And, of course, the fact that the air teperature goes from cryogenic at night to blast furnace temperatures at day won't effect it at all!
Algae and photosynthetic bacteria already cope with worse conditions. Plus they have nifty dryable mass-packable spores capable of being air dropped by tiny "pathfinder" style spacecraft.
Attempts to mandate traceback will simply fail over time as the various distributed-anonymity projects (Freenet etc) pass version 1.0.
What will have to grow up in the place of guaranteed identity, is the recognition that trust is proportional to identity. ACs must stand on the merits of their data, people hiding behind provable pseudonyms can build a trustworthy reputation, but likely never enough to get credit from a bank, and so on.
People will have to develop thick skins - against anonymous insults and libel, against politics, porn, hate speech, etc, whatever their pet info peeve is. If you don't like it, don't look it up, and if no-one looks for it, it'll drop off the bottom of Freenet.
As to the people who fear free speech will destroy their religion, politics, or agenda: good riddance. Cope or cry.
Identity means that physical objects will always be "scarce" - physical matter is only in one place at a time, take it away and it's no longer there.
However, patterns or forms (data) are not scarce, they can be duplicated and still remain in the original. Data cannot be moved or "taken away", only copied or deleted.
Data is always dependent on physical things, it cannot exist on ts own. This is because it's not a primary existent, it's the interpretation of a pattern in existents.
Rights do not conflict. If something conflicts with a right, it isn't a right.
The justification for physical private property is that it's the material expression of the right to free thought, that it's required for human life but is "scarce", and that a creator is the rightful beneficiary of his own creation.
Private property means the absolute right to do what I wish with my own property, unless I use it to commit force or fraud against someone else.
Intellectual property (IP) means treating data as private property.
Assumptions:
Technology increase will continue indefinately. We will likely reach the point where we have workable nanotech wihin this century.
Technology will eventually make arbitrary manipulation and copying of arbitrary data easy to the point of triviality. Computers do this already with digitized information; nanotech will extend it to physical form.
Conclusions:
IP necessarily violates physical property. It means that I don't have the right to arrange my property into the pattern you "own", even despite the fact that I'm doing so openly (no fraud) and with measurements I obtained fairly (no force).
IP meets none of the justifications of private property. Data you "own" is not necessarily expressed in your material property, so the first justification is irrelevant. Data is not scarce, so the second justification is irrelevant. No-one is forcing you to reveal data unprotected into the public domain, so the third justification is irrelevant.
Enforcing IP will get increasingly hard as the level of tech available to the general public rises. Assuming nanotech plus universal fast-networked computers, there is no practical way to enforce any IP short of having a policeman peering over your shoulder all day, or else banning public access to technology.
Therefore IP is not a right and it's enforcement violates rights.
"Information wants so be free" is a law of nature just like "trade wants to be free" - given a situation of choices, people will route around any restrictions except those that protect their own rights.
Therefore IP is as impossible, long term, as "a mixed economy" or any other such restriction-set.
Counter-arguments rebutted:
"Creators have a right to profit from their ideas" Yes, they do, but not at the expense of my rights. Besides, they can still profit; consensual-contract law allows binding of arbitrary restrictions to released data.
"Contract law is too weak, what if some third party copies it" It is (or should be) plenty strong enough; if the contract binds you not to release the data except under its own terms, then if some third party copies it they're "recieving stolen property" (since you broke contract by letting them) which is already illegal.
"Your right to swing your fist ends at the tip of my nose. Likewise your right to use your property stops when it violates my rights" True, but IP is, as I have shown, not a right. Also, you are not likely even involved in an "IP violation" - it could be me and a third party trading a copy of data from some physical property I already legitimately own.
"If information wants to be free, why will contracts work?" People want contracts enforced because contracts are in effect a protection from the fraud of promising one thing in a trade and then doing another.
