Just to be clear here, many "hawks" claim to follow "Christian Values".
Let's consider the Old Testament values:
leviticus 24:19-24:21
19 Anyone who maims another shall suffer the same injury in return: 20 fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth; the injury inflicted is the injury to be suffered. 21 One who kills an animal shall make restitution for it; but one who kills a human being shall be put to death.
Now the idea here is when you are wronged, you *can't* inflect more suffering than you suffered. There is a limit.
Then Jesus came along, and said this was an *upper limit* not a lower limit. You should instead return good for evil. In other words, these Christian Hawks should consider the fact that their ideas of bombing someone because of malware doesn't even past Old Testament standards, much less those of Christianity. How does a crashed computer equate to blowing up a house or office and killing who knows how many innocents in the process?
I am getting very tired of wars and conflicts to line the pockets of various corporate interests. How about we start demanding ethical principles of our leaders rather than buying into their excuses to abuse people abroad, and increasingly, Citizens at home. What is it going to take for people to realize that our government is getting out of hand, and is not behaving in line with our moral and ethical traditions? Seriously, we hear more concern out of our Religious leaders about allowing same sex marriage than we do the killing of 10's and sometimes 100's of women and children!
There *is* something seriously wrong with the morals of this country. When are we going to realize that we are supposed to come to people's aid when they are in need, to hear them when they cry out for relief? That we are not supposed to react by blowing them up?
No, it is tough for many people to believe, but I don't really listen to music at all.
Recording music over the radio or recording TV with a VHS is all legal.
Singing "Happy Birthday" is totally legal, as Time Warner Music's claim to the copyright is totally copyfraud. I do sing Happy Birthday in public, and if that makes me a pirate, then "Prepar 'ta be Boarded, Mate!"
I pay about 60 dollars a month for cable, which provides said TV seasons. They have a DVR feature. Just the other day, that featured failed to record the 2nd episode of House for me. Instead it recorded some lame strange show that I can't recognize.
I can't go to AT&T and get my 2nd episode. Maybe I can watch it on Hulu or something. But why bother? Say I download the thing. And now I am a pirate?
At the end of the year, I have paid 60x12 or 720 dollars into the system. Do I have any of these "seasons" of TV? No. The stupid DVR can hold about 20 or 30 shows. Period. I have watched some T.V. here and there (not much because I work too much), and I got nothing to show for it. Over 20 years this is like $14,000 spent and gone blowing in the wind.
There are good reasons to cut the cable, and buy maybe an outstanding show on DVD every now and then. Watch a bit of video over the Internet. But increasingly there is no way cable justifies its costs.
You are going to claim they have to have that money from that DVD or Blu-Ray to make money? They are gouging today, and if they made their product legitimately priced for people, they could sell it. Piracy only occurs where the business has failed to make their product available for a reasonable price under a reasonable distribution agreement.
It is like the starving folk hunting the "King's Deer." Yeah, some idiots are going to go and take what they shouldn't take regardless. But where everyone as reasonable access to food and hunting and protection, the people (mostly) leave the King's Deer alone. Jack up the price of food, kill them with fees and taxes, and people go and hunt the King's Deer.
Piracy is quite usefully the canary in the coal mind, indicating where businesses are gouging and not providing product at the price that makes sense in the market.
>There's really no need for encryption to increase in power.
The "increase in power" is likely to be in the form of more useful distributed and encrypted storage via cheaper storage, with faster access via faster networks.
The actual algorithms for encryption don't have to be improved upon (though I have no doubt that they will be) for the general line of thought to be valid.
Encryption that is tough to use and understand how to use isn't useful. Integrated Encryption that occurs automatically with better storage and management of security keys will be an "increase in power" even if the algorithms themselves are the same. I did not intend for the "easier to use" component to be divorced from the "increase in power" component of the statement.
No, the length of copyright is an incentive for the investors (I would say publishers/labels/studios/etc. ) to take ownership of the copyrights, and deny the creators compensation at all.
Copyright extends 70 years after the Content Producer is dead and buried. If more than half the term is after they are dead, how is that an incentive for the producers of works of art to keep producing?
Have you bought a new Cash album lately? Watched a new Hope movie? A new Carry Grant film?
