Why is somone who is not democratically elected, in a political office.
Oh, you mean like ALL the senators, ALL the judiciary, the directors (or assistant directors) of any number of agencies, and the various executives of any number of crown corporations? But yes, let's worry about the governor general, who's basically a rubber stamp anyway and whose biggest impact in the well-being of Canadians is if she spends money out of her ass like the last governor general. Which will STILL be a drop in the bucket compared to all the money wasted by our elected officials in the last 10 years.
The implicit idea behind this balance between innovators and the beneficiaries of innovation is that the innovator has some kind of natural right to her innovation
I would say that is neither implicit nor explicit. It certainly isn't what I believe, and it's not what I got from reading Greenspan's speech.
The rights an innovator possesses to her innovation are solely created by law, ostensibly to motivate her to develop more innovations.
That sounds more like what I got from it, although that implies it isn't a right, but a privelege.
Now, back to the top of your comment. How does one promote the useful arts and sciences? The premise behind IP law is that you give a government-mandated monopoly for some period of time in order to recoup your costs, make a profit, and have some time to devote towards what may be another useful invention. Without that protection, you often see 3 things occur. The first, you already mentioned - those who create for the love of creating keep on doing it (so long as they can afford it, and often in their spare time). The second is, they create things but keep them secret, often to the detriment of society. The history of obstetrical forceps is a good example of the consequences of this attitude (although patents may not have changed their creator's minds). The third option is where brilliant minds decide to turn their attention elsewhere that they can make a living, possibly to the detriment of society in general.
Your stance makes two assumptions. First, that those with the talent to create probably will whether they can see a financial payout at the end or not. Second, for those exceptions, that someone else who is equally talented will come along soon enough and invent it if that greedy inventor hadn't been there in the first place. I find both those assumptions to be unlikely at best, and catastrophic in the right historical setting.
I have to say, I read both pages you linked to (at least where they started talking about intellectual property), and I can't say I disagree with him, at least from an economic standpoint. If you have a moral objection to IP, he probably won't sway you much. Let's look at a few of his statements.
"Whether we protect intellectual property as an inalienable right or as a privilege vouchsafed by the sovereign, such protection inevitably entails making some choices that have crucial implications for the balance we strike between the interests of those who innovate and those who would benefit from innovation." A balance between the benefit of society and the benefit of the inventor? I can live with that. I have no problem with giving someone enough time to make good on their idea before all the me-toos jump on the bandwagon. Where that balance lies is the crucial thing, though.
"Of particular current relevance to our economy overall is the application of property right protection to information technology. A noticeable component of the surge in the trend growth of the economy in recent years arguably reflects the synergy of laser and fiber optic technologies in the 1960s and 1970s." Uh oh, he's talking about IP in the IT world, almost sounds scary. But his next statement is about hardware, and highly technical hardware no less. This is the closest he gets to talking about software patents. I'd love to hear him address that issue specifically, but so far, I can't disagree. IT has often piggy-backed on the IP of other areas, most notably because it's usually implemented as an abstract (virtual, if you prefer) version of a physical object. Other times it's because of the improvements of physical items that has increased the capacity of equipment used in the IT world.
"The dramatic gains in information technology have markedly improved the ability of businesses to identify and address incipient economic imbalances before they inflict significant damage. These gains reflect new advances in both the physical and the conceptual realms. It is imperative to find the appropriate intellectual property regime for each." That sounds suspiciously like "IP needs different protections for physical inventions versus conceptual inventions, and different rules may apply" to me. Again, an astute observation, and more obvious from an economic standpoint than most others. The IT world behaves differently than much of the physical world - why would we expect treating them the same to work without problems?
That's just a few of the things he has to say. I strongly recommend anyone who is concerned about IP, especially the economic impact of IP, read that speech. He's pointing the way to both criteria to test if IP law is effective, and means to formulate a solution to any problems found in IP law. If you can't get rid of IP law altogether (and I'm not sure I want to), at least arguments like his could guide us towards a more rational implementation. And all in an economic fashion, which matters far more to government than opinions, feelings, or ideals these days.
