Your mistake is believing that freedom to create is the point. Making money through artificial scarcity is the point. Laws are easily and cheaply bought to make sure the point comes through.
Laws are easily and cheaply bought. But that's meaningless without enforcement. And as the pretty much total disregard the copyright nowadays gets and the graffiti artists the parent mentioned prove, enforcement in this area is simply not possible.
Also, copyright laws are cheap to buy precisely because no one cares about them. An effective law to stop people from creating would lead to a civil war, one its makers would quickly lose. There are too many people who would be hurt by such guilds, and politicians aren't stupid enough to accept bribes for a suicide (and quite possibly not just a political one, either).
All it takes for evil to win is for good men to do nothing, but that only applies until said evil starts telling evil people to bend over and take one for team evil. At that point they're just as willing to fight it as good men are.
So your solution is that creators stop creating. Or only create if they freely give any and all creation to everyone?
You are free to create or not create. You are free to give or not give your creations away, should you make any. What you are not free to do is lord it over not only people you give one to, but also third parties that have never had any kind of direct dealings with you. Simply because I happen to heard something that was first thought up by you does not mean you own whatever ideas it might inspire in me.
Car analogy: I bought a used car. Does that mean that the manufacturer is within his rights to deny me the right to resell it? Or drive certain routes? Or pimp it up?
Again, how do creators eat?
Either become so good you'll get patronage (the Wikipedia model), or people will commission works from you (the Deviantart model), or get a job that pays your bills (the Joe Average model).
Being a creator does not entitle you to have power over anyone else's actions. Nor does it entitle you to be paid for the same work over and over and over again. Why on Earth would it?
I don't mind giving my artwork away, but I'll be damned if somebody else is going to be making money off of it.
How would they do that, though? I mean, if you can't make a profit selling it because people can get it for free, why would it be any different for anyone else?
Where's my incentive to share my work with strangers if I have no control over what they do with it?
Glory? Being commissioned to produce something specific? Simply wanting to create and let your creations spread?
Profit motive becomes the less important the higher you move in the Maslow's hierarchy of needs. That is arguably the biggest failing of economics today: it assumes everyone is permanently stuck operating on survival mode.
Once you're safe, warm, and more likely to be harmed by obesity than starvation, the opinion of strangers starts mattering more than their money. Which is why we're having this discussion on Slashdot rather than working a second or third job.
We choose to treat intellectual property like real property because the system works. Or I guess I should say that it works better than pure anarchy.
Rather than just say it, you should offer some evidence. Do you have some examples of such "pure anarchy"? Do you have some data to show their cultural output is inferior compared to ours, and evidence that this cannot be accounted with by other factors?
If you can show me a working system that encourages people to synthesize information and share it with the population, I'll sign right up.
Slashdot? Every single web forum in existence? The fanfic/art/music/whatever community (for absolutely anything that has them - they always end up producing things superior to the original through the inverse of Sturgeon's Law (also known as the Million Monkey Theorem))?
But right now the Wikipedia is the only example I can see and it has many limitations. (It's also protected by copyright and I wonder whether it would work without copyright.)
Wikipedia offers its database in a convenient format for download, with an explicit permission to reuse on other websites, commercial or noncommercial, as is or in an altered form. So what, exactly speaking, does copyright contribute here? Aside from the legal hassle of explicit licensing, I mean?
Well, then what is the solution? How would you pay the authors, musicians and photographers?
Commissions for artists and photographers, concerts for musicians. Writers are trickier, but not impossible; the problem is largely because of the false dichotomy between "eternal absolute copyright" and "free for all". Bookstores are still in business, after all, and there's no reason why "copyright" couldn't simply mean that the author gets a mandatory cut of the sales, for example.
Or will they need to get day jobs to fund the work while the aggregators get rich?
And that's another possibility. No one's forcing them to practice their profession, and many others have been made unprofitable in the course of history. If culture becomes the realm of people who do it for love of the craft rather than money, is that really so bad?
In other words: why should I have artificial restrictions applied to me just so you don't have to get a "day job"? Why should your profits trump over my freedom?
Customers don't give a damm about open source either. Just a tiny tiny % of geeks care.
