You're underestimating teenagers, and you're misunderstanding the way the computer learning curve works. There are tons of competent high school kids who can easily provide desktop technical support for any platform. Having done tech support as a high school student, and having gone through a University computer science program since, I'd personally recommend a smart highschool kid over me for tech support - I don't know anything that's relevant for "basic usage" that they wouldn't, and I'm way more expensive.
How do you suppose TV would work without copyright? So NBC broadcasts an episode that cost them $150K to make [say lots of actors, music, special effects]. Then some local station copies it and re-airs it without paying for it?
I don't know. $150k isn't a lot of money given the price of advertising - I bet NBC could come up with that if they could even get four affiliate stations to sign payment contracts beforehand. If that doesn't work, they could use the street performer protocol on a per-episode basis. People seem to prefer on-demand content to broadcast content anyway - the street performer protocol business model would remove the pressure from businesses against that trend.
Books are already usually in PDF format at the same time as paper. Without copyright or royalties we would just copy the PDF. Hell, I could get a PDF of a text book printed at lulu.com for cheaper than what it would cost retail. Does that make it right?
I occasionally play tabletop roleplaying games like D&D. Historically, money has been made in that field by selling books (game rules, rule supplements, and setting information). Players just downloading the books in PDF rather than buying them is a simple reality in the industry now - and books are less profitable than they used to be.
The first fact is this: People still want books. Even when the choice is between a $0 PDF and a $40 book, RPG publishers still get enough sales to make producing and selling the books worthwhile. In addition to that, the RPG publishers are starting to adjust their business model to the new reality. Wizards of the Cost (who make D&D) have been focusing more and more on their official plastic miniatures line - people buy those and you can't copy them by computer currently.
Sure, the same details don't work for every kind of book. Some books people will read on a screen happily - maybe the authors have to resort to the street performer protocol. Reference books are generally best on paper - people will keep buying them. Maybe there are other kinds of books that would cease to exist, self help books maybe; Are those really worth keeping the economy radically warped and sacrificing access to culture to preserve them?
And about NDAs, those are government enforced ultimately. You break your NDA, I sue, if I win, the government can enforce the decision.
NDAs are contracts. Contracts have nothing to do with copyright - they would still be perfectly valid if copyright were eliminated. I'm not talking about abolishing the rule of law here - just the removal of one specific class of law: copyright.
Point is we have, as a society, come up with a set of rules to follow in order to make certain ventures profitable.
The reason for copyright law is not to make "certain ventures profitable". That's just a means to an end. The goal is this: to encourage the production of artistic works so our culture can reap the benefits of that art.
In the case of books, movies, and music a royalty model is chosen so that the upfront costs to sign a band aren't excessive but they are rewarded if they appeal to the public.
That's how it works today. There's no reason it needs to exactly that way in the future. The vast majority of books and music don't make the authors a significant amount of money in royalties. The few superstars who make a living off it are exceptions, and there are perfectly good ways to turn being a superstar into making money anyway. Movies are a more interesting question, but I don't think that it would be severely disadvantageous to society if sequels with budgets like Oceans 13 become uneconomical. For smaller budget movies, you can fund them in other ways.
If you can think of a better way I'd love to hear it.
Just because you have root access doesn't mean you should be running as root. This isn't a contradiction, or even a hard problem; Ubuntu and OS X get it right.
By your logic though, if I commission a house to be built, on land I bought from the government, I shouldn't be able to charge rent since the house has already been made right?
Nope. The content of artistic works and land are completely different. My opinions about them are not related.
We'd adjust? WTF does that mean?
I mean that there are other business models, that would lead to more of some kinds of art and less of others. We'd get less artificial pop songs and more remixes. Less high budget action movies and more "art films" and low budget "cult classics". Those are both probably good trades actually.
This would mean we couldn't have TV, movies, books or software.
