Besides your nitpicking (money is the thing that you exchange for that food and tickets) you are clearly not aware of what goes into creating a creative work. Do you think that books just write themselves or movies just appear on the screen? Copyrights are not money for nothing. They are money rewarding somebody for spending a large amount of time creating something for somebody else to enjoy. As someone who is both a musician and an author on the site I can tell you that creative pursuits can be just as much work as anything else. Some of my favorite novels are historical fiction. Do you know how much work goes into something like that?
If you take away IP protection you actually destroy innovation and sharing. Let's say I develop a personal transporter ala Star Trek. Now if I have IP protection I can sell that technology to the world and eventually the patents will run out and everybody can have an affordable transporter. If I don't have protection then maybe I will make a few for my close friends but I am going to keep it very close because once it gets out anybody can build one and all my work is for nothing.
Does that make sense? It is hard to express everything in these damn little boxes. I should just write an article and be done with it.
I am trying to understand what you are saying. You are saying that IP is fine for commercial use but individuals who don't intend to sell the book shouldn't be protected? So you are saying that if I write a book and distribute it freely over the internet you can take that book and put it under your name and sell it commercially? That doesn't seem very fair.
No one is saying that sharing should be illegal. I am just saying that I should be rewarded for creating a truly original unique work that takes me years to create. Some authors spend years researching and writing a book. They travel around the world, they spend hours in libraries, the interview dozens of people all to bring you something to read on the train or bus home. Do they not deserve to sell their work?
I agree that the patent system needs work but I also recognize that they are severely understaffed and I don't see anybody increasing their budget in the years to come. That means it is up to the court system to invalidate these patents.
I would also like to know what of my original post was "delusional" since it was merely a statement of mostly facts.
First of all I think you need to get away from the "intellectual property" idea. The phrase is nothing more than an invention. The three concepts that the phrase encompasses are Trademarks, Copyrights and Patents.
The first - Trademarks - is typically the least attacked of the three. The theory of trademarks makes sense. I make my own ice cream and if I wanted to sell it I couldn't call it Breyers because it would deceive the customer. The only time trademarks get troublesome is when a company tries to expand their reach of their patents. The courts have done a pretty good job of keeping this under control, though.
Copyrights are only controversial because they have been stretched and manipulated so many times to almost make them perpetual. I think a lot of people would agree that compensating an author, musician, etc. for years worth of work is a bad thing. The real problem comes when money grubbing corporations take over and the real artists end up with only a small percentage.
Finally, patents are the new whipping boy. Business process patents that cover apparently common sense ideas and the companies who use them as their primary source of income are ridiculous but somewhere in the idea of patents is some value. I am not a big fan of the segway but something like that is definitely patentable. The only other defense of patents is that they are at least finite.
Having said all that. If you eliminate IP you would throw this country into a depression like none it has ever seen. I know the company I work for (~100,000 employees) would not exist without it and that goes for most companies. Those movies you enjoy? Gone. That book you are reading? Maybe not gone but not widely distributed. That TV show you are watching? Well imagine it more like the shows you see on public access.
Money is makes this world go round. No one has been able to create a perfect Communist society. You know why? Because that's what most people want.
Re-read the article. He specifically says a side project learning to speak Welsh. It doesn't say "study" Welsh. I am pretty sure you can learn Welsh anywhere.
This is a new standard to replace the old standard being created by the same association (PCMCIA) as the old standard. This new standard will allow gigabit ethernet on a card and will be much slimmer than the old cards. They are also talking about making it built into slimline desktops.
It typically takes two years full time and that includes a summer internship. That is with 15 credits a semester. Alan is a smart guy and he might try to scrunch that together more. It depends on where he is getting the degree, of coures. The 3 plus years you are thinking about are executive or part-time MBA's that only have two classes per semester.
I'd be pretty willing to wager that you don't have years on me. The point is EXACTLY how much your employer pays. Any moron who read my post could do the math and see what is being picked up by the employer. Contrary to your kindergarten experience - I worked as an auditor of Employee benefit plans for one of the Big 6 (now Big 4). I know very well how expensive it is for an employer. That's why temps and consultants are so popular.
My point, for the unintelligent masses, is that until you have a working established business you don't usually have health care. You usually go without until you can afford the premiums. As I said before, my girlfriend is going through this exact process right this minute. Healthcare is a huge obstacle to going out on your own. That is why the original poster asked about what do you do for healthcare.
