I wonder why so many hackers are interested in it then?
Because hackers aren't nearly as smart as they think they are, and are in fact extremely susceptible to dangerous fads if wrapped in crypto-libertarian trappings?
If I have $500 which can buy a new suit today, but several years into the future $500 can only buy half a suit, then it's caused by the private central bank
Or, you know, by there being a lesser supply or a greater demand for suits in the future. Why do you think the cost of all goods should be a constant over time?
By any reasonable definition, they have value. Someone is willing to pay for them, as evidenced by the exchange houses existing in the first place.
Then they obviously won't mind paying out of their private BitCoin profits for private security contractors to catch the thief and private justice contractors to make sure he's the right guy and private enforcement contractors to apply the appropriate penalty.
I don't think that word means what you think it does.
I have to go now, my lily-livered, weak-kneed, uncertain opponent, who can't make up his mind, is about to decisively crush the world in an iron fist. Or not. Maybe. Perhaps.
Problem is, if the government spends, I am paying for it.
I'm not sure you realise that when the private sector spends, you're also paying for it. Or do you not pay rent, utility bills, interest and service charges where you live? What do you think a landlord is other than a tiny pocket monarch who collects taxes?
The relevant question to ask is, for any given service, which provider historically has given better quality and cheaper prices, government or private sector? Or a hybrid approach of market plus regulatory oversight? There's no one answer which is automatically "ideologically correct". But for healthcare, for instance, the government approach seems to be doing better in countries like Canada and New Zealand. Stands to reason: if Wal-Mart can get better prices by buying in bulk, why can't a whole nation? And we do; we have this thing in NZ called Pharmac where we buy prescription medicines in bulk, and save. US private drug companies are trying to lobby to make it illegal, because, um. Because customer savings makes them sad.
The beauty of Commercial Space is, it doesn't cost taxpayers anything.
You sure it doesn't? Someone's paying the bills for that commercial launch operation, and it's probably the guy who wants the payload launched. That might be your TV company, or your phone company, as long as it's about exploiting already well-developed markets in well-understood technologies. And you know for sure that that launch cost will be included as a surcharge in your monthly bill, which for a ubiquitous service is pretty hard to distinguish from a "tax". But for innovative stuff that might or might not work and certainly won't produce an instant payoff, but might create whole new markets several decades down the track, the client is most likely someone a bit more forward-thinking like NASA, DARPA, the National Science Foundation or DoD.
Remember who invented, built, and services GPS? Hint: it wasn't, and isn't, Google. There wasn't even an Apple or a Microsoft when the system was designed (there was an IBM). But how many dollars a year in commercial services would you say it's worth now? And don't forget the secret history of Silicon Valley. The line between "government", "science", and "private industry" isn't nearly as clear-cut as you might like to think it is; many interesting players in the last century, such as Fred Terman and Alfred Loomis, crossed easily between all three.
So where is the magic land that actually has a capitalistic system?
Or is capitalism just impossible?
Capitalism isn't strictly impossible, any more than jumping off a building is impossible. However, like jumping, it is inherently self-contradictory; it can't be sustained infinitely, and the results when the system crashes aren't pretty.
Unfettered capitalism appears indistinguishable from feudalism: every initially free market rapidly devolves into one or two winners who become the equivalent of landlords. They own the land/property, everyone else becomes a serf who works and pays rent to the property-holder. This feudal situation with "late stage capitalism" of course ends up looking nothing like the early-stage "free market", but therein lies the self-contradiction. Then eventually the landlords overreach and you get a revolution or a disruptive technology, philosophy or outside invader, and this temporarily resets the game pieces. We see this happening in rapid acceleration in the intellectual property landscape in computing, but it looks much like the same forces that have been at work for thousands of years. Marx spotted this pattern but I think he was a bit off in his prescriptions on how to fix it; replacing capital with compulsion by force seems to do bad things for everyone involved.
It would be nice if there were more intellectual alternatives to the Austrian School than Marxism. I tend towards E F Schumacher, who isn't easy to pigeonhole as "left" or "right".
Sign me up for a colonist slot! Especially if I can take all my media files with me.
Oh, you can have as many MPEGs and MP3s as you want. Data storage won't be a problem. We can give you petabytes on a thumb drive.
However, since H2O is our primary commodity here, we do operate the oxygen vending system on a strictly free-market system. Workers below executive class are charged $10 per standard breath. You'll want to begin earning station credits as soon as possible. There are entry level openings available in the "bio-active resource reclamation center" below the latrines; here's your shovel.
Why are you equating the web with Facebook or the like? If I fire up Tomcat and serve a web app, how does that get at "everything there is to know about you"?
That depends. Who are you, who are your present and future commercial partners, what jurisdiction are you operating under, what personally identifying data am I entering into that app, what are your retention policies for that data, and where are you hosting it?
But if your app were an old-school non-Internet enabled desktop app running on my desktop (and especially with source code available), I wouldn't even have to begin asking any of those questions, because you wouldn't be able to see my data in the first place.
Web apps are not a step forward for privacy - and depending on the operator, they can be a huge step back.
The Linux Desktop is not one monolithic project. Instead it's a smorgasbord of incomplete and mutually incompatible choices. Gnome, KDE, XFCE, just plain X, IceWM, and many many many more. Each have their teams of bitterly divided coders who work on the X server, the Window Manager, the Display Manager, the interactions, overall themes, and lots of other factors that make each Linux desktop look unique.
Yes, you've neatly described the problem. The next step is to admit that it's a problem.
