Movies are not rated by the government: they are rated by the MPAA, ostensibly voluntarily. Private companies choosing to participate in the rating system is NOT censorship in the legal sense.
True censorship can be committed only by a government, since you can't very easily choose to patronize another government if yours does something you don't like. Yes, you can move, but anywhere you move, you are locked into some set of policy choices much smaller than the power set of potential policies.
This is, incidentally, a classic libertarian argument for limiting the power of government (a non-competitive entity, by definition).
This is so ridiculously deluded from a libertarian perspective, I'm not even going to touch it, other than to tell people to think about whether they REALLY want to pay for other peoples' network access.
This scheme completely ignores the difference in value of content, and assumes that every page is "worth" a penny. I know I would pay a lot more for a page of the Wall Street Journal, say, than for a page of goatse.cx.
Why can't we just let the market decide how much something is actually worth? If a site is good enough, people will pay to get at its content, though certainly not as many. That's the tradeoff for sites that decide to charge, and many of them are willing to accept this.
Am I wrong when I tell people that not everyone in the free software movement is a communist?
Seriously, the "Bill of Rights" article brings up some interesting points, but some of its assumptions are ridiculous. The right to work and to a living wage? Who is supposed to provide these jobs and wages in a world without incentive? That's what the writer seems to be advocating by suggesting that class differences are somehow wrong.
So, who else? The government? Yeah, that sounds like a good idea: reduce government power by increasing government power.
It seems the best way to reduce government intervention in our lives is to make it far less relevant. Restrict federal government power to foreign defense, and you'll see far fewer violations of our civil liberties.
Sanity returns once again to the government. Maybe now we (the free software community) can all get back to the business of beating Microsoft in the marketplace, instead of running to daddy DOJ whenever we want him to beat someone up.
> Patent law was a condition, an agreement, where people would
> forsake their rights to do as they wanted in effort to reward creation. This is obviously,
> especially in this case NOT a 'fair deal'. People are dying -> your profit 'right' ceases.
> Simple.
So, now that pharmecutical companies know there is no profit in making life-saving drugs, far fewer such drugs will be developed. Thus, you will have a far greater likelihood of dying from something that could have been cured. Simple.
You can't repeal the law of supply and demand. If there's no profit potential in something, the free market will not produce it, and it will have to emerge (much more slowly) from charity.
The bottom line is that anyone who understands how the free market works and who values life will support intellectual property and limited monopolies on life-saving inventions. In destroying IP for just those things that people need because "making profit off the suffering of others' is wrong," they're just prolonging the suffering.
I know I would rather take the chance of not being able to afford the cure for a particular disease for 20 years after the cure was found (the monopoly period) than cause the cure never to be found by supporting illogical social policies that villify the free market at the expense of progress.
To all of you who think you're taking the moral high-ground by opposing profit from life-saving inventions: "I was right" will make a great epitaph.
"You will disparage all trademark, copyright, and patent claims, except those owned by the things I like: namely, Linux."
Really, people: develop some consistency. As Slashdot's political leanings (leftist statist Commie pinko hypocrisy) become more evident, I find myself reading less and less. It's really sad that this forum has become the sounding board for some really misinformed politics.
I know others have said it, but no one has given it enough importance: Apple is a high-margin dinosaur in a low-margin market. Computers are commodities, and Apple's attempt to decommoditize their systems by making them "unique" in some way just isn't going to work for the masses.
If they're content with selling to the ever-dwindling Mac-loving $80k income crowd, that's fine; they should then abandon all hope of reaching the rest of us who want the best computing for the lowest cost. I have been using PC's since 1984, and although I have often thought, "That's a cool looking case!", that thought never once even influenced my decision on what to buy.
Most people don't care about cute when it comes to computers. A computer is a tool that you ignore when you're not using it. About the only useful innovation Apple had they didn't execute well enough on: the fanless case.
Cheap, reliable, compatible: AMD chips, ABIT motherboards, brand X RAM, WD IDE hard drives. A computer more powerful than the Cube for less than half the cost. No-brainer.
They really should give up on hardware. Apple's true strength lies in software and user interfaces, but I don't expect the market for end-user software to be fruitful for very long, so in the end it looks like they'll be SOL anyway.