I would also point out that the self-employed do not work about worker's comp, vacation time, etc. unless they have employees which is not something discussed at all here.
Who modded up this 15 year old troll? Maybe you should take a look at the difference in cost before you start spewing. I pay about $30/month at work. If my self-employed girlfriend tried to get insurance it is closer to $300/month. That is more than $3,000 a year extra you would have to pay. That can be a very serious entry barrier for people who are barely paying the bills as it is.
I think what he means is that if copyright didn't exist people would be much more careful about how and where they publish something they created. If I wrote a book and there was no such thing as copyright I might only print one copy and lend it to friends only so that somebody else doesn't take it and claim it as their own. That would mean the rest of the world would miss out on what might be a great work.
The fact that copyrights expire is not an afterthought as you make it seem. Here is the applicable quote from the Constitution:
"The Congress shall have the power. . . To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries. ..[emphasis mine]"
It is quite clear that the Founding Fathers fully intended copyrights to expire.
Right now it is just a few sites but I have seen the number of sites using this method triple in the last few months. All it takes is one company to step up and come up with a way around it. As someone in another post said Microsoft has started to do this by detecting Braille on the persons machine. I think this is also a great opportunity for the open-source community to step up.
So you are saying that blind people are not allowed to vote for the All Star Game (first site to came to mind when I read this). That doesn't seem very fair to me. Baseball is a great example of something that blind people can enjoy almost as much as a sighted person. Your analogy of a car is silly because you wouldn't expect a blind person to drive in the first place. You would expect them to surf the web, listen to baseball, and vote on the All Star game.
Now I understand that baseball is not life-threatening but it is just an example. I think you would feel differently if you or someone you loved was blind.
Sometimes I think it is ok to exagerrate the urgency of a problem. People were predicting that Y2K would be the end of the world which was probably a little extreme (picture Simpsons episode with plains falling straight out of the sky). Did it help get stuff done, though? Definitely. So now you tell the executives that the world will end if we don't go to IPv6 and see what happens. Who cares if the truth is 2 or 10 years away.
I don't think I can ever make you understand but I will try. A freedom is not limited only to things you find acceptable. Defining freedom can not be subjective. What may be hate to you may be common sense to another person. If I stand on a soapbox and say that the President is any idiot and needs to be removed from office, as many have, would you have me arrested for hate speech? What if instead I said that all Democrats and idiotic bleeding-heart liberals? What if I instead said that all blacks are ignorant fried-chicken eaters?
In my opinion those are all hateful statements. I personally don't agree with any of them but I will die protecting the right for them to be said (paraphrased from Voltaire).
Let me try another example. Take the following quote:
"The Jewish youth lies in wait for hours on end spying on the unsuspicious German girl he plans to seduce. He wants to contaminate her blood and remove her from the bosom of her own people. The Jew hates the white race and wants to lower its cultural level so that the Jews might dominate."
Is that hateful? I don't think many would argue that it is anything less than despicable. That was written by Hitler in Mein Kampf. Since that is hateful speech would you have the book removed from libraries and maybe even burned?
What if instead somebody said this:
"I would never date a black man because I think they're inferior."
What do you think of that? What if it was a black woman who said it? Should that person be arrested if they said it to a friend in the street? How about if they said it on national TV? Where is the line there?
So I have three questions for you:
1) Who decides what is hateful? Where is the dividing line between expressing an opinion and expressing hate?
2) In what situations is it ok to express hate? To one person? To a dozen? To a crowd of hundreds?
3) How do you handle written hate? Do you burn the books (much like Hitler did) or do you just ban them?
If you read the article it repeatedly refers to NASA and the other international partners. NASA just happens to be what is the largest and most well known space administration.
No reason to start an anti-American thread for this.
Well then you are just as bad as the hatemonger. If he is inciting a riot that is one thing but somebody who is just standing on the corner shouting hate speech has the same right to be there as a person standing on the corner preaching religion. The 1st amendment freedom of expression does not say that you have to like or that it has to have a positive result.
I truly hope that you never run for office. People like you make me ill.
"Aware at the same time that it may not be necessary to extend the right of reply to non-professional on-line media whose influence on public opinion is limited; "
I don't think that many weblog scould be considered professional or influencing of public opinion.
Anytime a company uses their status as the largest company in the country and number 1 music distributor to force another company to create two versions of a cd or otherwise not sell any version is a pretty bad thing.
