To reiterate the point, the obvious truth is that the beta will be "ready" when people chose it over classic slashdot.
But that's not ever going to happen. The thing is, beta's design goals - add bling, to put it bluntly - are in direct conflict with how people use Slashdot: mass conversation. You can't add whitespace or eye candy without forcing out information.
Also, to be honest, the "bling" on beta is pretty awful too.
So, no matter how much time they spend improving beta, it'll make Slashdot less usable when the switch occurs. The question that remains is whether the reduction on usability and resulting user exodus will be enough to kill the site? Network effect makes Slashdot less useful with every user who seeks greener pastures, and at some point this vicious circle passes the point of no return. Of course Slashdot could well be headed to that direction anyway, with beta as a panicky attempt to save it.
What this really shows is that there is a desperate need for a P2P forum software, which would allow Internet communities independence from any corporate or other hosting entity. Something like Frost, but refined to actual usability.
Any company can rent the physical lines from the non profit at the same cost and provide service to end users, and the non profit uses all revenue from doing so to maintain and upgrade the network.
Or, better yet, just let end users deal with the non-profit directly. What value would a for-profit middleman add in this situation?
I suspect it'll go the other way around: the bank will say you owe them money but the records were destroyed in the fire. Proof you don't, or have your home taken.
Is GRKN having a campaign or something? It's been mentioned twice now on this subthread, and bears no obvious connection to a tech website.
Well, we're the retirees who are slowly dying off, and Slashdot is the restaurant that can't sustain itself forever on our patronage.
The obvious difference between a restaurant and Slashdot is that a restaurant has lots of sunk capital - fridges, ovens, real estate - that's independent of its customers, while Slashdot has almost nothing. If us old-timers leave, you're pretty much looking to start up a new site rather than reopening an old one.
The lesson here is that the details of your business absolutely matter and can't be abstracted away.
Given that state of things, Dice essentially has two choices: double-down on retaining current users (a failing proposition, since we're a dwindling niche), or strike out in a different direction and hope they attract new users.
Or they could had used the same backend to start a new site and seen if it got more popular than Slashdot, then gone with the winner. Or they could simply keep both sites going side-by-side as alternative interfaces to the same underlaying database. Or just let Slashdot hemorrhage readers till it dies. Product lines sometimes do, it's no more dramatic - or at least shouldn't be - for companies than a single cell dying is for your body.
Because without a single replacement the user base will fragment and disperse, leaving each individual page with too few users to keep conversations going.
How many readers are going to leave if they cut it off slashdot classic completely?
Me, unless playing with user CSS and GreaseMonkey will get the something useful back. But even then the reverse network effect applies: the more users leave, the less valuable this site is for any remaining one.
your comments border on the nonsensical, especially the part where you justify six murder attempts by glibly assuming that the victims must have all tried to (evilly!) blackmail the guy who set up this crime network.
That's what newspaper says, actually. And I'm not "justifying" anything, just pointing out that this particular criminal enterprise doesn't seem to have resulted in any harm to anyone who didn't actively participate.
Ulbricht doesn't seem to be a nice person, but he also was not exactly a mafioso setting up territory. In your words, he's "not a guy who did things we should be concerned about" because, frankly, I care absolutely nothing if people get high, as long as they don't bother me about it. And like I said, the crazy junkie looking for the next hit couldn't use Silk Road.
And your breathless account of how the Silk Road model promises to take violent crime out of the illicit drug trade is just absurd.
Yet you fail to refute any part of it. You specifically fail to refute the assertion that removing thugs fighting over street corners and replacing them with postal orders lessens violence.
"Outdated business models" is code for "I don't like paying for things, but want them anyway"
No, it's code for "your attempts to make money are futile, since the assumptions they're based on have been made obsolete by technological innovations or changing social or economic conditions".
User account control is pretty much useless in a single-user machine. It's a holdover from multi-user UNIX mainframes, where it perhaps worked, but we desperately need a good, convenient way to isolate individual programs and program instants run by the same user from each other. Maybe make every process run as a root of its own VM and only merge changes upstream when an upstream process requests it?
Nuclear is fundamentally inflexible because you can't quickly ramp up or down electricity output from a nuclear power plant.
