Hey, I'm not saying that fossil fuel plants are any better than nuclear power plants;
Fair enough; I'm saying that (despite all the propaganda) nuclear is a lot better than fossil fuels.
in once case, air pollution and in the other case, radioactive waste that needs to be stored away somewhere
The key difference being that there are simple ecologically sound technical fixes for nuclear wastes--you can mix them back in with the tailings and put them back in the mines they came from, or drop them in a subduction zone--whereas fossil fuels the volume of waste is so much larger and the sources are so difuse that the technical problems of waste management are much harder.
What ballence them out of course is the political hurdles that have been raised (mostly by fear mongering) against rational policy on nuclear power.
there is no question in my mind that fuel-based (both fossil and nuclear) energy sources have a larger and more disruptive ecological footprint
Then the fossil fuel industry funded anti-nuclear propaganda machine has done its job well. That's a relief, since now they'll have to turn their efforts to convincing you that tidal energy is dirty too. Knowing them, they won't rest until there is no question in your mind that tidal energy, like nuclear, has an ecological footprint "just as large as fossil fuels".
I found a partial copy from 1989--no idea if it was developmental or stable (but given that it was on my machine I know which way I'd guess). It at least seems to come up under dosemu. If you e-mail me ("MarkusQLreality.com" at: 8 put: "@") I can send you what I've got.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. IIRC (based on where I found it), this is a chance survivor of a my-hard-drive-is-dying snapshot that got carried over for all this time because harddrives get larger & cheaper faster than I can type. So don't plan on using it to run a power plant or anything.
Presumably you'd have a low-level driver or watchdog timer or something like that looking after the rest of the OS.
This is quite common, but you need to have deep support for it. If some other part of the OS does a blue-screen-and-halt your driver isn't going to help; with something like MS Win you'd probably need to go to the external reset trick. (Which could be as simple as a count-down timer & some interface logic).
Especially if you have people come up and take snapshots of you taping it.
-- MarkusQ
Re:Mo Money! Mo Money! Mo Money!
on
Windows ATMs by 2005
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
OS Crash? Error message, shut down.
There's a level problem there. The problem with OS crashes is the application doesn't get a chance to decide what to do, and even if it did generally wouldn't have the wherewithall to do anything useful. Even impending power failure is easier to catch.
Anyone near the camera should go there and do something unusual but not illegal. (Drink from an imaginary bottle; blow soap bubbles and then snap at them like a dog; pointedly hide your forehead; open an umbrella for no reason; etc., etc.)
Hard as it is for me to believe, you may be talking about a language I wrote in the late 80's. "Ralph" was our internal name for it (inside joke); I think the market droids pushed it as NNSim or something like that. We released a full function version on a bunch of BBSs & talked it up on geni, compuserve, news groups, etc. to promote a hardware accelerator board (DSP based). The idea was people would get interested and then (as their models got larger) they'd want more speed and buy our accelerator board.
The core language was a based on pascal, but with salient structure (like python) and a bunch of (at the time) interesting extensions. You could declare networks and treat them like an array (for messing with the weights) or like a procedure (for training) or like a function (for using them).
Does this sound like what you're remembering?
-- MarkusQ
P.S. In case you can't guess how the story ends, it turned out that for really interesting networks you'd need a lot more oomph than our boards could provide. The product died, as did several others, and the company sank beneath the waves.
At my site, the overall spam traffic is highest on the weekend but (and I have no clue why) the spam to real users peaks mid-week. The weekend trafic tends to be more baby-name-book-buckshot or (and would I ever love to get my hands on the clowns who think this is clever), "A@...", "B@..."... "Z@...", "AA@...", "AB@..."... "AAA@..." and so forth. Frequently, these aren't spam per se, but simply seem designed to illicit a response--one, for example, from a guy claiming he wants to buy a flux capacitor & needs to know where to send the check; another is a pseudo survey with a "make your voice heard" pitch.
Perhaps they're under the dellusion that sysadmins get weekends off and thus won't notice?
Configure a centralized database and then try to make more updates than queries using the ACID propreties. Updates will cause the abortion of your queries. So the issue you raise is not new for replication
You can get around this by serialization (e.g. a request fifo), but you can't get around the bandwidth/multi-server syncronization issues in the same way.
Last I heard, Informix was not open source, which was a key part of the question.