I just think you're just being selective in your comparisons. The solutions already exist on the OS.
No, they really don't.
About ten years ago I was thinking about dipping my feet in Linux application development and started looking at the different object models then available, trying to work out which one was going to prevail. It was madness... and the situation hasn't got better since then. Shall I enumerate them for you, hmm? Keep in mind that the root of problem isn't just that we have a hopeless mishmash of implementations, but that we have a mismash of core object semantics that don't compose well.
Linux object model roll call!
GNOME: GObject. Still the official standard, based on C and now "Vala", no persistence, no remoting, several iterations of failed C++ wrappers GNOME: Bonobo. Based on CORBA for remoting, but used its own funky CORBA implementation, very quickly abandoned Freedesktop: D-bus. Sort of halfway of an object model only used for IPC, requires an underlying object model on the client. KDE: Qt. C++ library which ate the whole desktop, requires its own preprocessor for its own "extended" obejct model, so not quite pure C++. No persistence. KDE: KParts. Object model on top of Qt's special sauce. I think it's still there in the architecture? KDE: DCOP. Object model on top of Qt's special sauce. I think deprecated now in favour of D-bus? Firefox: XPCOM. Cross-platform object model cloned off of MS COM. But subtly different, of course. Based on C++. No persistence or remoting, I think. LibreOffice: UNO. Cross-platform object model I think based on COM or CORBA or something. And of course unique to LibreOffice project. Persistence built in, but probably not remoting. JavaBeans: Hey look, we still have Java on Linux, and yeah, it's got its own object model with persistence and remoting and stuff. Enterprise users probably live and breathe the stuff, but nobody else really. Mono:.NET clone which tried to eat GNOME and of course has its own object model, or two of them, based on.NET's assemblies and COM and whathaveyou. Subtly different to all the rest of course. Wine: MS COM. Well of course we also have the WINE project and that's got to implement MS COM somehow. But can it map directly onto any underlying native object system? Course not! Good old fashioned filesystem: If it wasn't in Unix 1.0 in 1969 then I don't want it on my Linux!/etc files are a good object model enough for anyone! etc. Available in a million flavours of kernel filesystem AND desktop project VIRTUAL filesystem APIs, of course. This is actually a good solution for persistence, but sadly not for remoting because Plan 9 never got adopted. X11's.... stuff. Yep, X11 has a sort of IPC mechanism which if you squint at it a bit might looks sort of like an "object model", since there's windows that persist across multiple processes and have their own data storage and stuff, but you don't really want to do that or you'll go mad. But it's there under the hood just to make sure nothing is 100% easy.
Oh, but that's not all. We've also got various flavours of semi-official languages at the application and system level with their OWN object models, most of which live in only the one running process and evaporate when runtime ends. Mostly.
C (with or without GObject) C++ (with or without Qt's special slot sauce and the K object models) Perl (whose "object model" is best forgotten, but still runs most of the world) PHP (confined to the web server, where it's the worst possible candidate for the job, and therefore used everywhere) Python (the "official" Ubuntu scripting language), with no official persistence/remoting solution, but lots of contenders. JavaScript (only in a web browser session, mostly). Not as bad as you might think, yet not quite usable. It's got JSON for persistence, sorta, although that doesn't include methods so you can't use it for system scripting. It's abou
They aren't getting a Mac because it does everything they need
they need VMWare or Parallels because there are a couple of special purpose Windows programs they need
Yes, that's what he said.
Fun fact about software lock-in: if you can't run 100% of the software you need on a platform, then that platform is 100% useless to you. 99% doesn't cut it. You either get your job done, or you don't, and look elsewhere for employment.
Another fun fact about software lock-in: that last lousy 1% of software probably was written 15 years ago, by some contractor who now lives in Venezuela, to specs which are posted in a badger cage under the eternal tyre fire in Building #12 basement. It stores its data in an obscure proprietary binary format, with dedicated DLT tape drives for backup and with no source code available. It's riddled with instant-root-on-receiving-a-packet vulnerabilities and requires a fully open non-firewalled connection to the entire Ethernet LAN (overNetBEUI and IPX/SPX protocols, of course; none of this upstart TCP/IP stuff). And it's a critical non-replaceable component of your entire enterprise's just-in-time order fulfilment system.
And it stopped working this morning, and it's your job to fix it.
What does not help at all is to hand-wave or diminish this particular problem, and blame the tools for not doing our due diligence.
I couldn't disagree more.
We're programmers. That means, we're in the business of creating tools to do repetitive things rather than doing them by hand. Automation, rather than hand-crafting, is what our chosen line of work is all about. And the best use of our tool-making ability is to automate, wherever and whenever we can, our own jobs.
So it is exactly the job of the tools we create to do our due diligence for us; we're making 'em, we're using 'em, we're giving and selling 'em to others, so we darn better make sure they do the job safely and correctly.
We're not only toolmakers, we're makers of tools that other toolmakers use to make other tools that make other tools. At every step, it's our job to make sure we're doing nothing by hand in an unsafe, unrepeatable manner that our tools can't do more simply and correctly and perfectly.
It's because we haven't been doing this - because we've been satisfied with making badly designed, unsafe tools, that don't automate everything that can be automated and when they do, have complex interactions that aren't correctly documented and defy logic - and then patching up our tools' deficiencies with a Byzantine maze of hand-crafted exceptions and fudges and "programmer lore" - that we've got the Internet into the mess that it's in.