That's not exactly true. You can't ramp the nuclear reactor up or down quickly, but you could put a large heat battery between it and the turbine. And if you used a pool of molten salt as the battery, you could even conceivably vary power output in sub-second range by short-circuiting a variying percentage of the generator's output through the pool, converting heat into electricity at a constant (plant's rated power) rate, converting the unneeded electricity back to heat, and using nuclear power (or perhaps even solar or whatever) to make up the difference.
As long as the pool has a large capacity relative to the maximum draw, you can take your sweet time ramping feed up or down.
The first question also goes away to some extent if the U.S. moves to metered billing like the rest of the world
Except that the rest of the world doesn't have metered billing. The rest of the world rarely has monthly bandwidth caps, either. Instead we simply expect our ISPs to build so much bandwidth that there's enough to go around even with Joe Basement-Dweller torrenting 24/7, and if they can't do this, they're free to leave the market to those who can.
You crazy Americans think that big, strong corporations need to be sheltered and coddled and brest-fed from public teat like delicate babies while actual babies must strangle each other with their bootstraps to prove they're worthy of life, or whatever Reagan said. It's the exact other way around. Put your damn workhorses of economy to work, let them starve if they refuse and leave welfare for humans.
The problems occur when using many windows and tabs and sleeping and hibernating the OS.
The problems occur when Firefox's memory usage starts nearing 2GB. That strongly suggests it's a problem with address space exhaustion/fragmentation and resulting memory allocation errors. And that means it won't be fixed before 32-bit version is left behind.
There were MANY here who claimed Reiser was innocent, and many who saw his guilt were modded into oblivion.
As well as they should been, along with those who claimed innocence. No one "saw" anything, except perhaps in a crystal ball; people were making wild guesses based on incomplete second-hand information, and then attributing calling a proverbial coin toss correctly on their 3l1t3 sk1llz rather than luck.
Occam's Razor applies to explaining one's own successes and failures too, not just external events.
You folks do understand that beyond the discussion about the silly "War On Drugs", this guy Ulbricht tried to hire hit men to kill a few people?
Yes, and by all accounts the intended victims were trying to blackmail Ulbricht. Which shifts the discussion from "is murder acceptable" into the rather more murky waters of "when, if ever, is using lethal force in self-defence acceptable"?
This whole thing promises to be far more interesting than the Reiser trial, precisely because the facts are pretty well-known but the moral implications far less clear.
What sort of prosaic nonsense is this? The guy set out to get rich by making an illegal and illicit black market, did so, tried to have a bunch of people killed using ill gotten gains as a lure, etc., and you sit and preach in foreboding tones, as if to imply he is somehow not the bad guy, or not A bad guy, or not a guy who did things we should be concerned about?
Did Dread Pirate Roberts send a pusher to your neighborhood? No. Did he try to force drugs on someone who was not interested in them? No. Did he try to get someone killed? Possibly, but if he was, it was someone trying to blackmail him. So what did he do? Set up a black market in an out-of-way location where those interested in drugs could buy and sell them without bothering anyone else. No bystanders were harmed or in fact affected in any way, unless you count eating into the profits of traditional drug gangs "harm".
So is Dread Pirate Roberts a bad guy? Maybe, but only if accept the proposition "( Powers That Be have a greater right than you to determine what you may do to your body and mind and denying them makes you a bad person rather than simply mistaken ) or that you are never allowed to use lethal force in self-defence".
Your conspiracy theory is a bit heady, no?
There is no "conspiracy theory" here. The Silk Road affair was a power struggle between DPR and PTB, and DPR lost. What happens now is that the victor destroys the luser. This may or may not be just, depending on your viewpoint, but for the PTB it's about maintaining their power.
Of course, this might end up being a rather pyrrhic victory for the PTB. Silk Road "normalized" drug trade from dealing with violent thugs to a comfortable online experience. With its downfall there are now a dozen replacements competing with safety features, user experience, stock, payment methods etc in the best free market fashion. As a result a stereotypical drug deal is turning from "deal with a dealer" into making a regular postal order after reading user reviews, harm mitigation guides, legal risk minimization guides, etc. And as a result of that, the stereotypical drug user is turning from a junkie giving blowjobs in an alley for the next shot into someone who has a home, a computer, Internet connection, can set up and deal with Tor, can acquire Bitcoins... in other words, a normal functional person.
