"The only way to generate money from IP is to use governments to create and enforce laws."
And right there is the crux of the problem: money. Why do you want to generate money from IP? Why not, say, paint yourself purple and stand on an egg saying "I am the King of Prussia"? That would be an equally appropriate response.
Money is a measure of exchange value. It's a measure of atoms, because two atoms can't share the same space, can't be duplicated, but can be easily exchanged. Money is an abstraction which has been deliberately and carefully engineered over centuries to have exactly the same properties fo excludability and exchangability and rarity as matter.
But bits are not atoms and information is not matter. Information is fundamentally cooperative - it can be shared more easily than it can be 'moved'. It creates global value rather than local value. It is weird stuff.
Using money, an artificial measure engineered to have the non-information-like properties of matter, to measure information, is fundamentally absurd.
The only thing more absurd would be creating laws to *enforce* this absurd mismeasure.
"A huge percentage of the present US economy is based on intellectual property: computer software, television shows, movies, music, the designs of complex things (computer chips, etc.). "
In other words, a huge percentage of the present US economy is not based on free trade, because you can't trade bits, and you especially can't trade bits for atoms - but that's what you're trying to do. US makes the bits, China turns the bits into atoms under the assumption that buying the bits means they can never freely share those bits with anyone, which they smile and promise not to do. Anything to take your money.
Not surprisingly, this is both not free trade and not going to work.
"Oh wait... the terrorists that are attacking the US are *Muslim*? Huh... guess that puts your entire theory onto the trash heap, eh?"
Not really. See "Carter Doctrine", and before WW2 (when the Imperial Anglosphere wreath was living on the other side of the Atlantic), "Balfour Declaration". I guess it was the fall and partitioning of the Ottoman Empire which we're still living in the wreckage of...
"The only reason we have a middle ground in the WiFi land (WEP) is because the crypto guys screwed up. It's handy. "
Um, I thought it was because when WiFi first launched, you couldn't *get* anything more secure than WEP.
Now that WPA2 is out, I can't see any reason to not use at least WPA2/PSK. Type in a password, set your Wifi manager to remember it forever, and you're good to go. How is that hard?
"The whole point of human space flight is the assumption that we will be in space sooner or later. Given that it's not that hard to put people in space for a length of time indicates to me that we'll likely have more extensive human presence in a few decades, but that's just IMHO."
There is a problem in that assumption, however.
The problem is that outer space, kinda by definition, is a complete absence of anything useful. Unless you can eat rock and breathe hard vacuum, space is really just a gigantic hole in the backside of nowhere. I mean you might think Utah is boring but that's just peanuts to space.
Space isn't any kind of frontier. It's the lack of frontiers. A lack of absolutely everything. It's where stuff isn't. Space: no stuff here. Bring your own stuff. All the cool stuff is on one planet which we already have.
I know we were told that Rockets Are The Future - but why? Why is it the glorious manifest destiny of the human race to jump into a giant empty hole which takes years to cross where no stuff is?
"Yeah, an astronaut in a space suit would be able to free the rover in seconds, and clean its solar panels while he was at it."
That's a great idea! Keep a single astronaut on site to monitor the rovers and dig them out if they break. And if you have any problems with the astronaut, you just [LONG RANGE COMMUNICATIONS NOT RESPONDING]
"Most of a programming language just symbolic (if, for, while) and could be replaced by icons and mean th same thing. The only real words are the variable and function names."
"as well as a CRM114-vintage machine designed to stretch your saccade, by forcing you to read words in a revealed window with a progressive speed ratchet."
"Case in point: It would be very profitable to chain your workers to the factory floor and have them work 18 hours a day for no money, and consumers would be able to buy the wares much cheaper, yet it would not be ethical."
And yet, historically, that's pretty much exactly what did happen in 18th century England - to the point of actual slavery, in America. And the manufacturers generating that profit from abuse of their workers not only found no ethical problems with it, but argued that 1) profit was an ethical imperative for the improvement of society (Adam Smith), and 2) they were doing the workers a favour by improving their living conditions - 'why, if not for us they'd be living in mud huts in bogs in Ireland/jungles in Africa!'
(Hey there, Roald Dahl! Willy Wonka mouths EXACTLY those platitudes in his 'Oompa-Loompa' speech in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Only apparently without a trace of irony.)
So, in *our* history, yes, 'the fact that it's profitable' did very much sidestep all ethical considerations. The manufacturers simply got to redefine ethics in their favour. That was neat! Ah, the golden age of Classical Liberal Economics.