So go ahead and blame our tools. They don't have feelings, but they do have bugs that need to be fixed.
they successfully churn out software to solve these challenges in elegant and creative ways
Would those be the same "good programmers" who have churned out the last 20 years of critical Internet-facing vulnerabilities?
All that software sold, after all, so by some measure it was "successful". Just not by the old fuddy-duddy "not guaranteed never to steal your identity and strangle you in the night" definition.
* ridiculously large & light zero-g free-floating solar arrays with uninterrupted sunlight
Which use that power to do what?
* space habitats & manufacturing plants
Which manufacture what, and send it where?
* spaceships
Which go where?
The big problem I see with space construction and habitation is bootstrapping: space construction makes sense once you have a big population in space, and space habitation makes sense once you have a lot of space construction to get done, but there's no fundamental point to all of it in the first place. It's like how the Space Shuttle was designed to get modules and people to the Space Station, which was designed to be serviced by the Space Shuttle, but the two of them together didn't actually have a reason to exist.
In the commercial world, this level of investment without ultimate return doesn't really happen. The big driver of space tech in the last 50 years has been military needs: the requirement to set cities we don't like on fire within 20 minutes, and then to take spy pictures of the other side's city-setting-on-fire facilities... and even going to the moon was a small clip-on hanging off the side of that whole military infrastructure. And yes, even Silicon Valley and the Internet were tiny byproducts of that huge flow of military money.
But it seems to have turned out that even having a manned base on the moon isn't even really that useful militarily, let alone paying its way commercially. It might yet happen, like Scott Base at Antarctica; but there aren't even penguins at Tranquility Base, so how many dead rocks are underfunded scientists and bored tourists going to pay to catalogue?
Teleoperated moon rovers I could see happening; they're relatively cheap and safe to launch. Fully manned presence? Hmm. Let me figure the health and class-action lawsuit insurance bills for that. Not seeing the upside yet.
It will certainly be a much cleaner, albeit hugely expensive, non-feasible fuel for the fusion reactors we won't be able to build in 2050 than the cheap and readily available non-feasible fuel we can't extract from ordinary seawater for the fusion reactors we can't build right now.
As a Documentary Film Maker, I am glad that any one is watching my films and happy to redistribute them. But, I don't want TV station taking my hard work and making a profit off them and not giving me a cent. I also often use footaged owned by large productions houses (As time machines are unavailable, I can't reshoot historic moments), and there clause are pretty standard, that for every dollar I make they want a peice; which, as a film make (that cost to produce films) I need to make money so have no problem with this logic.
Hmm. NC/ND is a bit of a double edged sword there, yes.
1. As a documentary film maker you are a consumer of raw source media. For that purpose, you want the rights of the material you're consuming to be as free as possible. You certainly would not be able to use ND licenced footage in your product - since you're making a derivative work. CC footage would also be useless to you if you ever wanted to charge money for copies of your documentary - even asking $1 for burning it onto a DVD-R for a friend would be illegal.
On the other hand, you'd be perfectly free to use any BY or BY-SA licenced footage in your work - just add an attribution to your credits roll and you're good to go. Crop it, remix it, sell copies of it - it's all allowed.
Do you want more indie documentaries to be produced? Do you want your life as a documentary producer to be simpler? Then you want more BY licenced works rather than NC/ND works.
2. However, if you're using commercial licensed footage, then you do have a problem - it won't mix with open SA licenced work of any kind (because you can't pass on the rights to use it). So you may need to licence your work as NC or ND to reflect that it's been "contaminated" with proprietary rights, that you don't really own all the rights to it, and the noncommercial requirement might actually be a requirement of the licence that you're inheriting.
I think NC/ND is best understood as "commercial, but we will refrain from prosecuting" rather than "free".
> So, if dropping NC and ND results in a single work being relicensed under a free license, this would be a benefit.
Even if thousands of equally skillfully crafted works were no longer released under any CC license and kept proprietory because the NC or ND clause was deemed too important?
Yes. See, here's the thing - with the NC/ND clause they are still proprietary. They're very strict "look, but don't touch" licences, which grant no ownership rights to the viewer. That is proprietary in every sense except the very restricted one of "you can look at this in certain approved contexts - but you can't talk about it in any works of your own". Heck, you can't even crop an ND photo! No way I want to touch that legal minefield with a bargepole.
What we're trying to create with the Open Culture movement is a movement away from the "billions of passive couch potatoes, a few thousand skilled/inspired Creators" model towards a recognition that everyone can add value to culture by remixing it and passing it on.
Whether you support this idea probably has a lot to do with your view of humanity. Do you think of the world as a giant seething cesspool full of scary leeching zombies who you, one of the few heroic noble Creators, must struggle against every second of your life, and fight a constant war to prevent the dark hordes from leeching off your beautiful Ideas? Or do you think of it as full of lots of creative people just like you, brimming with bright ideas and potential of their own, all of whom can add wonderful things you never thought of to an idea if you drop the threat of suing them if they try?
Say whatever one may, no-one - maybe not even the author - can "improve" on a specific artistic creation
That's an interesting stance to try to defend. Do you realise that taking that idea literally would make entire genres of art impossible?
* Music videos - they take an artist's music and add a director's images * Books derived from folktales - a modern author desecrates ancient stories * Translations of books - words are put into a language they were never meant to be heard in. * Theatrical adaptations of books - a completely unrelated playright mangles the original author's words into script * Theatrical performances of plays - then an unrelated director "interprets" that play * Film adaptations of stage plays - and then an unrelated director translates that play onto the screen! Moving pictures! Madness! * DVD commentary tracks - What, some other guy then talks over the movie? MAKE IT STOP. * Lolcats or any image memes - it's a corruption of the original photographer's vision and must be censored * Documentaries - they regularly mash up images taken from one source with a commentary from another * Poetry set to music * Any use of sampling in music * Any performance of classical music with modern instruments * Prints of artworks - go visit the Louvre if you want to see the Venus de Milo, barbarian!
