The simple solution would be government-run or at least government-funded research. Research is under 20% of big pharmaceuticals' budgets. The government could take 20% of the money spent on drugs today and use that to fund research and remove all patent, copyright, and trade secret (can't keep drug recipies secret) priviledges. The drugs themselves would be made in an open market and would likely be 20% the cost of patented drugs today.
No catch-22, the government saves money since it more than recoups its investments in medicare/medicaid payments and health insurance for government workers, and the public saves money through cheaper drugs for those not on the government programs.
Sure it might be cool to jam 16 HDs into such a small space, but for about $100K, it sure seems a bit pricey. Couldn't you get maybe 2-4 of the most reliable PC cases you can get and stuff them with HDs.
Or is there some super-important feature that I'm missing.
let's see... perhaps because the executable bit is set, and in the console it's displayed in bright yellow and with an asterik next to it. Same goes for shell scripts, which can be as risky as an executable.
This doesn't apply to files that require an interpreter or emulator, like.EXEs or ROMs for video game emulators, but that is only because you call the interpreter and pass the file to the interpreter, so the OS has no way of knowing it is an executable.
I generally run just about anything I find. At worst, I'll spot the file when doing clean up, and I don't want to risk deleting something useful. Funny.exe isn't very descriptive, so I probably will execute and have a look.
That said, I won't execute unsolicited stuff, but only if I can recognise it as such. Dump it to my download directory silently, and I'll get around to executing it, though I won't allow it to run as root if it asks (I'm not that reckless).
And BTW, I consider myself to be a fairly experienced user. It's just that viruses have never given me trouble, but I have lost data in the past, so I check everything before I delete.
GAIM would help, though only because you would be running Linux. The worst that can happen under WINE (which you would need to execute the payload) is that it screws up your WINE installation. Once you kill the WINE process, anything memory resident is wiped clean. Furthermore, only a handful of viruses manage to run under WINE, as viruses can do some tricky stuff.
What about books whos covers have fallen off through use. Do you have to get it repaired otherwise it's illegal to resell it (though I doubt you'd get much for selling a book in that poor condition, unless it's very rare).
The monopoly is on the particular songs and derivatives of it. It's an accepted use of the term monopoly, as in the term 'monopolistic competition' (which the music industry is). In monopolistic competition, you get monopoly prices because advertising and product differentiation.
Downloading a picture of it, I don't see anything wrong with that.
Hogwash. It's illegal because it's participating in another crime -- namely the production of child porn. It's no different from taking the picture yourself, or no different than seeing it take place and doing nothing to stop it -- in all cases you're an accomplice (IMO, IANAL, etc.)
What about computer generated picture of kiddie porn that looks just like the real thing. It's very revolting, but not a single kid was hurt in the process. Personally, I think that the first amendment should protect that as free speech, and it would be hard to argue against it when Nazis and KKK members can legally spew their hate speech (which can cause society a lot more harm).
Water vapor concentrations are rising because of global warming (a self-reenforcing mechanism). The only way they will come down is by countering global warming. On the plus side, water vapor lives a very short time in the atmosphere, a few weeks at most.
Methane comes from cows, rice, and leaked natural gas. Either way, it is much shorter lived. A push away from beef would have many other benefits as well (among meats, beef is about the least efficient of the mass-market meats to manufacture). Methane from rice could be reduced by abandoning flood irrigation. Much water would be saved in the process too.
It is possible that global warming could release large amounts of methane trapped in the permafrost, which would reenforce global warming.
Either way, all the problems should be attacked. CO2 alone is potent enough to cause serious global warming. Methane would just make it worse.
Nonsense, of course. We know that humans have slightly increased CO2 levels in the atmosphere, but hard evidence linking that to temperature rises is minimal.
First, there is plenty of hard evidence. Thermometers around the world, satellite data, and much soft evidence like receding glaciers and retreating sea ice points quite clearly to global warming being real.
Second, the theory is quite sound. CO2 pushes the energy budget of Earth up. Less energy out means Earth has to heat up.
