In more ways than the obvious ones. My mother has it, so I've had no choice but to learn about it. She can't really do chores any more though she still tries. She confuses clean and dirty dishes. She puts them in the wrong cupboards. She can't operate the washing machines any more, but she can and does still open the doors, stopping them. So we've had to either stand guard, or wash by hand, or use them at night when she is asleep. She's always thinking that people are coming over, or that we have to hurry up and go somewhere to meet people. She's beginning to have trouble remembering people. She really took to email, and was our family's big communicator. But about 2 years ago she stopped using it. Now she can't write anything but the most banal fluff. They say an early warning sign is difficulty with finances, and it was about 3 years ago we had to take over all the bill payments. The trigger was being 3 days late with a credit card payment. First time that ever happened, and the credit card company (Chase) wouldn't give an inch. I suppose the crisis made them hard ass. I paid the late fees and interest, and the entire bill, then I cancelled that credit card. A year later I finished cutting all ties with Chase, and closed my savings account with them.
How and when do you take the car keys away? We saw suspicious paint marks on the bumpers and doors, and knew we couldn't let her drive much longer. Dreaded having an ugly scene where we forcibly took her driver's license away. Making it harder was that her daily trips to the mall got her out of our hair so we could work. But we found a neat way around it. She was always misplacing her purse, with keys, credit cards, and all. In March last year, she got paranoid that thieves might break in, and hid her purse. Took us a week to find it that time. We used that to end her driving. Told her she couldn't drive until she found her license and car keys, and she didn't blow up and come down hard on us as it was obvious to her that it was her fault she'd lost her purse. We did not tell her when we finally found it.
Doctors, curse their greedy hides, are unable to do anything constructive about it. All they do is profit off our problems by selling us expensive prescriptions that may do nothing whatever. Aricept is a waste.
All that is pretty typical. It will get worse. I read that in the advanced stages, victims no longer have enough of a brain to coordinate walking, even if their bodies can still do it. So they have to use wheelchairs. We may ultimately have to put her in a nursing home. But I haven't yet told of a less obvious horror.
What I didn't know is how happy Alzheimer's victims are. She was always a moody person, prone to rampages over essentially trivial faults. She's a "sundowner", meaning that late afternoon is her triple witching hour so to speak. Her blood sugar bottoms out, and she becomes a hell of a grouch, more ready than usual to explode at any provocation whatever, and so ready to see provocation where there wasn't any. Got to feed her to calm her down and get her back to being just merely touchy and thin skinned. And then around 10 years ago, that changed. She became a much more pleasant, happy person. I took it as the wisdom of age. Thought she'd resolved to turn over a new leaf, and was succeeding. Everyone who met her told me how cool she was. And it gave me hope that people really can change, that genetics and formative events in our childhoods don't have to be our destinies. Now I understand that was the beginning of Alzheimer's. How can I express it? Horrifying to see that these improvements were thanks to irreversable brain damage, and that achieving happiness in life is perhaps not a worthy goal and not a real improvement.
That's the 2008 Financial Crisis in a nutshell. Then hold the mess up as an example of how bankrupt, stupid, and evil government and socialist organizations such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are. Blame it all on the policies of the Clinton and Carter administrations. Mock GM for now being "Government Motors". Crow about how great private enterprise is. Brazenly ignore the boatload of implicit contradictions, omissions, and lies in such statements.
To the hard right, socialists are the new communists. Sweden might be their poster nation of socialism run amok, or perhaps Greece now thanks to the recent debt trouble, but all of Europe is on their list of bad examples. France was a popular whipping boy, especially when they were indulging in a bit more anti-Americanism than average. It's harder to pick on Sweden because that nation works too well. But the minute Sweden slips up, I guarantee you'll be hearing all kinds of "I told you so!".
Just why they think that has me puzzled too. Surely taking the burden of providing health care off our corporations' HR departments is one of the most business and job friendly moves the government could have made? You know, lower the cost of employing people by removing the overhead of running health care programs, so that businesses will be able to employ more people? And we'll reap savings by catching problems earlier instead of waiting or denying care until they're emergencies, as we do now. The way we run our heath care now is, as the expression goes, "penny wise, pound foolish". Force people to be tough and not seek medical care, even when they should. But they don't see it that way. They see only the "moral hazard" problem. They think if health care is made "free", that's socialism, and people will abuse it. They haven't looked at any actual data on that issue, or if they have, they just dismiss it as biased or wrong.
They also have this knee jerk view that government can't do anything efficiently. Reagan once famously said "government is not a solution to our pro
If avionics is so fragile, why aren't there more crashes? What if a plane flies over a building that houses a server farm? I realize any signals from a building will be greatly attenuated by distance, but still, if an ebook reader can cause problems, why not that?
Jamming is another matter, and not what I meant. Of course you can't read a signal if you're being flooded with energy on the frequencies you're trying to receive. Would be like trying to make out constellations while someone shines a bright light in your face. But that light doesn't cause your heart or pacemaker to go crazy or quit, or otherwise make your body experience a catastrophic failure. Neither should planes suffer any kind of malfunction from such interference.
We've built space probes that can handle the difficult environments of deep space, and Jupiter, and the sun. We have military jets that absolutely must be able to withstand enemy attempts at jamming. We had planes before we had electronics and AM radio. Another place where PEDs could be a concern are hospitals, but somehow they aren't. There any cases of a doctor's cellphone causing equipment failure? Not that I've heard. How about cars? Any cases of cellphones or any other PED screwing up a car's electronics, causing the engine to quit, or activating the brakes, or causing "unintended acceleration" or some such? Again, not that I've heard. Kids play video games and watch movies in the backs of minivans, without any impact whatsoever on the correctness of the vehicle's operation. Heck, they stuff passenger planes full of LCD screens, "sky phones", and other luxuries, all of which could potentially cause interference.
As to your "badly manufactured cable" scenario, that's not the PED killing reason you make it out to be. That cable should be tested, and should fail. Also, 1000%? If necessary, that amount can be factored into a determination of what the standards should be.
Really, the air travel industry should stop being such wimps about consumer electronics.
Seriously. It's all very well for us to write letters. But we're busy trying to feed our families and keep our heads above water in this difficult economy, and cannot spare much time for that sort of thing, particularly when it is so likely to be wasted effort. If I'm going to take the time to write something, I prefer it to be available to a large audience, not an audience of 1 who may well be bought. As Lessig complained, our system is unable to reach the obvious conclusion that intellectual property law has gone too far. Instead, our representatives have sold us out time and again to special interests. If more than 10 years of opposition to and derision of things like the "Mickey Mouse Protection Act" have been unheard or unheeded, that's not our fault for not writing enough letters. Why don't they come read these discussions on Slashdot? (Maybe they do already? Doubt it.) Here we have a group of people who are more closely concerned with the problems posed by patent law, having a good discussion full of good examples and covering many aspects and ramifications. Representatives could also participate, anonymously or not, as they please. They could even try us with an "Ask Slashdot" article.
On-line forums are the town halls of the 21st century.
You build safety factors into your standards. Go 50% over what you think you need. Or 100% over. Then, normal wear and tear shouldn't cause devices to exceed the threshhold that causes trouble, even if they can no longer pass the standards for new devices. This has been done for centuries. The Romans did this with aqueducts! The elevated portions can withstand winds of up to 300 mph, 50% more than they thought might ever happen.