...corporations that do such things would be sued and likely have their chief execs jailed for corporate manslaughter. The fact that the legal system lets them get away with it is a government-caused error.
These two "rights" are mutually incompatible. "workplace regulations" for example actually help protect "the right of self ownership."
False. The right to self ownership includes the rihgt to self harm - including by contracting to work for an unsafe employer.
And yes, nearly all private property has changed hands countless times to and fro by theft and force over the years; "the war of all against all" is simply too complex a tangle to ever unwind. The only solution is to declare a truce and leave the property with those who now hold it. In a free system, competent people will rapidly make up the difference, while the incompetent rich will sink back to their own level.
I've given this some thought, and come to the conclusion that "intellectual property" is incompatible with real property or self ownership. This is because it asserts ownership over patterns in things rather than the things themselves. As such it means that to the extent that you can arrange your own property into protected patterns, it stops being your property, and to the extent you arrange your thoughts in those patterns, you lose the right to speak them.
This despite the fact that you are not necessarily harming or cheating anyone - which is the only legitimate reason to restrict your freedom of action - by selling them a copy of this protected pattern.
Hence I conclude: intellectual property is not a right and contradicts a right - ie: it is a Bad Thing.
Jon, corporations are not the danger
on
At The Crossroads
·
· Score: 3
Corporations have no intrinsic power to harm freedom; the power the bad ones wield is government power directed and applied through the legal system.
Forget corporations, stop bashing them, they are a distraction from the real problem which is the fact that the laws themselves do not respect rights.
- Porn laws and piracy laws ignore the right to free speech and thought.
- Decency laws, euthanasia laws and forced self-safety laws ignore the right of self ownership.
- Zoning rules, antitrust, workplace regulations and most taxes or tariffs ignore the right of private property.
Excellent, when can you start coding? Or at least designing the concepts into a codeable specification?
capitalism simply means freedom to choose
on
Censorship In China
·
· Score: 2
Capitalism has little to do with a nation's government. You can have a democracy, a republic, a parliament, a monarchy, even a dictatorship, and still have a capitalist economy.
Totally false. To the extent your nation is unfree, it isn't capitalist. This is because the defining nature of capitalism is that what's yours is yours, what's mine is mine, and neither of us has a right to take without permission - in other words, freedom. Anything that compromises this (tax-and-spend, communism, censorship etc) will commensurately destroy capitalism.
It runs the other way too, nowadays - capitalism left as an option will undermine and erode restrictions of free choice, by shopping around for legal systems - both on the personal and coprorate levels.
This doesn't mean, though, that companies will gain long-term by buying into corrupt regimes that are prepared to make them special exceptions. Such a situation will always backfire on them in time; they'll themselves become victims of a bigger crony, or they'll lose customers when the customers see the law is biased.
Capitalism pushes legal systems everywhere towards "laissez faire" - where the law is for justice, protection, and arbitration, not for restriction, privelige, or looting.
This does leave rather vulnerable should one of your flywheels gunge up and grind to a halt. All of a sudden you've got unexpected gyroscope effects in your car.
Instead of a manual or semi manual hinting evolver, how about going one better and designing an algorithm that can evolve a "most similar looking" shape for any outline font at any pixel size? Thereby removing the need for predesigned hinting at all.
...that does Klingon. How, umm, useful? I wonder what would be the Klingon version of "file! exit! no!" that I could shout to really annoy everyone using it near me;-)
...they just don't understand that morality is useful to them. Unfortunately the decision makers in those corporations proabably still associate morality with that self-destructive BS that gets passed off as morality by religious types (and secular-humanists).
The essence of sane legal morality is that you protect rights, because any system that allows their rights to be broken, allows yours to too, if the political wind changes. Interpersonal morality adds over that: that you don't want to damage yourself by faking reality (which commits you to living a lie).
Once you've grasped those two things, it becomes obvious that it's the selfish thing to do to be moral.
