You are confused. The original poster implied (to me, at least) that there should be NO copyright at all. My reply, of course, compounded the problem by implying to others that copyright should be perpetual. The original poster, it seems (see later posts in this thread) did not want to do away with all copyright protection, but does think that the DMCA extensions were bad policy, a point that I do agree with.
Could someone explain where the Libertarians stand on this issue? They have a <understatement> strong </understatement> belief in property rights, but do they consider a new idea to be property to be protected, or do they agree with Thomas Jefferson that there is no such right to an idea for exactly the reasons described by the parent post. This whole issue is central to the problem of Information Economics where there is a market failure since a free market will produce too few ideas if property rights cannot be enforced or do not exist. Copyright only imperfectly solves this problem. I am curious how the Libertarians address this problem.
they see the public domain as a system the steal works legaly fromt he creators....
coupled with your 2nd comment:
perhaps they should not have created copyright so that creators would create out of love and not greed.
as a belief that there should be no copyright at all. That would be a disaster for creativity. Authors do have to eat and pay bills. Perhaps you might have taken a moment to lay out a case for why putting something into the public domain is A GoodThing(tm) and not theft rather than calling the public ignorant for not believing what you believe.
I like the declaration of rights as far as it goes, but I should have been for going further. For instance, the following alterations and additons would have pleased me... Article 9. Monopolies may be allowed to persons for their own productions in literature, and their own inventions in the arts, for a term not exceeding ___ years, but for no longer term, and for no other purpose.
Letter from Jefferson to James Madison, 1789
The ___ years is in there because Jefferson hasn't figured out what that term should be.
Certainly an inventor ought to be allowed a right to the benefit of his invention for some certain time. It is equally certain it ought not to be perpetual; for to embarrass society with monopolies for every utensil existing, and in all the details of life, would be more injurious to them than had the supposed inventors never existed; because the natural understanding of its members would have suggested the same things or others as good. How long the term should be, is the difficult question. Our legislators have copied the English estimate of the term, perhaps without sufficiently considering how much longer, in a country so much more sparsely settled, it
takes for an invention to become known, and used to an extent profitable to the inventor. Nobody wishes more than I do that ingenuity should receive a liberal encouragement.
Letter from Jefferson to Oliver Evans, 1807
In a series of letters between Jefferson and James Madison (Madison as well as George Washington supported copyrights) prior to the adoption of the Bill of Rights, Jefferson agreed that a limited term for copyrights was OK. Jefferson's difficulty lay in figuring out what that limit should be. He tried to solve the problem at one point by basing the length of the term on statistical mortality tables, arriving at a term of 19 years. Using Jefferson's formula with today's actuarial tables results in a term of 30-35 years.
I doubt that you (the_2nd_coming) have more than a superficial understanding of Jefferson's views based on sound bites rather than real research.
If you care about this issue and want to really educate yourself about it, there is a whole branch of Economics known as Information Economics that tries to understand the effects of copyright and other IP protections. Try this for a very quick intro.
That does so much to convice others of the merits of your position. Someday, when you have a mortgage to pay and a wife and kids to feed and put through college, you will better understand mine.
You are right. We, the ignorant public, just don't get it. Someone worked very hard to write the music, book, whatever. You did nothing. And yet you believe that you are entitled to the benefits of that work without paying anything for those benefits. Nope, we just don't get it.
I laughed at my father years ago in my leftist youth when he told me an old quote variously attributed to Churchill, Clemanceau, Shaw, Russell, and Disraeli:
Any man who is not a socialist at age 20 has no heart.
Any man who is still a socialist at age 40 has no head.
However, once the copyright has been effectively relinquished by the author, either by actual sale of the copyright or by granting of exclusive licenses to a corporation, there is little rational reason for a copyright term more than ten years, at least if you think the purpose of copyright is to reward authors. Events more than ten years out simply don't factor into any corporate decisions, and therefore do not contribute to the price authors receive from their works.
Someone else who does not really understand the concept of present value. The company will pay P/((1+r)^t) right now for a payment (P) that will be received in year t given interest rate r. That means that $100 that you expect to receive 11 years from now is worth ~$58 today given an interest rate of 5%. You stop the copyright at 10 years after the work is purchased from the author and that $58 is now worth $0 to the purchaser and hence no portion of it will be paid to the author at the time the copyright is bought. You have just deprived the author of a nice chunk of change.
You better believe that authors (or at least their agents) are aware of that as are the publishing houses that buy the copyrights. And if they were not, and they could not think ahead 10 years, why did they want the extension in the first place?
