The idea behind copyright is that these "puffs of electrons and sequences of integer numbers" took time and effort to produce, and that those who do the work to create it should be rewarded by the people who use it.
Yes they took an effort to make but then you jumped to conclusion that all effort is to be rewarded by the same mechanism as in buying buns from a bakery. I spent time typing this reply in... do you owe me money? As you can see, effort alone is insufficient to demand compensation. What happens in a specific case of art, one can expect voluntary reward from the art patrons, otherwise known as "patronage system". In case of science, one expects your salary to be paid by academia. Etc. In any case you are creating out of an intrinsic need to create as an artist, or to discover as a scientist/inventor. Such as I am doing out of my (probably futile) intrinsic need to enlighten you. The trick of the corporatists of course is to try to link that need to money, since all they understand is money.
If I counterfeit money, have I actually "stolen" money from someone else? No, but that doesn't mean that it's not immoral.
False argument. When you counterfeight money and use it as wallpaper, you did nothing wrong. But as soon as you used the money to "buy" something, you stole from the prior owner of the goods since you gave him fake money for real goods. He is now left with nothing. You have the physical goods, he doesnt. Thus you stole them.
Simply seeing intellectual property as "puffs of electrons" is a far too simplistic view, just like calling money nothing more than ink and paper would be; you have to see it as the product of someone's work. If it's good work, the author(s) should be compensated for it.
As I indicated, it not only not "simplistic" but the only logical aproach. Money has value because we attribute value to it equal to that of physical objects, and we exchange it for them. This of course leads to the danger of abuse but the system is merely a shortcut between two parties exchanging the goods. Instead of barter, we use money to act as a convenience conduit, but in the end we do actually barter the physical goods (or labour). As to getting compensation for work, I already explained that arts and science have a different regiment due to their very nature and their financial rewards are also operating in a different maner from those, say, of a baker or a car mechanic.
Material property, what is that? A car, a house, a real estate? So if you own real estate, and you grow crops on it? Who owns the crops? You! Right?
If under the earth on your real estate is ore, or oil, and you dig it out, who owns it? You! Right?
If you take mud from your ground and form a statuett who owns it? You! Right?
Right. All of these are examples of property, since they have the following characteristics: they are physical objects that can occupy only one unique location in space and can be used by a person or group of persons ("the owners") who would lose the use of the said items if someone were to take them to another physical location i.e. "commit theft" (this of course does not apply to land unless you are in possession of a planet moving device).
And now the quantum leap: if you write a story.... who owns it? At roman times, where you reffer to, no one owned it. Everybody could "use" it and "make it to money". With the result that the "inventor" rarely made any money and barely could make a living.
This is a crucial piece of evidence here indicating that you have lost all perspective and are totally in the clutches of greed-worshippers. The actual truth is that the inventors did make fortunes if they were good at making fortunes from their inventions, but more importantly, most of them invented not because they wanted to get rich but because they were people who wanted to invent things from an intrinsic need to discover and improve things. This is the fallacy of the corporatist arguments. A worshipper of greed can only understand people as long as they are motivated exclusively by money. Money is a factor in people's lives but very few of us would go into science or art for the money and still could call themselves "scientists" or "artists". The argument you are making applies only to corporations, whereby the actual inventors who do it for the love for inventing are employees and the owner of the invention is the corporation. Corporations are indeed motivated exclusively by money.
This ludicrous argument of greed is of course is far more acute in the area of arts. I am sure Plato wrote out of greed. Shakespeare did it because he wanted to own a theatre chain. Mozart was composing out of love of gold. Etc. In fact, no artist does it for money. The definition of art is a search of way of expression of internal state of mind of an artist so that he/she can communicate it to other people. Money is a distantly remote factor, only useful as far as granting the artist tools for expression. That is why music and film "industries" aren't. An idea of an art "industry" is a perversion akin to having a "ministry of love". And just like Orwell predicted, terms such as "music industry" and "intellectual property" are made to obscure the truth and tilt the discussion towards the greed mongers by framing the issue in their terms.
Intellectual property makes a person who has nothing but his mind equal to any other person who has property, be it money, land or resources. Its NOT AGAINST humanity to have intellectual property laws. Its a basic human right that my ideas are MINE, that my work is MINE. If we had no laws, the people with the money had EVERYTHING. With no money you can't compete with them.
