Take this altruistic concept back to a primitive, tribal society level. One hunter brings back a deer to the village. He can hoard it all to himself and ensure the survival of himself and/or his family, OR, he can divvy out the deer to the entire tribe even though this means he'll get less for himself. Why would he do this? According to you, it's simply because it feels good to give, but the point of this article (imho) is to show that it's actually beneficial to his survival. And his survival is 100% dependent on the survival of the tribe.
What you are describing is a traditional gift economy and it's not altruistic in the least. What the hunter is effectively doing is extending a (primitive sort of) loan to his neighbours, full well knowing that it will be in their best interests to repay this loan in the future. Part of the reason that this is a great idea from his point of view (rather than just a good one) is that a deer is a perishable commodity and requires a fair bit of work if he intended to prepare it for storage so that he could keep all of it himself. Instead he is "selling" it as a perishable in order to rack up informal IOUs.
Of course, it is also in the hunter's interest to help ensure the continued good health and strength of his tribe and kinsmen since he presumably relies upon them to remain alive and well in a number of other ways. This follows from a straight "strength in numbers" philosophy.
People who are being altruistic are satisfying *their* own needs.
The question remains as to why we have such needs. There is nothing inherently rational in wanting to help other people (apart from kin etc.) and so it seems irrational that we should gain pleasure from doing so. Why, then, have we evolved in such a way?
There are also mathematical models that show the best strategy is to cooperate until the "other person" cheats you, or you are facing the last interaction with that person.
But this isn't altruism, this is a classical situation of give-and-take. Altruism would be when you cooperate with someone - at no net benefit to yourself - even if they have no possibility at all of retaliating against you should you cheat them.
Re:Public DNS is corrupt, but Private DNS is subli
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DNS Should not be a tool for politicians.
So you're basically saying there shouldn't be country codes?
Of course to create the pdf you still need a computer, then to offer it for downloading you need net access, and hosting if the isp doesn't offer space. Many people still don't have that.
Yes. Right now, this is largely virgin territory and it probably takes somewhat tech-savvy people to break the new ground. There are many unsolved problems that will need some bit of work. I don't expect it will take long, however, before services start being offered to make this easier even for technophobes. If the author can be persuaded to produce an electronic manuscript in some form or other, then the work of PDFing, hosting/torrent-seeding and general online marketing can be handed off to someone else (to your 15-year old nephew if necessary I suppose but more professional offerings are sure to come).
Incidentally, a decent early book using these techniques would be one that discusses how to market books in this manner:-)
ps. I wanted to thank you for your comments, ideas, and feedback. Unlike others in this thread you've given me something to think about and how copyrights may not be needed.
I am glad to have been of some help. I wish you the best of luck getting your book on the market.
Since people want what they buy today tomorrow or the next day this means that you're going to need a warehouse to store the printed books.
I realise there is a problem wrt running small print series of books. As this particular business model becomes more popular, I would expect an industry to grow up around managing the sales/printing/shipping of small-volume titles so that some large-scale benefits can be realised. More likely than not, amazon will want to be on in this gig - if I remember correctly, they have already remarked that a significant portion of their sales is from small-volume titles that normal book stores wouldn't dream of carrying because they're mainly limited by physical restrictions such as shelf space and storage space.
Until then, as you say, there remains the problem of how to finance and organise this. It really depends on how much up-front capital you have and how understanding your customers are of having to wait for a print-run to fill up etc. On the plus side, if demand is so small that this is a problem for you, your book is probably not worth the time and effort for a copy shop to offer for sale (they will basically have the same cost/profit problem wrt the print runs as you do) so you have some time to get things properly organised.
Counterfitters can take just as much due diligence making copies or knockoffs as the owner or creator can.
When I say that the competition's version will be seen as a "cheap copy", I don't mean that your competition will necessarily have a product that is physically inferior, but rather that they're not affiliated with the author and so will inevitably get a cheapness stigma attached to them. They will be seen as knock-offs, and that tends to be bad karma all around in significant parts of the population.
Note that, more likely than not, if your competitor were to market a deluxe collectors' edition with leather binding and gold trimmings that was really really neat, your customers would come to you and say "hey, this new edition from Knockoffs R Us is really neat - are you going to do something like that?" and if you said "err... right... oh, yeah, sure, working on that right now" many of them would probably be happy to wait for the genuine collectors' edition to come out.
