Yeah, and right now, the USA is deploying sonars to detect where snipers shot from, developing technology to intercept RPG and mortar and rockets, and yes, we will share that technology with our Israeli allies, and Hamas and Hizbollah can go crying back to their Iranian masters, just before we bomb them too.
Yes, of course, why didn't I think of this?! I mean once Ugh (a proto-American-Israeli) back at the dawn of time picked up a rock to use as a weapon, Mogh (a proto-Arab-French-communislamolibofascist) was done for because one could never develop a military technology or tactics to counter what the other guy has! And so no such thing as an arms race ever started! No, Sir! And so today the descendants of Ugh, whom we know and love as U.S.iAnus Shittus Cerberus, have a total global monopoly on thinking! The rest of the world, and Arabs in particular, can only do what the dwellers of the trailer parks of the US of A can teach them! Why, the Iraqis, for example, would be oh so grateful if these Towering American Titans of Intellect would only benevolently bestow their Cosmic Wisdom and Universal Insight via The 500lb Bombs Of Eternal Enlightenment onto these eager Iraqis! So grateful in fact as to promptly welcome the American Heroes with flowers and candy....
As I tried to explain, this is a matter of degrees. The flexibility of the demand for oil is indeed higher then that for water, but it is far, far more rigid then, say, for paper napkins. It is not simply a matter of convenience or luxury, it is a matter of serious, for many people outright devastating, societal changes. When you lose your house, your job and have no idea where your next meal for your family is coming from it quickly becomes a matter not far removed from that of lack of water.
People do shop when they make medical decisions... more importantly, they do not shop enough.
Yes, particularly when they are unconscious in an ambulance ferrying them away to the nearest emergency center or when the disease they are being treated for requires advanced specialized bio-molecular knowledge to understand....
And you under estimate the ability of people to respond to shortages through the rapid adoption of technologies.
You are simply a technocrat, i.e. a person who worships technology and which worship blinds him to the understanding that technology is incapable of solving many, many societal problems. In fact it causes quite a number of them. Subsequently your answer to pretty much everything is: "Worry not! We will most certainly invent a banana-to-oil-gizmo-o-matic and then the rivers will certainly run with milk and honey and the bunnies will dance in the streets...".
The truth of course is that oil-based technologies are what shaped the Western civilization as it is now and their termination will force a massive, fundamental changes in the life-style of the populace. Those changes will then cause great hardship. Will the situation stabilize after alternative technologies become viable (and sufficiently prevalent - which is a matter of decades)? Most certainly, but the point is that the society will resist this change with all its might. And that is why the demand for oil is inflexible.
Similarly, before that, the NAZI economy actually -increased- its production of quite a few items towards the end of the war and was able to also synthesize fuel until we bombed their plants.
You are obviously not familiar with the utterly wasteful and energy intensive nature of the Fischer-Tropsch synthesis.
if we wanted to, and the only reason there's not more plants doing that now is that those startups (besides SASOL), that are capable of doing this sort of thing are focusing on biodiesel instead because diesel is actually in greater demand than gasoline.
Bio-fuels are another red herring. Unless a vast scale commercial algae based systems are developed (at herculean expenditures, multi-decade effort and massive alteration of sea ecosystems) all the bio-fuel technologies must make a choice between agrarian use of land for fuel crops or for food crops. Presently there is not enough farm fields around the globe to supply enough bio-diesel to run even the USA alone at the current levels of consumption, never you mind the rest of the world. And that is assuming zero food production.
You keep forgetting, willfully, that the oil and coal energy are bio-fuels except that they represent the sunlight energy accumulated in biological matter over hundreds of millions of years. We are burning up each year of our crazed consumption a few million of years of cumulative sunlight that arrived at the ancient forests of Earth. If this source dries up, even if we capture the maximum amount of sunlight available for conversion on land we would still be rather short by a factor of a few million. Vast scale sea based systems would be the only escape (as the total surface area of oceans is much greater).
The proactive element in a capitalist system is the much-maligned futures market.
This is simply a disagreement about how far ahead a pro-active vision needs to be. The futures market offers only a very limited (from a civilization-level perspective) short-term advance warning. We are talking about a difference between basing your actions on someone running up to your house shouting "The tornado is 10 minutes away! Run!" versus meticulous preparation of an escape plan, building a tornado shelter years in advance etc.
Fine, the United States is the oldest presently continuing democracy
That would be France.
Oh you meant the oldest presently continuing without long interruptions democracy. Got it.
It was democracy only for the citizens of Athens, which is great you might say until you realize that citizens were limited to adult males (this excluded women, slaves, children, and resident foreigners)...
Sure, the specifics of the Athenian Democracy were quite different from those of the USA as were those of France after the Revolution. As are those of many other nations presently (i.e. Parliamentary, Proportional, Direct, Indirect etc etc etc).
The point remains however that the very concept of Democracy was first implemented (as far as we know, and however imperfectly by modern standards) by the City State of Athens. The very term "Democracy" is derived from the ancient Greek word describing the idea.
Normally this would be merely a historical curiosity, but it just happens to be one of those things Americans continuously attempt to take credit for to the point of absurdity. And so for this hubris induced nationalistic fever I feel obliged to prescribe a good cold shower of historical reality.
Every time something changes on the live system, you transmit the changes to the other sites.
What you are talking about is essentially a network block device backed RAID system. It might work if you are backing up a repository of Word documents, but it will not work at all for heavily used database applications or virtual machine disk storage as such activity translates to a very large amount of changes per second spread across the entire storage area. Such filesystem based snapshot systems are defeated if the ratio of free storage to the amount of write disk activity is low, especially if the filesystem consists of large frequently changing files, as is usually the case with database systems.
Well, that's the supposed theory of "inelastic" demand, and in a free market society, it's just not right.
How so? Here is an (extreme - but just to illustrate the point) example: food and water. Is the demand for food and water "elastic"? At some point the "free market" model breaks down and the former "buyer" will logically resort to any and all desperate means necessary to procure sustenance, violence included. Incidentally, this is among reasons why medical care does not (and cannot) operate as "trade" and thus is not subject to the "market" model, but that is another discussion.
Once major, devastating changes in people's lives are looming, the demand becomes quite inflexible. The level of rigidness of that demand corresponds to the level of potential suffering that one would be exposed to if the item in question were to be no longer available. In case of oil the situation is rather dire as we are talking about massive upheavals throughout pretty much all industries of the developed world, and as a result the demand is much much less flexible as it would be if we were talking about essentially levels of comfort between which the consumers are to choose (as opposed to levels of suffering).
Have a look at July car sales. Five years ago, you couldn't sell a small car in the USA, and now, the SUV is dead.
See above. There is a very great difference between the jump from "SUV" to "small car" versus "small car" to "no car". The first jump is essentially in the varying "comfort" zones. The second begins to entail "suffering" (for a family whose whole wealth is invested in a suburban home where no public transportation reaches - it spells a financial catastrophe, including loss of commute based jobs and essentially starvation).
Failure to observe these drastically different grades of flexibility is at the core of the mistake you are making.
If plastic gets to be too expensive, people will switch to glass or steel or wood, all of which can be made with coal as an energy source and last I checked, there's plenty of coal.
Again, you severely underestimate the levels of dependence on oil in most manufacturing processes. We are talking about a great majority of today's consumer items ceasing to be financially viable, even if the vast expense of essentially abandoning and rebuilding the factories used to make them would be made, as the entire production lines are dependent on plastic at every stage of their operation. This again is the reason why demand is inflexible. For most businesses a marked increase in cost of plastic spells disaster.
