While I agree that the record company shouldn't be able to get a whole lot of my money, the following expenses need to get paid somehow:
* Artists
* Recording Engineer
* Studio space
* Any marketing outside of selling CDs at shows and such
(I'm probably leaving a few out here)
There are a lot of expenses other than just paying the musicians, and many of them have an effect on the resulting recording. In particular the recording engineering and mastering can do a lot to make a piece/song sound better.
Without the patent system, you would basically have a wild west business climate where the only way to protect your inventions is to hire your own thugs to deal with people who infringe on your monopoly. Of course, someone else could hire their own thugs and just steal your invention (provided they had the expertise to manage it) as well. Neither situation is good for business or a climate friendly to inventors,...
Perhaps a relevent story is in order, anecdotal evidence as it is:
My sister worked as editor-in-chief of her high school newspaper. The newspaper is the recipient of around a dozen national awards, and has a reputation for accuracy and integrity, as well as subscribers in the community at large.
The paper reported on efforts by a certain Assistant Superintendant to essentially undermine the authority of the principal of the high school (who while not overly well liked was considered competant and fair) using dubious tactics. Along with the article came an editorial admonishing the Superintendant and School Board to intervene in favor of the school retaining some autonomy, as well as a letter signed by many of the faculty to the same effect.
Assistant Super reads the articles and editorials, and is incensed. His first step was to go over to the school, march into the newspaper office, and scream at the news editor who happened to be there, threatening her with disciplinary action and shutting down the paper if they continued to print articles critical of him. He also contacted the principal to try to convince him to stop the paper from being printed.
He had picked the wrong fight. My sister's reaction, after some discussion with the principal and faculty advisor (who supported the paper throughout), printed a story about the above incident, as well as editorials calling for the Assistant Super's resignation for threatening a student without cause. The paper also contacted the local ACLU, who was happy to get involved with stopping this obvious attempt at censorship.
Within 3 months the Assistant Super was relegated to being principal at one of the middle schools.
The key point: Fighting school authority with public speech is possible, but it requires a good loudspeaker, support from faculty and administration, smart and tough student leadership, and a really stupid opponent.
To start off, I'm registered as an Independant, and have supported Democrat, Republican, and Libertarian candidates. So the statement "What you are trying to do is justify why you support a party so against freedom of speech" is not applicable, since it is based on the incorrect supposition that I support the Democratic party.
Here's a more accurate description of what Democrats who voted against this bill believe: They'd rather control campaign spending on the Internet than add a law that says that internet postings are protected speech. Draw whatever conclusions you want from that.
In terms of how each party views free speech, both the Democrats and Republicans want the loudest megaphone possible to push their positions while completely silencing their opponents. They both will do anything they can get away with to silence anyone who disagrees with them, and will both shout down any other contenders before they have a real chance (for instance limiting televised debates to only Democrats and Republicans).
My take on the campaign finance reform issue is this: As long as there are ways to pay specific politicians or political organizations based on what decisions they make, corruption is possible. Unfortunately, there's no way to prevent this other than stopping all political speech. So the goal is to find a balance between the need to prevent corruption and the need to have free political discourse.
Politics always reminds me of the society Douglas Adams refers to where everyone votes for rats to lead their government because they don't want the wrong rat to be in charge. Or the battle between Turd Sandwich and Giant Douche on South Park. The only way to stop the 'lesser of 2 evils' problem is to have more than 2 choices, and the only way we'll see that is if we can somehow build a political party with real power without either major party finding out about it. We've only seen 3 real challenges to the 2 major parties in the last century: Socialists (1900-1915ish), Dixiecrats (1960-75ish), and Reform (1992).
Here's my take on this bill: 1. It was not intended to pass. If Republican leadership had wanted the bill to pass, they wouldn't have invoked the rules requiring a supermajority: They could have just brought it up as a regular bill, voted to close the debate (a majority vote in the House) immediately, and then voted to pass the bill.
2. Reasoning from (1), the bill was a setup. Republicans wanted Democrats to vote against this bill. Unfortunately for the Democrats, they took the bait, because if Democrats really wanted to stop it they still had the filibuster in the Senate.
