Actually lobbying *is* an honest profession. Legislators take lobbyists at their word because they're subject matter experts. It's just that Valenti is a dishonest practitioner. He needs to be discredited with the people who count, legislators. Velenti lies, and I don't think that the legislators and legislative staffs realize it.
He's being intellectually dishonest but not technically lying. If you lose $1 from a technology but gain $5 at the same time, you can smile at the net $4 extra you made or you can wail and moan about the unfairness of your $1 gross loss.
What I don't understand is why technologists don't just make a Valenti watch explaining how he's being dishonest and disinforming legislators. That would destroy his credibility as a lobbyist (legislators hate to be embarrassed by parroting a lying lobbyist) and badly hurt his employers, the MPAA.
The way a lot of dedicated mac servers get created runs like this 1. By best Photoshop machine around to make money 2. After 2-3 years buy another one because the extra productivity justifies the cost 3. Take your old machine and put large drives in it to make it a server.
For you, a G4 server doesn't make sense because you don't have a depreciated one just hanging around. Not everybody is so deprived.
I think that distribution changes have always led to legal and societal changes. The internet as a distribution mechanism is at least as disruptive as Gutenberg's printing press and by the amount of discontent evidenced with the DMCA et al and with rampant lawbreaking occuring, it's clear that the current tack is just not right. Massive, persistent lawbreaking by otherwise law abiding people is usually a bad sign for the rule of law and especially for the section(s) of law being defied.
I think that there has always been a small segment that never bought into the idea of the deal struck to goose along the arts and sciences in exchange for temporary monopolies and have acted on those political ideals. When the price to pay for giving up a few rights was small, they were in a distinct minority. As the price of that deal goes up, we may end up in a sad situation where the majority obey copyright no more than the majority obeyed the national speed limit of 55 on roads designed for 70mph+
The point is that there are experiments being done in the artistic field and guess what, it works. Some are trying it with music, others with books. I'm sure that the a significant chunk of movie people will eventually go to short serials, giving away a few chapters from the beginning.
The RIAA doesn't want people to have knowledge, they just want to scare people away from this new style of business because it unlocks the death grip they have over popular culture.
Actually theft is not defined by the courts. It is defined by the legislature. In the US we are not serfs but citizens. The legislature makes the definition, The executive puts it into practice, and the court interprets it, and a jury of our peers can put a middle finger to the entire machinery and find you not guilty if *they* believe the law is an ass.
A lot of the pro sharing arguments are not judicial but political, in the civil disobedience sense of the word. Trying to shoehorn what is essentially a political movement into a judicial straightjacket is not going to give you good analytical results. This is why you get a lot of talk about what should be instead of what is in the cut and dry precedent world of the judiciary.
If you don't understand the underlying thought matrix of the pro-sharing people, you'll always be sitting there scratching your head.
Software is different because when you give, you give your entire effort. Music, books, and much of what is art is different because you can give a book away (as the Baen free library does) and not give away others in a series. You can give a song away and still hold back others from your portfolio for exclusive sale.
The RIAA members are given a temporary monopoly over music in order to advance the arts (science really isn't under consideration here). Under certain circumstances this privilege (not right as normal property rights are conceived) is null and void. In any case, the privilege expires after a certain number of years and the music falls into the commons and can be used in any way anybody wants to.
Stealing music may be stealing music but giving a copy of music to somebody else is not always stealing (the monopoly might have expired). Sometimes it isn't even illegally breaching the monopoly grant and is called fair use.
Now anything Madonna, Brittany and co. have sung is too new to fall outside the current monopoly terms but I would say that for a significant number of people, P2P isn't stealing, it's civil disobedience to a privilege grant that should never have been extended into the recording realm in the manner it has been.
The fact that a lot of these people don't have an intellectually coherent regime to replace it with does not detract from their actions. I'm reasonably sure that not every lynched black and beaten civil rights marcher could explain it all to you with the eloquence of MLK Jr. either but they took a stand just the same. (Note: this is not to put the two struggles on the same moral plane, they're not. But they do share similarities in certain respects)
That doesn't explain similar results for Baen authors who put their books out for free in anelectronic library.
I think we're starting to assemble enough data points to be able to say with some confidence, putting out free stuff helps sales of both the rest of the IP portfolio and sales of the free stuff as well.
The problem is that for a sector like doctors, which is already highly controlled and biased against foreign medical graduates, there's no need for extra enforcement measures. You take your step exams (1-3) and if your scores are up to snuff you qualify for interviews. The number of residency slots available is strictly controlled, as is the number of slots in medical school. Dirty secret, not enough people want to be doctors to fill all the slots necessary for good medicine in the USA.