Like I always say, "If you want to keep a secret, don't tell anyone." Or it's corollary, "I only trust me and you, and I'm not sure about you..."
If you don't people to know shit, don't record it, whether in writing, email, audio, or anything else. Otherwise there is the risk it will come back to haunt you.
While I can see the value of knowing the specs for the complete OS you're running, why stop at just the OS? It takes far more than that to run many applications. Shall we start calling our various packages GNU+Linux+XWindows+KDE+WINE? It seems a little absurd to me. And why would RMS deserve more credit than any of the other elements in the rich framework of the Linux OS? When it comes down to it, the pervasiveness of the GNU tools in the *nix world makes adding the prefix to OSes more redundant, not less. At least I know some of the basic characteristics of the OS I'm running when I hear "*Linux" versus "*BSD". Tacking a few more letters in there isn't helping me much.
It just makes no sense for the name to be where the credit is given. Let's use cars for an analogy. For instance, the Mazda RX7. Most people wouldn't say "I have a Mazda RX7." More like "I have a Mazda" or "I have an RX7", or even "I have a 1998 RX7" (if such a year exists). Just like people say "I run Linux" or "I run Red Hat" or "I run Fedora Core 4". All the information is there. In the case of cars, when I hear "RX7", I know it's made by Mazda, it's a sport car, and it has a rotary engine. Sure, if someone asks, you might learn that the car is red with a black leather interior, but there's no need to put that in the name, either (even if the leather is Italian). But don't worry, when I get the receipt, or the manual, all that information is there. Right where it's needed.
And about your disingenuous comment about MS. They don't call Windows MS Windows. They call it Windows, just like the example above. Sure, it's a 1998 Mazda RX7, but that's year, make, and model. Just like MS Windows XP SP2 is brand, OS, major version, and minor version. And MS makes the name, and chooses the branding because they make the distribution, and that's what copyright allows. IF RMS wants to follow in their footsteps and require that GNU be mentioned wherever it's used, he'll just have to make his own distribution or remove the freedom currently in place in the license he helped create.
Don't get me wrong. I'm impressed with the work RMS has done, both in software development and in the legal framework that surrounds it. His work speaks for itself. But perhaps it's time he just ackowledged that Linus filled in the last critical gap in providing a free OS, and let it go. I look forward to the day when there's a GNU OS (Hurd is a part of GNU, after all, and it would be redundant to call it GNU/Hurd;) that he and the FSF can call whatever they want. Even GNU/Hurd, for all its redundancy.
Where exactly does the GPL (or anything else in the business or software world) require you to give credit to someone via the naming of a product? I've said it before and I'll say it again. AFAIK, there's nothing to stop me from forking every GNU project and giving it my own asinine name. If there is, it certainly isn't the GPL.
That said, I have no problem using whatever name the various distros choose for their package. Fedora Core Linux? Sure. Debian GNU/Linux? Why not. Windows XP SP2? Yep, MS distributes that. It's their package, they can call it what they want. If they want to tip their hat to rms (Linux distros, not MS, obviously), good for them. If they don't, that's fine, too. That's what freedom is all about, and something that rms, and you, would do well to remember.
And if you're talking about the OS instead of the package, I don't know of any that aren't built on GNU software, so the mention of such is redundant.
"Successful open voting systems that are cheaper, easier to manage, and more transparent than proprietary systems can be found in Australia, Canada, Estonia, and other places."
You know it's getting bad when the Americans need to start looking to Estonia for tools to build a better democracy...
You sir, are a leech. You want a product for free, not because of a moral issue, a desire for community support, accessible developers, or any other OS reason. No, you want an OS product because your greedy little heart wants something for free.
If you don't like the Open Source license, I hear there are other ones where you can require that the users support the (sometimes large, often rather small) community that develops it. [/sarcasm]
I think you need to re-read the definition on freedom, buddy. It's doing what I want, not what you want.