3. From (1) and (2), the whole point of this exercise was to create "proof" that "Democrats hate free speech, bloggers, and the Internet". Expect that to show up in websites (case in point: the headline of this article), debates and campaign ads starting in a few months.
This is the same sort of technique as creating a bill that states:
motherhood and apple pie are good, and we will kill kittens. When people vote against killing kittens, then their political opponants can say "Look here, this guy's against motherhood and apple pie". And as John Kerry (and many others before him) have learned, it's no use explaining that you were voting against killing kittens, and because of that were forced to vote against motherhood and apple pie.
There are a couple of key issues in your plan (which is a concept I approve of):
1. Can anyone who doesn't work for a company own shares? (I'd say no, because otherwise you'd be back to others controlling the company)
2. If not, what methods of getting investment money are available? Should we stick to bonds, preferred stock, and bank loans, or should we come up with something else?
3. What about part-time and temporary workers? Are they temporarily given a share of stock or are they paid by some other method?
I'm all in favor of saying that you can't make money off of a company unless you do some work for it. Another interesting effect of this system is that companies are less likely to hire people that aren't needed because the guy doing the hiring stands to lose money if the hire makes the company less profitable. It would also solve the problem of "If I work my ass off and Initech ships a few extra units, I don't see another dime!"
Part of my problem with Microsoft is that it seems like since Windows 95, they've been constantly playing a game of catch up, rather than bringing unique products to the market.
Most successful strategies I've heard of involve building a system out of parts that you know can't fail, and then designing the system around the failure of the parts that you know can't fail.
Most people have already pointed out the correlation!=causality problem with this study, but here are a couple of more issues: 1. This was done via a survey, so what that means is that people who admit to filesharing are more likely to admit to shoplifting and cheating. The "admit to" part is significant and was left out of the findings.
2. The argument appears to work like this: people 12-25 years old are most like to fileshare, and are most likely to shoplift, so therefor people who are likely to fileshare are likely to shoplift. In other words, A->B, A->C, therefor B->C.
So my basic interpretation of this one is along the lines of the "masturbation will make you go blind" argument: An utterly false statement that if true would make an otherwise relatively harmless activity seem harmful.
As long as we are clear that this is a list of European and American classics, it's a great list. However, if we start considering other cultures, we get a whole slew of other influential and important classics, such as:
Mohammed - The Koran
Sun Tzu - The Art of War
Lao Tzu - Tao Te Ching
various Vedic literature
Miyamoto Musashi - A Book of Five Rings
...
The point is that this list, long as it is, only scratches the surface of European and American classics, and completely ignores the majority of human civilization.
I have to call you on that one. If Congress passes the law, and the president signs it, it is by definition legal. There ain't no such thing as illegal legislation. There is such a thing as unconstitutional legislation, though, which is maybe what you were thinking of.
Actually, through the entire movie, Arthur says 5 when he means 3. For instance, he tells Lancelot to just answer the 5, no 3, questions the bridgekeeper asks him.
If it matters to you, the kind of democracy you describe is almost exactly what was practiced in ancient Athens, Greece, and is the origin of the term "democracy" (demos - people or citizenry).
That democracy worked well a lot of the time, but also killed Socrates. Also, the "tyranny of the majority" problem continued to stick around, and the numerous slaves in the city were not allowed to vote.
If you want some perspective on why the US government is not like this, read the Federalist Papers. They give a very clear picture on what the US government was supposed to be like, and the reasoning behind those choices.
Aeolian and Adhesion Morphodynamics and Phytoecology in Recent Coastal and Inland Sand and Snow Flats and Dunes from Mainly North Sea and Baltic Sea to Mars and Venus. (By Detlef Mader. Peter Lang, New York, 1995.)
This book really does exist. I first came across it back in my college days when some poor geology student had to read it.
Slashdot Mirror
While I agree that the record company shouldn't be able to get a whole lot of my money, the following expenses need to get paid somehow:
* Artists
* Recording Engineer
* Studio space
* Any marketing outside of selling CDs at shows and such
(I'm probably leaving a few out here)
There are a lot of expenses other than just paying the musicians, and many of them have an effect on the resulting recording. In particular the recording engineering and mastering can do a lot to make a piece/song sound better.
Version 1
Version 2
I'm experiencing a sense of deja vu here.