"scientists who say otherwise are hired by special interest groups or oil companies"
You are parodying the lefties here and not being serious, I presume? That is, making fun of the fact that most scientists who claim that 'global warming' is a threat are being paid by governments to do 'global warming' research and would be out of a job if they didn't keep claiming that it's a big threat?
Well, it's true. Most 'scientists' who are outspoken against there being global warming are paid by industry. Other scientists either believe that there is global warming, or are not informed on the subject and have no strong opinion.
As far as government hiring goes, my government (USA) tends to fire scientists with outspoken views in favor of global warming.
'Global Warming' is a multi-billion dollar a year industry around the world: if you wouldn't believe McDonalds if they said that their meals are good for you, why would you believe the global warming industry?
Pollution and CO2 generation (essentially all heavy industry and transportation, along with the fossil fuel industries) are a multi-trillion dollar a year industry, and you could be more specific in terms what is the 'global warming' industry.
I would say "information's inherent nature or natural tendancy is to be free." is more accurate, but it just doesn't deliver the punch of saying "information wants to be free". Inanimate objects can have a natural tendancy, such as the universal tendancy to disorder in a closed system (entropy).
As far as "people want things for free", hell yes. Free (as is beer and liberty) is better than pay and restricted any day. Isn't that what competition is supposed strive towards in a free market and communism supposed to do via efficient central planning?
And if you're going to compare this to theft, just remember that the free-market price would be the cost of hosting and bandwidth for downloads, and pressing and distribution for CDs. The music would have no contractual restrictions on it (the restrictions on legal internet music can be given a dollar cost). That would make the music company thieves by a loose interpretation of theft, as they've been using oligopoly power and collusion to keep prices over ten times their fair market price. Personally, I'd rather call people who download their music freeloaders and the music companies price gougers. That conveys a lot more information and the terminology isn't so baised.
The free-market price is the price if there were thousands of equally small music companies and thousands of distributors, all in fierce competition, and every customer had complete pricing information and was savvy with it. In addition, there are no geographical, political, or other advantages for one firm over another. Customers would know all the other CDs that sound about the same as the genre/style/mood they are looking for, and there would be no manipulative advertising. The free market price is when marginal cost equals margin price. Since music (or pretty much anything to do with copyright) has near zero marginal cost, the free market price will be very low.
At least over here in the US, live streams are not terribly popular. The networks don't release them, and it is illegal for someone without copyright permission to rebroadcast TV on the internet.
Most computerized TV takes the form of trading files using P2P or trading stacks of DVDs/CDs. Also, a very good portion of the trade is in stuff that is not aired in the US, like Anime.
On the plus side, the quality is generally quite good and anything you have is yours to keep, unlike streams which are view once (or require a lot of effort to record).
A good seat belt is good enough for most crashes to protect the body, so long as the car remains in tact.
As far as the car staying in one piece, small objects (like those little 2-inch toy cars) can survive far more punishment than a Hummer. Take a toy car and toss it twenty feet in the air and onto a grass lawn, and it will be intact, despite using sub-par construction materials. Toss a Hummer twenty feet into the air () and even if it lands on all four wheels it's likely to be badly damaged, though still in one piece and possibly repairable. Now take a house and toss it twenty feet into the air. You'll be lucky if you can recognise that the pile of sheet rock and wood once was a house.
My bet is that a small car with a very strong frame is going to fare fairly well if crashed or thrown about.
Re:That explains those mysterious hirings
on
Breaking Google's DRM
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
All these approaches can be defeated if you have an open-source browser, some programming skills, and a bit of determination.
Javascript: Edit browser code to silently ignore instructions that override right clicks and menu options.
ANY approach that doesn't force you to install and run a binary: Have the browser dump downloaded files to a directory of your choice. Alternatively, disable the cache timeout. Then browse the website as a human would, and later you have your copy.
Something akin to masquerading could be used if the files need to appear to be coming from the Google server.
If you have the source to the rendering device (the browser) and it is displayed on the screen, it can be copied.
The only thing I find lacking with this argument is a scientific basing for that conclusion, which I will try to fill.
