Congratulations, you've discovered the tautology.:-)
if I did go to the library, I'd pay library fees and they'd buy the books in.
"Library fees"? Do you mean "taxes", or do you live in some uncivilized part of the world without public libraries?
If I borrow my girlfriend's books and read those, she paid for them - and I give them back. This is legal, and in no way the same as it being legal for millions of people to go onto a P2P network and permanently download an exact copy of the book without giving the author any money.
It is, in fact, just the same in the way that matters: people enjoy a work without paying for it.
If I sing to myself in the shower then I'm not performing it to anyone; if anything I'm practicing. If I sang it to 500 people in a field, and charged them access the performance, then yes, I should pay performance royalties.
You don't have to give a public performance of a song in order to enjoy it. If you regard singing outside of performance solely as practicing for work, that's sad and pathetic.
And of course performance royalties apply only to for-profit performances. When I take my guitar on a camping trip and play "Louie, Louie" around the campfire, we're enjoying the some and not obligated to pay anyone royalties for it.
However, we're not talking about that. We're talking about the Pirate Party wanting to make it legal to copy a track or film off a CD or DVD, put it on a P2P network, and let millions of people get an identical copy of the original without any money going to the people involved in creating the content.
If you will kindly look up-thread, you will see that what we are talking about is the falsity of the premise, "if you like something, pay for it - it's only fair".
It has never been the case that everyone who liked a work paid for it. Just about everyone thinks -- or at least behaves as if they think -- that it is on many occasions fair to enjoy creative works without paying for them.
This is the same argument used for drug price controls
Patents are drug price controls. They are a state intervention that props up prices.
All that does is keep people from investing in research.
So maybe medical research -- and research into other fields of great importance to human welfare -- shouldn't be left to investors trying to make a buck, but should be publicly funded. As it is now, often we get the worst of both worlds. We pay for most of the research, and then the researcher gets to get a patent on it and charge us for its use.
Self-ownership is a nonsensical concept. My relationship with myself is not one of property or ownership. Self-determination, the ability to make private choices, is a fundamental human need; but confusing it with the idea of property leads to all sorts of problems.
Fast food? Too bad, government will ban it (they've already started in parts of the U.S.)
Citation needed. Where is fast food banned?
Yes, government regulations have kept toxic crap from being served in restaurants as food. Since purporting that something not fit for human consumption is "food" is a form of fraud, that's fine. But there's a world of difference between banning restaurants from putting lead, botulism, or trans fats in their dishes, and banning fast food.
Today's expanding government is not maintainable. The future of America is less government, by attrition.
There's nothing new about expanding government, indeed over the past few decades it's expanded more (measured by government spending as a fraction of GDP) under Republican administrations than under Democratic ones.
If that expanding government means further bloating the military-industrial and prison-industrial complexes, I'm against it. If expanding government means better funding for education, housing, and health care, I'm not opposed.
After a few decades of neglect by the magical thinking of pseudo-free market fundamentalists, we're going to incur high costs over the next few years to fix our fiscal and physical infrastructure. Relax. It worked during the New Deal, it'll work now.
The owners of the game space. When the House Rules are posted on the wall of the bar above the pool table, those are the correct way to play, even if it's different than the Billiard Congress of America rules, or the rules in your buddy's basement. When the company running a game server posts rules, those are the correct way to play.
And if we look at the social dynamic of the game world as being larger than merely a 'game'...
...then you will draw many bad conclusions from a failed analogy, since...
I mean, who is this self-proclaimed researcher to go around enforcing his vision of how people should play the game with the equivalent of violent force?
There is no equivalent of violent force in his gameplay. The violence here is in the criminal threats of actual violence directed against him.
He's a paying customer of a gaming service. He's playing the game he paid for, according to the rules, and not taking unsportsman-like advantage of any loopholes.
If a club puts up a sign that says "dance party, $10 cover", and some customers decide to sit on the dance floor, then they ought to move when dancers show up. If they don't, then they have no right to complain when they get stepped on.
Indeed they have. The net has lowered the cost of distributing a work to just about zero, and made collaboration with other artists orders of magnitude easier. At the same time, other improvements in technology have made the cost of producing a work much lower. The case for free non-commercial distribution is stronger because of the net.
But behind all of this, there must be a legal framework to say what's right and what's wrong. Something that says "if you like something, pay for it - it's only fair".
Do you pay for every book you read, or do you go to the library?
Do you pay for every joke you hear, or do you chuckle as someone re-tells a quip they heard from a friend of a friend around the water cooler?
Do you pay for every song, or do you sing in the shower without paying performance royalties?