And the creator may not have the means or resources to market never mind print a book.
If the book is actually a good one, then the free PDF is probably the best marketing tool you could hope for. Of course, you will also want to make people aware that the book exists and is available. Cue the usual methods for getting some bit of media/blog attention and high search engine ratings for your chosen topic.
I know probably 30 people who rushed out to buy Widescreen TVs, yet didn't know how to set the aspect ratio correctly. They boasted about the new TV even though the picture was skewed. (...)
This is most likely because your acquaintances bought something other than what you think they bought. You think they went out to buy themselves bigger, better TV images. They did not. They went out to buy themselves status symbols. Once the widescreen is firmly on display in their living rooms so that all that visit can see, it's Mission Accomplished. Repeated insistence that the screens aren't being used to their full potential is completely irrelevant drivel in this situation as that was never the goal in the first place and they really couldn't care less.
(In fact, flaunting your wealth by buying something really expensive and then not using it is in itself a status symbol.)
You will be amazed at how mind-numbingly stupid people are.
You need to keep in mind that a fair number of people (perhaps of the more intelligent portion, interestingly) like to feign stupidity when dealing with service people since this is more likely to gain them better assistance, faster. Standing around looking completely lost and asking really inane questions tends to be a good way to draw the attention of the staff and encourage them to help you *every* *step* *of* *the* *way* and that can be really convenient to you as a customer.
It appears you don't know how much it costs for a person to selfpublish then get wide distribution of it. That's where publishing companies come in, they have the means and resources to print and distribute.
I accept that this has been a serious problem for the centuries past and that this problem in itself provided good justification for copyright. Copyright has basically existed not to protect the writer, but the distributor. Distribution has, however, become effectively free. You seed the PDF in a torrent and sit back and wait for the word to spread. If your work is good, that word will spread, and people who like books will want the professionally printed hardcopy. Unless you put unreasonable hurdles in their way, they will come to you for it. Your only remaining problem will be to find someone to print it for you. The post office handles the rest.
Without copyrights a publisher could just take what was submitted and publish it without paying the writer.
And there are certainly those who will. They will not, however, have the single most valuable asset, which is you the author. Their books will be seen as cheap copies and will be shunned by your main base of readers, who will tend to come to your chosen outlet. This effect has been with us for a very long time: people want The Original and those who can afford it will get it. It may not be entirely rational but then we're not computers - we're humans.
The business case for the copy shops isn't even all that compelling: the primary cost in selling the book is likely to be typesetting, printing and shipping and not the check paid to the writer. They therefore have nearly the same cost as you do, but their product is inferior because they don't have you onboard. Their main line of attack would therefore be to try to get you onboard so that they can use you to boost sales.
Yes, there will be freeloaders (they will read the PDF and never pay you a cent). There always have been and there always will be. If you waste your life thinking angry thoughts about freeloaders then you really need to start reconsidering your mindset. They're simply not all that important.
Afterall what do you think the Business Software Alliance does?
It's basically a legalised protection racket. I see nothing to admire about the BSA. They make it their business to run around screwing up their customers' operations and then suing them afterwards.
And how would you know who the orginal author is? At least if a writer registers a copyright it is registered to them.
You don't need the copyright regime in order to register who the author is of any given work, and I'm not saying it should become acceptable, or even legal, to claim credit for someone else's work. But this is a different debate altogether and is probably better handled under trademark law.
So what are you arguing? That our laws DON'T fall in line with what is considered moral?
What I'm saying is that there are a great number of situations in a modern society that need to be regulated, not because acting in a random manner would be immoral but rather because it would be ineffecient and very costly. Traffic is a good example: which side of the road people drive on is morally neutral, but it seems desirable that we should mandate one particular side as the only one permitted. If you take the stance that the only source we can have for determining what laws to make is morality, then you simply cannot make such a law because it is morally neutral. Furthermore, if you do make the law, then you will quickly conclude that driving on the wrong side of the road has now become immoral, because it's against the law that we should all follow. A theory along the lines of "morality should dictate law and not the other way around" therefore falls apart very fast.
The problem is (and the last part of this sentence can basically be used on any problem, in any situation, so I'm hardly trying to be very innovative here) that the world is more complex than that. Morality and legality will necessarily influence eachother. Some things will be illegal because they are immoral (e.g. murder), others will be immoral because they are illegal (e.g. driving on the wrong side of the road), yet others will be illegal but moral (this is the real problem we should be trying to solve), or immoral but legal (probably not a huge problem).