DPR is as good as dead, but so is old-style drug trade and with it almost certainly the War on Drugs. The question remains how many people will be victimized by it befire PTB give it up.
If they expect me to pay, I expect them to bring me some original, exclusive news coverage/articles that's not easily found elsewhere for free.
It's impossible to to bring exclusive news coverage because let's face it: if an event is important to anyone at all, someone's live-tweeting it.
Newspapers as mere reporting devices are going to die. They can't compete with the Internet rumour mill. What they could do is go back to doing actual journalism: analyze the meaning behind events, reasons behind decisions, connections between politicians, etc.
Basically, if a newspaper can get some piece of information, then so can everyone else. Profit can only be had by adding value; in the Industrial Age, that meant turning iron into cars, in the Information Age, it means turning a flood of data into a coherent model of the world that can be examined at desired level of detail and used as a basis of decisions. Right now, we're still in the phase analogous to separating ore from rock, so there's definitely room for growth there.
You haven't paid a nickel until your willingness to tolerate the advertising seeps into your psyche in such a way that causes you to behave differently in how you participate in the economy to the advantage of those who generated the advertisement stream.
That is incorrect. The payment you make to the site you browse is a chance to be influenced. The site thus gains an opportunity to influence you, which they sell forward to the advertizers. Whether these advertizers succeed or fail in their attempt to use their opportunity is their problem, not yours. Either way you've paid.
Think of it as selling options. The option might end up being worth something, or it might not. But even if it ends up worthless, the seller still delivered his end of the bargain.
There is no source of information that the average person can access that doesn't already blend information with opinion.
There is no source of information that wouldn't be biased, since information is interpreted data and the process of interpretation is dependent on the interpreter and their model of the world. The best you can hope for is that the interpreter shares the model with the eventual recipient, so the message is intelligible.
The concepts relating to and methdods to deal with information are muddled and inefficient currently because these are only the first few decades of the Information Age. I suspect a better way to transfer information from viewpoint to viewpoint - and to deal with the probably inevitable losses of the process - will be to us what the concept of entropy was to Industrial Age. Damn I wish I'd studied more math:(...
Is there much of a moral distinction between copyright infringement and theft?
Yes: thieft involves taking something from someone while copyright infringement involves passing on information between third parties.
Both involve acquiring something to which you have no right, at the quantifiable detriment to the owner.
First, you don't own a piece of information you have copyright to, you own the copyright to it. Second, you have no way to even know if a third party A makes a copy of said information and passes it to third party B, much less quantify any detriment this might have on you. Third, asserting that said A and B don't have a right to pass each other information just because you were previously involved with its production does not make it true.
You do not have a right to profit, and you do not have a right to forbid others to act in ways that reduce your potential to profit - otherwise every restaurant in my area could sue me every time I eat at home. Copyright law is not an attempt to approximate human nature, like property law is, but an entirely artificial construct intended to incentivize creation through a temporal monopoly. It has become corrupted to the point of turning against its purpose, was contrary to human nature in the first place, and is consequently immoral and utterly disrespected. Attempts to enforce compliance through draconian punishments simply serve to bring this fact into sharper focus.
Copyright law won't be respected because it's not respectable. Creators's wishes are not listened to because they ask for too much (total control). That's all there is to it.
The entire time they were pouring their own money into making this stuff, they were doing so under the assumption that the law saying they would get a monopoly on their particular product would be upheld.
Really? Because I seem to recall the deal being limited monopoly for a limited time in exchange for the work entering public domain afterwards. So... when was the last time something did?
Why is Mickey Mouse not in public domain yet, Velvet? Did someone alter the deal? Did one party do so yet expect the other to still honour it?
And, moreover, they are entitled to reparations to those of us who break the monopoly.
I think you meant to say "obligated".
I agree. So what do you suggest? I'm personally of the mind that officially declaring the deal copyright holders broke non-binding on any entity except for commercial redistribution - meaning selling copies - would be fair, and solve this problem nicely.
The poor aren't being bribed in favor of my interests.