It has never been the case that we've had the rule "if you like something, pay for it - it's only fair".
The net has made our library bigger, enlarged the circle of friends around the global water cooler, and made it possible for the world to hear us sing in the shower. That's all.
The vast majority of books do not include such advertisements, but the publishers do still turn a profit. It's not like with magazines, where the costs of a print run are typically higher than revenue from subscription fees.
I do have a few old SF paperbacks with ads in the center. For example my Ace paperback copy of LeGuin's A Wizard of Earthsea has a thick glossy insert advertizing Kent cigarettes. (Ironic indeed considering that the book won the 1969 Horn Awards, awarded for excellence in children's and young adult literature. "Learn valuable moral lessons about courage and self-knowledge, kids -- oh, and remember to smoke Kents, the ones with the Micronite filter.")
And of course not a few old paperbacks had ads -- even tear-off mail-in order forms -- for other books by that publisher.
If you are just checking the odometer, my home state gets all the money even if I travel out of state often?
Why not? Your home state gets all of the sales tax and vehicle registration tax on your car, even if you mostly drive it out-of-state.
A GPS-based tax raises serious privacy concerns, and a federal mileage tax on ordinary drivers is of questionable constitutionality. But if a state wants to impose an odometer-reading based tax instead of or on top of their vehicle registration and/or inspection taxes (yes, they often call them "fees" to placate the anti-tax right, but they're taxes), I'd have to say suck it up and render on to Caesar what is Caesar's.
Feudal warlords are a form of government, so the fact that they suck does not invalidate the premise that governments suck.
Thoreau wrote that "'That government is best which governs not at all'; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which the will have." Thornley wrote that "Universal Enlightenment a prerequisite to abolition of the State, after which the State will inevitably vanish. Or - that failing - nobody will give a damn."
But we are not prepared for it, and Universal Enlightenment has not yet occurred. So anarchy remains an unstable proposition at this stage of human development. Take a large enough group of people with no government, and at best they'll restrict their hierarchical primate dominance behavior to some form of democracy; at worst you end up with strongman rule.
We should keep working toward the anarchic ideal (I think it's an asymptotic process and we might never entirely get there), but in the mean time, again with Thoreau, "I ask for, not at one no government, but at once a better government. Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it....How does it become a man to behave toward the American government today? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it."
This government of the people by the people and for the people crap that those fucktard founding fathers came up with... just pure evil.
The Founding Fathers were a bunch of slave owners, bankers, and landlords who wanted to remove the hierarchy above them, but still sit on top of the lower classes. Government "of the people, by the people, for the people" was not one of their memes, but is a quote from Lincoln's Gettysburg Address; he probably lifted it from an abolitionist minister, Theodore Parker, or from Daniel Webster.
And exactly how are you going to ban 'encrypted traffic' . There is no way to define what encrypt traffic looks like , that's one off the advantages of encryption.
Of course you can define what encrypt traffic looks like, if you don't mind false positives. You do statistical analysis, and anything that doesn't look like plain English -- or in this case, Farsi -- text, is banned. If you want to allow images, you can perform similar analysis, and have a group of your minions spot-check the intercepted traffic for anything that looks suspicious, and then go beat the living shit out of the sender.
Yes, this doesn't prevent coded messages or steganography, but it sure cuts down the communications bandwidth available to your opponents. If you have to distribute a code book to communicate, you're at a big handicap.
The best digital communications available to a resistance movement would be dial-up, point-to-point, like the old FidoNet BBS systems. Maybe with pre-paid cell phones instead of dial-up lines...
You assume he has actually solved the problems - given that it is entirely untested, I find that highly unlikely.
I make no such assumption. Learning about problem solving, or any creative process, includes learning how potential solutions are generated. Genius may be "1% inspiration and 99% perspiration", but any fool can sweat, it's that 1% that makes a genius.
(Of course, Edison -- attributed as the source of the 99%/1% meme -- was notably lacking in inspiration, and stole many of the ideas he's best known for, so the perspiration in his case may just be the sweaty hands of a con man who fears to be found out.)
While most judges and prosecutors have common sense...
Hmm. What nation do you live in where this is the case? I'm envious. Here in the U.S., with both the highest rate of incarceration in the world and a shockingly high rate of violent crime, it's clear that common sense is not found in judges, prosecutors, or legislators.
Who gives a rip if it was thought up by a 15 year old boy? His age doesn't change the facts of the matter one bit.
Uhhhh...one of the facts of the matter is that it was thought up by a 15 year old boy. Some of us who have an interest in the though processes that lead to successful problem solving find that interesting, an example of "beginner's mind" and a generalist approach.