As to your other concerns, it's not voodoo. Designs can account for connection problems and ignorant users who want to get their hands dirty. And planes must be shielded better. Otherwise, some prankster on the ground could aim a transmitter at a plane and screw with its electronics. Maybe a powerful radio station could accidentally do it. I recall there was an incident where someone on the ground pointed a laser into the cockpit, making it difficult for the pilots to see. Some things can't be shielded of course. But we don't know what's reasonable.
The fact is, we haven't seriously addressed this problem. Or we would have a better idea of what can be handled. No, it's been cheaper to ignore the problem and resort to crude measures such as blanket bans and let electronics remain the boogieman of air travel.
testing every possible consumer electronics device which might end up on an aircraft, against all the possible aircraft
... is the wrong approach to this problem. You've obviously spotted the issue that this would require m*n tests, where m is the number of airplane models and n is the number of PEDs. But then you just declare it impractical and give up!
Instead, you need standards. Then you test each device to see if it meets the standards, for a total of m+n tests. In the case of planes, test that they can tolerate a minimum amount of interference. And for the devices, test that they do not emit more than that minimum amount.
That's like asking which dog you'd back in a dog fight to the death.
We want the fighting ended. MS is just one of hundreds who are a little too eager to participate in these bloodsports. This time, MS's dog lost. Will this inspire MS to take a step back and rethink the whole thing? Not likely, but we can hope.
You talk as if the current system is fair, and we can't possibly come up with anything better based on some sort of patronage system.
We've all heard tales of how badly publishers rip off artists. That is not a condemnation of the system itself, merely the corruption of it. But let us suppose unfair deals made under duress and other sorts of corruption are not a problem. Even then, copyright does a poor job of compensating artists. An author like Rowling has hit the jackpot. She made enough money that she and the next several generations of her descendents will never need to work a day of their lives. She deserves significant compensation, but not that much. Her work went viral in a big way, and the primitive "percentage of sales" model of compensation converted that into a gigantic fortune. Why couldn't we use some kind of logarithmic scaling? After the first million sales, the royalty percentage ought to decrease by half, something like that. After 100 million sales, it ought to go public domain. Have we not paid enough that her works ought to pass into the public domain, now? What should it cost to just buy her out? Why is there no such option? She's awfully useful to publishers, as a poster girl for everyone who aspires to be a successful author. She's like a lottery winner who is used to entice the rest of the public to play, and in doing so, support the system. Meanwhile, most authors languish in obscurity, and perhaps they should-- they aren't that good. I have some friends who are thoroughly deluded by dreams of the wealth that could be theirs if only they manage to become successful authors, just like Rowling. They know at an intellectual level that they're kidding themselves, but emotionally they can't bear to give up these dreams. Cruel.
In a patronage system, we wouldn't have only one way of raising money or figuring compensation. We'd have dozens, in the hope that together they would be fairer than any one system alone could be. Popularity would only be one method. We'd also have them compete with each other in order to keep down the favoritism and corruption that the money is bound to attract. We already have a little of this with all kinds of prizes, things like the Hugo and Nebula Awards. But they aren't near enough. If that could be expanded, it could serve as part of a system of compensation. I think ultimately this could be done better, much better, and fairer than any copyright based system.
A status quo ought to have some steadiness to it. Copyright has been moved and redefined so often in recent years it can hardly be called a model of steadiness in a changing world. The most recent change I know of is the PRO-IP Act of 2008. ACTA may yet become the newest change, though we can hope it's dead. Every deliberate change has been a grotesque and blatant attempt to hold back progress, to try to make new kinds of media work "just like a book". Except they go further, and try to take away even what we have with books! All this is very much against the public interest. A very few changes inadvertently worked in the public's favor, but no deliberate change did, no matter what claims they like to make about how it's all for the artists' sakes.
I have hope we'll all come around. In the meantime, I'm a little scared that so many people are accepting or are at the least unthinking of these unconscionable restrictions on what we may do with our purchases. And living with the spying! As an example of how tracking can go wrong, my father's employer ordered everyone to purchase and read a book on leadership. (The employer was merely running with the latest management fad. They're suckers for that sort of thing.) Not wanting to take the time to travel to a bookstore for that, I introduced him to Amazon. In 5 minutes, created an account for him and picked out some random book on leadership, and done. Except you're never done. Ever since, he's been regularly pestered with email that assumes he likes such books. Must we hope that his employer is never granted access to Amazon's records on him, that his employment won't hang in the balance on that info?
That RMS's position could be seen as extreme is another fearful comment on the current state of affairs.
Perhaps criminal law stops the most blatant crimes. Madoff is in prison. But mostly, businesses are able to work around such impediments, and indulge in all the bribery, favoritism, and social irresponsibility they wish.
No other perpetrator of the financial disaster of 2008 and the subsequent Great Recession has been jailed or even convicted of anything. The most that's been done are a few fines that seem sizeable, but are just pocket change to these guys. I don't think Mozillo paid nearly enough. And they get a heck of a bargain in exchange-- they don't have to admit to anything. Some congressmen are personally investigating Goldman Sachs, and so they may yet be in trouble. But mostly, it's back to business as usual. Upper management pay is right back on the ludicrously high track it was on, and no one seems able to restrain it. As a stockholder, I resent seeing the value of my stock diluted and depressed by an end run around the market to hand these greedy bastards huge bonuses at my expense. But what can I do? I don't own enough for my votes to count for squat, and I certainly can't get executive pay on the agenda. I can't even realistically get out of the stock market, not the way our retirement money is automatically sucked in.
As for other crimes, no official of Massey Energy, including then CEO Don Blankenship, went to jail for the gross negligence that lead to the latest coal mine disaster that killed 29 miners. No one is going to prison for the 11 deaths on the Deepwater Horizon. We're told they're just accidents, just the cost of doing business, you know. Those coal miners knew it was a risky job, they have no right to complain. They should be grateful to have jobs. There are countless other examples of government impotence in the face of damaging, destructive, shameless crimes. Regulation is supposed to head that sort of thing off, but it can't if the very idea of it is under such heavy relentless assault that regulators spend all their time justifying themselves, or pleading for funding, or for their very jobs.
Effective boycotts are difficult to pull off. It's a reactionary, defensive move anyway. I think going on the offense would be better.
Propose our own law. And let's go straight to the top, and shoot for a Constitutional Amendment, a "Freedom of Knowledge" Amendment to match the other freedoms of religion, speech and the right to assemble and bear arms. I've tried to draft such an amendment, but there is so much ground to cover that I started getting bogged down in the details. The enemies of freedom have been very inventive. The main thing such an amendment should have is reform of copyright and patent law, which is another reason why it has to be nothing less than a Constitutional Amendment. And the particular reform? Elimination of the monopoly grants. We can set up markets to support art and science without that kind of government interference. Lot of other things could go into such an amendment, but removing the requirement to support artificial monopolies with our taxes is the main issue. We should seriously try for it, not merely use such an effort to negotiate concessions.