I define good as the being the common good, which I define as a combination of equality and the summed happiness of every person. Evil is definied as !good. It's a complimentary term that isn't strictly needed, though it can be quite conventient.
Like any basic premise, there is no hard scientific reason to accept my basic premise, but I consider it to be a very reasonable and common sense definition of good that lends itself to some level of scientific scrutiny, though being a social science, it can never be as exact as physics or mathematics.
Using this premise, simple cases of murder, like a person killing his ex-spouse or a drunk crashing his car, are evil because they reduce the happiness of the victim all the way to zero, are very unequal, and do not bring nearly enough, if any, benefit to society to balance the costs.
As far as information goes, violating copyright generally increases both equality and happiness, since raw efficiency is increased (the ideal price point for any good or service is where marginal_cost = price, which basic economic theory gives us) and you have many poor and middle class people benefiting at the expense of the rich. To punish copyright violators is evil, since overall happiness is reduced (both from the direct cost of having people sued or thrown in jail, and from the increased prices and reduced usage of information) and money is transferred from poor to rich. Therefore, copyright is an evil law.
The argument about 'people not creating if they're not compensated' can also be explained with this theory. For people who do stuff for the love of it, that love and the potential fame contributes to their happiness, the art contributes to overall society happiness, and since everyone benefits, it is fairly equal, though a small payment to the artist might be most equal. For stuff that people don't love to do, the resources should be mobilized so that projects that return a net benefit to society get done, and so that their fruits are as widely distributed as is efficient. The infornmation workers would be paid a normal salary, since this is just like any other job.
What I like about my 'good' and 'evil' is that it is fairly objective, as each individual gets to define his or her own happiness, and so long as you accept the basic premise, good and evil can be argued using psychology and economics instead of religion and morals.
I'll take a modest and steady income over having a larger income that is dependent on satisfying a boss who expects me to work 80 hours for 40 hours pay and expects me to write the software he wants me to write, the way he wants it.
I consider myself to be a well skilled programmer, and $25,000 would be enough to hire me if I get to choose, design, program, debug, and document (from start to finish) the games I write and whatever I write is released to the public domain (with source code).
In the cases of political and dissenting works, where independent voices are needed, donations are generally easy to come by and free labor is also easy to come by.
I doubt Karl Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto or Das Capital because of copyrights, or that the Federalist Papers were written because of copyright. Most political and influence groups are fine with waiving the money portion of their propaganda copyrights and only using copyright to silence their critics.
Government does a fine job of funding stuff like PBS Kids and other lightly political stuff. Even better would be to make the process democratic. Citizens could vote on what to produce and what to air using a system where losing votes are applied to second choices and then third and so forth, so every sizable group gets at least some of their interests met. If communists or fascists can get together 10,000 votes, then maybe they can get themselves the 3 am slot. Simpsons might get 2,000,000 votes and get the 7 pm and 7:30 pm slots along with a $20M a year production budget. And any educated person would vote for zero commercial advertisements. Of course, those with fast internet connections could always download the shows they want from government/university (since universities have so much experience with this stuff) funded servers or P2P.
In the case of software, GNU/Linux has shown how much can be done just for the love of it, and industry specific software WILL get written, one way or another, since industry needs it to function.
I would go one step further. Since information (outside of its uses in blackmail and other stuff where people are actually hurt) is a private matter, it should be outside of the scope of government and contracts. I include contracts because no reasonable contract regulates people's private lives, and therefore any such contracts should be null and void.
When information is copied, made into a derivative work, decompiled, converted, backed up, or whatever, it's a totally self-contained act that should be fully unemcombered by government or contract.
When it is distributed, it is a self-contained transaction between two people, the giver and the receiver. So long as both people consent and no other parties are involved (ie., blackmail and espionage - and I don't mean reverse-compiling software or cracking your encrypted data by that), it should be between those two parties. The government and outside parties should have zero say.
PS: I generally consider myself to be a socialist, so these views are very different from my typical views on the role of government, though I have no qualms with the government heavily subsidising the arts, so long as the money is distributed widely and fairly.