Or to put it more simply there should never be a law you hear about where you say "that ain't right".
If you wrote a book of laws for one single person to follow, you might be able to pull this off - but probably not even then. Try to write one single law book that applies to 1 million people or more and you're just being masochistic:-)
Indeed, if an Englishman were to move to my country, he would soon be heard saying "driving on the _right_ side of the road? That ain't right!" (well, perhaps without the American slang). You just won't be able to please them all.
The point is neither has any inherent value, only value as we assign it or as we assess it in regard to other financial concerns.
But then, this is true for pretty much everything. My computer has no value beyond what we assign to it. When I assign a value to my computer, it is based upon a subconscious calculation of perceived benefit (monetary or otherwise) much in the same way that a bean counter could calculate the risk of having a dirty floor.
As an extreme example, if I were to somehow be able to transport my computer back to the 800s it would presumably be completely useless and so have no value to the people who were to happen upon it (even if they knew how to use it, they'd have no power for it). Where, then, is its "inherent" value?
The value of any item, service or even situation (e.g. "having clean floors") is entirely dependent upon the setting they exist within and cannot be determined except by some calculation that involves, among other things, the needs and desires of the people involved. Risk assessments very much have a place in these calculations.
The point I'm making is that there is no inherent value in the result of the service, such that it is an exception to traditional capitalism.
While I may be mistaken, I do not believe that capitalism concerns itself much with "inherent value". Rather, it concerns itself mostly with supply and demand. If there is a demand for having clean floors and there is a limited supply of people prepared to turn dirty floors into clean ones, then having clean floors will have an easily determined cost and so be completely amenable to capitalistic considerations. I'm not sure if capitalism says anything about what its "value" would be.
It is most moral to drive on the pre-agreed-upon side of the law that everyone else has agreed to drive on so that you don't kill people. Indeed, but the premise of this new way of writing laws was that the law should not itself define morality - the law should instead be built on a foundation of what is already considered moral. If the law is then given the power to define morality anyway, we get into a nasty circular definition of what is moral and we quickly degenerate into a situation where "if it's illegal it's surely immoral" which is the problem we started with.
Having a clean floor has no inherent value Well, technically it does - at least if the floor is ever in use. You can calculate the hygiene and accident risks associated with having an unclean floor (effeciency reduction, sick leaves, lawsuit costs, etc.) and the value of having it be clean is presumably the absolute value of the cost of that risk. (Or something like that - I'm not a bean counter so don't know the correct jargon.)
The answer is to bring the law back in line with what the populace believes is moral.
This is only feasible with some of the most simple problems (e.g. murder).
As an example, how would you write the traffic laws in this new legality=morality scheme? Is it most moral to drive on the right side of the road, or is it most moral to drive on the left side? Is it most moral to have yellow indicator lights, or is it most moral to have blue ones? Both of these questions need to be codified into law for traffic to become navigable but it is not clear how a strict morality prerequisite can help us codify them in such a way that they are moral and the opposite is not moral.
Why would I spend so much tyme writing something if someone else could take what I wrote and make some money off it without me seeing a dime? Mostly because that would be very unlikely to happen. The only real way this could be achieved was if either you refused to market the product yourself and so left it all for someone else to profit from or else if someone else successfully managed to convince the world that it is actually they and not you who wrote the work. Copyright doesn't really do much to protect you from either of those situations.
Given the choice, I would tend to buy e.g. a book from its original author, for a variety of reasons. The most immediately practical reason would be that I could preorder it from him and get it on day one (while the knock-off shops would need at least a couple of days to get their own operation going). But more than that, I would get it from him simply because he's The Guy. This is by far your most valuable asset as an author - copyright is a red herring.
But you are right, if any program can be pirated without any repercussions, it WILL hurt both the company and the product's future. This is rapidly becoming less true. With Internet-based updates, it should be reasonably easy to give away a product like an OS for free and charge for maintenance. More likely than not, a large amount of people will pay for the service of easy updates even if the actual software delivered by those updates is free of charge. That is, you could pay MS for automatic painless updates (to the extent that they are able to deliver such) -or- you could go out of your way to obtain and install the patches on your own. I would be willing to pay for the convenience and I am sure so would others.