This is absolutely untrue. If it were so, no progress could have occured. The primodial caveman would demand that the idea of a "wheel" is his and his inhereitants until the end of time. An idea of a language. Alphabet. Numbers. All of these were brought to the world by people who were furthering the human race. If they were anything like you and yelled "Mine! Its all fucking Mine! Yeaa! Gimme! Gimme!" we would still be using stone tools to hunt. Furthermore, none of the ideas we have lives in vacuum. In order to learn we need the language (someone's property according to you), written symbols to read (someones else's property), numbers, formulas, physical discoverie
And the 'anti-copyright rights movement' wonders why decisions keep being made against their cause with laughable arguments that seem based on the idea that every person in the RIAA, MPAA, any court, etc. doesn't know how to turn on a computer
I am not sure what movement you refer to, but the one I consider myself being a part of has completely different motivation. We do believe that there is no such thing as "intellectual property" not on legal grounds but on moral and phillosophical ones. In other words, the "Intellectual Property" "laws" are nothing but a conspiracy by a cabal of crooks and idiots aimed to entrich themselves at the expense of the entire human race. Thus the analogies you mentioned are only used to illustrate utter ridiculousness of the entire idea of "intellectual property", and by extension any "laws" drafted to protect the insane thing. This technique, to demonstrate idiocy masquarading as wisdom by wrapping itself in semi-plausible complexity, is ancient and has even a latin name originating from ancient Rome, it is called "reductio ad absurdum".
People constantly scream about how 'copying isn't stealing' and these computer and Internet processes are unique and are misunderstood and not realistically covered under conventional laws: Well guess what guys, this is why all of your analogies aren't worth they time spent typing them out, because the other side realises this also, and hence why these decisions for modern-day technologies are different when put in a traditional environment.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Not only we do not claim that Internet is "unique" and "misunderstood" but we claim the exact opposite: that the concepts of "property" and "stealing" are ancient and immutable, being the very foundation of our branch of human civilizations, and thus are not subject of being mutated and transformed at a whim of a current crew of greed-worshippers just because they happen to use new technology to get rich. While we claim that one can only steal physical property, it is they who claim that the concept of stealing is a quaint little old thing and needs to be "updated" to include puffs of electrons and sequences of integer numbers. The fact that these decisions go against us have far more to do with victories of corporate globalization and establishment of permanent strata of corporate masters and overlords, whose "laws" superceed those "obsolete" ideals like freedom of thought and commerce.
According to your logic, I should be able to walk into a movie theater and watch a movie without paying. What does the theater lose? Nothing material.
Yes they do. They lose a seat, in which a paying customer could have sat. Thus their physical property (the only kind that exists, "Intellectual Property" is a propaganda term) is taken away from them, albait for a short period of time. No such thing occurs when you copy a stream of electrons or integer numbers. If the theatre is not full and you were unable to pay anyhow, then they indeed lose nothing, although drive-in theatre operators attempted to fight that with utter futility, only succiding in creating a cultural icon of the 1960s: a ride in a trunk to the drive-in cinema.
It's a wild overstatement. If DRM actually happened as the companies hope, which is utterly absurd, then computer users would permanently lose much power.
No it is not. I said it is a "link" in a chain. DRM is a part of a comprehensive strategy by corporatists to convert all information into "property", very much so as land or natural resources are and create a new class of property holders. So while yes, the DRM is only targetting computer users which will indeed lose most of their power, it is only a small part in a wholesale strategy of creating a society where you will be required to pay for access to even the most fundamental types of information and in which the already accellerating division into lords and hopelessly indebted and impoverished wage slaves. In the past, ability to read and self-educate was always an escape valve for talented people to lift themselves from their unfortunate circumstance of birth, and some very powerful people seek to close that route permanently. And I wont even get into the analysis of impact this cult of greed will have on prorgess of science and civilization in general.
So while you might think this is alarmist, it is only because you are looking at it with a narrow focus of some computer enterntainment. Try patents and copyrights on DNA and mathematical formulas and a world in which children have to pay royalties on the genetic cures of their parents. The next crucial and truly herculean battle for the shape of our civilization will be fought over "Intellectual Property" of which DRM is just a battlefield.
So predictable. The "techie" nerd crowd never fails to nod when someone explains to them the pitfalls of Digital Rights Managment, software patents, infinite copyrights and so called "Intellectual Property" in general. And then... some BigMegaCorp introduces a shiney new string of beeds.. and they all kill each other rushing over to say their "Ooohs" and "Aaaahs" while reaching for their wallets to eagerly pay for yet another link in a chain being forged to enslave them and all the future generations to come.
From all those features of the "cell" in the article, the only one of import is the fact that the system will attempt to isolate the user from any method used to control it. In other words anyone who "buys" this, will get something that works for Sony and IBM, not for the new "owner".
An old proverb teaches: A fool and his money are soon parted.
