* The government grants you a monopoly,
* The infringing party is the guy who competes with you.
It's like operating your own steamboat to carry passengers back when Robert Fulton was the only guy who was allowed to do that.. with the exception that the courts eventually decided that prohibiting competition was a really stupid idea.
The RIAA complaint about the iPod was before iTunes.. or at least that was my recollection. They estimated the cost of the songs from the cost of CDs.. and, of course, they did it poorly.. saying that people would pay $15 for a CD and only take 5 songs off each CD. Few $15 CDs have 15 tracks on them.. so you're not likely to reduce the cost per song down to less than $1 each.. so saying you're going to rip your CDs instead of using the iTunes store doesn't reduce that $24k to fill an 80 gig iPod. And yeah, the "it's for videos" excuse was concocted by Apple before the video iPod and after the RIAA complaint. It basically went no-where because Jobs talked to em.
Umm.. building a hydroplant is expensive.. if you have the choice between putting on a river and not putting it on a river, why would you choose the later? Explaining why something is obvious is a bit recursive.. if you can't see it is obvious, I really can't make you.
They worked out each song cost about $3 and each song goes for about 3 minutes, and the typical compression is about 1mb/minute. Most of that is still accurate, except the price, so divide by 3. Still, no-one is spending $24k to fill their 80 gig iPod. I believe Apple's solution to this was to say "hey, you can use it for video too!!" and that just invited the MPAA to join the party.
* We need new laws to make this illegal, hey Congress, can you hook us up? DENIED. * Ahh, the problem is public perception.. we need to vilify file sharing. Marketing moguls, can you hook us up? DENIED. * Ok, well maybe we can just scare people into our way of thinking. Lawyers, can you hook us up? DENIED. * Maybe we can use impossible technology to force everyone into forgetting how to copy. Cryptographers, can you hook us up? DENIED. * Ok, how about just crazy ass rootkit technology? That's doable. Hey Sony scumbags, can you hook us up? DENIED. * Boy oh boy, this is harder than making water not wet, we need an international conspiracy of ISPs to give us unaccounted power over all their customers. PENDING.
What other crazy schemes will they come up with?
* Maybe they'll start putting poison in cases of blank media (cause they obviously have this stupid idea that people still burn the music they download - look at the tax on blank media in Canada). * What ever happened to that lawsuit against Apple? Are they making so much money from the iTunes store that they've forgotten their water tight argument that an 80 gig iPod would take $79,200 to fill? I guess math never was their strong suite. * Direct hacking attacks on file sharers? They have your IP, I wouldn't put it past them. * What about voodoo? That shit works right? We just need everyone in the world to submit some of their hair or skin so the witch doctor can make a voodoo doll, then we can jab em whenever they share files.. how will we know when they share files? EVERYONE shares files, we just have to jab everyone equally, that's easy!
Isn't it obvious that pumped storage isn't cost effective? If you're going to build a hydroelectric plant it doesn't make sense to put it anywhere else other than a fast moving river.
Not now per se.. but give it 5 years. Around then there will be enough biobricks to make this more like programming than electronics. I also expect that, by then, you'll be able to do your design work entirely in silico, and send the compiled DNA sequences (at most a few plasmids) off to a lab to be synthesized, implanted into a specified bacterium, cloned, mailed to you - and for a cost that is affordable to hackers. Note that this is almost already here. Mr Gene will send you whatever DNA sequence you want for pretty cheap prices ($0.49/bp) but that needs to go down a whole lot more and they need to send the entire organism, not just the DNA they extract for you. Most their current customers don't want the whole organism, so they don't currently offer it, but I expect that could change as easily as getting the necessary paperwork done.
What kind of stuff can you make? Depends how creative you are. This year's iGEM Jamboree produced some amazing stuff.. and most every one of these projects had to make a new biobrick.. and that's the time consuming part, and cuts into the limited amount of time they had to get their entry in. If you're doing this in 5 years time it'll be hard to come up with a new biobrick that does something that hasn't been done. Instead, people will be working on reusable systems of biobricks.
