A Russian joke said that "After the fall of communism we found out that what American propaganda was saying about communism was true. The problem is, we also found out that what Soviet propaganda was telling us about capitalism was true as well".
It isn't. In Soviet Union copyrights were very limited and they were not intended for companies to profit from them, they were mostly honest "rights of the author", with the emphasis of the right to be credited, and similar rights.
It also didn't have such insane term lengths. In fact, everything that was created in Soviet Union before 1975 is in public domain. And everything that was created elsewhere in the world was public domain in the Soviet Union and is now public domain in Russia.
KiloByte, I am afraid you don't understand microeconomics very well. See, the one thing that free markets do well is equating demand and supply. They are really amazing at it. In a free market economy it's practically impossible to come to a store and have empty shelves. Is it because free market is so insanely great, efficient and productive? No, it is not. It's simply because free market balances supply and demand well, that's all. When a shortage emerges, the prices are increased, the demand drops and soon equals the supply. When there is a surplus, rices drop and the demand usually increases taking care of that surplus. Of course, it's a bit more complicated in reality, but you get the idea.
So, the day the prices were "liberated" in Poland and in the former Soviet Union as well, the stores simply increased their prices, so that the amount of products they could sell at that price became approximately equal to the amount of prodcuts they could buy at that price. Bingo. The prices shot up, the demand dropped, no more empty shelves.
Wasn't it great? Well, no, it wasn't. The reality is that while the empty shelves were gone, the average consumption of all useful products (such as meat, poultry, vegetables, cheese, chocolate, basically everything, which is not a Giffen good) dropped, sometimes several times. Of course, if you were a rich Pole, you were happy, because suddenly money decided whether you can buy food. But if you were an average Pole, you had just became a little bit (or a lot) poorer. Of course, Poland had fortunately solved this problem over the past 15 years, but please don't blame communism for empty shelves, they were just an artefact of trying to make sure every family could buy healthy food for themselves and their children.
Communism was anti-government. According to Marx's theory, when the means of production belong to people (and there is no private property) there is no need in government. Soviet Union was not a communist society yet, so there was government. But that's not an indicator of being communist.
In fact, a powerful government with a high degree of involvement in the economy is actually much closer to fascism (as defined by Mussolini).
Communism was all about the individual. The state, the party, the economy were supposed to cease to exist, what would we be concerned with, if not the individual?
Quoth the Soviet Constitution:
Article 15. The supreme goal of social production under socialism is the fullest possible satisfaction of the people's growing material, and cultural and intellectual requirements.
Article 20. In accordance with the communist ideal--"The free development of each is the condition of the free development of all"--the state pursues the aim of giving citizens more and more real opportunities to apply their creative energies, abilities, and talents, and to develop their personalities in every way.
Article 27. The state concerns itself with protecting, augmenting and making extensive use of society's cultural wealth for the moral and aesthetic education of the Soviet people, for raising their cultural level. In the USSR development of the professional, amateur and folk arts is encouraged in every way.
This wasn't just a formal document, that's the supreme law of the country and it was built according to that law. "Free development of each" was not just an empty slogan, it really was the guiding principle of the society development, with hundreds of Houses of Culture and Palaces of Culture opening their doors to everyone all over the country. Whatever drawbacks the Soviet system had, I am sure that noone in the USSR would sue a 12 year old girl for sharing an MP3 or sue a student for recharging his laptop using a public power outlet.
So I'd say that Creative Commons is certainly much closer to communism than to capitalism. And they should be proud of it.
P.S. First reply saying that the girl would get jail for sharing a politically sensitive MP3 gets an -1: Troll.
Gates says: "We can make sure the software cost is never really holding things back--that it's a small-enough percentage." He is not meaning to collect 100$ for a copy of Windows with every computer sold, but you can be damn sure he is meaning to collect something with every computer sold. I bet if you offered MS a 10 year monopoly on operating system, it would agree to guarantee that the price would not exceed 5$ per copy. These guys are insane.
Similarly, the incentive for Gates is not the money, may be it was in the past, but now the incentive is clearly the power and the control, world domination, in other words. Scary guy.
This depends on the culture. In some countries it would be expected that when coming to a house to clean the pool, mown the lawn, etc., you are entitled to using the bathroom for free. In other countries it would be expected that the person can drink some soda from the fridge if he's thirsty. It depends on what are the social norms.
