1. The point being, strong monetary incentives are not necessary for people to produce quality works (or whatever passes for it) in the music business.
2. So now no books were written prior to 1486? Pfft. Besides, early copyright was (1) laughably poorly enforced, and (2) primarily intended to ensure the accuracy of the text, rather than the profitability of the print shop.
3. It produces works terrible enough that people won't watch them on the terms offered by the market. "People won't pay to see your movie" is not a strong argument of the movie's quality. In any event, my point here was just that I don't care if Hollywood rots. If there's that much demand for its content, someone will fund it somewhere.
So, why don't you see if you can do better? Describe a credible system in which anyone can copy anything without restriction but there is still sufficient incentive for people to produce and share high quality work in the first place, and I'm sure the sceptics like me will be interested in what you have to say.
It's called "not having copyright," and it was good enough to give us Shakespeare and Milton. Really, what's the problem here? Are we worried about musicians? The vast majority of popular musicians would make more money working at a 7-11 than they do during their time on the market under the major labels. Are we worried about books? People have been writing books without copyright for as long as there's been books. The publishing industry is collapsing under its own weight, because of the abundance of free content out there (since the Internet appears to prove that people prefer "free" to "good"). Are we worried about movies?...why? Hollywood comes up with maybe two worthwhile ideas a year. Before I fight you on that one, I'd like to hear your explanation of any system that will actually cause people to produce and share high-quality movies, since it sure isn't happening now.
Really, for someone with a sig protesting the power of the state, you seem awfully chipper about "property" that's been wholly invented by the government.
This is not to say that reductionism is necessarily wrong - it could be the case that if we know everything physical about the world, we will know everything about the world - but it seems less and less likely to those who are not in the "hard sciences".
I think of the issue as: reductionism is right, but useless. Unless we can combine the countless calculations that describe the basic physical properties of some system with enough accuracy and detail to model its emergent behavior, then we cannot develop an improved understanding of that system through reductionist means. (Which incidentally is why strong AI is never going to happen.)
Or, a Monet is just a bunch of dried oily goo on some canvas, but it's much more productive to understand it by looking at it than by precisely describing the goo with equations. And one would need to appeal to an entirely different field (cognitive neuroscience) to explain the psychology of the historical context motivating the artist; and thus the art historian's approach manages to synthesize two enormous scientific fields without even needing any math...
Because (1) the page was originally written by my girlfriend, in my presence (though when I pointed that out I was dismissed as a sock puppet), and (2) the plagiarist also took articles verbatim from the Wall Street Journal and New York Times.
Which even a tiny bit of research on anyone's part would have confirmed, which is funny seeing as how the complaint did not originate from the plagiarist, but from a busybody WP editor who could've been doing something productive.
We're disappointed too. Disappointed, but not surprised. He was the lesser of two evils, and possibly the chance to get some of the young people to pay attention for a few minutes.
I don't know about the writing being better -- it was certainly different, but I've seen plenty of examples of old-style newspaper articles and the like, and they're just as prone to the faults of wordiness, excess, and imprecision as modern writers -- just in a different way.
But yeah, retrofitting is likely possible in many cases (on the other hand, fields like Mayan archaeology have been completely revolutionized since 1911).
The only point I'd make is that even if we have articles about all the important subjects (dubious), that wouldn't mean the project is done, because knowledge keeps expanding and changing. The ability of WP to welcome new editors remains essential to it being a useful and accurate repository of (some defined subset of) human knowledge.
(Don't forget to factor in price. I can't use any that cost anything.)
So your internet connection is free now?
Hey, I use Wikipedia all the time. But I've personally encountered (and had friends encounter) the kind of stuff that grossly reduces its useful content, which coupled with arrogant and high-handed admins, has made me view it with a whole tower of salt.
And the corollary is, a lot more scholarship has happened in a lot of those topics over the last, oh, hundred years, so "it's done" is hardly the case.
My sincere thanks also go out to those who made useful additions to Wikipedia, the 35% of Wikipedians who delete those useful additions for no reason or because they have been plagiarized by other sites and the plagiarism attributed to the original Wikipedia author, and the remaining 62% of Wikipedians who have added to the signal-to-noise ratio.
Well, yes--in this era of instant communications and dilute representation, representatives wouldn't be doing their jobs if they let themselves get swayed by impassioned rhetoric on the floor, instead of basing decisions on the desires (expressed and expected) of their constituents.