Perhaps you should go to your local library and read the news from about 40 years ago. Your parents' (or perhaps your own) contemporaries were doing the same thing that's happening in the Mid-east, the difference being color instead of religion. That's right, American tolerance could be said to be no more than 40 years ahead of the tolerance of some small portion of Muslims (assuming this was pretty much the last time, which I don't believe). There are still places in the U.S. where being the wrong color (and it could be any color, not just black) in the wrong area will get you killed. When it gets right down to it, if you take any cross-section of society, you're going to find nuts in it, whether it be muslims, christians, athiests, pro-choice, pro-life, black, white, educated, uneducated, rich, poor. So point the finger at who is to blame - the nuts, not the people of some semi-random cross-section of society.
Some scientific theories can be proven, usually ones in the pure sciences, such as mathematics, and are a small minority of the scientific field. In fact, it's considered a big deal when a long-standing mathematical formula without a proof gets proven or disproven.
Oprah lost all credibility to me outside of the talk show/human interest realm when she had a role in Beloved. I had the misfortune of seeing far too much of that movie, never even completed it, didn't pay to see it, and still felt like I should have gotten a refund. I'm sure you can find it on IMDB, but damned if I'm going to risk seeing any more of it. If her taste in books is as discriminating as her taste in movie roles, her approval will never be more than a footnote in my decision-making process for selecting reading material.
...until I can drop my e-book in the bathtub without ill effects...
Having dropped my share of paper books in a bathtub, I wouldn't say it comes without ill effects. Perhaps less disastrous than with an e-book, but not something I'd do for fun.
But we can make gold with heavy metals and the essence of the sun. Where do you think all the gold (and other heavy metals) came from? We can also do it with a smaller-scale apparatus that only mimics part of the solar environment, the cyclotron.
How about the benefits of both, as well? Can land in moderate winds, can fly relatively slowly for patrolling (or S&R), fast enough to meet current freight delivery times, greater operational times than helicopters, less requirements for infrastructure between cities (if used as the primary freight transportation system), likely a cheaper cost of operation than current blimp designs, smaller runway requirements than standard airplaces.
It's not made to replace airplanes, and not necessarily to replace trucks, but it does a good job of filling the gaps in traditional transportation systems. Also, for non-traditional issues, imagine if prefab housing could have been dropped off right beside a highway outside New Orleans last year? Instant emergency housing with no need to wait around all the backed up traffic. Too implausible? How about food? They have a whole page of ideas like this, many of which are feasible.
I don't think they're going to put anyone out of business next year, but they could very well take over new markets before others even had the chance to move in.
If modifications were required to include extra luggage (capacities of which I've never used on a plane), I doubt they would halve your mileage, which is what would be required to make this even somewhat relevant. I doubt the little aerodynamic luggage carrier trailers would reduce mileage by more than 25%.
The poor choices of people in general doesn't alter the fact that they're better off flying than using those vehicles for any kind of travelling (where alternatives exist), or that they're better off buying a more efficient vehicle in the first place.
Should have stopped looking at the pictures and read a little. It's a heavier-than-air craft, and requires a runway to take off and land. Much of the body is a lifting surface, as are the wings. Doubtless take-off (and maybe landing?) space is very small with no cargo.
My dad's Jetta gets about 60 mpg and carries 4 people relatively comfortably. That's 240 person-miles per gallon, with no waiting or transportation to the airport on either end, or the requirement of taxis or car rentals at either end. I wouldn't say a plane is exactly more economical for group flights, or shorter flights. Solitary passengers, or long trips, would certainly favour air travel.
Okay, I'm confused. When we ask a scientist who invented quantum theory, does the probability wave collapse and leave us with the right answer, or does each scientist we ask count as a different observation (giving us the chance for a different probability wave collapse)? And if we don't ask any scientists, are they (Planck, Heisenberg, Pauli, Dirac, Schrodinger, Einstein) all the single founder of QT? Hmm...
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm, reminds me of Picasso and, say, a naked lady. All the parts are there, but the context is all wrong....
"Mike Tyson, VP of Software Sales for XXXX, sucessfully defends World Patent Championship belt"
I'm guessing that if he was employeed by the RIAA biting ears would be mandatory.
Why is somone who is not democratically elected, in a political office.
