it's just that the people who get to make decisions about IP law aren't interested in being better off in an objective sense; they're just interested in making sure they will always do better than everyone below them.
From an evolutionary psych perspective, that makes sense. Our genes/memes are such that we would rather be a superking among paupers than a king among equal kings. Chicks dig the concentration of wealth and power, and the alphamales know it.
Those "good old days" were the days when your parents worked their asses off to provide stuff for you
Actually, in the good old days, only one parent had to work, and he/she was under much less stress. Today, both have to work their asses off, get fewer benefits, and have to worry about the increasing trend of jobs being off-shored and replaced by more productive automation.
'Greebling' on supposedly futuristic spacecraft has always pissed me off because it's almost always overblown and only put there to make the object "busy looking" and for audiences used to WW2-battleships-in-space. It's almost as if the ships were built with irregular pieces of purposely discolored sheetmetal in a shipyard, and then pipes and other techy doodads tacked on later for style'n.
I'm a fan of the sleek ship designs that keep their junk on the inside where it belongs. Of course, it's harder to judge scale when you can't see the irregular pieces of purposely discolored sheetmetal put into place by human hands (ugh)... but it makes more sense that way.
"If there is this much corporate demand to replace nurses now, imagine how quickly nurses (along with teachers, waiters/waitresses, store clerks, etc. etc.) will be replaced once there are humanoid robots like Toyota's available off-the-shelf to take over these jobs."
-- Marshall Brain
Well, I can think of one cheap way to keep the delivery robot safe: Start a "respect the beerbot" meme. People might kick the shit out of a regular vending machine, but they'd quickly learn not to mess with the sacred beerbot (as long as it never fails to deliver what was promised).
Other methods to keep the beerbot safe:
Give it a live webcam to shame vandals (if they have any shame that is).
Give it a GPS locator.
Make it shriek in a loud female voice if abused...
Why wouldn't we have seen some indication of superintelligent races?
Reasoning that the universe should be FILLED with intelligent life by now, Fermi simply asked, "So where are they?"
I assume that the vast majority of intelligent civilizations don't make it past The Great Filter. It's the rare race that survives the dangerous mismatch between their primitive brains and their exponentially advancing technology.
If there are any who have made it past Singularity, then their existence must surely be so far advanced as to be unrecognizable; like we are to ants (no *squish* jokes).
Whuffie, in our future economy of abundance (once we reach the point where the notion of "working for a living" is made meaningless by more productive robots, molecular manufacturing, and better AI.)
i once told a non-techy friend of mine that he could speed up his computer if he added more ram. he asked me if i had a copy of the cd with the ram so he could borrow the cd and install the upgrade.
Hi. I'm a time traveler from the year 2017. You can borrow my general-purpose molecular manufacturing "printer" and a copy of the molecular blueprint for a stick of Gnu-RAM. Or perhaps you'd rather print some diamond, seeing as that particular carbon configuration is still "scarce" in your time.
Step 4: They give up, copyright is drastically reformed, and a new economic model emerges based around funding the fundamentally scarce act of creation itself (rather than attempting to enforce the artificial scarcity that almost nobody respects (especially once media was separated from scarce medium)).
"Software piracy laws are so practically unenforceable and breaking them has become so socially acceptable that only a thin minority appears compelled...to obey them.... Whenever there is such profound divergence between the law and social practice, it is not society that adapts."
-- John Perry Barlow (the eff.org dude)
However, if the government keeps sending these groups to federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison, that's going to stop or at least trickle off at some point.
That's not what I see happening -- what I see is p2p systems being prodded to evolve faster, and respect for perpetual copyright (outside of corporations) plummeting.
We don't have global DRM to remove anonymity, and hopefully we never will.
The correlation between your slow net connection and your inability to find a correctly cracked game is hilarious, because only the kiddies know what they're doing. Everybody else just buys the game data on CD/DVD from the bargain bin and uses a tiny crack instead.
The continuing rise of open source and open content will have more impact than any of these crackdowns will. In fact, the crackdowns on "IP theft" only accelerate the progress toward an open future. Copy-prevention is just a stopgap by the old regime.
I can see you've never given serious thought to the inevitability of post-humanity, you bio-chauvinist:) -- a transhuman doesn't live in conventional meatspace, and the only real limit on the number of "mindchildren" you can have is the amount of energy and processing substrate you want to monopolize, but I think we'll be intelligent enough by then to live with zero population growth when need-be (rather than resort to monkey-war).
Recycling *IS* a waste of time in some cases. e.g. Plastic always costs more energy to recycle than to make new, but recycled aluminum on the other hand uses MUCH less energy, produces way less pollution, and requires fewer bauxite slave miners.
These multiplayer games aren't copied near as much as singleplayer games though. The phone-home-keycheck makes that kind of difficult, and the hacked-versions aren't nearly as numerous and stick out like sore thumbs.
Slashdot Mirror
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From an evolutionary psych perspective, that makes sense. Our genes/memes are such that we would rather be a superking among paupers than a king among equal kings. Chicks dig the concentration of wealth and power, and the alphamales know it.
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Actually, in the good old days, only one parent had to work, and he/she was under much less stress. Today, both have to work their asses off, get fewer benefits, and have to worry about the increasing trend of jobs being off-shored and replaced by more productive automation.
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I'm a fan of the sleek ship designs that keep their junk on the inside where it belongs. Of course, it's harder to judge scale when you can't see the irregular pieces of purposely discolored sheetmetal put into place by human hands (ugh)... but it makes more sense that way.
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Other methods to keep the beerbot safe:
- Give it a live webcam to shame vandals (if they have any shame that is).
- Give it a GPS locator.
- Make it shriek in a loud female voice if abused...
--Reasoning that the universe should be FILLED with intelligent life by now, Fermi simply asked, "So where are they?"
I assume that the vast majority of intelligent civilizations don't make it past The Great Filter. It's the rare race that survives the dangerous mismatch between their primitive brains and their exponentially advancing technology.
If there are any who have made it past Singularity, then their existence must surely be so far advanced as to be unrecognizable; like we are to ants (no *squish* jokes).
This IMO. My sig isn't a proof or anything.
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Hi. I'm a time traveler from the year 2017. You can borrow my general-purpose molecular manufacturing "printer" and a copy of the molecular blueprint for a stick of Gnu-RAM. Or perhaps you'd rather print some diamond, seeing as that particular carbon configuration is still "scarce" in your time.
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That's not what I see happening -- what I see is p2p systems being prodded to evolve faster, and respect for perpetual copyright (outside of corporations) plummeting.
We don't have global DRM to remove anonymity, and hopefully we never will.
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Sensationalism sells, so of course they'll go with it. FUD works.
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The continuing rise of open source and open content will have more impact than any of these crackdowns will. In fact, the crackdowns on "IP theft" only accelerate the progress toward an open future. Copy-prevention is just a stopgap by the old regime.
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I'd pay you to design a NEW virtual object, since that may be your scarce talent, but copies cost nothing.
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Also, loss of life doesn't seem to be an issue here... apparently being on the bomb squad gets you laid almost as much as being a post-9/11 fireman.
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Eh. And then there's the mutants like me who reject all authority and don't get the celebrity thing.
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