I doubt Gary said it when he saw the first copy of the brown box come from the printer, but he could have.
He wasn't the only one to create RPGs. Arguably they'd existed for a bit in the miniatures community in various half-finished states, such as ruler driven campaigns. But he was the one with the vision to write it all down and say "let's do it this way", combining all those ideas into one coherent work (even if the text didn't quite convey that coherence).
And with that text he made us all creators of world.
Yesterday a friend and I were exchanging emails on gaming and concluded that tabletop RPGs are one of the most accessible forms of creativity in the modern world.
I can't thank him enough for that gift. All I can do is pass it on.
I'm digusted that you can justify using time to post on/. that could be used cooking for those hungry children and using money that could go to feeding them to buy net time to post on/. and using electricity that could be used to cook food for them to post on/.
Or does your luxury (time on the computer) somehow not have to follow the same rules as the luxury of some collector?
Thank $diety someone else realizes who wrote this...I have long thought it a very bad cosmic joke that one of the best underappreciated writers of the Golden Age (Leigh Brackett) finally had something that meet great popular aclaim in her last work and then never got remembered for it.
A UNANIMOUS COURT ruled that Ella Williams' partial disability did not obligate her employer, car manufacturer Toyota, to tailor a job to suit her wrist, arm and shoulder problems.
So companies can require people to perform jobs that are injurous to them? I know the Libertarian readers will probably just respond by saying, "Get a job that's not on an assembly line", but then they probably have sufficient education and wealth that they can actually get other kinds of work.
Isn't OSHA supposed to step in somewhere? Do companies actually not realize that it's in their interest to attempt to ensure that their workers' jobs can be performed without injuring them?
This is NOT the Court saying Toyota can require her to do something injurous to herself. It is the Court saying Toyota does not have to redesign a job that has not be found unsafe by OSHA so that it is not painful or aggrevating for her. That is a big difference.
You ask where OSHA is? Trust me, this is the auto injury and OSHA is there, probably with an inspector on the shop floor. OSHA has probility had this job redesigned several times to be safe for the average person. The average person does not have CTS so OSHA safety requirements don't apply.
She argued that her CTS was bad enough that it qualified as a disability under the ADA. If she had won than Toyota could have been required to make reasonable (as defined by the court) accomodations, but even then it would not be absolute (otherwise a blind person could sue if not hired as a paint color match tester for example and the employer would have to find a way to make it work).
The CTS defines a disability as interfering with major life activities of the average person. While making a living qualifies, making a living as a paint inspector does not. Why? Because while the average person does have a job, they do not have a job as a paint inspector.
The same is not the case of every other method of power generation. Proponents like to discuss safety in terms of the chance of an accident. I'm saying they need to forget about chance, and think about the consequences, because accidents happen and it's always only a matter of time.
Proponents do discuss both. But chance is as important as consequences. Look at it this way:
Method A has a death rate of 1000 per accident and a 0.01% accident per unit of production. Result over time: 10 deaths per unit of production.
Method B has a death rate of 10 per accident and a 1% accident per unit of production. Result over time: 10 deaths per unit of production.
Now you would automatically eschew Method A because it causes more deaths, but over time they are the same. This is the reason why air travel is safer than car travel, but appears not to be. An airplane crashes and hundreds dies. A car crashes and a couple die, but more cars crash than planes.
Nuclear power has the same problem plus the added bonus of fear. Quick, which exposed people who lived five miles from the Japanese accident you mentioned to more radiation: their most recent medical X-ray or the accident? Yet this is far and away the worst accident in a modern, industrialized nation, slightly edging out TMI (TMI had no immediate deaths, Tokaimura did). Only one other accident (excepting Chernobyl, about which see below) has caused immediate death: SL-1 in the US. This despite the fact that several nations get signficant amounts of power from nuclear power.
The Chernobyl accident is the worst case you can show and it is not a very good anti-nuclear case for two reasons:
Causes
Effects
Let's look at causes: While the trigger was a human error the reasons it were so bad are all DESIGN issues that were possible only in an enviroment like the old USSR:
There was no containment beyond the piping. Unlike western reactors which are first put in reinforced concrete building and the use an multi-layered containment system to separate fuel from coolant Chernobyl was in basically a sheet metal shed and ran individual pipes over individual fuel rods.
Chernobyl was designed such that loss of coolant increased reactor power. Western reactors use coolant that aids reaction (ie, is a moderator) so if it is lost the reactor begins to shutdown, leaving residual heat to be delt with. Because of design the water cooling Chernobyl retarded reactions and a loss of coolant sped up the plant.
Chernobyl's control systems required both computer control at all times, were not passively regulating (ie, things like loss of power to the plant drops the rods and such), and were such that the reactor had to increase reaction rate during shutdown.
To give a comparison imagine building a car that when faster before slowing when you hit the brakes, had independent for acceleration, steering, and braking on each wheel, and the passenger front controls were done automatically by computer in response to your actions on the other three. How long would it be before you crashed? And when you crashed you had just an open frame and no seat belt. Would that be enough to get rid of cars?
As to effects, Kiev is habitable and if you find me a job I'll be happy to move there. Correct action can minimize the effects of an accident in the immediate term, it is possible to decon much of the exposure, andrelatively short amounts of time are required for decomposition of the most dangerous radioactives (on the order of 30 years, not 12,000). The longer lived radioactives are less radioactive per unit by definition (higher radioactivity means more decays per unit time so the half life must be shorter) and generally are less dangerous when external, being dangerous when ingested. While clearing topsoil is not picnic it is arguably easier than the cleanup of an oil spill because it is easier to use large machinery to match the scale.
What this means is that consequences, while worse, are not irreversible and can, depending on management of the technologies can result in less consequences over a given time period than competing ones even if the individual events are worse.
The real benefits of the pure IBM solution are going to be in one (well two) main area: financial and insurance companies using IBM big iron.
That's what my company has. While normally I would have fought for JBoss/Tomcat for our Ebusiness the Websphere application setup just adds too many useful things to integrate into our legacy systems. One thing is the ability to roll IMS transactions into a bundle with DB2 and Oracle transactions as a single supertransaction. To understand how powerful this is, if IMS transaction two requires transaction one to commit before running and Oracle transaction A requires IMS one/two to commit running you can still run all three and then rollback ALL of them when the last one fails (if you're wondering why they weren't written that way, remember these were written for step by step 3270 usage, not one webform). That alone makes paying for Websphere worthwhile for IBM big iron shops.
Those who use a server network and RDMS for the majority of their processing, though, are better off with JBoss (usually).
9. List to non-comerical radio and hear A LOT more variety than you ever do (admittedly this varies by location). Seriously, I listen to three local college stations 90% of the time (and all of the music radio I listen to) and the variety is incredible. It's out there if you look. Many broadcast on the web as well (WHUS is my biggest source of radio anymore both in the car via airwaves and at home via broadband).