The balkanization of Open Source continues. This won't merge with any existing license (including LessTif's). It's also a tad obnoxious in that you can't use it with commercial OSes, and it has all sorts of scary auto-termination clauses.
IOW: not quite as bad as the SCSL, but still a sneaky attempt to co-opt open source into helping them while still leaving their code isolated.
Although, reading the licence, they've slipped up in that they've provided no way to slurp back up the changes into the official motif, apart from releasing a license upgrade - they've forked their own code. Silly them.
...that they can make it illegal to use MP3 within the current law since they own very broad patents. What nobody can do, without explicitly changing the law, is make Ogg Vorbis illegal.
In fact, given that it is unencumbered and available, who gives a rat's ass about what the sheeple think of it? The source will still be out there.
"Beneath its hope-filled surface, it subliminally encourages people to put themselves ahead of others, to work against them to better oneself, and to treat every opportunity in life as a means of making more money for yourself."
Okay lets invert that:
- people should be encouraged to put themselves down and conform to the crowd
- people should remain frozen and not seek to better themselves
- people should treat every opportunity as a means to lose money
Now you come to see the hateful evil of this stance. The essence of "left" is coercion. Your property isn't yours, it's ours to own for our good. You don't own yourself. You exist to sacrifice yourself for all our wishes and needs.
Don't grow, it will make the stunted people feel their smallness.
Don't own. Everything you have we want, though we have nothing to give you in exchange. But you must esteem our lack as a virtue and hate your plenty as a vice.
Don't produce. But if you must produce, you may'nt have anything you've created, you must sacrifice yourself, your effort, your property to those who can't produce.
Don't think, it will place you above the stupid people. And who are you to tell them they are wrong?
Don't judge, what makes you so moral you can call us immoral?
There's nothing wrong from profiteering!!. Even if J.K. and co were in it purely for the $$$ and the fame, the book would still get out there, putting the info in the hands of the people who need to read it (non-techies). And, if J.K. etc had decided to keep the money, it would be going to the people who had had the inspiration and put in the effort to get the book written, edited, and out there - which is surely the way things should be. If you had wanted to sell your contribution for your own money, you should have done so instead of posting it in a public room. As to "a ruse to take your money" - there's no coercion in a free market and you needn't give up a cent if you don't want to buy it.
Capitalism is good, folks - everyone profits by the freedom of anyone to profit. So lose the automatic attack on money-makers.
Street Performer Protocol
on
RMS On eBooks
·
· Score: 1
People pay in advance. A third party holds the payments in trust. Payments are totalled and the total can be publically viewed. When the payments add up to an agreed figure, the work gets released into the public domain, and the author keeps the money. More complete detail here.
Instant on would not make crashes meaningless. Since the screw-up that caused the crash is also in memory, it would fail again as soon as restarted. You'd need to have some sort of transactional system you could backstep through to a non-crashing point - in effect to CVS a corefile every few seconds. It would be a huge waste of resources. So, in fact a crash would be the case when you *should* go through the slow proper boot process. You'd still lose all your work, and you'd still have to wait awhile, although booting from NV-RAM would be much faster than from hard disk.
First, if you want to a preview of what will be most prevalent on freenet, take a look at what people search for on google etc. Porn, including very extreme porn, is likely to make up a huge fraction of freenet's content.
Second, flooding fails on freenet because the caching system won't distribute your data any further than the server nearest to you. At most it will jam up one server.
Third, freenet is deliberately reticent on the topic of who is doing what with the data - it's designed to prevent any sort of censorship including blackmail-to-behave. As such, keeping any track of users and queries is specifically against design principles.
...the sci-fi universe with the most developed backstory, detailed characterization, realistic society, logical use of available tech, and internal consistency is probably Star Wars.
Slashdot Mirror
And, of course, the fact that the air teperature goes from cryogenic at night to blast furnace temperatures at day won't effect it at all!