Just because a packaged "solution" exists, it doesn't mean the problem ceases to exist. For example, real-time replication takes bandwidth. For some systems, this is going to eliminate any advantage from clustering (which is why shared-storage solutions also exist).
I wasn't "bitching" about anything. I was pointing out the major area where I have seen problems when people attempted to cluster database servers. Saying "watch out for the grues" isn't bitching (that would be something like "Who let all these @#$#! grues in here?").
The whole point of "Ask Slashdot" is that people can provide information they personally know (thus at low cost to them); it doesn't obligate us to go out and do people's research for them.
The decafinated brands taste just as good, and you can catch more flies, etc.
This means that you owe them money (because someone else you owe money has transferred that to them).
This means that you have a business relationship with them (because your debt was transferred from a company that you did have a business relationship with) and they can call your cell phone.
Not true. This means that someone you may have had a business relationship with has a business relationship with them. But the relationship isn't transitive--collection agencies can not legally harrass you just because they "bought" the aledged debt, although they certainly act like they think they can.
Call the 1-800 number, tell them to stop calling (###) ###-##### (for best results, use your cell phone number instead of the pound signs); tell them that you consider these calls harrassment and will report them as such; if you are on the national do-not-call list, it might not hurt to mention the fact.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. And, apart from all this, if you do have a legit debt to someone, work out a payment plan with them to take care of it. If they say they have "turned it over to collections" tell them that you didn't authorize and do not acknowledge the sale of your debt, and would like to pay them. Then do so.
PostgreSQL has released their replication technology under an open source licence.
Cool beans. I hadn't even noticed that. I swear, take your eyes off the internet for a weekend or two and you've got catching up to do. And since the last time I looked into the situation was about six months ago, so I'm probably hopelessly out of date.
IMHO, the biggest problem is replication; keeping them all consistent in the face of asyncronous updates. It can also reduce/eliminate the advantages of clustering if you have a significant number of updates compared to the number of quieries.
I guess the best answer depends on how dynamic your data is. If it's static, there are all sorts of easy answers. If all the updates come from a central source, or on a predictable schedule, you're almost as well off. If updates come from the great unwashed but the data can be partitioned in some way (say, geographically) you can still do it. If updates come from all over but queries can be centralized, or if your database is tiny, or if latency isn't a problem, or if you have a machine that prints money, it can still be done.
If you want to do everything for everyone everywhere, right now if not sooner, for under twenty bucks, you're screwed.
Because Titan changes both spatially and temporally based on observations of its atmosphere...
Isn't it a little big to show quantum effects like that? Or maybe we just need to turn the power down a tad on whatever we're using to observe its atomosphere.
P.S. That's what my wife (an MIT grad) claims to be doing sometimes when she stares off into space. Since the result often conflicts with my pet theory of the moment, I'm not sure how accurate the process is though.
We fell for the @#!% "IP" myth. There are at least four different things that get lumped into "IP" and we may be talking at cross puroses here. To clarify (I think):
Trademarks. The main purpose here is to prevent something akin to identity theft. I don't think either of us object to trademarks, within reason. (IIRC, this was the issue with WW & the illuminati mark, as well as several other cases).
Copyright. If we disagree at all, I think it's here. I object to the seemingly unlimited extention of copyright in durration, scope, and interpretation. But not as much as I object to...
Patents, which are totally out of control, and have to a large measure outlived their usefulness. Here is where I think my case is the clearest: why should society grant (and pay to enforce) monopolies that would not otherwise exist and serve no useful purpose?
"Pure IP"; things like the ideas people used to hawk to Asimov. I think we both agree that there is no need or purpose for protection, even though it is increasingly being granted.
So restricting the topic to copyrights only, I think we differ on:
I feel that the average creative person gains almost no protection from copyrights, if only because the cost of volating them is so much lower than the cost of finding, proving, and stopping violations. This has been true for serveral decades at least.
I therefore do not think that copyrights have any effect on the income of the average creative person, which is generally lower than it would be if they gave up and got a real job.
I stongly dispute the notion that copyright somehow causes creativity. That's just ballony. I know too many people who write for the love of writing, sing for the love of song, code for the rush of...well, ok, they're nuts, but the argument holds in general: these people (at least, the ones who are any good at all) are doing what they do out of love. Not only do you not have to pay them to continue, in many cases you couldn't pay them to stop.
I do think that copyrights are of major benifit to people who systematically prey on creative people. (See Spider Robinson's rant on the publishing industry, or the Artist-formerly-known-as-the-artist-formerly-known -as-Prince's writings for an insider's perpective on how fair things really are.) The promoters are the people who are outraged by the notion of file sharing.
