Even anonymous assholes on the Internet can be a force for social change. We just have to be diplomatic and patient.
Start by sticking to the obvious: that the current method is broken. State the obvious in simple ways that the average person can understand, as you did with "Copyright is damage to the network. The Internet has routed around the damage." That was nice work. You have a good creative mind for this work. Encourage the offended to action by appearing as reasonable as you can and offering action items that aren't too offensive.
We can make change, we just have to start small. Prime issues like "Eternal copyright is the theft of culture" is an idea that will take some time to develop. It is true though, so if we keep at it it will win out. It will be a long slog and you must be patient. The mass of minds won't be turned in one day, and this one website isn't even a good fraction of the mass that needs turned - though it is a powerful section. Keep up with the effort and don't be discouraged. The opposition will try and troll you to diminish your effectiveness by making you rant, so measure your replies to AC and the high userid folks quite carefully. They're opportunities to score points with the real audience by being measured, reasonable and obvious rather than invitations to go off the deep end and bash a troll.
I'm getting some traction with "this is stealing" as a contrast to people who call sharing one song stealing.
I'm thinking, 10-20yrs of incarceration for flagrant violations for ripping a digital copy of a CD or DVD for personal use, 25-40 for sharing it, and financial damages in the millions of dollars per shared song or book. That should adequately provide a disincentive for the casual intellectual property thief. Obviously forfeiture of your entire estate and a lifetime of collections to prevent future economic misdeeds is the only adequate preventive measure.
For thieves of software and commercial theft, adding chemical castration should nip the problem in the bud.
And of course to claw back the rampant theft of content the content cooperatives like BSA, RIAA and MPAA should get a surcharge of 50% on all R/W media including hard drives - 75% for SD media that's more frequently infringing, and on all streaming communications like Internet, Cable TV, cellular phones and POTS. Clearly the passing of digital or analog data across international borders is likewise a circumvention of just management of artist's rights - a "jurisdiction hole" and must be prevented totally. An overriding "Supercopyright Body" should be instituted consisting of all of these constituencies.
To ensure fair distribution of content licensing all equipment that contains an amplifier, recorder or speaker should enjoy the surcharge as well. After all if you play music in your car with the windows down that's a public performance. Naturally for all of this equipment adequate licensing protective measures of DRM should be mandatory as well.
I'm sure we can count on the righteous defenders of artists' rights to distribute the take equitably after accounting overhead and costs.
Oracle relies on a vast network of OEM partners and their sales partners to recommend, service and sell their product. These partners are likely to look at a software vendor that tries to compete with them on the hardware as well as a threat. Think of the row that would arise if Microsoft were to try to build and sell their own desktop and laptop PCs. Hardware vendors would consider it a matter of their corporate survival to deprecate Windows and other Microsoft products.
Is this why you guys tend to just regurgitate the top hit on google? If so you are missing a lot because that stuff is dynamically generated by quote engines like Enderle. They quote themselves and syndicate the article with a permuter to give discrete but similar results in seconds. This gives them high visibility because the google engine doesn't recognize synonyms as the same text and so the permutations seem to be discrete articles. This raises an article to the top spot for long enough to pwn you.
Rephrase your changelist as a press release that's buzzword compliant. Include some developer quotes and some user praise. Most of the IT press will submit it as is, some with a minor rewrite to file the serial numbers off and pass it off as their own work.
Most of the founders of this republic considered a government run amok the greatest threat to its citizens. They tried to protect future generations from their own foolishness. Unfortunately foolishness is a persistent and powerful force.
There are other sites where they don't know that the copyright lobby steals thousands of works from us each, each day. This is an effective counterargument and it needs more exposure. They have stolen from you and if that offends you then the best you can do to get back what you've lost is to share the fact that they've stolen from you everywhere that you can.
More people need to know that the copyright lobby and their craven politicians have stolen more from each of us than the Pirate Bay ever could. Every day thousands of works that are rightfully part of our culture and in the public domain are stolen. That's 300 million people each deprived of thousands of works. A day. Hundreds of billions of thefts each day. We need to take those works back.
Copyright as envisioned by the authors of the US Constitution was written to law as the Copyright Act of 1790.
Under that act protection was 14 years with a 14 year extension available if the copyright holder was still alive and it was renewed.
So... that's what they meant by "for limited times". They wrote it down for us. Under that law all works prior to 1980 would be in the public domain as would many prior to 1994. Every time copyright has been extended those works that would be public domain have been stolen from each of us. THAT'Sstealing.