Unfortunately, even the will of the represented constituents takes a backseat to politics and fellating moneyed/corporate interests these days (with the greater good of the country being some distant fourth- or fifth-place consideration).
As for the House, the issue there is that parliamentary rules in the House state that whenever there is any sort of conflict, doubt, or decision, you take a vote. Naturally, so long as the House leadership can string the votes together, it is literally against the rules even to debate something (and if the leadership can no longer deliver the votes... well, on minor matters, it doesn't happen, although the ability to lose a vote of confidence is one of the numerous advantages a Parliamentary system has over the American one). That's not a new thing though, I think that goes back to at least the late 19th century.
Part of the problem, in my view, is that districts are too large. Congress would be unmanageable if all districts were represented at a sufficiently granular level -- the Constitution only says that you can't have more than one representative for every 30,000 citizens, but (as a rough approximation, dividing 308 million by 435 reps) the districts now are more like one rep per 700,000. That's just broken. In the First Congress, there were 65 reps with a national population of 3 million (and 60,000 of them were slaves!), with a much-more-manageable one rep per 46,000 (or 37,000 free citizens). But a House of 6700, to achieve the representation levels endorsed by the Framers, would be impossible -- and the only conclusion left is that America is just too big for democracy to function effectively.
retail sales is the only sector like retail sales.
Jeez, not even retail sales works like retail sales any more. Here in New York (on 6th Ave. around 20th st, if you're wondering) directly across the street from each other sit a Container Store and a Bed Bath. The Bed Bath sells goods which are nearly identical to TCS' in many cases, but at prices that are consistently 10-20% lower. But no price war of any kind is going on; The Container Store simply has a higher price point, the end. Both stores seem to be doing fine... it's kind of odd, given that the goods are largely interchangeable, and similar goods could be purchased at Ikea for even less...
That could take up a lot more space, especially when it's a full keyboard being displayed. Not ideal for mobile devices.
Well, right. Then again, typing is not ideal for mobile devices. Sure, you can jerry-rig solutions, but none of them work terribly well. (At least, neither Blackberries nor iPhones seem to have the problem well-solved). Probably the best answer for full-size keyboard stuff for mobile devices is some kind of neutral-hand-position bimanual chording keyboard, but that's expensive and intimidating, and requires a lot of learning on the user's part.
Establish a grid of button surfaces, kind of like pixels, which can be dynamically re-grouped to merge them into larger buttons, and then put the display on that.
So, imagine you had a keyboard with essentially no gaps between the keys, and a screen on top of them. You could make one button out of qwe, one button out of tgyh, etc., while displaying your graphics seamlessly.
Or you could just do what ATMs have already been doing for ages, which is have blank buttons beside the screen and add the labels. But nooo, gotta be all fancy-like...
If the system is good enough to ensure that casual users receive only a steady stream of ideologically comfortable information, the system will ensure that it never faces more than a limited number of sophisticated and adversarial users.
Well think about it. If getting around the censorship is as easy as using a non-Chinese browser, it's not much of a firewall, is it? The class of Chinese people who care about censorship and have web access are very likely to know a non-Chinese language (probably English)...
What manufacturers are really worried about has nothing to do with the content of these specific regulations.
They're concerned about the possibility that individual states can have separate regulatory frameworks from the government. In that case, they'd be obliged to do testing and demonstrate that their products satisfy the regulations of every state in the Union that passed regulations. Theoretically they could just make sure they satisfy the most stringent of the state regulations, but if the regulations conflict, that's a problem; if different regulations emphasize different aspects, that's a problem. If CA mandates that televisions use less than 200 KW, and NY mandates that their manufacturing process not contain any Insidium-A, both those regulations may be achievable individually, but you may not be able to make an energy-efficient TV without Insidium-A, and now the megacorps lose the economies of scale that let them crush any smaller competition. (Though to be fair, it would be kind of a headache to keep track of all that, which was sort of the idea behind the Interstate Commerce Clause to begin with).
I don't think it's a terrible thing, particularly when the regulations aren't onerous and no other state really does this -- CA is large enough that it deserves to be its own state (in the poli-sci sense) anyway -- and the manufacturers, like all big businesses, have an immediate knee-jerk reaction against any kind of regulation. But I can see how the precedent might not be pleasing to manufacturers.
The real issue there is security, not prosperity. Having lots of kids is an unconscious hedge against the fact that most of them will die without reproducing.
But if we spread prosperity first, the current population glut will destroy the planet before the birth rate is sufficiently constrained.
