The real scarcity isn't in the intangible 'products' themselves, it's in the people who create them. For now, the West has a great advantage in skills and education - China and India might be able to pump out generic copies for a pittance once the designs are leaked, but so far the latest and greatest designs are still coming largely from the US and Europe.
Of course, this will change, and is changing, in the same way that most companies wouldn't have been able to outsource their manufacturing to China fifty years ago. For now, though, it isn't so much an economy based on closely guarded ideas, it's an economy based on creating those ideas.
I think we'd be far better off if that were the entirety of the reasoning behind US copyright policy; an economy based on cerebral creative work is not inherently worse than one based on welding and riveting. That's not the whole of the issue, though: an awful lot of recent copyright legislation - from domain seizures to DMCA to term extensions - does little to help the creative industry as a whole, but an awful lot to help the few companies (many of whom are just middlemen anyway) with deep pockets and a vested interest in preventing their business models from changing, often even to the detriment of both the consumers and the actual creators.
It's not an attempt to protect an IP-based economy, it's straightforward crony capitalism stemming from the lobbyists who don't want change. Their business model isn't threatened by infringement: 'piracy' is barely even slowed down by any of the countermeasures attempted, yet the industry continues to post record profits, implying that people do recognise that they need to pay, even for a crippled product. What they're actually threatened by is the emerging landscape in which they aren't the gatekeepers of all creative content.
Fifteen to twenty year terms would be a more than adequate incentive for the creation of new works, as well as providing a huge catalogue of new public domain works every year which would, in turn, stimulate further creative re-use. Essentially infinite terms coupled with DRM that is illegal to remove have very little impact on infringement, but they practically obliterate the possibility of legitimate resale or re-use that would actually help the industry as a whole.
Yet when the schools crack down, they seem to end up hitting precisely the wrong set of pupils - the actual troublemakers (at least those who aren't truly unbelievably stupid) become marginally more sneaky, delivering a constant and untraceable stream of snide comments and punches that the teachers never see, the majority of average students continue to plod along doing very little, and the good students who actually think for themselves grate against the increasingly invasive and obsessive authority until they either snap and do something stupid, or get kicked out anyway over a harmless YouTube video.
The article also said that "Gavin Russell, prime minister of the student government, gathered scores of signatures on a petition supporting Mr. Christie before two staff members warned him that, if he continued, he could also face punishment."; if they're threatening members of the student government (pointless as such organisations usually are, it's an issue of principle) for daring to circulating petitions, they sound like a bunch of authoritarian thugs and I see absolutely no reason to give them the benefit of the doubt.
It's not a different form factor, that's the thing, it's the same old notebook design that's been hit by a shrink-ray. I'm guessing that if they do sell them in Best Buy, there are going to be plenty of people complaining that the things on the screen of the little laptop look different to the big laptop.
If he'd been a little smarter, it sounds like it could've been a good way to get half-decent counterfeits out into they system without them being noticed. If the guy was really throwing photocopies in there, though, I don't know what he was expecting to happen.
Luggage is not regularly shaped, and adhesive tags all over (rather than looped through the handles and secured to the back of the tag itself) will either fall off or require industrial strength glue that'll you'll never manage to remove after the flight.
You probably could design a robot arm and/or multi-camera system, and it might even be reliable, but it'd be much, much more expensive than either RFID or employing a human to scan the tags. I'm sure these RFID tags will still have barcodes and human-readable destinations printed on them, since the infrastructure to read both is already present and the cost of printing is negligible, but they're a fallback measure.
Because many customers/patients blame the vendor/doctor when the product or service is fine the the customer/patient is an idiot.
Absolutely true, but if the doctor/dentist's solution is to have patients sign legally dubious, trust-destroying contracts like this, they are also overly litigious idiots.
I don't see that 15 to 20 year copyright terms would significantly impact the export market. Is there really that much work from the early 90s still generating significant revenue? Is that income stream significant enough that it wouldn't be offset by the new derivative works created from the vast influx of public domain source material that could be created by a significant reduction in term length?
Never the less, seeing this guy shake up the cozy little panel of "experts" makes me very happy.
I quite agree. I think that as a famous musician, and thus as one of the very people that his opponents on the panel claim to protect, he was superbly placed to make his points. When all the rhetoric centres around promoting the arts, it's perfect to have a set of businessmen talking about it in the abstract, and then to have an actual artist come in with this:
I may be one of very few people in this room who actually makes his living personally by creating what these gentlemen are pleased to call "intellectual property."