So tell me again, why doctors should be lumped in with SQL jockeys? Given tech's lax enforcement of standards, why not dump out the technologists into their own seperate visa class (H-1B(t)?) and up the fees to enforce standards only in areas that have widespread abuse.
Well you might not have the healthcare lobby against you if you split out the doctors into a H1x that was separate from the tech visas. The best camouflage for a bad program (not commenting on whether H1b fits or not) is to mix it in with good ones.
Here are a few legitimate concerns in order of importance (in my mind of course).
1. Blackmail: If this security chief assisted in any of Microsoft's prior bad acts (DR-DOS episode is just one example) and is vulnerable to a criminal charge, he's vulnerable to blackmail. That makes him singularly inappropriate to head a sensitive position such as this one.
2. Incompetence: He's a former head of MS security. His performance is part of the reason that MS had the trusted computing initiative after he left because security was so screwed up.
3. Unwillingness to choose honest dealing with the public over self-interest: He never blew the whistle on MS even though security people generally know where all the bodies are buried. A lot of insecure systems are out there on the Internet in part because he didn't want to make waves. That is not necessarily what you want in a govt. job.
Re:Where are the damned opportunists!?!?
on
Giant Sucking Noise
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· Score: 1
But if your new job is also outsourceable, why not outsource it yourself as well? There are no limits to what is possible with this approach!
Prices will drop because everybody is going to think the same thing, that if they cut prices by just a little, they can keep most of their excess profits and make even more in expanded market share. Very soon, all the excess profits are gone. Now *that* is basic supply and demand reality.
Re:Invent more better things for tech to do
on
Giant Sucking Noise
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· Score: 1
Individual hardware stores banded together and joined to form Ace and True Value. These stores are independent businesses but collectively they are powerful competitors to Home Depot and Lowes. There's no reason that other sectors can't follow similar patterns.
H1b is how foreign medical graduates get in. How do you think the state of West Virginia is going to have any doctors 5 years from now without foreign medical graduates?
The executive pay circle jerk only exists because shareholder rights are still in the stone age. If you could offer electronic proxies on individual issues and you could vote the shares you hold in mutual funds, I think that the circle jerk salary hikes would end along with a lot of what else is wrong with corporate america.
Oil *is* a zero sum game but not in the way that you think because you're not taking into account indirect competition. The market is energy. Long before we physically run out of oil, prices will rise sufficiently for some other source of energy to be cheaper to extract/produce. As for arable land, again, the problem isn't lack of space but lack of money. If there was enough demand for meat to bid up the price high enough, meat would be produced in far larger quantities than is done now.
Finally, the average indian and chinese person does not produce absolute levels of pollution higher than their US counterpart but they do produce higher levels per dollar of GDP.
Re:Painful? Yes. Helps long term? I don't see it.
on
Giant Sucking Noise
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· Score: 1
Most of the exploitation that goes on in the third world is exploitation by local elites of their own countrymen. Globalism, over a generation or two, will enable the creation of new power centers who can force the amelioration of that massive exploitation. How else is the problem going to get fixed, invade?
Re:What good is cheaper if no one has a job?
on
Giant Sucking Noise
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· Score: 1
You people are idiots. It's been 30 years since the rust belt demonstrated how destructive it is to run a one company or one industry town. Why haven't you been diversifying for the past two decades? I feel for the people who got nailed in the first round of outsourcing overseas and mass closures. Today's 'victims' all ignored the warnings for many years.
The big difference is that the indian companies that were getting outsourcing contracts a decade ago are branching out into writing their own software and selling it. Companies know that if they don't climb up the value chain, eventually they're going to be undercut in price. Indian companies are expanding into Pffstonia to maintain their price advantage and working to create software themselves. End result, your speculation just doesn't work, we end up with more competition and a wider market of suppliers from which to buy our software.
There's no rule that a techie with capital to invest has to form a tech business. Maybe he gives $15k to his 3 dumber brothers and they start a catering business to provide meals to those multinationals as they have conferences. There are lots of very profitable small businesses that don't need a lot of money to start off. I once met a fellow (suburban Chicago) who had a lawn cutting business and worked with VMS systems. The lawn cutting business during the season was earning him more money than the computer work. He had 8 or 9 trucks going out and cutting for him.
The last I heard, the US army (almost unique in the world) still court martials soldiers who follow illegal orders. Soldiers in the US take an oath to protect the Constitution not any President or government.
The truth is that multi-millionaires in the US generally got that way due to hard work and persistence, not inheritance or official favor. Yes, there are a small number of the rich who inherited it or bribed the govt. into giving them favors to make them wealthy but that's just not the normal way for things to go.