Or three, by an accident. Or four, by a genetic abnormality that makes them congenitally absent. Or five, due to sickness of the relevant organ. The metaphor really does not apply, unless you think that rights can be lost accidentally, or that there are some people who innately don't have them for some reason, etc.
human beings have an *innate* desire to experience Liberty.
Ignoring that Socrates is full of ill-founded assumptions about the universality of his own preferences, all this demonstrates is a desire to experience liberty. Not a right to do so. Put a man in front of an attractive naked member of the appropriate sex, and we both know what innate desire he's going to experience, but when he assumes his desire creates a right, we call that a crime.
I repeat: there is no objective demonstration of the existence of natural rights, because there is no such thing as a "natural right" existing outside of human culture. There are legal rights and customary rights, and there are opinions (most of which I agree with) about what legal rights ought to be universally acknowledged and protected, but the rights are not innate properties of the universe.
KBR then hands the keys to the military, and the military runs the base.
Again, this is not my understanding. I was looking for the source this morning on my way to work but couldn't spot it in the time I'd allotted, but I have read that most of the operational side (janitorial, food service, etc.) of modern bases is also handled by civilian contractors on cost-plus contracts.
If we don't actually agree with each others, my apologies.
Perhaps my point wasn't clear. I was not being hyperbolic; my description of US military expenditures is accurate, and I'm not pleased with it (among other things, it's a gross mis-allocation of resources, considering we aren't exactly fighting Hitler anywhere). I believe that most people who complain about "government waste" have in mind the kind of "liberal" or social programs that you described, but (with the exception of the very-popular Social Security and Medicare) those are mostly very minor budget items, which I think most people don't realize.
Slashdot Mirror
1. The point being, strong monetary incentives are not necessary for people to produce quality works (or whatever passes for it) in the music business.
2. So now no books were written prior to 1486? Pfft. Besides, early copyright was (1) laughably poorly enforced, and (2) primarily intended to ensure the accuracy of the text, rather than the profitability of the print shop.
3. It produces works terrible enough that people won't watch them on the terms offered by the market. "People won't pay to see your movie" is not a strong argument of the movie's quality. In any event, my point here was just that I don't care if Hollywood rots. If there's that much demand for its content, someone will fund it somewhere.
So, why don't you see if you can do better? Describe a credible system in which anyone can copy anything without restriction but there is still sufficient incentive for people to produce and share high quality work in the first place, and I'm sure the sceptics like me will be interested in what you have to say.
It's called "not having copyright," and it was good enough to give us Shakespeare and Milton. ...why? Hollywood comes up with maybe two worthwhile ideas a year. Before I fight you on that one, I'd like to hear your explanation of any system that will actually cause people to produce and share high-quality movies, since it sure isn't happening now.
Really, what's the problem here? Are we worried about musicians? The vast majority of popular musicians would make more money working at a 7-11 than they do during their time on the market under the major labels.
Are we worried about books? People have been writing books without copyright for as long as there's been books. The publishing industry is collapsing under its own weight, because of the abundance of free content out there (since the Internet appears to prove that people prefer "free" to "good").
Are we worried about movies?
Really, for someone with a sig protesting the power of the state, you seem awfully chipper about "property" that's been wholly invented by the government.
This is not to say that reductionism is necessarily wrong - it could be the case that if we know everything physical about the world, we will know everything about the world - but it seems less and less likely to those who are not in the "hard sciences".
I think of the issue as: reductionism is right, but useless. Unless we can combine the countless calculations that describe the basic physical properties of some system with enough accuracy and detail to model its emergent behavior, then we cannot develop an improved understanding of that system through reductionist means. (Which incidentally is why strong AI is never going to happen.)
Or, a Monet is just a bunch of dried oily goo on some canvas, but it's much more productive to understand it by looking at it than by precisely describing the goo with equations. And one would need to appeal to an entirely different field (cognitive neuroscience) to explain the psychology of the historical context motivating the artist; and thus the art historian's approach manages to synthesize two enormous scientific fields without even needing any math...
Because (1) the page was originally written by my girlfriend, in my presence (though when I pointed that out I was dismissed as a sock puppet), and (2) the plagiarist also took articles verbatim from the Wall Street Journal and New York Times.
Which even a tiny bit of research on anyone's part would have confirmed, which is funny seeing as how the complaint did not originate from the plagiarist, but from a busybody WP editor who could've been doing something productive.
We're disappointed too. Disappointed, but not surprised.
He was the lesser of two evils, and possibly the chance to get some of the young people to pay attention for a few minutes.