10. Listen to Spinner's channels. I can say, without any irony, that some of their channels play tons of current music you'll never hear on commerical radio, although you'll be genre restricted by the channels you choose (that doesn't bother me...I found 9&10 based on the fact that finding gothic and industrial music radio ain't easy).
11. Borrow your friend's CD or listen to it at his place if you want to verify his recommendation.
While I agree that downloaded music is a great marketing tool and that I used Napster for it I cannot help shake the feeling that a majority of the people I've encountered who argue for it aren't try before you buy, but just "free swag" type. YMMV.
It's clearly obvious to me that if the copyright owner (a music company, not an artist) failed to persuade me to pay the amount that they demand for access to the work on their terms, then they've already lost the sale, and so there's nothing left for me to deprive them of.
If you weren't interested in paying for it, why did you download it?
Is your answer "oh, well at free it's worth having"...well, it isn't being offered for free...it was being offered for a price you didn't like. Just because it's not physical property doesn't mean you aren't imposing costs by just taking it.
I dislike the RIAA and the big six as much as anyone who isn't a musician himself, mainly 'cause I see what my musician friends go through. But attitudes like yours actually boost the RIAA in the end.
"Why?" you ask. Simple, regardless of how music is recorded and sold it costs money. Now, let's look at an artist who wants to use the Internet to distribute his music without a major label/distributor involved. He sets up a website with paid downloads, say a dollar song and $8 for his 10 song CD (a 20% discount). All of that costs money and he based his prices on his expected sales (based on the turnout at shows and the size of his mailing list) so that it covers his recording and hosting costs and he makes minimum wage on the 100 hours he invested in this album if he gets expected sales.
Now you're on the band's list and like them but say "$8 is too much" so you just download it off a file service. Enough people do that so he only gets half the sales he expected and loses money. A couple of releases like that and the new business model breaks down.
There are a lot of reasons to like electronic distribute and such but in the end "Downloading it for free because it's too expensive" isn't one. It's just a rationalization for being cheap.
. Rather than granting 20-year monopoly entitlements, why not require that any company marketing a drug, even if it is copied from a known formula, either go through the same testing process as the "inventor" before they are licensed to sell their knockoff, buy a "license" for the certified product from the company which has already done the research and gotten the license to sell their product (probably the "inventor" at least initially), or pay a fee to the licensing agency equal to said costs to the governing agency, which fee would then be applied to further government funded or subsidized research, a portion of which could even go back to the "inventor" if entitlements really are your thing.
Wow, finally someone came up with a reasonable response. Each at least addresses the real issues that make patents attractive for encouraging drug research. In fact I think one would work very well.
That one is your second option which is a close relative to the patent, but without the ability to restrict licensing.
While the other two are interesting I would need to think about them somemore. The key problem is that while they address paying the testing costs of drugs that make the market those are only a fraction of the drugs that entering testing.
The sad fact is the current system requires companies to make blockbusters to recoop other costs (those huge marketing costs others cite in large part drug companies trying to make sows ears into blockbusters are increasing blockbusters) from failed drugs.
Perhaps the best idea would be to modify one of your ideas. I think government funded research is a poor second choice because it will often lack urgency that greed provides and that gave us, among other things, powerful AIDS drugs in a little over a decade of work.
However, what if we had the government do all the testing either on a first come, first serve, a bid basis (we'll pay x%), or maybe a profit percentage (similar to bid). Maybe charge the companies for testing for drugs that are licensed, cutting the researching company a break (to discourage all drug companies moving to a no research model) or an annual license fee (similar to a permenant government patent) until the drug is amoritized. Then the taxpayer only absorbs the costs for drugs the government won't let on the market, but companies pay for any drugs they can make a profit on.
I do wish people would stop it with the "how are they going to fund research?" crap. If you look at the big picture of drug research, and where the costs really are, you would see that a lot of it is inflated numbers caused by "economic factors" and other such nonsense.
I think here the problem is they mean one thing when they say R&D and you hear another R&D.
As I pointed out above the real R&D cost for drugs is not in research as you seem to mean: isolating chemicals, testing initial effectiveness, but in development: mass production, human toxicity, and, most importantly, FDA approval.
In general university researchers do much less pharma research in those areas than drug companies (when was the last time UConn got approval for a drug). Those costs, which are often incured for a drug that will never see approval for various reasons, are the real R&D costs.
Unfortunately, drug company PR flacks just use lumped costs when explaining this instead of breaking it down (talk to the people on the clinical side of R&D of a drug company to get a better picture) thus leading to said confusion.
I hope you're reminded of this when someone dosen't help you when it isn't in their best interest.
And I hope you remember this attitude when you or yours gets whatever the next big plague is. Governments make lots of demands, expensive demands, on drug companies that knock off a lot of promising drugs before they get to market (not just because of side effects...if you are working on drug X and your competitor gets drug Y approved that is just as effective as drug X against the target disease before you get X approved all R&D on X is now gone...the FDA will only approve drugs that are more effective in some way (fewer side effects, fewer non-response, treat worse cases, etc) than existing drugs and make even the ones that are released a very long term and expensive proposition.
Those tests and hoops are not jumped through by faceless corporations, but by people just like you...people who spent a lot of time in school working to understand the underlying science or getting medical training or mastering statistics and who, like you, want to be paid. Even a non-profit drug company would face huge costs and the legal need for companies to make a profit (fiducary responsibility) only increase them. Thus, if the producers of AIDS drugs have to face confescation of those drugs by countries without compensation when the plague after AIDS shows up how many drug companies will spend the money.
Right now there are tons of 'safe' profits in drugs for male impotency, better contriceptives, hair loss, weight loss, allergies, and so on. All of these will sell well in rich countries where the government will not infringe on patents thus risking the R&D costs never being repaid on both successful and unsuccessful drugs. Facing a choice between those and working on the next AIDS knowing poorer countries will just up and take your results with no compensation.
As it is, these AIDS drugs really exist because of AIDS being a big disease in the first world. Until the past few years malaria was the biggest killer in Africa and had been for a centuary or more, but there is little advance in malaria drugs. Why? Because the first world ended it with DDT before deciding DDT was too dangerous to use (before massive usage of DDT to wipe out malaria carrying mosquitos malaria was a common problem in even the US, including Washington DC). With this Pfizer, Roche, Brystol-Myers-Squib and the others must be asking "will this happen with a malaria vaccine, too". And they will ask the next time a drug is ravaging the third world.
And if you or yours gets that disease how will your attitude on AIDS have helped you?
There are other methods to solve this: charity, loans, limited licsencing, and many more. Just blowing the patent is not. Yet the former could have set a positive framework for the next plague. Now we have set a negative one.
So are every other form of patent that grants government enforced monopolies and undermines the very free market upon which our economies depend. There are other ways to finance expensive R&D besides grantintg 20 year monopolies and allowing said monopolies to extort exhorbitant prices from dying people and leaving millions of less fortunates to die (or extorting payment from their impoverished governments).