Most websites (and many other applications) mask passwords as users type them, and thereby theoretically prevent miscreants from looking over users' shoulders. Of course, a truly skilled criminal can simply look at the keyboard and note which keys are being pressed. So, password masking doesn't even protect fully against snoopers.
More importantly, there's usually nobody looking over your shoulder when you log in to a website. It's just you, sitting all alone in your office, suffering reduced usability to protect against a non-issue.
Meanwhile real criminals including murderers are caught by CCTV camera evidence every day. Reality beats hysterical paranoia every day.
Yes, reality beats hysteria. Perhaps then you should lose your hysteria about the number of "real criminals including murderers" being caught by surveillance cameras, and join us here in reality, where even the UK police admit that CCTV cameras do not reduce crime. (See also this and this.)
Basically ASACP is claiming that because AT&T controls the distribution, use, and "performance" (by triggering the ringtone when a call comes in) that they are responsible for public performance royalties.
If AT&T is making money off of Joe Songwriter's composition, I don't have a problem with requiring AT&T to pay Joe a royalty.
The basic idea behind performance royalties -- play my songs all you like, but if you make money off then, you owe me a cut -- is a good one, even if ASCAP and BMI are poor implementations of it. I have been arguing for years in favor of royalty right replacing copyright.
But whilst you are using civil disobedience to disregard the laws of the land that you feel are wrong, then you accept the outcome that you may be dealt with according to the law.
Civil disobedience means disobeying the law without violently resisting the government. It does not mean quietly accepting imprisonment.
If the democracy advocates attempt to establish a genuine democracy in Iran, violence will occur. Why? A large percentage of the population supports the brutal government and will kill the democracy advocates.
Nonsense.
The white minority in South Africa was able to hold power for decades. Why? They had the guns.
I don't know what percentage of the population supports the Iranian dictatorship. But so long as its supporters are armed and its opponents are not, it doesn't matter how many of them there are.
Yet, the Vietnamese do not channel their energies into seeking revenge (by, e. g., building a nuclear bomb) against the West.
Building a nuke has nothing to do with "revenge". Since the U.S. has demonstrated its willingness to engage in wars of aggression, any state not closely allied with a nuclear power can only secure itself by obtaining a nuclear deterrent.
Rather, the Vietnamese are diligently modernizing their society. They will reach 1st-world status long before the Iranians.
code reviews are boring to do, but has to be done be the best and most experienced developers usually the senior or lead developer. Some places doesn't understand that and just delegates this menial task to lower developers, or a team of inexperienced developers.
While it's necessary to have senior developers take part in the review, having only senior developers do it misses part of the benefit -- code reviews should be educational. They should allow newer developers to learn from the good coding habits of more senior people, and also to see mistakes and thus learn to avoid them.
If you want to learn to be a writer, you have to read. That applies to code as much as it does to books or poems or essays.
I vote for taking out North Korea today. I'd rather have a 100,000+ casualties today if it can prevent the likely horrific death of 20 million+ later.
And you call a nuclear attack from Norther Korea "likely" based on what, exactly?
The cease-fire between North and South has held for decades. They are unlikely to start such aggression.
The U.S., on the other hand -- the world's leader in the use of weapons of mass destruction, and the only nation to ever use nuclear weapons -- has recently demonstrated a willingness to engage in wars of aggression against small nations. Every country not an ally of ours, or of another nuclear power, now has strong incentive to obtain a nuclear deterrent. Attacking North Korea would only make that stronger.
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Congratulations, you've discovered the tautology. :-)
"Library fees"? Do you mean "taxes", or do you live in some uncivilized part of the world without public libraries?
It is, in fact, just the same in the way that matters: people enjoy a work without paying for it.
You don't have to give a public performance of a song in order to enjoy it. If you regard singing outside of performance solely as practicing for work, that's sad and pathetic.
And of course performance royalties apply only to for-profit performances. When I take my guitar on a camping trip and play "Louie, Louie" around the campfire, we're enjoying the some and not obligated to pay anyone royalties for it.
If you will kindly look up-thread, you will see that what we are talking about is the falsity of the premise, "if you like something, pay for it - it's only fair".
It has never been the case that everyone who liked a work paid for it. Just about everyone thinks -- or at least behaves as if they think -- that it is on many occasions fair to enjoy creative works without paying for them.
Patents are drug price controls. They are a state intervention that props up prices.
So maybe medical research -- and research into other fields of great importance to human welfare -- shouldn't be left to investors trying to make a buck, but should be publicly funded. As it is now, often we get the worst of both worlds. We pay for most of the research, and then the researcher gets to get a patent on it and charge us for its use.