Well, so the problem is that MS pays taxes just like you do. (Of course, corporations don't really pay taxes; only people do, but under our legal system, it doesn't matter.) So they should have full rights to the software, just as you do. IMO, all federally-funded software should be placed in the public domain, despite how much I like the GPL.
...have the government return the $225 million to the taxpayers, along with most of the rest of the budget, instead of spending it on crap designed to socially engineer a nanny state and dependent public. At least push most of it down to the state level so I can choose to live in a state where government does only that which it can do well: enforce the laws (in particular, contract law) and provide a judiciary for resolving conflicts between parties.
(1) A(n optional) method "this()" that returns some pointer-like object to be used as the "this" variable in method calls. Guess what this would allow? No-in-place garbage collection. Imagine being able to move an object around in memory inside a callstack in which the object is being accessed.
(2) Interface separation from inheritance, like "implements" in ML or Java. I would like to be able to specify an interface that a compliant class needs to follow to be passed as a parameter to my function, without requiring the author of that class to ever have heard of my function. This can't be done with inheritance, because the author of that class would need to have known about your interface (read: base class) in advance.
(1) Medical research is required by law to immediately enter the public domain. All for-profit efforts to perform medical research immediately grind to a halt. The cures for cancer, MS, diabetes, AIDS come in 500 years instead of 15 years.
(2) Medical research is patentable. Companies scramble to find cures for all those diseases, because they know they will have proprietary rights to them for 20 years. After the 15 years of research and the 20 years under patent, it enters the public domain.
So, which scenario do you prefer? (1), in which people die for the next 500 years from these diseases? Or (2), in which most get to benefit in 15 years, and the rest in 35? Being that I'll be around 60 in 35 years, I know which one I prefer.
Don't devalue patents. Although the terms may be inappropriate in some fields (20 years for a software patent? Sheesh...), the intent is to increase public knowledge by leveraging free-market demands. It's a good system, and it has been proven to work time and time again.
I hate smoking just as much as the next non-smoker, but restaurants are NOT public places. They are private establishments whose rules should be set by the owners, not by the government. You have the choice not to patronize establishments that permit smoking: the wonderful thing about a free market economy is that no sufficient demand will ever go unmet for long, so if enough people want non-smoking restaurants, they will appear.
Stop trying to get the government into everything, people. We need _less_ government intervention into our lives, not more. Quoth Reagan: "Government is not the solution to our problem; government IS the problem."
Trailers are typically made with music that has nothing to do with the final movie's actual soundtrack. Witness a recent trailer (can't remember which movie it was for) using some of the music from Braveheart.
Acoustic Energy Aegis Center
Acoustic Energy Aegis Front Satellites
Paradigm Atom Rear Satellites
Hsu Research VTF-2 subwoofer
The entire system performs excellently. The total cost for me was $2400, but (a) it's likely you can get the parts for less, and (b) you can probably substitute out the front satellites for something cheaper, or cut out the $500 sub, which really isn't necessary with satellites of this quality.
SS can be looked at as a form of insurance against living too long. Originally, SS benefits kicked in at one year after the average age of death: the idea being, you were expected to be able to support yourself for as long as you expected to live, but if you wound up living to 90 instead of 65, you wouldn't be left on the street.
Nowadays, since SS isn't tied to the average age of death, we have a pyramid scheme that's about to fall apart, since the top of the pyramid is getting too large: SS only works when there are more people working than retiring. This has to change.
The best thing to do would be to again tie it to the average death age: make the entitement age slowly move from 65 (???) toward the average death age, over a period of 30 years. This way, people would have enough advance warning to save up for the amount they're _not_ going to get from SS.
> It's time to end the hysterical equation of
> socialism to communism and the Soviet Union.
IMO, it's time to stop attacking those who don't support even moderate socialism by equating us to Cold War-era dinosaurs. Some of us simply dislike socialism on principle, as it inevitably leads to stagnation and large pockets of complacent parasitism.
No, free-market capitalism isn't "fair" either: life isn't fair, and people just have to deal with that. However, regulation almost invariably makes things worse. Case in point: the minimum wage sounds like a _great_ idea, except in practice when it reduces productivity, increases average salaries, and leads to stagflation, which causes people to scream, "Increase the minimum wage!"