Really?
I would love to hear how. Outside of the government being the only source of R&D I fail to see how it would work in the drug industry.
The standard arguement against patents is it is cheaper for me to just buy it from you than to figure out how to make it. The time to re-engineer is enough to recoup initial costs and be competitive. An inventor who does not patent does not have to open his design to the public leaving any potential competitors to complete re-engineering.
For many industries this is arguably true. Reverse engineering complex machinery (both physical and virtual) takes time and money that are often better spent on leap-frogging ahead instead of just catching up.
However, a drug is, in the end, a chemical. Once isolated and make into a medicinal form it is relatively simple to identify it. That is assuming that you need to.
You don't, however, because the chemical and lots of stuff about it are public record and would be even if there was no patent. Why? FDA testing.
The real R&D cost of drugs is not research (identifying) but development, specifically all the human and clinical testing needed. This is not a simple or short process and extends from an experimenters first idea to full scale drug tests.
FDA regs require specific notekeeping requirements in the labs while isolating and synthesizing(see any good book on technical writing for an outine, if it does not have an experimental notebook procedures appendex or it is not a good one). This process continues throughout the process.
Human trials are not just X people with the target disease. The first step is dose a healthy volunteer and take vitals and blood work after 15 minutes. Then an hour. Then a day later. Then try a new dose. Months or years of these human toxicity tests preceed double blind testing for affectiveness.
At each step the drug can fail thus wasting all money to that point.
Thus isolating the drug, which is the effort a copycat does, is the least part of drug costs. The patent is there to repay these efforts and failed ones on the way.
Does this increase costs to the public during the patent period? Of course, because, as you point out a patent is a monopoly which does not set fair prices in the market sense (markets require multiple independent sellers and buyers to set prices). However, as the market sets fair prices it also weeds out inefficient producers. In a pure market enviroment jumping through the FDA's hoops will always be economically inefficient, thus an intelligent drug company manager will let the other companies do R&D and just copy their efforts.
The problem comes when all drug companies get smart. In these case the patent makes sense because government is granting a limited legal exclusiveness to those who make the expenditures to statisfy a government requirement that is the largest part of the drug price.
If you want to get rid of drug patents I would recommend getting rid of the FDA or require the FDA to pay the costs of testing.
As someone who spent his first year out of school doing RS/6000 setup and admin I agree with all your advantages except one:
The ODM...
As you have noted ODM corruption is a often a fatal event.
It is and very easy to have happen. Our main company machine suffered this death due to a device not getting turned on before boot, but during it.
The ODM is the Windows registry on steroids. While good in theory it is much harder to maintain (as you note), easier to corrupt, and more fatal when it corrupts than flat files. Enterprise hardware should be able to get around most of the problems with flat files (speed of loading and so on) without the problems. The biggest advantage of the ODM and registry are the unified parsing model but XML can do the same thing if the XML parser is included in the OS as a standard piece without the problems of these custom binary databases.
The ODM is one direction that I would hate to see Linux take, even if that means we never get on Big Blue as an Enterprise OS.
I might also point out that there are already several laws on the books which prohibit destruction of school property, in addition to regulations of the school. We do not need a federal law to protect schools; "evil hackers" already are subject to prosecution. If they cross state lines, they may even be subject to prosecution in *two* states. There is no reason for the Federal government to become involved, even on an interstate level.
This covers a key point.
If you haven't read Bruce Sterling's The Hacker Crackdown you might want to. One of the INTELLIGENT (or maybe aware is a better word) law enforcement officers interviewd described his first cracker case.
A bank had been cracked. Initially he didn't understand what was going on until someone used the phrase "someone broke into our computer".
Once that occurred the cop had a context and both got his man and made sense of cracking by understanding that cyberspace (or whatever word you'd like to use) is a SPACE and applying space related laws.
A school's website is a school's sign/office in cyberspace. You can't spraypaint your schools sign or office legally because that's vandalism. The same law should just be directly applied. You can't harass a teacher (or anyone else) with crank calls and the same should apply to Instant Messaging. Continue as needed.
The end result makes lot of sense because once you start mapping physical space to computer space you have guidelines. Everyone emailing homework isn't illegal because it slows the network because it is the same as everyone rushing in at the end of the day to turn something in. A failled login just turns into pulling on a door you didn't know was locked and then stopped when you figured it out.
We have all the laws we need, except maybe one that maps cyberspace to real space as a legal concept.
Concerning the military sector, we have at least the geneva convention.
We also have the 1928 League of Nations treaty outlawing war whose major signatories were all at war within 15 years.
War is a habit...I am not appaulling it, I am merely pointing out a fact.
Chemical weaponry knocks you dead to, nonetheless the use is prohibited. Even the Nazis obeyed at least this rule as they did not use them in war (Hitler ordered the use of them, but the order was disobeyed)
But it is quite possible the Japanese didn't. Arguably the US did it in Vietnam (was Agent Orange banded chemical warfare or was it legal?), Iraq certainly hasn't. The Warsaw Pact routinely trained for it and had it carefully integrated into their breakthough doctrines.
I would argue that the real reason Germany didn't use it in WWII is they lacked effective countermeasures to protect their own troops and thus its value was much less than its risk. It was this issue that had created problems with the usage of gas from Ypres on in WWI.
With infantry in an explotation role mounted, effective suits for unmounted infantry securing an area, and positive pressure filtering systems on vechiles have made gas much more effective.
Expect to see it used to break a statemate in a conventional war with 20 years.
Not by the US or the western nations...probably not by Japan or even Russia, but by some minor power whose leadership worries less about public outcry and more about victory.
Saddly the same is probably true for tac nukes. My bet is tac nukes get used first, actually, during the next India/Pakistan War. Herb
This would be bad, occasionally these things crash.
Why is that bad?
Nuclear weapons have to be set off intentionally...you don't just drop it and have it go off like a cheap pistol. Trust me, the US military alone has "tried" this a lot.
In fact, US weapons are specifically designed NOT to do this. The detonating explosives require specific timing to get the correct denisty/surface area ratio to get the uncontrolled chain reaction. The signalling wires are designed so that relatively small errors in the wire length will prevent correct detonation timing. And if it doesn't explode then we have roughly the same dangers as other radioactives going into orbit, which has nothing to do with militarization of space. Herb
With the Internet, we will be able to distribute the knowledge of how to produce. This will eliminate the challenges associated with distribution, so there will be no money to be made there.
Really...
How does this make distribution costs not an issue for wheat in the Sarhara or fresh water in Southern California? What about steel in Florida or plastics in Peru?
While it might be possible to make anything anywhere you still need the requisite raw materials. Even if tech can perfect alchemical transformations which method costs less energy: transformation or transportation?
Technology can make physical things cheaper...I doubt it can ever make them free.
Herb
But the plan also touches many raw nerves, most obviously among those who object to the militarisation of space
I have to wonder if these people ever paid attention.