They are bribed to not rebel. That's why you can give these modern-day "let them eat cake" statements without worrying about being dragged to a guillotine.
But human beings tend to regard whatever they're used to as the "natural" resting point of things. That's why politicians can't comprehend that if roads are not maintained, they'll be gone eventually. That's why people can't comprehend that if they don't stop stuffing their face, they'll have a heart attack and die. And that's why conservatists can't comprehend that if they implement their policies of removing all maintenance from civil society, they'll get a civil war.
I'm starting to think it'll take a major Western nation falling to anarchy to drive this point home again. Russia's fate did that once, but is old enough history to be ignored nowadays. Thanks for volunteering America.
The Dark Side is not about winning, it's about making someone else lose worse than you. This was true a long time ago in a galaxy far away and it's true here and now.
Once you realize this, a lot of absurd things dicatorships, companies and the 1% do start making sense. It's just people acting out the archetype of the villain, realizing at some level what they are even if they refuse to admit it consciously. Palpatine does; the path of the Sith is all about embracing evil and going out of your way to act in harmony with the archetype in full self-awareness of what you're doing. Vader never really does, lacking the awareness and the guts, lying to himself about his noble motives - first saving his wife, then bringing order to the galaxy - and thus loses his duels against Obi-Wan and much later Luke. It's also why he can ultimately repent (which takes Palpatine by surprise because he's too much in synch with his archetype, and salvation is beyond it).
...All of which means that Hayden Christensen was the perfect choice for the role of Vader and played it perfectly. My mind is blown:o.
That's not in the long term benefit of most governments. Having an educated population that can actually see through their bullshit is contra-productive to staying in power.
It's in the long-term interests of the government itself, but not necessarily it's individual members. Which is why modern democratic governments with huge bureaucracies actually running everything tend to be far more efficient than old-style dictatorships: a bureaucracy is a kind of living thing in itself and wants to survive, and that requires the host country to prosper. The less power individual politicians have, the stronger the collective hivemind becomes.
Just because someone doesn't have power doesn't mean that being a dick is somehow acceptable.
I never said it was. And sexual extortion goes a bit beyond "being a dick".
They might be someone's boss, or might become a manager one day, and their views are not suddenly doing to change.
Do you think it would be appropriate for a boss to ask their underling out? Likely not. Is it appropriate to ask their peer out? Yes. The limits of appropriate behaviour do change all the time depending on the relative roles of the subject and object of said behaviour. It is perfectly reasonable to expect people to implement corresponding changes in their behaviour, regardless of their views.
We have to deal with these attitudes where we find them, not find excuses for them.
"These attitudes" being someone admitting to finding someone else sexually attractive to third parties. No, "we" don't have to do anything about that, since it's utterly harmless. Your Majesty and Your Royal Side Personas are free to do as You wish, of course.
People ask other people on a date because they find them sexually attractive.
Wow, what horribly shallow and unfulfilling relationships you must have. Personally I find that most women are sexually attractive if I have a connection with them, regardless of looks. About 98%* of the time we spend together we are not having sex, so I tend to date women based on their personality and interests.
Right. So do you also date men? And if not, does this has to do with them not having compatible personalities and interests, or do you simply not find them attractive? In other words, is that 2% of the time you do spend having sex important for whether you date someone or simply befriend them, which was what I claimed?
Or did you simply want to insult someone and I happened along? In that case, consider me emotionally devastated. Was it good for you?
* I keep a meticulous diary.
And a running count of your sexual encounters, apparently. Perhaps you're simply projecting?
Slashdot Mirror
But that's not ever going to happen. The thing is, beta's design goals - add bling, to put it bluntly - are in direct conflict with how people use Slashdot: mass conversation. You can't add whitespace or eye candy without forcing out information.
Also, to be honest, the "bling" on beta is pretty awful too.
So, no matter how much time they spend improving beta, it'll make Slashdot less usable when the switch occurs. The question that remains is whether the reduction on usability and resulting user exodus will be enough to kill the site? Network effect makes Slashdot less useful with every user who seeks greener pastures, and at some point this vicious circle passes the point of no return. Of course Slashdot could well be headed to that direction anyway, with beta as a panicky attempt to save it.