I also strongly suspect that the whole issue of copyrights is a red herring. The record companies, for example, are not nearly as worried about people "sharing" material to which they hold copyright as they are about the creation of a distribution channel for material in which they have absolutely no involvement. The real threat isn't that (for example) small-time web-radio stations will play the latest hits (which, remember, they presently pay (not charge, pay) regular radio stations to play) but that they will play indie artists who can thus develop a following and do an end run arround the whole industry. From this persepective, all of their actions make much more sense; they aren't stupid, just very, very scared.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. This will have to be my last post on the thread--I'm about to *gasp* leave my internet connection for the weekend. Thanks for an enjoyable back-and-forth.
You keep saying that you are interested in a "capitalistic" solution, yet your entire argument seems to be based on the communist principle of "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs." You even seem willing to go down the path that all communists eventually follow, arguing that the government should make stricter and stricter laws and (if needed, back them up with force) to make sure that your system "works."
You are assuming what you are trying to prove.
You claim we need IP laws because...
You claim without them people would stop creating because...
You claim the only reason people create is to make money and...
You claim that people can't make money without IP laws, which I am supposed to accept because...
You claim we need IP laws.
I dispute 2 & 3; I hold that the urge to create is a fundemental part of what it means to be human, as is the urge to copy/immitate others.
I dispute 4 because people (such as game designers, cooks, fashion designers, etc.) make money off of goods (games, food, clothing) which are not covered by IP (excluding trademarks, as I did earlier).
I have worked in the game industry for over twenty years, and in all that time I have never seen IP laws successfully used to defend a company like SJG, but have seen several cases where they were successfully used to attack one.
[ As an aside, I was one of the people who wrote a letter in support of Steve when he was raided by the FBI years ago. ]
As for IP laws being the cause (rather than a consequence) of the wealth of creative output, consider. In a state of nature, man copies what he sees others doing. It is a basic part of our nature. In a creatively impoverished environment, there is the risk that there may not be enough templates to copy, because only a few people are innovating in any given area, and they may elect to hide their discoveries. So society offers a bargin: they will prevent the natual copying for a limited period of time, in exchange for the disclosure of new discoveries / inventions. This is the basis of all IP except trademarks.
As society grows larger, richer, and more diverse, the supply of templates rises rapidly. If all parties adhered to this "fair trade" and the growth arose from the IP laws (as you suggest), we should expect the price (length of IP terms, etc.) to drop as the supply increased and the demand remained relatively constant.
If, as I maintain, causality goes the other way and the natural growth of society's creative output (which has made IP increasingly lucrative is) instead driving IP laws, we should expect the price to rise--and this is in fact what we see.
Do we have such a shortage of creative material that we need to make special laws to encourage people to create more?
We have the creative material because of the laws. It's like asking if we have such a shortage of power that we need to use anything but wind power.
No, we have the creative material because we have a society rich enough for a large number of people to indulge in the near universal urge to create. To see this, consider that there is a wealth of creativity even in areas not aforded "IP" status; the only difference being that making it IP makes viable the promotion and marketing of the "product."
I'm not sure where you were going with the wind-power thing.
There is very little evidence that IP laws do anything other than enrich the promoters and gatekeepers that lobby for them in the first place.
Besides the millions of people - actors and other movie people, writers and editors, studio musicians - that make a living off IP.
I never claimed that people weren't making money off of IP--quite the contrary.
Joe working artist is much more likely to be forced to pay than to be paid on the basis of IP law.
Joe Working Artist always has the option of not using others works and dumping his work out on Kazaa for free. Harrison Ford, Spielberg, Asimov, Stephen King, J.K. Rowling, Dana Hill, John Williams, Matt Groening and many others have been very happy with the IP law. I'm sure everyone trading the Simpsons via Kazaa would be real happy to hear Fox cancel the Simpsons because the IP laws got repealed and they can't afford it anymore.
Matt Groening (to choose just one of your examples) is paid by Fox because they make money off of advertizing.
By your logic, it should be illegal (or perhaps just immoral) to go to the bathroom during a comercial break.
Not only is the television business model independent of IP, it works just fine (perhaps even better) the less "IP" is involved--thus the push to news, reality TV, and other show with no writers (for some reason journalists aren't considered writers).