Have they heard of Blue Gemini? Are they aware that half of Salyut series of Soviet space station were military? That both the US and Russian have mature anti-satillite technology (and probably the ESA and China as well)? That both the US and USSR had designs for orbital nuclear platforms? That the USSR's platforms re-entry vehicles may have been tesed (mixed reporting on that one still)?
Space is militarized and will continue to be. Why, because war is humanity's racial bad habit. I fail to understand why bombing someone with a suborbital bomber is somehow worse than doing it with a B-2, a B-1, an F-117, an F/A-18, or even a 155mm or 203mm artillery piece.
All will knock down your house and leave you dead.
Want to hate war, good for you...coming from a long line of soldiers I'm not a big fan either (we tend to die a lot)...but to decry this plan as militarizing space is to ignore current reality, history, and human nature.
A royalty based system, if one could design a good one, appears to me to be far superior.
With the possible exception of a schedule of fees and enforced licensing, how does this differ from patents?
A patent grants exclusive usage to the holder for 20 years (renewable once). That usage can either be direct (I build a product using the patent myself) or indirect (I grant you a license to use the patent). If I license the patent, I have to pay you a fee that you set. How is that not a royalty system?
The only difference I can see would be instead of me negotiating each license separately is a royalty system would bundle a fee schedule with the patent and once the check clears you have a license, instead of now where I can grant or refuse at will and grant two licenses for different prices.
While that might seem nice, such a flat fee might do more harm than good, if patent licensing is similar to trademark licensing (not sure if it is, mind you) because there the price changes depending on the product. Multiple application patents with flat fees would risk being underpriced for some uses or priced out of others.
Take a look at "Second Treatise on Government" - Locke describes private property to be that which one has put work into.
That why doesn't IP be measured the same way?
If I write a computer program or a novel I have certainly put work into it. This certainly would still allow reverse engineering, because you can take a set of inputs and outputs and find a way to make the later from the former, but protects the original from direct copying. Herb
I don't see how you're comparing PP to IP, all I see is how you say that they're distinct because there's no unit cost for IP.
I was pointing out two things and probably did neither well:
1. That claiming IP is different because you use other IP as your foundation is pretty much true about PP as well. The difference is when I incorporate elements of PP in new PP, the old PP is lost to some degree. Turning sheet metal into a car body certainly is the creation of new PP, a car, but it consumes old PP, the sheet metal. Using the plot of King Lear to write a modern fantasy novel does not make it impossilbe to read King Lear. That is the difference in new property being built on old property.
2. That IP in the past was treated pretty much as PP because the means of transmitting it was definately governed by physical limitations. To hear music required either direct attendance at a performance or have someone provide a hard to duplicate well recording. As modern transmission and storage technologies grew this IP as PP situation began to die off. However, the law is designed to use these now gone technology limitations as a primary enforcement mechanism. Herb
Any 'intellectual property physical property' comparison is a troll. IP can be copied and still exists for the original creator, physical property can't be magically duplicated. Until you adress that issue you're just adding to the N side of the S/N ratio.
Your IP is based on the collective history of the world. Where would be be if Shakespeare had the courts uphold a broad copyright on the idea of a tragedy, and his heirs sued people for creating derivative works? What if Calculus was patented and mathmeticians were sued for using it?
That's the kind of bullshit you're arguing for. Your IP is not an island. It exists on the foundation of other works, you don't deserve a universal monopoly on your ideas anymore than everyone your derivative life (and everyone else's) is based on deserve royalties when you do something that's unoriginal.
Perhaps but you make one mistake in rejecting the comparison of PP to IP on source grounds (not copying grounds) in some simple way:
Outside of land most PP rests on other people's PP that has been exchanged.
How is that you ask? Well, let us take those mythical cookies: you needed flour, sugar, etc. Unless you are VERY self-sufficient some of those items were someone else's property. You obtained that property and made it your own and made it the basis for your cookies. In this case your usage consumes the full value of the property in the sense that the property owner cannot reuse it. IP has the advantage of perpetual reuse (in a general sense, there are exceptions). Because of that the costs of using IP to create derivitive works are much lower without some kind of legal structure (copyright).
That is where the real difference exists, not in its dependance on the work of others but that new IP can be created from old IP without consuming it. No one would claim your car goes public domain after X years because doing so removes it completely from your use. Yet even if my music goes public domain I can still listen to it or play it and thus maintain use.
Historically we have been able to insure that at least some users pay the creator because the costs of creating a copy were high. Modern publishing is built on this fact (see notes below about publishing) where the publisher pays the creator and creates copies for a fee.
Thus, we run into the current problem with IP in general that the OSS movement has most closely addressed: If production costs after the first one are almost nil how much should we charge for it and how should we assess that charge?
We could charge the first user the full cost and after that everyone could get it for free. This is the simplest system and is somewhat describes how publishing works, especially music publishing (not in the lawyer's mind, but in practical terms). A publisher buys the material from the creater and gives it to you for free, but charges you for physical media (Napster is simply the end product of confusing selling physical media and selling IP). The downside is it gives no one the incentive to be first Publishing worked until the mid-90s because quality media was too expensive for you to make from a transient form such as a computer file. Now that you can generate high quality, transportable versions of music the music publishing industry will change (even if they fight real hard...the law cannot long stop reality).
We could give it away for free and accept donations. This is used very successfully for performing arts from street musicians to lounge players with a tip jar. It has also worked okay in the Windows/DOS world as shareware. I will not even harzard to guess if this is practical as long term solution. I would point out that the donations are not necessarily directly money. Creating promient and successful OSS has led to some people getting jobs and minor participation has probably been used as resume bullets.
We could make the first X users pay and then make it free. This is in theory current copyright law, although the extensions have moved closer to the fears raised in the article above. Basically, the idea behind copyright and patent was you could charge for others to use your IP for a certain number of years and after that it was free. The more compelling the IP the more users in the those years and hence better pay for better quality (in a rough way).
What we can no longer do is confuse IP with the PP used to transmit it.
Several posts here on this and other space topics have links to space advocay organizations.
The industrialized world represents a population of at least 700 million (quick almanac work, but I missed some countries). Let us assume that 1 in 10,000 could be a serious space enthusist willing to invest some small amount into a private space program. This gives a base of 70,000 people.
A quick scan of the news stories indicates serious work would require a budget of between $200M US and $500M US (the later is the total budget of NASA SLT, which appears to fund several projects).
Quick math then:
500,000,000/(700,000,000/10,000) = $7000 (rounded to one sig fig) at the top and $1400 at the low end.
That is a lot to get people to put out year after year, but: The Boston Ballet has over a thousand members giving $1000 this year above their ticket costs. It has over a hundred paying more than $10,000 and a handful (complete nubmers later when I get my most recent program) who have committed to $30,000+ over 3 or more years. This are all individuals or families. That is in one city in the US. Extend it to the Industralized world and you have a lot of money even if we do a tenth as well.