Coal does not offer any sort of replacement due to extreme inefficiencies of converting coal into polymers usable for plastics. And of course coal is also sharing the main characteristic of oil: it is a finite resource with multi-hundred million year accumulation span.
Or, perhaps people will use coal steam cars. Or, coal to liquids might work, or, maybe just electric cars or maybe there will be no cars at all. In that case, in case you haven't looked a map, you'll be pleasantly surprised to find that nearly every American city is built on or near a rail stop.
Utter naivety. Coal based fuels have fraction of the efficiency required to sustain the present US economy. And the rail stations do absolutely nothing for the disastrously laid out US cities, although they might offer some minor relief: you forget that the current rail system capacity is also a tiny fraction of what is required as it was neglected (and in fact scaled down) for the last 50 years. A massive (and again vastly expensive and decades long) expansion of railways would be required to sustain even a portion of US economy.
The reasons for the demand inflexibility are legion. It would take a book to even touch on them all.
But, as prices increase, then, demand can and will fall and level off. It might be at $200/bbl, but, the price increases will level off as a greater percentage of the population decides to not have it.
Many analysts believe (and I agree with them) that the Western technological culture is hopelessly addicted to oil and that the growth demand is pretty much inflexible unless truly drastic changes are made to the Western (and by extension all other countries which adopted or are adopting this system such as Japan and China) life-style and technology. Consider this: every electronic device uses plastic as its chief (by volume) component. Nearly all food processing involves plastic in packaging. Etc and so on. Some countries, such as USA, are hopelessly dependent on individual (as opposed to mass) transportation as the entire infrastructure of cities is centered on this. Should individual transportation become too expensive then a whole gamut of things such as suburbia and big-box shopping centers cease to be feasible. Not to mention heating and the fact that many parts of the country depend on inexpensive energy for food delivery from remote locations. It goes on and on and on.
So the equilibrium point is far, far above $200 a barrel, most likely in the $5000+ dollar range as the amount of dependence on this energy and polymer source is truly staggering. It is not simply a matter of "deciding not to have it". Going cold turkey on oil means death as far as Western technological civilization as we know it is concerned.
Oil was in the past extremely unreasonably cheap - it is solar energy accumulated over hundreds of millions of years which we brainlessly and unspeakably wastefully proceeded to use up in just few centuries, and now finally its value is becoming belatedly obvious.
That's just the way humanity works. Any increase in supply, thus, is always going to be beneficial, as it will act to either delay or suppress the price increase. Now, you could have an argument with ANWR, but, to say that 200 billion barrels of Iraqi supply cannot make a dent in world prices is absurd.
See above. All the Iraqi oil would do (assuming that it can be brought to market quickly enough, which is extremely unlikely as the infrastructure needs to be rebuilt from ground up and the insurgents are not likely to let the pipelines alone and there is no feasible way to protect them due to their length) is to delay the inevitable. Oil is a finite resource, the Western technological civilization is hooked on it like a crack whore (worse in fact, as a crack whore is unlikely to die from lack of crack) and no feasible replacement technologies at this point exist or are even at a prototype stage.
But, you can't just say "empires are stupid and doomed to fail", because, right now, to the best of our knowledge, empires produced the longest lasting and most stable forms of human government -ever-
The imperial longevity is in reverse proportion to the amount of people involved, availability and speed of communication and transportation technologies and the cost of running the empire. That is why you will note that as we progress in history the average reign of an "empire" has shortened dramatically. The US empire is already showing all the signs of collapse, after mere few decades of openly imperial policies. More boldly these policies are expressed, more accelerated the pace of collapse. Iraq war being a perfect example, which (with a host of other factors) has in essence bankrupted (financially and morally both) the USA and no amount of magical accounting and creative statistics can hide this fact except from those who are truly desperate to believe otherwise.
But one thing all empires have in common is that they are vicious and murderous entities which are responsible for untold amounts of carnage, suffering and misery. And USA is working really, really hard to acquire its share of
If you have your incremental backups on the same filesystem (e.g. hard disc), then hard links can provide incremental backups and also a full backup, with only minor additional costs. For instance,
the --link-dest option on rsync could implement this for a small system.
What in the world is the point of making "backups" to the same file system? How is this going to protect you from a catastrophic failure in the file system itself of a failure of a RAID controller (causing a loss of the whole array) or some such? How are you planning to perform a from-scratch disaster recovery (i.e. building with your data center has burned down) with this?
You still must perform periodic full system backups, or you else your incremental backups will have no starting reference point, no matter what magical differential method you use. And if you can pull off a full backup that means that you have the capacity and bandwidth to do so. Subsequently there is little point to performing the incremental backups since all you are doing is losing reliability (a loss of one incremental backup in a sequence will render all subsequent differentials useless). And so for this simple reason most companies do not bother with this. There is a lot of (potentially devastating) downsides, much added complexity, and very little upside (other then cost).
Right, which small law firm is that which produces 5TB of new or changed data *a month*?... You need to invest in some better backup technology me thinks. Something that backs up files rather than filesystem
Incremental backup systems are a kludge invented primarily because of limitations of backup media and transfer rates to/from such media. They trade the speed of disaster recovery in favor of lowering the cost of the backups themselves. The end result is that a catastrophic file system failure will require far more extensive recovery effort then with complete file-system backups. Greater the distance from the last "full" backup covered by multiple differential backups the greater the recovery effort. In some (if not most) organizations the cost of even a day of downtime far, far outweighs any possible savings that incremental backups provide. And that does not account for the fact that some operating systems are notorious for slow and convoluted recovery procedures with any backup system other then whole file-system imaging.
It is a little wonder that your preaching from a high horse comes out of a university, as a school is one of the examples where a 2-week downtime of all computer systems would likely be met with a collective shrug.
Now, let's say that the Iraqis come through and increase their oil production to first 3m bbls/day, and then to 5m / bbls a day, and the benefits of this production increase result in additional 50 billion a year in profits to American companies...
Err... American oil under all that Iraqi sand, eh? Who knew!
If, on the other hand, the USA wins the war and a stable semi-US-friendly government emerges and thus we can withdraw the troops, and Iraq still pumps enough to lower the price of gasoline by a $1 a gallon, then the war would basically pay for itself in about 5 years, and then after that, it would be pure profit for the USA
LOL. Assuming of course that oil prices are all due to them nasty "speculators" and not to the fact that the rate of growth of demand is far outpacing any conceivable rate of growth of supply (including all Iraq, ANWAR, deep-sea, Arctic and what not) and that no feasible increase in supply is going to make a long-term dent. Some experts believe that oil prices (barring short-term reversals) are bound for the stratosphere (until either all oil runs out - in not so distant future, or an alternative infrastructure to produce the mountains of plastic wasted every minute and means to power super-inefficient small-scale transportation are found).
Hey, imperialism can be profitable, which is why countries do it!
Ask the Roman, Mongol, Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, British, Japanese, Nazi and Soviet empires. Amongst others.
I want to hold out this silly tripe tjstork had put out for all to see as what passes as "reason" amongst all of these war-hawks. Wild assumptions, blissful ignorance, delusions of grandeur all "backed up" by "calculations" (half of which use values pulled out of the poster's ass).