But the biggest problem with your examples is that they are far from "Joe Working Artist"--all of them are among the small fraction of a percent that have "made it" in the game run by the IP conglomerates; just like the winners promoted by casinos, they are too few to bring up the average. Yes, there are a few thousand people around that could argue from personal experience that lotteries are good investment, but that wouldn't make it true.
I think the lottery example is telling: by your logic one could claim that if we want to have fun and games we need casinos and state lotteries, because without the big prizes they offer, no one would play games. Further, we need brothels because without them no one would have sex. I claim that this is absurd, and that people will tell stories, sing, play games and have sex even if no one makes a dime off of them doing so. Paying megacorps for the right to participate in these fundemental human activities on the mistaken belief that they are somehow causal is just nuts.
Until there is a viable alternative on this side of communism, IP cannot be allowed to die.
And now you write:
But copyright is more necessary to protect artists that produce digital goods (musicians, renderers, etc). If they had no protection, people would have very little to pay them anything.
Which is arguing from the principle of "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs." When I buy something, I pay to get what I want at the best price I can; that is capitalism. I don't (in general) buy things because the person who made them needs to be subsidized. If we all followed that logic, either by mass delusion or government fiat, the economy would colapse. (After all, the people who sell penis pills over the internet need to eat just as the farmers and recording artists do! Think of the mimes!)
Copyright is a price paid by society to get something, but contrary to all logic the price keeps rising even though the demand isn't going up and the supply is growing rapidly.
And on one point:
There's still concerts, but concerts often make little money once all the costs are taken out, and instead serve to promote the band (so that it can sell CDs).
This is just incorrect. The reason most bands play concerts is it's the only way they can make any money. The CD sales all accrue to their lables (who are pushing hard the last year or so for a cut of the concerts too, in at least one case arguing on the grounds that it was a public performance of songs to which the lable holds the copyright).
What was the original goal of IP laws? To encourage authors to create and distribute their work, instead of keeping it locked behind closed doors and non-disclosure agreements, not creating it at all. I fail to see how that has been elimentated; musicians and authors still need to eat.
That's the same non-sequitur everyone uses (I probably should have included it in my list). You make two unrelated statements as if they lead to some conclution.
Do we have such a shortage of creative material that we need to make special laws to encourage people to create more? I see no sign of it. What I see, in fact, is such a surplus that it can support thriving niches whose sole purpose is to stem the tide.
Everyone needs to eat. So?
Even if your points were related, would they lead to your conclusion? I don't see why. There is very little evidence that IP laws do anything other than enrich the promoters and gatekeepers that lobby for them in the first place. Joe working artist is much more likely to be forced to pay than to be paid on the basis of IP law. He certainly can't eat IP.
Slashdot Mirror
Dead on. If this isn't a case of the DMCA being misused I don't know what is. Have you contacted them to suggest it?
-- MarkusQ
I almost fell for it.
-- MarkusQ
Hey, I'm not saying that fossil fuel plants are any better than nuclear power plants;
Fair enough; I'm saying that (despite all the propaganda) nuclear is a lot better than fossil fuels.
in once case, air pollution and in the other case, radioactive waste that needs to be stored away somewhere
The key difference being that there are simple ecologically sound technical fixes for nuclear wastes--you can mix them back in with the tailings and put them back in the mines they came from, or drop them in a subduction zone--whereas fossil fuels the volume of waste is so much larger and the sources are so difuse that the technical problems of waste management are much harder.
What ballence them out of course is the political hurdles that have been raised (mostly by fear mongering) against rational policy on nuclear power.
-- MarkusQ
there is no question in my mind that fuel-based (both fossil and nuclear) energy sources have a larger and more disruptive ecological footprint
Then the fossil fuel industry funded anti-nuclear propaganda machine has done its job well. That's a relief, since now they'll have to turn their efforts to convincing you that tidal energy is dirty too. Knowing them, they won't rest until there is no question in your mind that tidal energy, like nuclear, has an ecological footprint "just as large as fossil fuels".
-- MarkusQ
-- MarkusQ
I found a partial copy from 1989--no idea if it was developmental or stable (but given that it was on my machine I know which way I'd guess). It at least seems to come up under dosemu. If you e-mail me ("MarkusQLreality.com" at: 8 put: "@") I can send you what I've got.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. IIRC (based on where I found it), this is a chance survivor of a my-hard-drive-is-dying snapshot that got carried over for all this time because harddrives get larger & cheaper faster than I can type. So don't plan on using it to run a power plant or anything.