I think you are confusing a few things, and seeing paradoxes where there aren't any. Firstly, we have the mixup between "regulating" and "policing". The way these terms are used, they mean almost the same thing. The only difference is that the first one applies to businesses, and the second to people. Somehow, "regulation" has become a perjorative term for laws that "hurt business" and the ultimate example of unwanted, clumsy, wasteful "government interference", but "policing" is an extremely desired and practically holy activity to keep us and our children safe from terrorists and other ilk. Do you really think businesses are so trustworthy that they shouldn't be policed? Or that the market alone is capable of policing business? Bit difficult for the market to police a monopoly, when they pull stuff like "planned obsolescence" and get away with it because the customers have no competition to turn to. Nor can the market alone stop monopolies from forming.
You also seem to be seeing "free market" and "government regulation" as polar opposites. They aren't. If we didn't have our interfering government, what would stop our businesses from stooping to particularly destructive forms of competition, such as murdering the employees, suppliers, and even customers of rivals, the way Mexican drug gangs are doing now? And bribing and murdering government workers and officials so that their jobs will not be done? Nothing that I can see. Imagine trying to hold a hockey game without those interfering referees and rules. Would you want to play? In less than a minute, it wouldn't be a hockey game anymore. It would be just a brawl.
Another bit of confusion is mistaking government interference for what is really business interference. Did the people support this law? Were we asked? Of course not! Regulatory capture and subversion of our elected representatives and other sorts of corruption have always been problems, and these days, they are worse than ever. Our government is supposed to serve us, not special interests. This outrageous proposal should never have stood a chance of becoming law.
This new Tennessee law is the very worst sort of business sponsored interference.
If you're going to talk of economic incentives, the telecoms industry has every incentive to make sure we never do definitive research on this question. That is the reason we don't know how dangerous EMR really is. Maybe it's not at all dangerous. We know it depends greatly on frequency and intensity. Gamma rays are very dangerous. X-rays are not as bad, and we actually make use of brief and light exposures to them. Ultraviolet can cause skin cancer. And the part of the spectrum used by cellphones? We don't know. The industry isn't going to take that chance, and does much to squash research into this area, and spread confusion and doubt about what little we do have in the way of findings. Any time there's a proposal to research the matter with government funding, suddenly the deficit gets talked up, or some other pretext is advanced, and the funding is slashed.
A question like this is too well known to be left unanswered. It is crazy that we haven't found out just exactly what EMR does to us. We know it can't be too bad just from the fact that people have been using cellphones for years. It doesn't kill a user in a matter of months. But we can find out more, and we should.
Too many. There was the Upper Big Branch Mine Disaster in 2010, which killed 29. According to a show I saw some time ago, coal mining is the 2nd most dangerous occupation there is, after crab fishing off Alaska. But that misses the point. Coal is not a good standard of comparison. You guys seem to like to use it because it's bad enough that maybe nuclear doesn't look so bad in comparison.
west coast... people get more radiation on a daily basis from the smoke detectors in their houses(Americium), than any possible fallout from Fukushima.
Now you're citing irrelevant facts. What counts is the significant radiation that the locals got, not the barely detectable amounts experienced by people halfway around the world. What amount of radiaton would the west coast inhabitants experience if one of the local nuclear power plants leaked?
Throughout, you go on about the number of fatalities, and how there've been way more with coal power than nuclear power. But that's another too narrow focus that makes nuclear power look better, and once again, only when compared to coal. And driving? You've only picked the most dangerous commonplace activity for comparison. Why don't you compare nuclear power to something more suitable, like, say, construction work, particularly on dams, or some other blue collar occupation.
For a different measure, consider how many square km have been rendered unfit for habitation and agricuture, times how many years. For coal, I expect that number is very low, perhaps 0. There could be some ecological effects from reckless disposal of waste from irresponsibly run mining operations, so perhaps not 0, but still quite low, as it can be cleaned up relatively quickly. It may not stay low if sea levels rise and that can be blamed on coal burning. For driving, windmills, hydroelectric dams, and solar cell farms, it is 0. Any time we really want to, we can drain whatever lake we wish, and, assuming it hasn't been used as a toxic waste dump, quickly return that land to agriculture. For nuclear power, it is of course rather higher. 30km^2 * pi * 300 years * 2 sites is about 1.7 million "sq km years" of land that we've lost. Nuclear power is almost uniquely dangerous in this way.
You can't just ignore these factors, if you're going to have a serious discussion about the real costs and risks of various kinds of power.
I'll up your 'Broken Utopia' with 'Horizon Effect'. We don't properly assess risks. We've done a terrible job of accounting for external costs. We tend to be overly optimistic, and entirely too willing to stick our heads in the sand, and ignore problems that are seemingly low probability, or decades in the future. What are the odds some terrorist attack or a tornado or other natural disaster will breach the makeshift waste storage? Or that some of this material will be stolen and used in a dirty bomb? This stuff can make large areas of land unsafe for habitation for centuries.
All that applies even when everyone is honest. Lot of people aren't. Nuclear power proponents have not demonstrated enough trustworthiness to be allowed free rein. There've been far more incidents than ONE. Many of them went unreported. When there were problems, it was too easy to squelch research so that no one would ever know for sure, or dismiss it as statistical noise, or blame it on something else. You should read up on those liars from Big Tobacco and their infamous slogan "doubt is our product", and testimony before Congress, "nicotine is not addictive".
It's not that we haven't given nuclear power a chance. We have. And they've blown it. If we properly assessed the costs and risks, I think we would honestly conclude, as Germany evidently has, that nuclear is simply too dangerous, and not use it at all. Same for offshore oil drilling. We've all seen just how damaging that can be. We have many other options. Don't give nuclear or coal a pass out of misplaced nostalgia or comfort with the familiar.
You wrote "gay" where you meant "guy". "Gay" has become slang for a homosexual man.
Anyway, about this latest bit of lawmaking. Sounds great on the surface, but I feared it was another attempt at whitewashing. Call the law the opposite of what is really intended.
It's fake value. It's the old idea of monopoly. Yes, monopolies are very valuable-- to the owners. To the rest of us, not so much. In this case, they are of negative value. It costs us a great deal to maintain these wholly artificial monopolies. We spend much money on enforcement, court cases, DRM, and other completely ineffective wastes of effort to hold back the tide. And it is used to screw over the artists, the very people these laws are supposed to enable! We pass up even more money in the form of lost opportunities. We could save hugely on public libraries if it were legal for them to go digital. Our culture would be so much more searchable, researchable, mashable, and generally available. Novel, and very valuable uses could flourish. Instead, we have "debates" over such things as whether any form of "shifting" should be allowed. Shows just how screwy the discussion has been.
Perhaps worst of all is the climate. Many artists are so afraid of being ripped off that they act as their own worst enemies. Their efforts to make certain they aren't pirated instead ensure that they never rise out of obscurity. The public cannot discover their works. It's all locked away. And there's been an all too convenient complicity. Gives struggling artists great rationalizations for why they haven't succeeded. And many people support the existing system because they've been seduced by dreams of possibly becoming the next one of the very few really successful artists, not seeing that it could be so much better. It's like all the people who play the lottery without really getting that they have better odds of being struck by lightning or murdered than hitting the jackpot. We're screwing ourselves to maintain the parasitic lottery system known as copyright that gulls so many of us with these near hopeless and fake dreams of wealth.
You paint it black and white. "Strengthening the laws" or "increase exports from other areas" are hardly the only alternatives.