Sure "imperialism can be profitable" to... a tiny elite capable of jumping ship when the empire gets sucked into unwinnable quagmires and spends itself into oblivion. All of the empires I mentioned fell to dust but their true (as opposed to the outwardly visible) elites survived unscathed with most of their loot. Even the Nazi empire was survived by the Krupp dynasty who (amongst others) funded it all (in addition to producing the bulk of Nazi heavy weaponry). Some 7 millions of Germans (not to mention 60+ million of others) were not so lucky. Yay, empires!
Let's ignore the fact that my understanding is the word "kinoki" is meaningless and the characters they use in the ad don't even read "kinoki".
I think they are going for "ki no ki" (the first "ki" being "tree" and the second "spirit"; US Slashdot doesn't do Kanji, sorry) as in "spirit of trees" or some such. The word on the screen reads "kijoueki" which is "tree sap" (a bit redundant).
Seriously kid, you need to grow some brain cells, and get a job, stop leeching off the honest people in society. Nobody likes fucking thieves and leechers like you.
Your desperate attempts at labeling me a "kid" are really making me laugh. Those serious Freudian issues you are hiding there are slipping out. Still wanting to suck on Moms tits? Separated too early? Wanna hide from the nasty world populated by villains like me back in the safety of her skirts? Do tell.
For your info, I am just about to retire from the IT industry after nearly 30 years in the field and in my career I have produced more code both commercially and under GPL then you are likely to see in your entire miserable greedy, whiny life. The view I hold on copyright is a result of years of observation and discussions with people who, like me, produce works which are today deemed copyrightable, amongst them musicians and other artists.
You on the other hand let some traits of your psychotic personality rule your "reasoning". That repressed infantile inferiority complex and out of control greed in particular.
One can tell, because beside petulant, squeaky attempts at labeling people "thieves" (as if information could be "stolen") you've offered exactly no logical reasoning in defense of your "position" (and comically you even put forth examples that undermine it). Jumping up and down, whining, shouting and spitting is not a very effective method in convincing people, but that is all you have done. Then again, psychopaths like you don't give damn about reason or logic, only your narcissistic instincts which never developed past the level of a 5-year old: "Mine! Its all mine! Mine! Mine! Moooooom!".
fuck off and get a job ok? then you can talk to the grown ups...
That thing you are doing is called projection. You take your own immaturity, your own inability to get another part time job after they said they did not want you anymore at that burger joint, and then you try to project these inadequacies of yours onto your opponents. Next you are going to project onto me your failing grades in that high-school....
DO YOU FUCKING UNDERSTAND THAT NOT ALL CREATIVE PEOPLE WORK FOR BIG MEGA CONGLOMERATES?
That is why you focused on Spielberg and Connery (apart from your self-inflicted counter-example of Austen)! Logic apparently was never your strong suite.
DO YOU UNDERSTAND THAT UNLIKE ELITIST PRICKS SUCH AS YOURSELF TENS OF MILLIONS OF PEOPLE APPRECIATE PEOPLE LIKE STEPHEN SPIELBERG?
The fact that people like stuff produced by Spielberg's minions for which he takes credit does not make any of it "art". People also like tobacco and booze, but that does not make either into "medicine".
Art has a specific definition, integral part of which being the need of an artist to share his artistic expression as widely as possible. And so Austen does fit the definition (as she preferred dissemination of her work over money), Spielberg does not (as he prefers money over dissemination of his kitsch). It is that simple.
If you don't like popular culture, then fine, fuck off and enjoy your French jazz dance in a little room, just dont try and lecture the rest of us.
As soon as you fuck off with your police state which you are diligently attempting to construct to control everything about my use of digital technology and communications for the benefit of this "popular culture" (read: media conglomerates, big business moguls and establishment politicians), we have a deal. Somehow however I do not expect you to do so, given that all your bristling about "popular culture" and "elitism" is designed to obscure your true motives: limitless greed and desire to control others, as brutally as you can get away with, for your own personal profit.
Don't bother replying, it will just be more piracy-justifying ego-wank.
Piracy? I do not even have a sea-worthy vessel, never you mind that the nearest sea is a few thousands kilometers away!
Do you atcually KNOW the neural activity of everyone who produces entertainment content? Of course you fucking don't. You have *no idea* whether Jane Austen wrote mainly for the money, or whether Sean Connery only acted for the cash.
I see. So let me get this straight: you believe that the motivating force for true artistic expression is money? That an "artist" does not feel a need to express himself until a silk-suited agent of a media conglomerate shows up with a contract that "will make you rich beyond all yer dreams, honey!". That is when the "artistic muse" answers the calling, no?
I have news for you: for every over-hyped Connery there are 100s of true artists who create true art while doing other jobs.
And since you asked, yes, Connery is a kitsch peddler. Austen never made any money to speak of (as that was not the case with books in the early 1800s). As a matter of fact she got paid £10 for the copyright to "Northanger Abbey", which languished unpublished, and which she could not get back until she raised the £10 back so that she could re-purchase the rights to her own book. It was more important for her to publish the book then the money (as she no longer owned the copyright)! Talk about shooting your own arguments down, sparky.
You just like to tell yourself that everyone who has talent in terms of entertainment MUST be doing it just for the love of it, (despite the fact that there is fuck all evidence of this), because its part of the mental gymnastics people like you are forced to employ in order to justify taking other peoples work for free.
There is plenty evidence of this (in addition to simple logical reasoning) and it has nothing to do with "taking other peoples work for free". Copyright is a privilege granted to the artists by the society in trade for specific returns! No returns - no deal. And as it stands the society is being leaned on more and more heavily by these "artists" who demand for us to relinquish our basic freedoms for their profit while the quality of their "art" steadily deteriorates.
You rate the time of a plumber who is barely competent to be higher than the time of the most talented writer / songwriter / musician and actor on earth.
It has nothing to do with rating "time". Art is not measured in "time". A brilliant artist can get an inspiration and produce a brilliant poem in 3 hours in a middle of a night. Another will take 3 years to finish same. Art simply does not operate on the same principle as labor of a plumber and so it cannot be measured by the same criteria. And as I pointed out, art is not trade-able in a way that would make it a subject of the capitalist model. Any attempts to do so are desperate and contorted kludges which require outright totalitarian measures in order to enforce them.
n order to pay his rent, you would willingly send spielberg to stack shelves in wal mart wouldn't you?
Given that Spielberg hasn't produced any art in his entire life (and probably couldn't if his life depended on it - although he is consummate in taking credit for the work of others whom he finances - a perfect example of the wondrous effects of copyright on art) then the answer is yes. Him stacking shelves might be actually a net gain for the society, and certainly for art in particular.
What an incredibly silly point of view.
It the only logical point of view on the subject. The fact that you find it "silly" says way more about you then anything else.
In the absence of copyright law, the amount of music created would not be the socially optimal one. Fewer people would choose a career in music (and, contrary to popular misconceptions, it is not true that genuinely talented individuals would play anyway -- you can be incredibly talented and motivated by profit, romantic myths notwithstanding), less good music would be made (since record companies would have less money to spend on new artists), etc.
This is where you are 100% wrong. A 99% reduction in production of what currently passes as "art" would have no impact whatsoever as the only thing that profit motive motivates is utter kitsch. One artist who does art as art must be done: as an internal calling to express himself, is worth 1000 "for profit" schmucks manufactured by media companies to be "products". And this is all there is to it.
Human civilization was awash in art long before there was a copyright and it will remain so long after the idiotic idea bites the dust.
Unless of course by "socially optimal" you mean for some selected view mega-corporate fiefdoms to be raking in billions running an elaborate scam, at a mere expense of a totalitarian police state required to make the scheme stick in the age of digital communications.