Oh, you mean like ALL the senators, ALL the judiciary, the directors (or assistant directors) of any number of agencies, and the various executives of any number of crown corporations? But yes, let's worry about the governor general, who's basically a rubber stamp anyway and whose biggest impact in the well-being of Canadians is if she spends money out of her ass like the last governor general. Which will STILL be a drop in the bucket compared to all the money wasted by our elected officials in the last 10 years.
The implicit idea behind this balance between innovators and the beneficiaries of innovation is that the innovator has some kind of natural right to her innovation
I would say that is neither implicit nor explicit. It certainly isn't what I believe, and it's not what I got from reading Greenspan's speech.
The rights an innovator possesses to her innovation are solely created by law, ostensibly to motivate her to develop more innovations.
That sounds more like what I got from it, although that implies it isn't a right, but a privelege.
Now, back to the top of your comment. How does one promote the useful arts and sciences? The premise behind IP law is that you give a government-mandated monopoly for some period of time in order to recoup your costs, make a profit, and have some time to devote towards what may be another useful invention. Without that protection, you often see 3 things occur. The first, you already mentioned - those who create for the love of creating keep on doing it (so long as they can afford it, and often in their spare time). The second is, they create things but keep them secret, often to the detriment of society. The history of obstetrical forceps is a good example of the consequences of this attitude (although patents may not have changed their creator's minds). The third option is where brilliant minds decide to turn their attention elsewhere that they can make a living, possibly to the detriment of society in general.
Your stance makes two assumptions. First, that those with the talent to create probably will whether they can see a financial payout at the end or not. Second, for those exceptions, that someone else who is equally talented will come along soon enough and invent it if that greedy inventor hadn't been there in the first place. I find both those assumptions to be unlikely at best, and catastrophic in the right historical setting.
I have to say, I read both pages you linked to (at least where they started talking about intellectual property), and I can't say I disagree with him, at least from an economic standpoint. If you have a moral objection to IP, he probably won't sway you much. Let's look at a few of his statements.
"Whether we protect intellectual property as an inalienable right or as a privilege vouchsafed by the sovereign, such protection inevitably entails making some choices that have crucial implications for the balance we strike between the interests of those who innovate and those who would benefit from innovation." A balance between the benefit of society and the benefit of the inventor? I can live with that. I have no problem with giving someone enough time to make good on their idea before all the me-toos jump on the bandwagon. Where that balance lies is the crucial thing, though.
"Of particular current relevance to our economy overall is the application of property right protection to information technology. A noticeable component of the surge in the trend growth of the economy in recent years arguably reflects the synergy of laser and fiber optic technologies in the 1960s and 1970s." Uh oh, he's talking about IP in the IT world, almost sounds scary. But his next statement is about hardware, and highly technical hardware no less. This is the closest he gets to talking about software patents. I'd love to hear him address that issue specifically, but so far, I can't disagree. IT has often piggy-backed on the IP of other areas, most notably because it's usually implemented as an abstract (virtual, if you prefer) version of a physical object. Other times it's because of the improvements of physical items that has increased the capacity of equipment used in the IT world.
"The dramatic gains in information technology have markedly improved the ability of businesses to identify and address incipient economic imbalances before they inflict significant damage. These gains reflect new advances in both the physical and the conceptual realms. It is imperative to find the appropriate intellectual property regime for each." That sounds suspiciously like "IP needs different protections for physical inventions versus conceptual inventions, and different rules may apply" to me. Again, an astute observation, and more obvious from an economic standpoint than most others. The IT world behaves differently than much of the physical world - why would we expect treating them the same to work without problems?
That's just a few of the things he has to say. I strongly recommend anyone who is concerned about IP, especially the economic impact of IP, read that speech. He's pointing the way to both criteria to test if IP law is effective, and means to formulate a solution to any problems found in IP law. If you can't get rid of IP law altogether (and I'm not sure I want to), at least arguments like his could guide us towards a more rational implementation. And all in an economic fashion, which matters far more to government than opinions, feelings, or ideals these days.
Like I always say, "If you want to keep a secret, don't tell anyone." Or it's corollary, "I only trust me and you, and I'm not sure about you..."
If you don't people to know shit, don't record it, whether in writing, email, audio, or anything else. Otherwise there is the risk it will come back to haunt you.