This will all explode faster than computing technology ever did, because we're talking about machines that can manipulate the physical world here. If there's a single industry, 10 years from now, that doesn't include some kind of engineered biology then it'll be for a very good reason.. hopefully not legislative:)
Then you're one up on the politicians. The justification for the ISS was that it would keep Russian engineers busy making peaceful space stations rather than working on missile technology which they would most likely be selling to Iran and other nations that the US considers likely to result in destabilization of the middle east.. which is where all the oil is.. which is an important resource.. I don't know how much depth I need to get into here, you seem pretty naive. If the ISS can serve some sort of useful function beyond that, then yah, we're ahead of the game. Compared to the price of fighting a war with Russia, a few billion dropped on "science" and "international co-operation" is chump change. Or did you think space exploration was a national priority or something?
You pay your taxes because if you don't they'll kill/imprison you. Stop deluding yourself and be thankful you get "some pretty pictures of a distant galaxy" out of it.
I'm trying desperately to see a coherent argument here. Are you complaining that your tax dollars are being squandered.. cause, ya know, that's what governments do. If you're pissed at the cost of ISS, maybe you shouldn't take a look at the national budget any time soon. If you're all about scientific research, maybe you shouldn't look at the kind of research the NSF chooses to fund. I'm still trying to understand what any of this has to do with space tourism. Or are you basically saying that people shouldn't be free to pursue goals that you consider stupid?
IBM does more basic science than any other company in the world.. outside Japan. They're also better financed and have institutional knowledge that exceeds most universities by light years. As for government labs, they're good for nuclear research and that's about it.
Umm.. about the only people who are doing space tourism is the russians.. and they are doing it to subsidize their national space program. Maybe soon we'll see Virgin Galactic doing some suborbital space tourism.. and that's being done without a nickle of tax payer funds. So, what, exactly, are you on about?
Hehe, you don't read the paper much do you? There's a whole lot of contracted "security" firms in Iraq right now being paid by the US government. You might remember some of them were running a prison.. you might remember the atrocities. Ya.
Anyway, space tourism will pay for itself.. give it time.
I know this is a common US principle that is largely ignored in practice, but it's not at all common in the rest of the world. I think it's a good idea.. but, frankly, it's totally irrelevant for rocketry as the governments of the world have decided that rocketry is just too damn awesome for making weapons to be freely able to be published.
The world isn't a simple as you make it out to be. Patents and copyrights lock things up, but trade secrets lock them up even more. Government intervention to make people act against their own interests is a never ending spiral. There's no way to mandate that people do good science. It's interesting that you mention national security. Current legislation basically makes good science and engineering in rocketry illegal.. cause any improvement to a rocket is an improvement to the death count of a potential weapon using that rocket. I, personally, care more about the progress of rocketry than I care about the number of potential lives lost in a potential war fought with potential rocket-based weapons in the potential future, but other people think differently.
I've made my side perfectly clear. I think copyright monopolies are just as bad for markets as any other kind of monopoly. I think competitive markets are good things that we should protect. I think Apple has had it too good for too long and their monopolistic tendencies need a serious slap down.
You are required to buy a Honda car if you want to run it with a Honda engine. Honda can take any steps they want to prevent you from running their engines in a Toyota. That is not illegal.
This is what is really annoying about talking about anti-trust stuff with geeks. No, Honda can not.
All this stuff has already been done - in dozens of markets - in the 1800s. It has been made perfectly clear that any action taken by a manufacturer to deliberately break interoperability with competing products is illegal.
In fact, even your exact example has been addressed in US courts. Honda is not required to maintain compatibility with any competitors that are using their engines, but if they make modifications specifically to break competitor's ability to use their engines, then they are engaging in anti-trust action.
Don't disagree with you.. But Psystar is not selling counterfeits. They're selling clones.
Taking work that someone else spent the time and money to create, then using it to compete against them, is called "being a huge flaming asshole"...
Economics would disagree with you. Making clones is a normal respectable part of every business.. except ones where the government has granted a monopoly.. and Apple seems to think their copyright monopoly gives them a monopoly over their commodity hardware business too.
The code in the Lexmark cartridges did a heck of a lot more than just stopping competitors. Lexmark lost copyright over the entire program. That's the precedent. Just because you're ignorant of it, doesn't make it not so.
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Sure, you own your work, but that's not what copyright is about. Copyright is about giving you control over MY copy of YOUR work.
Copyright infringement in layman's terms:
* The government grants you a monopoly,
* The infringing party is the guy who competes with you.
It's like operating your own steamboat to carry passengers back when Robert Fulton was the only guy who was allowed to do that.. with the exception that the courts eventually decided that prohibiting competition was a really stupid idea.