One group that I have heard very little from in this debate over extensions are the authors themselves. I wonder where people like Norman Mailer or Tom Clancy stand on this issue? Probably they are for the extension since it should mean extra dollars in their pockets when a new book contract is written.
There are ways of testing the accuracy of at least some of these methods. Carbon-14 dating, for example, has been compared with tree ring dating methods going back 10K (IIRC) or so years. There have probably been similar attempts with other isotope based methods.
Are you sure of that? The US runs a huge trade deficit each year that is typically paid for by Europeans and Japanese buying US stocks and bonds. I haven't checked the figures, but I would not be at all suprised to find that the percentage of US corps owned by the Europeans is larger than the percent of Euro corps owned by the US. It is probably even larger if you consider direct investment by Europeans in the US (e.g. the BMW factory in S. Carolina) versus US direct investment in Europe.
Same likely holds for the US versus Japan. The US got itself into quite a tizzy a few years ago after Sony bought one of the big entertainment conglamerates and some other Japanese corp bought Rockefeller Center in NYC.
That trade deficit does a lot to keep the worst excesses of the US in check. If we get too nasty, we would be unable to pay for all of the foreign goods we import. Of course it works both ways. Without the US trade deficit, European unemployment would be horrific instead of merely intolerable.
Also, any stream that contains "copy flag bits" must be required to include the expiration date of the copyright. Copy-prevention systems must be required to freely decrypt material that has entered the public domain.
There is no current requirement that once something enters the public domain, the old copyright holder is required to make it easy for you to obtain. Nor should there be. But the converse should also be true. If you do crack the encryption on public domain material, no one can prosecute you.
The DAT part comes from the names of the original backers: Kenjiro Den, Rokuro Aoyama and Meitaro Takeuchi when the company was formed in 1911. The son part was the name of their 2nd car (1918) the Datson which was an amalgam of DAT and the English word son so the 2nd car was named "Son of DAT." And dat, according to the business press at the time, can mean either "very fast" or "fast rabbit." The problems with the name stemmed from this mixture of Japanese and English. This was very well reported in the US car mags and business newspapers at the time of the name switch from Datsun to Nissan as would be expected. A car like the Datsun Z having its makers name change is a very big deal in automotive circles. One reason why they sold under the original Datsun name in the US was that they did not know how the US market would react to their cars and did not want to risk the Nissan mark if their cars had been a failure. But they had a very savvy exec (Yutaka Katayamain) in the US who understood US consumers and had the Z series designed from the ground up for the US market. Katayamain had earlier started Nissan's racing program. I'll stand by my earlier post.
Nissan did not even use the name Nissan in Japan until 1933 and in the US until a couple of years after the VW Rabbit came out. They were called Datsun which some Nissan exec decided was too confusing since dat means "fast rabbit" in Japanese and therefore obviously (to the Nissan exec, anyway) Datsun means "Son of Fast Rabbit." In Japan they were originally called Datson but son means "to lose money" so they changed the name to Datsun. No, I did not make this up. This is what happens inside a company that is starting to export and has to build a brand name that is at least benign in all markets where you are trying to sell (US brand Puff's tissues tried to enter the German market, for example, where puff is a term for a whorehouse).
Nissan is a trademark. To keep the trademark valid, you must defend it. Plaintiff let the domain name slide for too long. And IIRC, trademarks only apply within an industry. Computers and Automobiles have not quite converged yet. Nissan.com stays with the computer industry.
Quite a selfish viewpoint you have there - it turns out that the best solution for YOU may not be the best for society at large.
Who are you to impose on the rest of us your vision of what is best for society at large -- especially when your vision conflicts with what is best for someone else?
But if businesses had their way, there would be no free software - and you don't find that the least bit scary?
Not at all because it won't happen. You will always be free to write software and licence it as GNU/BSD/Whatever so long as your software does not steal rights that belong to someone else. Note that the "so long" clause has many implications that will be fought out in the courts, legislatures, and international orgs like the WTO in the coming months and years.
Think about it - you have 0 rights to your hardware unless you start dishing out cash and accepting possibly onerous license agreements. In other words, you give up all of your rights.
What rights are you giving up? When you buy a product, you enter a contractual arrangement with the seller. You only get those rights that you purchase. Want more rights to the something? Then convince the seller to sell them to you. Think about a plot of land you are considering buying. Does the sale include the mineral rights? Does it include deed restrictions? Why is software different? Some companies sell their software as purely closed source, some sell it with source code. In each case you have bought a different package of rights. Why does any product offered for sale have to include all potential rights to that product? Unbundling the product into seperate packages of rights enhances the public welfare by increasing the choices available to both sellers and buyers. Fewer people would buy the product if the seller were forced to include all potential rights.
