The ramifications of not signing would be extremely hard.
For example, one thing to do would be to downgrade the credit rating of said country, raising its spread and interest rate. Remember, the companies that do the rating are all US companies. Then governments would be unable to borrow money from foreign and domestic banks, leading to a catastrophic economic spiral in said countries.
This would be like a death sentence for politicians, because they will be associated with the catastrophy, and they would not be elected again.
So, the politicians are willing to sign things like ACTA, in order not to jeopardise their career.
...it would be easy to find the 'radial blur' command, and there would be no need for command search.
Hunting down a command happens only the first few times the command is accessed; typically, the user learns where the command is on the UI and uses the command having memorized the actions to select this command. That is, unless the UI is completely unintuitive, and the user has to search for the command each time he/she wants to use that command.
I like that the open source community is seeking ways to improve its products, but I don't think the search bar is a good long-term fix for the problem.
Nobody has yet come up with a viable programming model for such processors.
The Actor model fits well to this type of CPU. Each CPU could be considered an actor.
A Jump instruction to a memory bank of another CPU could be translated as an Actor call to be executed in parallel with the caller.
A call instruction to a memory bank of another CPU could be translated as a parallel call and wait instruction.
A load/store instruction could be translated as a queued request for retrieving/updating data.
This provides a very natural multitasking solution, that provides good expandability both in memory and processing power by adding more memory/CPU chips.
An object-oriented programming language could spread out parallel objects into as many CPUs as possible.
The most dangerous aspect of SOPA is not the censorship. It is the enforcement of punishment without going to court. SOPA simply says that sites should be blocked without going to court, to allow the site owners to prove their innocence.
This is extremely dangerous. It is esentially the first step towards dictatorship. Citizens will no longer be prosecuted and judged in a court of law; they will be going to prison as soon as someone complains.
Star Trek actually foretold this, in TNG episode 1, where humanity is put on trial in a "court of facts", i.e. a court that, due to facts, one is gulity and must prove his innocence. This was presented as an act of barbarism by humanity. Who could imagine in 1987 that a few years later, people would be considered guilty without even going to court?
While you recognize the right of man to access the human culture, you fail to recognize the right of a man to be compensated according to his abilities.
Our society is based on the principle that the higher more able or more clever one is, the more is entitled to be compensated.
By giving everyone a free pass to everything created, we effectively destroy that principle, which is really unfair to both the more able (because they get to be compensated less than they deserve to) and to the less able (who think they are entitled to everything without even working to have access to it).
Not having to work for something is completely unethical, in my opinion. I thought America valued hard work above all.
The value of a product, real or abstract, is not defined by the cost of its material, it is defined by the demand for it. The higher the demand, the higher the price.
I wonder why so many slashdotters have this wrong idea about the value of a product. It is even more amazing that most of you are Americans, you consider America the best country ever, yet you fail to acknowledge the fact that America was build on capitalistic principles, which is basically the law of supply and demand and economic freedom.
By saying that IP is not property, you effectively go against the very principles that made you the greatest, because if IP is not treated like property, then neither the law of supply and demand works and there is no freedom to choose the way to make your property available to the market.
For example, a Picasso painting may cost a few million dollars, not because of the effort of the painter, but because of the perceived value of it: it is considered a symbol of status, and therefore demand for it is very high, and therefore its price is very high.
The law of supply and demand is the basis of capitalism.
Capitalism helped mankind make huge progress in the last century.
As for not being creative due to copyright, why is that bad? as long as there is demand, why someone has to create anything else? having demand for your 70+ year old creation means that you created something that everybody wants, so it is fair for you to be able to be compensated for it for as long as there is demand for it.
The issue with piracy is not that it prevents you from having a profit.
The issue is that it prevents you from having the profits that you are entitled to, according to the people that are using your creation.
For example, Valve had huge profits from L4D, but the actual number of people that have played this game is ten times more than those who actually bought it.
If there was no piracy, perhaps Valve would have made 17000% more, not simply 1700% more, which is unfair to Valve because they made a game everyone wants to play.
You have to realize that the people who actually buy video games are a tiny minority when compared to the people that actually play those games. I grew up as a gamer, with a huge list of gamer friends, and the number of people who actually bought the games they played was extremely small...perhaps 1 in 100 people.
It is the same with music and movies. The number of people who enjoy the "free" stuff is many times the number of people who buy that stuff.
And these people will never come forward to admit that they do not pay for the material they have downloaded. The internet is filled with forum posts from people that pay for what they illegally download, but the rest of "pirates" will never admit to that fact publically, creating the impression that most people buy what they download, which is not the truth.
The economics of piracy are very clear: you can use piracy to spread your creation around, and receive huge benefits from that, if the stock market responds positively to that. Otherwise, piracy screws you easily.
As for the argument that people created things before copyright, think about this: the progress made in the 20th century is many times the progress made in all the previous centuries, simply because people where motivated by profit. Without copyright, this motivation will be lost.
The abundance argument is valid for naturally occuring items.
In the world of ideas, value of an item is defined not by its scarcity, but by the benefit it brings to its users.