In a "swing state," I would vote for Bush (capital gains tax must go down, socialism must be defeated at any cost, yada yada...), but seeing as I'm in Massachusetts, the second most liberal state in the Union, I will vote my conscience: Harry Browne of the Libertarian Party.
It's actually quite amazing, but logical, that the LP is making huge inroads in "one-party" jurisdictions like MA and DC: these are people like me who are fiscally conservative but socially liberal (and scared of the GOP's faith-based, pro-life agenda).
I guess people like me are also pissed off that the GOP has basically "given in" on a lot of traditionally Democratic issues: e.g., instead of talking about how to shore-up SS, we should instead be talking about how to rid ourselves of it.
Health Insurance companies are for-profit, generally. They exist to make their shareholders money. Therefore, whatever there is demand for, they will provide.
What is driving this scenario is DEMAND: low-risk individuals, who constitute the majority, demand lower premiums. The insurance companies realize they can make a bigger profit this way by denying coverage to high-risk individuals. Now, the technology exists to actually do this type of screening.
What I see happening is exactly what _should_ happen:
(1) Low-risk individuals will pay less.
(2) Medium-risk individuals will pay more.
(3) High-risk individuals will be unable to obtain health insurance.
Perhaps this will entice geneticists and technologists into fixing the problem at the source, now that we have the technology to do so. Having a healthier population is not a bad thing, and presumably if we can screen for a defective gene, we can also repair it before fertilization.
Ever get the feeling you were born a bit early?
on
Ready-To-Wear PCs
·
· Score: 1
The possibilities are nearly limitless for social interaction once you can carry the internet with you and engage in some form of "close" network interaction a la CarNet, but without a keyboard, monitor, or any other kind of artificial input or output device.
Lain was certainly disturbing at times, but losing one's self in the Wired for a night and being able to choose your appearance and attire and possibly alter your personality would make things a whole lot more interesting than a typical nightclub. Just a thought....
Thankfully, economics suggests a limited number of large SUV's on the road. So, we don't need to worry about everyone even owning a regular SUV, much less a "super SUV."
Slashdot Mirror
Movies are not rated by the government: they are rated by the MPAA, ostensibly voluntarily. Private companies choosing to participate in the rating system is NOT censorship in the legal sense.
True censorship can be committed only by a government, since you can't very easily choose to patronize another government if yours does something you don't like. Yes, you can move, but anywhere you move, you are locked into some set of policy choices much smaller than the power set of potential policies.
This is, incidentally, a classic libertarian argument for limiting the power of government (a non-competitive entity, by definition).
This is so ridiculously deluded from a libertarian perspective, I'm not even going to touch it, other than to tell people to think about whether they REALLY want to pay for other peoples' network access.
This scheme completely ignores the difference in value of content, and assumes that every page is "worth" a penny. I know I would pay a lot more for a page of the Wall Street Journal, say, than for a page of goatse.cx.
Why can't we just let the market decide how much something is actually worth? If a site is good enough, people will pay to get at its content, though certainly not as many. That's the tradeoff for sites that decide to charge, and many of them are willing to accept this.
Kyle
Am I wrong when I tell people that not everyone in the free software movement is a communist?
Seriously, the "Bill of Rights" article brings up some interesting points, but some of its assumptions are ridiculous. The right to work and to a living wage? Who is supposed to provide these jobs and wages in a world without incentive? That's what the writer seems to be advocating by suggesting that class differences are somehow wrong.
So, who else? The government? Yeah, that sounds like a good idea: reduce government power by increasing government power.
It seems the best way to reduce government intervention in our lives is to make it far less relevant. Restrict federal government power to foreign defense, and you'll see far fewer violations of our civil liberties.
Sanity returns once again to the government. Maybe now we (the free software community) can all get back to the business of beating Microsoft in the marketplace, instead of running to daddy DOJ whenever we want him to beat someone up.
> Patent law was a condition, an agreement, where people would
> forsake their rights to do as they wanted in effort to reward creation. This is obviously,
> especially in this case NOT a 'fair deal'. People are dying -> your profit 'right' ceases.
> Simple.
So, now that pharmecutical companies know there is no profit in making life-saving drugs, far fewer such drugs will be developed. Thus, you will have a far greater likelihood of dying from something that could have been cured. Simple.
You can't repeal the law of supply and demand. If there's no profit potential in something, the free market will not produce it, and it will have to emerge (much more slowly) from charity.