Not everyone would contribut that much, but as a rough model let us try:
Membership of 70,000 world wide:
Half give at a basic level of $75 US (cost of skipping going to MickeyD's once a month). For each ramp up by 1000% we get half the remaining members until we get to $10,000 then split half between that and twice that.
35,000 at $75/US for $2,625,000
17,500 at $750/US for $13,125,000
8,750 at $7500/US for $65,625,000
8,750 at $15,000/US for $131,250,000
Total $212,625,000 which allowing for 5% organizational overhead meets our floor budget.
What if a core group founded a non-profit whose sole purpose was manned access to space, but whose primary method was not advocacy but research? If done right it could be considered a charity for foundation and tax purposes (which helps in some gifts). It might take three or four years to do enough to have seed money for the first investment, but why not.
If we want to go to space, why not just pay for it ourselves. What we would need is 12 years of fundraising at the above levels (with inflation covered), two to get seeded (to get space and contracts for parts and such) and ten more to fund.
Personally, I feel that at the end of the day, most "liberals" want the same thing "conservatives" want, good food, good love, and good entertainment. It's just that the politics and the path we choose get in the way of the end.
I wish more people would realize this. Last election I was a party poll worker for the first time. I stood all day handing out GOP literature outside (in a very liberal precint, in a liberal town, in a liberal state) and then watched the recording of the machine counts (we used the levered machines...very nice...impossible to overvote and damned near impossible to undervote).
There were rotating Dems and an all day Green. When introduced ourselves the running joke was 'I will be your opponent for the day'. And then we argued all day, covered each other in our coffee runs, and generally had a pleasant day.
And we all knew although we differ in how to get there we generally wanted the same things out of life (although it was a bit of a revelation to our Green friend).
The authors work deals with the vast number of statements that are true or un-true, but for which no 'proof' can ever be discovered. They are simply true by random chance.
This seems to be, in the end, a fairly straight line conclusion from Godel (and actually fits how I try to explain Godel to non-math people).
Think of it this way: Godel tells me a single proof cannot encompass the system because there are undefined statements. Even if I add them one by one to the system as axioms I never finish. Why, because my 'new' system also suffers from this limitation.
If you define vast then simply take the system of choice and keep adding axioms...eventually you will have a vast list of unknowable (relative to the first system) statements and meet your explanation.
Slashdot Mirror
I doubt Gary said it when he saw the first copy of the brown box come from the printer, but he could have.
He wasn't the only one to create RPGs. Arguably they'd existed for a bit in the miniatures community in various half-finished states, such as ruler driven campaigns. But he was the one with the vision to write it all down and say "let's do it this way", combining all those ideas into one coherent work (even if the text didn't quite convey that coherence).
And with that text he made us all creators of world.
Yesterday a friend and I were exchanging emails on gaming and concluded that tabletop RPGs are one of the most accessible forms of creativity in the modern world.
I can't thank him enough for that gift. All I can do is pass it on.
I'm digusted that you can justify using time to post on /. that could be used cooking for those hungry children and using money that could go to feeding them to buy net time to post on /. and using electricity that could be used to cook food for them to post on /.
Or does your luxury (time on the computer) somehow not have to follow the same rules as the luxury of some collector?
Thank $diety someone else realizes who wrote this...I have long thought it a very bad cosmic joke that one of the best underappreciated writers of the Golden Age (Leigh Brackett) finally had something that meet great popular aclaim in her last work and then never got remembered for it.
So companies can require people to perform jobs that are injurous to them? I know the Libertarian readers will probably just respond by saying, "Get a job that's not on an assembly line", but then they probably have sufficient education and wealth that they can actually get other kinds of work.
Isn't OSHA supposed to step in somewhere? Do companies actually not realize that it's in their interest to attempt to ensure that their workers' jobs can be performed without injuring them?
This is NOT the Court saying Toyota can require her to do something injurous to herself. It is the Court saying Toyota does not have to redesign a job that has not be found unsafe by OSHA so that it is not painful or aggrevating for her. That is a big difference.
You ask where OSHA is? Trust me, this is the auto injury and OSHA is there, probably with an inspector on the shop floor. OSHA has probility had this job redesigned several times to be safe for the average person. The average person does not have CTS so OSHA safety requirements don't apply.
She argued that her CTS was bad enough that it qualified as a disability under the ADA. If she had won than Toyota could have been required to make reasonable (as defined by the court) accomodations, but even then it would not be absolute (otherwise a blind person could sue if not hired as a paint color match tester for example and the employer would have to find a way to make it work).
The CTS defines a disability as interfering with major life activities of the average person. While making a living qualifies, making a living as a paint inspector does not. Why? Because while the average person does have a job, they do not have a job as a paint inspector.
Proponents do discuss both. But chance is as important as consequences. Look at it this way:
- Method A has a death rate of 1000 per accident and a 0.01% accident per unit of production. Result over time: 10 deaths per unit of production.
- Method B has a death rate of 10 per accident and a 1% accident per unit of production. Result over time: 10 deaths per unit of production.
Now you would automatically eschew Method A because it causes more deaths, but over time they are the same. This is the reason why air travel is safer than car travel, but appears not to be. An airplane crashes and hundreds dies. A car crashes and a couple die, but more cars crash than planes.Nuclear power has the same problem plus the added bonus of fear. Quick, which exposed people who lived five miles from the Japanese accident you mentioned to more radiation: their most recent medical X-ray or the accident? Yet this is far and away the worst accident in a modern, industrialized nation, slightly edging out TMI (TMI had no immediate deaths, Tokaimura did). Only one other accident (excepting Chernobyl, about which see below) has caused immediate death: SL-1 in the US. This despite the fact that several nations get signficant amounts of power from nuclear power.
The Chernobyl accident is the worst case you can show and it is not a very good anti-nuclear case for two reasons:
- Causes
- Effects
Let's look at causes: While the trigger was a human error the reasons it were so bad are all DESIGN issues that were possible only in an enviroment like the old USSR:- There was no containment beyond the piping. Unlike western reactors which are first put in reinforced concrete building and the use an multi-layered containment system to separate fuel from coolant Chernobyl was in basically a sheet metal shed and ran individual pipes over individual fuel rods.
- Chernobyl was designed such that loss of coolant increased reactor power. Western reactors use coolant that aids reaction (ie, is a moderator) so if it is lost the reactor begins to shutdown, leaving residual heat to be delt with. Because of design the water cooling Chernobyl retarded reactions and a loss of coolant sped up the plant.
- Chernobyl's control systems required both computer control at all times, were not passively regulating (ie, things like loss of power to the plant drops the rods and such), and were such that the reactor had to increase reaction rate during shutdown.