The thing is, if somebody besides me and them record a performance of it, who's song is that, mine or theirs? What if the performer put my notes to their modified lyrics, or vice versa?
Ignoring for a moment the complicated non-Euclidean weirdness of music licencing, where there's about four different types of "content" involved (music/lyrics, performance, recording, broadcast - if I understand correctly, and I probably don't) - what you're talking about is already covered under the concept of ShareAlike and "derivative work".
Public Domain is NOT CC-BY, and CC-BY is NOT CC-BY-SA. Public Domain means anyone can create derivative works and recopyright them, then turn around and sue anyone reproducing the original Public Domain work. This, as you've noticed, is a bad thing, and preventing it is why Richard Stallman originally created the concept of Copyleft.
CC-BY (Attribution) means that anyone can reproduce the work but MUST attribute the original author (this requirement in itself can get tricky when there are a huge number of authors, but at the moment quoting a definitive reference URL seems to be sufficient).
CC-BY-SA (Attribution plus ShareAlike) means that any "derivative works" must fall under the same copyright terms. This closes the "what if someone makes small modifications and recopyrights them commercially thus making the work nonfree" loophole. Just like with a standard commercial copyright, they simply can't legally do this; they can make the modifications, but the copyright terms must allow others to reshare the work. (Of course, whether you want or have the time/money to prosecute a CC violation is another matter.)
So basically, we already have the licence you want. It's not Public Domain, it's CC-BY-SA, which grants maximum rights to the audience.
But if you really do want to have your cake and eat it - write a hit, perform it, distribute it widely to the world, assume sole responsibilty and authority for distributing it over computer networks that you don't control, get money for every time it's distributed over those networks, get the entire world singing it in their head, and then turn around and claim that you still "own" every single copy of that work playing in people's heads... with all the implications that involves, such that you want to claim ownership to a piece off everyone in the world's brain, and claim the right to restrict absolutely what everyone in the world does with that piece of brain... then you'll probably need to use standard commercial copyright to get that result. And it'll do that just fine.
I'm not afraid someone will do it better. I'm afraid that some organization will take what I've given away, copy it, make a token modification, and copyright it, thus turning the work that I made as a gift into something that has a price on it, all without paying me a dime.
I'm not sure that you've understood the CC licence options correctly. If all you want is to prevent commercial operators from copyrighting modifications made to your work, then NonCommercial is overkill - ShareAlike would do that just fine. ShareAlike means that people can charge money for products including your work, but they can't copyright the modifications they've made - or at least, can't prevent other people from using them. And if you want to reserve the right to later sell commercial rights to companies (ie, giving them the right to NOT allow others to share and remix their work), you can do that just by holding the copyright and dual-licencing the original work to them under a full commercial licence.
The main purpose of CC is to promote a legal "share and remix" culture, assuming that value gets created for society by allowing multiple people to remix, modify, incorporate, and translate works. As opposed to the current paradigm of "one author who has all the inspiration and gets all the rights, many viewers who can't do anything but passively consume", CC and the Open Culture movement want to legitimise the idea of "prosumers" - everyone can read, modify, write and pass along the rights to do the same.
The "NonCommercial" tag seems to me to be a very heavy hammer and really breaks the prosumer model. It means people can't incorporate your work into anything that involves money changing hands in any way, which can restrict small busineses and non-profit social groups alike. It puts any organisation that uses your work on very shaky legal ground if in any way shape or form that work contributes to any money-making activity. It completely locks your work out from WikiPedia or any similar "commons" project. It means nobody who views your work can ever feel safe using it; they have absolutely zero guarantee of any kind of rights in the future should any money at any point cross their hands. Just like an ordinary commercial licence, it divides the world into two very different classes, content owners vs content consumers, and makes sure the consumers know that they're always and forever second class citizens.
NonCommercial, ironically, actually marks your work as being practically identical to commercial. It's more like a sort of "try before you buy" kind of sampler licence for than a practical contribution to Open Culture in the long term. As a sort of sampler or demo of open culture, sure, fine - maybe it's an okay interim strategy. But it's not comparable with genuine copyleft any more than renting a building is comparable to owning it.
If you know you exist, being conscious is just an extrapolation of that same principle.
Extrapolation, but in what direction? How can you give numbers and structure to such vaguely defined concepts as "knowing" and "existence"?
A Lisp circular list of A= (1 . A) could be said to contain an information-theoretic representation of both "existence" and "knowing" - it certainly is self-referential, as long as you have an interpreter defined for traversing it, and it's a piece of data which is distinguishable from zero or null. But conscious, it ain't.
So consciousness is obviously something quite different from mere existence plus self-reference. And knowing that I know that I know that... I both exist and am smart enough to stop traversing that chain of infinite self-references.... doesn't really help me define what my intuitive sense of "knowing" or "existence" actually mean in hard mechanical or mathematical terms.
It's quite an interesting problem actually. Here's a fact we all see to know and agree on, but we can't give it much of a structure. Why?
Slashdot Mirror
"Because bitcoin is a pure pump and dump scam."
I wonder why so many hackers are interested in it then?
Because hackers aren't nearly as smart as they think they are, and are in fact extremely susceptible to dangerous fads if wrapped in crypto-libertarian trappings?