Huh? Why? The ones we have wouldn't just disappear. Advertising wouldn't stop being a good business model for TV. Movie production would change drastically, but we'd still get new movies. Selling books would still be profitable - I bet that "author authorized" editions would be enough to support superstar authors, the other authors have day jobs anyway. Software would move to an Open Source + custom work model. It'd be different, but not nesissarily worse.
We couldn't distribute function blocks of IP (e.g. hardware designs) either.
Mostly those aren't distributed. They're kept secret and protected by NDAs. That wouldn't change at all.
There would be absolutely no patents either, etc.
What? Why? We're talking about copyright here, and patents have nothing to do with copyright.
The truth is not all business models are the same.
That's true. Some business models wouldn't work without government granted monopolies. Any government granted monopoly will allow the recipient to be wildly profitable, but that doesn't mean that they're generally a good idea.
Just because you benefit from copyright law doesn't make it a good idea for society. Nor do the existence of business models that depend on it justify it. If there were no copyright, things would be different. The question isn't if people would have to adjust - obviously they would. The question is this: would the overall benefit to society be greater?
Many people who receive copyright royalties think that they have some sort of natural right to those royalties. A right to get paid long into the future for something they did in the past - regardless of the cost to society. That's simply selfish greed, and I'm not terribly interested. If you can show that some version of copyright is the best policy overall, great - let's use that. If copyright isn't the best choice, we should do something else.
The goal isn't to make sure that artists get paid for every copy of their work. That just happens to be what copyright tries to do. The goal is to make sure that the maximum number of people have access to the greatest variety of artistic works. If we were to abolish copyrights completely today, and as a result no new artistic works were created (which wouldn't happen), there would still be more overall access to artistic works for *many years* - simply because people who couldn't afford copyrighted works before would have access to them.
So the relevent questions are these: What is the rate of artistic production in the absence of copyright? Is it worth taking action to increase that rate? What action is worth taking? My strong hunch is that the answers end up being "reasonably high", "yes", and "not copyright". Even government art grants are likely to be a better social tradeoff, since that way we don't prevent people from having access to the art that is created - unappreciated art provides no social benefit.
As for "wait till you don't get paid for your hard work", I write software for a living. Custom software. I bill by the hour. Many writers are like me - they don't live off royalties. They get paid either by the piece, on salary, or some other way.
Why not split things out into multiple javascript interpreters then? Why does per-tab javascript even *want* to run in the same interpreter as UI code?
It feels like a lot of design tradeoffs were made in Mozilla that trade 100k of RAM for like a second of UI latency. Bad deal.
Cheater. Yes, Linux gives you the tools to prevent that code from being a problem. There are other examples I can give, and most of them have counters. My point is this - Linux, as it comes out of the box, can be made to freeze up by misbehaving user code. With the default settings in most Linux distros, the code I gave you will result in such a freeze.
Even today, tons of art is commissioned by rich people. There are even far more people with the necessary wealth than there used to be. I don't think that explains Shakespeare though - I think he got paid from theater admissions. And then there's the largest source of art, that created by dedicated artists - the people with a drive to create and will do so even unpaid in their spare time.
There are perfectly functional copyright-free business models for most types of art. Popular music would be somewhat different - there would be less economic incentive to create artificial pop stars Movie budgets would come down - but you could still raise millions of production dollars through methods like having theater owners pre-pay and the same level of product placement major movies already have. If that stuff is not enough, maybe we should discuss government art grants. But... here's the important thing: The economic load imposed by copyright is way more than the taxes it would take to directly fund art that produced the same level of social good.
Consider this brute force solution: We know that the browser can handle running with one tab now. We know that the rendering engine can be embedded in other browsers with different tabbing setups. They could just embed separate instances of the rendering engine in each tab. Sure, they might have to redo some of the UI. Sure, it would take a ton of RAM. But... it would work, and it would be multithreaded, and they could tune it to have shared data as needed from there.
Legally, things tend to get worse rather than better. There is economic reinforcement of bad legal policies, and there's no motivation for lawmakers to fix them.
If private disclosure is illegal, then anonymous public disclosure is absolutely the right plan.
