots that can do everything a human can.
Maybe that's just because we haven't considered spending $1 billion to make 10 such robots instead of spending $10 billion to send humans up there.
I'm pretty sure that $1 billion would give us a re-usable remotely operated humanoid robot system that can do everything we can and better.
It was an indirect affilliate link, it's a valid criticism. We can't tell if it's an honest recommendation or some a**h*le making money. Welcome to my enemies list boys and girls.
Hee hee, good point. And that hay would just be decomposing on the ground anyways, just like fallen trees decompose in the woods.
:)
So instead of microbes eating the trees, we have cows eating the trees and us eating the cows!
So I guess PETA is in fact a "pro microbe" lobby. They value the existence of a bunch of microbes over that of cows. (Yeah yeah, I'm getting out there, and at least the microbes don't mind their lives one way or the other
Anyways, unless you model the entire cycle in all of the relevant cases, how do you know what is good and what is not, never mind how good or how bad?
Nope.
Cows themselves are 1000 pounds or so.
A quick search shows that a cow will eat 25 pounds of hay per day - and the average age when taken to slaughter is 4-5 years.
That means one cow requires 41,000 pounds of feed over it's life, that's 20 tons. The amount of usable meat is around 700 pounds (although only 100 pounds or so is used for hamburger meat, but that's just the typing of the meat).
So for every single pound of (hamburger) meat, you need 58 pounds of hay. (Fair deal if you ask me.)
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We haven't added in the transportation and processing costs, which if we used current plant matter instead of 10,000,000 year old refined plant matter, would increase it by how much? (Sorry, I'm not going to do that calculation).
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;)
> Those are two arguments which come to mind. Hopefully I've done them justice, but probaly not.
There's something to be said for brevity. I wish I had saw your post before I composed my own
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Sorry, I haven't previewed this - there's just too much here :)
Physical property laws are based upon the premise that originally, way way back before we evolved into any kind of real society, everything in the world belonged equally to everyone.
The idea of "ownership" of physical objects is useful in a society's attempts to make use of the world around us. If someone cuts down a tree and makes a chair, isn't it fair that the chair is now "owned" by them? If someone clears a field and begins sowing it, isn't it fair that the land is now theirs?
Of course it didn't happen quite like that, we were a bit more savage back in the day, and there were hundreds of little civilizations developing and dying here and there, and things developed "organically". But philosophically speaking, this makes sense.
At some point "everyone" (the government, society) decided/or-whatever that everything that wasn't yet owned by someone, was owned by everyone (the government), and any further "dispersal" of ownership of said things would have to be by agreement of "everyone" (the government) - hence you get things like stumpage fees and mineral claims and on and on.
Ok, so how does intellectual property fit in?
Here's the thing. Intellectual property, ideas, information - can all be represented by a string of numbers. What's the difference between this number - 8372792994 - and the numbers necessary to represent the song "Happy Birthday"? Not much, if you compress the words to the song Happy Birthday, it takes up about 78 numbers. If you index a dictionary and use the index numbers to represent the song, you can get down to as little as 20 numbers. For a song whose "ownership" is worth millions per year.
Pretty ridiculous, eh?
Somewhere out there is a string of atoms arranged in a manner that it spells out the song happy birthday.(*) It can be proven by any 3rd year statistical physics studen. So why is anyone allowed to "own" something that did/could-have already existed long before they "discovered" it?
Because it's good for us. It benefits us all if we give a small monopoly to someone whose efforts resulted in their "discovering" (as far as known recorded human history) a tiny bit of numbers or information.
But information can be copied without cost. Information can enrich the lives of an infinite number of people and yet cost us nothing to "discover" it other than what it took the original "discoverer" to discover/create it.
So 150 or so years ago we as a society decided to allow people who "create/discover" a particular set of information/knowledge - which could already exist somewhere in the universe but in a place inaccessible to us - which probably would eventually be "discovered/created" by someone else, maybe even an alien species - we decided that it's quite natural to allow them a significant portion of their life (I think it was originally 20 years) to try and "profit" from their "work".
Thus there is an incentive to discover and create, and we as a society will "discover and create" information and knowledge at an optimal rate.