To give a comparison imagine building a car that when faster before slowing when you hit the brakes, had independent for acceleration, steering, and braking on each wheel, and the passenger front controls were done automatically by computer in response to your actions on the other three. How long would it be before you crashed? And when you crashed you had just an open frame and no seat belt. Would that be enough to get rid of cars?As to effects, Kiev is habitable and if you find me a job I'll be happy to move there. Correct action can minimize the effects of an accident in the immediate term, it is possible to decon much of the exposure, andrelatively short amounts of time are required for decomposition of the most dangerous radioactives (on the order of 30 years, not 12,000). The longer lived radioactives are less radioactive per unit by definition (higher radioactivity means more decays per unit time so the half life must be shorter) and generally are less dangerous when external, being dangerous when ingested. While clearing topsoil is not picnic it is arguably easier than the cleanup of an oil spill because it is easier to use large machinery to match the scale.
What this means is that consequences, while worse, are not irreversible and can, depending on management of the technologies can result in less consequences over a given time period than competing ones even if the individual events are worse.
The real benefits of the pure IBM solution are going to be in one (well two) main area: financial and insurance companies using IBM big iron.
That's what my company has. While normally I would have fought for JBoss/Tomcat for our Ebusiness the Websphere application setup just adds too many useful things to integrate into our legacy systems. One thing is the ability to roll IMS transactions into a bundle with DB2 and Oracle transactions as a single supertransaction. To understand how powerful this is, if IMS transaction two requires transaction one to commit before running and Oracle transaction A requires IMS one/two to commit running you can still run all three and then rollback ALL of them when the last one fails (if you're wondering why they weren't written that way, remember these were written for step by step 3270 usage, not one webform). That alone makes paying for Websphere worthwhile for IBM big iron shops.
Those who use a server network and RDMS for the majority of their processing, though, are better off with JBoss (usually).
10. Listen to Spinner's channels. I can say, without any irony, that some of their channels play tons of current music you'll never hear on commerical radio, although you'll be genre restricted by the channels you choose (that doesn't bother me...I found 9&10 based on the fact that finding gothic and industrial music radio ain't easy).
11. Borrow your friend's CD or listen to it at his place if you want to verify his recommendation.
While I agree that downloaded music is a great marketing tool and that I used Napster for it I cannot help shake the feeling that a majority of the people I've encountered who argue for it aren't try before you buy, but just "free swag" type. YMMV.
If you weren't interested in paying for it, why did you download it?
Is your answer "oh, well at free it's worth having"...well, it isn't being offered for free...it was being offered for a price you didn't like. Just because it's not physical property doesn't mean you aren't imposing costs by just taking it.
I dislike the RIAA and the big six as much as anyone who isn't a musician himself, mainly 'cause I see what my musician friends go through. But attitudes like yours actually boost the RIAA in the end.
"Why?" you ask. Simple, regardless of how music is recorded and sold it costs money. Now, let's look at an artist who wants to use the Internet to distribute his music without a major label/distributor involved. He sets up a website with paid downloads, say a dollar song and $8 for his 10 song CD (a 20% discount). All of that costs money and he based his prices on his expected sales (based on the turnout at shows and the size of his mailing list) so that it covers his recording and hosting costs and he makes minimum wage on the 100 hours he invested in this album if he gets expected sales.
Now you're on the band's list and like them but say "$8 is too much" so you just download it off a file service. Enough people do that so he only gets half the sales he expected and loses money. A couple of releases like that and the new business model breaks down.
There are a lot of reasons to like electronic distribute and such but in the end "Downloading it for free because it's too expensive" isn't one. It's just a rationalization for being cheap.
Wow, finally someone came up with a reasonable response. Each at least addresses the real issues that make patents attractive for encouraging drug research. In fact I think one would work very well.
That one is your second option which is a close relative to the patent, but without the ability to restrict licensing.
While the other two are interesting I would need to think about them somemore. The key problem is that while they address paying the testing costs of drugs that make the market those are only a fraction of the drugs that entering testing.
The sad fact is the current system requires companies to make blockbusters to recoop other costs (those huge marketing costs others cite in large part drug companies trying to make sows ears into blockbusters are increasing blockbusters) from failed drugs.
Perhaps the best idea would be to modify one of your ideas. I think government funded research is a poor second choice because it will often lack urgency that greed provides and that gave us, among other things, powerful AIDS drugs in a little over a decade of work.
However, what if we had the government do all the testing either on a first come, first serve, a bid basis (we'll pay x%), or maybe a profit percentage (similar to bid). Maybe charge the companies for testing for drugs that are licensed, cutting the researching company a break (to discourage all drug companies moving to a no research model) or an annual license fee (similar to a permenant government patent) until the drug is amoritized. Then the taxpayer only absorbs the costs for drugs the government won't let on the market, but companies pay for any drugs they can make a profit on.
I think here the problem is they mean one thing when they say R&D and you hear another R&D.
As I pointed out above the real R&D cost for drugs is not in research as you seem to mean: isolating chemicals, testing initial effectiveness, but in development: mass production, human toxicity, and, most importantly, FDA approval.
In general university researchers do much less pharma research in those areas than drug companies (when was the last time UConn got approval for a drug). Those costs, which are often incured for a drug that will never see approval for various reasons, are the real R&D costs.
Unfortunately, drug company PR flacks just use lumped costs when explaining this instead of breaking it down (talk to the people on the clinical side of R&D of a drug company to get a better picture) thus leading to said confusion.
And I hope you remember this attitude when you or yours gets whatever the next big plague is. Governments make lots of demands, expensive demands, on drug companies that knock off a lot of promising drugs before they get to market (not just because of side effects...if you are working on drug X and your competitor gets drug Y approved that is just as effective as drug X against the target disease before you get X approved all R&D on X is now gone...the FDA will only approve drugs that are more effective in some way (fewer side effects, fewer non-response, treat worse cases, etc) than existing drugs and make even the ones that are released a very long term and expensive proposition.
Those tests and hoops are not jumped through by faceless corporations, but by people just like you...people who spent a lot of time in school working to understand the underlying science or getting medical training or mastering statistics and who, like you, want to be paid. Even a non-profit drug company would face huge costs and the legal need for companies to make a profit (fiducary responsibility) only increase them. Thus, if the producers of AIDS drugs have to face confescation of those drugs by countries without compensation when the plague after AIDS shows up how many drug companies will spend the money.
Right now there are tons of 'safe' profits in drugs for male impotency, better contriceptives, hair loss, weight loss, allergies, and so on. All of these will sell well in rich countries where the government will not infringe on patents thus risking the R&D costs never being repaid on both successful and unsuccessful drugs. Facing a choice between those and working on the next AIDS knowing poorer countries will just up and take your results with no compensation.
As it is, these AIDS drugs really exist because of AIDS being a big disease in the first world. Until the past few years malaria was the biggest killer in Africa and had been for a centuary or more, but there is little advance in malaria drugs. Why? Because the first world ended it with DDT before deciding DDT was too dangerous to use (before massive usage of DDT to wipe out malaria carrying mosquitos malaria was a common problem in even the US, including Washington DC). With this Pfizer, Roche, Brystol-Myers-Squib and the others must be asking "will this happen with a malaria vaccine, too". And they will ask the next time a drug is ravaging the third world.