If we, as a society, say that ideas are not worth anything, then any sort of motivation will be lost. The current progress is based on the principle that the more capable you are, the higher you are compensated for your services. If that is lost, there would be no motivation for progress for the majority of people.
Progress will then be left ot the hands of a few idealists, as it was before the 20th century. Need I remind you that the 20th century growth and progress was many times the growth and progress of all the previous centuries?
The damage is done by those who upload movies, games and music to public sites. The damage is done by those who post links to copyrighted material.
As the acts are written, they are trying to scare people from even posting a link to a youtube clip. That will never work. If you want to combat piracy, go after the uploaders, i.e. the people who actually upload the stuff, not those who download the stuff.
Infringing on copyright is economic theft because it increases the supply of a product beyond what the author desired, resulting in the devaluation of said product.
According to the law of supply and demand, the more supply increases, the cheaper the product becomes. This is no problem if done by the creator of a product, because it would be intentional; but if done by others without the consent of the author, then it violates the author's right to make the product available in a way that maximizes their profits.
The right of an individual or enterprise to sell their product as they see fit is a fundamental human right that relates to economic freedom. If there is no copyright, or if copyright is infringed, this freedom no longer exists.
Yes, they do. It's not that difficult: if a site infringes on copyright, a notice is enough to block access to it. There is no need to involve any technical definitions in the explanation.
What I am attempting to communicate is that when people created art for free, it was not an occupation that their survival depended on.
Your examples rather reenforce my view than change it. Shakespeare needed a theater company? that's what I am talking about: he could not live solely on his works.
Slashdot Mirror
The ramifications of not signing would be extremely hard.
For example, one thing to do would be to downgrade the credit rating of said country, raising its spread and interest rate. Remember, the companies that do the rating are all US companies. Then governments would be unable to borrow money from foreign and domestic banks, leading to a catastrophic economic spiral in said countries.
This would be like a death sentence for politicians, because they will be associated with the catastrophy, and they would not be elected again.
So, the politicians are willing to sign things like ACTA, in order not to jeopardise their career.
The Actor model helps write correct multi-threaded applications reasonably quickly.
From experience, I'd say that this model allows not only for 'reasonably quickly', but it is on par with single-threaded programming.
So there is no need for the command search, is it?
...it would be easy to find the 'radial blur' command, and there would be no need for command search.
Hunting down a command happens only the first few times the command is accessed; typically, the user learns where the command is on the UI and uses the command having memorized the actions to select this command. That is, unless the UI is completely unintuitive, and the user has to search for the command each time he/she wants to use that command.
I like that the open source community is seeking ways to improve its products, but I don't think the search bar is a good long-term fix for the problem.
Nobody has yet come up with a viable programming model for such processors.
The Actor model fits well to this type of CPU. Each CPU could be considered an actor.
A Jump instruction to a memory bank of another CPU could be translated as an Actor call to be executed in parallel with the caller.
A call instruction to a memory bank of another CPU could be translated as a parallel call and wait instruction.
A load/store instruction could be translated as a queued request for retrieving/updating data.
This provides a very natural multitasking solution, that provides good expandability both in memory and processing power by adding more memory/CPU chips.
An object-oriented programming language could spread out parallel objects into as many CPUs as possible.
The most dangerous aspect of SOPA is not the censorship. It is the enforcement of punishment without going to court. SOPA simply says that sites should be blocked without going to court, to allow the site owners to prove their innocence.
This is extremely dangerous. It is esentially the first step towards dictatorship. Citizens will no longer be prosecuted and judged in a court of law; they will be going to prison as soon as someone complains.
Star Trek actually foretold this, in TNG episode 1, where humanity is put on trial in a "court of facts", i.e. a court that, due to facts, one is gulity and must prove his innocence. This was presented as an act of barbarism by humanity. Who could imagine in 1987 that a few years later, people would be considered guilty without even going to court?
Have you seen how many people are involved in one video game or movie?
Do you know how many man workyears are spent on these things:
An individual alone would have to spent his entire lifetime creating just one video game or music.
If that was viable, it would have happened already. But it is not.
You would not say that if it was your IP and you survived on selling it.
Ideas have value you know, it is not only physical products that have value.
One is not being paid for the effort to do the work, he is being paid for the value his work creates, which may extend beyond the actual effort.
For example, you pay for food that someone else has prepared for you. At the time you eat it, no one was working on it, yet you happily paid for it.
While you recognize the right of man to access the human culture, you fail to recognize the right of a man to be compensated according to his abilities.
Our society is based on the principle that the higher more able or more clever one is, the more is entitled to be compensated.
By giving everyone a free pass to everything created, we effectively destroy that principle, which is really unfair to both the more able (because they get to be compensated less than they deserve to) and to the less able (who think they are entitled to everything without even working to have access to it).
Not having to work for something is completely unethical, in my opinion. I thought America valued hard work above all.
The value of a product, real or abstract, is not defined by the cost of its material, it is defined by the demand for it. The higher the demand, the higher the price.