Presumably you'd have a low-level driver or watchdog timer or something like that looking after the rest of the OS.
This is quite common, but you need to have deep support for it. If some other part of the OS does a blue-screen-and-halt your driver isn't going to help; with something like MS Win you'd probably need to go to the external reset trick. (Which could be as simple as a count-down timer & some interface logic).
-- MarkusQ
Especially if you have people come up and take snapshots of you taping it.
-- MarkusQ
OS Crash? Error message, shut down.
There's a level problem there. The problem with OS crashes is the application doesn't get a chance to decide what to do, and even if it did generally wouldn't have the wherewithall to do anything useful. Even impending power failure is easier to catch.
-- MarkusQ
Anyone near the camera should go there and do something unusual but not illegal. (Drink from an imaginary bottle; blow soap bubbles and then snap at them like a dog; pointedly hide your forehead; open an umbrella for no reason; etc., etc.)
-- MarkusQ
Hard as it is for me to believe, you may be talking about a language I wrote in the late 80's. "Ralph" was our internal name for it (inside joke); I think the market droids pushed it as NNSim or something like that. We released a full function version on a bunch of BBSs & talked it up on geni, compuserve, news groups, etc. to promote a hardware accelerator board (DSP based). The idea was people would get interested and then (as their models got larger) they'd want more speed and buy our accelerator board.
The core language was a based on pascal, but with salient structure (like python) and a bunch of (at the time) interesting extensions. You could declare networks and treat them like an array (for messing with the weights) or like a procedure (for training) or like a function (for using them).
Does this sound like what you're remembering?
-- MarkusQ
P.S. In case you can't guess how the story ends, it turned out that for really interesting networks you'd need a lot more oomph than our boards could provide. The product died, as did several others, and the company sank beneath the waves.
At my site, the overall spam traffic is highest on the weekend but (and I have no clue why) the spam to real users peaks mid-week. The weekend trafic tends to be more baby-name-book-buckshot or (and would I ever love to get my hands on the clowns who think this is clever), "A@...", "B@..."
Perhaps they're under the dellusion that sysadmins get weekends off and thus won't notice?
-- MarkusQ
Configure a centralized database and then try to make more updates than queries using the ACID propreties. Updates will cause the abortion of your queries. So the issue you raise is not new for replication
You can get around this by serialization (e.g. a request fifo), but you can't get around the bandwidth/multi-server syncronization issues in the same way.
-- MarkusQ
- Last I heard, Informix was not open source, which was a key part of the question.
- Just because a packaged "solution" exists, it doesn't mean the problem ceases to exist. For example, real-time replication takes bandwidth. For some systems, this is going to eliminate any advantage from clustering (which is why shared-storage solutions also exist).
- I wasn't "bitching" about anything. I was pointing out the major area where I have seen problems when people attempted to cluster database servers. Saying "watch out for the grues" isn't bitching (that would be something like "Who let all these @#$#! grues in here?").
- The whole point of "Ask Slashdot" is that people can provide information they personally know (thus at low cost to them); it doesn't obligate us to go out and do people's research for them.
- The decafinated brands taste just as good, and you can catch more flies, etc.
--MarkusQThis means that you owe them money (because someone else you owe money has transferred that to them).
This means that you have a business relationship with them (because your debt was transferred from a company that you did have a business relationship with) and they can call your cell phone.
Not true. This means that someone you may have had a business relationship with has a business relationship with them. But the relationship isn't transitive--collection agencies can not legally harrass you just because they "bought" the aledged debt, although they certainly act like they think they can.
Call the 1-800 number, tell them to stop calling (###) ###-##### (for best results, use your cell phone number instead of the pound signs); tell them that you consider these calls harrassment and will report them as such; if you are on the national do-not-call list, it might not hurt to mention the fact.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. And, apart from all this, if you do have a legit debt to someone, work out a payment plan with them to take care of it. If they say they have "turned it over to collections" tell them that you didn't authorize and do not acknowledge the sale of your debt, and would like to pay them. Then do so.
PostgreSQL has released their replication technology under an open source licence.
Cool beans. I hadn't even noticed that. I swear, take your eyes off the internet for a weekend or two and you've got catching up to do. And since the last time I looked into the situation was about six months ago, so I'm probably hopelessly out of date.