Unsolvable? You shouldn't accept such a proposition.
Interfaces are finite and enumerable. There is only just so much functionality in even the most powerful app. The essence of an interface can be captured and expressed with logic. And we have all kinds of tools that can handle logic. We've been doing this for software for years. The "interface" of a programming language is much more open ended and complicated than a mere user interface, and we've been reasoning about language for decades.
Yes, bad interfaces are everywhere. That doesn't mean it's a hard problem. Just that people haven't put much thought into it. Game software typically has the best interfaces, and even that can be of spotty quality. Worst interfaces I've seen are in CAD software. Yeah, they can be even worse than the GIMP. Unbelievable how bad some of it is. They still seem to expect users to be able to draw precisely with the mouse. Why even allow such freehand? Should always use a snap grid, or some sort of intelligent positioning so you don't end up 0.00001 off, or get cramps trying to nudge the mouse pointer one pixel over.
I'm so used to hearing of "spiral" galaxies and other 2D shapes it's easy to overlook the 3rd dimension. A hurricane is a 2D spiral on a curved surface. Our solar system has a distinct plane. What I've read is that the solar system started as a large amorphous blob that through gravity condensed into a small area, and by conservation of angular momentum, changed whatever small random spin it began with into enough of a force to make the material spread back out, but this time along the equator of the spin, as a disk that eventually birthed planets and moons.
Does this disk formation process scale up from solar system to galactic sizes? Are methods of galaxy formation even all that close to solar system formation? Maybe many of what appear to be spiral galaxies are actually helixes? Possibly very shallow helixes, easy to mistake as spiral? Seems very unlikely that if the Milky Way is a helix, all the other "spiral" galaxies we see really are spirals.
How about an experiment? What formation would you see if you have a cube or sphere of material (liquid or gas) in micro gravity, and you drain the matter through a straw with one end positioned at the center?
I'm tired of it too. Tired of this accusation that we're just a bunch of freeloaders, and tired of these cheesy challenges of the sort you just made. If someone did what you say, would you really be convinced? I doubt it. Because it is already being done with software development, and you are overlooking it. As just one example, there's a company called Red Hat that is earning money with copyleft software. They employ quite a few software developers. There's also the Humble Indie Bundle. I bought that. And those being games, there was indeed art in there. I've bought many games and music CDs over the years. But see, that won't convince you either. I'm sure you'll still call me a freeloader.
Further, the environment is extremely hostile. This is not a level playing field in which the best ideas win. In this chicken and egg problem, the law should be changed first. But it won't be. It'll be the last thing to catch up.
Nor are most artists doing all that well with the existing system! The cartels have screwed them too.
Plus, artists are appallingly backward. What struck me the last time I popped into an art festival was the ludicrousness of their expectations. They all seemed to be hoping some rich idiot with more money than sense would come along and scoop up their precious painting or scupture for absolutely crazy prices like $3000 or $15000. And if that does happen, it will disappear into the obscurity of a private collection. And it is that expensive in part because of the "artistic" techniques they insist on using. As a tool for creating and working on art, the computer cannot be ignored, but most were ignoring it. This is absolutely the wrong way to go about art. We should have organizations pool money, buy the art, and then scan, copy, and distribute it to the world. I'd be happy to toss $10 into a pool with thousands of others to buy some good art. For their part, they could do a lot to help by providing their works in a digital format to make the aforementioned distributing easier. In fact, I insist. Or they shan't see any of my money. But noooo, they're so afraid of piracy they'd rather starve. They put up signs begging people not to take photos, or threatening them if they do. The best offer they have at a reasonable price is a deliberately low quality print. That is no way to treat customers. Then there's the egregious crap the typical museum pulls. Long though copyright lasts, they tend to have a lot of stuff that most definitely is no longer under copyright. But all the same, they try to keep everything locked up, try to tell us that we can't take photos of our own belongings.
Why should you be allowed to, essentially, distribute a copy of a work when you don't have the permission to do so?
Why not? Why should anyone need any permission to do that? We can borrow recordings from public libraries. We can invite our friends over to watch. Why shouldn't we be able to do the same thing over the Internet?
we have to have some control over the media we create
No, we don't.
else the term "profit" will mean almost nothing.
Of course I knew that's what you were getting at. There are ways to profit from artistic endeavor without copyright, without any control whatsoever over what people do with works of art. The way you talk, you'd think copyright is the only way anyone can make art without starving. Not so!
And there's really no choice. We'll have to move to a different business model. Neither legal nor technical methods can enforce restrictions on the ability to make copies. Declaring that everyone may be a pirate, and suing us by the thousands, has been an abysmal failure. DRM is a stupid joke.
You ought to be thankful the universe doesn't work the way the entertainment cartels evidently wish it to, for if it did, we'd all be much poorer.
Vote? That's only playing their game. Powerful interests have managed to fix the game so it doesn't matter who we vote for.
You can't realize the full potential of revolutionary changes by being overly obedient. Too easy for entrenched interests to put the obedient in a no win situation. Any legal move that threatens their interests can be outlawed immediately, no matter how popular it was, and then what? When every way forward has been outlawed, and when we are powerless to undo these changes through legal channels, what is left? Stagnate and decline, or break the law.
Besides which, it's a very inefficient use of our resources to fight in the ways you seem to prefer. We are not going to let these robbers draw us into open ended debates in which the status quo of more robbery is maintained for years and years while the issues are never resolved. A pity we don't have a stronger concept of self defense against bad laws. Just jury nullification. The court cases have been pretty much all backwards. Some of us have been forced to defend ourselves from their accusations, when it should be the other way around. They should be defending themselves, and they should be losing, for the simple reason that they are in the wrong. They could also give up, but they've chosen to engage in war. No, the easiest way is not to wait on the law, but simply to use these marvellous new capabilities. Not to use what we have is crazy. When people pirate music or movies, very likely they choose a far more efficient way of obtaining it than optical media from a distant bricks and mortar business. In my view, that makes them heroes. Until such time as the entrenched interests are brought to heel, their greed curbed, their insolent war against the public and reality ended, and we've adopted new business models acceptable to the public, let the piracy continue. Piracy is the rational and the right thing to do, and the fastest, least costly way to break them and the bad deals they continue to try to force upon us all.
Unfortunately, our system of government has largely been captured and corrupted to serve the interests of the rich and powerful. Congress has enacted many changes to copyright that harm society for nothing. As Lessig complained, the decisions should have been no brainers, but Congress couldn't get there. We should not have seen copyright extended again and again (Sonny Bono), shouldn't have seen such abominations as the DMCA, UCITA, COICA, and most recently ACTA. We shouldn't be treated to all these deliberate confusions and conflations in measures such as the PATRIOT and Communications Decency Acts.
So how should we combat the massive robbery of our culture perpetrated by legalistic extension of copyright terms to what all but a very few agree are far too many years? And the attempts to hold back progress, at immense cost to us all? It is not and never was the will of the people, nor in the public interest, that copyright should last anywhere near as long as it does now. They knew that, but they ignored us and did it anyway. So what should we do?