Nah, couldn't be that.
If I have $500 which can buy a new suit today, but several years into the future $500 can only buy half a suit, then it's caused by the private central bank
Or, you know, by there being a lesser supply or a greater demand for suits in the future. Why do you think the cost of all goods should be a constant over time?
By any reasonable definition, they have value. Someone is willing to pay for them, as evidenced by the exchange houses existing in the first place.
Then they obviously won't mind paying out of their private BitCoin profits for private security contractors to catch the thief and private justice contractors to make sure he's the right guy and private enforcement contractors to apply the appropriate penalty.
the wishy-washy Congress asserting control
I don't think that word means what you think it does.
I have to go now, my lily-livered, weak-kneed, uncertain opponent, who can't make up his mind, is about to decisively crush the world in an iron fist. Or not. Maybe. Perhaps.
Problem is, if the government spends, I am paying for it.
I'm not sure you realise that when the private sector spends, you're also paying for it. Or do you not pay rent, utility bills, interest and service charges where you live? What do you think a landlord is other than a tiny pocket monarch who collects taxes?
The relevant question to ask is, for any given service, which provider historically has given better quality and cheaper prices, government or private sector? Or a hybrid approach of market plus regulatory oversight? There's no one answer which is automatically "ideologically correct". But for healthcare, for instance, the government approach seems to be doing better in countries like Canada and New Zealand. Stands to reason: if Wal-Mart can get better prices by buying in bulk, why can't a whole nation? And we do; we have this thing in NZ called Pharmac where we buy prescription medicines in bulk, and save. US private drug companies are trying to lobby to make it illegal, because, um. Because customer savings makes them sad.
I meant to link that. The Secret History of Silicon Valley
The beauty of Commercial Space is, it doesn't cost taxpayers anything.
You sure it doesn't? Someone's paying the bills for that commercial launch operation, and it's probably the guy who wants the payload launched. That might be your TV company, or your phone company, as long as it's about exploiting already well-developed markets in well-understood technologies. And you know for sure that that launch cost will be included as a surcharge in your monthly bill, which for a ubiquitous service is pretty hard to distinguish from a "tax". But for innovative stuff that might or might not work and certainly won't produce an instant payoff, but might create whole new markets several decades down the track, the client is most likely someone a bit more forward-thinking like NASA, DARPA, the National Science Foundation or DoD.
Remember who invented, built, and services GPS? Hint: it wasn't, and isn't, Google. There wasn't even an Apple or a Microsoft when the system was designed (there was an IBM). But how many dollars a year in commercial services would you say it's worth now? And don't forget the secret history of Silicon Valley. The line between "government", "science", and "private industry" isn't nearly as clear-cut as you might like to think it is; many interesting players in the last century, such as Fred Terman and Alfred Loomis, crossed easily between all three.
So where is the magic land that actually has a capitalistic system?
Or is capitalism just impossible?
Capitalism isn't strictly impossible, any more than jumping off a building is impossible. However, like jumping, it is inherently self-contradictory; it can't be sustained infinitely, and the results when the system crashes aren't pretty.
Unfettered capitalism appears indistinguishable from feudalism: every initially free market rapidly devolves into one or two winners who become the equivalent of landlords. They own the land/property, everyone else becomes a serf who works and pays rent to the property-holder. This feudal situation with "late stage capitalism" of course ends up looking nothing like the early-stage "free market", but therein lies the self-contradiction. Then eventually the landlords overreach and you get a revolution or a disruptive technology, philosophy or outside invader, and this temporarily resets the game pieces. We see this happening in rapid acceleration in the intellectual property landscape in computing, but it looks much like the same forces that have been at work for thousands of years. Marx spotted this pattern but I think he was a bit off in his prescriptions on how to fix it; replacing capital with compulsion by force seems to do bad things for everyone involved.
It would be nice if there were more intellectual alternatives to the Austrian School than Marxism. I tend towards E F Schumacher, who isn't easy to pigeonhole as "left" or "right".
Sign me up for a colonist slot! Especially if I can take all my media files with me.
Oh, you can have as many MPEGs and MP3s as you want. Data storage won't be a problem. We can give you petabytes on a thumb drive.
However, since H2O is our primary commodity here, we do operate the oxygen vending system on a strictly free-market system. Workers below executive class are charged $10 per standard breath. You'll want to begin earning station credits as soon as possible. There are entry level openings available in the "bio-active resource reclamation center" below the latrines; here's your shovel.
Why are you equating the web with Facebook or the like? If I fire up Tomcat and serve a web app, how does that get at "everything there is to know about you"?
That depends. Who are you, who are your present and future commercial partners, what jurisdiction are you operating under, what personally identifying data am I entering into that app, what are your retention policies for that data, and where are you hosting it?
But if your app were an old-school non-Internet enabled desktop app running on my desktop (and especially with source code available), I wouldn't even have to begin asking any of those questions, because you wouldn't be able to see my data in the first place.
Web apps are not a step forward for privacy - and depending on the operator, they can be a huge step back.
The Linux Desktop is not one monolithic project. Instead it's a smorgasbord of incomplete and mutually incompatible choices. Gnome, KDE, XFCE, just plain X, IceWM, and many many many more. Each have their teams of bitterly divided coders who work on the X server, the Window Manager, the Display Manager, the interactions, overall themes, and lots of other factors that make each Linux desktop look unique.
Yes, you've neatly described the problem. The next step is to admit that it's a problem.
I just think you're just being selective in your comparisons. The solutions already exist on the OS.