Imagine if Microsoft told a game company that it wouldn't allow its games to work in Windows unless they censored it. Now that games company could tell Microsoft to go f themselves but that would mean losing a huge amount of sales. Instead they would suck up the extra cost of producing two versions.
Seems to me we have played this game before but here we go:
censor - to examine in order to suppress or delete anything considered objectionable
Used in a sentence:
Walmart uses their huge market strength to force the creation of censored versions of cd's. This censorship is often against the will of the artist but is a necessity if the label doesn't want to lose its largest distributor.
The system is very simple. Joe Schmoe signs up and gets his name on the DNC list. If you are a telemarketer you buy the list from the FTC. You run that list against your database and where there is a match you delete the person. If you don't then you are liable.
The end. I don't know why you are making it seem so complicated. The FTC won't care where you got your list from. It is the calling company's responsibility to check the list against the DNC list. I would start here for more info - The National "Do Not Call" Registry
The mailman has to stop at every house whether you have mail or not so that he can pick up outgoing mail. That is just the way it works. The absence of bulk mail wouldn't change that.
Each rules is basically one less step for the post office to perform. Each less step reduces the cost of bulk mail.
You are suggesting something totally different. You try to tell the American public that they will only get mail 2 or 3 times or week. I think you will find that most people would not like that. Especially little old Miss Marple who relies on the mailman picking up her outgoing mail instead of going to the post office.
I also am not sure what your scope of important is but I receive checks in my regular mail all the time. It is bad enough that the bank takes up to 5 days to clear it now I have to wait an extra couple of days to actually get it?
The current service works with a very great level of success at a very low level of cost to the users of the system. I am not sure why we should change it at all.
Sorry. I forgot to address your offtopic priority mail comment. Priority mail does not guarantee delivery dates and it states that clearly in the ad. I would also argue that registered mail is much more intensive then what most parcel carriers offer.
You should also not use Postal Watch as you main reference. Their business is finding something wrong with a service that has something like 94% satisfaction. It is in their best interest to manipulate facts enough to make something seem more interesting than it is.
Slashdot Mirror
Besides your nitpicking (money is the thing that you exchange for that food and tickets) you are clearly not aware of what goes into creating a creative work. Do you think that books just write themselves or movies just appear on the screen? Copyrights are not money for nothing. They are money rewarding somebody for spending a large amount of time creating something for somebody else to enjoy. As someone who is both a musician and an author on the site I can tell you that creative pursuits can be just as much work as anything else. Some of my favorite novels are historical fiction. Do you know how much work goes into something like that?
If you take away IP protection you actually destroy innovation and sharing. Let's say I develop a personal transporter ala Star Trek. Now if I have IP protection I can sell that technology to the world and eventually the patents will run out and everybody can have an affordable transporter. If I don't have protection then maybe I will make a few for my close friends but I am going to keep it very close because once it gets out anybody can build one and all my work is for nothing.
Does that make sense? It is hard to express everything in these damn little boxes. I should just write an article and be done with it.
I am trying to understand what you are saying. You are saying that IP is fine for commercial use but individuals who don't intend to sell the book shouldn't be protected? So you are saying that if I write a book and distribute it freely over the internet you can take that book and put it under your name and sell it commercially? That doesn't seem very fair.
No one is saying that sharing should be illegal. I am just saying that I should be rewarded for creating a truly original unique work that takes me years to create. Some authors spend years researching and writing a book. They travel around the world, they spend hours in libraries, the interview dozens of people all to bring you something to read on the train or bus home. Do they not deserve to sell their work?
I agree that the patent system needs work but I also recognize that they are severely understaffed and I don't see anybody increasing their budget in the years to come. That means it is up to the court system to invalidate these patents.
I would also like to know what of my original post was "delusional" since it was merely a statement of mostly facts.
First of all I think you need to get away from the "intellectual property" idea. The phrase is nothing more than an invention. The three concepts that the phrase encompasses are Trademarks, Copyrights and Patents.
The first - Trademarks - is typically the least attacked of the three. The theory of trademarks makes sense. I make my own ice cream and if I wanted to sell it I couldn't call it Breyers because it would deceive the customer. The only time trademarks get troublesome is when a company tries to expand their reach of their patents. The courts have done a pretty good job of keeping this under control, though.
Copyrights are only controversial because they have been stretched and manipulated so many times to almost make them perpetual. I think a lot of people would agree that compensating an author, musician, etc. for years worth of work is a bad thing. The real problem comes when money grubbing corporations take over and the real artists end up with only a small percentage.