So you have a choice - live in a world where free software is a critical force for maintaining the rights of consumers, or live in a world where you just want whats "best", and therefor implying that the world would be just fine without free software.
Huh? Why does a willingness to pay for a particular feature set that is currently provided only by closed source vendors imply "that the world would be just fine without free software." Your logic escapes me.
It is there (at least for local partitions, never tried it with network mounts), but it is a bit picky. For example, the target directory of the mount must be empty. Try creating a dir (C:\foo) and then touch a file in foo. You can no longer mount a partition under foo.
Yes, but with Win2K, you can mount drives just like in Unix. No need for drive letters beyond C. Of course, it is still windows so you likely cannot mount more than 24 partitions.
A physicist, a chemist and an economist are stranded on an island, with nothing to eat. A can of soup washes ashore. The physicist says, "Lets smash the can open with a rock." The chemist says, "Lets build a fire and heat the can first." The economist says, "Lets assume that we have a can-opener..."
Paul Samuelson
Actually he started the whole mess by saying: Take a look at the total absence of foreigners from western European countries. Obviously not everyone thinks the US is all that great. My point (and the figures prove this) is that there is still a lot of immigration from Western Europe to the US. Yes, it has decreased markedly since 1900. But the relative opportunities have improved markedly in Western Europe, too, since 1900. And especially since the end of WWII. But there are still well in excess of 100,000 people moving here each year from Western Europe. That's roughly the equlivalent of 0.5% of Australia's total population to put some perspective on the numbers.
Re: South America, yes they were shafted by an old, barbaric, imperialistic, European colonial power. Many of these economic policies (where they opened their markets in accordance with the Washington Concensus (This is probably what you studied in economics)) has not helped them to improve the lifestyle of the general populace.
Nope, the short story is that after WWII, South America bit into an economic policy that encouraged self-reliance and gov't planning rather than trade and decentralised markets. The policy is known as import substitution (India tried this, too, as did many other developing nations). One of its chief proponents was CEPAL (The UN Economic Commision for Latin America). The result was disastrous compared with countries that went for the export-led development approach (e.g.Taiwan, S. Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, etc. Note that these countries started with far less natural endowment than LA and are nearly in the developed category today). Much of the problem with import substitution is that smaller countries simply don't have the markets to reach economies of scale in many industries. So the locals wind up paying high prices compared to world market prices. Argentina, for example, has a wonderful climate for producing beef and grain. What did they do? They charged high export tarrifs on agriculture to fund their import substitution program. It almost killed the agriculture industry and the industries that were funded were mostly high-priced failures. When they finally dumped the tariff, they got caught up in the supply glut caused by US/European/Aussie/Canadian ag production and export subsidies. South America also borrowed heavily to pay for the new industries. The result was a huge debt burden and very high inflation. Things came to a head in the 1980s (the "Lost Decade"). By 1986, 3/4s of LA countries had inflation rates above 30%. Only in the last 10 years or so have they switched over to market economies and open trade. The result is that most (maybe all except Columbia) are now Democracies and have resumed some growth. I was in Mexico recently and it is clearly back on a growth path. Are the market reforms a success? Too soon to tell. Any time you take a country from isolated to open and from central to market economy, there will be both winners and losers. And no, the losers are often not the small fry who can often quickly adapt by creating micro-industries and will benefit from the price reductions on the goods they buy that open trade brings.
For Iraq, I fear that the cure will be worse than the disease. Lets see, we got: Bush (Not too bright), Condi Rice (couldn't keep her fucking mouth shut and said we didn't like the democratically elected guy when Venezuala had their near coup recently. Stupid bitch. We spent 30 years trying to get LA to respect the outcome of elections and overcome the shame of what we did in Chile to have her undo it in 2 sentences.), Powell (Helped run the US war in Nicaragua. I've seen footage of him praising the El Salvador generals who ran the 1980s death squads), Rumsfeld and Cheny (didn't take down Sadam 10 years ago since that might have meant a democratic gov't in Iraq and we couldn't piss off the Saudis, now, could we?).
1st, when you subtract out the known cases of voter fraud committed by the DNC and Gore Organization he actually had less votes than Bush.
No matter who you claim to have voted for, you really ought to provide some substantiative proof of your allegation and back it up with your name before posting as an Anonymous Coward. Of course, you may not necessarily care if anyone truly believes you now. You know that if you repeat a lie often enough, people may eventually come to believe it.
Umm, no we did not. Gore won more votes across the nation and lost the election due to a Supreme Court ruling that prevented a recount of Florida votes.