Personally, as a web service provider, I would post a relatively prominent policy on my site that "security related bug reports are happily accepted, we won't sue you for being neighborly and helping us". I'm all for full disclosure, but I have no interest in turning down a free pre-notification of my security issue.
If copyright is what is required for society to reward "art" than so be it.
Are you sure about this statement? Is it just a knee-jerk emotional reaction? Is it actually a good idea? Do you have any rational reason for that conclusion?
Copyright is a reasonably simple economic tradeoff. Art will be produced in the absence of legal incentives - in fact, much of the historically "great" art (Shakespeare, Mozart, etc) was produced in the complete absence of copyright. Copyright provides one main benefit: It creates a business model for full time, professional, publish-only artists. In exchange, it has three major disadvantages: it restricts the distribution and enjoyment of all art, it creates a massively profitable natural oligarchy: the publishing business, and it prevents the creation of certain classes of derivative art.
There probably is a good way to promote the creation of more art than would be created without social incentives. Copyright, as currently implemented, isn't it.
Relakks is an excellent solution to this class of problem. TOR is not - It'll be dog slow, and you'll be slowing down other people who have interactive tasks they're trying to accomplish over TOR, like web browsing.
Firefox should be moving to multi-threading anyway, because SMP has been solidly mainstream for years now. The fact that it fixes this entire class of bugs for free is just really nice.
What's the hard part here? You have a main thread that handles everything that isn't actual per-tab content. You spawn a thread for each tab, and have it basically the same code it's running now. The only difference is that UI events for the tab-content need to be either A.) sent by the windowing system to the tab's thread or B.) accepted by the main thread and queued up for the tab thread.
Perhaps there have been really stupid architectural decisions in Firefox that hurt this plan, but if that's true they should be getting fixed *now*.
But just as a general thing, unless you are talking about spreading stuff between cores, an event-driven model will almost always beat a multithreaded model, at least performance-wise.
It's true that a synchronous event loop generally has better throughput on a single processor core than any sort of multi-threaded construct. But, that doesn't make it the right architectural choice for a web browser. First, computers are fast enough that a 15% throughput penalty is irrelevant compared to the much more important issue of latency - when I click in a Firefox window, I want there to be a thread listening, I don't want my event to wait in a queue for half a second for the event loop to get to it. Second, I hear multi-core processors are pretty common, and my guess would be that they're getting more common rather than less common.
Thing is, single threaded apps aren't going to stay even marginally useful for more than about 20 more minutes. Maybe there are hard problem in threading, but putting each tab in a tabbed browser into its own thread isn't one of them.
I find this particularly neat in that the easiest deterrent of overpopulation is perhaps technological proliferation.
A lot of people seem to share that opinion, but say it different ways. Some people talk about "better education", other people talk about "less poverty", others talk about "industrialization". In this context they're all basically the same thing - the overpopulation problem will go away if more people are better educated, have better jobs, and have more money.
I bred at less than my replacement level. If everyone in the word were to follow that tendency...
But they won't, and so all you accomplished is selecting yourself out of the gene pool.
We have a ton of resources on the planet. Supporting more humans with the resources that we have is a reasonably easy problem technologically. Yes, we have a high population compared to what a species without agriculture (and modern agriculture) could do, but we have those things. The earth could handle a bunch more population, but the trends indicate that human population growth is slowing quickly enough that it won't be a real issue.
The appropriate tactic here isn't to have less kids, it's to have as many kids as you think you can reasonably educate. The only way we'll be able to keep quality of life up as a species is to have as high a percentage of well educated people as possible - that way there will be people around to suggest and implement rational solutions to problems.
I'm a little bit fuzzy on the physics here, but I'm pretty sure that EM waves don't interact with the air in a way that makes resistance relevant (i.e. it's not about electrons pushing each other around in a material, it's about photons or something).