While I can see the value of knowing the specs for the complete OS you're running, why stop at just the OS? It takes far more than that to run many applications. Shall we start calling our various packages GNU+Linux+XWindows+KDE+WINE? It seems a little absurd to me. And why would RMS deserve more credit than any of the other elements in the rich framework of the Linux OS? When it comes down to it, the pervasiveness of the GNU tools in the *nix world makes adding the prefix to OSes more redundant, not less. At least I know some of the basic characteristics of the OS I'm running when I hear "*Linux" versus "*BSD". Tacking a few more letters in there isn't helping me much.
;) that he and the FSF can call whatever they want. Even GNU/Hurd, for all its redundancy.
It just makes no sense for the name to be where the credit is given. Let's use cars for an analogy. For instance, the Mazda RX7. Most people wouldn't say "I have a Mazda RX7." More like "I have a Mazda" or "I have an RX7", or even "I have a 1998 RX7" (if such a year exists). Just like people say "I run Linux" or "I run Red Hat" or "I run Fedora Core 4". All the information is there. In the case of cars, when I hear "RX7", I know it's made by Mazda, it's a sport car, and it has a rotary engine. Sure, if someone asks, you might learn that the car is red with a black leather interior, but there's no need to put that in the name, either (even if the leather is Italian). But don't worry, when I get the receipt, or the manual, all that information is there. Right where it's needed.
And about your disingenuous comment about MS. They don't call Windows MS Windows. They call it Windows, just like the example above. Sure, it's a 1998 Mazda RX7, but that's year, make, and model. Just like MS Windows XP SP2 is brand, OS, major version, and minor version. And MS makes the name, and chooses the branding because they make the distribution, and that's what copyright allows. IF RMS wants to follow in their footsteps and require that GNU be mentioned wherever it's used, he'll just have to make his own distribution or remove the freedom currently in place in the license he helped create.
Don't get me wrong. I'm impressed with the work RMS has done, both in software development and in the legal framework that surrounds it. His work speaks for itself. But perhaps it's time he just ackowledged that Linus filled in the last critical gap in providing a free OS, and let it go. I look forward to the day when there's a GNU OS (Hurd is a part of GNU, after all, and it would be redundant to call it GNU/Hurd
The main problem is, what are people going to use them for?
I'm guessing about half will go to the latest version of Windows and Office.
Where exactly does the GPL (or anything else in the business or software world) require you to give credit to someone via the naming of a product? I've said it before and I'll say it again. AFAIK, there's nothing to stop me from forking every GNU project and giving it my own asinine name. If there is, it certainly isn't the GPL.
That said, I have no problem using whatever name the various distros choose for their package. Fedora Core Linux? Sure. Debian GNU/Linux? Why not. Windows XP SP2? Yep, MS distributes that. It's their package, they can call it what they want. If they want to tip their hat to rms (Linux distros, not MS, obviously), good for them. If they don't, that's fine, too. That's what freedom is all about, and something that rms, and you, would do well to remember.
And if you're talking about the OS instead of the package, I don't know of any that aren't built on GNU software, so the mention of such is redundant.
"Successful open voting systems that are cheaper, easier to manage, and more transparent than proprietary systems can be found in Australia, Canada, Estonia, and other places."
You know it's getting bad when the Americans need to start looking to Estonia for tools to build a better democracy...
You sir, are a leech. You want a product for free, not because of a moral issue, a desire for community support, accessible developers, or any other OS reason. No, you want an OS product because your greedy little heart wants something for free.
If you don't like the Open Source license, I hear there are other ones where you can require that the users support the (sometimes large, often rather small) community that develops it. [/sarcasm]
I think you need to re-read the definition on freedom, buddy. It's doing what I want, not what you want.
Perhaps you should go to your local library and read the news from about 40 years ago. Your parents' (or perhaps your own) contemporaries were doing the same thing that's happening in the Mid-east, the difference being color instead of religion. That's right, American tolerance could be said to be no more than 40 years ahead of the tolerance of some small portion of Muslims (assuming this was pretty much the last time, which I don't believe). There are still places in the U.S. where being the wrong color (and it could be any color, not just black) in the wrong area will get you killed. When it gets right down to it, if you take any cross-section of society, you're going to find nuts in it, whether it be muslims, christians, athiests, pro-choice, pro-life, black, white, educated, uneducated, rich, poor. So point the finger at who is to blame - the nuts, not the people of some semi-random cross-section of society.