My first point was simply that your evidence did not support the claims in your post as well as they did the opinions of the person you sought to bag.
I had a good course in human population analysis in grad school so I thought the evidence fit my point well. On the other hand, I also learned in grad school that one should always have someone else review one's own work since what the author thinks might be an obvious point may be obscure to the reader.
Careful what you say about South America. My 1st university degree was a double major in Economics and Latin American Studies with a minor in Meso-American Anthropology. While the US has certainly done some amoral things there, most of their troubles are due to Spanish colonial legacies and their own bad economic policies.
As to Iraq, I'm in a quandry. I am what passes for a liberal in the US these days (pro choice, prefer more environmental cleanup, pro gun control, want a better health care system, etc.) but I am getting more libertarian since the gov't too often mucks up the implementation. I used to abhore the right wing, flag waving God is on our side exclusively crowd (OK, for the most part I still do). But Sept 11 caused a sea change in the US. It well and truly pissed off just about everyone here. Even long-haired loonies like myself have US flags flying on their front porches. Sadam clearly has to go. Leaving him to stay and abuse his own people, let alone the rest of the world, is a lot worse choice than going in with an army and hanging him from the nearest lampost. But we have to do it through the UN. They'll eventually come around. It took them forever to get around to pressuring the Indonesians on E. Timor, the Croats and Serbs in Bosnia, etc. But enough US pressure and they will do something. Clinton was far better at building coalitions against petty tyrants than W ever will be and I don't hold out a lot of hope that W will ever understand why multilateral action is the way to go.
Stress free day? Gawd, I wish. But thanks for the thought. I started my own company a year ago It is on a knife edge of ruin or riches at the moment.
This just raises the question of how an OS is signed and certified. If I am not connected to the net when I boot, how will the BIOS know that the certificate on the OS is valid? Either the cert or the BIOS would have to have a pointer to the cert authority that could verify the cert. This implies that I have to be connected to the net when I boot and that the cert authority's ip addr cannot be moved since I don't know how to translate names to ip numbers when I boot.
And if it can't know how to check the OS's cert, then why can't I compile a kernel and self-sign it with my own cert issued by my own installed openSSL cert authority? If I can do that, then a TCPA version of Linux is just an extra step in the kernel make process.
This could actually be a GoodThing(tm) for Linux since it would enable TCPA checking of binaries downloaded from the net. This would be a kind of automated checking of GPG signatures that too few of us take the time for today. As to DRM, I am confused about how my self-signed TCPA enabled Linux would interoperate with an MS Palladium DRM server. Likely no differently than a non-TCPA enabled OS - it wouldn't play the content either. What other implications are there for a self-signed OS?
1. Ignorant hicks from outside the US whose sole source of information about the rest of the world is a Rupert Murdoch publication.
or
2. Left wing snobs from outside the US who dump on us just because it is fashionable but who can't be bothered to see if their comparisons and criticisms have any basis in fact.
My point? Fix your own fucking problems before pointing fingers at others! We take in nearly a million people each year who seem to think that we have something better to offer than wherever they were born (Fact: a lot of those people are from Western Europe, Oz, NZ, and CA).
Thank you for providing evidence to demonstrate how wrong you are.
Er, I think you missed the point of those stats entirely. Emmigration from West Europe to the US is still going strong. Sure, it is less relative to other (mostly less developed) countries, but it has far from dried up completely. More West Europeans move to the US to live and work (e.g. Linus Torvalds) than go in the opposite direction. Between 10 and 20% of the West European immigrants will choose to become citizens of the US. It is rare for a US citizen to move abroad and become a citizen of another country.
Oh, people also go to the USA on holiday, so they know what they are not choosing. Maybe you should do the same.
I have traveled extensively (Europe, South America, South and SE Asia) and worked for a year in India. I, too, know what I am not choosing.
The US is far from perfect, but what irritates me about these "[West Europe, Oz, NZ, CA, etc] is better than the US" diatribes is that they usually ignore the fact that these places themselves often have an ugly side. Who was it who said "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone?" West Europe, Oz, NZ, CA, and, yes, the US are all pretty good places to live and work. Each has their own unique advantages and disadvantages and
none is really any better than another.
Slashdot Mirror
You are confused. The original poster implied (to me, at least) that there should be NO copyright at all. My reply, of course, compounded the problem by implying to others that copyright should be perpetual. The original poster, it seems (see later posts in this thread) did not want to do away with all copyright protection, but does think that the DMCA extensions were bad policy, a point that I do agree with.