How about a new hit from the folks that brought you "Happy Birthday?" (I would have used their name, but we don't really know who wrote it, but Time Warner Music still gets 2 Million a year off its copyright anyway).
I think there would be more incentive to produce if Content Providers had to compete with a larger body of free work. Their stuff would have to be better to sell, but hey! They could actually use "Happy Birthday" in their movie without paying Time Warner Music (That Great Content Producer!) 10 grand for the right to use a song written in the late 1800's.
Actually, if you are not murdering people, those that don't die benefit. Mostly this is the public, as weapons are rarely trained on the rich and the wealthy that can afford to avoid dangerous situations and pay for protection. It is the common man that mostly gets mowed down. And if the government is preventing the sell of new weapons systems to people, then those at the top are getting punished.
You are trying to tie the idea of the Government enforcing laws that protect the public with Strong Copyright which does not protect the public but just the favored few. Any amount of effort looking at the differences between copyright and weapons systems, and it is clear that your analogy totally breaks down. The right thing (control weapons to save lives) benefits the public and takes away from the profits of those at the top. The right thing (weaker copyright to grant more freedoms and less liability as people share and develop content) benefits the public and takes away from the profits of those at the top.
In the case of copyright, "those at the top" are not the actual content producers by far and large. Copyright now extends 70 years AFTER the content producer is dead and buried. How is copyright about funding content producers if more than half its term is after the content producer is dead?
The fundamental problem Strong Copyright has with piracy is that technology is going to *continue* to advance. This will make copying even easier in the future than it is now. Encryption and Peer to Peer networks are going to increase in power, and will be easier to use.
The only way to maintain Strong Copyright is through government force. Increasingly it isn't about stopping people from doing "bad things" like "stealing" content. Instead it becomes a Government managed and controlled system for collecting income for a few favored parties.
Strong Copyright is about protecting the public. It is about protecting the few at the top that can rake in the dough.
Seriously, I have a Google Nexus One, I am one of the 165K that bought the thing.
It has been a joy. No Telecom crap. A few applications I can't uninstall (grrrrr) but the UI and functionality has been peachy. I am always showing off how easy it is to do multitasking, navigation, web searches,... All the stuff I want to do.
My wife's Atrix? Not so much. Maybe now that Google is buying them, Google can scrape the sludge of a UI Motorola slathered on their phones.
A dominate product has more influence. But the real question is if there are so many products that look like the iPad before the iPad, where is the uproar about Apple copying *those* designs? Why does Apple get to copy, but nobody else does?
Measurements on my Jobsmeter give this image a reality distortion field of no more than 10 miliJobs. Apple's own distortions register 1000 miliJobs. Given that these measurements come from my objective Jobsmeter and not my opinion, I think (baring calibration issues) I must be right.
How about making a phone call? After all, someone could hear what is going on in the background.
How about closed circuit T.V.? The U.K is famous for having cameras everywhere. Isn't that a privacy issue?
How much of our ability to record the events in our lives is illegal under this logic, and subject to confiscation?
What if we just remember what we had for lunch? That could be terrible. Can we tweet about what we see? Is it okay to post a description of who you see at the mall?
Seriously, what does it mean to route to a destination? On just about any device, you can route to a set of destinations. Obviously, you can route people by a destination that the user didn't specify. Obviously this could be a retailer or other business, if you had any reason to do so. Obviously if they pay you to do so, that would be a reason.
Where is the "invention" here? It uses all the existing APIs. It uses standard business practice (i.e. you do something if someone pays you to do it).
Seriously I am struggling here. Does this mean you can patent "route avoids streets that have restaurants that serve meat" to accommodate strict Hindus? "route avoids paths that would make the driver pass a church" to accommodate flaming atheists?
I can play this game all day. You can route trips for all sorts of random reasons other than quickest path, shortest path, avoids tolls, avoids highways, is acceptable for walking, is acceptable for bicycles. Heck, maybe if no patents exist for these, they can be patented "first" now.
All of this is obvious, but worse it is obviously not an invention. Just an idea and a bit of api work and common (sadly) business practice.