The bottom line is that anyone who understands how the free market works and who values life will support intellectual property and limited monopolies on life-saving inventions. In destroying IP for just those things that people need because "making profit off the suffering of others' is wrong," they're just prolonging the suffering.
I know I would rather take the chance of not being able to afford the cure for a particular disease for 20 years after the cure was found (the monopoly period) than cause the cure never to be found by supporting illogical social policies that villify the free market at the expense of progress.
To all of you who think you're taking the moral high-ground by opposing profit from life-saving inventions: "I was right" will make a great epitaph.
"You will disparage all trademark, copyright, and patent claims, except those owned by the things I like: namely, Linux."
Really, people: develop some consistency. As Slashdot's political leanings (leftist statist Commie pinko hypocrisy) become more evident, I find myself reading less and less. It's really sad that this forum has become the sounding board for some really misinformed politics.
Kyle
I know others have said it, but no one has given it enough importance: Apple is a high-margin dinosaur in a low-margin market. Computers are commodities, and Apple's attempt to decommoditize their systems by making them "unique" in some way just isn't going to work for the masses.
If they're content with selling to the ever-dwindling Mac-loving $80k income crowd, that's fine; they should then abandon all hope of reaching the rest of us who want the best computing for the lowest cost. I have been using PC's since 1984, and although I have often thought, "That's a cool looking case!", that thought never once even influenced my decision on what to buy.
Most people don't care about cute when it comes to computers. A computer is a tool that you ignore when you're not using it. About the only useful innovation Apple had they didn't execute well enough on: the fanless case.
Cheap, reliable, compatible: AMD chips, ABIT motherboards, brand X RAM, WD IDE hard drives. A computer more powerful than the Cube for less than half the cost. No-brainer.
They really should give up on hardware. Apple's true strength lies in software and user interfaces, but I don't expect the market for end-user software to be fruitful for very long, so in the end it looks like they'll be SOL anyway.
Well, so the problem is that MS pays taxes just like you do. (Of course, corporations don't really pay taxes; only people do, but under our legal system, it doesn't matter.) So they should have full rights to the software, just as you do. IMO, all federally-funded software should be placed in the public domain, despite how much I like the GPL.
Because Jon Katz doesn't like it, I'll probably go see it.
...have the government return the $225 million to the taxpayers, along with most of the rest of the budget, instead of spending it on crap designed to socially engineer a nanny state and dependent public. At least push most of it down to the state level so I can choose to live in a state where government does only that which it can do well: enforce the laws (in particular, contract law) and provide a judiciary for resolving conflicts between parties.
(1) A(n optional) method "this()" that returns some pointer-like object to be used as the "this" variable in method calls. Guess what this would allow? No-in-place garbage collection. Imagine being able to move an object around in memory inside a callstack in which the object is being accessed.
(2) Interface separation from inheritance, like "implements" in ML or Java. I would like to be able to specify an interface that a compliant class needs to follow to be passed as a parameter to my function, without requiring the author of that class to ever have heard of my function. This can't be done with inheritance, because the author of that class would need to have known about your interface (read: base class) in advance.
Kyle
Here are your choices:
(1) Medical research is required by law to immediately enter the public domain. All for-profit efforts to perform medical research immediately grind to a halt. The cures for cancer, MS, diabetes, AIDS come in 500 years instead of 15 years.
(2) Medical research is patentable. Companies scramble to find cures for all those diseases, because they know they will have proprietary rights to them for 20 years. After the 15 years of research and the 20 years under patent, it enters the public domain.
So, which scenario do you prefer? (1), in which people die for the next 500 years from these diseases? Or (2), in which most get to benefit in 15 years, and the rest in 35? Being that I'll be around 60 in 35 years, I know which one I prefer.
Don't devalue patents. Although the terms may be inappropriate in some fields (20 years for a software patent? Sheesh...), the intent is to increase public knowledge by leveraging free-market demands. It's a good system, and it has been proven to work time and time again.
Kyle
> not in a public [family] restaraunt.
I hate smoking just as much as the next non-smoker, but restaurants are NOT public places. They are private establishments whose rules should be set by the owners, not by the government. You have the choice not to patronize establishments that permit smoking: the wonderful thing about a free market economy is that no sufficient demand will ever go unmet for long, so if enough people want non-smoking restaurants, they will appear.