This is one of the places where the fact that the OS is really "GNU/Linux" becomes really obvious and relevant. All of the GNU code is going to be moved to GPLv3 - Bash, GCC, GNU libc, GNU tar, GNU binutils, etc. When that happens, any "Linux distribution" will include quite a bit of GPLv3 code. It's true that the kernel, Linux, probably won't use the new license - at least not any time soon - but the kernel's only a small part of the system.
The correct thing to do in this case is to show the GPL "About" blurb:
one line to give the program's name and an idea of what it does.
Copyright (C) yyyy name of author
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License
as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2
of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA.
Making the user hit "I agree" to that even makes some sense - it might make the warantee disclaimer stronger.
Slashdot Mirror
You're underestimating teenagers, and you're misunderstanding the way the computer learning curve works. There are tons of competent high school kids who can easily provide desktop technical support for any platform. Having done tech support as a high school student, and having gone through a University computer science program since, I'd personally recommend a smart highschool kid over me for tech support - I don't know anything that's relevant for "basic usage" that they wouldn't, and I'm way more expensive.
I don't know. $150k isn't a lot of money given the price of advertising - I bet NBC could come up with that if they could even get four affiliate stations to sign payment contracts beforehand. If that doesn't work, they could use the street performer protocol on a per-episode basis. People seem to prefer on-demand content to broadcast content anyway - the street performer protocol business model would remove the pressure from businesses against that trend.
I occasionally play tabletop roleplaying games like D&D. Historically, money has been made in that field by selling books (game rules, rule supplements, and setting information). Players just downloading the books in PDF rather than buying them is a simple reality in the industry now - and books are less profitable than they used to be.
The first fact is this: People still want books. Even when the choice is between a $0 PDF and a $40 book, RPG publishers still get enough sales to make producing and selling the books worthwhile. In addition to that, the RPG publishers are starting to adjust their business model to the new reality. Wizards of the Cost (who make D&D) have been focusing more and more on their official plastic miniatures line - people buy those and you can't copy them by computer currently.
Sure, the same details don't work for every kind of book. Some books people will read on a screen happily - maybe the authors have to resort to the street performer protocol. Reference books are generally best on paper - people will keep buying them. Maybe there are other kinds of books that would cease to exist, self help books maybe; Are those really worth keeping the economy radically warped and sacrificing access to culture to preserve them?
NDAs are contracts. Contracts have nothing to do with copyright - they would still be perfectly valid if copyright were eliminated. I'm not talking about abolishing the rule of law here - just the removal of one specific class of law: copyright.
The reason for copyright law is not to make "certain ventures profitable". That's just a means to an end. The goal is this: to encourage the production of artistic works so our culture can reap the benefits of that art.
That's how it works today. There's no reason it needs to exactly that way in the future. The vast majority of books and music don't make the authors a significant amount of money in royalties. The few superstars who make a living off it are exceptions, and there are perfectly good ways to turn being a superstar into making money anyway. Movies are a more interesting question, but I don't think that it would be severely disadvantageous to society if sequels with budgets like Oceans 13 become uneconomical. For smaller budget movies, you can fund them in other ways.
The point
Just because you have root access doesn't mean you should be running as root. This isn't a contradiction, or even a hard problem; Ubuntu and OS X get it right.
Nope. The content of artistic works and land are completely different. My opinions about them are not related.
I mean that there are other business models, that would lead to more of some kinds of art and less of others. We'd get less artificial pop songs and more remixes. Less high budget action movies and more "art films" and low budget "cult classics". Those are both probably good trades actually.
Huh? Why? The ones we have wouldn't just disappear. Advertising wouldn't stop being a good business model for TV. Movie production would change drastically, but we'd still get new movies. Selling books would still be profitable - I bet that "author authorized" editions would be enough to support superstar authors, the other authors have day jobs anyway. Software would move to an Open Source + custom work model. It'd be different, but not nesissarily worse.
Mostly those aren't distributed. They're kept secret and protected by NDAs. That wouldn't change at all.
What? Why? We're talking about copyright here, and patents have nothing to do with copyright.