Much of what you said it true, but much is a bit kind to Jonathan Schwartz. Companies like Sun was need to push their consultants out to bring in the cash. They have great products, tons of open source, and it would stand to reason that they would be the best to provide support and maintenance. But did Sun do this? Here is one example:
"IBM and Sun have announced that IBM will distribute the Solaris Operating System and Solaris Subscriptions for select x86-based IBM System x and BladeCenter servers. The agreement extends IBM's existing support for the Solaris OS on select IBM BladeCenter servers , and IBM and Sun's support of interoperability through open standards.
http://www.it-director.com/business/change/content.php?cid=9790
It wasn't obvious, except to Sun's bottom line, but Sun under Schwartz no longer pushed their own hardware. They didn't push their consulting arm. They were not populating large Enterprise Projects based on Java with their consultants. I know, because my wife lived through this at Sun, and I worked numerous projects under a range of consulting companies for both state, county, and private projects. I worked with IBM consultants. I worked with Oracle consultants. Rational Consultants. And seriously hundreds of other consultants, but NEVER a Sun consultant.
Sun did this to themselves. Your other examples are really very much alike, even if not as friendly and well thought of as Sun.
There is no excuse for a company with Sun's resources and advantages to fail to make money.
Yeah, but even Microsoft is getting into the open source game. It may be that certain dynamics of software may favor companies of a certain profile who support selected open source efforts.
I think claiming that every company needs to support open source is like saying every company has to serve espresso. Obviously some will, and some won't.
Your argument is like "Apple succeeds because of their Excellent Hardware, not due to their excellent advertising."
Seriously, Oracle didn't save enough money by cutting projects, nor made enough money by diverting users from open source to proprietary extensions to make Sun profitable. The fact is that Larry is pretty good at walking up to a company/government/organization and saying, "Say, why don't you buy my hardware? Oh, and here is your service contract!"
I will tell you how dumb Sun was.... Sun actively diverted service contracts to SUN HARDWARE to IBM!! Now cutting THAT off on day one went along way for Oracle making Sun profitable. Making Sun profitable had little to do with cutting Sun's support for Open Source. (Of course I am not claiming it hurt either; however long term if Oracle fails to continue to support Java and MySQL and other significant projects, it could come back to haunt them!)
IBM and Google have to make money. Open source both price cuts competition, makes friendly with customers, and provides them with a better product that they can make money on (hardware, advertising, whatever).
There IS a significant place for open source in a company's business plan.
Sun's problem wasn't because they contributed to Open Source. The problem with Sun was that they couldn't be bothered with making money.
Oracle made their operations profitable within a year without any significant changes to their open source projects. Or in other words, had they chosen to support all the same open source efforts, the changes in marketing and management Oracle introduced still made sun profitable.
IBM contributes heavily to open source, and in fact might be the biggest contributor to open source, and they are quite profitable.
Google contributes heavily to open source, and they are quite profitable.
Companies that contribute to Open Source just cannot make that their *entire* business plan.
Man, what a dream that would be! A company that focuses on solving problems for customers, and doesn't try to own every little crappy angle to squeeze their customers!
Seriously, imagine if HP took *every* possible open source option in building a PC, and opened as much of the system as possible to allow crowd sourcing of solutions to the problems that always pop up in systems! Now with Windows, that would still be pretty limited. But hey! This would be a company I could buy from!
It is possible that Intel just wants to do the right thing, and that is because doing the right thing will help them. They know Universities and their research are not going to spawn Chip Fabs. Those efforts cost Billions. No, the small start ups are going to compete against other companies more than they will against Intel. It is about taking down many competitors more than it will take down Intel.
And fewer trolls will mean more start ups to buy. They couldn't care less about impoverishing post docs. Why should they? A few dollars proving your worth means nothing to Intel. On the other hand, Intel wants successful people/companies/start ups to buy.
Slashdot Mirror
Just to be clear here, many "hawks" claim to follow "Christian Values".
Let's consider the Old Testament values:
leviticus 24:19-24:21
19 Anyone who maims another shall suffer the same injury in return:
20 fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth; the injury inflicted is the injury to be suffered.
21 One who kills an animal shall make restitution for it; but one who kills a human being shall be put to death.
Now the idea here is when you are wronged, you *can't* inflect more suffering than you suffered. There is a limit.