At the moment, each artist is free to choose whether he wants to release its works for free, or charge a fee. If this fee is too high, consumers can buy another, less expensive CD, or simply not listen to music anymore.
You are making the fundamental errors all "greed philosophers" do: that art is a "product" to be bought and sold. Followed by even more grave scientific error: that art forms based on pure information can be traded at all, as information does not posses the required attributes to be a trade-able "private property".
The government's job is simply to make sure that everyone's choice is not violated. Nobody looses out because of copyright law: if you refuse to listen to a song because it is too expensive, you haven't lost anything!
Except a host of personal freedoms. In order for the government to enforce the idiotic copyright regime designed for ink splattered on a by product of dead trees, and which is wholly unworkable in a digital age, the only path available to the government is wholesale monitoring of all communications coupled with draconian "guilty until proven otherwise" measures we see proposed more and more frequently. This is simply a straightforward logical outcome of the concept of "copyright". While it was practically workable in an age where only few select individuals were capable of possessing an ability to copy a book, it is no longer so in a world in which the cost of duplication is approaching zero and the means of which are in the hands of every member of the society. The only way to make copyright workable again is to reverse the technological progress (i.e. to make sure that the cost of duplication becomes astronomical again and/or it is only available to select elites). Which of course has the desired side-effect of restoring control of all mass communications (and thus political speech) to the "right people".
If, however, copyright is abolished or file sharing legalized, the artist's freedom is threatened (since he cannot decide who gets access to his music).
No such control ever existed. It is like trying to control who has access to the photons bouncing off your ass when you walk on a major city street. The very definition of art is a mass dissemination of the artist's expressions. Every artist (as opposed to a greed-motivated kitsch "manufacturer") has an intrinsic desire to spread his message as widely as possible. Attempting to control who gets the message is the very anathema of art. The moment you try you cease to become an artist.
Your arguments are more effective if they stay on-topic. We are talking about economics, not science and not religion. We are talking about made up societal "contracts", thats all.
And I am pointing out that these societal contracts contradict science and logic. Therefore they amount to not only a religiously (i.e. with no scientific foundation) motivated set of rules for all people to follow so that some few people get richer but they also require that scientific knowledge is actively repressed for these rules to be enforced.
It cannot get more "on topic" then that.
It wasn't a person operating a scam,
No, it was a group of people which set up conditions for a large number of other people to operate the scam. The fact that the original instigators were ignorantly "well meaning" changes nothing in the final outcome.
it was a society that agreed the pros and cons of one economic model relating to specific transactions were more favorable to society as a whole than the other alternatives.
The same "reasoning" can be applied to slavery and laws governing human sacrifices. In both cases the "society" selected the cons of some people being slaves or have their hearts ripped out on a sacrificial altar as "more favorable" to it then the "other alternatives". That precisely because "the society" is historically prone to "agreeing" on such (and many many many other) examples of utter illogic and stupidity that science and logic are the only viable measurements by which to judge these "agreements".
A mere fact that an ignorant mob agrees to something while egged on by a hypocritical bunch of self-serving priests of Greed does not by itself make such an "agreement" right. Not even practically workable.
Something you may not realize is that there really are no absolute rights, we created all of them.
Spoken like a true Objectivst. Nothing exists to you outside of your Greed!
Some of us believe on the other hand that all sentient beings come into existence with some unalienable and self evident set of rights which no one can take away. Some dudes even tried to found a nation on that principle...
This is a fundamental difference in world view between a self-centered, spineless, unprincipled sociopathic weasel like you to whom all rights are "negotiable" (as soon as he can get away with ignoring them) and someone who would rather die then be deprived of them.
The only things preventing me from taking your computer are our laws/enforcement, and the possibility that you might be bigger than me. Whether it's physical property or any other manner of economic interaction, the only reason we have any rules is because we made them up.
See above. If that is the only thing that stops you, you are not a human. Some sort of Neanderthal who somehow managed to acquire modern language but not any other traits of sentience, such as conscience. It is a little wonder that troglodytes such as you are at the forefront of creation and defense of these "Intellectual Property" "laws". Greed is the only thing that exists in your existence and Greed requires that you own as much of the Universe as your slime covered paws could possibly manage to grab, consequences for everyone and everything else be damned. I assume that the moment some natural disaster renders the police force in your area defunct you are going to go on a murderous rampage through your neighborhood to steal as much shit as you can possibly cart away, attacking of course only the places you know for sure old ladies and children are the only occupants as they are guaranteed not to be "bigger then you". After all, as per your own admission, these were, quote, "the only things preventing you" from it.
It seems like a very real problem with this model would b
IP is a mechanism created by society for a specific economic reason: to encourage the investment of time and money in production of non-physical products because it is assumed, as a society, we would prefer to have those products than not have those products.
Except that this "mechanism" contradicts in a wholesale manner the scientifically testable properties of information, which it is supposed to somehow govern. As such it is an exact equivalent of a fundamentalist religion in which a "holy book" takes precedence over all scientific discovery.
Do you have an alternate economic model that will still result in the creation of products most affected by IP (software, movies, songs, books, etc.)?
First of all, an "alternate economic model" is not a requirement in demonstrating the anti-scientific nature of "Intellectual Property". If your business depends on people pretending that gravity does not exist, my demonstrating that it does (and by doing so depriving you of income) is not dependent on me finding you some other way to make money! It is your problem! After all it was you who were operating a scam based on falsehoods.
I can however point out an alternative: an updated for the Information Age patronage system. This is in fact what many independent artists do already: they depend on direct electronic donations from their fans from all over the globe. If promotion of arts and sciences was indeed the goal, one could set up a myriad of private, non-profit and governmental foundations, direct donation systems and so on, complete with methods of electronic public participation in allocation of these funds to specific artists. This not only solves the problem of paying the artists (and scientists) it does so without attempting to contradict the scientific properties of information. Of course under such system a mega-corporation would not be able to manufacture a random blond ditz into a "pop star" in order to profit from such a "product". And that is the main reason why this fight against science is on.
Would an author still spend a year or two creating a book if there there were no copyright laws allowing him/her to make money? Maybe it's possible, but I haven't heard any kind of explanation yet as to how it might work.
See above. All art developed prior to 18th century was created in the world without copyright. Only someone blinded by an ideology of greed would deny that the bulk of what we call "art" today existed before the assembly line "art" model was invented.
However, smoking dope in public doesn't get the law changed - it gets me a £50 fine
Only if this is you doing it by your lone self. Now try 100000 people smoking at the same time and see what happens.
I've spent my time on the barricades, unlike the politically apathetic students of today but, with age comes a certain amount of prudence and I know I have to temper my personal beliefs with those of society at large.
That is called "submission" and is the most basic mechanism by which the power elites get to rule, in whatever political system. Once you have a comfortable house, a car, kids and all sorts of things "to lose", your begin to make "compromises" designed to keep your comforts at the expense of "small concessions" in your personal beliefs and general "prudence". And before you know it, you have traded all your principles for a comfy couch in front of a flickering idiot box. Congratulations.
Just ignoring the law and breaking it doesn't make you a fearless defender of freedom. It just makes you a criminal.
All "fearless defenders of freedom" are always criminals in the eyes of their respective tyrants. Period.
Only if, through your actions, you actually hope to effect real change, can you justify them using your thesis.