There is no reason to grant someone a perpetual monopoly on a tiny bit of information that someone else could have just as easily created in the past or the future. Nor do many of us really think that our great-great-great grandchildren should get a free ride and not have to work. Heck, we *can't* do that even if we wanted to - Imagine if everyone in the world tried to retire right now this instant. Prices would rise 100,000 percent and people would be forced back to work, no matter how much "intellectual property" they have.
But corporations - they have no such limited lifespans. They are the only things on this earth that would desire perpetual infinite monopolies on information. But what would that do for society? What would that do for us? Absolutely nothing. Eventually there would be so much intellectual property owned by corporations that the net value
Nothing in the world beats having millions of people testing your product in the real world.
;)
And in the real world, we have had 3 seperate cases of cellphones "blowing up" this year (malfunctioning severely enough to emit sparks/hot-carbon-bits).
What if they had been holding their phone in their left hand at their waist while pulling the nozzle from their gas tank when it happened?
Leave the statistics and probabilities to the experts (except when the experts have a financial incentive to ignore safety, of course
Now to figure out how to get real-time access to this mesh of sensors and create a really cool screensaver...
Hmmm, you know, p2p would be the perfect way to distribute said data among all the people who need access to it (if it was a screensaver and so popular and contained realtime feed...)
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Hmmmmm, I should get a 1-900 number and re-imburse my friends and family for their calls.
Does anyone know of a GOOD ip only voice-chat phone/voicemail work-alike PC software? (To hell with integration with the POTS, everyone I know has high-speed internet, let's do IP to IP only "phone calls".)
I'd use teamspeak or something similar, but the lack of voicemail for when I'm not in and the fact that I can't be guaranteed that the microphone is shut off and the manual "connect/disconnect" to indicate that I'm home instead of a "ring" makes it's use as a phone substitute problematic.
And don't worry, it won't be long until some standards body (or ingenious group of techies working on sendmail or whatever) approves pgp-certificate based authenticated servers and clients with rings of trust or whatever. The question is what will be the impetus to spread it into common use so everyone with e-mail uses it... and how to make it easy to use for lusers and individhuals...
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[bling bling] [bling bling]
( 3d tactical map flickers )
Computer voice of Saddam: "Comin' to getcha... comin' to getcha"
[bling bling] [bling bling]
( general opens hatch and begins playing with controls, failure continues )
General: "Fucking windows 98!"
(kicks machine, machie goes dead)
General: "Get Bill Gates in here!"
(door opens, Gill Gates walks in followed closely by two M16 toting soldiers)
General: "You told us Windows 98 would be faster and more stable, with a better connection to the internet!!!"
Gates: "It is faster, by over 98 percent f..."
BANG!
(Bill Gates fall to the floor dead)
General: "Get some rest men, for tomorrow we go to war!"
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He's not the only idiot.
Toronto Police issued a challenge yesterday to other internet providers to follow Microsoft's lead and shut down free, anonymous chat rooms
But then again, I haven't been lurking at the easy to find chat rooms that morons like Microsoft and the like have been making available. Maybe there are chat rooms out there that are all dressed up and easy to find for children (like at disney or the cartoon network) that have no controls and that are simply just too easy for predators to infiltrate (unlike IRC where ops and network admins prevent spamming, and the technology isn't as exploitable as Microsoft's crap, and you have to be pretty clue'd to find the place anyways as opposed to an 8 year old neophyte on a web board).
There's also a "child exploitation conference" going on in Toronto this week, the Toronto Police probably just spouted that crap off to look good.
Nope, ideas and words on paper are one and the same. Information. I can memorize the words you wrote on paper as easily as I can a poem. There was even one guy who memorized the entire Illiad and could quote it sentence by sentence.
If I write your words down on my own piece of paper, who owns my piece of paper. You or me?
> I'm not asserting that I own the thoughts and the ideas; I am stating that I own the words and the medium on which they are written.
I agree that you own the medium on which they are written (the paper, the ink), but you don't own the words. Society grants you a temporary right to derive economic benefit from that particular arrangement of words, as an incentive for you to arrange those words. And as a result, I am not allowed to write down that particular arrangement of words on my own piece of paper for 100 years or so, not without your permission. This "temporary right" did not exist as little as 250 years ago (8 generations ago, you in your lifetime will know 5 generations of people, from your grandparents to your grandchildren, so 250 years is in fact a small snippet of time).