It seems these days we need an updated version: A damn stupid hypnotized by shiney beeds fool and his freedom in addition to money are soon parted.
If I want to read left wing propaganda I'd pick up the NY Times
This never ceases to amaze me. US politics is so far right that the right fringes of it are starting to firmly push into the grounds once reserved for the likes of Hitler. And the American public is so brainwashed and numbed down that a center-right rag (more right then center as the run up to Iraq clearly demnostrated) is claimed to be "left wing"... ah how would Dr. Goebbels be proud, such a trumph of propaganda!
Dude, I have shocking news for you from the real world: Mother Jones is a leftist magazine, not NYT.
I wonder if you know of many laptops that come without touchpads?
Unfortunately I do not, I (along with many people in the companies I work with) used to be addicted to the IBM ThinkPad line. But ever since they caved in, and are now becoming Chairman Mao's Great Wall Metal Works company, things are looking even more depressing.
Unless we have some serious communication breakdown here, your statement indicated that you are sarcastically comparing my wanting to have "eraser-head" mice to someone irrationally complaining that the joysticks were replaced by mice. To which I responded in kind. If that was not your intention, then I appologise and you should perheaps try to express yourself in some more unambiguous terms.
Or do you have only one hand and rest it squarely in the middle of the laptop? (my left and right palms are sitting firmly on the laptop right now, at least 2 inches on either side of the touch pad.)
That probably depends on your hand size, the way you type, your body positioning versus the laptop location etc. On every laptop I ever tried with a touchpad I always inevietably end up doing something to the thing and end up moving the mouse/clicking at random. It happened to me so many times on so many laptops (I do consulting) that the very sight of a touchpad makes me cringe.
I was no fan of touchpads at first, but think the stupid nipple mouse is even worse.
To each their own. I am not advocating banning touchpads, although it would seem the touchpad lovers seem to have successfully banned the eraser-head from many laptop brands. That is what irks me.
Yes you can but that does not solve the two problems I have with that idea: a) I dont get to have any built-in pointing device left and b) the thing still bothers me when I rest my palms on the uneven surface represented by the touchpad and its edge. All I want is to have a damn choice of buying a laptop with the alternative pointing system but it seems that Touchpad Priests have successfully brainwashed the consumers to accept the not-so-flawless system as the only choice available.
I still don't get why we got rid of the joystick and started sliding these damn strange things around on our desks.
Are you implying that the touchpad is a newer or better then the eraser-head? You clearly did not follow the evolution of the pointing devices, it was trackball->touchpad->eraserhead. By your logic we should be all using the "eraser-heads" because they are newer! While I do like the eraser-heads over the touchpads 100-fold, I would never advocate such mindless, stupid adherence to newer=better as you seem to.
The fact that people do it is not the fault of the touch pad developers.
Let me get this straight... you are saying that the laptop developers should take "purist" approach and penalize people who do not follow the "proper" rules by installing a pointing device of dubious functionality just to frustrate the naughty indecent palm resting types? Aren't those people you are trying to punish called "customers", Herr OberSuspendedTouchTypingFuhrer?
Decided I had to take exception to that. The "typist" position you speak of does not include you resting your palms on the keyboard while typing. You are supposed to keep your palms in the air whilst you type.
Quite correct, however you failed to recognize the basic fact of typing: that we only type for short bursts and in between of these we rest our hands. Also you neglected to realize that a vast majority of typists do follow the "touch typing" rules only partially, and do in fact rest their palms while typing. That is why there is an entire industry out there booming with "gel wrist rests" etc, and that is why most modern laptops include forward palm "rest" area. The touchpads are interfering with that function. The eraser-head does not interfere with typing neither in proper "suspended wrist" mode nor it does in the much more common "relaxed wrist" mode employed by a vast majority of amateur typists.
A significant portion of people out there, myself included, can't stand clit mice. I find it impossible to do precision work with those things
Neither can we do work with the touchpads. And your point?
With a touchpad I can even play FPS's.
Playing FPSs with a built-in pointing device is the last of the worries for most people buying laptops.
Mice are still more precise, but with a mouse I have to move my hand off of the keyboard all the time.
You surely jest. You mean your touchpad is positioned in between the G and H keys so that you can use it while maintaining the typist's positioning of hands over the keyboard? Wasn't that one of the major advantages of the eraser-head system? And wasn't the touchpad the one that causes constant random pointer motion due to your palms naturaly pressing on it and thus requiring some weird and rarely working kludges such as "palm detection" software?