That's it, there's no mystery to it.
The RIAA complaint about the iPod was before iTunes.. or at least that was my recollection. They estimated the cost of the songs from the cost of CDs.. and, of course, they did it poorly.. saying that people would pay $15 for a CD and only take 5 songs off each CD. Few $15 CDs have 15 tracks on them.. so you're not likely to reduce the cost per song down to less than $1 each.. so saying you're going to rip your CDs instead of using the iTunes store doesn't reduce that $24k to fill an 80 gig iPod. And yeah, the "it's for videos" excuse was concocted by Apple before the video iPod and after the RIAA complaint. It basically went no-where because Jobs talked to em.
Umm.. building a hydroplant is expensive.. if you have the choice between putting on a river and not putting it on a river, why would you choose the later? Explaining why something is obvious is a bit recursive.. if you can't see it is obvious, I really can't make you.
They worked out each song cost about $3 and each song goes for about 3 minutes, and the typical compression is about 1mb/minute. Most of that is still accurate, except the price, so divide by 3. Still, no-one is spending $24k to fill their 80 gig iPod. I believe Apple's solution to this was to say "hey, you can use it for video too!!" and that just invited the MPAA to join the party.
Typically because they are built by governments. They never are profitable.
Yeah. The RIAA is like:
* We need new laws to make this illegal, hey Congress, can you hook us up? DENIED.
* Ahh, the problem is public perception.. we need to vilify file sharing. Marketing moguls, can you hook us up? DENIED.
* Ok, well maybe we can just scare people into our way of thinking. Lawyers, can you hook us up? DENIED.
* Maybe we can use impossible technology to force everyone into forgetting how to copy. Cryptographers, can you hook us up? DENIED.
* Ok, how about just crazy ass rootkit technology? That's doable. Hey Sony scumbags, can you hook us up? DENIED.
* Boy oh boy, this is harder than making water not wet, we need an international conspiracy of ISPs to give us unaccounted power over all their customers. PENDING.
What other crazy schemes will they come up with?
* Maybe they'll start putting poison in cases of blank media (cause they obviously have this stupid idea that people still burn the music they download - look at the tax on blank media in Canada).
* What ever happened to that lawsuit against Apple? Are they making so much money from the iTunes store that they've forgotten their water tight argument that an 80 gig iPod would take $79,200 to fill? I guess math never was their strong suite.
* Direct hacking attacks on file sharers? They have your IP, I wouldn't put it past them.
* What about voodoo? That shit works right? We just need everyone in the world to submit some of their hair or skin so the witch doctor can make a voodoo doll, then we can jab em whenever they share files.. how will we know when they share files? EVERYONE shares files, we just have to jab everyone equally, that's easy!
Ok, now I'm just being silly.
Isn't it obvious that pumped storage isn't cost effective? If you're going to build a hydroelectric plant it doesn't make sense to put it anywhere else other than a fast moving river.
It's not just you, the rest of the world is also subjected to this bullshit.
"Disingenuous" is what some people call it. I think that's too polite.
Not now per se.. but give it 5 years. Around then there will be enough biobricks to make this more like programming than electronics. I also expect that, by then, you'll be able to do your design work entirely in silico, and send the compiled DNA sequences (at most a few plasmids) off to a lab to be synthesized, implanted into a specified bacterium, cloned, mailed to you - and for a cost that is affordable to hackers. Note that this is almost already here. Mr Gene will send you whatever DNA sequence you want for pretty cheap prices ($0.49/bp) but that needs to go down a whole lot more and they need to send the entire organism, not just the DNA they extract for you. Most their current customers don't want the whole organism, so they don't currently offer it, but I expect that could change as easily as getting the necessary paperwork done.
What kind of stuff can you make? Depends how creative you are. This year's iGEM Jamboree produced some amazing stuff.. and most every one of these projects had to make a new biobrick.. and that's the time consuming part, and cuts into the limited amount of time they had to get their entry in. If you're doing this in 5 years time it'll be hard to come up with a new biobrick that does something that hasn't been done. Instead, people will be working on reusable systems of biobricks.
This will all explode faster than computing technology ever did, because we're talking about machines that can manipulate the physical world here. If there's a single industry, 10 years from now, that doesn't include some kind of engineered biology then it'll be for a very good reason.. hopefully not legislative :)
VCRs often work as good without the remote as with. DVD players are almost completely useless without that remote.