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How about calling it "normal behaviour" ? I am sure we will, once it becomes legal. Until then, however, it is helpful to have a term to help us differentiate it from copying activity that is currently legal.
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You can buy knock-off parts, and usually they aren't very good. But then, knock-off parts aren't generally illegal unless protected by some patent or trademark that you are violating. It is pretty common in the car industry to buy non-original replacement parts and I don't see how this is a problem.
The timing says everything. While I certainly see that the agreement may not be very explicit (national pride was too much a part of the problem for any one side to want to be seen to give in), England's adoption of the metre in 1884 together with France desiding not to sink the Greenwich meridian in 1884 (which they could have done by voting against it - it was a very important country at the time) speaks volumes of discussions held behind closed doors. Looking back, it is therefore easy to see that France sold its meridian in exchange for universal adoption of its system of measurements. It is equally easy to see that these things take a while to change even with a treaty in place, but that is to be expected.
So, we'll make a bi-lateral treaty -- we'll accept the metric system as our official measuring standard as soon as France accepts English as its official language. I'm afraid you're a little for this one - that particular deal was struck long ago: Britain would accept the French metric system for mapmaking purposes if France would agree to use the Greenwich meridian. You will have to find some other bargaining chip if you want to avoid looking like a sore loser:-)
This has me wondering: what is the world record for turning a neutral phrase into one with disastrously negative connotations? It hasn't been that many years since "DRM" was just a TLA to most people and now it's already sufficiently tainted that its proponents have started trying to replace it. (Of course, a clever entertainment industry leader would recognize that as a hint . ..) So, are there any other phrases that went through that same process with comparable speed? (And in order to retain some level of challenge to the exercise, let's leave WW2 out of it:-)
The Church punished people who attempted to bring the Bible to the masses, because that cut into the Church's lucrative business of being the middle-man between God and the rest of us. While there is certainly strong financial and political motivation for acting as you describe, it also needs to be pointed out that there is a strong philosophical argument for this mode of behaviour. In short, Christian philosophy has held (since Thomas Aquinas I think, if not earlier) that you need a high level of education and enlightenment in order to make proper sense of what God is. If a layman without this understanding were to be confronted with the more esoteric knowledge to soon, it would only confuse him and he would reach very wrong conclusions. For this reason, the layman needs to have a more knowledgable person (i.e. a priest) help him navigate the religion and shouldn't be allowed to study it on his own as some sort of hobby. While this is certainly an arrogant attitude, it's still based upon a noble intention (that is, not to confuse the common people with overly complicated theories). For this reason, you would find discussions among learned clergy that would have been considered heresy if discussed among laypersons. After all, highly educated clergy would not be led astray by false ideas the way a layman might. (I have seen suggestions that the main reason Gallileo was persecuted by the church was that he tried to bring the astronomical debate out among the common people before the case had been settled by the academics - that particular debate had been done openly up to then, but confined to academic circles.) Of course, the Scientologists could claim the same approach: the only reason the whole Xenu tyranny story seems ridiculous to most of us is that we lack the necessary knowledge to actually understand it. Others would say that it's because most of us aren't sufficiently brain-washed to buy it hook line and sinker:-)
Your use of "all a matter of time" somewhat overlooks the sheer scale of the problem at hand.
Quoting MechaBlue (from http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/wireless/networks/archi ves/cracking-wpapsk-6730): Assuming a decent utility is used, a 31 character long password of random upper- and lowercase letters and numbers results in 62^31, or 3.7x10^55 possible combinations. If we assume 60 attempts per second, it will take more that 1.3x10^36 times the age of the universe (15 billion years) to attempt every possible combination. The average time would be half that, or 6.5x10^35 times the age of the universe. Even if someone were to come up with a scheme that reduced the bruteforce time to 1 trillionth of what would be required otherwise, it would still take 6.5x10^23 times the age of the universe. And so on...
That is perfectly good enough for me to secure my home network:-)
cracking WPA requires only the 4 way handshake and the use of a decent dictionary or brute force attack You seem to have left something out: Cracking WPA also requires that the administrator decided to use a weak key, i.e. one that is susceptible to brute force or dictionary attacks. But if you are allowed to assume this, then any encryption is "easily" cracked. Even OTP is trivially cracked if the key sequence is easy to guess.