Also as I said, unlike you (being a typical touchpad zealot) who demands that I dont get to use what I want, I indicated that latpop makers should make the eraser-head/touchpad system a choice of the buyer.
With a touchpad you can just define two-finger-clicks to be right clicks, and three-finger-clicks to be middle clicks. No such luck with a clit mouse.
And with twelve-finger + one-foot + penis tap you can have scroll wheel working in no time. The point is that some of us prefer to use an ergonomic (to us) device which accommodates 95% of our work needs without interfering with our typing which comprises even higher proportion of activity then mousing. And dont even bother musing about the ridiculous kludges such as "palm detection" used to try to rescue that decrepid thing from moving the mouse and clicking randomly while you type.
But as I said, since there appear to be devotees of arcane and unwieldy devices such as touchpads, they should make the laptops with those too, I can imagine that it is not a rocket-science type of technological achoievement to have a piece of plastic snap in where touchpad was after you detach it and an eraser head to be simply inserted into an existing slot between the keys. That way you can have your touchpad and I can have my eraser head. But I would imagine that touchpad zealots would not stand for that. They would whine and scream like with the ThinkPads untill their choice interferes prominently with everything, something about being threatened by alternatives I guess.
still carry around a USB mouse. I only use the built-in when absolutely necessary.
I used to do that too but after years of using the eraser-head I find people get so good at it that the mouse gets pulled out really rarely. I never use an external mouse anymore. And yes I forgot about the single button thing, a total deal breaker that it is!
And most of those geeks who demand a linux laptop are being slightly drawn by mac's right now.
Not untill they start making iBooks with the "eraser-head" mice instead of the touchpads. A sgnificant portion of people out there, myself included, cant stand touchpads. That is one of the reasons IBM ThinPads had such a following. Many of us were terribly disappointed when IBM caved in to the screaming wankers of touchpads and started adding them to the ThinkPads thus fucking their existing customer base with an unwieldy kludge thing interfering with positioning of one's palms when typing. Yes you could disable that abomination (I dont recall any of my ThinkPad using friends ever having one enabled) but it was still a portruding distraction right in the middle of the wrist support area.
Really what should happen they should make separate lines of laptops, one for users of touchpads (I will never know why but there are a lot of people who seem to believe they are usable) and eraser-head mice. Then I will start buying iBooks.
Parent's signature (We sleep...) is sad but so accurate.
They stand ready to do violence on our behalf... But then they get bored standing and start doing pre-emptive violence, you know jusr a little bit, who would know? And then they get the taste of power that violence brings and before you can blink the rough men are pulling you out of your bed to do the violence to you on behalf of the "state" or are bombing others in their beds in foreign lands "on your behalf". And when they get over their heads and the violence gets out of control they will come to pull whomever is still in their beds and will speak the word "Draft" to them.
If you borrowed money to buy a house (or your landlord borrowed money to buy your apartment) you can thank a quant for getting the callable bond market off the ground.
OMG! Nooo! Serious? You mean there were no money lenders and money borrowers before quants?! Why, although I am an agnostic, I could swear that dude Jesus was moaning something about "usurers" and "money-changers"...
And I could swear the "percentage points" had way more to do with greed, competition and the central bank's politically motivated rate then with "callable bond market". But then again I am not a priest of mumbo-jumbo, voodoo, calculus-probabilistic-binary-stochastic multi-dimensional economics, like thesedudes who blazed that trail before you.
For those who didnt get it: this whole "quant" subject is the modern rendition of the old traveling salesman selling the "patented" and "amazing", Kernel Sam's "secret" forumula snake-innard cure-all potion from the back of his wagon. A fool and his money....
That's 'cause the Russians don't really care if they lose a few ships or cosmonauts, so they under-engineer stuff
This is absoultely false, the Russians are just as concerned about safety as NASA is, their method is different. While NASA tries to use primarilly bureaucracy the Russians try to use an incremental system whereby they use proven and tested stuff with small modifications. Your assertion that NASA is "over-engineering" is laughable: the Shuttle has virtually no workable astronaut escape system, while the Soyuz has an emergency escape rocket on top of the launch stack that can be used from the moment when the cosmonauts are in the capsule all the way to the point where capsule has enough altitude to land on its own in case of the booster explosion or malfunction. In other words for the most dangerous part of the launch sequence the Shuttle has no safety mechanism. And then there is the unprotected heat shielding and overcomplicated system whith the main engine in the shuttle itself etc etc. At this point in time it is Soyuz and its launch system that are "over-engineered" for safety in a good sense of the word.