As history teaches us, there usually is no other way. Being a "criminal" comes with the territory as your foes in power are certain to label you this way, particularly when you threaten their massive wealth and power with your actions.
Words can be exchanged for ones of sufficiently close meaning, the edges of a picture cropped, sections of a tune repeated and so on in ways which do not significantly change the information a human would extract, but which would defeat a simple binary comparison.
All of those are examples of binary data and mathematical manipulation of thereof. Picture can be represented, to an arbitrary degree of precision, as binary data. The operation of "cropping" is a mathematical transform on such. Repetition is a mathematical transform. Words are equivalent to numbers. "Close meaning" is a concept representable by numbers (a pair of concepts in a table with a number indicating "cloeseness" between them). Etc. Information and numbers (and thus binary numbers) are one and the same. Furthermore, the information inside human brain is represented in a form of electrical discharges and chemical states, all of which are equivalent to numbers. There is no escape from this. All information and numbers are interchangeable. This is one of the fundamental properties of information.
While we can represent information as binary data, we just don't know how to represent the nuances of human interpretation as mathematical operators on binary data.
All of these are already numbers (represented by electrical discharges and protein assemblies). That is what information is.
That's not a failing of copyright law, but of mathematics and biology.
No it is not. Science has dealt with this long ago, whole scientific theories were developed and tested dealing with properties of information and its transmission. It is the brain-dead lawyers and politicians who refuse to listen, primarily because this scientific knowledge gets in the way of Lord Greed. And we all know that Greed will trump science every time.
So can neuronal discharges. Neurons in our brains can only be in one of two electrical states: firing and idle.
As such, a digital recording of a record, or a digitised photograph is only a representation.
Information is by definition a "representation". Image of a building, a concept of a building are not the same as the photons bouncing off a building nor the concrete and steel itself. And by the very nature information is mathematically convertible to binary format (with an arbitrary loss of precision).
The fact that we can represent it in this way does not mean that this representation is what we have copyrighted.
In order to be detectable in this Universe, information must be "represented" in some way, be it in dimples on a CD or as electron discharges in your brain or configurations of proteins in your synapses. Furthermore, all abstract concepts are, by definition, mutually equivalent with numbers. Every single one. That is one of the fundamental properties of information. And every number can be represented in base of 2.
In legal circles, there isn't any concept of "divinely defined".
Anything contradicting science (and logic or mathematics in particular) is by definition arbitrary bullshit pulled out of lawyers asses.
Typically they use the "reasonable person" test.
A few centuries back any "reasonable person" would tell you that one can test women for witchcraft by submerging them in a sack until they die. If they float, they are witches...
Even though mathematically, an mp3 and an analogue recording of the same song are very different, a reasonable person, when it is explained how these recordings are typically used, would conclude that they are the same tune.
See above. That is why lawyers, judges and politicians so regularly turn out to be brain-dead jackasses. They simply have no idea about the things they try to decide on.
Information is a scientific, not legal, concept and it has specific properties and attributes that govern its behavior. No amount of silk-suited morons will alter these properties nor the nature of information, no matter how many brown envelopes change hands and no matter how many "reasonable people" get to express their ignorant superstitions.
As long as we live in society we have to pay some regard to the rules of that society whether they make sense to us or not.
If all people were as pathetic as you, feudal lords and slavery would be the norm in all societies today. USA would not even exist, merely a colony ruled by the unchallengeable laws of the King of Britain, because as you so aptly said: "we have to pay some regard to the rules of that society whether they make sense to us or not". Luckily for us all, some of our ancestors took somewhat more enlightened view, sometimes even involving sticking a sword up the "divine lawmakers" asses.
Laws are only to be respected if they are a) logical and b) just. All others are just tools of tyranny and usurpation of power to be ignored and resisted. If all else fails, violently and with deadly force. It is a difference between principled courage and spineless slavery.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, of course, why didn't I think of this?! I mean once Ugh (a proto-American-Israeli) back at the dawn of time picked up a rock to use as a weapon, Mogh (a proto-Arab-French-communislamolibofascist) was done for because one could never develop a military technology or tactics to counter what the other guy has! And so no such thing as an arms race ever started! No, Sir! And so today the descendants of Ugh, whom we know and love as U.S.iAnus Shittus Cerberus, have a total global monopoly on thinking! The rest of the world, and Arabs in particular, can only do what the dwellers of the trailer parks of the US of A can teach them! Why, the Iraqis, for example, would be oh so grateful if these Towering American Titans of Intellect would only benevolently bestow their Cosmic Wisdom and Universal Insight via The 500lb Bombs Of Eternal Enlightenment onto these eager Iraqis! So grateful in fact as to promptly welcome the American Heroes with flowers and candy....
Rectal-Cranial-Inversion Nationalistic Hubris much?
As I tried to explain, this is a matter of degrees. The flexibility of the demand for oil is indeed higher then that for water, but it is far, far more rigid then, say, for paper napkins. It is not simply a matter of convenience or luxury, it is a matter of serious, for many people outright devastating, societal changes. When you lose your house, your job and have no idea where your next meal for your family is coming from it quickly becomes a matter not far removed from that of lack of water.
Yes, particularly when they are unconscious in an ambulance ferrying them away to the nearest emergency center or when the disease they are being treated for requires advanced specialized bio-molecular knowledge to understand ....
You are simply a technocrat, i.e. a person who worships technology and which worship blinds him to the understanding that technology is incapable of solving many, many societal problems. In fact it causes quite a number of them. Subsequently your answer to pretty much everything is: "Worry not! We will most certainly invent a banana-to-oil-gizmo-o-matic and then the rivers will certainly run with milk and honey and the bunnies will dance in the streets ...".
The truth of course is that oil-based technologies are what shaped the Western civilization as it is now and their termination will force a massive, fundamental changes in the life-style of the populace. Those changes will then cause great hardship. Will the situation stabilize after alternative technologies become viable (and sufficiently prevalent - which is a matter of decades)? Most certainly, but the point is that the society will resist this change with all its might. And that is why the demand for oil is inflexible.
You are obviously not familiar with the utterly wasteful and energy intensive nature of the Fischer-Tropsch synthesis.
Bio-fuels are another red herring. Unless a vast scale commercial algae based systems are developed (at herculean expenditures, multi-decade effort and massive alteration of sea ecosystems) all the bio-fuel technologies must make a choice between agrarian use of land for fuel crops or for food crops. Presently there is not enough farm fields around the globe to supply enough bio-diesel to run even the USA alone at the current levels of consumption, never you mind the rest of the world. And that is assuming zero food production.
You keep forgetting, willfully, that the oil and coal energy are bio-fuels except that they represent the sunlight energy accumulated in biological matter over hundreds of millions of years. We are burning up each year of our crazed consumption a few million of years of cumulative sunlight that arrived at the ancient forests of Earth. If this source dries up, even if we capture the maximum amount of sunlight available for conversion on land we would still be rather short by a factor of a few million. Vast scale sea based systems would be the only escape (as the total surface area of oceans is much greater).
This is simply a disagreement about how far ahead a pro-active vision needs to be. The futures market offers only a very limited (from a civilization-level perspective) short-term advance warning. We are talking about a difference between basing your actions on someone running up to your house shouting "The tornado is 10 minutes away! Run!" versus meticulous preparation of an escape plan, building a tornado shelter years in advance etc.
Actually to correct myself here, the French came second. Somehow I remembered the date for the French Revolution as 1769 instead if 1789. My bad.
Greece still got you beat however by a pile of centuries.
That would be France.