Two points. First, speeding is not a felony. A felony if punished by losing the right to vote, several years of jail time, and a very hard time finding a respectful job afterwards. It is generally reserved for such acts as murder and bad cases of rape. Speeding is punished by a small fine and a few points on your license. This punishment is enough to deter speeders, while not ruining their lives or unnecessarily punishing them.
Second point: The speed limits are stupidly low in many places. The Long Island Expressway (near New York City) has a speed limit of 55 mph, yet people regularly do 80 mph when there isn't much traffic. 65 mph is perfectly safe, and 80 mph would be a reasonable tradeoff among safety, fuel efficiency, and time. The law is designed to make most people violate it (about 99% on that particular highway), which gives excessive power to the cops since they get to pick and choose who gets the ticket, instead of forcing them to only ticket the fastest speeders.
Of course, that misses the whole point that I don't believe in copyright and therefore would like to see the entire copyright code repealed (and replaced by an anti-plagarism law, which curiously enough does not exist in the USA).
It is. The only reason why media companies can keep their hugely profitable middleman role in a sector where many artists are willing to produce for free just because they love their art is because of Copyright Law.
Without copyright, most distributors and production companies (who are often one and the same) would have nothing to offer to people to use their pricey and restricted networks instead of independent retailers (who could sell burnt on the spot CDs for a dollar a piece, and with a greater selection) and P2P (which would become more reliable and more diverse now that it would be fully legal).
The industry owes its parasitic existance to Copyright Law, and they seem to be integrated horizontally (TV companies buying movie companies, software companies buying TV companies, distributors buying producers, etc), so calling it the Copyright Industry seems reasonable enough, though Copyright Extortion Racket might be a more accurate term, since industries generally add value.
I find bandwidth limiting to be very useful. I (like most americans) have much less up bandwidth than down bandwidth, and if I limit uploads to 90% of my bandwidth, downloads work fine, but if the upload pipe is fully saturated, downloads slow to a crawl.
Also, the latency of net games goes through the roof once the up pipe gets clogged.
Perhaps there could be a way to verify how much 'real' bandwidth a person has and only them to limit it to say 90% of capacity?
Such a report would be inherently flawed. Since so many machines ship with Microsoft's windowing system, even a large migration to linux will register in the single digits. A much smaller number of people buying linux machines to install Microsoft's windowing system will make up a large percentage of linux sales, since the base is so much smaller.
A better statistic would be a comparison of the absolute number of machines switching one way or the other. This would probably be in favor of Linux, at least in developed countries.
There is precedent that anything over 99 years is effectively forever. If you want to 'lease' property to someone forever for $1 a year(effectively giving the property without paying capital gains taxes), it is considered to be forever (and it becomes taxable) if the term is over 99 years.
Hong Kong was leased to the British for 99 years using some similar reasoning.
With copyright at 95 years (or 70 + life for those few works not made for hire), it slips in right under that number.
Of course, with the current Supreme Court, I'd be suprised if they overturned any law favoring big media, no matter how unconstitutional.
My car gets about 325 miles on a 16-gallon tank, so that's 60 liters of gas, or about 3400 megajoules. To get that same amount of energy from hydrogen, I'd need 309100 liters of the stuff, at STP. To fit that into a 16-gallon tank, I'd need to pressurize it to about 5000psi, or about 340 atmospheres.
My math shows that the pressure will be 41.6 kPa per mole of hydrogen using a 60 litre tank at 300 Kelvins (around room temperature). The heat of reaction of H2 + 1/2O2 = H20 is 241.8 kJ/mol, so to store 3.4 GJ of energy, you would need 14,060 moles of hydrogen, and the pressure would be about 584 MPa, or about 5,800 atmospheres assuming hydrogen is an ideal gas.
Hydrogen ceases to be like an ideal gas far before 5,800 atmospheres are reached. In fact, no amount of compression short of squeezing the hydrogen into a ball of neutrons (trillions of atmospheres required at a minimum) will fit the hydrogen into that tank. Well, there would be an intermediate point (after a few billion atmospheres) where the carbon and leftover hydrogen could be combined into hydrocarbons and those should fit into the tank.