He added that he was more interested in talking about "incentivizing creativity by people who create things, and not large institutions who prey on them and have for years."
If the big media guys want the public on their side, they'll have to do so by convincing us that syphoning money into the middle-men is a good idea, because I don't think the "protecting the artists" façade can hold for that much longer.
I don't see why an initial 'gold rush' leads to the conclusion that it's a scam - sure, the first guys are getting rich, but that doesn't necessarily imply anything negative about the currency once it does stabilise somewhat, as far as I can see.
As I understand it, the process doesn't create anything of inherent value, but it serves to limit supply - same way that gold is difficult to find and mine, is of limited industrial use (and thus limited intrinsic value), and tends to just sit around in vaults once it's been refined, but is still traded and invested in.
The key difference, of course, is that the value of gold has more 'inertia' since there are far, far more people who buy into the notion that gold has value. Bitcoin is pretty volatile because there are far fewer people with a vested interest (in the most literal sense of the term) in its maintained value, and because people find it easier to accept the value of a shiny metal with thousands of years of history than that of a cryptographically signed set of data.
I was wondering what the summary meant by IFE as a revenue generator - it seems a fairly sizeable step backwards to from free in-seat screens to paid movies that you have to bring your own laptop for, if that is indeed their plan. I guess as a retrofit for planes without LCDs it might work, but if I'm on a regional jet it'll only be for a few hours anyway; it'd just feel petty and unnecessary to pay for video if that's how long I need to occupy myself for.
As a free service, it'd be a nice alternative to the systems they have now (which can be a bit clunky), but that "Of course, the airline industry offers in-flight entertainment not solely to keep passengers amused but also to generate revenue." sentence implies it's going to be another excuse for them to extract a few bucks from their customers.
It's perhaps clearer if you see the screen in question. I don't use an iPhone myself, but I was interested to see what all the complaints are about, and as far as I can see this is what they're referring to, and the icon then leads to this. It's not a picture of a clock and a '+' symbol, it's a fairly clear list to which you are adding - the actual alarm setting screen has a clear 'Save' button presented with text. Very, very different to what I (and perhaps many others) envisaged from TFA's description (which was provided without any useful graphic, for some reason).
Although I use a CLI on occasion, all I know of DOS is 'cd' and 'dir' - my first instinct would be to type 'help', and if that didn't work I'd probably try 'man' or 'manual'. Assuming one of those worked, I would then read the instructions and find out how to proceed. If not, I'd get out my phone and Google it, or ask somebody. That's exactly the same as what I would do with a new GUI program, except that I'm limited to clicking a finite number of random buttons rather than typing an infinite number of words.
To me, that means the GUI is easier to start up on, but honestly there's very little in it either way - you don't know, you experiment first, and you ask if that doesn't solve your problem. If you can't learn that, you're a lost cause; if you can remember those couple of simple steps, you'll figure out 90% of the standard end-user problems far better than most. I honestly don't see how age or experience comes into it, beyond the fact that the latter speeds up the process by means of increased intuition gained from using similar systems.
TL;DR If you can't use this, however old you may be, you probably shouldn't be trusted with complex electronics in the first place.
Is that 300,000 years to a static observer, or to the party in transit, though? If you're talking about putting that much mass in space to start with, a power plant capable of getting up to a non-negligible fraction of light speed wouldn't be so far-fetched, even with current tech - the humans on Earth may have evolved into an entirely new species, but the guys on the ship will only have had time to start a few religions, develop their own art, science and language, and maybe work out how to turn the whole ship around and deliver a cosmic bitchslap back to the people who decided to cram them into a tin can for a few centuries in the first place.
According to TFA it looks to be habitable in principle (using Earth-centric assumptions about complex life, of course) but toxic to humans, so perhaps not a prime candidate for humanity's first extrasolar excursion.
Slashdot Mirror
The real scarcity isn't in the intangible 'products' themselves, it's in the people who create them. For now, the West has a great advantage in skills and education - China and India might be able to pump out generic copies for a pittance once the designs are leaked, but so far the latest and greatest designs are still coming largely from the US and Europe.
Of course, this will change, and is changing, in the same way that most companies wouldn't have been able to outsource their manufacturing to China fifty years ago. For now, though, it isn't so much an economy based on closely guarded ideas, it's an economy based on creating those ideas.