Although it's hard to talk up the Russians when their oxygen generator keeps balking up on the ISS.>
ISS' main function is to be a political boondogle and I am certain that the Russians would probably have replaced the thing long time ago if it was their decision to make (and if they had funds to do so). Also banging the thing with a wrench is an acceptable solution if the unit was made to accommodate such treatment from the get go, which, being Russian it probably was.
The american's got it right, they got it almost perfect, but congress didn't give them enough cash so they had to take out a lot of things from the shuttle design to make it as cheap as possible and as safe as possible.
Dude. What precisely did they "take out"? An anti-matter warp drive? An anti-gravity generator? That is what one could reasonably expect if the shuttle got any bigger budget. It probably will come as a shock to you but the insanely overpriced abomination that the space shuttle is, costs a cool 0.5 billion greenbacks each frigging launch! Never you mind all that contented squeeling of corporate pork feeding at the NASA troff during the design phase. If it were not for the Congress putting its foot down, they will be still spending 15 billion per design only to reject it in final phase to start over.
The parent poster is absoulutely right, for 1/1000th of the design budget of the Shuttle, the Russians would have the Buran flying like clockwork and each launch would have cost 1/100th of that of the Shuttle's.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes they took an effort to make but then you jumped to conclusion that all effort is to be rewarded by the same mechanism as in buying buns from a bakery. I spent time typing this reply in ... do you owe me money? As you can see, effort alone is insufficient to demand compensation. What happens in a specific case of art, one can expect voluntary reward from the art patrons, otherwise known as "patronage system". In case of science, one expects your salary to be paid by academia. Etc. In any case you are creating out of an intrinsic need to create as an artist, or to discover as a scientist/inventor. Such as I am doing out of my (probably futile) intrinsic need to enlighten you. The trick of the corporatists of course is to try to link that need to money, since all they understand is money.
If I counterfeit money, have I actually "stolen" money from someone else? No, but that doesn't mean that it's not immoral.
False argument. When you counterfeight money and use it as wallpaper, you did nothing wrong. But as soon as you used the money to "buy" something, you stole from the prior owner of the goods since you gave him fake money for real goods. He is now left with nothing. You have the physical goods, he doesnt. Thus you stole them.
Simply seeing intellectual property as "puffs of electrons" is a far too simplistic view, just like calling money nothing more than ink and paper would be; you have to see it as the product of someone's work. If it's good work, the author(s) should be compensated for it.
As I indicated, it not only not "simplistic" but the only logical aproach. Money has value because we attribute value to it equal to that of physical objects, and we exchange it for them. This of course leads to the danger of abuse but the system is merely a shortcut between two parties exchanging the goods. Instead of barter, we use money to act as a convenience conduit, but in the end we do actually barter the physical goods (or labour). As to getting compensation for work, I already explained that arts and science have a different regiment due to their very nature and their financial rewards are also operating in a different maner from those, say, of a baker or a car mechanic.
Let's see.
Material property, what is that? A car, a house, a real estate? So if you own real estate, and you grow crops on it? Who owns the crops? You! Right? If under the earth on your real estate is ore, or oil, and you dig it out, who owns it? You! Right? If you take mud from your ground and form a statuett who owns it? You! Right?
Right. All of these are examples of property, since they have the following characteristics: they are physical objects that can occupy only one unique location in space and can be used by a person or group of persons ("the owners") who would lose the use of the said items if someone were to take them to another physical location i.e. "commit theft" (this of course does not apply to land unless you are in possession of a planet moving device).
And now the quantum leap: if you write a story .... who owns it? At roman times, where you reffer to, no one owned it. Everybody could "use" it and "make it to money". With the result that the "inventor" rarely made any money and barely could make a living.
This is a crucial piece of evidence here indicating that you have lost all perspective and are totally in the clutches of greed-worshippers. The actual truth is that the inventors did make fortunes if they were good at making fortunes from their inventions, but more importantly, most of them invented not because they wanted to get rich but because they were people who wanted to invent things from an intrinsic need to discover and improve things. This is the fallacy of the corporatist arguments. A worshipper of greed can only understand people as long as they are motivated exclusively by money. Money is a factor in people's lives but very few of us would go into science or art for the money and still could call themselves "scientists" or "artists". The argument you are making applies only to corporations, whereby the actual inventors who do it for the love for inventing are employees and the owner of the invention is the corporation. Corporations are indeed motivated exclusively by money.