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Take this altruistic concept back to a primitive, tribal society level. One hunter brings back a deer to the village. He can hoard it all to himself and ensure the survival of himself and/or his family, OR, he can divvy out the deer to the entire tribe even though this means he'll get less for himself. Why would he do this? According to you, it's simply because it feels good to give, but the point of this article (imho) is to show that it's actually beneficial to his survival. And his survival is 100% dependent on the survival of the tribe.
What you are describing is a traditional gift economy and it's not altruistic in the least. What the hunter is effectively doing is extending a (primitive sort of) loan to his neighbours, full well knowing that it will be in their best interests to repay this loan in the future. Part of the reason that this is a great idea from his point of view (rather than just a good one) is that a deer is a perishable commodity and requires a fair bit of work if he intended to prepare it for storage so that he could keep all of it himself. Instead he is "selling" it as a perishable in order to rack up informal IOUs.
Of course, it is also in the hunter's interest to help ensure the continued good health and strength of his tribe and kinsmen since he presumably relies upon them to remain alive and well in a number of other ways. This follows from a straight "strength in numbers" philosophy.
Or you are NOT correct, in which it doesn't matter what you think because you're a goddam moron.
:-)
Only an idiot never considers the possibility that he may be an idiot
People who are being altruistic are satisfying *their* own needs.
The question remains as to why we have such needs. There is nothing inherently rational in wanting to help other people (apart from kin etc.) and so it seems irrational that we should gain pleasure from doing so. Why, then, have we evolved in such a way?
There are also mathematical models that show the best strategy is to cooperate until the "other person" cheats you, or you are facing the last interaction with that person.
But this isn't altruism, this is a classical situation of give-and-take. Altruism would be when you cooperate with someone - at no net benefit to yourself - even if they have no possibility at all of retaliating against you should you cheat them.
DNS Should not be a tool for politicians.
So you're basically saying there shouldn't be country codes?
That's just what you get when you try to take on one of Apple's iCons.
Of course to create the pdf you still need a computer, then to offer it for downloading you need net access, and hosting if the isp doesn't offer space. Many people still don't have that.
:-)
Yes. Right now, this is largely virgin territory and it probably takes somewhat tech-savvy people to break the new ground. There are many unsolved problems that will need some bit of work. I don't expect it will take long, however, before services start being offered to make this easier even for technophobes. If the author can be persuaded to produce an electronic manuscript in some form or other, then the work of PDFing, hosting/torrent-seeding and general online marketing can be handed off to someone else (to your 15-year old nephew if necessary I suppose but more professional offerings are sure to come).
Incidentally, a decent early book using these techniques would be one that discusses how to market books in this manner
ps. I wanted to thank you for your comments, ideas, and feedback. Unlike others in this thread you've given me something to think about and how copyrights may not be needed.
I am glad to have been of some help. I wish you the best of luck getting your book on the market.
Since people want what they buy today tomorrow or the next day this means that you're going to need a warehouse to store the printed books.
... right ... oh, yeah, sure, working on that right now" many of them would probably be happy to wait for the genuine collectors' edition to come out.
I realise there is a problem wrt running small print series of books. As this particular business model becomes more popular, I would expect an industry to grow up around managing the sales/printing/shipping of small-volume titles so that some large-scale benefits can be realised. More likely than not, amazon will want to be on in this gig - if I remember correctly, they have already remarked that a significant portion of their sales is from small-volume titles that normal book stores wouldn't dream of carrying because they're mainly limited by physical restrictions such as shelf space and storage space.
Until then, as you say, there remains the problem of how to finance and organise this. It really depends on how much up-front capital you have and how understanding your customers are of having to wait for a print-run to fill up etc. On the plus side, if demand is so small that this is a problem for you, your book is probably not worth the time and effort for a copy shop to offer for sale (they will basically have the same cost/profit problem wrt the print runs as you do) so you have some time to get things properly organised.
Counterfitters can take just as much due diligence making copies or knockoffs as the owner or creator can.
When I say that the competition's version will be seen as a "cheap copy", I don't mean that your competition will necessarily have a product that is physically inferior, but rather that they're not affiliated with the author and so will inevitably get a cheapness stigma attached to them. They will be seen as knock-offs, and that tends to be bad karma all around in significant parts of the population.
Note that, more likely than not, if your competitor were to market a deluxe collectors' edition with leather binding and gold trimmings that was really really neat, your customers would come to you and say "hey, this new edition from Knockoffs R Us is really neat - are you going to do something like that?" and if you said "err
And the creator may not have the means or resources to market never mind print a book.