Finally, patents are the new whipping boy. Business process patents that cover apparently common sense ideas and the companies who use them as their primary source of income are ridiculous but somewhere in the idea of patents is some value. I am not a big fan of the segway but something like that is definitely patentable. The only other defense of patents is that they are at least finite.
Having said all that. If you eliminate IP you would throw this country into a depression like none it has ever seen. I know the company I work for (~100,000 employees) would not exist without it and that goes for most companies. Those movies you enjoy? Gone. That book you are reading? Maybe not gone but not widely distributed. That TV show you are watching? Well imagine it more like the shows you see on public access.
Money is makes this world go round. No one has been able to create a perfect Communist society. You know why? Because that's what most people want.
Re-read the article. He specifically says a side project learning to speak Welsh. It doesn't say "study" Welsh. I am pretty sure you can learn Welsh anywhere.
This is a new standard to replace the old standard being created by the same association (PCMCIA) as the old standard. This new standard will allow gigabit ethernet on a card and will be much slimmer than the old cards. They are also talking about making it built into slimline desktops.
It typically takes two years full time and that includes a summer internship. That is with 15 credits a semester. Alan is a smart guy and he might try to scrunch that together more. It depends on where he is getting the degree, of coures. The 3 plus years you are thinking about are executive or part-time MBA's that only have two classes per semester.
I'd be pretty willing to wager that you don't have years on me. The point is EXACTLY how much your employer pays. Any moron who read my post could do the math and see what is being picked up by the employer. Contrary to your kindergarten experience - I worked as an auditor of Employee benefit plans for one of the Big 6 (now Big 4). I know very well how expensive it is for an employer. That's why temps and consultants are so popular.
My point, for the unintelligent masses, is that until you have a working established business you don't usually have health care. You usually go without until you can afford the premiums. As I said before, my girlfriend is going through this exact process right this minute. Healthcare is a huge obstacle to going out on your own. That is why the original poster asked about what do you do for healthcare.
I would also point out that the self-employed do not work about worker's comp, vacation time, etc. unless they have employees which is not something discussed at all here.
Who modded up this 15 year old troll? Maybe you should take a look at the difference in cost before you start spewing. I pay about $30/month at work. If my self-employed girlfriend tried to get insurance it is closer to $300/month. That is more than $3,000 a year extra you would have to pay. That can be a very serious entry barrier for people who are barely paying the bills as it is.
I think what he means is that if copyright didn't exist people would be much more careful about how and where they publish something they created. If I wrote a book and there was no such thing as copyright I might only print one copy and lend it to friends only so that somebody else doesn't take it and claim it as their own. That would mean the rest of the world would miss out on what might be a great work.
.[emphasis mine]"
The fact that copyrights expire is not an afterthought as you make it seem. Here is the applicable quote from the Constitution:
"The Congress shall have the power. . . To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries. .
It is quite clear that the Founding Fathers fully intended copyrights to expire.
Right now it is just a few sites but I have seen the number of sites using this method triple in the last few months. All it takes is one company to step up and come up with a way around it. As someone in another post said Microsoft has started to do this by detecting Braille on the persons machine. I think this is also a great opportunity for the open-source community to step up.
So you are saying that blind people are not allowed to vote for the All Star Game (first site to came to mind when I read this). That doesn't seem very fair to me. Baseball is a great example of something that blind people can enjoy almost as much as a sighted person. Your analogy of a car is silly because you wouldn't expect a blind person to drive in the first place. You would expect them to surf the web, listen to baseball, and vote on the All Star game.
Now I understand that baseball is not life-threatening but it is just an example. I think you would feel differently if you or someone you loved was blind.
Sometimes I think it is ok to exagerrate the urgency of a problem. People were predicting that Y2K would be the end of the world which was probably a little extreme (picture Simpsons episode with plains falling straight out of the sky). Did it help get stuff done, though? Definitely. So now you tell the executives that the world will end if we don't go to IPv6 and see what happens. Who cares if the truth is 2 or 10 years away.
I don't think I can ever make you understand but I will try. A freedom is not limited only to things you find acceptable. Defining freedom can not be subjective. What may be hate to you may be common sense to another person. If I stand on a soapbox and say that the President is any idiot and needs to be removed from office, as many have, would you have me arrested for hate speech? What if instead I said that all Democrats and idiotic bleeding-heart liberals? What if I instead said that all blacks are ignorant fried-chicken eaters?
In my opinion those are all hateful statements. I personally don't agree with any of them but I will die protecting the right for them to be said (paraphrased from Voltaire).