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In more ways than the obvious ones. My mother has it, so I've had no choice but to learn about it. She can't really do chores any more though she still tries. She confuses clean and dirty dishes. She puts them in the wrong cupboards. She can't operate the washing machines any more, but she can and does still open the doors, stopping them. So we've had to either stand guard, or wash by hand, or use them at night when she is asleep. She's always thinking that people are coming over, or that we have to hurry up and go somewhere to meet people. She's beginning to have trouble remembering people. She really took to email, and was our family's big communicator. But about 2 years ago she stopped using it. Now she can't write anything but the most banal fluff. They say an early warning sign is difficulty with finances, and it was about 3 years ago we had to take over all the bill payments. The trigger was being 3 days late with a credit card payment. First time that ever happened, and the credit card company (Chase) wouldn't give an inch. I suppose the crisis made them hard ass. I paid the late fees and interest, and the entire bill, then I cancelled that credit card. A year later I finished cutting all ties with Chase, and closed my savings account with them.
How and when do you take the car keys away? We saw suspicious paint marks on the bumpers and doors, and knew we couldn't let her drive much longer. Dreaded having an ugly scene where we forcibly took her driver's license away. Making it harder was that her daily trips to the mall got her out of our hair so we could work. But we found a neat way around it. She was always misplacing her purse, with keys, credit cards, and all. In March last year, she got paranoid that thieves might break in, and hid her purse. Took us a week to find it that time. We used that to end her driving. Told her she couldn't drive until she found her license and car keys, and she didn't blow up and come down hard on us as it was obvious to her that it was her fault she'd lost her purse. We did not tell her when we finally found it.
Doctors, curse their greedy hides, are unable to do anything constructive about it. All they do is profit off our problems by selling us expensive prescriptions that may do nothing whatever. Aricept is a waste.
All that is pretty typical. It will get worse. I read that in the advanced stages, victims no longer have enough of a brain to coordinate walking, even if their bodies can still do it. So they have to use wheelchairs. We may ultimately have to put her in a nursing home. But I haven't yet told of a less obvious horror.
What I didn't know is how happy Alzheimer's victims are. She was always a moody person, prone to rampages over essentially trivial faults. She's a "sundowner", meaning that late afternoon is her triple witching hour so to speak. Her blood sugar bottoms out, and she becomes a hell of a grouch, more ready than usual to explode at any provocation whatever, and so ready to see provocation where there wasn't any. Got to feed her to calm her down and get her back to being just merely touchy and thin skinned. And then around 10 years ago, that changed. She became a much more pleasant, happy person. I took it as the wisdom of age. Thought she'd resolved to turn over a new leaf, and was succeeding. Everyone who met her told me how cool she was. And it gave me hope that people really can change, that genetics and formative events in our childhoods don't have to be our destinies. Now I understand that was the beginning of Alzheimer's. How can I express it? Horrifying to see that these improvements were thanks to irreversable brain damage, and that achieving happiness in life is perhaps not a worthy goal and not a real improvement.
Not quite.
Privatize the gains, socialize the losses.
That's the 2008 Financial Crisis in a nutshell. Then hold the mess up as an example of how bankrupt, stupid, and evil government and socialist organizations such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are. Blame it all on the policies of the Clinton and Carter administrations. Mock GM for now being "Government Motors". Crow about how great private enterprise is. Brazenly ignore the boatload of implicit contradictions, omissions, and lies in such statements.
Don't know how that happened. It was all there when I hit the submit button. Wonky computers :(.
To the hard right, socialists are the new communists. Sweden might be their poster nation of socialism run amok, or perhaps Greece now thanks to the recent debt trouble, but all of Europe is on their list of bad examples. France was a popular whipping boy, especially when they were indulging in a bit more anti-Americanism than average. It's harder to pick on Sweden because that nation works too well. But the minute Sweden slips up, I guarantee you'll be hearing all kinds of "I told you so!".
Just why they think that has me puzzled too. Surely taking the burden of providing health care off our corporations' HR departments is one of the most business and job friendly moves the government could have made? You know, lower the cost of employing people by removing the overhead of running health care programs, so that businesses will be able to employ more people? And we'll reap savings by catching problems earlier instead of waiting or denying care until they're emergencies, as we do now. The way we run our heath care now is, as the expression goes, "penny wise, pound foolish". Force people to be tough and not seek medical care, even when they should. But they don't see it that way. They see only the "moral hazard" problem. They think if health care is made "free", that's socialism, and people will abuse it. They haven't looked at any actual data on that issue, or if they have, they just dismiss it as biased or wrong.
They also have this knee jerk view that government can't do anything efficiently. Reagan once famously said "government is not a solution to our pro
If avionics is so fragile, why aren't there more crashes? What if a plane flies over a building that houses a server farm? I realize any signals from a building will be greatly attenuated by distance, but still, if an ebook reader can cause problems, why not that?
Jamming is another matter, and not what I meant. Of course you can't read a signal if you're being flooded with energy on the frequencies you're trying to receive. Would be like trying to make out constellations while someone shines a bright light in your face. But that light doesn't cause your heart or pacemaker to go crazy or quit, or otherwise make your body experience a catastrophic failure. Neither should planes suffer any kind of malfunction from such interference.
We've built space probes that can handle the difficult environments of deep space, and Jupiter, and the sun. We have military jets that absolutely must be able to withstand enemy attempts at jamming. We had planes before we had electronics and AM radio. Another place where PEDs could be a concern are hospitals, but somehow they aren't. There any cases of a doctor's cellphone causing equipment failure? Not that I've heard. How about cars? Any cases of cellphones or any other PED screwing up a car's electronics, causing the engine to quit, or activating the brakes, or causing "unintended acceleration" or some such? Again, not that I've heard. Kids play video games and watch movies in the backs of minivans, without any impact whatsoever on the correctness of the vehicle's operation. Heck, they stuff passenger planes full of LCD screens, "sky phones", and other luxuries, all of which could potentially cause interference.
As to your "badly manufactured cable" scenario, that's not the PED killing reason you make it out to be. That cable should be tested, and should fail. Also, 1000%? If necessary, that amount can be factored into a determination of what the standards should be.
Really, the air travel industry should stop being such wimps about consumer electronics.
Seriously. It's all very well for us to write letters. But we're busy trying to feed our families and keep our heads above water in this difficult economy, and cannot spare much time for that sort of thing, particularly when it is so likely to be wasted effort. If I'm going to take the time to write something, I prefer it to be available to a large audience, not an audience of 1 who may well be bought. As Lessig complained, our system is unable to reach the obvious conclusion that intellectual property law has gone too far. Instead, our representatives have sold us out time and again to special interests. If more than 10 years of opposition to and derision of things like the "Mickey Mouse Protection Act" have been unheard or unheeded, that's not our fault for not writing enough letters. Why don't they come read these discussions on Slashdot? (Maybe they do already? Doubt it.) Here we have a group of people who are more closely concerned with the problems posed by patent law, having a good discussion full of good examples and covering many aspects and ramifications. Representatives could also participate, anonymously or not, as they please. They could even try us with an "Ask Slashdot" article.
On-line forums are the town halls of the 21st century.
More pessimism! There's an answer to this too.
You build safety factors into your standards. Go 50% over what you think you need. Or 100% over. Then, normal wear and tear shouldn't cause devices to exceed the threshhold that causes trouble, even if they can no longer pass the standards for new devices. This has been done for centuries. The Romans did this with aqueducts! The elevated portions can withstand winds of up to 300 mph, 50% more than they thought might ever happen.