Then Jesus came along, and said this was an *upper limit* not a lower limit. You should instead return good for evil. In other words, these Christian Hawks should consider the fact that their ideas of bombing someone because of malware doesn't even past Old Testament standards, much less those of Christianity. How does a crashed computer equate to blowing up a house or office and killing who knows how many innocents in the process?
I am getting very tired of wars and conflicts to line the pockets of various corporate interests. How about we start demanding ethical principles of our leaders rather than buying into their excuses to abuse people abroad, and increasingly, Citizens at home. What is it going to take for people to realize that our government is getting out of hand, and is not behaving in line with our moral and ethical traditions? Seriously, we hear more concern out of our Religious leaders about allowing same sex marriage than we do the killing of 10's and sometimes 100's of women and children!
There *is* something seriously wrong with the morals of this country. When are we going to realize that we are supposed to come to people's aid when they are in need, to hear them when they cry out for relief? That we are not supposed to react by blowing them up?
No, it is tough for many people to believe, but I don't really listen to music at all.
Recording music over the radio or recording TV with a VHS is all legal.
Singing "Happy Birthday" is totally legal, as Time Warner Music's claim to the copyright is totally copyfraud. I do sing Happy Birthday in public, and if that makes me a pirate, then "Prepar 'ta be Boarded, Mate!"
Funny you should mention buying a $40 TV season.
I pay about 60 dollars a month for cable, which provides said TV seasons. They have a DVR feature. Just the other day, that featured failed to record the 2nd episode of House for me. Instead it recorded some lame strange show that I can't recognize.
I can't go to AT&T and get my 2nd episode. Maybe I can watch it on Hulu or something. But why bother? Say I download the thing. And now I am a pirate?
At the end of the year, I have paid 60x12 or 720 dollars into the system. Do I have any of these "seasons" of TV? No. The stupid DVR can hold about 20 or 30 shows. Period. I have watched some T.V. here and there (not much because I work too much), and I got nothing to show for it. Over 20 years this is like $14,000 spent and gone blowing in the wind.
There are good reasons to cut the cable, and buy maybe an outstanding show on DVD every now and then. Watch a bit of video over the Internet. But increasingly there is no way cable justifies its costs.
You are going to claim they have to have that money from that DVD or Blu-Ray to make money? They are gouging today, and if they made their product legitimately priced for people, they could sell it. Piracy only occurs where the business has failed to make their product available for a reasonable price under a reasonable distribution agreement.
It is like the starving folk hunting the "King's Deer." Yeah, some idiots are going to go and take what they shouldn't take regardless. But where everyone as reasonable access to food and hunting and protection, the people (mostly) leave the King's Deer alone. Jack up the price of food, kill them with fees and taxes, and people go and hunt the King's Deer.
Piracy is quite usefully the canary in the coal mind, indicating where businesses are gouging and not providing product at the price that makes sense in the market.
>There's really no need for encryption to increase in power.
The "increase in power" is likely to be in the form of more useful distributed and encrypted storage via cheaper storage, with faster access via faster networks.
The actual algorithms for encryption don't have to be improved upon (though I have no doubt that they will be) for the general line of thought to be valid.
Encryption that is tough to use and understand how to use isn't useful. Integrated Encryption that occurs automatically with better storage and management of security keys will be an "increase in power" even if the algorithms themselves are the same. I did not intend for the "easier to use" component to be divorced from the "increase in power" component of the statement.
My 14 year old likes Big Band and Swing music. But you are right, he doesn't go out and buy it, but just listens to it on various podcasts.
No, the length of copyright is an incentive for the investors (I would say publishers/labels/studios/etc. ) to take ownership of the copyrights, and deny the creators compensation at all.
ever! Just do like you just did. Make a subsequent post. Fixed comments are what keeps Slashdot ahead of the rest.
Funny that you left the Subject alone. Ironic, no?
Copyright extends 70 years after the Content Producer is dead and buried. If more than half the term is after they are dead, how is that an incentive for the producers of works of art to keep producing?
Have you bought a new Cash album lately? Watched a new Hope movie? A new Carry Grant film?
How about a new hit from the folks that brought you "Happy Birthday?" (I would have used their name, but we don't really know who wrote it, but Time Warner Music still gets 2 Million a year off its copyright anyway).