This poster now applies to MS Security Despair. It's nice when your business model depends on you screwing up.
Some scientific theories can be proven, usually ones in the pure sciences, such as mathematics, and are a small minority of the scientific field. In fact, it's considered a big deal when a long-standing mathematical formula without a proof gets proven or disproven.
Also, generalizations are usually wrong.
Oprah lost all credibility to me outside of the talk show/human interest realm when she had a role in Beloved. I had the misfortune of seeing far too much of that movie, never even completed it, didn't pay to see it, and still felt like I should have gotten a refund. I'm sure you can find it on IMDB, but damned if I'm going to risk seeing any more of it. If her taste in books is as discriminating as her taste in movie roles, her approval will never be more than a footnote in my decision-making process for selecting reading material.
Q: What happens when trolls go prefessional?
A: They run for Congress.
And the corollary. Politicians are born with this statement: "That was fun. The only thing that could make it better is getting paid for it..."
I erred in my head, I should have had 363.(63)* repeating...It's not like I was scheduling a fly-by for Saturn's moons or anything.
And a good thing, too. With an error like that instead of doing a fly-by of Saturn's moons, that gorilla would have slammed into Uranus!
...until I can drop my e-book in the bathtub without ill effects...
Having dropped my share of paper books in a bathtub, I wouldn't say it comes without ill effects. Perhaps less disastrous than with an e-book, but not something I'd do for fun.
But we can make gold with heavy metals and the essence of the sun. Where do you think all the gold (and other heavy metals) came from? We can also do it with a smaller-scale apparatus that only mimics part of the solar environment, the cyclotron.
How about the benefits of both, as well? Can land in moderate winds, can fly relatively slowly for patrolling (or S&R), fast enough to meet current freight delivery times, greater operational times than helicopters, less requirements for infrastructure between cities (if used as the primary freight transportation system), likely a cheaper cost of operation than current blimp designs, smaller runway requirements than standard airplaces.
It's not made to replace airplanes, and not necessarily to replace trucks, but it does a good job of filling the gaps in traditional transportation systems. Also, for non-traditional issues, imagine if prefab housing could have been dropped off right beside a highway outside New Orleans last year? Instant emergency housing with no need to wait around all the backed up traffic. Too implausible? How about food? They have a whole page of ideas like this, many of which are feasible.
I don't think they're going to put anyone out of business next year, but they could very well take over new markets before others even had the chance to move in.
If modifications were required to include extra luggage (capacities of which I've never used on a plane), I doubt they would halve your mileage, which is what would be required to make this even somewhat relevant. I doubt the little aerodynamic luggage carrier trailers would reduce mileage by more than 25%.
Besides, you've never seen my mother pack.
The poor choices of people in general doesn't alter the fact that they're better off flying than using those vehicles for any kind of travelling (where alternatives exist), or that they're better off buying a more efficient vehicle in the first place.
Should have stopped looking at the pictures and read a little. It's a heavier-than-air craft, and requires a runway to take off and land. Much of the body is a lifting surface, as are the wings. Doubtless take-off (and maybe landing?) space is very small with no cargo.
My dad's Jetta gets about 60 mpg and carries 4 people relatively comfortably. That's 240 person-miles per gallon, with no waiting or transportation to the airport on either end, or the requirement of taxis or car rentals at either end. I wouldn't say a plane is exactly more economical for group flights, or shorter flights. Solitary passengers, or long trips, would certainly favour air travel.
Okay, I'm confused. When we ask a scientist who invented quantum theory, does the probability wave collapse and leave us with the right answer, or does each scientist we ask count as a different observation (giving us the chance for a different probability wave collapse)? And if we don't ask any scientists, are they (Planck, Heisenberg, Pauli, Dirac, Schrodinger, Einstein) all the single founder of QT? Hmm...