What this really shows is that there is a desperate need for a P2P forum software, which would allow Internet communities independence from any corporate or other hosting entity. Something like Frost, but refined to actual usability.
Or, better yet, just let end users deal with the non-profit directly. What value would a for-profit middleman add in this situation?
I suspect it'll go the other way around: the bank will say you owe them money but the records were destroyed in the fire. Proof you don't, or have your home taken.
Is GRKN having a campaign or something? It's been mentioned twice now on this subthread, and bears no obvious connection to a tech website.
The obvious difference between a restaurant and Slashdot is that a restaurant has lots of sunk capital - fridges, ovens, real estate - that's independent of its customers, while Slashdot has almost nothing. If us old-timers leave, you're pretty much looking to start up a new site rather than reopening an old one.
The lesson here is that the details of your business absolutely matter and can't be abstracted away.
Or they could had used the same backend to start a new site and seen if it got more popular than Slashdot, then gone with the winner. Or they could simply keep both sites going side-by-side as alternative interfaces to the same underlaying database. Or just let Slashdot hemorrhage readers till it dies. Product lines sometimes do, it's no more dramatic - or at least shouldn't be - for companies than a single cell dying is for your body.
Because without a single replacement the user base will fragment and disperse, leaving each individual page with too few users to keep conversations going.
Slashdot wants to sell out, no one wants to buy. There ain't getting back your youth...
Me, unless playing with user CSS and GreaseMonkey will get the something useful back. But even then the reverse network effect applies: the more users leave, the less valuable this site is for any remaining one.
I think we're witnessing the end.
You do that.
That's what newspaper says, actually. And I'm not "justifying" anything, just pointing out that this particular criminal enterprise doesn't seem to have resulted in any harm to anyone who didn't actively participate.
Ulbricht doesn't seem to be a nice person, but he also was not exactly a mafioso setting up territory. In your words, he's "not a guy who did things we should be concerned about" because, frankly, I care absolutely nothing if people get high, as long as they don't bother me about it. And like I said, the crazy junkie looking for the next hit couldn't use Silk Road.
Yet you fail to refute any part of it. You specifically fail to refute the assertion that removing thugs fighting over street corners and replacing them with postal orders lessens violence.
No, it's code for "your attempts to make money are futile, since the assumptions they're based on have been made obsolete by technological innovations or changing social or economic conditions".
User account control is pretty much useless in a single-user machine. It's a holdover from multi-user UNIX mainframes, where it perhaps worked, but we desperately need a good, convenient way to isolate individual programs and program instants run by the same user from each other. Maybe make every process run as a root of its own VM and only merge changes upstream when an upstream process requests it?
That's not exactly true. You can't ramp the nuclear reactor up or down quickly, but you could put a large heat battery between it and the turbine. And if you used a pool of molten salt as the battery, you could even conceivably vary power output in sub-second range by short-circuiting a variying percentage of the generator's output through the pool, converting heat into electricity at a constant (plant's rated power) rate, converting the unneeded electricity back to heat, and using nuclear power (or perhaps even solar or whatever) to make up the difference.
As long as the pool has a large capacity relative to the maximum draw, you can take your sweet time ramping feed up or down.
Except that the rest of the world doesn't have metered billing. The rest of the world rarely has monthly bandwidth caps, either. Instead we simply expect our ISPs to build so much bandwidth that there's enough to go around even with Joe Basement-Dweller torrenting 24/7, and if they can't do this, they're free to leave the market to those who can.
You crazy Americans think that big, strong corporations need to be sheltered and coddled and brest-fed from public teat like delicate babies while actual babies must strangle each other with their bootstraps to prove they're worthy of life, or whatever Reagan said. It's the exact other way around. Put your damn workhorses of economy to work, let them starve if they refuse and leave welfare for humans.
The problems occur when Firefox's memory usage starts nearing 2GB. That strongly suggests it's a problem with address space exhaustion/fragmentation and resulting memory allocation errors. And that means it won't be fixed before 32-bit version is left behind.
My irony sense is tingling.
As well as they should been, along with those who claimed innocence. No one "saw" anything, except perhaps in a crystal ball; people were making wild guesses based on incomplete second-hand information, and then attributing calling a proverbial coin toss correctly on their 3l1t3 sk1llz rather than luck.