I think we'd be far better off if that were the entirety of the reasoning behind US copyright policy; an economy based on cerebral creative work is not inherently worse than one based on welding and riveting. That's not the whole of the issue, though: an awful lot of recent copyright legislation - from domain seizures to DMCA to term extensions - does little to help the creative industry as a whole, but an awful lot to help the few companies (many of whom are just middlemen anyway) with deep pockets and a vested interest in preventing their business models from changing, often even to the detriment of both the consumers and the actual creators.
It's not an attempt to protect an IP-based economy, it's straightforward crony capitalism stemming from the lobbyists who don't want change. Their business model isn't threatened by infringement: 'piracy' is barely even slowed down by any of the countermeasures attempted, yet the industry continues to post record profits, implying that people do recognise that they need to pay, even for a crippled product. What they're actually threatened by is the emerging landscape in which they aren't the gatekeepers of all creative content.
Fifteen to twenty year terms would be a more than adequate incentive for the creation of new works, as well as providing a huge catalogue of new public domain works every year which would, in turn, stimulate further creative re-use. Essentially infinite terms coupled with DRM that is illegal to remove have very little impact on infringement, but they practically obliterate the possibility of legitimate resale or re-use that would actually help the industry as a whole.
I'm trying to work out what part of a student-made video is apparently owned by a German media conglomerate?
Yet when the schools crack down, they seem to end up hitting precisely the wrong set of pupils - the actual troublemakers (at least those who aren't truly unbelievably stupid) become marginally more sneaky, delivering a constant and untraceable stream of snide comments and punches that the teachers never see, the majority of average students continue to plod along doing very little, and the good students who actually think for themselves grate against the increasingly invasive and obsessive authority until they either snap and do something stupid, or get kicked out anyway over a harmless YouTube video.
The article also said that "Gavin Russell, prime minister of the student government, gathered scores of signatures on a petition supporting Mr. Christie before two staff members warned him that, if he continued, he could also face punishment."; if they're threatening members of the student government (pointless as such organisations usually are, it's an issue of principle) for daring to circulating petitions, they sound like a bunch of authoritarian thugs and I see absolutely no reason to give them the benefit of the doubt.
It's not a different form factor, that's the thing, it's the same old notebook design that's been hit by a shrink-ray. I'm guessing that if they do sell them in Best Buy, there are going to be plenty of people complaining that the things on the screen of the little laptop look different to the big laptop.
Sounds like time for a couple of parabolic dishes and a friendly neighbour within the gigabit coverage area...
If he'd been a little smarter, it sounds like it could've been a good way to get half-decent counterfeits out into they system without them being noticed. If the guy was really throwing photocopies in there, though, I don't know what he was expecting to happen.
get other religious leaders to understand and see is as an effort to oppress and control people
"Hi Pot, have you met my friend Kettle?"
That will do nothing to protect you from DPI and other offensive behavior by your service provider.
Forgive my potential ignorance, but I thought that was exactly what Freenet was designed to do?
1) How do we route around this damage?
Although it's been some time since I last looked at the project, Freenet still seems like a good bet.
Luggage is not regularly shaped, and adhesive tags all over (rather than looped through the handles and secured to the back of the tag itself) will either fall off or require industrial strength glue that'll you'll never manage to remove after the flight.
You probably could design a robot arm and/or multi-camera system, and it might even be reliable, but it'd be much, much more expensive than either RFID or employing a human to scan the tags. I'm sure these RFID tags will still have barcodes and human-readable destinations printed on them, since the infrastructure to read both is already present and the cost of printing is negligible, but they're a fallback measure.
Because many customers/patients blame the vendor/doctor when the product or service is fine the the customer/patient is an idiot.
Absolutely true, but if the doctor/dentist's solution is to have patients sign legally dubious, trust-destroying contracts like this, they are also overly litigious idiots.
I don't see that 15 to 20 year copyright terms would significantly impact the export market. Is there really that much work from the early 90s still generating significant revenue? Is that income stream significant enough that it wouldn't be offset by the new derivative works created from the vast influx of public domain source material that could be created by a significant reduction in term length?
Perhaps not by name, but who hasn't heard of the Grateful Dead?
Never the less, seeing this guy shake up the cozy little panel of "experts" makes me very happy.