In the United States it just so happens that the majority of people using portable devices think it's ok to use power outlets and the majority of various establishments think that it's ok. Everyone who disagrees and thinks it's stealing should STFU because they are a minority. If you don't want me to use your electricity, cover the outlets or put a sign. If you don't and then start complaining, I will kick you in the nuts for being an annoying moron.
If I am coming to a night club, and pay them perfectly good money for drinks, while watching striptease or a table dancer, it's the responsibility of the establishment (including the girls themselves and the security) to make it clear to me that free sex is not included.
It's not like we are talking about people just breaking into private apartments and charging their laptops there.
This is bullshit. I don't ask explicit permission to use napkins, sugar or salt, I don't ask explicit permission to use toilet paper. It's just that salt and toilet paper was used for decades and everyone expects the restaurant patrons to use them. Electrical outlets were not used before as we didn't have the portables, but fortunately the outlets themselves were available.
Almost everyone realises that your customers should be allowed to use the outlets (except that one bitch waitress). Almost every customer realises that (even though it wasn't common 10 years ago) now you have the implicit right to get electricity from the restaurant. It's still not as obvious and rarely do establishments provide the outlets specifically for the clients, but overall it's pretty safe to say that there is already a consensus - you have the right to use electrical power in a restaurant (or anywhere else). Just like filling a bottle with water in the bathroom (when you need it for a long car trip or something).
It's called common sense and basic decency. Humans are able to live together without signing a contract everytime they need to pass gas or charge a cellphone.
The only thing it proves is you can't realy on Slashdot moderation. Your comment is wrong, as an AC pointed out. DWBT didn't realise that you were completely wrong, but gave a clarification anyway.
The correct explanation of what the theorem was is that every sufficiently strong logical system (number theory is sufficiently strong, linear algebra isn't) either contains true proposition that can't be proved inside the theory or is inconsistant so you can prove both the statement and its negative.
Soviet Union has never placed dictators in other countries. How could it if the whole point was to support popular revolutions of the proletariat? Yes, often those revolutions ended up with a dictator in power. And often the USSR supported an existing dictator if he promised to move towards communism. But I don't recall the USSR doing anything like the US did with Saddam or Taliban. It never supported militant groups or rogue countries just to piss off the US.
Slate says you can't add more file types to search in MSN Desktop Search. While this is mostly true - this function is absent from the program, you can change a few registry entries and it would start searching more types. Obviously, it can't index files with complex file formats, because it wouldn't know how to extract meaningful data, but you can add the ASCII- and XML-based filetypes (their extensions) to RSSearch folder in registry and it would mostly work (at least it does for me). You need to check out how it's done with existing extensions - you specify the handler (MS Office, XML, text) for the filetype.
You can also use registry to specify where to store the index. By default it is stored in Documents and Settings (a user directory), just search and replace all occurences of certain path strings (smth like "Application Data\\Blah-blah-blah) with your preferred path.
Well, MSN Desktop search doesn't include spyware, doesn't send any information to MS (though you can opt-in to send performance statistics to them), doesn't show ads or charge money. The only problem it's still not perfect and comes without a source. Still, no reason to attack these companies.
Re:I think I've seen this some where before....
on
Reinventing the Wheel
·
· Score: 1
I doubt that a division of French corporation would get a technology from NASA.
Well, that paper was quite an eye-opener for me. I would never imagine that playing a game in another language can help you learn it... What next - watching foreign movies with subtitles can help learn a new language?
On a more serious note, we can only hope that these obvious ideas would reach the teachers and school administrators. Teaching language with the Sims game is a great idea. Add to that a few different games and you can teach the students most of the vocabulary they would ever need. Personally I learned a lot of English playing Civilization (and English games in general) and can vouch for the effectiveness of this method.
The public wants to see blockbuster movies with familiar actors. That's why studios make such movies (after all, they have to provide what the customer wants). Since they all target the same audience, they need to promote the films like hell. Since they promote these films like hell, people are only exposed to information (ads) about blockbuster films, so they only to to theatres to see them. So the movie theatres mostly carry blockbusters. The vicious circle continues.
You don't understand. This may not fly initially, but the content distributors are interesting in resolving all DRM problems eventually. It may cause problems at first, but they will fix them (or at least do their best). The big problem is not when DRM doesn't work, but when it does.
He is not devoid of "good marketing", which is serving the needs of the people while getting paid for that. But he is devoid of "bad marketing", which is trying to control what everyone can do with your product and sending C&Ds and DMCA notices to everyone who does anything not officially sanctioned.