It is not "juvenile political ranting" to wonder whether or not this temporary monopoly is still in our best interests, considering just how easily it is to infinitely duplicate and distribute "your words that you own".
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Shoot, I just took a look at your profile. I think I've been trolled. Go away troll, I have better things to do than argue with someone who is actually arguing for the fun of it because they're unemployed and lonely or something.
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> Intellectual property is as real as the chair I'm sitting on. If someone makes something, they own it until they decide otherwise.
No it is not.
Information can exist without an act of creation by a sentient being. Somewhere in the universe there are literally thousands of different patches of atoms and lines of sand which in morse code spell out this very sentence. Information can be posessed by every single sentient being in the universe, and yet not deprive the original "creator" (if there is one) of anything.
How can I "OWN" the sentence I typed above, when inanimate objects all over the universe already exist with that "information" embedded into them? Who "created" that sentence first?
The difference between a short story and a single sentence is only the *amount* of information needed to formulate it. Who owns the following? - 00101101011010010100010111001010 ?
Do you even understand the fundamental philosophical origin of physical property itself?
Who owns the earth and all the things on it? You or me? What about the guy over there? Who owns the wood you used to create the chair? The origin of the "ownership" of physical property is entirely based upon the premise that "ownership" only happens once a person has used physical effort to change a raw material (say that tree over there that currently belongs to all of us) into something useful. We as a society grant them "ownership" of that physical object because it is useful for us as a society to do that.
There is no innanimate right for you to own anything. If we as a society decided to abolish "ownership" of physical things, we could.
Of course we won't, because we know that human beings are too selfless to create a proper society with something to motivate them, such as ownership. Remember all the little kids fighting over shit? Yeah, "ownership" is a social concept we use to channel that selfish desire into something that helps us be civilized and create great things.
The concept of "Intellectual property" as you call it, was created for similar reasons, but does not have nearly the fundamental underpinnings that ownership of physical objects have.
God help us if we let mooks like you continue to make laws about complicated matters like this.
Very interesting.
Here's an idea. It's the people who appreciate actors and basketball players that decide they would like more of "that thing" and as such divert their money to those people. If we want kids like this to become "scientific rock stars", then we the people that appreciate their accomplishments should be the first to divert *our* money to these people. Now the question is, how do we set that up? Send this kid and his thingie on a science-museum tour where we techies can pay $5 each to get a look at it?
Or do you just want to take away the tens of millions of dollars that some actors and sports-stars make, seeing as there really is no good reason that Michael Jackson should have control of a half billion dollars worth of society's resources? AKA cap what they can gross?
I'm cool with that.
Where do you live?
You can get 1Mbit DSL in most small towns in Saskatchewan now for $40-$50 CDN per month.
FYI: For the Americans bitching about "population density", rural Saskatchewan has one small town of 1000 people every 20 miles. Saskatchewan is also the birthplace of Medicare and is the most "Commie" of Canadian provinces, currently has a "CANADIAN-LEFT" provincial government that subsidised this DSL rollout.
It's not just the federal initiative, that's only really responsible in the rural areas.
In the urban areas it's the competition between cable and the DSL broadband providers, combined with the incumbent Bells' fore-sight and willingness to invest but tempered with the lack of interest in screwing over their customers or engaging in dirty tricks against other DSL sub-providers.
These latter two seems to be a US thing that really holds them back - Bells playing dirty tricks and whining to congress and bitching about how much it costs to roll DSL out and on and on. On the other hand in South Korea, Japan, and Canada where they were willing to invest, the result has been greater revenue.
There is one other thing that the report notes. There was already greater telecom spending by consumers in these countries.
Maybe Americans consumers are just too cheap - and as such their telecom companies couldn't roll it out as fast as they want even if they wanted to, they don't have enough revenue from all their other business!??
> Almost all our .... retire in the next 10 years
That's exactly what they told me about physics in 1989 when I got out of high school.
BOY OH BOY WERE THEY WRONG.
Dumbasses didn't have any solid data, just one old badly done "survey" from 5 years earlier, predicting what would happen in 10-15 years. What they forgot to do was count how many people were *already* in the physics pipeline, how many postdocs were *already* waiting to replace the profs. And no-one saw the end of the cold war's effects coming until the cold war ended.