This ludicrous argument of greed is of course is far more acute in the area of arts. I am sure Plato wrote out of greed. Shakespeare did it because he wanted to own a theatre chain. Mozart was composing out of love of gold. Etc. In fact, no artist does it for money. The definition of art is a search of way of expression of internal state of mind of an artist so that he/she can communicate it to other people. Money is a distantly remote factor, only useful as far as granting the artist tools for expression. That is why music and film "industries" aren't. An idea of an art "industry" is a perversion akin to having a "ministry of love". And just like Orwell predicted, terms such as "music industry" and "intellectual property" are made to obscure the truth and tilt the discussion towards the greed mongers by framing the issue in their terms.
Intellectual property makes a person who has nothing but his mind equal to any other person who has property, be it money, land or resources. Its NOT AGAINST humanity to have intellectual property laws. Its a basic human right that my ideas are MINE, that my work is MINE. If we had no laws, the people with the money had EVERYTHING. With no money you can't compete with them.
This is absolutely untrue. If it were so, no progress could have occured. The primodial caveman would demand that the idea of a "wheel" is his and his inhereitants until the end of time. An idea of a language. Alphabet. Numbers. All of these were brought to the world by people who were furthering the human race. If they were anything like you and yelled "Mine! Its all fucking Mine! Yeaa! Gimme! Gimme!" we would still be using stone tools to hunt. Furthermore, none of the ideas we have lives in vacuum. In order to learn we need the language (someone's property according to you), written symbols to read (someones else's property), numbers, formulas, physical discoverie
I am not sure what movement you refer to, but the one I consider myself being a part of has completely different motivation. We do believe that there is no such thing as "intellectual property" not on legal grounds but on moral and phillosophical ones. In other words, the "Intellectual Property" "laws" are nothing but a conspiracy by a cabal of crooks and idiots aimed to entrich themselves at the expense of the entire human race. Thus the analogies you mentioned are only used to illustrate utter ridiculousness of the entire idea of "intellectual property", and by extension any "laws" drafted to protect the insane thing. This technique, to demonstrate idiocy masquarading as wisdom by wrapping itself in semi-plausible complexity, is ancient and has even a latin name originating from ancient Rome, it is called "reductio ad absurdum".
People constantly scream about how 'copying isn't stealing' and these computer and Internet processes are unique and are misunderstood and not realistically covered under conventional laws: Well guess what guys, this is why all of your analogies aren't worth they time spent typing them out, because the other side realises this also, and hence why these decisions for modern-day technologies are different when put in a traditional environment.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Not only we do not claim that Internet is "unique" and "misunderstood" but we claim the exact opposite: that the concepts of "property" and "stealing" are ancient and immutable, being the very foundation of our branch of human civilizations, and thus are not subject of being mutated and transformed at a whim of a current crew of greed-worshippers just because they happen to use new technology to get rich. While we claim that one can only steal physical property, it is they who claim that the concept of stealing is a quaint little old thing and needs to be "updated" to include puffs of electrons and sequences of integer numbers. The fact that these decisions go against us have far more to do with victories of corporate globalization and establishment of permanent strata of corporate masters and overlords, whose "laws" superceed those "obsolete" ideals like freedom of thought and commerce.
C&C ... obviously over your head.
Nah, just incompatible sense of humour I think.
I fail to see what a crowbar has to do with this, but I am sure you will soon enlighten me.
Yes they do. They lose a seat, in which a paying customer could have sat. Thus their physical property (the only kind that exists, "Intellectual Property" is a propaganda term) is taken away from them, albait for a short period of time. No such thing occurs when you copy a stream of electrons or integer numbers. If the theatre is not full and you were unable to pay anyhow, then they indeed lose nothing, although drive-in theatre operators attempted to fight that with utter futility, only succiding in creating a cultural icon of the 1960s: a ride in a trunk to the drive-in cinema.
No it is not. I said it is a "link" in a chain. DRM is a part of a comprehensive strategy by corporatists to convert all information into "property", very much so as land or natural resources are and create a new class of property holders. So while yes, the DRM is only targetting computer users which will indeed lose most of their power, it is only a small part in a wholesale strategy of creating a society where you will be required to pay for access to even the most fundamental types of information and in which the already accellerating division into lords and hopelessly indebted and impoverished wage slaves. In the past, ability to read and self-educate was always an escape valve for talented people to lift themselves from their unfortunate circumstance of birth, and some very powerful people seek to close that route permanently. And I wont even get into the analysis of impact this cult of greed will have on prorgess of science and civilization in general.
So while you might think this is alarmist, it is only because you are looking at it with a narrow focus of some computer enterntainment. Try patents and copyrights on DNA and mathematical formulas and a world in which children have to pay royalties on the genetic cures of their parents. The next crucial and truly herculean battle for the shape of our civilization will be fought over "Intellectual Property" of which DRM is just a battlefield.