Slashdot Mirror
The simple solution would be government-run or at least government-funded research. Research is under 20% of big pharmaceuticals' budgets. The government could take 20% of the money spent on drugs today and use that to fund research and remove all patent, copyright, and trade secret (can't keep drug recipies secret) priviledges. The drugs themselves would be made in an open market and would likely be 20% the cost of patented drugs today.
No catch-22, the government saves money since it more than recoups its investments in medicare/medicaid payments and health insurance for government workers, and the public saves money through cheaper drugs for those not on the government programs.
Sure it might be cool to jam 16 HDs into such a small space, but for about $100K, it sure seems a bit pricey. Couldn't you get maybe 2-4 of the most reliable PC cases you can get and stuff them with HDs.
Or is there some super-important feature that I'm missing.
let's see ... perhaps because the executable bit is set, and in the console it's displayed in bright yellow and with an asterik next to it. Same goes for shell scripts, which can be as risky as an executable.
.EXEs or ROMs for video game emulators, but that is only because you call the interpreter and pass the file to the interpreter, so the OS has no way of knowing it is an executable.
This doesn't apply to files that require an interpreter or emulator, like
I generally run just about anything I find. At worst, I'll spot the file when doing clean up, and I don't want to risk deleting something useful. Funny.exe isn't very descriptive, so I probably will execute and have a look.
That said, I won't execute unsolicited stuff, but only if I can recognise it as such. Dump it to my download directory silently, and I'll get around to executing it, though I won't allow it to run as root if it asks (I'm not that reckless).
And BTW, I consider myself to be a fairly experienced user. It's just that viruses have never given me trouble, but I have lost data in the past, so I check everything before I delete.
GAIM would help, though only because you would be running Linux. The worst that can happen under WINE (which you would need to execute the payload) is that it screws up your WINE installation. Once you kill the WINE process, anything memory resident is wiped clean. Furthermore, only a handful of viruses manage to run under WINE, as viruses can do some tricky stuff.
What about books whos covers have fallen off through use. Do you have to get it repaired otherwise it's illegal to resell it (though I doubt you'd get much for selling a book in that poor condition, unless it's very rare).
The monopoly is on the particular songs and derivatives of it. It's an accepted use of the term monopoly, as in the term 'monopolistic competition' (which the music industry is). In monopolistic competition, you get monopoly prices because advertising and product differentiation.
Downloading a picture of it, I don't see anything wrong with that. Hogwash. It's illegal because it's participating in another crime -- namely the production of child porn. It's no different from taking the picture yourself, or no different than seeing it take place and doing nothing to stop it -- in all cases you're an accomplice (IMO, IANAL, etc.)
What about computer generated picture of kiddie porn that looks just like the real thing. It's very revolting, but not a single kid was hurt in the process. Personally, I think that the first amendment should protect that as free speech, and it would be hard to argue against it when Nazis and KKK members can legally spew their hate speech (which can cause society a lot more harm).
Water vapor concentrations are rising because of global warming (a self-reenforcing mechanism). The only way they will come down is by countering global warming. On the plus side, water vapor lives a very short time in the atmosphere, a few weeks at most.
Methane comes from cows, rice, and leaked natural gas. Either way, it is much shorter lived. A push away from beef would have many other benefits as well (among meats, beef is about the least efficient of the mass-market meats to manufacture). Methane from rice could be reduced by abandoning flood irrigation. Much water would be saved in the process too.
It is possible that global warming could release large amounts of methane trapped in the permafrost, which would reenforce global warming.
Either way, all the problems should be attacked. CO2 alone is potent enough to cause serious global warming. Methane would just make it worse.
Nonsense, of course. We know that humans have slightly increased CO2 levels in the atmosphere, but hard evidence linking that to temperature rises is minimal.
First, there is plenty of hard evidence. Thermometers around the world, satellite data, and much soft evidence like receding glaciers and retreating sea ice points quite clearly to global warming being real.
Second, the theory is quite sound. CO2 pushes the energy budget of Earth up. Less energy out means Earth has to heat up.