Oh you meant the oldest presently continuing without long interruptions democracy. Got it.
Sure, the specifics of the Athenian Democracy were quite different from those of the USA as were those of France after the Revolution. As are those of many other nations presently (i.e. Parliamentary, Proportional, Direct, Indirect etc etc etc).
The point remains however that the very concept of Democracy was first implemented (as far as we know, and however imperfectly by modern standards) by the City State of Athens. The very term "Democracy" is derived from the ancient Greek word describing the idea.
Normally this would be merely a historical curiosity, but it just happens to be one of those things Americans continuously attempt to take credit for to the point of absurdity. And so for this hubris induced nationalistic fever I feel obliged to prescribe a good cold shower of historical reality.
What you are talking about is essentially a network block device backed RAID system. It might work if you are backing up a repository of Word documents, but it will not work at all for heavily used database applications or virtual machine disk storage as such activity translates to a very large amount of changes per second spread across the entire storage area. Such filesystem based snapshot systems are defeated if the ratio of free storage to the amount of write disk activity is low, especially if the filesystem consists of large frequently changing files, as is usually the case with database systems.
How so? Here is an (extreme - but just to illustrate the point) example: food and water. Is the demand for food and water "elastic"? At some point the "free market" model breaks down and the former "buyer" will logically resort to any and all desperate means necessary to procure sustenance, violence included. Incidentally, this is among reasons why medical care does not (and cannot) operate as "trade" and thus is not subject to the "market" model, but that is another discussion.
Once major, devastating changes in people's lives are looming, the demand becomes quite inflexible. The level of rigidness of that demand corresponds to the level of potential suffering that one would be exposed to if the item in question were to be no longer available. In case of oil the situation is rather dire as we are talking about massive upheavals throughout pretty much all industries of the developed world, and as a result the demand is much much less flexible as it would be if we were talking about essentially levels of comfort between which the consumers are to choose (as opposed to levels of suffering).
See above. There is a very great difference between the jump from "SUV" to "small car" versus "small car" to "no car". The first jump is essentially in the varying "comfort" zones. The second begins to entail "suffering" (for a family whose whole wealth is invested in a suburban home where no public transportation reaches - it spells a financial catastrophe, including loss of commute based jobs and essentially starvation).
Failure to observe these drastically different grades of flexibility is at the core of the mistake you are making.
Again, you severely underestimate the levels of dependence on oil in most manufacturing processes. We are talking about a great majority of today's consumer items ceasing to be financially viable, even if the vast expense of essentially abandoning and rebuilding the factories used to make them would be made, as the entire production lines are dependent on plastic at every stage of their operation. This again is the reason why demand is inflexible. For most businesses a marked increase in cost of plastic spells disaster.
Coal does not offer any sort of replacement due to extreme inefficiencies of converting coal into polymers usable for plastics. And of course coal is also sharing the main characteristic of oil: it is a finite resource with multi-hundred million year accumulation span.
Utter naivety. Coal based fuels have fraction of the efficiency required to sustain the present US economy. And the rail stations do absolutely nothing for the disastrously laid out US cities, although they might offer some minor relief: you forget that the current rail system capacity is also a tiny fraction of what is required as it was neglected (and in fact scaled down) for the last 50 years. A massive (and again vastly expensive and decades long) expansion of railways would be required to sustain even a portion of US economy.
The reasons for the demand inflexibility are legion. It would take a book to even touch on them all.
Many analysts believe (and I agree with them) that the Western technological culture is hopelessly addicted to oil and that the growth demand is pretty much inflexible unless truly drastic changes are made to the Western (and by extension all other countries which adopted or are adopting this system such as Japan and China) life-style and technology. Consider this: every electronic device uses plastic as its chief (by volume) component. Nearly all food processing involves plastic in packaging. Etc and so on. Some countries, such as USA, are hopelessly dependent on individual (as opposed to mass) transportation as the entire infrastructure of cities is centered on this. Should individual transportation become too expensive then a whole gamut of things such as suburbia and big-box shopping centers cease to be feasible. Not to mention heating and the fact that many parts of the country depend on inexpensive energy for food delivery from remote locations. It goes on and on and on.
So the equilibrium point is far, far above $200 a barrel, most likely in the $5000+ dollar range as the amount of dependence on this energy and polymer source is truly staggering. It is not simply a matter of "deciding not to have it". Going cold turkey on oil means death as far as Western technological civilization as we know it is concerned. Oil was in the past extremely unreasonably cheap - it is solar energy accumulated over hundreds of millions of years which we brainlessly and unspeakably wastefully proceeded to use up in just few centuries, and now finally its value is becoming belatedly obvious.
See above. All the Iraqi oil would do (assuming that it can be brought to market quickly enough, which is extremely unlikely as the infrastructure needs to be rebuilt from ground up and the insurgents are not likely to let the pipelines alone and there is no feasible way to protect them due to their length) is to delay the inevitable. Oil is a finite resource, the Western technological civilization is hooked on it like a crack whore (worse in fact, as a crack whore is unlikely to die from lack of crack) and no feasible replacement technologies at this point exist or are even at a prototype stage.
The imperial longevity is in reverse proportion to the amount of people involved, availability and speed of communication and transportation technologies and the cost of running the empire. That is why you will note that as we progress in history the average reign of an "empire" has shortened dramatically. The US empire is already showing all the signs of collapse, after mere few decades of openly imperial policies. More boldly these policies are expressed, more accelerated the pace of collapse. Iraq war being a perfect example, which (with a host of other factors) has in essence bankrupted (financially and morally both) the USA and no amount of magical accounting and creative statistics can hide this fact except from those who are truly desperate to believe otherwise.
But one thing all empires have in common is that they are vicious and murderous entities which are responsible for untold amounts of carnage, suffering and misery. And USA is working really, really hard to acquire its share of
What in the world is the point of making "backups" to the same file system? How is this going to protect you from a catastrophic failure in the file system itself of a failure of a RAID controller (causing a loss of the whole array) or some such? How are you planning to perform a from-scratch disaster recovery (i.e. building with your data center has burned down) with this?
You still must perform periodic full system backups, or you else your incremental backups will have no starting reference point, no matter what magical differential method you use. And if you can pull off a full backup that means that you have the capacity and bandwidth to do so. Subsequently there is little point to performing the incremental backups since all you are doing is losing reliability (a loss of one incremental backup in a sequence will render all subsequent differentials useless). And so for this simple reason most companies do not bother with this. There is a lot of (potentially devastating) downsides, much added complexity, and very little upside (other then cost).
Incremental backup systems are a kludge invented primarily because of limitations of backup media and transfer rates to/from such media. They trade the speed of disaster recovery in favor of lowering the cost of the backups themselves. The end result is that a catastrophic file system failure will require far more extensive recovery effort then with complete file-system backups. Greater the distance from the last "full" backup covered by multiple differential backups the greater the recovery effort. In some (if not most) organizations the cost of even a day of downtime far, far outweighs any possible savings that incremental backups provide. And that does not account for the fact that some operating systems are notorious for slow and convoluted recovery procedures with any backup system other then whole file-system imaging.
It is a little wonder that your preaching from a high horse comes out of a university, as a school is one of the examples where a 2-week downtime of all computer systems would likely be met with a collective shrug.
Err ... American oil under all that Iraqi sand, eh? Who knew!