As soon as you explain how DRM is not doing precisely what I described, I will accept your accolades.
From all those features of the "cell" in the article, the only one of import is the fact that the system will attempt to isolate the user from any method used to control it. In other words anyone who "buys" this, will get something that works for Sony and IBM, not for the new "owner".
An old proverb teaches: A fool and his money are soon parted.
It seems these days we need an updated version: A damn stupid hypnotized by shiney beeds fool and his freedom in addition to money are soon parted.
This never ceases to amaze me. US politics is so far right that the right fringes of it are starting to firmly push into the grounds once reserved for the likes of Hitler. And the American public is so brainwashed and numbed down that a center-right rag (more right then center as the run up to Iraq clearly demnostrated) is claimed to be "left wing"... ah how would Dr. Goebbels be proud, such a trumph of propaganda!
Dude, I have shocking news for you from the real world: Mother Jones is a leftist magazine, not NYT.
Unfortunately I do not, I (along with many people in the companies I work with) used to be addicted to the IBM ThinkPad line. But ever since they caved in, and are now becoming Chairman Mao's Great Wall Metal Works company, things are looking even more depressing.
Unless we have some serious communication breakdown here, your statement indicated that you are sarcastically comparing my wanting to have "eraser-head" mice to someone irrationally complaining that the joysticks were replaced by mice. To which I responded in kind. If that was not your intention, then I appologise and you should perheaps try to express yourself in some more unambiguous terms.
That probably depends on your hand size, the way you type, your body positioning versus the laptop location etc. On every laptop I ever tried with a touchpad I always inevietably end up doing something to the thing and end up moving the mouse/clicking at random. It happened to me so many times on so many laptops (I do consulting) that the very sight of a touchpad makes me cringe.
I was no fan of touchpads at first, but think the stupid nipple mouse is even worse.
To each their own. I am not advocating banning touchpads, although it would seem the touchpad lovers seem to have successfully banned the eraser-head from many laptop brands. That is what irks me.
Yes you can but that does not solve the two problems I have with that idea: a) I dont get to have any built-in pointing device left and b) the thing still bothers me when I rest my palms on the uneven surface represented by the touchpad and its edge. All I want is to have a damn choice of buying a laptop with the alternative pointing system but it seems that Touchpad Priests have successfully brainwashed the consumers to accept the not-so-flawless system as the only choice available.
Are you implying that the touchpad is a newer or better then the eraser-head? You clearly did not follow the evolution of the pointing devices, it was trackball->touchpad->eraserhead. By your logic we should be all using the "eraser-heads" because they are newer! While I do like the eraser-heads over the touchpads 100-fold, I would never advocate such mindless, stupid adherence to newer=better as you seem to.
Let me get this straight... you are saying that the laptop developers should take "purist" approach and penalize people who do not follow the "proper" rules by installing a pointing device of dubious functionality just to frustrate the naughty indecent palm resting types? Aren't those people you are trying to punish called "customers", Herr OberSuspendedTouchTypingFuhrer?
Quite correct, however you failed to recognize the basic fact of typing: that we only type for short bursts and in between of these we rest our hands. Also you neglected to realize that a vast majority of typists do follow the "touch typing" rules only partially, and do in fact rest their palms while typing. That is why there is an entire industry out there booming with "gel wrist rests" etc, and that is why most modern laptops include forward palm "rest" area. The touchpads are interfering with that function. The eraser-head does not interfere with typing neither in proper "suspended wrist" mode nor it does in the much more common "relaxed wrist" mode employed by a vast majority of amateur typists.
Neither can we do work with the touchpads. And your point?
With a touchpad I can even play FPS's.
Playing FPSs with a built-in pointing device is the last of the worries for most people buying laptops.
Mice are still more precise, but with a mouse I have to move my hand off of the keyboard all the time.
You surely jest. You mean your touchpad is positioned in between the G and H keys so that you can use it while maintaining the typist's positioning of hands over the keyboard? Wasn't that one of the major advantages of the eraser-head system? And wasn't the touchpad the one that causes constant random pointer motion due to your palms naturaly pressing on it and thus requiring some weird and rarely working kludges such as "palm detection" software?
Also as I said, unlike you (being a typical touchpad zealot) who demands that I dont get to use what I want, I indicated that latpop makers should make the eraser-head/touchpad system a choice of the buyer.
And with twelve-finger + one-foot + penis tap you can have scroll wheel working in no time. The point is that some of us prefer to use an ergonomic (to us) device which accommodates 95% of our work needs without interfering with our typing which comprises even higher proportion of activity then mousing. And dont even bother musing about the ridiculous kludges such as "palm detection" used to try to rescue that decrepid thing from moving the mouse and clicking randomly while you type.