"scientists who say otherwise are hired by special interest groups or oil companies"
You are parodying the lefties here and not being serious, I presume? That is, making fun of the fact that most scientists who claim that 'global warming' is a threat are being paid by governments to do 'global warming' research and would be out of a job if they didn't keep claiming that it's a big threat?
Well, it's true. Most 'scientists' who are outspoken against there being global warming are paid by industry. Other scientists either believe that there is global warming, or are not informed on the subject and have no strong opinion.
As far as government hiring goes, my government (USA) tends to fire scientists with outspoken views in favor of global warming.
'Global Warming' is a multi-billion dollar a year industry around the world: if you wouldn't believe McDonalds if they said that their meals are good for you, why would you believe the global warming industry?
Pollution and CO2 generation (essentially all heavy industry and transportation, along with the fossil fuel industries) are a multi-trillion dollar a year industry, and you could be more specific in terms what is the 'global warming' industry.
I would say "information's inherent nature or natural tendancy is to be free." is more accurate, but it just doesn't deliver the punch of saying "information wants to be free". Inanimate objects can have a natural tendancy, such as the universal tendancy to disorder in a closed system (entropy).
As far as "people want things for free", hell yes. Free (as is beer and liberty) is better than pay and restricted any day. Isn't that what competition is supposed strive towards in a free market and communism supposed to do via efficient central planning?
And if you're going to compare this to theft, just remember that the free-market price would be the cost of hosting and bandwidth for downloads, and pressing and distribution for CDs. The music would have no contractual restrictions on it (the restrictions on legal internet music can be given a dollar cost). That would make the music company thieves by a loose interpretation of theft, as they've been using oligopoly power and collusion to keep prices over ten times their fair market price. Personally, I'd rather call people who download their music freeloaders and the music companies price gougers. That conveys a lot more information and the terminology isn't so baised.
The free-market price is the price if there were thousands of equally small music companies and thousands of distributors, all in fierce competition, and every customer had complete pricing information and was savvy with it. In addition, there are no geographical, political, or other advantages for one firm over another. Customers would know all the other CDs that sound about the same as the genre/style/mood they are looking for, and there would be no manipulative advertising. The free market price is when marginal cost equals margin price. Since music (or pretty much anything to do with copyright) has near zero marginal cost, the free market price will be very low.
At least over here in the US, live streams are not terribly popular. The networks don't release them, and it is illegal for someone without copyright permission to rebroadcast TV on the internet.
Most computerized TV takes the form of trading files using P2P or trading stacks of DVDs/CDs. Also, a very good portion of the trade is in stuff that is not aired in the US, like Anime.
On the plus side, the quality is generally quite good and anything you have is yours to keep, unlike streams which are view once (or require a lot of effort to record).
A good seat belt is good enough for most crashes to protect the body, so long as the car remains in tact.
As far as the car staying in one piece, small objects (like those little 2-inch toy cars) can survive far more punishment than a Hummer. Take a toy car and toss it twenty feet in the air and onto a grass lawn, and it will be intact, despite using sub-par construction materials. Toss a Hummer twenty feet into the air () and even if it lands on all four wheels it's likely to be badly damaged, though still in one piece and possibly repairable. Now take a house and toss it twenty feet into the air. You'll be lucky if you can recognise that the pile of sheet rock and wood once was a house.
My bet is that a small car with a very strong frame is going to fare fairly well if crashed or thrown about.
All these approaches can be defeated if you have an open-source browser, some programming skills, and a bit of determination.
Javascript: Edit browser code to silently ignore instructions that override right clicks and menu options.
ANY approach that doesn't force you to install and run a binary: Have the browser dump downloaded files to a directory of your choice. Alternatively, disable the cache timeout. Then browse the website as a human would, and later you have your copy.
Something akin to masquerading could be used if the files need to appear to be coming from the Google server.
If you have the source to the rendering device (the browser) and it is displayed on the screen, it can be copied.
I agree totally.
The only thing I find lacking with this argument is a scientific basing for that conclusion, which I will try to fill.
I define good as the being the common good, which I define as a combination of equality and the summed happiness of every person. Evil is definied as !good. It's a complimentary term that isn't strictly needed, though it can be quite conventient.