Algae and photosynthetic bacteria already cope with worse conditions. Plus they have nifty dryable mass-packable spores capable of being air dropped by tiny "pathfinder" style spacecraft.
Attempts to mandate traceback will simply fail over time as the various distributed-anonymity projects (Freenet etc) pass version 1.0.
What will have to grow up in the place of guaranteed identity, is the recognition that trust is proportional to identity. ACs must stand on the merits of their data, people hiding behind provable pseudonyms can build a trustworthy reputation, but likely never enough to get credit from a bank, and so on.
People will have to develop thick skins - against anonymous insults and libel, against politics, porn, hate speech, etc, whatever their pet info peeve is. If you don't like it, don't look it up, and if no-one looks for it, it'll drop off the bottom of Freenet.
As to the people who fear free speech will destroy their religion, politics, or agenda: good riddance. Cope or cry.
Where was it I've seen that before? Oh, yeah.
Has any of the bright sparks at NASA ever thought of using plants?
Facts:
Identity means that physical objects will always be "scarce" - physical matter is only in one place at a time, take it away and it's no longer there.
However, patterns or forms (data) are not scarce, they can be duplicated and still remain in the original. Data cannot be moved or "taken away", only copied or deleted.
Data is always dependent on physical things, it cannot exist on ts own. This is because it's not a primary existent, it's the interpretation of a pattern in existents.
Rights do not conflict. If something conflicts with a right, it isn't a right.
The justification for physical private property is that it's the material expression of the right to free thought, that it's required for human life but is "scarce", and that a creator is the rightful beneficiary of his own creation.
Private property means the absolute right to do what I wish with my own property, unless I use it to commit force or fraud against someone else.
Intellectual property (IP) means treating data as private property.
Assumptions:
Technology increase will continue indefinately. We will likely reach the point where we have workable nanotech wihin this century.
Technology will eventually make arbitrary manipulation and copying of arbitrary data easy to the point of triviality. Computers do this already with digitized information; nanotech will extend it to physical form.
Conclusions:
IP necessarily violates physical property. It means that I don't have the right to arrange my property into the pattern you "own", even despite the fact that I'm doing so openly (no fraud) and with measurements I obtained fairly (no force).
IP meets none of the justifications of private property. Data you "own" is not necessarily expressed in your material property, so the first justification is irrelevant. Data is not scarce, so the second justification is irrelevant. No-one is forcing you to reveal data unprotected into the public domain, so the third justification is irrelevant.
Enforcing IP will get increasingly hard as the level of tech available to the general public rises. Assuming nanotech plus universal fast-networked computers, there is no practical way to enforce any IP short of having a policeman peering over your shoulder all day, or else banning public access to technology.
Therefore IP is not a right and it's enforcement violates rights.
"Information wants so be free" is a law of nature just like "trade wants to be free" - given a situation of choices, people will route around any restrictions except those that protect their own rights.
Therefore IP is as impossible, long term, as "a mixed economy" or any other such restriction-set.
Counter-arguments rebutted:
"Creators have a right to profit from their ideas"
Yes, they do, but not at the expense of my rights. Besides, they can still profit; consensual-contract law allows binding of arbitrary restrictions to released data.
"Contract law is too weak, what if some third party copies it"
It is (or should be) plenty strong enough; if the contract binds you not to release the data except under its own terms, then if some third party copies it they're "recieving stolen property" (since you broke contract by letting them) which is already illegal.
"Your right to swing your fist ends at the tip of my nose. Likewise your right to use your property stops when it violates my rights"
True, but IP is, as I have shown, not a right. Also, you are not likely even involved in an "IP violation" - it could be me and a third party trading a copy of data from some physical property I already legitimately own.
"If information wants to be free, why will contracts work?"
People want contracts enforced because contracts are in effect a protection from the fraud of promising one thing in a trade and then doing another.
...corporations that do such things would be sued and likely have their chief execs jailed for corporate manslaughter. The fact that the legal system lets them get away with it is a government-caused error.