Personally I am willing to accept a very different and somewhat incompatible office suite. I just want it to feel good, to have useful functions, logical and consistent well thought out interface and all its functions to work as one expects. Of course, a modern word processor should also be powerful for editing large and complex documents (with the power given to the user in a very friendly way). I tried 602 a long time ago, I tried Open Office several times, but MS Office still looks better to me. May be I should learn TeX, but the idea doesn't appear very attractive.
Dimensionality may not be the best choice of words, but mathematically it is correct.
May be most people perceive our colour vision as a spectrum, not an n-dimensional space. Thus when you suggest we add in 370nm 500nm and 630 nm, an average person (not a vision scientist) may think that would improve colour "resolution", that is we would be able to see finer shades of "existing" colours and see some colours outside of the visible spectrum.
Light we see may be a combination of different wavelength light, but I certainly don't see it that way. I see it as either a set of possible colours or a rainbow of colours. Normally I am totally unaware that I have separate receptors for 3 parts of the spectrum, so I don't see it in terms of dimensionality. Of course, once you explain it, it becomes much clearer why 7-dimensional vision is exactly that.
We (the downloaders) are not greedy. We don't want to get too much of anything and we don't mind others having whatever they want. We are the opposite of greedy and the fact that we also don't want to pay for movies doesn't prove anything.
Our point is that we are under no responsibility to support movie companies. They are not our kids, they are not our parents, they are not war veterans. They are corporations and deserve neither our love, nor our pity.
The movies are still going to be made, because the movie industry is still profitable. As long as movies are made even the poor set-builders would get paid. We have no reason to worry, and we do not feel responsible for the well-being of Mr. Eisner and his friends, so there is nothing wrong with downloading a movie.
Absolutely correct. But the solution is obvious - this issue will solve by itself eventually. It's simple - in the long-term (20 years) most movies will be generated on computers in real-time by an AI program based on a simple script idea. Meanwhile the struggle will continue, but no side will be able to achieve a total victory. The ever more expensive movies will be made, they will set new box office record, they will still be stolen weeks before their release despite DRM at every stage and superagents with night vision goggles in every theatre. These leaks will set new records for pirated distributions and most people will be able to get movies for free if they so want.
But evnentually the problem will disappear. Though if you are willing to spend your time and money, it makes sense to support P2P development, to oppose bad legislation, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Or the labour force.
A Russian joke said that "After the fall of communism we found out that what American propaganda was saying about communism was true. The problem is, we also found out that what Soviet propaganda was telling us about capitalism was true as well".
It isn't. In Soviet Union copyrights were very limited and they were not intended for companies to profit from them, they were mostly honest "rights of the author", with the emphasis of the right to be credited, and similar rights.
It also didn't have such insane term lengths. In fact, everything that was created in Soviet Union before 1975 is in public domain. And everything that was created elsewhere in the world was public domain in the Soviet Union and is now public domain in Russia.
KiloByte, I am afraid you don't understand microeconomics very well. See, the one thing that free markets do well is equating demand and supply. They are really amazing at it. In a free market economy it's practically impossible to come to a store and have empty shelves. Is it because free market is so insanely great, efficient and productive? No, it is not. It's simply because free market balances supply and demand well, that's all. When a shortage emerges, the prices are increased, the demand drops and soon equals the supply. When there is a surplus, rices drop and the demand usually increases taking care of that surplus. Of course, it's a bit more complicated in reality, but you get the idea.
So, the day the prices were "liberated" in Poland and in the former Soviet Union as well, the stores simply increased their prices, so that the amount of products they could sell at that price became approximately equal to the amount of prodcuts they could buy at that price. Bingo. The prices shot up, the demand dropped, no more empty shelves.
Wasn't it great? Well, no, it wasn't. The reality is that while the empty shelves were gone, the average consumption of all useful products (such as meat, poultry, vegetables, cheese, chocolate, basically everything, which is not a Giffen good) dropped, sometimes several times. Of course, if you were a rich Pole, you were happy, because suddenly money decided whether you can buy food. But if you were an average Pole, you had just became a little bit (or a lot) poorer. Of course, Poland had fortunately solved this problem over the past 15 years, but please don't blame communism for empty shelves, they were just an artefact of trying to make sure every family could buy healthy food for themselves and their children.
Communism was anti-government. According to Marx's theory, when the means of production belong to people (and there is no private property) there is no need in government. Soviet Union was not a communist society yet, so there was government. But that's not an indicator of being communist.
In fact, a powerful government with a high degree of involvement in the economy is actually much closer to fascism (as defined by Mussolini).
Communism was all about the individual. The state, the party, the economy were supposed to cease to exist, what would we be concerned with, if not the individual?