And if you or yours gets that disease how will your attitude on AIDS have helped you?
There are other methods to solve this: charity, loans, limited licsencing, and many more. Just blowing the patent is not. Yet the former could have set a positive framework for the next plague. Now we have set a negative one.
Really?
I would love to hear how. Outside of the government being the only source of R&D I fail to see how it would work in the drug industry.
The standard arguement against patents is it is cheaper for me to just buy it from you than to figure out how to make it. The time to re-engineer is enough to recoup initial costs and be competitive. An inventor who does not patent does not have to open his design to the public leaving any potential competitors to complete re-engineering.
For many industries this is arguably true. Reverse engineering complex machinery (both physical and virtual) takes time and money that are often better spent on leap-frogging ahead instead of just catching up.
However, a drug is, in the end, a chemical. Once isolated and make into a medicinal form it is relatively simple to identify it. That is assuming that you need to.
You don't, however, because the chemical and lots of stuff about it are public record and would be even if there was no patent. Why? FDA testing.
The real R&D cost of drugs is not research (identifying) but development, specifically all the human and clinical testing needed. This is not a simple or short process and extends from an experimenters first idea to full scale drug tests.
FDA regs require specific notekeeping requirements in the labs while isolating and synthesizing(see any good book on technical writing for an outine, if it does not have an experimental notebook procedures appendex or it is not a good one). This process continues throughout the process.
Human trials are not just X people with the target disease. The first step is dose a healthy volunteer and take vitals and blood work after 15 minutes. Then an hour. Then a day later. Then try a new dose. Months or years of these human toxicity tests preceed double blind testing for affectiveness.
At each step the drug can fail thus wasting all money to that point.
Thus isolating the drug, which is the effort a copycat does, is the least part of drug costs. The patent is there to repay these efforts and failed ones on the way.
Does this increase costs to the public during the patent period? Of course, because, as you point out a patent is a monopoly which does not set fair prices in the market sense (markets require multiple independent sellers and buyers to set prices). However, as the market sets fair prices it also weeds out inefficient producers. In a pure market enviroment jumping through the FDA's hoops will always be economically inefficient, thus an intelligent drug company manager will let the other companies do R&D and just copy their efforts.
The problem comes when all drug companies get smart. In these case the patent makes sense because government is granting a limited legal exclusiveness to those who make the expenditures to statisfy a government requirement that is the largest part of the drug price.
If you want to get rid of drug patents I would recommend getting rid of the FDA or require the FDA to pay the costs of testing.
As someone who spent his first year out of school doing RS/6000 setup and admin I agree with all your advantages except one:
The ODM...
As you have noted ODM corruption is a often a fatal event.
It is and very easy to have happen. Our main company machine suffered this death due to a device not getting turned on before boot, but during it.
The ODM is the Windows registry on steroids. While good in theory it is much harder to maintain (as you note), easier to corrupt, and more fatal when it corrupts than flat files. Enterprise hardware should be able to get around most of the problems with flat files (speed of loading and so on) without the problems. The biggest advantage of the ODM and registry are the unified parsing model but XML can do the same thing if the XML parser is included in the OS as a standard piece without the problems of these custom binary databases.
The ODM is one direction that I would hate to see Linux take, even if that means we never get on Big Blue as an Enterprise OS.
This covers a key point.
If you haven't read Bruce Sterling's The Hacker Crackdown you might want to. One of the INTELLIGENT (or maybe aware is a better word) law enforcement officers interviewd described his first cracker case.
A bank had been cracked. Initially he didn't understand what was going on until someone used the phrase "someone broke into our computer".
Once that occurred the cop had a context and both got his man and made sense of cracking by understanding that cyberspace (or whatever word you'd like to use) is a SPACE and applying space related laws.
A school's website is a school's sign/office in cyberspace. You can't spraypaint your schools sign or office legally because that's vandalism. The same law should just be directly applied. You can't harass a teacher (or anyone else) with crank calls and the same should apply to Instant Messaging. Continue as needed.
The end result makes lot of sense because once you start mapping physical space to computer space you have guidelines. Everyone emailing homework isn't illegal because it slows the network because it is the same as everyone rushing in at the end of the day to turn something in. A failled login just turns into pulling on a door you didn't know was locked and then stopped when you figured it out.
We have all the laws we need, except maybe one that maps cyberspace to real space as a legal concept.
Herb
We also have the 1928 League of Nations treaty outlawing war whose major signatories were all at war within 15 years.
War is a habit...I am not appaulling it, I am merely pointing out a fact.
Chemical weaponry knocks you dead to, nonetheless the use is prohibited. Even the Nazis obeyed at least this rule as they did not use them in war (Hitler ordered the use of them, but the order was disobeyed)
But it is quite possible the Japanese didn't. Arguably the US did it in Vietnam (was Agent Orange banded chemical warfare or was it legal?), Iraq certainly hasn't. The Warsaw Pact routinely trained for it and had it carefully integrated into their breakthough doctrines.
I would argue that the real reason Germany didn't use it in WWII is they lacked effective countermeasures to protect their own troops and thus its value was much less than its risk. It was this issue that had created problems with the usage of gas from Ypres on in WWI.
With infantry in an explotation role mounted, effective suits for unmounted infantry securing an area, and positive pressure filtering systems on vechiles have made gas much more effective.
Expect to see it used to break a statemate in a conventional war with 20 years.
Not by the US or the western nations...probably not by Japan or even Russia, but by some minor power whose leadership worries less about public outcry and more about victory.
Saddly the same is probably true for tac nukes. My bet is tac nukes get used first, actually, during the next India/Pakistan War.
Herb
Why is that bad?
Nuclear weapons have to be set off intentionally...you don't just drop it and have it go off like a cheap pistol. Trust me, the US military alone has "tried" this a lot.
In fact, US weapons are specifically designed NOT to do this. The detonating explosives require specific timing to get the correct denisty/surface area ratio to get the uncontrolled chain reaction. The signalling wires are designed so that relatively small errors in the wire length will prevent correct detonation timing. And if it doesn't explode then we have roughly the same dangers as other radioactives going into orbit, which has nothing to do with militarization of space.
Herb
Really...
How does this make distribution costs not an issue for wheat in the Sarhara or fresh water in Southern California? What about steel in Florida or plastics in Peru?
While it might be possible to make anything anywhere you still need the requisite raw materials. Even if tech can perfect alchemical transformations which method costs less energy: transformation or transportation?
Technology can make physical things cheaper...I doubt it can ever make them free.
Herb
I have to wonder if these people ever paid attention.
Have they heard of Blue Gemini? Are they aware that half of Salyut series of Soviet space station were military? That both the US and Russian have mature anti-satillite technology (and probably the ESA and China as well)? That both the US and USSR had designs for orbital nuclear platforms? That the USSR's platforms re-entry vehicles may have been tesed (mixed reporting on that one still)?