I wonder why so many slashdotters have this wrong idea about the value of a product. It is even more amazing that most of you are Americans, you consider America the best country ever, yet you fail to acknowledge the fact that America was build on capitalistic principles, which is basically the law of supply and demand and economic freedom.
By saying that IP is not property, you effectively go against the very principles that made you the greatest, because if IP is not treated like property, then neither the law of supply and demand works and there is no freedom to choose the way to make your property available to the market.
It seems to me that wanting game copyright to expire after 5 years is just an excuse for making pirating of older games legal.
In reality, 5 years is a very short time for games, given the emulator, abandonware and retro game activity online.
From the success of the MAME emulator alone, it is obvious that 5 years of copyright for games is not enough.
Payment does not reflect costs.
Payment is defined by supply and demand.
For example, a Picasso painting may cost a few million dollars, not because of the effort of the painter, but because of the perceived value of it: it is considered a symbol of status, and therefore demand for it is very high, and therefore its price is very high.
The law of supply and demand is the basis of capitalism.
Capitalism helped mankind make huge progress in the last century.
As for not being creative due to copyright, why is that bad? as long as there is demand, why someone has to create anything else? having demand for your 70+ year old creation means that you created something that everybody wants, so it is fair for you to be able to be compensated for it for as long as there is demand for it.
What makes you think you have the right to watch a movie you missed by your own means?
You do not have that right.
The TV channel that showed the movie paid some money for the right to show the movie. You did not.
You cannot download a movie and claim you missed it in cinemas either.
The issue with piracy is not that it prevents you from having a profit.
The issue is that it prevents you from having the profits that you are entitled to, according to the people that are using your creation.
For example, Valve had huge profits from L4D, but the actual number of people that have played this game is ten times more than those who actually bought it.
If there was no piracy, perhaps Valve would have made 17000% more, not simply 1700% more, which is unfair to Valve because they made a game everyone wants to play.
You have to realize that the people who actually buy video games are a tiny minority when compared to the people that actually play those games. I grew up as a gamer, with a huge list of gamer friends, and the number of people who actually bought the games they played was extremely small...perhaps 1 in 100 people.
It is the same with music and movies. The number of people who enjoy the "free" stuff is many times the number of people who buy that stuff.
And these people will never come forward to admit that they do not pay for the material they have downloaded. The internet is filled with forum posts from people that pay for what they illegally download, but the rest of "pirates" will never admit to that fact publically, creating the impression that most people buy what they download, which is not the truth.
The economics of piracy are very clear: you can use piracy to spread your creation around, and receive huge benefits from that, if the stock market responds positively to that. Otherwise, piracy screws you easily.
As for the argument that people created things before copyright, think about this: the progress made in the 20th century is many times the progress made in all the previous centuries, simply because people where motivated by profit. Without copyright, this motivation will be lost.
That copyright is difficult to enforce in the digital era does not make copyright violation legal or ethical.
Your argument is like this: in the era of abundance of lethal weapons, homicide prevention is untenable, so it should be allowed.
Which is all very wrong, obviously.
The abundance argument is valid for naturally occuring items.
In the world of ideas, value of an item is defined not by its scarcity, but by the benefit it brings to its users.
If we, as a society, say that ideas are not worth anything, then any sort of motivation will be lost. The current progress is based on the principle that the more capable you are, the higher you are compensated for your services. If that is lost, there would be no motivation for progress for the majority of people.
Progress will then be left ot the hands of a few idealists, as it was before the 20th century. Need I remind you that the 20th century growth and progress was many times the growth and progress of all the previous centuries?
The damage is done by those who upload movies, games and music to public sites. The damage is done by those who post links to copyrighted material.
As the acts are written, they are trying to scare people from even posting a link to a youtube clip. That will never work. If you want to combat piracy, go after the uploaders, i.e. the people who actually upload the stuff, not those who download the stuff.
Infringing on copyright is economic theft because it increases the supply of a product beyond what the author desired, resulting in the devaluation of said product.
According to the law of supply and demand, the more supply increases, the cheaper the product becomes. This is no problem if done by the creator of a product, because it would be intentional; but if done by others without the consent of the author, then it violates the author's right to make the product available in a way that maximizes their profits.
The right of an individual or enterprise to sell their product as they see fit is a fundamental human right that relates to economic freedom. If there is no copyright, or if copyright is infringed, this freedom no longer exists.
Man, I logged in to make this exact joke, but I didn't expect it would be first post!!!!
Yes, they do. It's not that difficult: if a site infringes on copyright, a notice is enough to block access to it. There is no need to involve any technical definitions in the explanation.
They do not just admit it. It is easier for them to say "I ignore technology" in order to justify their anti-technology laws.
Actually, it is Paul Van Riper.
He did manage to rip the US Navy apart with his clever tactics, proving that wars are almost never won by brute force.
What I am attempting to communicate is that when people created art for free, it was not an occupation that their survival depended on.
Your examples rather reenforce my view than change it. Shakespeare needed a theater company? that's what I am talking about: he could not live solely on his works.