LOL. Assuming of course that oil prices are all due to them nasty "speculators" and not to the fact that the rate of growth of demand is far outpacing any conceivable rate of growth of supply (including all Iraq, ANWAR, deep-sea, Arctic and what not) and that no feasible increase in supply is going to make a long-term dent. Some experts believe that oil prices (barring short-term reversals) are bound for the stratosphere (until either all oil runs out - in not so distant future, or an alternative infrastructure to produce the mountains of plastic wasted every minute and means to power super-inefficient small-scale transportation are found).
Ask the Roman, Mongol, Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, British, Japanese, Nazi and Soviet empires. Amongst others.
I want to hold out this silly tripe tjstork had put out for all to see as what passes as "reason" amongst all of these war-hawks. Wild assumptions, blissful ignorance, delusions of grandeur all "backed up" by "calculations" (half of which use values pulled out of the poster's ass).
Sure "imperialism can be profitable" to ... a tiny elite capable of jumping ship when the empire gets sucked into unwinnable quagmires and spends itself into oblivion. All of the empires I mentioned fell to dust but their true (as opposed to the outwardly visible) elites survived unscathed with most of their loot. Even the Nazi empire was survived by the Krupp dynasty who (amongst others) funded it all (in addition to producing the bulk of Nazi heavy weaponry). Some 7 millions of Germans (not to mention 60+ million of others) were not so lucky. Yay, empires!
I think they are going for "ki no ki" (the first "ki" being "tree" and the second "spirit"; US Slashdot doesn't do Kanji, sorry) as in "spirit of trees" or some such. The word on the screen reads "kijoueki" which is "tree sap" (a bit redundant).
Your desperate attempts at labeling me a "kid" are really making me laugh. Those serious Freudian issues you are hiding there are slipping out. Still wanting to suck on Moms tits? Separated too early? Wanna hide from the nasty world populated by villains like me back in the safety of her skirts? Do tell.
For your info, I am just about to retire from the IT industry after nearly 30 years in the field and in my career I have produced more code both commercially and under GPL then you are likely to see in your entire miserable greedy, whiny life. The view I hold on copyright is a result of years of observation and discussions with people who, like me, produce works which are today deemed copyrightable, amongst them musicians and other artists.
You on the other hand let some traits of your psychotic personality rule your "reasoning". That repressed infantile inferiority complex and out of control greed in particular.
One can tell, because beside petulant, squeaky attempts at labeling people "thieves" (as if information could be "stolen") you've offered exactly no logical reasoning in defense of your "position" (and comically you even put forth examples that undermine it). Jumping up and down, whining, shouting and spitting is not a very effective method in convincing people, but that is all you have done. Then again, psychopaths like you don't give damn about reason or logic, only your narcissistic instincts which never developed past the level of a 5-year old: "Mine! Its all mine! Mine! Mine! Moooooom!".
That thing you are doing is called projection. You take your own immaturity, your own inability to get another part time job after they said they did not want you anymore at that burger joint, and then you try to project these inadequacies of yours onto your opponents. Next you are going to project onto me your failing grades in that high-school ....
That is why you focused on Spielberg and Connery (apart from your self-inflicted counter-example of Austen)! Logic apparently was never your strong suite.
The fact that people like stuff produced by Spielberg's minions for which he takes credit does not make any of it "art". People also like tobacco and booze, but that does not make either into "medicine".
Art has a specific definition, integral part of which being the need of an artist to share his artistic expression as widely as possible. And so Austen does fit the definition (as she preferred dissemination of her work over money), Spielberg does not (as he prefers money over dissemination of his kitsch). It is that simple.
As soon as you fuck off with your police state which you are diligently attempting to construct to control everything about my use of digital technology and communications for the benefit of this "popular culture" (read: media conglomerates, big business moguls and establishment politicians), we have a deal. Somehow however I do not expect you to do so, given that all your bristling about "popular culture" and "elitism" is designed to obscure your true motives: limitless greed and desire to control others, as brutally as you can get away with, for your own personal profit.
Piracy? I do not even have a sea-worthy vessel, never you mind that the nearest sea is a few thousands kilometers away!
I see. So let me get this straight: you believe that the motivating force for true artistic expression is money? That an "artist" does not feel a need to express himself until a silk-suited agent of a media conglomerate shows up with a contract that "will make you rich beyond all yer dreams, honey!". That is when the "artistic muse" answers the calling, no?
I have news for you: for every over-hyped Connery there are 100s of true artists who create true art while doing other jobs.
And since you asked, yes, Connery is a kitsch peddler. Austen never made any money to speak of (as that was not the case with books in the early 1800s). As a matter of fact she got paid £10 for the copyright to "Northanger Abbey", which languished unpublished, and which she could not get back until she raised the £10 back so that she could re-purchase the rights to her own book. It was more important for her to publish the book then the money (as she no longer owned the copyright)! Talk about shooting your own arguments down, sparky.
There is plenty evidence of this (in addition to simple logical reasoning) and it has nothing to do with "taking other peoples work for free". Copyright is a privilege granted to the artists by the society in trade for specific returns! No returns - no deal. And as it stands the society is being leaned on more and more heavily by these "artists" who demand for us to relinquish our basic freedoms for their profit while the quality of their "art" steadily deteriorates.
It has nothing to do with rating "time". Art is not measured in "time". A brilliant artist can get an inspiration and produce a brilliant poem in 3 hours in a middle of a night. Another will take 3 years to finish same. Art simply does not operate on the same principle as labor of a plumber and so it cannot be measured by the same criteria. And as I pointed out, art is not trade-able in a way that would make it a subject of the capitalist model. Any attempts to do so are desperate and contorted kludges which require outright totalitarian measures in order to enforce them.
Given that Spielberg hasn't produced any art in his entire life (and probably couldn't if his life depended on it - although he is consummate in taking credit for the work of others whom he finances - a perfect example of the wondrous effects of copyright on art) then the answer is yes. Him stacking shelves might be actually a net gain for the society, and certainly for art in particular.
It the only logical point of view on the subject. The fact that you find it "silly" says way more about you then anything else.
This is where you are 100% wrong. A 99% reduction in production of what currently passes as "art" would have no impact whatsoever as the only thing that profit motive motivates is utter kitsch. One artist who does art as art must be done: as an internal calling to express himself, is worth 1000 "for profit" schmucks manufactured by media companies to be "products". And this is all there is to it.
Human civilization was awash in art long before there was a copyright and it will remain so long after the idiotic idea bites the dust.
Unless of course by "socially optimal" you mean for some selected view mega-corporate fiefdoms to be raking in billions running an elaborate scam, at a mere expense of a totalitarian police state required to make the scheme stick in the age of digital communications.
You are making the fundamental errors all "greed philosophers" do: that art is a "product" to be bought and sold. Followed by even more grave scientific error: that art forms based on pure information can be traded at all, as information does not posses the required attributes to be a trade-able "private property".
Except a host of personal freedoms. In order for the government to enforce the idiotic copyright regime designed for ink splattered on a by product of dead trees, and which is wholly unworkable in a digital age, the only path available to the government is wholesale monitoring of all communications coupled with draconian "guilty until proven otherwise" measures we see proposed more and more frequently. This is simply a straightforward logical outcome of the concept of "copyright". While it was practically workable in an age where only few select individuals were capable of possessing an ability to copy a book, it is no longer so in a world in which the cost of duplication is approaching zero and the means of which are in the hands of every member of the society. The only way to make copyright workable again is to reverse the technological progress (i.e. to make sure that the cost of duplication becomes astronomical again and/or it is only available to select elites). Which of course has the desired side-effect of restoring control of all mass communications (and thus political speech) to the "right people".