Could someone explain where the Libertarians stand on this issue? They have a <understatement> strong </understatement> belief in property rights, but do they consider a new idea to be property to be protected, or do they agree with Thomas Jefferson that there is no such right to an idea for exactly the reasons described by the parent post. This whole issue is central to the problem of Information Economics where there is a market failure since a free market will produce too few ideas if property rights cannot be enforced or do not exist. Copyright only imperfectly solves this problem. I am curious how the Libertarians address this problem.
Sorry, I read your initial comment:
they see the public domain as a system the steal works legaly fromt he creators....
coupled with your 2nd comment:
perhaps they should not have created copyright so that creators would create out of love and not greed.
as a belief that there should be no copyright at all. That would be a disaster for creativity. Authors do have to eat and pay bills. Perhaps you might have taken a moment to lay out a case for why putting something into the public domain is A GoodThing(tm) and not theft rather than calling the public ignorant for not believing what you believe.
I like the declaration of rights as far as it goes, but I should have been for going further. For instance, the following alterations and additons would have pleased me... Article 9. Monopolies may be allowed to persons for their own productions in literature, and their own inventions in the arts, for a term not exceeding ___ years, but for no longer term, and for no other purpose.
Letter from Jefferson to James Madison, 1789
The ___ years is in there because Jefferson hasn't figured out what that term should be.
Certainly an inventor ought to be allowed a right to the benefit of his invention for some certain time. It is equally certain it ought not to be perpetual; for to embarrass society with monopolies for every utensil existing, and in all the details of life, would be more injurious to them than had the supposed inventors never existed; because the natural understanding of its members would have suggested the same things or others as good. How long the term should be, is the difficult question. Our legislators have copied the English estimate of the term, perhaps without sufficiently considering how much longer, in a country so much more sparsely settled, it takes for an invention to become known, and used to an extent profitable to the inventor. Nobody wishes more than I do that ingenuity should receive a liberal encouragement.
Letter from Jefferson to Oliver Evans, 1807
In a series of letters between Jefferson and James Madison (Madison as well as George Washington supported copyrights) prior to the adoption of the Bill of Rights, Jefferson agreed that a limited term for copyrights was OK. Jefferson's difficulty lay in figuring out what that limit should be. He tried to solve the problem at one point by basing the length of the term on statistical mortality tables, arriving at a term of 19 years. Using Jefferson's formula with today's actuarial tables results in a term of 30-35 years.
I doubt that you (the_2nd_coming) have more than a superficial understanding of Jefferson's views based on sound bites rather than real research.
If you care about this issue and want to really educate yourself about it, there is a whole branch of Economics known as Information Economics that tries to understand the effects of copyright and other IP protections. Try this for a very quick intro.
LOL
you are a dope
That does so much to convice others of the merits of your position. Someday, when you have a mortgage to pay and a wife and kids to feed and put through college, you will better understand mine.
You are right. We, the ignorant public, just don't get it. Someone worked very hard to write the music, book, whatever. You did nothing. And yet you believe that you are entitled to the benefits of that work without paying anything for those benefits. Nope, we just don't get it.
I laughed at my father years ago in my leftist youth when he told me an old quote variously attributed to Churchill, Clemanceau, Shaw, Russell, and Disraeli:
Any man who is not a socialist at age 20 has no heart.
Any man who is still a socialist at age 40 has no head.
One day, you, too will not get it either.
Such companies are called investment banks. Their stock analysts used to be able to produce new telcos for about five cents a minute.
However, once the copyright has been effectively relinquished by the author, either by actual sale of the copyright or by granting of exclusive licenses to a corporation, there is little rational reason for a copyright term more than ten years, at least if you think the purpose of copyright is to reward authors. Events more than ten years out simply don't factor into any corporate decisions, and therefore do not contribute to the price authors receive from their works.
Someone else who does not really understand the concept of present value. The company will pay P/((1+r)^t) right now for a payment (P) that will be received in year t given interest rate r. That means that $100 that you expect to receive 11 years from now is worth ~$58 today given an interest rate of 5%. You stop the copyright at 10 years after the work is purchased from the author and that $58 is now worth $0 to the purchaser and hence no portion of it will be paid to the author at the time the copyright is bought. You have just deprived the author of a nice chunk of change.
You better believe that authors (or at least their agents) are aware of that as are the publishing houses that buy the copyrights. And if they were not, and they could not think ahead 10 years, why did they want the extension in the first place?
One group that I have heard very little from in this debate over extensions are the authors themselves. I wonder where people like Norman Mailer or Tom Clancy stand on this issue? Probably they are for the extension since it should mean extra dollars in their pockets when a new book contract is written.