Like any basic premise, there is no hard scientific reason to accept my basic premise, but I consider it to be a very reasonable and common sense definition of good that lends itself to some level of scientific scrutiny, though being a social science, it can never be as exact as physics or mathematics.
Using this premise, simple cases of murder, like a person killing his ex-spouse or a drunk crashing his car, are evil because they reduce the happiness of the victim all the way to zero, are very unequal, and do not bring nearly enough, if any, benefit to society to balance the costs.
As far as information goes, violating copyright generally increases both equality and happiness, since raw efficiency is increased (the ideal price point for any good or service is where marginal_cost = price, which basic economic theory gives us) and you have many poor and middle class people benefiting at the expense of the rich. To punish copyright violators is evil, since overall happiness is reduced (both from the direct cost of having people sued or thrown in jail, and from the increased prices and reduced usage of information) and money is transferred from poor to rich. Therefore, copyright is an evil law.
The argument about 'people not creating if they're not compensated' can also be explained with this theory. For people who do stuff for the love of it, that love and the potential fame contributes to their happiness, the art contributes to overall society happiness, and since everyone benefits, it is fairly equal, though a small payment to the artist might be most equal. For stuff that people don't love to do, the resources should be mobilized so that projects that return a net benefit to society get done, and so that their fruits are as widely distributed as is efficient. The infornmation workers would be paid a normal salary, since this is just like any other job.
What I like about my 'good' and 'evil' is that it is fairly objective, as each individual gets to define his or her own happiness, and so long as you accept the basic premise, good and evil can be argued using psychology and economics instead of religion and morals.
I'll take a modest and steady income over having a larger income that is dependent on satisfying a boss who expects me to work 80 hours for 40 hours pay and expects me to write the software he wants me to write, the way he wants it.
I consider myself to be a well skilled programmer, and $25,000 would be enough to hire me if I get to choose, design, program, debug, and document (from start to finish) the games I write and whatever I write is released to the public domain (with source code).
In the cases of political and dissenting works, where independent voices are needed, donations are generally easy to come by and free labor is also easy to come by.
I doubt Karl Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto or Das Capital because of copyrights, or that the Federalist Papers were written because of copyright. Most political and influence groups are fine with waiving the money portion of their propaganda copyrights and only using copyright to silence their critics.
Government does a fine job of funding stuff like PBS Kids and other lightly political stuff. Even better would be to make the process democratic. Citizens could vote on what to produce and what to air using a system where losing votes are applied to second choices and then third and so forth, so every sizable group gets at least some of their interests met. If communists or fascists can get together 10,000 votes, then maybe they can get themselves the 3 am slot. Simpsons might get 2,000,000 votes and get the 7 pm and 7:30 pm slots along with a $20M a year production budget. And any educated person would vote for zero commercial advertisements. Of course, those with fast internet connections could always download the shows they want from government/university (since universities have so much experience with this stuff) funded servers or P2P.
In the case of software, GNU/Linux has shown how much can be done just for the love of it, and industry specific software WILL get written, one way or another, since industry needs it to function.
Well, going 100 MPH is fine and legal if you do it on private property and either own the land or have permission from the landowner.
I would go one step further. Since information (outside of its uses in blackmail and other stuff where people are actually hurt) is a private matter, it should be outside of the scope of government and contracts. I include contracts because no reasonable contract regulates people's private lives, and therefore any such contracts should be null and void.
When information is copied, made into a derivative work, decompiled, converted, backed up, or whatever, it's a totally self-contained act that should be fully unemcombered by government or contract.
When it is distributed, it is a self-contained transaction between two people, the giver and the receiver. So long as both people consent and no other parties are involved (ie., blackmail and espionage - and I don't mean reverse-compiling software or cracking your encrypted data by that), it should be between those two parties. The government and outside parties should have zero say.
PS: I generally consider myself to be a socialist, so these views are very different from my typical views on the role of government, though I have no qualms with the government heavily subsidising the arts, so long as the money is distributed widely and fairly.