I think that globalization is a safety valve that allows for the growth of a middle class in these nations. Nike, much as it might have to bribe people to get into a country, pays wages that are above local scale. When they do that, they pave the way for the rise of a new middle class that can overthrow the current elite's stranglehold on power much as the irish overthrew the brahmins in Boston a century ago.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually lobbying *is* an honest profession. Legislators take lobbyists at their word because they're subject matter experts. It's just that Valenti is a dishonest practitioner. He needs to be discredited with the people who count, legislators. Velenti lies, and I don't think that the legislators and legislative staffs realize it.
He's being intellectually dishonest but not technically lying. If you lose $1 from a technology but gain $5 at the same time, you can smile at the net $4 extra you made or you can wail and moan about the unfairness of your $1 gross loss.
What I don't understand is why technologists don't just make a Valenti watch explaining how he's being dishonest and disinforming legislators. That would destroy his credibility as a lobbyist (legislators hate to be embarrassed by parroting a lying lobbyist) and badly hurt his employers, the MPAA.
The way a lot of dedicated mac servers get created runs like this
1. By best Photoshop machine around to make money
2. After 2-3 years buy another one because the extra productivity justifies the cost
3. Take your old machine and put large drives in it to make it a server.
For you, a G4 server doesn't make sense because you don't have a depreciated one just hanging around. Not everybody is so deprived.
I think that distribution changes have always led to legal and societal changes. The internet as a distribution mechanism is at least as disruptive as Gutenberg's printing press and by the amount of discontent evidenced with the DMCA et al and with rampant lawbreaking occuring, it's clear that the current tack is just not right. Massive, persistent lawbreaking by otherwise law abiding people is usually a bad sign for the rule of law and especially for the section(s) of law being defied.
I think that there has always been a small segment that never bought into the idea of the deal struck to goose along the arts and sciences in exchange for temporary monopolies and have acted on those political ideals. When the price to pay for giving up a few rights was small, they were in a distinct minority. As the price of that deal goes up, we may end up in a sad situation where the majority obey copyright no more than the majority obeyed the national speed limit of 55 on roads designed for 70mph+
The point is that there are experiments being done in the artistic field and guess what, it works. Some are trying it with music, others with books. I'm sure that the a significant chunk of movie people will eventually go to short serials, giving away a few chapters from the beginning.
The RIAA doesn't want people to have knowledge, they just want to scare people away from this new style of business because it unlocks the death grip they have over popular culture.
Actually theft is not defined by the courts. It is defined by the legislature. In the US we are not serfs but citizens. The legislature makes the definition, The executive puts it into practice, and the court interprets it, and a jury of our peers can put a middle finger to the entire machinery and find you not guilty if *they* believe the law is an ass.
A lot of the pro sharing arguments are not judicial but political, in the civil disobedience sense of the word. Trying to shoehorn what is essentially a political movement into a judicial straightjacket is not going to give you good analytical results. This is why you get a lot of talk about what should be instead of what is in the cut and dry precedent world of the judiciary.
If you don't understand the underlying thought matrix of the pro-sharing people, you'll always be sitting there scratching your head.
Software is different because when you give, you give your entire effort. Music, books, and much of what is art is different because you can give a book away (as the Baen free library does) and not give away others in a series. You can give a song away and still hold back others from your portfolio for exclusive sale.
The RIAA members are given a temporary monopoly over music in order to advance the arts (science really isn't under consideration here). Under certain circumstances this privilege (not right as normal property rights are conceived) is null and void. In any case, the privilege expires after a certain number of years and the music falls into the commons and can be used in any way anybody wants to.
Stealing music may be stealing music but giving a copy of music to somebody else is not always stealing (the monopoly might have expired). Sometimes it isn't even illegally breaching the monopoly grant and is called fair use.
Now anything Madonna, Brittany and co. have sung is too new to fall outside the current monopoly terms but I would say that for a significant number of people, P2P isn't stealing, it's civil disobedience to a privilege grant that should never have been extended into the recording realm in the manner it has been.
The fact that a lot of these people don't have an intellectually coherent regime to replace it with does not detract from their actions. I'm reasonably sure that not every lynched black and beaten civil rights marcher could explain it all to you with the eloquence of MLK Jr. either but they took a stand just the same. (Note: this is not to put the two struggles on the same moral plane, they're not. But they do share similarities in certain respects)
That doesn't explain similar results for Baen authors who put their books out for free in anelectronic library.
I think we're starting to assemble enough data points to be able to say with some confidence, putting out free stuff helps sales of both the rest of the IP portfolio and sales of the free stuff as well.
The problem is that for a sector like doctors, which is already highly controlled and biased against foreign medical graduates, there's no need for extra enforcement measures. You take your step exams (1-3) and if your scores are up to snuff you qualify for interviews. The number of residency slots available is strictly controlled, as is the number of slots in medical school. Dirty secret, not enough people want to be doctors to fill all the slots necessary for good medicine in the USA.