If the book is actually a good one, then the free PDF is probably the best marketing tool you could hope for. Of course, you will also want to make people aware that the book exists and is available. Cue the usual methods for getting some bit of media/blog attention and high search engine ratings for your chosen topic.
I know probably 30 people who rushed out to buy Widescreen TVs, yet didn't know how to set the aspect ratio correctly. They boasted about the new TV even though the picture was skewed. (...)
This is most likely because your acquaintances bought something other than what you think they bought. You think they went out to buy themselves bigger, better TV images. They did not. They went out to buy themselves status symbols. Once the widescreen is firmly on display in their living rooms so that all that visit can see, it's Mission Accomplished. Repeated insistence that the screens aren't being used to their full potential is completely irrelevant drivel in this situation as that was never the goal in the first place and they really couldn't care less.
(In fact, flaunting your wealth by buying something really expensive and then not using it is in itself a status symbol.)
You will be amazed at how mind-numbingly stupid people are.
You need to keep in mind that a fair number of people (perhaps of the more intelligent portion, interestingly) like to feign stupidity when dealing with service people since this is more likely to gain them better assistance, faster. Standing around looking completely lost and asking really inane questions tends to be a good way to draw the attention of the staff and encourage them to help you *every* *step* *of* *the* *way* and that can be really convenient to you as a customer.
It appears you don't know how much it costs for a person to selfpublish then get wide distribution of it. That's where publishing companies come in, they have the means and resources to print and distribute.
I accept that this has been a serious problem for the centuries past and that this problem in itself provided good justification for copyright. Copyright has basically existed not to protect the writer, but the distributor. Distribution has, however, become effectively free. You seed the PDF in a torrent and sit back and wait for the word to spread. If your work is good, that word will spread, and people who like books will want the professionally printed hardcopy. Unless you put unreasonable hurdles in their way, they will come to you for it. Your only remaining problem will be to find someone to print it for you. The post office handles the rest.
Without copyrights a publisher could just take what was submitted and publish it without paying the writer.
And there are certainly those who will. They will not, however, have the single most valuable asset, which is you the author. Their books will be seen as cheap copies and will be shunned by your main base of readers, who will tend to come to your chosen outlet. This effect has been with us for a very long time: people want The Original and those who can afford it will get it. It may not be entirely rational but then we're not computers - we're humans.
The business case for the copy shops isn't even all that compelling: the primary cost in selling the book is likely to be typesetting, printing and shipping and not the check paid to the writer. They therefore have nearly the same cost as you do, but their product is inferior because they don't have you onboard. Their main line of attack would therefore be to try to get you onboard so that they can use you to boost sales.
Yes, there will be freeloaders (they will read the PDF and never pay you a cent). There always have been and there always will be. If you waste your life thinking angry thoughts about freeloaders then you really need to start reconsidering your mindset. They're simply not all that important.
Afterall what do you think the Business Software Alliance does?
It's basically a legalised protection racket. I see nothing to admire about the BSA. They make it their business to run around screwing up their customers' operations and then suing them afterwards.
And how would you know who the orginal author is? At least if a writer registers a copyright it is registered to them.
You don't need the copyright regime in order to register who the author is of any given work, and I'm not saying it should become acceptable, or even legal, to claim credit for someone else's work. But this is a different debate altogether and is probably better handled under trademark law.
So what are you arguing? That our laws DON'T fall in line with what is considered moral?
:-)
What I'm saying is that there are a great number of situations in a modern society that need to be regulated, not because acting in a random manner would be immoral but rather because it would be ineffecient and very costly. Traffic is a good example: which side of the road people drive on is morally neutral, but it seems desirable that we should mandate one particular side as the only one permitted. If you take the stance that the only source we can have for determining what laws to make is morality, then you simply cannot make such a law because it is morally neutral. Furthermore, if you do make the law, then you will quickly conclude that driving on the wrong side of the road has now become immoral, because it's against the law that we should all follow. A theory along the lines of "morality should dictate law and not the other way around" therefore falls apart very fast.
The problem is (and the last part of this sentence can basically be used on any problem, in any situation, so I'm hardly trying to be very innovative here) that the world is more complex than that. Morality and legality will necessarily influence eachother. Some things will be illegal because they are immoral (e.g. murder), others will be immoral because they are illegal (e.g. driving on the wrong side of the road), yet others will be illegal but moral (this is the real problem we should be trying to solve), or immoral but legal (probably not a huge problem).