No, they really don't.
About ten years ago I was thinking about dipping my feet in Linux application development and started looking at the different object models then available, trying to work out which one was going to prevail. It was madness... and the situation hasn't got better since then. Shall I enumerate them for you, hmm? Keep in mind that the root of problem isn't just that we have a hopeless mishmash of implementations, but that we have a mismash of core object semantics that don't compose well.
Linux object model roll call!
GNOME: GObject. Still the official standard, based on C and now "Vala", no persistence, no remoting, several iterations of failed C++ wrappers .NET clone which tried to eat GNOME and of course has its own object model, or two of them, based on .NET's assemblies and COM and whathaveyou. Subtly different to all the rest of course. /etc files are a good object model enough for anyone! etc. Available in a million flavours of kernel filesystem AND desktop project VIRTUAL filesystem APIs, of course. This is actually a good solution for persistence, but sadly not for remoting because Plan 9 never got adopted.
GNOME: Bonobo. Based on CORBA for remoting, but used its own funky CORBA implementation, very quickly abandoned
Freedesktop: D-bus. Sort of halfway of an object model only used for IPC, requires an underlying object model on the client.
KDE: Qt. C++ library which ate the whole desktop, requires its own preprocessor for its own "extended" obejct model, so not quite pure C++. No persistence.
KDE: KParts. Object model on top of Qt's special sauce. I think it's still there in the architecture?
KDE: DCOP. Object model on top of Qt's special sauce. I think deprecated now in favour of D-bus?
Firefox: XPCOM. Cross-platform object model cloned off of MS COM. But subtly different, of course. Based on C++. No persistence or remoting, I think.
LibreOffice: UNO. Cross-platform object model I think based on COM or CORBA or something. And of course unique to LibreOffice project. Persistence built in, but probably not remoting.
JavaBeans: Hey look, we still have Java on Linux, and yeah, it's got its own object model with persistence and remoting and stuff. Enterprise users probably live and breathe the stuff, but nobody else really.
Mono:
Wine: MS COM. Well of course we also have the WINE project and that's got to implement MS COM somehow. But can it map directly onto any underlying native object system? Course not!
Good old fashioned filesystem: If it wasn't in Unix 1.0 in 1969 then I don't want it on my Linux!
X11's.... stuff. Yep, X11 has a sort of IPC mechanism which if you squint at it a bit might looks sort of like an "object model", since there's windows that persist across multiple processes and have their own data storage and stuff, but you don't really want to do that or you'll go mad. But it's there under the hood just to make sure nothing is 100% easy.
Oh, but that's not all. We've also got various flavours of semi-official languages at the application and system level with their OWN object models, most of which live in only the one running process and evaporate when runtime ends. Mostly.
C (with or without GObject)
C++ (with or without Qt's special slot sauce and the K object models)
Perl (whose "object model" is best forgotten, but still runs most of the world)
PHP (confined to the web server, where it's the worst possible candidate for the job, and therefore used everywhere)
Python (the "official" Ubuntu scripting language), with no official persistence/remoting solution, but lots of contenders.
JavaScript (only in a web browser session, mostly). Not as bad as you might think, yet not quite usable. It's got JSON for persistence, sorta, although that doesn't include methods so you can't use it for system scripting. It's abou
They aren't getting a Mac because it does everything they need
they need VMWare or Parallels because there are a couple of special purpose Windows programs they need
Yes, that's what he said.
Fun fact about software lock-in: if you can't run 100% of the software you need on a platform, then that platform is 100% useless to you. 99% doesn't cut it. You either get your job done, or you don't, and look elsewhere for employment.
Another fun fact about software lock-in: that last lousy 1% of software probably was written 15 years ago, by some contractor who now lives in Venezuela, to specs which are posted in a badger cage under the eternal tyre fire in Building #12 basement. It stores its data in an obscure proprietary binary format, with dedicated DLT tape drives for backup and with no source code available. It's riddled with instant-root-on-receiving-a-packet vulnerabilities and requires a fully open non-firewalled connection to the entire Ethernet LAN (overNetBEUI and IPX/SPX protocols, of course; none of this upstart TCP/IP stuff). And it's a critical non-replaceable component of your entire enterprise's just-in-time order fulfilment system.
And it stopped working this morning, and it's your job to fix it.
What does not help at all is to hand-wave or diminish this particular problem, and blame the tools for not doing our due diligence.
I couldn't disagree more.
We're programmers. That means, we're in the business of creating tools to do repetitive things rather than doing them by hand. Automation, rather than hand-crafting, is what our chosen line of work is all about. And the best use of our tool-making ability is to automate, wherever and whenever we can, our own jobs.
So it is exactly the job of the tools we create to do our due diligence for us; we're making 'em, we're using 'em, we're giving and selling 'em to others, so we darn better make sure they do the job safely and correctly.
We're not only toolmakers, we're makers of tools that other toolmakers use to make other tools that make other tools. At every step, it's our job to make sure we're doing nothing by hand in an unsafe, unrepeatable manner that our tools can't do more simply and correctly and perfectly.
It's because we haven't been doing this - because we've been satisfied with making badly designed, unsafe tools, that don't automate everything that can be automated and when they do, have complex interactions that aren't correctly documented and defy logic - and then patching up our tools' deficiencies with a Byzantine maze of hand-crafted exceptions and fudges and "programmer lore" - that we've got the Internet into the mess that it's in.