Two points. First, speeding is not a felony. A felony if punished by losing the right to vote, several years of jail time, and a very hard time finding a respectful job afterwards. It is generally reserved for such acts as murder and bad cases of rape. Speeding is punished by a small fine and a few points on your license. This punishment is enough to deter speeders, while not ruining their lives or unnecessarily punishing them.
Second point: The speed limits are stupidly low in many places. The Long Island Expressway (near New York City) has a speed limit of 55 mph, yet people regularly do 80 mph when there isn't much traffic. 65 mph is perfectly safe, and 80 mph would be a reasonable tradeoff among safety, fuel efficiency, and time. The law is designed to make most people violate it (about 99% on that particular highway), which gives excessive power to the cops since they get to pick and choose who gets the ticket, instead of forcing them to only ticket the fastest speeders.
Of course, that misses the whole point that I don't believe in copyright and therefore would like to see the entire copyright code repealed (and replaced by an anti-plagarism law, which curiously enough does not exist in the USA).
It is. The only reason why media companies can keep their hugely profitable middleman role in a sector where many artists are willing to produce for free just because they love their art is because of Copyright Law.
Without copyright, most distributors and production companies (who are often one and the same) would have nothing to offer to people to use their pricey and restricted networks instead of independent retailers (who could sell burnt on the spot CDs for a dollar a piece, and with a greater selection) and P2P (which would become more reliable and more diverse now that it would be fully legal).
The industry owes its parasitic existance to Copyright Law, and they seem to be integrated horizontally (TV companies buying movie companies, software companies buying TV companies, distributors buying producers, etc), so calling it the Copyright Industry seems reasonable enough, though Copyright Extortion Racket might be a more accurate term, since industries generally add value.
I find bandwidth limiting to be very useful. I (like most americans) have much less up bandwidth than down bandwidth, and if I limit uploads to 90% of my bandwidth, downloads work fine, but if the upload pipe is fully saturated, downloads slow to a crawl.
Also, the latency of net games goes through the roof once the up pipe gets clogged.
Perhaps there could be a way to verify how much 'real' bandwidth a person has and only them to limit it to say 90% of capacity?
Such a report would be inherently flawed. Since so many machines ship with Microsoft's windowing system, even a large migration to linux will register in the single digits. A much smaller number of people buying linux machines to install Microsoft's windowing system will make up a large percentage of linux sales, since the base is so much smaller.
A better statistic would be a comparison of the absolute number of machines switching one way or the other. This would probably be in favor of Linux, at least in developed countries.
There is precedent that anything over 99 years is effectively forever. If you want to 'lease' property to someone forever for $1 a year(effectively giving the property without paying capital gains taxes), it is considered to be forever (and it becomes taxable) if the term is over 99 years.
Hong Kong was leased to the British for 99 years using some similar reasoning.
With copyright at 95 years (or 70 + life for those few works not made for hire), it slips in right under that number.
Of course, with the current Supreme Court, I'd be suprised if they overturned any law favoring big media, no matter how unconstitutional.
My car gets about 325 miles on a 16-gallon tank, so that's 60 liters of gas, or about 3400 megajoules. To get that same amount of energy from hydrogen, I'd need 309100 liters of the stuff, at STP. To fit that into a 16-gallon tank, I'd need to pressurize it to about 5000psi, or about 340 atmospheres.
My math shows that the pressure will be 41.6 kPa per mole of hydrogen using a 60 litre tank at 300 Kelvins (around room temperature). The heat of reaction of H2 + 1/2O2 = H20 is 241.8 kJ/mol, so to store 3.4 GJ of energy, you would need 14,060 moles of hydrogen, and the pressure would be about 584 MPa, or about 5,800 atmospheres assuming hydrogen is an ideal gas.
Hydrogen ceases to be like an ideal gas far before 5,800 atmospheres are reached. In fact, no amount of compression short of squeezing the hydrogen into a ball of neutrons (trillions of atmospheres required at a minimum) will fit the hydrogen into that tank. Well, there would be an intermediate point (after a few billion atmospheres) where the carbon and leftover hydrogen could be combined into hydrocarbons and those should fit into the tank.