As to your other concerns, it's not voodoo. Designs can account for connection problems and ignorant users who want to get their hands dirty. And planes must be shielded better. Otherwise, some prankster on the ground could aim a transmitter at a plane and screw with its electronics. Maybe a powerful radio station could accidentally do it. I recall there was an incident where someone on the ground pointed a laser into the cockpit, making it difficult for the pilots to see. Some things can't be shielded of course. But we don't know what's reasonable.
The fact is, we haven't seriously addressed this problem. Or we would have a better idea of what can be handled. No, it's been cheaper to ignore the problem and resort to crude measures such as blanket bans and let electronics remain the boogieman of air travel.
testing every possible consumer electronics device which might end up on an aircraft, against all the possible aircraft
... is the wrong approach to this problem. You've obviously spotted the issue that this would require m*n tests, where m is the number of airplane models and n is the number of PEDs. But then you just declare it impractical and give up!
Instead, you need standards. Then you test each device to see if it meets the standards, for a total of m+n tests. In the case of planes, test that they can tolerate a minimum amount of interference. And for the devices, test that they do not emit more than that minimum amount.
That's like asking which dog you'd back in a dog fight to the death.
We want the fighting ended. MS is just one of hundreds who are a little too eager to participate in these bloodsports. This time, MS's dog lost. Will this inspire MS to take a step back and rethink the whole thing? Not likely, but we can hope.
You talk as if the current system is fair, and we can't possibly come up with anything better based on some sort of patronage system.
We've all heard tales of how badly publishers rip off artists. That is not a condemnation of the system itself, merely the corruption of it. But let us suppose unfair deals made under duress and other sorts of corruption are not a problem. Even then, copyright does a poor job of compensating artists. An author like Rowling has hit the jackpot. She made enough money that she and the next several generations of her descendents will never need to work a day of their lives. She deserves significant compensation, but not that much. Her work went viral in a big way, and the primitive "percentage of sales" model of compensation converted that into a gigantic fortune. Why couldn't we use some kind of logarithmic scaling? After the first million sales, the royalty percentage ought to decrease by half, something like that. After 100 million sales, it ought to go public domain. Have we not paid enough that her works ought to pass into the public domain, now? What should it cost to just buy her out? Why is there no such option? She's awfully useful to publishers, as a poster girl for everyone who aspires to be a successful author. She's like a lottery winner who is used to entice the rest of the public to play, and in doing so, support the system. Meanwhile, most authors languish in obscurity, and perhaps they should-- they aren't that good. I have some friends who are thoroughly deluded by dreams of the wealth that could be theirs if only they manage to become successful authors, just like Rowling. They know at an intellectual level that they're kidding themselves, but emotionally they can't bear to give up these dreams. Cruel.
In a patronage system, we wouldn't have only one way of raising money or figuring compensation. We'd have dozens, in the hope that together they would be fairer than any one system alone could be. Popularity would only be one method. We'd also have them compete with each other in order to keep down the favoritism and corruption that the money is bound to attract. We already have a little of this with all kinds of prizes, things like the Hugo and Nebula Awards. But they aren't near enough. If that could be expanded, it could serve as part of a system of compensation. I think ultimately this could be done better, much better, and fairer than any copyright based system.
I see the "status quo" as the extreme position.
A status quo ought to have some steadiness to it. Copyright has been moved and redefined so often in recent years it can hardly be called a model of steadiness in a changing world. The most recent change I know of is the PRO-IP Act of 2008. ACTA may yet become the newest change, though we can hope it's dead. Every deliberate change has been a grotesque and blatant attempt to hold back progress, to try to make new kinds of media work "just like a book". Except they go further, and try to take away even what we have with books! All this is very much against the public interest. A very few changes inadvertently worked in the public's favor, but no deliberate change did, no matter what claims they like to make about how it's all for the artists' sakes.
I have hope we'll all come around. In the meantime, I'm a little scared that so many people are accepting or are at the least unthinking of these unconscionable restrictions on what we may do with our purchases. And living with the spying! As an example of how tracking can go wrong, my father's employer ordered everyone to purchase and read a book on leadership. (The employer was merely running with the latest management fad. They're suckers for that sort of thing.) Not wanting to take the time to travel to a bookstore for that, I introduced him to Amazon. In 5 minutes, created an account for him and picked out some random book on leadership, and done. Except you're never done. Ever since, he's been regularly pestered with email that assumes he likes such books. Must we hope that his employer is never granted access to Amazon's records on him, that his employment won't hang in the balance on that info?
That RMS's position could be seen as extreme is another fearful comment on the current state of affairs.
Perhaps criminal law stops the most blatant crimes. Madoff is in prison. But mostly, businesses are able to work around such impediments, and indulge in all the bribery, favoritism, and social irresponsibility they wish.
No other perpetrator of the financial disaster of 2008 and the subsequent Great Recession has been jailed or even convicted of anything. The most that's been done are a few fines that seem sizeable, but are just pocket change to these guys. I don't think Mozillo paid nearly enough. And they get a heck of a bargain in exchange-- they don't have to admit to anything. Some congressmen are personally investigating Goldman Sachs, and so they may yet be in trouble. But mostly, it's back to business as usual. Upper management pay is right back on the ludicrously high track it was on, and no one seems able to restrain it. As a stockholder, I resent seeing the value of my stock diluted and depressed by an end run around the market to hand these greedy bastards huge bonuses at my expense. But what can I do? I don't own enough for my votes to count for squat, and I certainly can't get executive pay on the agenda. I can't even realistically get out of the stock market, not the way our retirement money is automatically sucked in.
As for other crimes, no official of Massey Energy, including then CEO Don Blankenship, went to jail for the gross negligence that lead to the latest coal mine disaster that killed 29 miners. No one is going to prison for the 11 deaths on the Deepwater Horizon. We're told they're just accidents, just the cost of doing business, you know. Those coal miners knew it was a risky job, they have no right to complain. They should be grateful to have jobs. There are countless other examples of government impotence in the face of damaging, destructive, shameless crimes. Regulation is supposed to head that sort of thing off, but it can't if the very idea of it is under such heavy relentless assault that regulators spend all their time justifying themselves, or pleading for funding, or for their very jobs.
Effective boycotts are difficult to pull off. It's a reactionary, defensive move anyway. I think going on the offense would be better.
Propose our own law. And let's go straight to the top, and shoot for a Constitutional Amendment, a "Freedom of Knowledge" Amendment to match the other freedoms of religion, speech and the right to assemble and bear arms. I've tried to draft such an amendment, but there is so much ground to cover that I started getting bogged down in the details. The enemies of freedom have been very inventive. The main thing such an amendment should have is reform of copyright and patent law, which is another reason why it has to be nothing less than a Constitutional Amendment. And the particular reform? Elimination of the monopoly grants. We can set up markets to support art and science without that kind of government interference. Lot of other things could go into such an amendment, but removing the requirement to support artificial monopolies with our taxes is the main issue. We should seriously try for it, not merely use such an effort to negotiate concessions.