No such control ever existed. It is like trying to control who has access to the photons bouncing off your ass when you walk on a major city street. The very definition of art is a mass dissemination of the artist's expressions. Every artist (as opposed to a greed-motivated kitsch "manufacturer") has an intrinsic desire to spread his message as widely as possible. Attempting to control who gets the message is the very anathema of art. The moment you try you cease to become an artist.
And I am pointing out that these societal contracts contradict science and logic. Therefore they amount to not only a religiously (i.e. with no scientific foundation) motivated set of rules for all people to follow so that some few people get richer but they also require that scientific knowledge is actively repressed for these rules to be enforced.
It cannot get more "on topic" then that.
No, it was a group of people which set up conditions for a large number of other people to operate the scam. The fact that the original instigators were ignorantly "well meaning" changes nothing in the final outcome.
The same "reasoning" can be applied to slavery and laws governing human sacrifices. In both cases the "society" selected the cons of some people being slaves or have their hearts ripped out on a sacrificial altar as "more favorable" to it then the "other alternatives". That precisely because "the society" is historically prone to "agreeing" on such (and many many many other) examples of utter illogic and stupidity that science and logic are the only viable measurements by which to judge these "agreements".
A mere fact that an ignorant mob agrees to something while egged on by a hypocritical bunch of self-serving priests of Greed does not by itself make such an "agreement" right. Not even practically workable.
Spoken like a true Objectivst. Nothing exists to you outside of your Greed!
Some of us believe on the other hand that all sentient beings come into existence with some unalienable and self evident set of rights which no one can take away. Some dudes even tried to found a nation on that principle ...
This is a fundamental difference in world view between a self-centered, spineless, unprincipled sociopathic weasel like you to whom all rights are "negotiable" (as soon as he can get away with ignoring them) and someone who would rather die then be deprived of them.
See above. If that is the only thing that stops you, you are not a human. Some sort of Neanderthal who somehow managed to acquire modern language but not any other traits of sentience, such as conscience. It is a little wonder that troglodytes such as you are at the forefront of creation and defense of these "Intellectual Property" "laws". Greed is the only thing that exists in your existence and Greed requires that you own as much of the Universe as your slime covered paws could possibly manage to grab, consequences for everyone and everything else be damned. I assume that the moment some natural disaster renders the police force in your area defunct you are going to go on a murderous rampage through your neighborhood to steal as much shit as you can possibly cart away, attacking of course only the places you know for sure old ladies and children are the only occupants as they are guaranteed not to be "bigger then you". After all, as per your own admission, these were, quote, "the only things preventing you" from it.
Except that this "mechanism" contradicts in a wholesale manner the scientifically testable properties of information, which it is supposed to somehow govern. As such it is an exact equivalent of a fundamentalist religion in which a "holy book" takes precedence over all scientific discovery.
First of all, an "alternate economic model" is not a requirement in demonstrating the anti-scientific nature of "Intellectual Property". If your business depends on people pretending that gravity does not exist, my demonstrating that it does (and by doing so depriving you of income) is not dependent on me finding you some other way to make money! It is your problem! After all it was you who were operating a scam based on falsehoods.
I can however point out an alternative: an updated for the Information Age patronage system. This is in fact what many independent artists do already: they depend on direct electronic donations from their fans from all over the globe. If promotion of arts and sciences was indeed the goal, one could set up a myriad of private, non-profit and governmental foundations, direct donation systems and so on, complete with methods of electronic public participation in allocation of these funds to specific artists. This not only solves the problem of paying the artists (and scientists) it does so without attempting to contradict the scientific properties of information. Of course under such system a mega-corporation would not be able to manufacture a random blond ditz into a "pop star" in order to profit from such a "product". And that is the main reason why this fight against science is on.
See above. All art developed prior to 18th century was created in the world without copyright. Only someone blinded by an ideology of greed would deny that the bulk of what we call "art" today existed before the assembly line "art" model was invented.
Only if this is you doing it by your lone self. Now try 100000 people smoking at the same time and see what happens.
That is called "submission" and is the most basic mechanism by which the power elites get to rule, in whatever political system. Once you have a comfortable house, a car, kids and all sorts of things "to lose", your begin to make "compromises" designed to keep your comforts at the expense of "small concessions" in your personal beliefs and general "prudence". And before you know it, you have traded all your principles for a comfy couch in front of a flickering idiot box. Congratulations.
All "fearless defenders of freedom" are always criminals in the eyes of their respective tyrants. Period.
As history teaches us, there usually is no other way. Being a "criminal" comes with the territory as your foes in power are certain to label you this way, particularly when you threaten their massive wealth and power with your actions.
All of those are examples of binary data and mathematical manipulation of thereof. Picture can be represented, to an arbitrary degree of precision, as binary data. The operation of "cropping" is a mathematical transform on such. Repetition is a mathematical transform. Words are equivalent to numbers. "Close meaning" is a concept representable by numbers (a pair of concepts in a table with a number indicating "cloeseness" between them). Etc. Information and numbers (and thus binary numbers) are one and the same. Furthermore, the information inside human brain is represented in a form of electrical discharges and chemical states, all of which are equivalent to numbers. There is no escape from this. All information and numbers are interchangeable. This is one of the fundamental properties of information.
All of these are already numbers (represented by electrical discharges and protein assemblies). That is what information is.
No it is not. Science has dealt with this long ago, whole scientific theories were developed and tested dealing with properties of information and its transmission. It is the brain-dead lawyers and politicians who refuse to listen, primarily because this scientific knowledge gets in the way of Lord Greed. And we all know that Greed will trump science every time.
So can neuronal discharges. Neurons in our brains can only be in one of two electrical states: firing and idle.
Information is by definition a "representation". Image of a building, a concept of a building are not the same as the photons bouncing off a building nor the concrete and steel itself. And by the very nature information is mathematically convertible to binary format (with an arbitrary loss of precision).
In order to be detectable in this Universe, information must be "represented" in some way, be it in dimples on a CD or as electron discharges in your brain or configurations of proteins in your synapses. Furthermore, all abstract concepts are, by definition, mutually equivalent with numbers. Every single one. That is one of the fundamental properties of information. And every number can be represented in base of 2.
Anything contradicting science (and logic or mathematics in particular) is by definition arbitrary bullshit pulled out of lawyers asses.
A few centuries back any "reasonable person" would tell you that one can test women for witchcraft by submerging them in a sack until they die. If they float, they are witches...
See above. That is why lawyers, judges and politicians so regularly turn out to be brain-dead jackasses. They simply have no idea about the things they try to decide on.
Information is a scientific, not legal, concept and it has specific properties and attributes that govern its behavior. No amount of silk-suited morons will alter these properties nor the nature of information, no matter how many brown envelopes change hands and no matter how many "reasonable people" get to express their ignorant superstitions.
If all people were as pathetic as you, feudal lords and slavery would be the norm in all societies today. USA would not even exist, merely a colony ruled by the unchallengeable laws of the King of Britain, because as you so aptly said: "we have to pay some regard to the rules of that society whether they make sense to us or not". Luckily for us all, some of our ancestors took somewhat more enlightened view, sometimes even involving sticking a sword up the "divine lawmakers" asses.
Laws are only to be respected if they are a) logical and b) just. All others are just tools of tyranny and usurpation of power to be ignored and resisted. If all else fails, violently and with deadly force. It is a difference between principled courage and spineless slavery.