That's true. Some business models wouldn't work without government granted monopolies. Any government granted monopoly will allow the recipient to be wildly profitable, but that doesn't mean that they're generally a good idea.
Just because you benefit from copyright law doesn't make it a good idea for society. Nor do the existence of business models that depend on it justify it. If there were no copyright, things would be different. The question isn't if people would have to adjust - obviously they would. The question is this: would the overall benefit to society be greater?
Many people who receive copyright royalties think that they have some sort of natural right to those royalties. A right to get paid long into the future for something they did in the past - regardless of the cost to society. That's simply selfish greed, and I'm not terribly interested. If you can show that some version of copyright is the best policy overall, great - let's use that. If copyright isn't the best choice, we should do something else.
The goal isn't to make sure that artists get paid for every copy of their work. That just happens to be what copyright tries to do. The goal is to make sure that the maximum number of people have access to the greatest variety of artistic works. If we were to abolish copyrights completely today, and as a result no new artistic works were created (which wouldn't happen), there would still be more overall access to artistic works for *many years* - simply because people who couldn't afford copyrighted works before would have access to them.
So the relevent questions are these: What is the rate of artistic production in the absence of copyright? Is it worth taking action to increase that rate? What action is worth taking? My strong hunch is that the answers end up being "reasonably high", "yes", and "not copyright". Even government art grants are likely to be a better social tradeoff, since that way we don't prevent people from having access to the art that is created - unappreciated art provides no social benefit.
As for "wait till you don't get paid for your hard work", I write software for a living. Custom software. I bill by the hour. Many writers are like me - they don't live off royalties. They get paid either by the piece, on salary, or some other way.
Why not split things out into multiple javascript interpreters then? Why does per-tab javascript even *want* to run in the same interpreter as UI code?
It feels like a lot of design tradeoffs were made in Mozilla that trade 100k of RAM for like a second of UI latency. Bad deal.
Cheater. Yes, Linux gives you the tools to prevent that code from being a problem. There are other examples I can give, and most of them have counters. My point is this - Linux, as it comes out of the box, can be made to freeze up by misbehaving user code. With the default settings in most Linux distros, the code I gave you will result in such a freeze.
Even today, tons of art is commissioned by rich people. There are even far more people with the necessary wealth than there used to be. I don't think that explains Shakespeare though - I think he got paid from theater admissions. And then there's the largest source of art, that created by dedicated artists - the people with a drive to create and will do so even unpaid in their spare time.
There are perfectly functional copyright-free business models for most types of art. Popular music would be somewhat different - there would be less economic incentive to create artificial pop stars Movie budgets would come down - but you could still raise millions of production dollars through methods like having theater owners pre-pay and the same level of product placement major movies already have. If that stuff is not enough, maybe we should discuss government art grants. But... here's the important thing: The economic load imposed by copyright is way more than the taxes it would take to directly fund art that produced the same level of social good.
Consider this brute force solution: We know that the browser can handle running with one tab now. We know that the rendering engine can be embedded in other browsers with different tabbing setups. They could just embed separate instances of the rendering engine in each tab. Sure, they might have to redo some of the UI. Sure, it would take a ton of RAM. But... it would work, and it would be multithreaded, and they could tune it to have shared data as needed from there.
Legally, things tend to get worse rather than better. There is economic reinforcement of bad legal policies, and there's no motivation for lawmakers to fix them.
If private disclosure is illegal, then anonymous public disclosure is absolutely the right plan.
Personally, as a web service provider, I would post a relatively prominent policy on my site that "security related bug reports are happily accepted, we won't sue you for being neighborly and helping us". I'm all for full disclosure, but I have no interest in turning down a free pre-notification of my security issue.
Are you sure about this statement? Is it just a knee-jerk emotional reaction? Is it actually a good idea? Do you have any rational reason for that conclusion?