I think you are confusing a few things, and seeing paradoxes where there aren't any. Firstly, we have the mixup between "regulating" and "policing". The way these terms are used, they mean almost the same thing. The only difference is that the first one applies to businesses, and the second to people. Somehow, "regulation" has become a perjorative term for laws that "hurt business" and the ultimate example of unwanted, clumsy, wasteful "government interference", but "policing" is an extremely desired and practically holy activity to keep us and our children safe from terrorists and other ilk. Do you really think businesses are so trustworthy that they shouldn't be policed? Or that the market alone is capable of policing business? Bit difficult for the market to police a monopoly, when they pull stuff like "planned obsolescence" and get away with it because the customers have no competition to turn to. Nor can the market alone stop monopolies from forming.
You also seem to be seeing "free market" and "government regulation" as polar opposites. They aren't. If we didn't have our interfering government, what would stop our businesses from stooping to particularly destructive forms of competition, such as murdering the employees, suppliers, and even customers of rivals, the way Mexican drug gangs are doing now? And bribing and murdering government workers and officials so that their jobs will not be done? Nothing that I can see. Imagine trying to hold a hockey game without those interfering referees and rules. Would you want to play? In less than a minute, it wouldn't be a hockey game anymore. It would be just a brawl.
Another bit of confusion is mistaking government interference for what is really business interference. Did the people support this law? Were we asked? Of course not! Regulatory capture and subversion of our elected representatives and other sorts of corruption have always been problems, and these days, they are worse than ever. Our government is supposed to serve us, not special interests. This outrageous proposal should never have stood a chance of becoming law.
This new Tennessee law is the very worst sort of business sponsored interference.
If you're going to talk of economic incentives, the telecoms industry has every incentive to make sure we never do definitive research on this question. That is the reason we don't know how dangerous EMR really is. Maybe it's not at all dangerous. We know it depends greatly on frequency and intensity. Gamma rays are very dangerous. X-rays are not as bad, and we actually make use of brief and light exposures to them. Ultraviolet can cause skin cancer. And the part of the spectrum used by cellphones? We don't know. The industry isn't going to take that chance, and does much to squash research into this area, and spread confusion and doubt about what little we do have in the way of findings. Any time there's a proposal to research the matter with government funding, suddenly the deficit gets talked up, or some other pretext is advanced, and the funding is slashed.
A question like this is too well known to be left unanswered. It is crazy that we haven't found out just exactly what EMR does to us. We know it can't be too bad just from the fact that people have been using cellphones for years. It doesn't kill a user in a matter of months. But we can find out more, and we should.
How many people died mining coal last year?
Too many. There was the Upper Big Branch Mine Disaster in 2010, which killed 29. According to a show I saw some time ago, coal mining is the 2nd most dangerous occupation there is, after crab fishing off Alaska. But that misses the point. Coal is not a good standard of comparison. You guys seem to like to use it because it's bad enough that maybe nuclear doesn't look so bad in comparison.
west coast ... people get more radiation on a daily basis from the smoke detectors in their houses(Americium), than any possible fallout from Fukushima.
Now you're citing irrelevant facts. What counts is the significant radiation that the locals got, not the barely detectable amounts experienced by people halfway around the world. What amount of radiaton would the west coast inhabitants experience if one of the local nuclear power plants leaked?
Throughout, you go on about the number of fatalities, and how there've been way more with coal power than nuclear power. But that's another too narrow focus that makes nuclear power look better, and once again, only when compared to coal. And driving? You've only picked the most dangerous commonplace activity for comparison. Why don't you compare nuclear power to something more suitable, like, say, construction work, particularly on dams, or some other blue collar occupation.
For a different measure, consider how many square km have been rendered unfit for habitation and agricuture, times how many years. For coal, I expect that number is very low, perhaps 0. There could be some ecological effects from reckless disposal of waste from irresponsibly run mining operations, so perhaps not 0, but still quite low, as it can be cleaned up relatively quickly. It may not stay low if sea levels rise and that can be blamed on coal burning. For driving, windmills, hydroelectric dams, and solar cell farms, it is 0. Any time we really want to, we can drain whatever lake we wish, and, assuming it hasn't been used as a toxic waste dump, quickly return that land to agriculture. For nuclear power, it is of course rather higher. 30km^2 * pi * 300 years * 2 sites is about 1.7 million "sq km years" of land that we've lost. Nuclear power is almost uniquely dangerous in this way.
You can't just ignore these factors, if you're going to have a serious discussion about the real costs and risks of various kinds of power.
'sciency'? Go look in a mirror.
I'll up your 'Broken Utopia' with 'Horizon Effect'. We don't properly assess risks. We've done a terrible job of accounting for external costs. We tend to be overly optimistic, and entirely too willing to stick our heads in the sand, and ignore problems that are seemingly low probability, or decades in the future. What are the odds some terrorist attack or a tornado or other natural disaster will breach the makeshift waste storage? Or that some of this material will be stolen and used in a dirty bomb? This stuff can make large areas of land unsafe for habitation for centuries.
All that applies even when everyone is honest. Lot of people aren't. Nuclear power proponents have not demonstrated enough trustworthiness to be allowed free rein. There've been far more incidents than ONE. Many of them went unreported. When there were problems, it was too easy to squelch research so that no one would ever know for sure, or dismiss it as statistical noise, or blame it on something else. You should read up on those liars from Big Tobacco and their infamous slogan "doubt is our product", and testimony before Congress, "nicotine is not addictive".
It's not that we haven't given nuclear power a chance. We have. And they've blown it. If we properly assessed the costs and risks, I think we would honestly conclude, as Germany evidently has, that nuclear is simply too dangerous, and not use it at all. Same for offshore oil drilling. We've all seen just how damaging that can be. We have many other options. Don't give nuclear or coal a pass out of misplaced nostalgia or comfort with the familiar.
You wrote "gay" where you meant "guy". "Gay" has become slang for a homosexual man.
Anyway, about this latest bit of lawmaking. Sounds great on the surface, but I feared it was another attempt at whitewashing. Call the law the opposite of what is really intended.
It's fake value. It's the old idea of monopoly. Yes, monopolies are very valuable-- to the owners. To the rest of us, not so much. In this case, they are of negative value. It costs us a great deal to maintain these wholly artificial monopolies. We spend much money on enforcement, court cases, DRM, and other completely ineffective wastes of effort to hold back the tide. And it is used to screw over the artists, the very people these laws are supposed to enable! We pass up even more money in the form of lost opportunities. We could save hugely on public libraries if it were legal for them to go digital. Our culture would be so much more searchable, researchable, mashable, and generally available. Novel, and very valuable uses could flourish. Instead, we have "debates" over such things as whether any form of "shifting" should be allowed. Shows just how screwy the discussion has been.
Perhaps worst of all is the climate. Many artists are so afraid of being ripped off that they act as their own worst enemies. Their efforts to make certain they aren't pirated instead ensure that they never rise out of obscurity. The public cannot discover their works. It's all locked away. And there's been an all too convenient complicity. Gives struggling artists great rationalizations for why they haven't succeeded. And many people support the existing system because they've been seduced by dreams of possibly becoming the next one of the very few really successful artists, not seeing that it could be so much better. It's like all the people who play the lottery without really getting that they have better odds of being struck by lightning or murdered than hitting the jackpot. We're screwing ourselves to maintain the parasitic lottery system known as copyright that gulls so many of us with these near hopeless and fake dreams of wealth.