They said the same thing for teachers back then. And the same for nurses.
On and on and on.
They most certainly are not! This whole argument is utter bullshit. The patron should be responsible for themselves! Blaming everyone else who is nearby for your own actions is a complete cop-out.
You missed his use of the word "partly". The world is not black and white, it's pretty rare that one single human being is 100 percent responsible for anything.
You also completely forgot that we KNOW that human beings - including yourself - are not capable of perfection. Eventually, they make simple mistakes. WE KNOW THIS 100 PERCENT. As a society we can greatly reduce the death and physical harm that comes to one another if we react appropriately to reduce these probabilities. It is valid to discuss what level of reactions are worth the expense or make sense morally. But to ignore the issue completely is irresponsible.
Not allowing people who are stone blind drunk to drive is #1, and not only are bar owners responsible, so are you.
Ensuring corporations act responsibly when they are not only capable of knowing but have in almost every single case already figured out how many people their method of doing business will hurt or kill, is #2.
The razor you are talking about is already on the market, and companies making it do not get sued.
Nope, that's not an acceptable analogy.
If you showed a straight razor to anyone, they would say "yeah you'd have to be super careful with that, you could end up in the hospital for two weeks or die if you make a mistake".
If you showed any of the other non-straight-razors on the market to anyone, you know the safety razors, they'd say "that's pretty safe, it'd be almost impossible to hurt hourself really badly with it".
I'm sorry, I'm not going to continue a discussion with someone who's capability for logic is so limited and scatter-brained as to bring up a straight blade wrt my analogy.
You shave with a razor. Now razor companies make their razors nice and sharp so you can easily cut your stubble and have a nice smooth shave. You know razors are sharp, but it's common knowledge that you don't have to be *super* careful with razors to prevent yourself from slashing your jugular. Along comes a big razor manufacturer who wants to make the best razor in the world and makes lots of money. So they sell razors that are sharper than anyone else in the world. In 99.999 percent of circumstances, people shaving with them will be ok. But the company discovers that once in every 100,000 shaves, someone will press too hard and angle the blade just such that their jugular might get cut. Considering how many blades they sell every year, it's pretty good odds that someone will get badly hurt. They decide that they would rather keep selling blades than prevent someone from "hurting themselves" through a simple human mistake.
Are they liable? I mean, you should have known better than to press really hard with super sharp razor while driving down the road in your car.
A dozen people were on that coffee jury and saw all of the evidence, not one of them dissented. Every single time someone talks about the infamous "coffee case" there are a half dozen other people with greater detailed knowledge about the specifics of the case (which do count) that speak up and say that no, it wasn't an unjust or out-of-whack decision. There is lots of other details besides "coffee is hot, anyone should know better" that turn it from "innocent company doing business gets sued" into "company knew it was selling highly dangerous product, company discussed it and knew it was highly dangerous and decided to keep selling it to make money instead of protecting consumers from grotesque injury due to simple common accidents that will happen no matter how careful people are".
Remember, you are a human being. Despite "knowing better" and everything, some day you will have a brain fart and forget to look left when you are turning a corner because you were thinking about something else. Despite all of us "knowing better", we as a society or a corporation can KNOW and can predict that someday someone will do that, through almost no fault of their own. They are called accidents.
If you serve yourself coffee that hot, you're putting yourself at serious risk of third degree burns. You are a human being and someday you will make a human mistake (not being able to forsee "every" consequence or having a brain fart, admit it, you have them), and you will suffer the consequences, despite being such a smart "I should know better" type person. Some circumstance will arise where you can't get the one part of your clothes that you spilled a cup of that superheated water on off your skin within a second or two, and you'll require skin grafts and two weeks in the hospital.
The only difference between the situation in the above paragraph and the case is that a big corporation didn't discuss your injuries months ahead of time and decide that they wanted to make money more than they wanted to protect you against a human mistake with their product.
The world isn't black and white, it's amazing how wrong you can be when you look at a grey wall and scream "it's white"!!
That would explain the discrepancy between their "3 year" figure and my old-recall of the (approx) 100 year figure.
Thanks, I certainly didn't have enough time to try and figure out what "flaw" their calculations and assumptiosn was based on.