Occam's Razor applies to explaining one's own successes and failures too, not just external events.
Yes, and by all accounts the intended victims were trying to blackmail Ulbricht. Which shifts the discussion from "is murder acceptable" into the rather more murky waters of "when, if ever, is using lethal force in self-defence acceptable"?
This whole thing promises to be far more interesting than the Reiser trial, precisely because the facts are pretty well-known but the moral implications far less clear.
Did Dread Pirate Roberts send a pusher to your neighborhood? No. Did he try to force drugs on someone who was not interested in them? No. Did he try to get someone killed? Possibly, but if he was, it was someone trying to blackmail him. So what did he do? Set up a black market in an out-of-way location where those interested in drugs could buy and sell them without bothering anyone else. No bystanders were harmed or in fact affected in any way, unless you count eating into the profits of traditional drug gangs "harm".
So is Dread Pirate Roberts a bad guy? Maybe, but only if accept the proposition "( Powers That Be have a greater right than you to determine what you may do to your body and mind and denying them makes you a bad person rather than simply mistaken ) or that you are never allowed to use lethal force in self-defence".
There is no "conspiracy theory" here. The Silk Road affair was a power struggle between DPR and PTB, and DPR lost. What happens now is that the victor destroys the luser. This may or may not be just, depending on your viewpoint, but for the PTB it's about maintaining their power.
Of course, this might end up being a rather pyrrhic victory for the PTB. Silk Road "normalized" drug trade from dealing with violent thugs to a comfortable online experience. With its downfall there are now a dozen replacements competing with safety features, user experience, stock, payment methods etc in the best free market fashion. As a result a stereotypical drug deal is turning from "deal with a dealer" into making a regular postal order after reading user reviews, harm mitigation guides, legal risk minimization guides, etc. And as a result of that, the stereotypical drug user is turning from a junkie giving blowjobs in an alley for the next shot into someone who has a home, a computer, Internet connection, can set up and deal with Tor, can acquire Bitcoins... in other words, a normal functional person.
DPR is as good as dead, but so is old-style drug trade and with it almost certainly the War on Drugs. The question remains how many people will be victimized by it befire PTB give it up.
It's impossible to to bring exclusive news coverage because let's face it: if an event is important to anyone at all, someone's live-tweeting it.
Newspapers as mere reporting devices are going to die. They can't compete with the Internet rumour mill. What they could do is go back to doing actual journalism: analyze the meaning behind events, reasons behind decisions, connections between politicians, etc.
Basically, if a newspaper can get some piece of information, then so can everyone else. Profit can only be had by adding value; in the Industrial Age, that meant turning iron into cars, in the Information Age, it means turning a flood of data into a coherent model of the world that can be examined at desired level of detail and used as a basis of decisions. Right now, we're still in the phase analogous to separating ore from rock, so there's definitely room for growth there.
That is incorrect. The payment you make to the site you browse is a chance to be influenced. The site thus gains an opportunity to influence you, which they sell forward to the advertizers. Whether these advertizers succeed or fail in their attempt to use their opportunity is their problem, not yours. Either way you've paid.
Think of it as selling options. The option might end up being worth something, or it might not. But even if it ends up worthless, the seller still delivered his end of the bargain.
42.
You can send payment to this Bitcoin address:
1GZVi3MQsorsF3fUc9NYD2g6yw86fDtGD5
There is no source of information that wouldn't be biased, since information is interpreted data and the process of interpretation is dependent on the interpreter and their model of the world. The best you can hope for is that the interpreter shares the model with the eventual recipient, so the message is intelligible.
The concepts relating to and methdods to deal with information are muddled and inefficient currently because these are only the first few decades of the Information Age. I suspect a better way to transfer information from viewpoint to viewpoint - and to deal with the probably inevitable losses of the process - will be to us what the concept of entropy was to Industrial Age. Damn I wish I'd studied more math :(...
Yes: thieft involves taking something from someone while copyright infringement involves passing on information between third parties.