I quite agree. I think that as a famous musician, and thus as one of the very people that his opponents on the panel claim to protect, he was superbly placed to make his points. When all the rhetoric centres around promoting the arts, it's perfect to have a set of businessmen talking about it in the abstract, and then to have an actual artist come in with this:
I may be one of very few people in this room who actually makes his living personally by creating what these gentlemen are pleased to call "intellectual property."
He added that he was more interested in talking about "incentivizing creativity by people who create things, and not large institutions who prey on them and have for years."
If the big media guys want the public on their side, they'll have to do so by convincing us that syphoning money into the middle-men is a good idea, because I don't think the "protecting the artists" façade can hold for that much longer.
I don't see why an initial 'gold rush' leads to the conclusion that it's a scam - sure, the first guys are getting rich, but that doesn't necessarily imply anything negative about the currency once it does stabilise somewhat, as far as I can see.
As I understand it, the process doesn't create anything of inherent value, but it serves to limit supply - same way that gold is difficult to find and mine, is of limited industrial use (and thus limited intrinsic value), and tends to just sit around in vaults once it's been refined, but is still traded and invested in.
The key difference, of course, is that the value of gold has more 'inertia' since there are far, far more people who buy into the notion that gold has value. Bitcoin is pretty volatile because there are far fewer people with a vested interest (in the most literal sense of the term) in its maintained value, and because people find it easier to accept the value of a shiny metal with thousands of years of history than that of a cryptographically signed set of data.
I was wondering what the summary meant by IFE as a revenue generator - it seems a fairly sizeable step backwards to from free in-seat screens to paid movies that you have to bring your own laptop for, if that is indeed their plan. I guess as a retrofit for planes without LCDs it might work, but if I'm on a regional jet it'll only be for a few hours anyway; it'd just feel petty and unnecessary to pay for video if that's how long I need to occupy myself for.
As a free service, it'd be a nice alternative to the systems they have now (which can be a bit clunky), but that "Of course, the airline industry offers in-flight entertainment not solely to keep passengers amused but also to generate revenue." sentence implies it's going to be another excuse for them to extract a few bucks from their customers.
Is that "in practice", "in theory" or "in the wild now"?
It's perhaps clearer if you see the screen in question. I don't use an iPhone myself, but I was interested to see what all the complaints are about, and as far as I can see this is what they're referring to, and the icon then leads to this. It's not a picture of a clock and a '+' symbol, it's a fairly clear list to which you are adding - the actual alarm setting screen has a clear 'Save' button presented with text. Very, very different to what I (and perhaps many others) envisaged from TFA's description (which was provided without any useful graphic, for some reason).
Although I use a CLI on occasion, all I know of DOS is 'cd' and 'dir' - my first instinct would be to type 'help', and if that didn't work I'd probably try 'man' or 'manual'. Assuming one of those worked, I would then read the instructions and find out how to proceed. If not, I'd get out my phone and Google it, or ask somebody. That's exactly the same as what I would do with a new GUI program, except that I'm limited to clicking a finite number of random buttons rather than typing an infinite number of words.
To me, that means the GUI is easier to start up on, but honestly there's very little in it either way - you don't know, you experiment first, and you ask if that doesn't solve your problem. If you can't learn that, you're a lost cause; if you can remember those couple of simple steps, you'll figure out 90% of the standard end-user problems far better than most. I honestly don't see how age or experience comes into it, beyond the fact that the latter speeds up the process by means of increased intuition gained from using similar systems.
TL;DR If you can't use this, however old you may be, you probably shouldn't be trusted with complex electronics in the first place.
Is that 300,000 years to a static observer, or to the party in transit, though? If you're talking about putting that much mass in space to start with, a power plant capable of getting up to a non-negligible fraction of light speed wouldn't be so far-fetched, even with current tech - the humans on Earth may have evolved into an entirely new species, but the guys on the ship will only have had time to start a few religions, develop their own art, science and language, and maybe work out how to turn the whole ship around and deliver a cosmic bitchslap back to the people who decided to cram them into a tin can for a few centuries in the first place.
According to TFA it looks to be habitable in principle (using Earth-centric assumptions about complex life, of course) but toxic to humans, so perhaps not a prime candidate for humanity's first extrasolar excursion.
Yeah, and French Fries are from France. FRANCE I SAY!
Belgium, actually. And properly served with mayo, not ketchup, although I'd be willing to accept ranch dressing as a suitably American substitute!