And guess what, that's exactly what's happening today in China and Mexico and the Phillipines. Same kind of conditions, same kind of ethical arguments put forward about how the rigors of low-wage industrialisation is 'doing the workers a favour by giving them jobs they couldn't get elsewhere'. Have we raised our ethical standards as a society? No we have not, we have dropped them. Back to the Dickens era.
What stopped that kind of insanity in our history was when workers and anti-slavery campaigners started organising and *forced* the manufacturers to change their ways. But that's Communism.
Well obviously you'll want to retrofit a modern antigravity warp gradient generator into the thing as the actual propulsion core, and hack up some custom nanotech to manage the environmental controls. Trying to rebuild a fully-functional vintage chemical launch system with period 20th century technology would be just silly...
"participants in these groups, who by definition are more suspicious than most, will now be paranoid that their peers are government infiltrators. They'll be less open with each other, and may quit altogether."
Er, have you visited any political blog in the last eight years? Their comment pages were all "I respectfully disagree with your conclusion that nuking Tehran will cause spontaneous outbreaks of West-worship, and that 9/11 was caused by hologram drones." "TROLL! Someone get that TROLLING TROLL out of here! You FOX/CNN TROLL!"
"The Chinese are all about assimilation of technology. "
Yes. And this is Slashdot, a website which is generally in favour of people assimilating, reverse engineering, decrypting, hacking, cracking, opening, jailbreaking, repurposing, learning, making, rebuilding, customising and sharing technology. We believe in the right to read, the right to copy, Stallman's Four Freedoms, that technology should be owned, not licenced, that DRM is evil because it blocks a user's ability to control their own technological destiny, that software patents stifle innovation, that copyright and region coding keeps media prices artificially high, that censorship is an intrinsic evil, that business models must perpetually innovate, that nobody owes buggy whip makers a living, etc.
We believe that We The People Have The Right to learn stuff, copy stuff, and share stuff, and that technology is only safe when the user is in the driving seat.
Oh... but suddenly all that is bad if CHINA does it? Eek! Scary Asian people stealing our freedom (to control them).
I say, let China assimilate all they want. The bigger problem here is US corporations who think they have the moral right and practical ability to *stop* other countries sharing technological information - and then foolishly built business models on that foundation of sand.
Sell stuff to China if you choose to. Don't sell stuff to China if you choose to. Just don't expect them to 'respect' your crazy ideas that information is property, which it isn't. I mean, this is Slashdot - we know that, right? We read Lawrence Lessig and Cory Doctorow, we put Creative Commons on our photos and GPL on our code, we know that information *should* be copied because that's its strength... right?
Don't try to 'sell' your secrets to China with one hand while trying to grab them back with the other, because that's like posting your drunk party photos on Facebook then saying 'but I didn't mean for the world to see me naked!'
"I find the lack of shame and intentional IP theft appalling personally."
Right, let me just check the Slashzeitgeist for a moment.. we're now all in favour of IP when it's China that's violating it? Those evil slant-eyed commie bastards, how DARE they reverse engineer any technology! Only the glorious corporate West has that right! IP is our protection and learning new information from others is corporate espionage!
But if it's Brazilian generic drug manufacturers, Swedish DVD pirates, Russian or German leakers violating copyright and trade secrets... let the fountainhead of freedom flow wide and free! John Perry Barlow 4ever! You weary giants of flesh and steel, hands off our cybertubes!
Just checking we're on the same page here. Wouldn't want to ungoodthink by being contranewfact.
Slashdot Mirror
"What are we going to do when every possible piece of music (words excluded) exists?"
We become melancholy elephants.
"The only way to generate money from IP is to use governments to create and enforce laws."
And right there is the crux of the problem: money. Why do you want to generate money from IP? Why not, say, paint yourself purple and stand on an egg saying "I am the King of Prussia"? That would be an equally appropriate response.
Money is a measure of exchange value. It's a measure of atoms, because two atoms can't share the same space, can't be duplicated, but can be easily exchanged. Money is an abstraction which has been deliberately and carefully engineered over centuries to have exactly the same properties fo excludability and exchangability and rarity as matter.
But bits are not atoms and information is not matter. Information is fundamentally cooperative - it can be shared more easily than it can be 'moved'. It creates global value rather than local value. It is weird stuff.