Then you're one up on the politicians. The justification for the ISS was that it would keep Russian engineers busy making peaceful space stations rather than working on missile technology which they would most likely be selling to Iran and other nations that the US considers likely to result in destabilization of the middle east.. which is where all the oil is.. which is an important resource.. I don't know how much depth I need to get into here, you seem pretty naive. If the ISS can serve some sort of useful function beyond that, then yah, we're ahead of the game. Compared to the price of fighting a war with Russia, a few billion dropped on "science" and "international co-operation" is chump change. Or did you think space exploration was a national priority or something?
You pay your taxes because if you don't they'll kill/imprison you. Stop deluding yourself and be thankful you get "some pretty pictures of a distant galaxy" out of it.
I'm trying desperately to see a coherent argument here. Are you complaining that your tax dollars are being squandered.. cause, ya know, that's what governments do. If you're pissed at the cost of ISS, maybe you shouldn't take a look at the national budget any time soon. If you're all about scientific research, maybe you shouldn't look at the kind of research the NSF chooses to fund. I'm still trying to understand what any of this has to do with space tourism. Or are you basically saying that people shouldn't be free to pursue goals that you consider stupid?
We were talking about engineering, but ok.
IBM does more basic science than any other company in the world.. outside Japan. They're also better financed and have institutional knowledge that exceeds most universities by light years. As for government labs, they're good for nuclear research and that's about it.
Umm.. about the only people who are doing space tourism is the russians.. and they are doing it to subsidize their national space program. Maybe soon we'll see Virgin Galactic doing some suborbital space tourism.. and that's being done without a nickle of tax payer funds. So, what, exactly, are you on about?
Why don't we privatize our armed forces next..
Hehe, you don't read the paper much do you? There's a whole lot of contracted "security" firms in Iraq right now being paid by the US government. You might remember some of them were running a prison.. you might remember the atrocities. Ya.
Anyway, space tourism will pay for itself.. give it time.
I know this is a common US principle that is largely ignored in practice, but it's not at all common in the rest of the world. I think it's a good idea.. but, frankly, it's totally irrelevant for rocketry as the governments of the world have decided that rocketry is just too damn awesome for making weapons to be freely able to be published.
Because using american tax dollars to pay russian salaries isn't good economic sense.
Duh.
The world isn't a simple as you make it out to be. Patents and copyrights lock things up, but trade secrets lock them up even more. Government intervention to make people act against their own interests is a never ending spiral. There's no way to mandate that people do good science. It's interesting that you mention national security. Current legislation basically makes good science and engineering in rocketry illegal.. cause any improvement to a rocket is an improvement to the death count of a potential weapon using that rocket. I, personally, care more about the progress of rocketry than I care about the number of potential lives lost in a potential war fought with potential rocket-based weapons in the potential future, but other people think differently.
I've made my side perfectly clear. I think copyright monopolies are just as bad for markets as any other kind of monopoly. I think competitive markets are good things that we should protect. I think Apple has had it too good for too long and their monopolistic tendencies need a serious slap down.
Indeed. And that's why, when asked, Nintendo says it does these things to stop piracy.. not to lock out competitors.
You are required to buy a Honda car if you want to run it with a Honda engine. Honda can take any steps they want to prevent you from running their engines in a Toyota. That is not illegal.
This is what is really annoying about talking about anti-trust stuff with geeks. No, Honda can not.
All this stuff has already been done - in dozens of markets - in the 1800s. It has been made perfectly clear that any action taken by a manufacturer to deliberately break interoperability with competing products is illegal.
In fact, even your exact example has been addressed in US courts. Honda is not required to maintain compatibility with any competitors that are using their engines, but if they make modifications specifically to break competitor's ability to use their engines, then they are engaging in anti-trust action.
It's not hard.
Don't disagree with you.. But Psystar is not selling counterfeits. They're selling clones.
Taking work that someone else spent the time and money to create, then using it to compete against them, is called "being a huge flaming asshole" ...
Economics would disagree with you. Making clones is a normal respectable part of every business.. except ones where the government has granted a monopoly.. and Apple seems to think their copyright monopoly gives them a monopoly over their commodity hardware business too.
The code in the Lexmark cartridges did a heck of a lot more than just stopping competitors. Lexmark lost copyright over the entire program. That's the precedent. Just because you're ignorant of it, doesn't make it not so.