I don't know about the writing being better -- it was certainly different, but I've seen plenty of examples of old-style newspaper articles and the like, and they're just as prone to the faults of wordiness, excess, and imprecision as modern writers -- just in a different way.
But yeah, retrofitting is likely possible in many cases (on the other hand, fields like Mayan archaeology have been completely revolutionized since 1911).
The only point I'd make is that even if we have articles about all the important subjects (dubious), that wouldn't mean the project is done, because knowledge keeps expanding and changing. The ability of WP to welcome new editors remains essential to it being a useful and accurate repository of (some defined subset of) human knowledge.
(Don't forget to factor in price. I can't use any that cost anything.)
So your internet connection is free now?
Hey, I use Wikipedia all the time. But I've personally encountered (and had friends encounter) the kind of stuff that grossly reduces its useful content, which coupled with arrogant and high-handed admins, has made me view it with a whole tower of salt.
And the corollary is, a lot more scholarship has happened in a lot of those topics over the last, oh, hundred years, so "it's done" is hardly the case.
My sincere thanks also go out to those who made useful additions to Wikipedia, the 35% of Wikipedians who delete those useful additions for no reason or because they have been plagiarized by other sites and the plagiarism attributed to the original Wikipedia author, and the remaining 62% of Wikipedians who have added to the signal-to-noise ratio.
Senators don't sign laws or treaties, they only approve them.
Or in this case, hopefully, refuse to approve them.
In which case the President isn't supposed to be able to do squat.
There are numerous easy solutions... However, none of them will ever get anywhere
Based on your statement, I think we may have different understandings of the word "easy."
Well, yes--in this era of instant communications and dilute representation, representatives wouldn't be doing their jobs if they let themselves get swayed by impassioned rhetoric on the floor, instead of basing decisions on the desires (expressed and expected) of their constituents.
Unfortunately, even the will of the represented constituents takes a backseat to politics and fellating moneyed/corporate interests these days (with the greater good of the country being some distant fourth- or fifth-place consideration).
As for the House, the issue there is that parliamentary rules in the House state that whenever there is any sort of conflict, doubt, or decision, you take a vote. Naturally, so long as the House leadership can string the votes together, it is literally against the rules even to debate something (and if the leadership can no longer deliver the votes... well, on minor matters, it doesn't happen, although the ability to lose a vote of confidence is one of the numerous advantages a Parliamentary system has over the American one). That's not a new thing though, I think that goes back to at least the late 19th century.
Part of the problem, in my view, is that districts are too large. Congress would be unmanageable if all districts were represented at a sufficiently granular level -- the Constitution only says that you can't have more than one representative for every 30,000 citizens, but (as a rough approximation, dividing 308 million by 435 reps) the districts now are more like one rep per 700,000. That's just broken. In the First Congress, there were 65 reps with a national population of 3 million (and 60,000 of them were slaves!), with a much-more-manageable one rep per 46,000 (or 37,000 free citizens). But a House of 6700, to achieve the representation levels endorsed by the Framers, would be impossible -- and the only conclusion left is that America is just too big for democracy to function effectively.
retail sales is the only sector like retail sales.
Jeez, not even retail sales works like retail sales any more. Here in New York (on 6th Ave. around 20th st, if you're wondering) directly across the street from each other sit a Container Store and a Bed Bath. The Bed Bath sells goods which are nearly identical to TCS' in many cases, but at prices that are consistently 10-20% lower. But no price war of any kind is going on; The Container Store simply has a higher price point, the end. Both stores seem to be doing fine... it's kind of odd, given that the goods are largely interchangeable, and similar goods could be purchased at Ikea for even less...
That could take up a lot more space, especially when it's a full keyboard being displayed. Not ideal for mobile devices.
Well, right. Then again, typing is not ideal for mobile devices. Sure, you can jerry-rig solutions, but none of them work terribly well. (At least, neither Blackberries nor iPhones seem to have the problem well-solved). Probably the best answer for full-size keyboard stuff for mobile devices is some kind of neutral-hand-position bimanual chording keyboard, but that's expensive and intimidating, and requires a lot of learning on the user's part.
Establish a grid of button surfaces, kind of like pixels, which can be dynamically re-grouped to merge them into larger buttons, and then put the display on that.
So, imagine you had a keyboard with essentially no gaps between the keys, and a screen on top of them. You could make one button out of qwe, one button out of tgyh, etc., while displaying your graphics seamlessly.