Stop trying to get the government into everything, people. We need _less_ government intervention into our lives, not more. Quoth Reagan: "Government is not the solution to our problem; government IS the problem."
Trailers are typically made with music that has nothing to do with the final movie's actual soundtrack. Witness a recent trailer (can't remember which movie it was for) using some of the music from Braveheart.
Acoustic Energy Aegis Center
Acoustic Energy Aegis Front Satellites
Paradigm Atom Rear Satellites
Hsu Research VTF-2 subwoofer
The entire system performs excellently. The total cost for me was $2400, but (a) it's likely you can get the parts for less, and (b) you can probably substitute out the front satellites for something cheaper, or cut out the $500 sub, which really isn't necessary with satellites of this quality.
Kyle
Me fail English? That's unpossible!
SS can be looked at as a form of insurance against living too long. Originally, SS benefits kicked in at one year after the average age of death: the idea being, you were expected to be able to support yourself for as long as you expected to live, but if you wound up living to 90 instead of 65, you wouldn't be left on the street.
Nowadays, since SS isn't tied to the average age of death, we have a pyramid scheme that's about to fall apart, since the top of the pyramid is getting too large: SS only works when there are more people working than retiring. This has to change.
The best thing to do would be to again tie it to the average death age: make the entitement age slowly move from 65 (???) toward the average death age, over a period of 30 years. This way, people would have enough advance warning to save up for the amount they're _not_ going to get from SS.
Kyle
> It's time to end the hysterical equation of
> socialism to communism and the Soviet Union.
IMO, it's time to stop attacking those who don't support even moderate socialism by equating us to Cold War-era dinosaurs. Some of us simply dislike socialism on principle, as it inevitably leads to stagnation and large pockets of complacent parasitism.
No, free-market capitalism isn't "fair" either: life isn't fair, and people just have to deal with that. However, regulation almost invariably makes things worse. Case in point: the minimum wage sounds like a _great_ idea, except in practice when it reduces productivity, increases average salaries, and leads to stagflation, which causes people to scream, "Increase the minimum wage!"
In a "swing state," I would vote for Bush (capital gains tax must go down, socialism must be defeated at any cost, yada yada...), but seeing as I'm in Massachusetts, the second most liberal state in the Union, I will vote my conscience: Harry Browne of the Libertarian Party.
It's actually quite amazing, but logical, that the LP is making huge inroads in "one-party" jurisdictions like MA and DC: these are people like me who are fiscally conservative but socially liberal (and scared of the GOP's faith-based, pro-life agenda).
I guess people like me are also pissed off that the GOP has basically "given in" on a lot of traditionally Democratic issues: e.g., instead of talking about how to shore-up SS, we should instead be talking about how to rid ourselves of it.
Health Insurance companies are for-profit, generally. They exist to make their shareholders money. Therefore, whatever there is demand for, they will provide.
What is driving this scenario is DEMAND: low-risk individuals, who constitute the majority, demand lower premiums. The insurance companies realize they can make a bigger profit this way by denying coverage to high-risk individuals. Now, the technology exists to actually do this type of screening.
What I see happening is exactly what _should_ happen:
(1) Low-risk individuals will pay less.
(2) Medium-risk individuals will pay more.
(3) High-risk individuals will be unable to obtain health insurance.
Perhaps this will entice geneticists and technologists into fixing the problem at the source, now that we have the technology to do so. Having a healthier population is not a bad thing, and presumably if we can screen for a defective gene, we can also repair it before fertilization.
The possibilities are nearly limitless for social interaction once you can carry the internet with you and engage in some form of "close" network interaction a la CarNet, but without a keyboard, monitor, or any other kind of artificial input or output device.
Lain was certainly disturbing at times, but losing one's self in the Wired for a night and being able to choose your appearance and attire and possibly alter your personality would make things a whole lot more interesting than a typical nightclub. Just a thought....
and freenet, and whatever other mechanisms exist for distributing files. Let them know that the court decision means nothing to real life.
As much as I'd like to believe everything will be okay, this is a real loss for fair use. Hopefully they will win on appeal.
Thankfully, economics suggests a limited number of large SUV's on the road. So, we don't need to worry about everyone even owning a regular SUV, much less a "super SUV."