Quoth the Soviet Constitution:
Article 15. The supreme goal of social production under socialism is the fullest possible satisfaction of the people's growing material, and cultural and intellectual requirements.
Article 20. In accordance with the communist ideal--"The free development of each is the condition of the free development of all"--the state pursues the aim of giving citizens more and more real opportunities to apply their creative energies, abilities, and talents, and to develop their personalities in every way.
Article 27. The state concerns itself with protecting, augmenting and making extensive use of society's cultural wealth for the moral and aesthetic education of the Soviet people, for raising their cultural level. In the USSR development of the professional, amateur and folk arts is encouraged in every way.
This wasn't just a formal document, that's the supreme law of the country and it was built according to that law. "Free development of each" was not just an empty slogan, it really was the guiding principle of the society development, with hundreds of Houses of Culture and Palaces of Culture opening their doors to everyone all over the country. Whatever drawbacks the Soviet system had, I am sure that noone in the USSR would sue a 12 year old girl for sharing an MP3 or sue a student for recharging his laptop using a public power outlet.
So I'd say that Creative Commons is certainly much closer to communism than to capitalism. And they should be proud of it.
P.S. First reply saying that the girl would get jail for sharing a politically sensitive MP3 gets an -1: Troll.
Gates says: "We can make sure the software cost is never really holding things back--that it's a small-enough percentage." He is not meaning to collect 100$ for a copy of Windows with every computer sold, but you can be damn sure he is meaning to collect something with every computer sold. I bet if you offered MS a 10 year monopoly on operating system, it would agree to guarantee that the price would not exceed 5$ per copy. These guys are insane.
Similarly, the incentive for Gates is not the money, may be it was in the past, but now the incentive is clearly the power and the control, world domination, in other words. Scary guy.
This depends on the culture. In some countries it would be expected that when coming to a house to clean the pool, mown the lawn, etc., you are entitled to using the bathroom for free. In other countries it would be expected that the person can drink some soda from the fridge if he's thirsty. It depends on what are the social norms.
In the United States it just so happens that the majority of people using portable devices think it's ok to use power outlets and the majority of various establishments think that it's ok. Everyone who disagrees and thinks it's stealing should STFU because they are a minority. If you don't want me to use your electricity, cover the outlets or put a sign. If you don't and then start complaining, I will kick you in the nuts for being an annoying moron.
If I am coming to a night club, and pay them perfectly good money for drinks, while watching striptease or a table dancer, it's the responsibility of the establishment (including the girls themselves and the security) to make it clear to me that free sex is not included.
It's not like we are talking about people just breaking into private apartments and charging their laptops there.
This is bullshit. I don't ask explicit permission to use napkins, sugar or salt, I don't ask explicit permission to use toilet paper. It's just that salt and toilet paper was used for decades and everyone expects the restaurant patrons to use them. Electrical outlets were not used before as we didn't have the portables, but fortunately the outlets themselves were available.
Almost everyone realises that your customers should be allowed to use the outlets (except that one bitch waitress). Almost every customer realises that (even though it wasn't common 10 years ago) now you have the implicit right to get electricity from the restaurant. It's still not as obvious and rarely do establishments provide the outlets specifically for the clients, but overall it's pretty safe to say that there is already a consensus - you have the right to use electrical power in a restaurant (or anywhere else). Just like filling a bottle with water in the bathroom (when you need it for a long car trip or something).
It's called common sense and basic decency. Humans are able to live together without signing a contract everytime they need to pass gas or charge a cellphone.
The only thing it proves is you can't realy on Slashdot moderation. Your comment is wrong, as an AC pointed out. DWBT didn't realise that you were completely wrong, but gave a clarification anyway.
The correct explanation of what the theorem was is that every sufficiently strong logical system (number theory is sufficiently strong, linear algebra isn't) either contains true proposition that can't be proved inside the theory or is inconsistant so you can prove both the statement and its negative.
Soviet Union has never placed dictators in other countries. How could it if the whole point was to support popular revolutions of the proletariat? Yes, often those revolutions ended up with a dictator in power. And often the USSR supported an existing dictator if he promised to move towards communism. But I don't recall the USSR doing anything like the US did with Saddam or Taliban. It never supported militant groups or rogue countries just to piss off the US.
May be because of whatever crappy CRT/LCD you are watching the article on. I see perfectly blue roses on my OLED display.