Or to put it more simply there should never be a law you hear about where you say "that ain't right".
If you wrote a book of laws for one single person to follow, you might be able to pull this off - but probably not even then. Try to write one single law book that applies to 1 million people or more and you're just being masochistic
Indeed, if an Englishman were to move to my country, he would soon be heard saying "driving on the _right_ side of the road? That ain't right!" (well, perhaps without the American slang). You just won't be able to please them all.
The point is neither has any inherent value, only value as we assign it or as we assess it in regard to other financial concerns.
But then, this is true for pretty much everything. My computer has no value beyond what we assign to it. When I assign a value to my computer, it is based upon a subconscious calculation of perceived benefit (monetary or otherwise) much in the same way that a bean counter could calculate the risk of having a dirty floor.
As an extreme example, if I were to somehow be able to transport my computer back to the 800s it would presumably be completely useless and so have no value to the people who were to happen upon it (even if they knew how to use it, they'd have no power for it). Where, then, is its "inherent" value?
The value of any item, service or even situation (e.g. "having clean floors") is entirely dependent upon the setting they exist within and cannot be determined except by some calculation that involves, among other things, the needs and desires of the people involved. Risk assessments very much have a place in these calculations.
The point I'm making is that there is no inherent value in the result of the service, such that it is an exception to traditional capitalism.
While I may be mistaken, I do not believe that capitalism concerns itself much with "inherent value". Rather, it concerns itself mostly with supply and demand. If there is a demand for having clean floors and there is a limited supply of people prepared to turn dirty floors into clean ones, then having clean floors will have an easily determined cost and so be completely amenable to capitalistic considerations. I'm not sure if capitalism says anything about what its "value" would be.
It is most moral to drive on the pre-agreed-upon side of the law that everyone else has agreed to drive on so that you don't kill people.
Indeed, but the premise of this new way of writing laws was that the law should not itself define morality - the law should instead be built on a foundation of what is already considered moral. If the law is then given the power to define morality anyway, we get into a nasty circular definition of what is moral and we quickly degenerate into a situation where "if it's illegal it's surely immoral" which is the problem we started with.
Having a clean floor has no inherent value
Well, technically it does - at least if the floor is ever in use. You can calculate the hygiene and accident risks associated with having an unclean floor (effeciency reduction, sick leaves, lawsuit costs, etc.) and the value of having it be clean is presumably the absolute value of the cost of that risk. (Or something like that - I'm not a bean counter so don't know the correct jargon.)
The answer is to bring the law back in line with what the populace believes is moral.
This is only feasible with some of the most simple problems (e.g. murder).
As an example, how would you write the traffic laws in this new legality=morality scheme? Is it most moral to drive on the right side of the road, or is it most moral to drive on the left side? Is it most moral to have yellow indicator lights, or is it most moral to have blue ones? Both of these questions need to be codified into law for traffic to become navigable but it is not clear how a strict morality prerequisite can help us codify them in such a way that they are moral and the opposite is not moral.
Why would I spend so much tyme writing something if someone else could take what I wrote and make some money off it without me seeing a dime?
Mostly because that would be very unlikely to happen. The only real way this could be achieved was if either you refused to market the product yourself and so left it all for someone else to profit from or else if someone else successfully managed to convince the world that it is actually they and not you who wrote the work. Copyright doesn't really do much to protect you from either of those situations.
Given the choice, I would tend to buy e.g. a book from its original author, for a variety of reasons. The most immediately practical reason would be that I could preorder it from him and get it on day one (while the knock-off shops would need at least a couple of days to get their own operation going). But more than that, I would get it from him simply because he's The Guy. This is by far your most valuable asset as an author - copyright is a red herring.
But you are right, if any program can be pirated without any repercussions, it WILL hurt both the company and the product's future.
This is rapidly becoming less true. With Internet-based updates, it should be reasonably easy to give away a product like an OS for free and charge for maintenance. More likely than not, a large amount of people will pay for the service of easy updates even if the actual software delivered by those updates is free of charge. That is, you could pay MS for automatic painless updates (to the extent that they are able to deliver such) -or- you could go out of your way to obtain and install the patches on your own. I would be willing to pay for the convenience and I am sure so would others.