Copyright is a reasonably simple economic tradeoff. Art will be produced in the absence of legal incentives - in fact, much of the historically "great" art (Shakespeare, Mozart, etc) was produced in the complete absence of copyright. Copyright provides one main benefit: It creates a business model for full time, professional, publish-only artists. In exchange, it has three major disadvantages: it restricts the distribution and enjoyment of all art, it creates a massively profitable natural oligarchy: the publishing business, and it prevents the creation of certain classes of derivative art.
There probably is a good way to promote the creation of more art than would be created without social incentives. Copyright, as currently implemented, isn't it.
Relakks is an excellent solution to this class of problem. TOR is not - It'll be dog slow, and you'll be slowing down other people who have interactive tasks they're trying to accomplish over TOR, like web browsing.
Create a file named "freeze.sh" with the following contents:
Run it, count to 100, and then fix it without rebooting.
Firefox should be moving to multi-threading anyway, because SMP has been solidly mainstream for years now. The fact that it fixes this entire class of bugs for free is just really nice.
What's the hard part here? You have a main thread that handles everything that isn't actual per-tab content. You spawn a thread for each tab, and have it basically the same code it's running now. The only difference is that UI events for the tab-content need to be either A.) sent by the windowing system to the tab's thread or B.) accepted by the main thread and queued up for the tab thread.
Perhaps there have been really stupid architectural decisions in Firefox that hurt this plan, but if that's true they should be getting fixed *now*.
Loading java applets is what annoys the crap out of me. Firefox stops responding for like 10 seconds.
I'm visualizing the simple code to spawn a thread for each tab, and... I have no idea why they aren't doing it. None.
It's true that a synchronous event loop generally has better throughput on a single processor core than any sort of multi-threaded construct. But, that doesn't make it the right architectural choice for a web browser. First, computers are fast enough that a 15% throughput penalty is irrelevant compared to the much more important issue of latency - when I click in a Firefox window, I want there to be a thread listening, I don't want my event to wait in a queue for half a second for the event loop to get to it. Second, I hear multi-core processors are pretty common, and my guess would be that they're getting more common rather than less common.
Thing is, single threaded apps aren't going to stay even marginally useful for more than about 20 more minutes. Maybe there are hard problem in threading, but putting each tab in a tabbed browser into its own thread isn't one of them.
A lot of people seem to share that opinion, but say it different ways. Some people talk about "better education", other people talk about "less poverty", others talk about "industrialization". In this context they're all basically the same thing - the overpopulation problem will go away if more people are better educated, have better jobs, and have more money.
But they won't, and so all you accomplished is selecting yourself out of the gene pool.
We have a ton of resources on the planet. Supporting more humans with the resources that we have is a reasonably easy problem technologically. Yes, we have a high population compared to what a species without agriculture (and modern agriculture) could do, but we have those things. The earth could handle a bunch more population, but the trends indicate that human population growth is slowing quickly enough that it won't be a real issue.
The appropriate tactic here isn't to have less kids, it's to have as many kids as you think you can reasonably educate. The only way we'll be able to keep quality of life up as a species is to have as high a percentage of well educated people as possible - that way there will be people around to suggest and implement rational solutions to problems.
I'm a little bit fuzzy on the physics here, but I'm pretty sure that EM waves don't interact with the air in a way that makes resistance relevant (i.e. it's not about electrons pushing each other around in a material, it's about photons or something).
This is one of the places where the fact that the OS is really "GNU/Linux" becomes really obvious and relevant. All of the GNU code is going to be moved to GPLv3 - Bash, GCC, GNU libc, GNU tar, GNU binutils, etc. When that happens, any "Linux distribution" will include quite a bit of GPLv3 code. It's true that the kernel, Linux, probably won't use the new license - at least not any time soon - but the kernel's only a small part of the system.
The correct thing to do in this case is to show the GPL "About" blurb:
Making the user hit "I agree" to that even makes some sense - it might make the warantee disclaimer stronger.
How is this for efficiency? Can you actually beat a copper wire since there wouldn't be resistance? What sort of distances does this work over?