-- MarkusQ
IMHO, the biggest problem is replication; keeping them all consistent in the face of asyncronous updates. It can also reduce/eliminate the advantages of clustering if you have a significant number of updates compared to the number of quieries.
I guess the best answer depends on how dynamic your data is. If it's static, there are all sorts of easy answers. If all the updates come from a central source, or on a predictable schedule, you're almost as well off. If updates come from the great unwashed but the data can be partitioned in some way (say, geographically) you can still do it. If updates come from all over but queries can be centralized, or if your database is tiny, or if latency isn't a problem, or if you have a machine that prints money, it can still be done.
If you want to do everything for everyone everywhere, right now if not sooner, for under twenty bucks, you're screwed.
So, what are your needs?
-- MarkusQ
Elwood:
forsetti:
Dude. How do you manage to be informative and funny in the same post?
I've never figured that out on /.
-- MarkusQ
Now this post was easy to do!
Because Titan changes both spatially and temporally based on observations of its atmosphere...
Isn't it a little big to show quantum effects like that? Or maybe we just need to turn the power down a tad on whatever we're using to observe its atomosphere.
-- MarkusQ
MIT and no computer? Yeah right.
Keep in mind how they measure things when they don't have a measuring device. Who says they aren't equally creative when it comes to computing things with out a computing device?
-- MarkusQ
P.S. That's what my wife (an MIT grad) claims to be doing sometimes when she stares off into space. Since the result often conflicts with my pet theory of the moment, I'm not sure how accurate the process is though.
Damn.
We fell for the @#!% "IP" myth. There are at least four different things that get lumped into "IP" and we may be talking at cross puroses here. To clarify (I think):
- Trademarks. The main purpose here is to prevent something akin to identity theft. I don't think either of us object to trademarks, within reason. (IIRC, this was the issue with WW & the illuminati mark, as well as several other cases).
- Copyright. If we disagree at all, I think it's here. I object to the seemingly unlimited extention of copyright in durration, scope, and interpretation. But not as much as I object to...
- Patents, which are totally out of control, and have to a large measure outlived their usefulness. Here is where I think my case is the clearest: why should society grant (and pay to enforce) monopolies that would not otherwise exist and serve no useful purpose?
- "Pure IP"; things like the ideas people used to hawk to Asimov. I think we both agree that there is no need or purpose for protection, even though it is increasingly being granted.
So restricting the topic to copyrights only, I think we differ on:- I feel that the average creative person gains almost no protection from copyrights, if only because the cost of volating them is so much lower than the cost of finding, proving, and stopping violations. This has been true for serveral decades at least.
- I therefore do not think that copyrights have any effect on the income of the average creative person, which is generally lower than it would be if they gave up and got a real job.
- I stongly dispute the notion that copyright somehow causes creativity. That's just ballony. I know too many people who write for the love of writing, sing for the love of song, code for the rush of...well, ok, they're nuts, but the argument holds in general: these people (at least, the ones who are any good at all) are doing what they do out of love. Not only do you not have to pay them to continue, in many cases you couldn't pay them to stop.
- I do think that copyrights are of major benifit to people who systematically prey on creative people. (See Spider Robinson's rant on the publishing industry, or the Artist-formerly-known-as-the-artist-formerly-know
n -as-Prince's writings for an insider's perpective on how fair things really are.) The promoters are the people who are outraged by the notion of file sharing.
- I also strongly suspect that the whole issue of copyrights is a red herring. The record companies, for example, are not nearly as worried about people "sharing" material to which they hold copyright as they are about the creation of a distribution channel for material in which they have absolutely no involvement. The real threat isn't that (for example) small-time web-radio stations will play the latest hits (which, remember, they presently pay (not charge, pay) regular radio stations to play) but that they will play indie artists who can thus develop a following and do an end run arround the whole industry. From this persepective, all of their actions make much more sense; they aren't stupid, just very, very scared.
-- MarkusQP.S. This will have to be my last post on the thread--I'm about to *gasp* leave my internet connection for the weekend. Thanks for an enjoyable back-and-forth.
- You keep saying that you are interested in a "capitalistic" solution, yet your entire argument seems to be based on the communist principle of "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs." You even seem willing to go down the path that all communists eventually follow, arguing that the government should make stricter and stricter laws and (if needed, back them up with force) to make sure that your system "works."
- You are assuming what you are trying to prove.