How about calling it "normal behaviour" ?
I am sure we will, once it becomes legal. Until then, however, it is helpful to have a term to help us differentiate it from copying activity that is currently legal.
You can buy knock-off parts, and usually they aren't very good.
But then, knock-off parts aren't generally illegal unless protected by some patent or trademark that you are violating. It is pretty common in the car industry to buy non-original replacement parts and I don't see how this is a problem.
The timing says everything. While I certainly see that the agreement may not be very explicit (national pride was too much a part of the problem for any one side to want to be seen to give in), England's adoption of the metre in 1884 together with France desiding not to sink the Greenwich meridian in 1884 (which they could have done by voting against it - it was a very important country at the time) speaks volumes of discussions held behind closed doors.
Looking back, it is therefore easy to see that France sold its meridian in exchange for universal adoption of its system of measurements. It is equally easy to see that these things take a while to change even with a treaty in place, but that is to be expected.
So, we'll make a bi-lateral treaty -- we'll accept the metric system as our official measuring standard as soon as France accepts English as its official language. :-)
I'm afraid you're a little for this one - that particular deal was struck long ago: Britain would accept the French metric system for mapmaking purposes if France would agree to use the Greenwich meridian. You will have to find some other bargaining chip if you want to avoid looking like a sore loser
This has me wondering: what is the world record for turning a neutral phrase into one with disastrously negative connotations? It hasn't been that many years since "DRM" was just a TLA to most people and now it's already sufficiently tainted that its proponents have started trying to replace it. (Of course, a clever entertainment industry leader would recognize that as a hint . . .) :-)
So, are there any other phrases that went through that same process with comparable speed? (And in order to retain some level of challenge to the exercise, let's leave WW2 out of it
The Church punished people who attempted to bring the Bible to the masses, because that cut into the Church's lucrative business of being the middle-man between God and the rest of us. :-)
While there is certainly strong financial and political motivation for acting as you describe, it also needs to be pointed out that there is a strong philosophical argument for this mode of behaviour. In short, Christian philosophy has held (since Thomas Aquinas I think, if not earlier) that you need a high level of education and enlightenment in order to make proper sense of what God is. If a layman without this understanding were to be confronted with the more esoteric knowledge to soon, it would only confuse him and he would reach very wrong conclusions. For this reason, the layman needs to have a more knowledgable person (i.e. a priest) help him navigate the religion and shouldn't be allowed to study it on his own as some sort of hobby. While this is certainly an arrogant attitude, it's still based upon a noble intention (that is, not to confuse the common people with overly complicated theories).
For this reason, you would find discussions among learned clergy that would have been considered heresy if discussed among laypersons. After all, highly educated clergy would not be led astray by false ideas the way a layman might. (I have seen suggestions that the main reason Gallileo was persecuted by the church was that he tried to bring the astronomical debate out among the common people before the case had been settled by the academics - that particular debate had been done openly up to then, but confined to academic circles.)
Of course, the Scientologists could claim the same approach: the only reason the whole Xenu tyranny story seems ridiculous to most of us is that we lack the necessary knowledge to actually understand it. Others would say that it's because most of us aren't sufficiently brain-washed to buy it hook line and sinker
Your use of "all a matter of time" somewhat overlooks the sheer scale of the problem at hand.
i ves/cracking-wpapsk-6730):
:-)
Quoting MechaBlue (from http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/wireless/networks/arch
Assuming a decent utility is used, a 31 character long password of random upper- and lowercase letters and numbers results in 62^31, or 3.7x10^55 possible combinations.
If we assume 60 attempts per second, it will take more that 1.3x10^36 times the age of the universe (15 billion years) to attempt every possible combination. The average time would be half that, or 6.5x10^35 times the age of the universe.
Even if someone were to come up with a scheme that reduced the bruteforce time to 1 trillionth of what would be required otherwise, it would still take 6.5x10^23 times the age of the universe. And so on...
That is perfectly good enough for me to secure my home network
cracking WPA requires only the 4 way handshake and the use of a decent dictionary or brute force attack
You seem to have left something out: Cracking WPA also requires that the administrator decided to use a weak key, i.e. one that is susceptible to brute force or dictionary attacks. But if you are allowed to assume this, then any encryption is "easily" cracked. Even OTP is trivially cracked if the key sequence is easy to guess.