These two "rights" are mutually incompatible. "workplace regulations" for example actually help protect "the right of self ownership."
False. The right to self ownership includes the rihgt to self harm - including by contracting to work for an unsafe employer.
And yes, nearly all private property has changed hands countless times to and fro by theft and force over the years; "the war of all against all" is simply too complex a tangle to ever unwind. The only solution is to declare a truce and leave the property with those who now hold it. In a free system, competent people will rapidly make up the difference, while the incompetent rich will sink back to their own level.
I've given this some thought, and come to the conclusion that "intellectual property" is incompatible with real property or self ownership. This is because it asserts ownership over patterns in things rather than the things themselves. As such it means that to the extent that you can arrange your own property into protected patterns, it stops being your property, and to the extent you arrange your thoughts in those patterns, you lose the right to speak them.
This despite the fact that you are not necessarily harming or cheating anyone - which is the only legitimate reason to restrict your freedom of action - by selling them a copy of this protected pattern.
Hence I conclude: intellectual property is not a right and contradicts a right - ie: it is a Bad Thing.
Corporations have no intrinsic power to harm freedom; the power the bad ones wield is government power directed and applied through the legal system.
Forget corporations, stop bashing them, they are a distraction from the real problem which is the fact that the laws themselves do not respect rights.
- Porn laws and piracy laws ignore the right to free speech and thought.
- Decency laws, euthanasia laws and forced self-safety laws ignore the right of self ownership.
- Zoning rules, antitrust, workplace regulations and most taxes or tariffs ignore the right of private property.
- And so on.
Excellent, when can you start coding? Or at least designing the concepts into a codeable specification?
Capitalism has little to do with a nation's government. You can have a democracy, a republic, a parliament, a monarchy, even a dictatorship, and still have a capitalist economy.
Totally false. To the extent your nation is unfree, it isn't capitalist. This is because the defining nature of capitalism is that what's yours is yours, what's mine is mine, and neither of us has a right to take without permission - in other words, freedom. Anything that compromises this (tax-and-spend, communism, censorship etc) will commensurately destroy capitalism.
It runs the other way too, nowadays - capitalism left as an option will undermine and erode restrictions of free choice, by shopping around for legal systems - both on the personal and coprorate levels.
This doesn't mean, though, that companies will gain long-term by buying into corrupt regimes that are prepared to make them special exceptions. Such a situation will always backfire on them in time; they'll themselves become victims of a bigger crony, or they'll lose customers when the customers see the law is biased.
Capitalism pushes legal systems everywhere towards "laissez faire" - where the law is for justice, protection, and arbitration, not for restriction, privelige, or looting.
This does leave rather vulnerable should one of your flywheels gunge up and grind to a halt. All of a sudden you've got unexpected gyroscope effects in your car.
Instead of a manual or semi manual hinting evolver, how about going one better and designing an algorithm that can evolve a "most similar looking" shape for any outline font at any pixel size? Thereby removing the need for predesigned hinting at all.
More than a tad.
...that does Klingon. How, umm, useful? I wonder what would be the Klingon version of "file! exit! no!" that I could shout to really annoy everyone using it near me ;-)
...they just don't understand that morality is useful to them. Unfortunately the decision makers in those corporations proabably still associate morality with that self-destructive BS that gets passed off as morality by religious types (and secular-humanists).
The essence of sane legal morality is that you protect rights, because any system that allows their rights to be broken, allows yours to too, if the political wind changes. Interpersonal morality adds over that: that you don't want to damage yourself by faking reality (which commits you to living a lie).
Once you've grasped those two things, it becomes obvious that it's the selfish thing to do to be moral.
The balkanization of Open Source continues. This won't merge with any existing license (including LessTif's). It's also a tad obnoxious in that you can't use it with commercial OSes, and it has all sorts of scary auto-termination clauses.