I think there would be more incentive to produce if Content Providers had to compete with a larger body of free work. Their stuff would have to be better to sell, but hey! They could actually use "Happy Birthday" in their movie without paying Time Warner Music (That Great Content Producer!) 10 grand for the right to use a song written in the late 1800's.
Actually, if you are not murdering people, those that don't die benefit. Mostly this is the public, as weapons are rarely trained on the rich and the wealthy that can afford to avoid dangerous situations and pay for protection. It is the common man that mostly gets mowed down. And if the government is preventing the sell of new weapons systems to people, then those at the top are getting punished.
You are trying to tie the idea of the Government enforcing laws that protect the public with Strong Copyright which does not protect the public but just the favored few. Any amount of effort looking at the differences between copyright and weapons systems, and it is clear that your analogy totally breaks down. The right thing (control weapons to save lives) benefits the public and takes away from the profits of those at the top. The right thing (weaker copyright to grant more freedoms and less liability as people share and develop content) benefits the public and takes away from the profits of those at the top.
In the case of copyright, "those at the top" are not the actual content producers by far and large. Copyright now extends 70 years AFTER the content producer is dead and buried. How is copyright about funding content producers if more than half its term is after the content producer is dead?
Try again.
I don't download music, I don't torrent music, I don't P2P music.
I am a model citizen.
More about me:
* I am over 50
* I have bought maybe 10 Albums/Cassettes/8-Tracks/Digital Downloads in my *Entire* life.
Wouldn't the music industry love having an entire market of folks just like me!
"Strong Copyright is *not* about protecting the public"
sheesh.... No matter how hard I try to proof read, I still screw up! We need to be able to edit our own posts Slashdot!
The fundamental problem Strong Copyright has with piracy is that technology is going to *continue* to advance. This will make copying even easier in the future than it is now. Encryption and Peer to Peer networks are going to increase in power, and will be easier to use.
The only way to maintain Strong Copyright is through government force. Increasingly it isn't about stopping people from doing "bad things" like "stealing" content. Instead it becomes a Government managed and controlled system for collecting income for a few favored parties.
Strong Copyright is about protecting the public. It is about protecting the few at the top that can rake in the dough.
And I'm a .... whale.....
Seriously, I have a Google Nexus One, I am one of the 165K that bought the thing.
... All the stuff I want to do.
It has been a joy. No Telecom crap. A few applications I can't uninstall (grrrrr) but the UI and functionality has been peachy. I am always showing off how easy it is to do multitasking, navigation, web searches,
My wife's Atrix? Not so much. Maybe now that Google is buying them, Google can scrape the sludge of a UI Motorola slathered on their phones.
I AM a Computer Scientist!
A dominate product has more influence. But the real question is if there are so many products that look like the iPad before the iPad, where is the uproar about Apple copying *those* designs? Why does Apple get to copy, but nobody else does?
Measurements on my Jobsmeter give this image a reality distortion field of no more than 10 miliJobs. Apple's own distortions register 1000 miliJobs. Given that these measurements come from my objective Jobsmeter and not my opinion, I think (baring calibration issues) I must be right.
What about writing in your journal?
How about making a phone call? After all, someone could hear what is going on in the background.
How about closed circuit T.V.? The U.K is famous for having cameras everywhere. Isn't that a privacy issue?
How much of our ability to record the events in our lives is illegal under this logic, and subject to confiscation?
What if we just remember what we had for lunch? That could be terrible. Can we tweet about what we see? Is it okay to post a description of who you see at the mall?
Seriously, what does it mean to route to a destination? On just about any device, you can route to a set of destinations. Obviously, you can route people by a destination that the user didn't specify. Obviously this could be a retailer or other business, if you had any reason to do so. Obviously if they pay you to do so, that would be a reason.
Where is the "invention" here? It uses all the existing APIs. It uses standard business practice (i.e. you do something if someone pays you to do it).
Seriously I am struggling here. Does this mean you can patent "route avoids streets that have restaurants that serve meat" to accommodate strict Hindus? "route avoids paths that would make the driver pass a church" to accommodate flaming atheists?