So tell me again, why doctors should be lumped in with SQL jockeys? Given tech's lax enforcement of standards, why not dump out the technologists into their own seperate visa class (H-1B(t)?) and up the fees to enforce standards only in areas that have widespread abuse.
Well you might not have the healthcare lobby against you if you split out the doctors into a H1x that was separate from the tech visas. The best camouflage for a bad program (not commenting on whether H1b fits or not) is to mix it in with good ones.
Here are a few legitimate concerns in order of importance (in my mind of course).
1. Blackmail: If this security chief assisted in any of Microsoft's prior bad acts (DR-DOS episode is just one example) and is vulnerable to a criminal charge, he's vulnerable to blackmail. That makes him singularly inappropriate to head a sensitive position such as this one.
2. Incompetence: He's a former head of MS security. His performance is part of the reason that MS had the trusted computing initiative after he left because security was so screwed up.
3. Unwillingness to choose honest dealing with the public over self-interest: He never blew the whistle on MS even though security people generally know where all the bodies are buried. A lot of insecure systems are out there on the Internet in part because he didn't want to make waves. That is not necessarily what you want in a govt. job.
But if your new job is also outsourceable, why not outsource it yourself as well? There are no limits to what is possible with this approach!
Prices will drop because everybody is going to think the same thing, that if they cut prices by just a little, they can keep most of their excess profits and make even more in expanded market share. Very soon, all the excess profits are gone. Now *that* is basic supply and demand reality.
Individual hardware stores banded together and joined to form Ace and True Value. These stores are independent businesses but collectively they are powerful competitors to Home Depot and Lowes. There's no reason that other sectors can't follow similar patterns.
H1b is how foreign medical graduates get in. How do you think the state of West Virginia is going to have any doctors 5 years from now without foreign medical graduates?
It's already happening and Indian IT companies are branching out and buying up firms in cheaper markets to extend their franchise.
The executive pay circle jerk only exists because shareholder rights are still in the stone age. If you could offer electronic proxies on individual issues and you could vote the shares you hold in mutual funds, I think that the circle jerk salary hikes would end along with a lot of what else is wrong with corporate america.
Um, have you noticed how lousy the FRG's economy is?
Oil *is* a zero sum game but not in the way that you think because you're not taking into account indirect competition. The market is energy. Long before we physically run out of oil, prices will rise sufficiently for some other source of energy to be cheaper to extract/produce. As for arable land, again, the problem isn't lack of space but lack of money. If there was enough demand for meat to bid up the price high enough, meat would be produced in far larger quantities than is done now.
Finally, the average indian and chinese person does not produce absolute levels of pollution higher than their US counterpart but they do produce higher levels per dollar of GDP.
Most of the exploitation that goes on in the third world is exploitation by local elites of their own countrymen. Globalism, over a generation or two, will enable the creation of new power centers who can force the amelioration of that massive exploitation. How else is the problem going to get fixed, invade?
You people are idiots. It's been 30 years since the rust belt demonstrated how destructive it is to run a one company or one industry town. Why haven't you been diversifying for the past two decades? I feel for the people who got nailed in the first round of outsourcing overseas and mass closures. Today's 'victims' all ignored the warnings for many years.
The big difference is that the indian companies that were getting outsourcing contracts a decade ago are branching out into writing their own software and selling it. Companies know that if they don't climb up the value chain, eventually they're going to be undercut in price. Indian companies are expanding into Pffstonia to maintain their price advantage and working to create software themselves. End result, your speculation just doesn't work, we end up with more competition and a wider market of suppliers from which to buy our software.
There's no rule that a techie with capital to invest has to form a tech business. Maybe he gives $15k to his 3 dumber brothers and they start a catering business to provide meals to those multinationals as they have conferences. There are lots of very profitable small businesses that don't need a lot of money to start off. I once met a fellow (suburban Chicago) who had a lawn cutting business and worked with VMS systems. The lawn cutting business during the season was earning him more money than the computer work. He had 8 or 9 trucks going out and cutting for him.
The last I heard, the US army (almost unique in the world) still court martials soldiers who follow illegal orders. Soldiers in the US take an oath to protect the Constitution not any President or government.
The truth is that multi-millionaires in the US generally got that way due to hard work and persistence, not inheritance or official favor. Yes, there are a small number of the rich who inherited it or bribed the govt. into giving them favors to make them wealthy but that's just not the normal way for things to go.
I think that globalization is a safety valve that allows for the growth of a middle class in these nations. Nike, much as it might have to bribe people to get into a country, pays wages that are above local scale. When they do that, they pave the way for the rise of a new middle class that can overthrow the current elite's stranglehold on power much as the irish overthrew the brahmins in Boston a century ago.