Self-ownership is a nonsensical concept. My relationship with myself is not one of property or ownership. Self-determination, the ability to make private choices, is a fundamental human need; but confusing it with the idea of property leads to all sorts of problems.
Citation needed. Where is fast food banned?
Yes, government regulations have kept toxic crap from being served in restaurants as food. Since purporting that something not fit for human consumption is "food" is a form of fraud, that's fine. But there's a world of difference between banning restaurants from putting lead, botulism, or trans fats in their dishes, and banning fast food.
There's nothing new about expanding government, indeed over the past few decades it's expanded more (measured by government spending as a fraction of GDP) under Republican administrations than under Democratic ones.
If that expanding government means further bloating the military-industrial and prison-industrial complexes, I'm against it. If expanding government means better funding for education, housing, and health care, I'm not opposed.
After a few decades of neglect by the magical thinking of pseudo-free market fundamentalists, we're going to incur high costs over the next few years to fix our fiscal and physical infrastructure. Relax. It worked during the New Deal, it'll work now.
The owners of the game space. When the House Rules are posted on the wall of the bar above the pool table, those are the correct way to play, even if it's different than the Billiard Congress of America rules, or the rules in your buddy's basement. When the company running a game server posts rules, those are the correct way to play.
...then you will draw many bad conclusions from a failed analogy, since...
...nobody owns the world.
There is no equivalent of violent force in his gameplay. The violence here is in the criminal threats of actual violence directed against him.
He's a paying customer of a gaming service. He's playing the game he paid for, according to the rules, and not taking unsportsman-like advantage of any loopholes.
If a club puts up a sign that says "dance party, $10 cover", and some customers decide to sit on the dance floor, then they ought to move when dancers show up. If they don't, then they have no right to complain when they get stepped on.
Indeed they have. The net has lowered the cost of distributing a work to just about zero, and made collaboration with other artists orders of magnitude easier. At the same time, other improvements in technology have made the cost of producing a work much lower. The case for free non-commercial distribution is stronger because of the net.
Do you pay for every book you read, or do you go to the library?
Do you pay for every joke you hear, or do you chuckle as someone re-tells a quip they heard from a friend of a friend around the water cooler?
Do you pay for every song, or do you sing in the shower without paying performance royalties?
It has never been the case that we've had the rule "if you like something, pay for it - it's only fair".
The net has made our library bigger, enlarged the circle of friends around the global water cooler, and made it possible for the world to hear us sing in the shower. That's all.
I do have a few old SF paperbacks with ads in the center. For example my Ace paperback copy of LeGuin's A Wizard of Earthsea has a thick glossy insert advertizing Kent cigarettes. (Ironic indeed considering that the book won the 1969 Horn Awards, awarded for excellence in children's and young adult literature. "Learn valuable moral lessons about courage and self-knowledge, kids -- oh, and remember to smoke Kents, the ones with the Micronite filter.")
And of course not a few old paperbacks had ads -- even tear-off mail-in order forms -- for other books by that publisher.
Why not? Your home state gets all of the sales tax and vehicle registration tax on your car, even if you mostly drive it out-of-state.
A GPS-based tax raises serious privacy concerns, and a federal mileage tax on ordinary drivers is of questionable constitutionality. But if a state wants to impose an odometer-reading based tax instead of or on top of their vehicle registration and/or inspection taxes (yes, they often call them "fees" to placate the anti-tax right, but they're taxes), I'd have to say suck it up and render on to Caesar what is Caesar's.
Feudal warlords are a form of government, so the fact that they suck does not invalidate the premise that governments suck.
Thoreau wrote that "'That government is best which governs not at all'; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which the will have." Thornley wrote that "Universal Enlightenment a prerequisite to abolition of the State, after which the State will inevitably vanish. Or - that failing - nobody will give a damn."
But we are not prepared for it, and Universal Enlightenment has not yet occurred. So anarchy remains an unstable proposition at this stage of human development. Take a large enough group of people with no government, and at best they'll restrict their hierarchical primate dominance behavior to some form of democracy; at worst you end up with strongman rule.
We should keep working toward the anarchic ideal (I think it's an asymptotic process and we might never entirely get there), but in the mean time, again with Thoreau, "I ask for, not at one no government, but at once a better government. Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it....How does it become a man to behave toward the American government today? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it."
The Founding Fathers were a bunch of slave owners, bankers, and landlords who wanted to remove the hierarchy above them, but still sit on top of the lower classes. Government "of the people, by the people, for the people" was not one of their memes, but is a quote from Lincoln's Gettysburg Address; he probably lifted it from an abolitionist minister, Theodore Parker, or from Daniel Webster.