The comments of an anonymous coward don't matter much. Count yourself amongst the goatse nigger and frist psot trolls, if that consoles you. You might has well have done your bit into a toilet.
There will be many arguments here each way and the other. There are good arguments both for and against this policy. For the argument that whichever way the winds might blow, wikipedia is crap, I offer only this bio of a living person known to most of us whose contribution may not be disputed, yet nonetheless is misrepresented in his article:
Rob Enderle.
Twitter has more accepted slashdot stories than anybody I know of. If he finds a thing interesting the odds are the rest of us do too. Like myself he might find life not challenging enough to be interesting. For this space though the point is moot.
Twitter finds us interesting stuff on the Internet. This is a useful service. Twitter posts in articles many interesting things others might not know about because he's got a long memory and an axe to grind. This gives us contrary dialog to the marketdroids who would embrace a product because it's in their financial interest to do so. Twitter finds us astroturf trollbots to ignore. That's a good service too. Yes, his $'isms are a nuisance. Nonetheless he adds more value to slashdot than I do, and that's quite a bit.
Every challenge is an opportunity. I doubt Twitter could be induced to work for Microsoft but Yahoo is doable. For a measly $250k/yr Twitter could move a lot of mindshare. It's just bonus that he couldn't be spending all of his energy poking holes in every marketing effort. Oh FSM how I hate myself for posting that. The guy has every bit as much influence as Matt Asay, or more. We would miss him, but his children would be fat.
An important part of authorship is being aware of your audience. You haven't written anything that's untrue - but if you want to be a force of change you have to moderate your writing to move the audience gradually. Rome was not built in a day, and people's opinions won't sweep from one pole to the other in a single post.
So it is that in the article we move from making every pothead a felon to not being interested in small amounts. It's a gradual thing. Let's not make every post on the subject an indictment of human history, or a comparison to Hitler. Let your opponents go there, and win by the humorous absurdness of their replies.
Reason will win not by ridiclule, but by merit. As I often tell the Microsoft Blogbots: don't paste in all of your talking points all at once. Save some of them for the inevitable replies.
I don't envy my kids. To them constant observation is going to seem normal.
No normal person can get through an average day without violating some law or other. The prospect of every action being recorded will drive both normalization and atavism. Those who rebel will rebel most violently. Those who conform will do so most complacently. The transition from complacence to rebellion will become more acute. What that's going to do to my kids psychologically I wouldn't care to guess. I can't imagine it's a good thing but I don't see how to avoid it. My best hope is to teach them to be cynical.
We're two generations from colonization of the moon, Mars and the asteroid belt. Hopefully I can instill in my offspring a desire to be free of you idiots at least in the proxy of their spawn. Otherwise everything I've done till now will come to naught.
Outsourcing does give a larger chunk of the budget to external commercial interests. Who will then choose to operate in the states of malleable Senators and Congressmen, and fund a healthy lobbyist budget.
With the operations distributed in enough key states, we'll find a legislature ready to drown NASA in billions. Some of those billions might actually get spent building stuff.
It failed because we the people threw a royal hissy fit.
It failed for the same reason that all similar laws will fail: Congress does not have the power to repeal the laws of Botany or Chemistry. They can try, but the Universe laughs at their hubris. They may as well legislate the value of pi.
There would be some text here if I had something else to say, but I don't. I'm really just giving the lazy moderators a chance to see the parent post because I have the karma to burn.
That was my point above, modded "insightful flamebait". We've tried prohibition. The effect was to take a popular commodity and make it more popular, at the social cost of developing a criminal conspiracy in which nearly all citizens were involved. Violence erupted, and became more violent as prosecution increased. The criminalization of a popular product produced an industry to provide it that infested every sector of the body politic and the greater enforcement grew, the greater the profits for the illicit industry.
The experiment was abandoned as hopeless and upon its repeal US President Woodrow Wilson was reported to say: "I think this would be a good time for a beer."
We cannot as a free society abolish the practice of chemistry. We must abandon one hope or the other.
Slashdot Mirror
Even anonymous assholes on the Internet can be a force for social change. We just have to be diplomatic and patient.
Start by sticking to the obvious: that the current method is broken. State the obvious in simple ways that the average person can understand, as you did with "Copyright is damage to the network. The Internet has routed around the damage." That was nice work. You have a good creative mind for this work. Encourage the offended to action by appearing as reasonable as you can and offering action items that aren't too offensive.