Or you could just do what ATMs have already been doing for ages, which is have blank buttons beside the screen and add the labels. But nooo, gotta be all fancy-like...
It'd be a walking about sort of tool.
I can fix that for you if you let me take out one letter and an apostrophe. What'd'ya say?
"It be a walking about sort of tool?"
I'd like to know what you mean.
Ahh, but see, in the engineering industry there's this thing called "professional ethics" and "desire to do a good job."
In the banking industry, there's nothing but your score, measured in dollars. Whoever retires with the most of them wins.
If the system is good enough to ensure that casual users receive only a steady stream of ideologically comfortable information, the system will ensure that it never faces more than a limited number of sophisticated and adversarial users.
Cf. the United States.
It's unclear how this kind of protest would work anyway, since Opera is free.
Everybody cares about market share. Even in the OSS community, you'd rather make a project that lots of people use than that nobody uses.
he was upfront about that fact that he couldn't protest in this manner
If changing your browser is too much of a stretch to stand up for your beliefs, then lord knows what wouldn't be.
I don't know why this is
Well think about it. If getting around the censorship is as easy as using a non-Chinese browser, it's not much of a firewall, is it?
The class of Chinese people who care about censorship and have web access are very likely to know a non-Chinese language (probably English)...
I thought it was more that the more power your TVs take, the less everybody else will have?
Mandating energy-efficient devices is not a step down a slippery slope to CommunoFacist Dystopia. Really. Simmer down.
What manufacturers are really worried about has nothing to do with the content of these specific regulations.
They're concerned about the possibility that individual states can have separate regulatory frameworks from the government. In that case, they'd be obliged to do testing and demonstrate that their products satisfy the regulations of every state in the Union that passed regulations. Theoretically they could just make sure they satisfy the most stringent of the state regulations, but if the regulations conflict, that's a problem; if different regulations emphasize different aspects, that's a problem. If CA mandates that televisions use less than 200 KW, and NY mandates that their manufacturing process not contain any Insidium-A, both those regulations may be achievable individually, but you may not be able to make an energy-efficient TV without Insidium-A, and now the megacorps lose the economies of scale that let them crush any smaller competition. (Though to be fair, it would be kind of a headache to keep track of all that, which was sort of the idea behind the Interstate Commerce Clause to begin with).
I don't think it's a terrible thing, particularly when the regulations aren't onerous and no other state really does this -- CA is large enough that it deserves to be its own state (in the poli-sci sense) anyway -- and the manufacturers, like all big businesses, have an immediate knee-jerk reaction against any kind of regulation. But I can see how the precedent might not be pleasing to manufacturers.
The real issue there is security, not prosperity. Having lots of kids is an unconscious hedge against the fact that most of them will die without reproducing.
But if we spread prosperity first, the current population glut will destroy the planet before the birth rate is sufficiently constrained.
Only by two methods
Or three, by an accident. Or four, by a genetic abnormality that makes them congenitally absent. Or five, due to sickness of the relevant organ.
The metaphor really does not apply, unless you think that rights can be lost accidentally, or that there are some people who innately don't have them for some reason, etc.
human beings have an *innate* desire to experience Liberty.
Ignoring that Socrates is full of ill-founded assumptions about the universality of his own preferences, all this demonstrates is a desire to experience liberty. Not a right to do so. Put a man in front of an attractive naked member of the appropriate sex, and we both know what innate desire he's going to experience, but when he assumes his desire creates a right, we call that a crime.
I repeat: there is no objective demonstration of the existence of natural rights, because there is no such thing as a "natural right" existing outside of human culture. There are legal rights and customary rights, and there are opinions (most of which I agree with) about what legal rights ought to be universally acknowledged and protected, but the rights are not innate properties of the universe.
KBR then hands the keys to the military, and the military runs the base.
Again, this is not my understanding. I was looking for the source this morning on my way to work but couldn't spot it in the time I'd allotted, but I have read that most of the operational side (janitorial, food service, etc.) of modern bases is also handled by civilian contractors on cost-plus contracts.
If we don't actually agree with each others, my apologies.
Perhaps my point wasn't clear. I was not being hyperbolic; my description of US military expenditures is accurate, and I'm not pleased with it (among other things, it's a gross mis-allocation of resources, considering we aren't exactly fighting Hitler anywhere). I believe that most people who complain about "government waste" have in mind the kind of "liberal" or social programs that you described, but (with the exception of the very-popular Social Security and Medicare) those are mostly very minor budget items, which I think most people don't realize.