Space is militarized and will continue to be. Why, because war is humanity's racial bad habit. I fail to understand why bombing someone with a suborbital bomber is somehow worse than doing it with a B-2, a B-1, an F-117, an F/A-18, or even a 155mm or 203mm artillery piece.
All will knock down your house and leave you dead.
Want to hate war, good for you...coming from a long line of soldiers I'm not a big fan either (we tend to die a lot)...but to decry this plan as militarizing space is to ignore current reality, history, and human nature.
Herb
With the possible exception of a schedule of fees and enforced licensing, how does this differ from patents?
A patent grants exclusive usage to the holder for 20 years (renewable once). That usage can either be direct (I build a product using the patent myself) or indirect (I grant you a license to use the patent). If I license the patent, I have to pay you a fee that you set. How is that not a royalty system?
The only difference I can see would be instead of me negotiating each license separately is a royalty system would bundle a fee schedule with the patent and once the check clears you have a license, instead of now where I can grant or refuse at will and grant two licenses for different prices.
While that might seem nice, such a flat fee might do more harm than good, if patent licensing is similar to trademark licensing (not sure if it is, mind you) because there the price changes depending on the product. Multiple application patents with flat fees would risk being underpriced for some uses or priced out of others.
Herb
That why doesn't IP be measured the same way?
If I write a computer program or a novel I have certainly put work into it. This certainly would still allow reverse engineering, because you can take a set of inputs and outputs and find a way to make the later from the former, but protects the original from direct copying.
Herb
I don't see how you're comparing PP to IP, all I see is how you say that they're distinct because there's no unit cost for IP. I was pointing out two things and probably did neither well: 1. That claiming IP is different because you use other IP as your foundation is pretty much true about PP as well. The difference is when I incorporate elements of PP in new PP, the old PP is lost to some degree. Turning sheet metal into a car body certainly is the creation of new PP, a car, but it consumes old PP, the sheet metal. Using the plot of King Lear to write a modern fantasy novel does not make it impossilbe to read King Lear. That is the difference in new property being built on old property. 2. That IP in the past was treated pretty much as PP because the means of transmitting it was definately governed by physical limitations. To hear music required either direct attendance at a performance or have someone provide a hard to duplicate well recording. As modern transmission and storage technologies grew this IP as PP situation began to die off. However, the law is designed to use these now gone technology limitations as a primary enforcement mechanism.
Herb
Your IP is based on the collective history of the world. Where would be be if Shakespeare had the courts uphold a broad copyright on the idea of a tragedy, and his heirs sued people for creating derivative works? What if Calculus was patented and mathmeticians were sued for using it?
That's the kind of bullshit you're arguing for. Your IP is not an island. It exists on the foundation of other works, you don't deserve a universal monopoly on your ideas anymore than everyone your derivative life (and everyone else's) is based on deserve royalties when you do something that's unoriginal.
Perhaps but you make one mistake in rejecting the comparison of PP to IP on source grounds (not copying grounds) in some simple way:
Outside of land most PP rests on other people's PP that has been exchanged.
How is that you ask? Well, let us take those mythical cookies: you needed flour, sugar, etc. Unless you are VERY self-sufficient some of those items were someone else's property. You obtained that property and made it your own and made it the basis for your cookies. In this case your usage consumes the full value of the property in the sense that the property owner cannot reuse it. IP has the advantage of perpetual reuse (in a general sense, there are exceptions). Because of that the costs of using IP to create derivitive works are much lower without some kind of legal structure (copyright).
That is where the real difference exists, not in its dependance on the work of others but that new IP can be created from old IP without consuming it. No one would claim your car goes public domain after X years because doing so removes it completely from your use. Yet even if my music goes public domain I can still listen to it or play it and thus maintain use.
Historically we have been able to insure that at least some users pay the creator because the costs of creating a copy were high. Modern publishing is built on this fact (see notes below about publishing) where the publisher pays the creator and creates copies for a fee.
Thus, we run into the current problem with IP in general that the OSS movement has most closely addressed: If production costs after the first one are almost nil how much should we charge for it and how should we assess that charge?
What we can no longer do is confuse IP with the PP used to transmit it.
Herb
Several posts here on this and other space topics have links to space advocay organizations.
The industrialized world represents a population of at least 700 million (quick almanac work, but I missed some countries). Let us assume that 1 in 10,000 could be a serious space enthusist willing to invest some small amount into a private space program. This gives a base of 70,000 people.
A quick scan of the news stories indicates serious work would require a budget of between $200M US and $500M US (the later is the total budget of NASA SLT, which appears to fund several projects).
Quick math then:
500,000,000/(700,000,000/10,000) = $7000 (rounded to one sig fig) at the top and $1400 at the low end.
That is a lot to get people to put out year after year, but: The Boston Ballet has over a thousand members giving $1000 this year above their ticket costs. It has over a hundred paying more than $10,000 and a handful (complete nubmers later when I get my most recent program) who have committed to $30,000+ over 3 or more years. This are all individuals or families. That is in one city in the US. Extend it to the Industralized world and you have a lot of money even if we do a tenth as well.
Not everyone would contribut that much, but as a rough model let us try:
Membership of 70,000 world wide:
Half give at a basic level of $75 US (cost of skipping going to MickeyD's once a month). For each ramp up by 1000% we get half the remaining members until we get to $10,000 then split half between that and twice that.
What if a core group founded a non-profit whose sole purpose was manned access to space, but whose primary method was not advocacy but research? If done right it could be considered a charity for foundation and tax purposes (which helps in some gifts). It might take three or four years to do enough to have seed money for the first investment, but why not.
If we want to go to space, why not just pay for it ourselves. What we would need is 12 years of fundraising at the above levels (with inflation covered), two to get seeded (to get space and contracts for parts and such) and ten more to fund.
Anyone want to start an X-Prize non-profit?
Herb
I wish more people would realize this. Last election I was a party poll worker for the first time. I stood all day handing out GOP literature outside (in a very liberal precint, in a liberal town, in a liberal state) and then watched the recording of the machine counts (we used the levered machines...very nice...impossible to overvote and damned near impossible to undervote).
There were rotating Dems and an all day Green. When introduced ourselves the running joke was 'I will be your opponent for the day'. And then we argued all day, covered each other in our coffee runs, and generally had a pleasant day.
And we all knew although we differ in how to get there we generally wanted the same things out of life (although it was a bit of a revelation to our Green friend).
Herb
This seems to be, in the end, a fairly straight line conclusion from Godel (and actually fits how I try to explain Godel to non-math people).
Think of it this way: Godel tells me a single proof cannot encompass the system because there are undefined statements. Even if I add them one by one to the system as axioms I never finish. Why, because my 'new' system also suffers from this limitation.
If you define vast then simply take the system of choice and keep adding axioms...eventually you will have a vast list of unknowable (relative to the first system) statements and meet your explanation.
Herb