We can make change, we just have to start small. Prime issues like "Eternal copyright is the theft of culture" is an idea that will take some time to develop. It is true though, so if we keep at it it will win out. It will be a long slog and you must be patient. The mass of minds won't be turned in one day, and this one website isn't even a good fraction of the mass that needs turned - though it is a powerful section. Keep up with the effort and don't be discouraged. The opposition will try and troll you to diminish your effectiveness by making you rant, so measure your replies to AC and the high userid folks quite carefully. They're opportunities to score points with the real audience by being measured, reasonable and obvious rather than invitations to go off the deep end and bash a troll.
I'm getting some traction with "this is stealing" as a contrast to people who call sharing one song stealing.
I'm thinking, 10-20yrs of incarceration for flagrant violations for ripping a digital copy of a CD or DVD for personal use, 25-40 for sharing it, and financial damages in the millions of dollars per shared song or book. That should adequately provide a disincentive for the casual intellectual property thief. Obviously forfeiture of your entire estate and a lifetime of collections to prevent future economic misdeeds is the only adequate preventive measure.
For thieves of software and commercial theft, adding chemical castration should nip the problem in the bud.
And of course to claw back the rampant theft of content the content cooperatives like BSA, RIAA and MPAA should get a surcharge of 50% on all R/W media including hard drives - 75% for SD media that's more frequently infringing, and on all streaming communications like Internet, Cable TV, cellular phones and POTS. Clearly the passing of digital or analog data across international borders is likewise a circumvention of just management of artist's rights - a "jurisdiction hole" and must be prevented totally. An overriding "Supercopyright Body" should be instituted consisting of all of these constituencies.
To ensure fair distribution of content licensing all equipment that contains an amplifier, recorder or speaker should enjoy the surcharge as well. After all if you play music in your car with the windows down that's a public performance. Naturally for all of this equipment adequate licensing protective measures of DRM should be mandatory as well.
I'm sure we can count on the righteous defenders of artists' rights to distribute the take equitably after accounting overhead and costs.
Oracle relies on a vast network of OEM partners and their sales partners to recommend, service and sell their product. These partners are likely to look at a software vendor that tries to compete with them on the hardware as well as a threat. Think of the row that would arise if Microsoft were to try to build and sell their own desktop and laptop PCs. Hardware vendors would consider it a matter of their corporate survival to deprecate Windows and other Microsoft products.
It seems more likely Dell requires the hard drive OEM to put the image on at manufacturing time.
Software has no manufacturing cost. The margins are like 80%.
Instead they should keep the parts that are made of stuff you have to buy, in an expensive factory, with union labor?
I have never heard acoustic piano amplified this loud. The crowd is eating it up.
You people disgust me.
Is this why you guys tend to just regurgitate the top hit on google? If so you are missing a lot because that stuff is dynamically generated by quote engines like Enderle. They quote themselves and syndicate the article with a permuter to give discrete but similar results in seconds. This gives them high visibility because the google engine doesn't recognize synonyms as the same text and so the permutations seem to be discrete articles. This raises an article to the top spot for long enough to pwn you.
seriously, are you guys pets?
Because other than that, the post works for me, but this one odd word messes with the flow.
Rephrase your changelist as a press release that's buzzword compliant. Include some developer quotes and some user praise. Most of the IT press will submit it as is, some with a minor rewrite to file the serial numbers off and pass it off as their own work.
Oracle needs to unload the hardware hot potato and HP is a natural buyer for this.
Most of the founders of this republic considered a government run amok the greatest threat to its citizens. They tried to protect future generations from their own foolishness. Unfortunately foolishness is a persistent and powerful force.
There are other sites where they don't know that the copyright lobby steals thousands of works from us each, each day. This is an effective counterargument and it needs more exposure. They have stolen from you and if that offends you then the best you can do to get back what you've lost is to share the fact that they've stolen from you everywhere that you can.
More people need to know that the copyright lobby and their craven politicians have stolen more from each of us than the Pirate Bay ever could. Every day thousands of works that are rightfully part of our culture and in the public domain are stolen. That's 300 million people each deprived of thousands of works. A day. Hundreds of billions of thefts each day. We need to take those works back.
Copyright as envisioned by the authors of the US Constitution was written to law as the Copyright Act of 1790.
Under that act protection was 14 years with a 14 year extension available if the copyright holder was still alive and it was renewed.
So... that's what they meant by "for limited times". They wrote it down for us. Under that law all works prior to 1980 would be in the public domain as would many prior to 1994. Every time copyright has been extended those works that would be public domain have been stolen from each of us. THAT'S stealing.