IOW: not quite as bad as the SCSL, but still a sneaky attempt to co-opt open source into helping them while still leaving their code isolated.
Although, reading the licence, they've slipped up in that they've provided no way to slurp back up the changes into the official motif, apart from releasing a license upgrade - they've forked their own code. Silly them.
...that they can make it illegal to use MP3 within the current law since they own very broad patents. What nobody can do, without explicitly changing the law, is make Ogg Vorbis illegal.
In fact, given that it is unencumbered and available, who gives a rat's ass about what the sheeple think of it? The source will still be out there.
The competition is for mind-share and developer time.
The profit is good programs, kudos, pleasure in work, and commercial spin-offs.
This is not communism, nobody points a gun at your head and says "you're assigned to hack kernel today, comrade".
... invert the sense of what you're attacking.
"Beneath its hope-filled surface, it subliminally encourages people to put themselves ahead of others, to work against them to better oneself, and to treat every opportunity in life as a means of making more money for yourself."
Okay lets invert that:
- people should be encouraged to put themselves down and conform to the crowd
- people should remain frozen and not seek to better themselves
- people should treat every opportunity as a means to lose money
Now you come to see the hateful evil of this stance. The essence of "left" is coercion. Your property isn't yours, it's ours to own for our good. You don't own yourself. You exist to sacrifice yourself for all our wishes and needs.
Don't grow, it will make the stunted people feel their smallness.
Don't own. Everything you have we want, though we have nothing to give you in exchange. But you must esteem our lack as a virtue and hate your plenty as a vice.
Don't produce. But if you must produce, you may'nt have anything you've created, you must sacrifice yourself, your effort, your property to those who can't produce.
Don't think, it will place you above the stupid people. And who are you to tell them they are wrong?
Don't judge, what makes you so moral you can call us immoral?
Don't be good, or you will expose our evil
Think about it.
There's nothing wrong from profiteering!!. Even if J.K. and co were in it purely for the $$$ and the fame, the book would still get out there, putting the info in the hands of the people who need to read it (non-techies). And, if J.K. etc had decided to keep the money, it would be going to the people who had had the inspiration and put in the effort to get the book written, edited, and out there - which is surely the way things should be. If you had wanted to sell your contribution for your own money, you should have done so instead of posting it in a public room. As to "a ruse to take your money" - there's no coercion in a free market and you needn't give up a cent if you don't want to buy it.
Capitalism is good, folks - everyone profits by the freedom of anyone to profit. So lose the automatic attack on money-makers.
People pay in advance. A third party holds the payments in trust. Payments are totalled and the total can be publically viewed. When the payments add up to an agreed figure, the work gets released into the public domain, and the author keeps the money. More complete detail here.
Take a look here at a wired news article all about a silicon valley CEO with a very strong ethical approach - if not the one you might be expecting.
Instant on would not make crashes meaningless. Since the screw-up that caused the crash is also in memory, it would fail again as soon as restarted. You'd need to have some sort of transactional system you could backstep through to a non-crashing point - in effect to CVS a corefile every few seconds. It would be a huge waste of resources. So, in fact a crash would be the case when you *should* go through the slow proper boot process. You'd still lose all your work, and you'd still have to wait awhile, although booting from NV-RAM would be much faster than from hard disk.
Some replies:
First, if you want to a preview of what will be most prevalent on freenet, take a look at what people search for on google etc. Porn, including very extreme porn, is likely to make up a huge fraction of freenet's content.
Second, flooding fails on freenet because the caching system won't distribute your data any further than the server nearest to you. At most it will jam up one server.
Third, freenet is deliberately reticent on the topic of who is doing what with the data - it's designed to prevent any sort of censorship including blackmail-to-behave. As such, keeping any track of users and queries is specifically against design principles.
...the sci-fi universe with the most developed backstory, detailed characterization, realistic society, logical use of available tech, and internal consistency is probably Star Wars.