So go ahead and blame our tools. They don't have feelings, but they do have bugs that need to be fixed.
they successfully churn out software to solve these challenges in elegant and creative ways
Would those be the same "good programmers" who have churned out the last 20 years of critical Internet-facing vulnerabilities?
All that software sold, after all, so by some measure it was "successful". Just not by the old fuddy-duddy "not guaranteed never to steal your identity and strangle you in the night" definition.
* ridiculously large & light zero-g free-floating solar arrays with uninterrupted sunlight
Which use that power to do what?
* space habitats & manufacturing plants
Which manufacture what, and send it where?
* spaceships
Which go where?
The big problem I see with space construction and habitation is bootstrapping: space construction makes sense once you have a big population in space, and space habitation makes sense once you have a lot of space construction to get done, but there's no fundamental point to all of it in the first place. It's like how the Space Shuttle was designed to get modules and people to the Space Station, which was designed to be serviced by the Space Shuttle, but the two of them together didn't actually have a reason to exist.
In the commercial world, this level of investment without ultimate return doesn't really happen. The big driver of space tech in the last 50 years has been military needs: the requirement to set cities we don't like on fire within 20 minutes, and then to take spy pictures of the other side's city-setting-on-fire facilities... and even going to the moon was a small clip-on hanging off the side of that whole military infrastructure. And yes, even Silicon Valley and the Internet were tiny byproducts of that huge flow of military money.
But it seems to have turned out that even having a manned base on the moon isn't even really that useful militarily, let alone paying its way commercially. It might yet happen, like Scott Base at Antarctica; but there aren't even penguins at Tranquility Base, so how many dead rocks are underfunded scientists and bored tourists going to pay to catalogue?
Teleoperated moon rovers I could see happening; they're relatively cheap and safe to launch. Fully manned presence? Hmm. Let me figure the health and class-action lawsuit insurance bills for that. Not seeing the upside yet.
3He will power the world!
It will certainly be a much cleaner, albeit hugely expensive, non-feasible fuel for the fusion reactors we won't be able to build in 2050 than the cheap and readily available non-feasible fuel we can't extract from ordinary seawater for the fusion reactors we can't build right now.
"CC footage would also be useless to you" - I meant "NC footage".
As a Documentary Film Maker, I am glad that any one is watching my films and happy to redistribute them.
But, I don't want TV station taking my hard work and making a profit off them and not giving me a cent.
I also often use footaged owned by large productions houses (As time machines are unavailable, I can't reshoot historic moments), and there clause are pretty standard, that for every dollar I make they want a peice; which, as a film make (that cost to produce films) I need to make money so have no problem with this logic.
Hmm. NC/ND is a bit of a double edged sword there, yes.
1. As a documentary film maker you are a consumer of raw source media. For that purpose, you want the rights of the material you're consuming to be as free as possible. You certainly would not be able to use ND licenced footage in your product - since you're making a derivative work. CC footage would also be useless to you if you ever wanted to charge money for copies of your documentary - even asking $1 for burning it onto a DVD-R for a friend would be illegal.
On the other hand, you'd be perfectly free to use any BY or BY-SA licenced footage in your work - just add an attribution to your credits roll and you're good to go. Crop it, remix it, sell copies of it - it's all allowed.
Do you want more indie documentaries to be produced? Do you want your life as a documentary producer to be simpler? Then you want more BY licenced works rather than NC/ND works.
2. However, if you're using commercial licensed footage, then you do have a problem - it won't mix with open SA licenced work of any kind (because you can't pass on the rights to use it). So you may need to licence your work as NC or ND to reflect that it's been "contaminated" with proprietary rights, that you don't really own all the rights to it, and the noncommercial requirement might actually be a requirement of the licence that you're inheriting.
I think NC/ND is best understood as "commercial, but we will refrain from prosecuting" rather than "free".
> So, if dropping NC and ND results in a single work being relicensed under a free license, this would be a benefit.
Even if thousands of equally skillfully crafted works were no longer released under any CC license and kept proprietory because the NC or ND clause was deemed too important?
Yes. See, here's the thing - with the NC/ND clause they are still proprietary. They're very strict "look, but don't touch" licences, which grant no ownership rights to the viewer. That is proprietary in every sense except the very restricted one of "you can look at this in certain approved contexts - but you can't talk about it in any works of your own". Heck, you can't even crop an ND photo! No way I want to touch that legal minefield with a bargepole.
What we're trying to create with the Open Culture movement is a movement away from the "billions of passive couch potatoes, a few thousand skilled/inspired Creators" model towards a recognition that everyone can add value to culture by remixing it and passing it on.
Whether you support this idea probably has a lot to do with your view of humanity. Do you think of the world as a giant seething cesspool full of scary leeching zombies who you, one of the few heroic noble Creators, must struggle against every second of your life, and fight a constant war to prevent the dark hordes from leeching off your beautiful Ideas? Or do you think of it as full of lots of creative people just like you, brimming with bright ideas and potential of their own, all of whom can add wonderful things you never thought of to an idea if you drop the threat of suing them if they try?
Say whatever one may, no-one - maybe not even the author - can "improve" on a specific artistic creation
That's an interesting stance to try to defend. Do you realise that taking that idea literally would make entire genres of art impossible?
* Music videos - they take an artist's music and add a director's images
* Books derived from folktales - a modern author desecrates ancient stories
* Translations of books - words are put into a language they were never meant to be heard in.
* Theatrical adaptations of books - a completely unrelated playright mangles the original author's words into script
* Theatrical performances of plays - then an unrelated director "interprets" that play
* Film adaptations of stage plays - and then an unrelated director translates that play onto the screen! Moving pictures! Madness!