The comments of an anonymous coward don't matter much. Count yourself amongst the goatse nigger and frist psot trolls, if that consoles you. You might has well have done your bit into a toilet.
There will be many arguments here each way and the other. There are good arguments both for and against this policy. For the argument that whichever way the winds might blow, wikipedia is crap, I offer only this bio of a living person known to most of us whose contribution may not be disputed, yet nonetheless is misrepresented in his article: Rob Enderle.
I dare you to fix it.
Twitter has more accepted slashdot stories than anybody I know of. If he finds a thing interesting the odds are the rest of us do too. Like myself he might find life not challenging enough to be interesting. For this space though the point is moot.
Twitter finds us interesting stuff on the Internet. This is a useful service. Twitter posts in articles many interesting things others might not know about because he's got a long memory and an axe to grind. This gives us contrary dialog to the marketdroids who would embrace a product because it's in their financial interest to do so. Twitter finds us astroturf trollbots to ignore. That's a good service too. Yes, his $'isms are a nuisance. Nonetheless he adds more value to slashdot than I do, and that's quite a bit.
Every challenge is an opportunity. I doubt Twitter could be induced to work for Microsoft but Yahoo is doable. For a measly $250k/yr Twitter could move a lot of mindshare. It's just bonus that he couldn't be spending all of his energy poking holes in every marketing effort. Oh FSM how I hate myself for posting that. The guy has every bit as much influence as Matt Asay, or more. We would miss him, but his children would be fat.
Tom,
An important part of authorship is being aware of your audience. You haven't written anything that's untrue - but if you want to be a force of change you have to moderate your writing to move the audience gradually. Rome was not built in a day, and people's opinions won't sweep from one pole to the other in a single post.
So it is that in the article we move from making every pothead a felon to not being interested in small amounts. It's a gradual thing. Let's not make every post on the subject an indictment of human history, or a comparison to Hitler. Let your opponents go there, and win by the humorous absurdness of their replies.
Reason will win not by ridiclule, but by merit. As I often tell the Microsoft Blogbots: don't paste in all of your talking points all at once. Save some of them for the inevitable replies.
Best to you,
Symbolset.
I don't envy my kids. To them constant observation is going to seem normal.
No normal person can get through an average day without violating some law or other. The prospect of every action being recorded will drive both normalization and atavism. Those who rebel will rebel most violently. Those who conform will do so most complacently. The transition from complacence to rebellion will become more acute. What that's going to do to my kids psychologically I wouldn't care to guess. I can't imagine it's a good thing but I don't see how to avoid it. My best hope is to teach them to be cynical.
We're two generations from colonization of the moon, Mars and the asteroid belt. Hopefully I can instill in my offspring a desire to be free of you idiots at least in the proxy of their spawn. Otherwise everything I've done till now will come to naught.
The cool thing is that with an average lifespan of 1000 years*, the average camera will capture one crime.
Some of those crimes might even not have other actionable evidence (witnesses, bloody fingerprints, criminal leaving picture ID at the scene).
*ymmv
Outsourcing does give a larger chunk of the budget to external commercial interests. Who will then choose to operate in the states of malleable Senators and Congressmen, and fund a healthy lobbyist budget.
With the operations distributed in enough key states, we'll find a legislature ready to drown NASA in billions. Some of those billions might actually get spent building stuff.
Disgusting, but if it works it works.
The jailer's union has two friends: the liberals who are friends of unions, and the conservatives who need to be tough on crime.
They have little to worry about. The Teacher's union is similarly protected.
It failed because we the people threw a royal hissy fit.
It failed for the same reason that all similar laws will fail: Congress does not have the power to repeal the laws of Botany or Chemistry. They can try, but the Universe laughs at their hubris. They may as well legislate the value of pi.
There would be some text here if I had something else to say, but I don't. I'm really just giving the lazy moderators a chance to see the parent post because I have the karma to burn.
they tried at already and it didn't work.
That was my point above, modded "insightful flamebait". We've tried prohibition. The effect was to take a popular commodity and make it more popular, at the social cost of developing a criminal conspiracy in which nearly all citizens were involved. Violence erupted, and became more violent as prosecution increased. The criminalization of a popular product produced an industry to provide it that infested every sector of the body politic and the greater enforcement grew, the greater the profits for the illicit industry.
The experiment was abandoned as hopeless and upon its repeal US President Woodrow Wilson was reported to say: "I think this would be a good time for a beer."
We cannot as a free society abolish the practice of chemistry. We must abandon one hope or the other.