I can play this game all day. You can route trips for all sorts of random reasons other than quickest path, shortest path, avoids tolls, avoids highways, is acceptable for walking, is acceptable for bicycles. Heck, maybe if no patents exist for these, they can be patented "first" now.
All of this is obvious, but worse it is obviously not an invention. Just an idea and a bit of api work and common (sadly) business practice.
Much of what you said it true, but much is a bit kind to Jonathan Schwartz. Companies like Sun was need to push their consultants out to bring in the cash. They have great products, tons of open source, and it would stand to reason that they would be the best to provide support and maintenance. But did Sun do this? Here is one example:
"IBM and Sun have announced that IBM will distribute the Solaris Operating System and Solaris Subscriptions for select x86-based IBM System x and BladeCenter servers. The agreement extends IBM's existing support for the Solaris OS on select IBM BladeCenter servers , and IBM and Sun's support of interoperability through open standards.
http://www.it-director.com/business/change/content.php?cid=9790
It wasn't obvious, except to Sun's bottom line, but Sun under Schwartz no longer pushed their own hardware. They didn't push their consulting arm. They were not populating large Enterprise Projects based on Java with their consultants. I know, because my wife lived through this at Sun, and I worked numerous projects under a range of consulting companies for both state, county, and private projects. I worked with IBM consultants. I worked with Oracle consultants. Rational Consultants. And seriously hundreds of other consultants, but NEVER a Sun consultant.
Sun did this to themselves. Your other examples are really very much alike, even if not as friendly and well thought of as Sun.
There is no excuse for a company with Sun's resources and advantages to fail to make money.
Written by someone who obviously has never done any reverse engineering. It just isn't that easy.
Yeah, but even Microsoft is getting into the open source game. It may be that certain dynamics of software may favor companies of a certain profile who support selected open source efforts.
I think claiming that every company needs to support open source is like saying every company has to serve espresso. Obviously some will, and some won't.
Your argument is like "Apple succeeds because of their Excellent Hardware, not due to their excellent advertising."
Seriously, Oracle didn't save enough money by cutting projects, nor made enough money by diverting users from open source to proprietary extensions to make Sun profitable. The fact is that Larry is pretty good at walking up to a company/government/organization and saying, "Say, why don't you buy my hardware? Oh, and here is your service contract!"
I will tell you how dumb Sun was.... Sun actively diverted service contracts to SUN HARDWARE to IBM!! Now cutting THAT off on day one went along way for Oracle making Sun profitable. Making Sun profitable had little to do with cutting Sun's support for Open Source. (Of course I am not claiming it hurt either; however long term if Oracle fails to continue to support Java and MySQL and other significant projects, it could come back to haunt them!)
IBM and Google have to make money. Open source both price cuts competition, makes friendly with customers, and provides them with a better product that they can make money on (hardware, advertising, whatever).
There IS a significant place for open source in a company's business plan.
Sun's problem wasn't because they contributed to Open Source. The problem with Sun was that they couldn't be bothered with making money.
Oracle made their operations profitable within a year without any significant changes to their open source projects. Or in other words, had they chosen to support all the same open source efforts, the changes in marketing and management Oracle introduced still made sun profitable.
IBM contributes heavily to open source, and in fact might be the biggest contributor to open source, and they are quite profitable.
Google contributes heavily to open source, and they are quite profitable.
Companies that contribute to Open Source just cannot make that their *entire* business plan.
Man, what a dream that would be! A company that focuses on solving problems for customers, and doesn't try to own every little crappy angle to squeeze their customers!
Seriously, imagine if HP took *every* possible open source option in building a PC, and opened as much of the system as possible to allow crowd sourcing of solutions to the problems that always pop up in systems! Now with Windows, that would still be pretty limited. But hey! This would be a company I could buy from!
It is possible that Intel just wants to do the right thing, and that is because doing the right thing will help them. They know Universities and their research are not going to spawn Chip Fabs. Those efforts cost Billions. No, the small start ups are going to compete against other companies more than they will against Intel. It is about taking down many competitors more than it will take down Intel.
And fewer trolls will mean more start ups to buy. They couldn't care less about impoverishing post docs. Why should they? A few dollars proving your worth means nothing to Intel. On the other hand, Intel wants successful people/companies/start ups to buy.