I dispute 2 & 3; I hold that the urge to create is a fundemental part of what it means to be human, as is the urge to copy/immitate others.I dispute 4 because people (such as game designers, cooks, fashion designers, etc.) make money off of goods (games, food, clothing) which are not covered by IP (excluding trademarks, as I did earlier).
I have worked in the game industry for over twenty years, and in all that time I have never seen IP laws successfully used to defend a company like SJG, but have seen several cases where they were successfully used to attack one.
[ As an aside, I was one of the people who wrote a letter in support of Steve when he was raided by the FBI years ago. ]
As for IP laws being the cause (rather than a consequence) of the wealth of creative output, consider. In a state of nature, man copies what he sees others doing. It is a basic part of our nature. In a creatively impoverished environment, there is the risk that there may not be enough templates to copy, because only a few people are innovating in any given area, and they may elect to hide their discoveries. So society offers a bargin: they will prevent the natual copying for a limited period of time, in exchange for the disclosure of new discoveries / inventions. This is the basis of all IP except trademarks.
As society grows larger, richer, and more diverse, the supply of templates rises rapidly. If all parties adhered to this "fair trade" and the growth arose from the IP laws (as you suggest), we should expect the price (length of IP terms, etc.) to drop as the supply increased and the demand remained relatively constant.
If, as I maintain, causality goes the other way and the natural growth of society's creative output (which has made IP increasingly lucrative is) instead driving IP laws, we should expect the price to rise--and this is in fact what we see.
-- MarkusQ
No, we have the creative material because we have a society rich enough for a large number of people to indulge in the near universal urge to create. To see this, consider that there is a wealth of creativity even in areas not aforded "IP" status; the only difference being that making it IP makes viable the promotion and marketing of the "product."
I'm not sure where you were going with the wind-power thing.
I never claimed that people weren't making money off of IP--quite the contrary.
Matt Groening (to choose just one of your examples) is paid by Fox because they make money off of advertizing. By your logic, it should be illegal (or perhaps just immoral) to go to the bathroom during a comercial break.
Not only is the television business model independent of IP, it works just fine (perhaps even better) the less "IP" is involved--thus the push to news, reality TV, and other show with no writers (for some reason journalists aren't considered writers).
But the biggest problem with your examples is that they are far from "Joe Working Artist"--all of them are among the small fraction of a percent that have "made it" in the game run by the IP conglomerates; just like the winners promoted by casinos, they are too few to bring up the average. Yes, there are a few thousand people around that could argue from personal experience that lotteries are good investment, but that wouldn't make it true.
I think the lottery example is telling: by your logic one could claim that if we want to have fun and games we need casinos and state lotteries, because without the big prizes they offer, no one would play games. Further, we need brothels because without them no one would have sex. I claim that this is absurd, and that people will tell stories, sing, play games and have sex even if no one makes a dime off of them doing so. Paying megacorps for the right to participate in these fundemental human activities on the mistaken belief that they are somehow causal is just nuts.
-- MarkusQ
No, I have not shifted my ground.
I beg to differ. In an earlier post you wrote:
Until there is a viable alternative on this side of communism, IP cannot be allowed to die.
And now you write:
But copyright is more necessary to protect artists that produce digital goods (musicians, renderers, etc). If they had no protection, people would have very little to pay them anything.
Which is arguing from the principle of "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs." When I buy something, I pay to get what I want at the best price I can; that is capitalism. I don't (in general) buy things because the person who made them needs to be subsidized. If we all followed that logic, either by mass delusion or government fiat, the economy would colapse. (After all, the people who sell penis pills over the internet need to eat just as the farmers and recording artists do! Think of the mimes!)
Copyright is a price paid by society to get something, but contrary to all logic the price keeps rising even though the demand isn't going up and the supply is growing rapidly.
And on one point:
There's still concerts, but concerts often make little money once all the costs are taken out, and instead serve to promote the band (so that it can sell CDs).
This is just incorrect. The reason most bands play concerts is it's the only way they can make any money. The CD sales all accrue to their lables (who are pushing hard the last year or so for a cut of the concerts too, in at least one case arguing on the grounds that it was a public performance of songs to which the lable holds the copyright).
-- MarkusQ
What was the original goal of IP laws? To encourage authors to create and distribute their work, instead of keeping it locked behind closed doors and non-disclosure agreements, not creating it at all. I fail to see how that has been elimentated; musicians and authors still need to eat.
That's the same non-sequitur everyone uses (I probably should have included it in my list). You make two unrelated statements as if they lead to some conclution.
-- MarkusQ