Let me try another example. Take the following quote:
"The Jewish youth lies in wait for hours on end spying on the unsuspicious German girl he plans to seduce. He wants to contaminate her blood and remove her from the bosom of her own people. The Jew hates the white race and wants to lower its cultural level so that the Jews might dominate."
Is that hateful? I don't think many would argue that it is anything less than despicable. That was written by Hitler in Mein Kampf. Since that is hateful speech would you have the book removed from libraries and maybe even burned?
What if instead somebody said this:
"I would never date a black man because I think they're inferior."
What do you think of that? What if it was a black woman who said it? Should that person be arrested if they said it to a friend in the street? How about if they said it on national TV? Where is the line there?
So I have three questions for you:
1) Who decides what is hateful? Where is the dividing line between expressing an opinion and expressing hate?
2) In what situations is it ok to express hate? To one person? To a dozen? To a crowd of hundreds?
3) How do you handle written hate? Do you burn the books (much like Hitler did) or do you just ban them?
I look forward to your response.
If you read the article it repeatedly refers to NASA and the other international partners. NASA just happens to be what is the largest and most well known space administration.
No reason to start an anti-American thread for this.
Well then you are just as bad as the hatemonger. If he is inciting a riot that is one thing but somebody who is just standing on the corner shouting hate speech has the same right to be there as a person standing on the corner preaching religion. The 1st amendment freedom of expression does not say that you have to like or that it has to have a positive result.
I truly hope that you never run for office. People like you make me ill.
They admit it was a stretch but it was a stretch in the right direction.
I am sure I am missing your meaning here. You are saying that you think it is a good idea to stretch a law to arrest somebody just for preaching hate?
Ignore my comment. I found the edited latest version.
According to the draft:
"Aware at the same time that it may not be necessary to extend the right of reply to non-professional on-line media whose influence on public opinion is limited; "
I don't think that many weblog scould be considered professional or influencing of public opinion.
Anytime a company uses their status as the largest company in the country and number 1 music distributor to force another company to create two versions of a cd or otherwise not sell any version is a pretty bad thing.
Imagine if Microsoft told a game company that it wouldn't allow its games to work in Windows unless they censored it. Now that games company could tell Microsoft to go f themselves but that would mean losing a huge amount of sales. Instead they would suck up the extra cost of producing two versions.
Seems to me we have played this game before but here we go:
censor - to examine in order to suppress or delete anything considered objectionable
Used in a sentence:
Walmart uses their huge market strength to force the creation of censored versions of cd's. This censorship is often against the will of the artist but is a necessity if the label doesn't want to lose its largest distributor.
I think what walmart might do is lower their prices so much that local stores can't compete. I think this is called outsourcing?
The phrase you are looking for is predatory pricing and Walmart has been accused of it many times.
Outsourcing is when you hire an outside company to perform job functions that would normally be performed internally - such as payroll, legal, etc.
The system is very simple. Joe Schmoe signs up and gets his name on the DNC list. If you are a telemarketer you buy the list from the FTC. You run that list against your database and where there is a match you delete the person. If you don't then you are liable.
The end. I don't know why you are making it seem so complicated. The FTC won't care where you got your list from. It is the calling company's responsibility to check the list against the DNC list. I would start here for more info - The National "Do Not Call" Registry
The mailman has to stop at every house whether you have mail or not so that he can pick up outgoing mail. That is just the way it works. The absence of bulk mail wouldn't change that.
Each rules is basically one less step for the post office to perform. Each less step reduces the cost of bulk mail.
You are suggesting something totally different. You try to tell the American public that they will only get mail 2 or 3 times or week. I think you will find that most people would not like that. Especially little old Miss Marple who relies on the mailman picking up her outgoing mail instead of going to the post office.
I also am not sure what your scope of important is but I receive checks in my regular mail all the time. It is bad enough that the bank takes up to 5 days to clear it now I have to wait an extra couple of days to actually get it?
The current service works with a very great level of success at a very low level of cost to the users of the system. I am not sure why we should change it at all.
Sorry. I forgot to address your offtopic priority mail comment. Priority mail does not guarantee delivery dates and it states that clearly in the ad. I would also argue that registered mail is much more intensive then what most parcel carriers offer.
You should also not use Postal Watch as you main reference. Their business is finding something wrong with a service that has something like 94% satisfaction. It is in their best interest to manipulate facts enough to make something seem more interesting than it is.