Well, you don't need shades of blue, humans can barely discern them anyway. :)
Slate says you can't add more file types to search in MSN Desktop Search. While this is mostly true - this function is absent from the program, you can change a few registry entries and it would start searching more types. Obviously, it can't index files with complex file formats, because it wouldn't know how to extract meaningful data, but you can add the ASCII- and XML-based filetypes (their extensions) to RSSearch folder in registry and it would mostly work (at least it does for me). You need to check out how it's done with existing extensions - you specify the handler (MS Office, XML, text) for the filetype.
You can also use registry to specify where to store the index. By default it is stored in Documents and Settings (a user directory), just search and replace all occurences of certain path strings (smth like "Application Data\\Blah-blah-blah) with your preferred path.
Well, MSN Desktop search doesn't include spyware, doesn't send any information to MS (though you can opt-in to send performance statistics to them), doesn't show ads or charge money. The only problem it's still not perfect and comes without a source. Still, no reason to attack these companies.
I doubt that a division of French corporation would get a technology from NASA.
Well, that paper was quite an eye-opener for me. I would never imagine that playing a game in another language can help you learn it... What next - watching foreign movies with subtitles can help learn a new language?
On a more serious note, we can only hope that these obvious ideas would reach the teachers and school administrators. Teaching language with the Sims game is a great idea. Add to that a few different games and you can teach the students most of the vocabulary they would ever need. Personally I learned a lot of English playing Civilization (and English games in general) and can vouch for the effectiveness of this method.
The public wants to see blockbuster movies with familiar actors. That's why studios make such movies (after all, they have to provide what the customer wants). Since they all target the same audience, they need to promote the films like hell. Since they promote these films like hell, people are only exposed to information (ads) about blockbuster films, so they only to to theatres to see them. So the movie theatres mostly carry blockbusters. The vicious circle continues.
Blame the public, not the studios.
You don't understand. This may not fly initially, but the content distributors are interesting in resolving all DRM problems eventually. It may cause problems at first, but they will fix them (or at least do their best). The big problem is not when DRM doesn't work, but when it does.
He is not devoid of "good marketing", which is serving the needs of the people while getting paid for that. But he is devoid of "bad marketing", which is trying to control what everyone can do with your product and sending C&Ds and DMCA notices to everyone who does anything not officially sanctioned.
Personally I am willing to accept a very different and somewhat incompatible office suite. I just want it to feel good, to have useful functions, logical and consistent well thought out interface and all its functions to work as one expects. Of course, a modern word processor should also be powerful for editing large and complex documents (with the power given to the user in a very friendly way). I tried 602 a long time ago, I tried Open Office several times, but MS Office still looks better to me. May be I should learn TeX, but the idea doesn't appear very attractive.
Dimensionality may not be the best choice of words, but mathematically it is correct.
May be most people perceive our colour vision as a spectrum, not an n-dimensional space. Thus when you suggest we add in 370nm 500nm and 630 nm, an average person (not a vision scientist) may think that would improve colour "resolution", that is we would be able to see finer shades of "existing" colours and see some colours outside of the visible spectrum.
Light we see may be a combination of different wavelength light, but I certainly don't see it that way. I see it as either a set of possible colours or a rainbow of colours. Normally I am totally unaware that I have separate receptors for 3 parts of the spectrum, so I don't see it in terms of dimensionality. Of course, once you explain it, it becomes much clearer why 7-dimensional vision is exactly that.
We (the downloaders) are not greedy. We don't want to get too much of anything and we don't mind others having whatever they want. We are the opposite of greedy and the fact that we also don't want to pay for movies doesn't prove anything.
Our point is that we are under no responsibility to support movie companies. They are not our kids, they are not our parents, they are not war veterans. They are corporations and deserve neither our love, nor our pity.
The movies are still going to be made, because the movie industry is still profitable. As long as movies are made even the poor set-builders would get paid. We have no reason to worry, and we do not feel responsible for the well-being of Mr. Eisner and his friends, so there is nothing wrong with downloading a movie.
Absolutely correct. But the solution is obvious - this issue will solve by itself eventually. It's simple - in the long-term (20 years) most movies will be generated on computers in real-time by an AI program based on a simple script idea. Meanwhile the struggle will continue, but no side will be able to achieve a total victory. The ever more expensive movies will be made, they will set new box office record, they will still be stolen weeks before their release despite DRM at every stage and superagents with night vision goggles in every theatre. These leaks will set new records for pirated distributions and most people will be able to get movies for free if they so want.
But evnentually the problem will disappear. Though if you are willing to spend your time and money, it makes sense to support P2P development, to oppose bad legislation, etc.