The proper tool is not a taser -- which, after all, might kill your lover. The proper tool is a violet wand, TENS unit, or similar apparatus. Have fun.
Of course you can define what encrypt traffic looks like, if you don't mind false positives. You do statistical analysis, and anything that doesn't look like plain English -- or in this case, Farsi -- text, is banned. If you want to allow images, you can perform similar analysis, and have a group of your minions spot-check the intercepted traffic for anything that looks suspicious, and then go beat the living shit out of the sender.
Yes, this doesn't prevent coded messages or steganography, but it sure cuts down the communications bandwidth available to your opponents. If you have to distribute a code book to communicate, you're at a big handicap.
The best digital communications available to a resistance movement would be dial-up, point-to-point, like the old FidoNet BBS systems. Maybe with pre-paid cell phones instead of dial-up lines...
So what? Heart disease is more responsible for human deaths than murder, and yet we still take action against murderers.
I make no such assumption. Learning about problem solving, or any creative process, includes learning how potential solutions are generated. Genius may be "1% inspiration and 99% perspiration", but any fool can sweat, it's that 1% that makes a genius.
(Of course, Edison -- attributed as the source of the 99%/1% meme -- was notably lacking in inspiration, and stole many of the ideas he's best known for, so the perspiration in his case may just be the sweaty hands of a con man who fears to be found out.)
Hmm. What nation do you live in where this is the case? I'm envious. Here in the U.S., with both the highest rate of incarceration in the world and a shockingly high rate of violent crime, it's clear that common sense is not found in judges, prosecutors, or legislators.
Ah, so the cost is not that of a simple units conversion; the cost is that of the horribly bone-headed decision to use proprietary data formats.
Freedom makes business sense.
Uhhhh...one of the facts of the matter is that it was thought up by a 15 year old boy. Some of us who have an interest in the though processes that lead to successful problem solving find that interesting, an example of "beginner's mind" and a generalist approach.
Might I suggest you RTFA?
Except that the "space shuttle SRBs are the size they are because of old Roman standards derived from the width of a horse's butt" is an urban legend without much factual basis.
Yes, reality beats hysteria. Perhaps then you should lose your hysteria about the number of "real criminals including murderers" being caught by surveillance cameras, and join us here in reality, where even the UK police admit that CCTV cameras do not reduce crime. (See also this and this.)
If AT&T is making money off of Joe Songwriter's composition, I don't have a problem with requiring AT&T to pay Joe a royalty.
The basic idea behind performance royalties -- play my songs all you like, but if you make money off then, you owe me a cut -- is a good one, even if ASCAP and BMI are poor implementations of it. I have been arguing for years in favor of royalty right replacing copyright.
Civil disobedience means disobeying the law without violently resisting the government. It does not mean quietly accepting imprisonment.
And how does a minority hold on to the money? Guns.
And those "necessary people" for maintaining political power, are those who can bring guns to bear.
Mao was a murderous bastard, but he sure got one thing right: power comes out of the barrel of a gun.
Nonsense.
The white minority in South Africa was able to hold power for decades. Why? They had the guns.
I don't know what percentage of the population supports the Iranian dictatorship. But so long as its supporters are armed and its opponents are not, it doesn't matter how many of them there are.
Building a nuke has nothing to do with "revenge". Since the U.S. has demonstrated its willingness to engage in wars of aggression, any state not closely allied with a nuclear power can only secure itself by obtaining a nuclear deterrent.
Ah, ignorance of history is bliss, ain't it?
Iran was a becoming a modern, secular state. But it's elected prime minister has the temerity to nationalize its oil reserves, which didn't sit well with the U.S. and U.K., so we backed the Shah.
While it's necessary to have senior developers take part in the review, having only senior developers do it misses part of the benefit -- code reviews should be educational. They should allow newer developers to learn from the good coding habits of more senior people, and also to see mistakes and thus learn to avoid them.
If you want to learn to be a writer, you have to read. That applies to code as much as it does to books or poems or essays.
And you call a nuclear attack from Norther Korea "likely" based on what, exactly?
The cease-fire between North and South has held for decades. They are unlikely to start such aggression.
The U.S., on the other hand -- the world's leader in the use of weapons of mass destruction, and the only nation to ever use nuclear weapons -- has recently demonstrated a willingness to engage in wars of aggression against small nations. Every country not an ally of ours, or of another nuclear power, now has strong incentive to obtain a nuclear deterrent. Attacking North Korea would only make that stronger.