But as I said, since there appear to be devotees of arcane and unwieldy devices such as touchpads, they should make the laptops with those too, I can imagine that it is not a rocket-science type of technological achoievement to have a piece of plastic snap in where touchpad was after you detach it and an eraser head to be simply inserted into an existing slot between the keys. That way you can have your touchpad and I can have my eraser head. But I would imagine that touchpad zealots would not stand for that. They would whine and scream like with the ThinkPads untill their choice interferes prominently with everything, something about being threatened by alternatives I guess.
I used to do that too but after years of using the eraser-head I find people get so good at it that the mouse gets pulled out really rarely. I never use an external mouse anymore. And yes I forgot about the single button thing, a total deal breaker that it is!
Not untill they start making iBooks with the "eraser-head" mice instead of the touchpads. A sgnificant portion of people out there, myself included, cant stand touchpads. That is one of the reasons IBM ThinPads had such a following. Many of us were terribly disappointed when IBM caved in to the screaming wankers of touchpads and started adding them to the ThinkPads thus fucking their existing customer base with an unwieldy kludge thing interfering with positioning of one's palms when typing. Yes you could disable that abomination (I dont recall any of my ThinkPad using friends ever having one enabled) but it was still a portruding distraction right in the middle of the wrist support area.
Really what should happen they should make separate lines of laptops, one for users of touchpads (I will never know why but there are a lot of people who seem to believe they are usable) and eraser-head mice. Then I will start buying iBooks.
They stand ready to do violence on our behalf... But then they get bored standing and start doing pre-emptive violence, you know jusr a little bit, who would know? And then they get the taste of power that violence brings and before you can blink the rough men are pulling you out of your bed to do the violence to you on behalf of the "state" or are bombing others in their beds in foreign lands "on your behalf". And when they get over their heads and the violence gets out of control they will come to pull whomever is still in their beds and will speak the word "Draft" to them.
OMG! Nooo! Serious? You mean there were no money lenders and money borrowers before quants?! Why, although I am an agnostic, I could swear that dude Jesus was moaning something about "usurers" and "money-changers"...
And I could swear the "percentage points" had way more to do with greed, competition and the central bank's politically motivated rate then with "callable bond market". But then again I am not a priest of mumbo-jumbo, voodoo, calculus-probabilistic-binary-stochastic multi-dimensional economics, like these dudes who blazed that trail before you.
For those who didnt get it: this whole "quant" subject is the modern rendition of the old traveling salesman selling the "patented" and "amazing", Kernel Sam's "secret" forumula snake-innard cure-all potion from the back of his wagon. A fool and his money....
This is absoultely false, the Russians are just as concerned about safety as NASA is, their method is different. While NASA tries to use primarilly bureaucracy the Russians try to use an incremental system whereby they use proven and tested stuff with small modifications. Your assertion that NASA is "over-engineering" is laughable: the Shuttle has virtually no workable astronaut escape system, while the Soyuz has an emergency escape rocket on top of the launch stack that can be used from the moment when the cosmonauts are in the capsule all the way to the point where capsule has enough altitude to land on its own in case of the booster explosion or malfunction. In other words for the most dangerous part of the launch sequence the Shuttle has no safety mechanism. And then there is the unprotected heat shielding and overcomplicated system whith the main engine in the shuttle itself etc etc. At this point in time it is Soyuz and its launch system that are "over-engineered" for safety in a good sense of the word.
Although it's hard to talk up the Russians when their oxygen generator keeps balking up on the ISS.>
ISS' main function is to be a political boondogle and I am certain that the Russians would probably have replaced the thing long time ago if it was their decision to make (and if they had funds to do so). Also banging the thing with a wrench is an acceptable solution if the unit was made to accommodate such treatment from the get go, which, being Russian it probably was.
Dude. What precisely did they "take out"? An anti-matter warp drive? An anti-gravity generator? That is what one could reasonably expect if the shuttle got any bigger budget. It probably will come as a shock to you but the insanely overpriced abomination that the space shuttle is, costs a cool 0.5 billion greenbacks each frigging launch! Never you mind all that contented squeeling of corporate pork feeding at the NASA troff during the design phase. If it were not for the Congress putting its foot down, they will be still spending 15 billion per design only to reject it in final phase to start over.
The parent poster is absoulutely right, for 1/1000th of the design budget of the Shuttle, the Russians would have the Buran flying like clockwork and each launch would have cost 1/100th of that of the Shuttle's.