Without the patent system, you would basically have a wild west business climate where the only way to protect your inventions is to hire your own thugs to deal with people who infringe on your monopoly. Of course, someone else could hire their own thugs and just steal your invention (provided they had the expertise to manage it) as well. Neither situation is good for business or a climate friendly to inventors, ...
s/thugs/lawyers/g
s/Without/With/
Perhaps a relevent story is in order, anecdotal evidence as it is:
My sister worked as editor-in-chief of her high school newspaper. The newspaper is the recipient of around a dozen national awards, and has a reputation for accuracy and integrity, as well as subscribers in the community at large.
The paper reported on efforts by a certain Assistant Superintendant to essentially undermine the authority of the principal of the high school (who while not overly well liked was considered competant and fair) using dubious tactics. Along with the article came an editorial admonishing the Superintendant and School Board to intervene in favor of the school retaining some autonomy, as well as a letter signed by many of the faculty to the same effect.
Assistant Super reads the articles and editorials, and is incensed. His first step was to go over to the school, march into the newspaper office, and scream at the news editor who happened to be there, threatening her with disciplinary action and shutting down the paper if they continued to print articles critical of him. He also contacted the principal to try to convince him to stop the paper from being printed.
He had picked the wrong fight. My sister's reaction, after some discussion with the principal and faculty advisor (who supported the paper throughout), printed a story about the above incident, as well as editorials calling for the Assistant Super's resignation for threatening a student without cause. The paper also contacted the local ACLU, who was happy to get involved with stopping this obvious attempt at censorship.
Within 3 months the Assistant Super was relegated to being principal at one of the middle schools.
The key point: Fighting school authority with public speech is possible, but it requires a good loudspeaker, support from faculty and administration, smart and tough student leadership, and a really stupid opponent.
To start off, I'm registered as an Independant, and have supported Democrat, Republican, and Libertarian candidates. So the statement "What you are trying to do is justify why you support a party so against freedom of speech" is not applicable, since it is based on the incorrect supposition that I support the Democratic party.
Here's a more accurate description of what Democrats who voted against this bill believe: They'd rather control campaign spending on the Internet than add a law that says that internet postings are protected speech. Draw whatever conclusions you want from that.
In terms of how each party views free speech, both the Democrats and Republicans want the loudest megaphone possible to push their positions while completely silencing their opponents. They both will do anything they can get away with to silence anyone who disagrees with them, and will both shout down any other contenders before they have a real chance (for instance limiting televised debates to only Democrats and Republicans).
My take on the campaign finance reform issue is this: As long as there are ways to pay specific politicians or political organizations based on what decisions they make, corruption is possible. Unfortunately, there's no way to prevent this other than stopping all political speech. So the goal is to find a balance between the need to prevent corruption and the need to have free political discourse.
Politics always reminds me of the society Douglas Adams refers to where everyone votes for rats to lead their government because they don't want the wrong rat to be in charge. Or the battle between Turd Sandwich and Giant Douche on South Park. The only way to stop the 'lesser of 2 evils' problem is to have more than 2 choices, and the only way we'll see that is if we can somehow build a political party with real power without either major party finding out about it. We've only seen 3 real challenges to the 2 major parties in the last century: Socialists (1900-1915ish), Dixiecrats (1960-75ish), and Reform (1992).
Here's my take on this bill:
1. It was not intended to pass. If Republican leadership had wanted the bill to pass, they wouldn't have invoked the rules requiring a supermajority: They could have just brought it up as a regular bill, voted to close the debate (a majority vote in the House) immediately, and then voted to pass the bill.
2. Reasoning from (1), the bill was a setup. Republicans wanted Democrats to vote against this bill. Unfortunately for the Democrats, they took the bait, because if Democrats really wanted to stop it they still had the filibuster in the Senate.
3. From (1) and (2), the whole point of this exercise was to create "proof" that "Democrats hate free speech, bloggers, and the Internet". Expect that to show up in websites (case in point: the headline of this article), debates and campaign ads starting in a few months.
This is the same sort of technique as creating a bill that states:
motherhood and apple pie are good, and we will kill kittens.
When people vote against killing kittens, then their political opponants can say "Look here, this guy's against motherhood and apple pie". And as John Kerry (and many others before him) have learned, it's no use explaining that you were voting against killing kittens, and because of that were forced to vote against motherhood and apple pie.