Using money, an artificial measure engineered to have the non-information-like properties of matter, to measure information, is fundamentally absurd.
The only thing more absurd would be creating laws to *enforce* this absurd mismeasure.
"A huge percentage of the present US economy is based on intellectual property: computer software, television shows, movies, music, the designs of complex things (computer chips, etc.). "
In other words, a huge percentage of the present US economy is not based on free trade, because you can't trade bits, and you especially can't trade bits for atoms - but that's what you're trying to do. US makes the bits, China turns the bits into atoms under the assumption that buying the bits means they can never freely share those bits with anyone, which they smile and promise not to do. Anything to take your money.
Not surprisingly, this is both not free trade and not going to work.
"Oh wait... the terrorists that are attacking the US are *Muslim*? Huh... guess that puts your entire theory onto the trash heap, eh?"
Not really. See "Carter Doctrine", and before WW2 (when the Imperial Anglosphere wreath was living on the other side of the Atlantic), "Balfour Declaration". I guess it was the fall and partitioning of the Ottoman Empire which we're still living in the wreckage of...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partitioning_of_the_Ottoman_Empire
Whee, messy.
"The only reason we have a middle ground in the WiFi land (WEP) is because the crypto guys screwed up. It's handy. "
Um, I thought it was because when WiFi first launched, you couldn't *get* anything more secure than WEP.
Now that WPA2 is out, I can't see any reason to not use at least WPA2/PSK. Type in a password, set your Wifi manager to remember it forever, and you're good to go. How is that hard?
"The whole point of human space flight is the assumption that we will be in space sooner or later. Given that it's not that hard to put people in space for a length of time indicates to me that we'll likely have more extensive human presence in a few decades, but that's just IMHO."
There is a problem in that assumption, however.
The problem is that outer space, kinda by definition, is a complete absence of anything useful. Unless you can eat rock and breathe hard vacuum, space is really just a gigantic hole in the backside of nowhere. I mean you might think Utah is boring but that's just peanuts to space.
Space isn't any kind of frontier. It's the lack of frontiers. A lack of absolutely everything. It's where stuff isn't. Space: no stuff here. Bring your own stuff. All the cool stuff is on one planet which we already have.
I know we were told that Rockets Are The Future - but why? Why is it the glorious manifest destiny of the human race to jump into a giant empty hole which takes years to cross where no stuff is?
"What work is getting done, again?"
Getting me pretty desktop background pictures! That's what NASA exists for, right?
"Yeah, an astronaut in a space suit would be able to free the rover in seconds, and clean its solar panels while he was at it."
That's a great idea! Keep a single astronaut on site to monitor the rovers and dig them out if they break. And if you have any problems with the astronaut, you just [LONG RANGE COMMUNICATIONS NOT RESPONDING]
Each time I read "Spirit and Opportunity" I keep thinking they should have named the first rover "Motive"...
"Most of a programming language just symbolic (if, for, while) and could be replaced by icons and mean th same thing. The only real words are the variable and function names."
Lisp cries!
Symbols not first-class entities? nil!
"as well as a CRM114-vintage machine designed to stretch your saccade, by forcing you to read words in a revealed window with a progressive speed ratchet."
I read that as "CRM114 vintage machine gun"
Now that would be aggressive testing...
I agree that it's dumb - but it's interesting how such a dumb idea flourished for so long in the American South, isn't it?
"Case in point: It would be very profitable to chain your workers to the factory floor and have them work 18 hours a day for no money, and consumers would be able to buy the wares much cheaper, yet it would not be ethical."
And yet, historically, that's pretty much exactly what did happen in 18th century England - to the point of actual slavery, in America. And the manufacturers generating that profit from abuse of their workers not only found no ethical problems with it, but argued that 1) profit was an ethical imperative for the improvement of society (Adam Smith), and 2) they were doing the workers a favour by improving their living conditions - 'why, if not for us they'd be living in mud huts in bogs in Ireland/jungles in Africa!'
(Hey there, Roald Dahl! Willy Wonka mouths EXACTLY those platitudes in his 'Oompa-Loompa' speech in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Only apparently without a trace of irony.)
So, in *our* history, yes, 'the fact that it's profitable' did very much sidestep all ethical considerations. The manufacturers simply got to redefine ethics in their favour. That was neat! Ah, the golden age of Classical Liberal Economics.