There are ways of testing the accuracy of at least some of these methods. Carbon-14 dating, for example, has been compared with tree ring dating methods going back 10K (IIRC) or so years. There have probably been similar attempts with other isotope based methods.
Primar on archeological dating methods
Archeologists date flakes.
Are you sure of that? The US runs a huge trade deficit each year that is typically paid for by Europeans and Japanese buying US stocks and bonds. I haven't checked the figures, but I would not be at all suprised to find that the percentage of US corps owned by the Europeans is larger than the percent of Euro corps owned by the US. It is probably even larger if you consider direct investment by Europeans in the US (e.g. the BMW factory in S. Carolina) versus US direct investment in Europe.
Same likely holds for the US versus Japan. The US got itself into quite a tizzy a few years ago after Sony bought one of the big entertainment conglamerates and some other Japanese corp bought Rockefeller Center in NYC.
That trade deficit does a lot to keep the worst excesses of the US in check. If we get too nasty, we would be unable to pay for all of the foreign goods we import. Of course it works both ways. Without the US trade deficit, European unemployment would be horrific instead of merely intolerable.
Also, any stream that contains "copy flag bits" must be required to include the expiration date of the copyright. Copy-prevention systems must be required to freely decrypt material that has entered the public domain.
There is no current requirement that once something enters the public domain, the old copyright holder is required to make it easy for you to obtain. Nor should there be. But the converse should also be true. If you do crack the encryption on public domain material, no one can prosecute you.
The DAT part comes from the names of the original backers: Kenjiro Den, Rokuro Aoyama and Meitaro Takeuchi when the company was formed in 1911. The son part was the name of their 2nd car (1918) the Datson which was an amalgam of DAT and the English word son so the 2nd car was named "Son of DAT." And dat, according to the business press at the time, can mean either "very fast" or "fast rabbit." The problems with the name stemmed from this mixture of Japanese and English. This was very well reported in the US car mags and business newspapers at the time of the name switch from Datsun to Nissan as would be expected. A car like the Datsun Z having its makers name change is a very big deal in automotive circles. One reason why they sold under the original Datsun name in the US was that they did not know how the US market would react to their cars and did not want to risk the Nissan mark if their cars had been a failure. But they had a very savvy exec (Yutaka Katayamain) in the US who understood US consumers and had the Z series designed from the ground up for the US market. Katayamain had earlier started Nissan's racing program. I'll stand by my earlier post.
Nissan did not even use the name Nissan in Japan until 1933 and in the US until a couple of years after the VW Rabbit came out. They were called Datsun which some Nissan exec decided was too confusing since dat means "fast rabbit" in Japanese and therefore obviously (to the Nissan exec, anyway) Datsun means "Son of Fast Rabbit." In Japan they were originally called Datson but son means "to lose money" so they changed the name to Datsun. No, I did not make this up. This is what happens inside a company that is starting to export and has to build a brand name that is at least benign in all markets where you are trying to sell (US brand Puff's tissues tried to enter the German market, for example, where puff is a term for a whorehouse).
Nissan is a trademark. To keep the trademark valid, you must defend it. Plaintiff let the domain name slide for too long. And IIRC, trademarks only apply within an industry. Computers and Automobiles have not quite converged yet. Nissan.com stays with the computer industry.
If The Big Ten can include 11 teams, why can't the 9 planets of the solar system have 10 planets?
I exist with the capability to impose. Existence alone is sufficient. I need nothing else.
You might need a bigger gun than mine. Your existence is one reason I support the 2nd Amendment.
The bullshit sure is thick around here today.
Quite a selfish viewpoint you have there - it turns out that the best solution for YOU may not be the best for society at large.
Who are you to impose on the rest of us your vision of what is best for society at large -- especially when your vision conflicts with what is best for someone else?
But if businesses had their way, there would be no free software - and you don't find that the least bit scary?
Not at all because it won't happen. You will always be free to write software and licence it as GNU/BSD/Whatever so long as your software does not steal rights that belong to someone else. Note that the "so long" clause has many implications that will be fought out in the courts, legislatures, and international orgs like the WTO in the coming months and years.
Think about it - you have 0 rights to your hardware unless you start dishing out cash and accepting possibly onerous license agreements. In other words, you give up all of your rights.
What rights are you giving up? When you buy a product, you enter a contractual arrangement with the seller. You only get those rights that you purchase. Want more rights to the something? Then convince the seller to sell them to you. Think about a plot of land you are considering buying. Does the sale include the mineral rights? Does it include deed restrictions? Why is software different? Some companies sell their software as purely closed source, some sell it with source code. In each case you have bought a different package of rights. Why does any product offered for sale have to include all potential rights to that product? Unbundling the product into seperate packages of rights enhances the public welfare by increasing the choices available to both sellers and buyers. Fewer people would buy the product if the seller were forced to include all potential rights.