First, you don't own a piece of information you have copyright to, you own the copyright to it. Second, you have no way to even know if a third party A makes a copy of said information and passes it to third party B, much less quantify any detriment this might have on you. Third, asserting that said A and B don't have a right to pass each other information just because you were previously involved with its production does not make it true.
You do not have a right to profit, and you do not have a right to forbid others to act in ways that reduce your potential to profit - otherwise every restaurant in my area could sue me every time I eat at home. Copyright law is not an attempt to approximate human nature, like property law is, but an entirely artificial construct intended to incentivize creation through a temporal monopoly. It has become corrupted to the point of turning against its purpose, was contrary to human nature in the first place, and is consequently immoral and utterly disrespected. Attempts to enforce compliance through draconian punishments simply serve to bring this fact into sharper focus.
Copyright law won't be respected because it's not respectable. Creators's wishes are not listened to because they ask for too much (total control). That's all there is to it.
Really? Because I seem to recall the deal being limited monopoly for a limited time in exchange for the work entering public domain afterwards. So... when was the last time something did?
Why is Mickey Mouse not in public domain yet, Velvet? Did someone alter the deal? Did one party do so yet expect the other to still honour it?
I think you meant to say "obligated".
I agree. So what do you suggest? I'm personally of the mind that officially declaring the deal copyright holders broke non-binding on any entity except for commercial redistribution - meaning selling copies - would be fair, and solve this problem nicely.
They are bribed to not rebel. That's why you can give these modern-day "let them eat cake" statements without worrying about being dragged to a guillotine.
But human beings tend to regard whatever they're used to as the "natural" resting point of things. That's why politicians can't comprehend that if roads are not maintained, they'll be gone eventually. That's why people can't comprehend that if they don't stop stuffing their face, they'll have a heart attack and die. And that's why conservatists can't comprehend that if they implement their policies of removing all maintenance from civil society, they'll get a civil war.
I'm starting to think it'll take a major Western nation falling to anarchy to drive this point home again. Russia's fate did that once, but is old enough history to be ignored nowadays. Thanks for volunteering America.
The Dark Side is not about winning, it's about making someone else lose worse than you. This was true a long time ago in a galaxy far away and it's true here and now.
Once you realize this, a lot of absurd things dicatorships, companies and the 1% do start making sense. It's just people acting out the archetype of the villain, realizing at some level what they are even if they refuse to admit it consciously. Palpatine does; the path of the Sith is all about embracing evil and going out of your way to act in harmony with the archetype in full self-awareness of what you're doing. Vader never really does, lacking the awareness and the guts, lying to himself about his noble motives - first saving his wife, then bringing order to the galaxy - and thus loses his duels against Obi-Wan and much later Luke. It's also why he can ultimately repent (which takes Palpatine by surprise because he's too much in synch with his archetype, and salvation is beyond it).
...All of which means that Hayden Christensen was the perfect choice for the role of Vader and played it perfectly. My mind is blown :o.
It's in the long-term interests of the government itself, but not necessarily it's individual members. Which is why modern democratic governments with huge bureaucracies actually running everything tend to be far more efficient than old-style dictatorships: a bureaucracy is a kind of living thing in itself and wants to survive, and that requires the host country to prosper. The less power individual politicians have, the stronger the collective hivemind becomes.
I never said it was. And sexual extortion goes a bit beyond "being a dick".
Do you think it would be appropriate for a boss to ask their underling out? Likely not. Is it appropriate to ask their peer out? Yes. The limits of appropriate behaviour do change all the time depending on the relative roles of the subject and object of said behaviour. It is perfectly reasonable to expect people to implement corresponding changes in their behaviour, regardless of their views.
"These attitudes" being someone admitting to finding someone else sexually attractive to third parties. No, "we" don't have to do anything about that, since it's utterly harmless. Your Majesty and Your Royal Side Personas are free to do as You wish, of course.
Right. So do you also date men? And if not, does this has to do with them not having compatible personalities and interests, or do you simply not find them attractive? In other words, is that 2% of the time you do spend having sex important for whether you date someone or simply befriend them, which was what I claimed?
Or did you simply want to insult someone and I happened along? In that case, consider me emotionally devastated. Was it good for you?
And a running count of your sexual encounters, apparently. Perhaps you're simply projecting?