There are a couple of key issues in your plan (which is a concept I approve of):
1. Can anyone who doesn't work for a company own shares? (I'd say no, because otherwise you'd be back to others controlling the company)
2. If not, what methods of getting investment money are available? Should we stick to bonds, preferred stock, and bank loans, or should we come up with something else?
3. What about part-time and temporary workers? Are they temporarily given a share of stock or are they paid by some other method?
I'm all in favor of saying that you can't make money off of a company unless you do some work for it. Another interesting effect of this system is that companies are less likely to hire people that aren't needed because the guy doing the hiring stands to lose money if the hire makes the company less profitable. It would also solve the problem of "If I work my ass off and Initech ships a few extra units, I don't see another dime!"
Part of my problem with Microsoft is that it seems like since Windows 95, they've been constantly playing a game of catch up, rather than bringing unique products to the market.
s/Windows 95/around 1992/
Most successful strategies I've heard of involve building a system out of parts that you know can't fail, and then designing the system around the failure of the parts that you know can't fail.
Most people have already pointed out the correlation!=causality problem with this study, but here are a couple of more issues:
1. This was done via a survey, so what that means is that people who admit to filesharing are more likely to admit to shoplifting and cheating. The "admit to" part is significant and was left out of the findings.
2. The argument appears to work like this: people 12-25 years old are most like to fileshare, and are most likely to shoplift, so therefor people who are likely to fileshare are likely to shoplift. In other words, A->B, A->C, therefor B->C.
So my basic interpretation of this one is along the lines of the "masturbation will make you go blind" argument: An utterly false statement that if true would make an otherwise relatively harmless activity seem harmful.
wonder what happened when MS decides to zig when they want to zag
Cmon, this is so simple I'm surprised an obviously intelligent poster like your self missed it. All the developer needs to do is "take off every zig".
That would explain why people tend to look at him as if he had two heads.
Mohammed - The Koran
Sun Tzu - The Art of War
Lao Tzu - Tao Te Ching
various Vedic literature
Miyamoto Musashi - A Book of Five Rings
...
The point is that this list, long as it is, only scratches the surface of European and American classics, and completely ignores the majority of human civilization.
illegal legislation
I have to call you on that one. If Congress passes the law, and the president signs it, it is by definition legal. There ain't no such thing as illegal legislation. There is such a thing as unconstitutional legislation, though, which is maybe what you were thinking of.
The problem with most blogs, like most personal websites, is that they violate ESR's first rule of making a good website:
Have something interesting or important to say.
Actually, through the entire movie, Arthur says 5 when he means 3. For instance, he tells Lancelot to just answer the 5, no 3, questions the bridgekeeper asks him.
If it matters to you, the kind of democracy you describe is almost exactly what was practiced in ancient Athens, Greece, and is the origin of the term "democracy" (demos - people or citizenry). That democracy worked well a lot of the time, but also killed Socrates. Also, the "tyranny of the majority" problem continued to stick around, and the numerous slaves in the city were not allowed to vote. If you want some perspective on why the US government is not like this, read the Federalist Papers. They give a very clear picture on what the US government was supposed to be like, and the reasoning behind those choices.
Well, they wanted to see whether OpenOffice was good in Third World countries.
Philo: Welcome to Secrets of the Universe. Today, we are going to learn to make weapons-grade plutonium from common household items.
Of course, the real problem with this is that you can't switch back to looking busy when your boss comes around.
IANAL, I have not yet RTFL.
;)
Don't worry, neither has most of Congress.
You think that title's long, check this one out:
Aeolian and Adhesion Morphodynamics and Phytoecology in Recent Coastal and Inland Sand and Snow Flats and Dunes from Mainly North Sea and Baltic Sea to Mars and Venus.
(By Detlef Mader. Peter Lang, New York, 1995.)
This book really does exist. I first came across it back in my college days when some poor geology student had to read it.
Or you can use the following brief, which actually won a case (My mother, who is a lawyer, saw this one):
Dear Honorable ______,
Plaintiff has got to be kidding.
Respectfully submitted,
________________
Attorneys at Law
If the Hitchhiker's Guide wasn't mobile, it wouldn't be much use to a hitchhiker, now would it?