So you have a choice - live in a world where free software is a critical force for maintaining the rights of consumers, or live in a world where you just want whats "best", and therefor implying that the world would be just fine without free software.
Huh? Why does a willingness to pay for a particular feature set that is currently provided only by closed source vendors imply "that the world would be just fine without free software." Your logic escapes me.
It is there (at least for local partitions, never tried it with network mounts), but it is a bit picky. For example, the target directory of the mount must be empty. Try creating a dir (C:\foo) and then touch a file in foo. You can no longer mount a partition under foo.
Yes, but with Win2K, you can mount drives just like in Unix. No need for drive letters beyond C. Of course, it is still windows so you likely cannot mount more than 24 partitions.
A physicist, a chemist and an economist are stranded on an island, with nothing to eat. A can of soup washes ashore. The physicist says, "Lets smash the can open with a rock." The chemist says, "Lets build a fire and heat the can first." The economist says, "Lets assume that we have a can-opener..." Paul Samuelson
Actually he started the whole mess by saying: Take a look at the total absence of foreigners from western European countries. Obviously not everyone thinks the US is all that great. My point (and the figures prove this) is that there is still a lot of immigration from Western Europe to the US. Yes, it has decreased markedly since 1900. But the relative opportunities have improved markedly in Western Europe, too, since 1900. And especially since the end of WWII. But there are still well in excess of 100,000 people moving here each year from Western Europe. That's roughly the equlivalent of 0.5% of Australia's total population to put some perspective on the numbers.
Re: South America, yes they were shafted by an old, barbaric, imperialistic, European colonial power. Many of these economic policies (where they opened their markets in accordance with the Washington Concensus (This is probably what you studied in economics)) has not helped them to improve the lifestyle of the general populace.
Nope, the short story is that after WWII, South America bit into an economic policy that encouraged self-reliance and gov't planning rather than trade and decentralised markets. The policy is known as import substitution (India tried this, too, as did many other developing nations). One of its chief proponents was CEPAL (The UN Economic Commision for Latin America). The result was disastrous compared with countries that went for the export-led development approach (e.g.Taiwan, S. Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, etc. Note that these countries started with far less natural endowment than LA and are nearly in the developed category today). Much of the problem with import substitution is that smaller countries simply don't have the markets to reach economies of scale in many industries. So the locals wind up paying high prices compared to world market prices. Argentina, for example, has a wonderful climate for producing beef and grain. What did they do? They charged high export tarrifs on agriculture to fund their import substitution program. It almost killed the agriculture industry and the industries that were funded were mostly high-priced failures. When they finally dumped the tariff, they got caught up in the supply glut caused by US/European/Aussie/Canadian ag production and export subsidies. South America also borrowed heavily to pay for the new industries. The result was a huge debt burden and very high inflation. Things came to a head in the 1980s (the "Lost Decade"). By 1986, 3/4s of LA countries had inflation rates above 30%. Only in the last 10 years or so have they switched over to market economies and open trade. The result is that most (maybe all except Columbia) are now Democracies and have resumed some growth. I was in Mexico recently and it is clearly back on a growth path. Are the market reforms a success? Too soon to tell. Any time you take a country from isolated to open and from central to market economy, there will be both winners and losers. And no, the losers are often not the small fry who can often quickly adapt by creating micro-industries and will benefit from the price reductions on the goods they buy that open trade brings.
For Iraq, I fear that the cure will be worse than the disease. Lets see, we got: Bush (Not too bright), Condi Rice (couldn't keep her fucking mouth shut and said we didn't like the democratically elected guy when Venezuala had their near coup recently. Stupid bitch. We spent 30 years trying to get LA to respect the outcome of elections and overcome the shame of what we did in Chile to have her undo it in 2 sentences.), Powell (Helped run the US war in Nicaragua. I've seen footage of him praising the El Salvador generals who ran the 1980s death squads), Rumsfeld and Cheny (didn't take down Sadam 10 years ago since that might have meant a democratic gov't in Iraq and we couldn't piss off the Saudis, now, could we?).
1st, when you subtract out the known cases of voter fraud committed by the DNC and Gore Organization he actually had less votes than Bush.
No matter who you claim to have voted for, you really ought to provide some substantiative proof of your allegation and back it up with your name before posting as an Anonymous Coward. Of course, you may not necessarily care if anyone truly believes you now. You know that if you repeat a lie often enough, people may eventually come to believe it.