And guess what, that's exactly what's happening today in China and Mexico and the Phillipines. Same kind of conditions, same kind of ethical arguments put forward about how the rigors of low-wage industrialisation is 'doing the workers a favour by giving them jobs they couldn't get elsewhere'. Have we raised our ethical standards as a society? No we have not, we have dropped them. Back to the Dickens era.
What stopped that kind of insanity in our history was when workers and anti-slavery campaigners started organising and *forced* the manufacturers to change their ways. But that's Communism.
Well obviously you'll want to retrofit a modern antigravity warp gradient generator into the thing as the actual propulsion core, and hack up some custom nanotech to manage the environmental controls. Trying to rebuild a fully-functional vintage chemical launch system with period 20th century technology would be just silly...
"participants in these groups, who by definition are more suspicious than most, will now be paranoid that their peers are government infiltrators. They'll be less open with each other, and may quit altogether."
Er, have you visited any political blog in the last eight years? Their comment pages were all "I respectfully disagree with your conclusion that nuking Tehran will cause spontaneous outbreaks of West-worship, and that 9/11 was caused by hologram drones." "TROLL! Someone get that TROLLING TROLL out of here! You FOX/CNN TROLL!"
So nothing much will change then.
@neo: What good is a Twitter account, Mr Anderson... if you are unable to type?
"The Chinese are all about assimilation of technology. "
Yes. And this is Slashdot, a website which is generally in favour of people assimilating, reverse engineering, decrypting, hacking, cracking, opening, jailbreaking, repurposing, learning, making, rebuilding, customising and sharing technology. We believe in the right to read, the right to copy, Stallman's Four Freedoms, that technology should be owned, not licenced, that DRM is evil because it blocks a user's ability to control their own technological destiny, that software patents stifle innovation, that copyright and region coding keeps media prices artificially high, that censorship is an intrinsic evil, that business models must perpetually innovate, that nobody owes buggy whip makers a living, etc.
We believe that We The People Have The Right to learn stuff, copy stuff, and share stuff, and that technology is only safe when the user is in the driving seat.
Oh... but suddenly all that is bad if CHINA does it? Eek! Scary Asian people stealing our freedom (to control them).
I say, let China assimilate all they want. The bigger problem here is US corporations who think they have the moral right and practical ability to *stop* other countries sharing technological information - and then foolishly built business models on that foundation of sand.
Sell stuff to China if you choose to. Don't sell stuff to China if you choose to. Just don't expect them to 'respect' your crazy ideas that information is property, which it isn't. I mean, this is Slashdot - we know that, right? We read Lawrence Lessig and Cory Doctorow, we put Creative Commons on our photos and GPL on our code, we know that information *should* be copied because that's its strength... right?
Don't try to 'sell' your secrets to China with one hand while trying to grab them back with the other, because that's like posting your drunk party photos on Facebook then saying 'but I didn't mean for the world to see me naked!'
"Yeah, I'm sure China will be as damaged by their 'collapse' as we have been by ours."
When all their rivers are polluted and their crops tainted with industrial effluent... they're probably going to be worse off.
Industrialisation is great and all, but converting all planetary biomass into iPods does surprisingly have a down side. Who knew?
"They walk on egg shells because China is the largest nuclear threat since the USSR "
That, and China can stop making our underpants.
I don't know about you, but that second threat scares me more.
"They may lose china"
Google owns China? I knew they were big, but man...
"the Monroe Doctrine"
That's the one that decrees that gentlemen prefer blondes, right?
"Tell me the Western company that is making money in China itself."
Blizzard? World of Warcraft subscriptions aren't easily pirated.
"I find the lack of shame and intentional IP theft appalling personally."
Right, let me just check the Slashzeitgeist for a moment.. we're now all in favour of IP when it's China that's violating it? Those evil slant-eyed commie bastards, how DARE they reverse engineer any technology! Only the glorious corporate West has that right! IP is our protection and learning new information from others is corporate espionage!
But if it's Brazilian generic drug manufacturers, Swedish DVD pirates, Russian or German leakers violating copyright and trade secrets... let the fountainhead of freedom flow wide and free! John Perry Barlow 4ever! You weary giants of flesh and steel, hands off our cybertubes!
Just checking we're on the same page here. Wouldn't want to ungoodthink by being contranewfact.
Frank Miller's Sim City...
"I'm gonna find the tornado that blew up my power station, and I'm gonna cut it so bad..."
Gah! You linked me to TVtropes! You owe me five hours and a new keyboard!