* DVD commentary tracks - What, some other guy then talks over the movie? MAKE IT STOP.
* Lolcats or any image memes - it's a corruption of the original photographer's vision and must be censored
* Documentaries - they regularly mash up images taken from one source with a commentary from another
* Poetry set to music
* Any use of sampling in music
* Any performance of classical music with modern instruments
* Prints of artworks - go visit the Louvre if you want to see the Venus de Milo, barbarian!
Good luck with your future art prospects.
The thing is, if somebody besides me and them record a performance of it, who's song is that, mine or theirs? What if the performer put my notes to their modified lyrics, or vice versa?
Ignoring for a moment the complicated non-Euclidean weirdness of music licencing, where there's about four different types of "content" involved (music/lyrics, performance, recording, broadcast - if I understand correctly, and I probably don't) - what you're talking about is already covered under the concept of ShareAlike and "derivative work".
Public Domain is NOT CC-BY, and CC-BY is NOT CC-BY-SA. Public Domain means anyone can create derivative works and recopyright them, then turn around and sue anyone reproducing the original Public Domain work. This, as you've noticed, is a bad thing, and preventing it is why Richard Stallman originally created the concept of Copyleft.
CC-BY (Attribution) means that anyone can reproduce the work but MUST attribute the original author (this requirement in itself can get tricky when there are a huge number of authors, but at the moment quoting a definitive reference URL seems to be sufficient).
CC-BY-SA (Attribution plus ShareAlike) means that any "derivative works" must fall under the same copyright terms. This closes the "what if someone makes small modifications and recopyrights them commercially thus making the work nonfree" loophole. Just like with a standard commercial copyright, they simply can't legally do this; they can make the modifications, but the copyright terms must allow others to reshare the work. (Of course, whether you want or have the time/money to prosecute a CC violation is another matter.)
So basically, we already have the licence you want. It's not Public Domain, it's CC-BY-SA, which grants maximum rights to the audience.
But if you really do want to have your cake and eat it - write a hit, perform it, distribute it widely to the world, assume sole responsibilty and authority for distributing it over computer networks that you don't control, get money for every time it's distributed over those networks, get the entire world singing it in their head, and then turn around and claim that you still "own" every single copy of that work playing in people's heads... with all the implications that involves, such that you want to claim ownership to a piece off everyone in the world's brain, and claim the right to restrict absolutely what everyone in the world does with that piece of brain... then you'll probably need to use standard commercial copyright to get that result. And it'll do that just fine.
I'm not afraid someone will do it better. I'm afraid that some organization will take what I've given away, copy it, make a token modification, and copyright it, thus turning the work that I made as a gift into something that has a price on it, all without paying me a dime.
I'm not sure that you've understood the CC licence options correctly. If all you want is to prevent commercial operators from copyrighting modifications made to your work, then NonCommercial is overkill - ShareAlike would do that just fine. ShareAlike means that people can charge money for products including your work, but they can't copyright the modifications they've made - or at least, can't prevent other people from using them. And if you want to reserve the right to later sell commercial rights to companies (ie, giving them the right to NOT allow others to share and remix their work), you can do that just by holding the copyright and dual-licencing the original work to them under a full commercial licence.
The main purpose of CC is to promote a legal "share and remix" culture, assuming that value gets created for society by allowing multiple people to remix, modify, incorporate, and translate works. As opposed to the current paradigm of "one author who has all the inspiration and gets all the rights, many viewers who can't do anything but passively consume", CC and the Open Culture movement want to legitimise the idea of "prosumers" - everyone can read, modify, write and pass along the rights to do the same.
The "NonCommercial" tag seems to me to be a very heavy hammer and really breaks the prosumer model. It means people can't incorporate your work into anything that involves money changing hands in any way, which can restrict small busineses and non-profit social groups alike. It puts any organisation that uses your work on very shaky legal ground if in any way shape or form that work contributes to any money-making activity. It completely locks your work out from WikiPedia or any similar "commons" project. It means nobody who views your work can ever feel safe using it; they have absolutely zero guarantee of any kind of rights in the future should any money at any point cross their hands. Just like an ordinary commercial licence, it divides the world into two very different classes, content owners vs content consumers, and makes sure the consumers know that they're always and forever second class citizens.
NonCommercial, ironically, actually marks your work as being practically identical to commercial. It's more like a sort of "try before you buy" kind of sampler licence for than a practical contribution to Open Culture in the long term. As a sort of sampler or demo of open culture, sure, fine - maybe it's an okay interim strategy. But it's not comparable with genuine copyleft any more than renting a building is comparable to owning it.
If you know you exist, being conscious is just an extrapolation of that same principle.
Extrapolation, but in what direction? How can you give numbers and structure to such vaguely defined concepts as "knowing" and "existence"?
A Lisp circular list of A= (1 . A) could be said to contain an information-theoretic representation of both "existence" and "knowing" - it certainly is self-referential, as long as you have an interpreter defined for traversing it, and it's a piece of data which is distinguishable from zero or null. But conscious, it ain't.
So consciousness is obviously something quite different from mere existence plus self-reference. And knowing that I know that I know that... I both exist and am smart enough to stop traversing that chain of infinite self-references.... doesn't really help me define what my intuitive sense of "knowing" or "existence" actually mean in hard mechanical or mathematical terms.
It's quite an interesting problem actually. Here's a fact we all see to know and agree on, but we can't give it much of a structure. Why?
you could fill a library with the things I don't know
And indeed, they have.