Umm, no we did not. Gore won more votes across the nation and lost the election due to a Supreme Court ruling that prevented a recount of Florida votes.
My first point was simply that your evidence did not support the claims in your post as well as they did the opinions of the person you sought to bag.
I had a good course in human population analysis in grad school so I thought the evidence fit my point well. On the other hand, I also learned in grad school that one should always have someone else review one's own work since what the author thinks might be an obvious point may be obscure to the reader.
Careful what you say about South America. My 1st university degree was a double major in Economics and Latin American Studies with a minor in Meso-American Anthropology. While the US has certainly done some amoral things there, most of their troubles are due to Spanish colonial legacies and their own bad economic policies.
As to Iraq, I'm in a quandry. I am what passes for a liberal in the US these days (pro choice, prefer more environmental cleanup, pro gun control, want a better health care system, etc.) but I am getting more libertarian since the gov't too often mucks up the implementation. I used to abhore the right wing, flag waving God is on our side exclusively crowd (OK, for the most part I still do). But Sept 11 caused a sea change in the US. It well and truly pissed off just about everyone here. Even long-haired loonies like myself have US flags flying on their front porches. Sadam clearly has to go. Leaving him to stay and abuse his own people, let alone the rest of the world, is a lot worse choice than going in with an army and hanging him from the nearest lampost. But we have to do it through the UN. They'll eventually come around. It took them forever to get around to pressuring the Indonesians on E. Timor, the Croats and Serbs in Bosnia, etc. But enough US pressure and they will do something. Clinton was far better at building coalitions against petty tyrants than W ever will be and I don't hold out a lot of hope that W will ever understand why multilateral action is the way to go.
Stress free day? Gawd, I wish. But thanks for the thought. I started my own company a year ago It is on a knife edge of ruin or riches at the moment.
This just raises the question of how an OS is signed and certified. If I am not connected to the net when I boot, how will the BIOS know that the certificate on the OS is valid? Either the cert or the BIOS would have to have a pointer to the cert authority that could verify the cert. This implies that I have to be connected to the net when I boot and that the cert authority's ip addr cannot be moved since I don't know how to translate names to ip numbers when I boot.
And if it can't know how to check the OS's cert, then why can't I compile a kernel and self-sign it with my own cert issued by my own installed openSSL cert authority? If I can do that, then a TCPA version of Linux is just an extra step in the kernel make process.
This could actually be a GoodThing(tm) for Linux since it would enable TCPA checking of binaries downloaded from the net. This would be a kind of automated checking of GPG signatures that too few of us take the time for today. As to DRM, I am confused about how my self-signed TCPA enabled Linux would interoperate with an MS Palladium DRM server. Likely no differently than a non-TCPA enabled OS - it wouldn't play the content either. What other implications are there for a self-signed OS?
They are just as often started by:
1. Ignorant hicks from outside the US whose sole source of information about the rest of the world is a Rupert Murdoch publication.
or
2. Left wing snobs from outside the US who dump on us just because it is fashionable but who can't be bothered to see if their comparisons and criticisms have any basis in fact.
My point? Fix your own fucking problems before pointing fingers at others! We take in nearly a million people each year who seem to think that we have something better to offer than wherever they were born (Fact: a lot of those people are from Western Europe, Oz, NZ, and CA).
Er, I think you missed the point of those stats entirely. Emmigration from West Europe to the US is still going strong. Sure, it is less relative to other (mostly less developed) countries, but it has far from dried up completely. More West Europeans move to the US to live and work (e.g. Linus Torvalds) than go in the opposite direction. Between 10 and 20% of the West European immigrants will choose to become citizens of the US. It is rare for a US citizen to move abroad and become a citizen of another country.
Oh, people also go to the USA on holiday, so they know what they are not choosing. Maybe you should do the same.
I have traveled extensively (Europe, South America, South and SE Asia) and worked for a year in India. I, too, know what I am not choosing.
As for Australia:
- Australia Taps More Phones Than Entire U.S.
- Australia's Censored URL List Remains Hidden
- Australia Plans More Spying on Citizens
- Oz Government Seizes Games For "Full Classification"
- A Social Health Atlas of Australia
- Racism in Australia
- Statistics: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples
- Asylum Seekers in Australia
The US is far from perfect, but what irritates me about these "[West Europe, Oz, NZ, CA, etc] is better than the US" diatribes is that they usually ignore the fact that these places themselves often have an ugly side. Who was it who said "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone?" West Europe, Oz, NZ, CA, and, yes, the US are all pretty good places to live and work. Each has their own unique advantages and disadvantages and none is really any better than another.