You paint it black and white. "Strengthening the laws" or "increase exports from other areas" are hardly the only alternatives.
Unsolvable? You shouldn't accept such a proposition.
Interfaces are finite and enumerable. There is only just so much functionality in even the most powerful app. The essence of an interface can be captured and expressed with logic. And we have all kinds of tools that can handle logic. We've been doing this for software for years. The "interface" of a programming language is much more open ended and complicated than a mere user interface, and we've been reasoning about language for decades.
Yes, bad interfaces are everywhere. That doesn't mean it's a hard problem. Just that people haven't put much thought into it. Game software typically has the best interfaces, and even that can be of spotty quality. Worst interfaces I've seen are in CAD software. Yeah, they can be even worse than the GIMP. Unbelievable how bad some of it is. They still seem to expect users to be able to draw precisely with the mouse. Why even allow such freehand? Should always use a snap grid, or some sort of intelligent positioning so you don't end up 0.00001 off, or get cramps trying to nudge the mouse pointer one pixel over.
I'm so used to hearing of "spiral" galaxies and other 2D shapes it's easy to overlook the 3rd dimension. A hurricane is a 2D spiral on a curved surface. Our solar system has a distinct plane. What I've read is that the solar system started as a large amorphous blob that through gravity condensed into a small area, and by conservation of angular momentum, changed whatever small random spin it began with into enough of a force to make the material spread back out, but this time along the equator of the spin, as a disk that eventually birthed planets and moons.
Does this disk formation process scale up from solar system to galactic sizes? Are methods of galaxy formation even all that close to solar system formation? Maybe many of what appear to be spiral galaxies are actually helixes? Possibly very shallow helixes, easy to mistake as spiral? Seems very unlikely that if the Milky Way is a helix, all the other "spiral" galaxies we see really are spirals.
How about an experiment? What formation would you see if you have a cube or sphere of material (liquid or gas) in micro gravity, and you drain the matter through a straw with one end positioned at the center?
His pattern indicates two-dimensional thinking.
-- Spock, Star Trek II, the Wrath of Khan.
I'm tired of it too. Tired of this accusation that we're just a bunch of freeloaders, and tired of these cheesy challenges of the sort you just made. If someone did what you say, would you really be convinced? I doubt it. Because it is already being done with software development, and you are overlooking it. As just one example, there's a company called Red Hat that is earning money with copyleft software. They employ quite a few software developers. There's also the Humble Indie Bundle. I bought that. And those being games, there was indeed art in there. I've bought many games and music CDs over the years. But see, that won't convince you either. I'm sure you'll still call me a freeloader.
Further, the environment is extremely hostile. This is not a level playing field in which the best ideas win. In this chicken and egg problem, the law should be changed first. But it won't be. It'll be the last thing to catch up.
Nor are most artists doing all that well with the existing system! The cartels have screwed them too.
Plus, artists are appallingly backward. What struck me the last time I popped into an art festival was the ludicrousness of their expectations. They all seemed to be hoping some rich idiot with more money than sense would come along and scoop up their precious painting or scupture for absolutely crazy prices like $3000 or $15000. And if that does happen, it will disappear into the obscurity of a private collection. And it is that expensive in part because of the "artistic" techniques they insist on using. As a tool for creating and working on art, the computer cannot be ignored, but most were ignoring it. This is absolutely the wrong way to go about art. We should have organizations pool money, buy the art, and then scan, copy, and distribute it to the world. I'd be happy to toss $10 into a pool with thousands of others to buy some good art. For their part, they could do a lot to help by providing their works in a digital format to make the aforementioned distributing easier. In fact, I insist. Or they shan't see any of my money. But noooo, they're so afraid of piracy they'd rather starve. They put up signs begging people not to take photos, or threatening them if they do. The best offer they have at a reasonable price is a deliberately low quality print. That is no way to treat customers. Then there's the egregious crap the typical museum pulls. Long though copyright lasts, they tend to have a lot of stuff that most definitely is no longer under copyright. But all the same, they try to keep everything locked up, try to tell us that we can't take photos of our own belongings.
Why should you be allowed to, essentially, distribute a copy of a work when you don't have the permission to do so?
Why not? Why should anyone need any permission to do that? We can borrow recordings from public libraries. We can invite our friends over to watch. Why shouldn't we be able to do the same thing over the Internet?
we have to have some control over the media we create
No, we don't.
else the term "profit" will mean almost nothing.
Of course I knew that's what you were getting at. There are ways to profit from artistic endeavor without copyright, without any control whatsoever over what people do with works of art. The way you talk, you'd think copyright is the only way anyone can make art without starving. Not so!
And there's really no choice. We'll have to move to a different business model. Neither legal nor technical methods can enforce restrictions on the ability to make copies. Declaring that everyone may be a pirate, and suing us by the thousands, has been an abysmal failure. DRM is a stupid joke.
You ought to be thankful the universe doesn't work the way the entertainment cartels evidently wish it to, for if it did, we'd all be much poorer.
Vote? That's only playing their game. Powerful interests have managed to fix the game so it doesn't matter who we vote for.
You can't realize the full potential of revolutionary changes by being overly obedient. Too easy for entrenched interests to put the obedient in a no win situation. Any legal move that threatens their interests can be outlawed immediately, no matter how popular it was, and then what? When every way forward has been outlawed, and when we are powerless to undo these changes through legal channels, what is left? Stagnate and decline, or break the law.
Besides which, it's a very inefficient use of our resources to fight in the ways you seem to prefer. We are not going to let these robbers draw us into open ended debates in which the status quo of more robbery is maintained for years and years while the issues are never resolved. A pity we don't have a stronger concept of self defense against bad laws. Just jury nullification. The court cases have been pretty much all backwards. Some of us have been forced to defend ourselves from their accusations, when it should be the other way around. They should be defending themselves, and they should be losing, for the simple reason that they are in the wrong. They could also give up, but they've chosen to engage in war. No, the easiest way is not to wait on the law, but simply to use these marvellous new capabilities. Not to use what we have is crazy. When people pirate music or movies, very likely they choose a far more efficient way of obtaining it than optical media from a distant bricks and mortar business. In my view, that makes them heroes. Until such time as the entrenched interests are brought to heel, their greed curbed, their insolent war against the public and reality ended, and we've adopted new business models acceptable to the public, let the piracy continue. Piracy is the rational and the right thing to do, and the fastest, least costly way to break them and the bad deals they continue to try to force upon us all.
Unfortunately, our system of government has largely been captured and corrupted to serve the interests of the rich and powerful. Congress has enacted many changes to copyright that harm society for nothing. As Lessig complained, the decisions should have been no brainers, but Congress couldn't get there. We should not have seen copyright extended again and again (Sonny Bono), shouldn't have seen such abominations as the DMCA, UCITA, COICA, and most recently ACTA. We shouldn't be treated to all these deliberate confusions and conflations in measures such as the PATRIOT and Communications Decency Acts.
So how should we combat the massive robbery of our culture perpetrated by legalistic extension of copyright terms to what all but a very few agree are far too many years? And the attempts to hold back progress, at immense cost to us all? It is not and never was the will of the people, nor in the public interest, that copyright should last anywhere near as long as it does now. They knew that, but they ignored us and did it anyway. So what should we do?