Customers do give a damn about the availability of apps, though. You can get Angry Birds on any platform, thus it's not a selling point; but the presence of niche applications is, and those are too low-profit for companies to bother. That leaves geeks as suppliers, and as you said: a % of geeks care about open source.
Unlike desktop, mobile actually has real competition, so can Google afford to give up an advantage just because a primadonna chip maker feels like acting up?
As someone who was brought up in a school with a cadet force which taught marksmanship and such, but in a country which doesn't have much of a gun culture, I really don't get this obsession with 3D-printer-manufacturing of parts of guns.
You don't need to care about guns themselves to be excited about this. It's quite sufficient to be interested in 3D printing itself. After all, a gun combines high pressures, high temperatures, sudden shocks of both and corrosive substances (from the burnt propellant) with low tolerances so if you can print a working gun, chances are that you can print pretty much anything.
On the other hand, companies know this too, so it's only natural that there's scaremongering around the issue. "You wouldn't print a car..."
"Idiocracy" is not only prophecy, it's a documentary sent from the future. Hell we are already in the early stages of it. I have seen the SIGNS!
Specifically, you're smarter than other people and have less sex - not because you're arrogant, antisocial and out of shape but because you're more responsible than them.
"Idiocracy" is a cynical attempt to prey on geeks ego and self-deception, nothing more.
As for slums, yeah, there's still a lot of business to do there, just because it sucks and every individual is poor, it doesn't mean that the overall economy is unproductive, it's just not productive enough to provide a high standard of living for the teeming masses.
Or it could be productive enough to provide a high standard of living for everyone, but all the resources are directed towards providing the elite with an ultra-high one. You know, the same reason we have economic problems now.
Heads up...life has always been a contest, for each creature to struggle and fight with others to survive...in our case, to also live more comfortably and provide for our families, even if that means beating someone else out of things to do so.
So... you're saying that we should stop talking and simply loot a few mansions?
Or did you mean it's every man for himself only when it benefits certain people?
That article gives no reason to be worried about elliptical curves. What it does give reason to be worried about is magical constants and the use of asymmetrical primitives for something that can be done with symmetrical primitives.
No, what it shows is that the NSA is sneaky. "I don't understand why the NSA was so insistent about including Dual_EC_DRBG in the standard." Because it's a distraction. It has a visible flaw and thus draws attention away from the other methods in the standard which presumably have other, more subtle flaws.
Altough the real lesson is to not use a weapon supplied by your enemy to fight him.
I said nothing about key exchange systems or anything else... I was making a general comment about encryption schemes; Your confusion is because you are drawing your own conclusions, rather than staying on point: Which is that every encryption algorithm, regardless of type or usage-scenario, has a shelf life.
You still can't replace an outdated public-key encryption key system with a symmetric system. Because, in real life, usage scenarios and key exchange systems actually matter - in fact, they are the most crucial aspect of the whole thing, otherwise we'd use true random one-time pads and be safe from any attack with any level of computing power forever.
FF is inherently unusable as a browser because it eats all of my memory when I leave 30 tabs opened for a few days at a time.
I have the opposite problem: I have 16 gigabytes of memory but Firefox crashes when it hits 2 gigs, presumably because of heap fragmentation or something. Which is perfectly understandable, being a problem inherent in C/C++ due to the lack of ability to relocate heap objects, and data items of essentially random sizes allocated and freed at random.
But what is not understandable is that 32-bit is not only the default, but the only officially available build in 2013. How many people have 32-bit processors and operating systems at this point? Is there any reason to pander to dirty 32-bit peasants rather than embrace the glorious 64-bit master race and its vast open vistas of virtual memory space?
A partial solution can be achieved only if each poster has to authenticate with the server using a globally unique ID that is assigned to that person at birth. Then if that person abuses their right to post, you can kick them by that ID - and they have no other ID to use. In the end spammers will run out of willing workers.
Thus replacing a minor irritant with every tyrant's wet dream. And it wouldn't even stop spam: spammers would simply use a virus to send their spam from your machine in your name.
The companies that those billionaires own are what drive the economy and do things like grow and distribute our food.
No, the people working the fields grow the food and the people driving the trucks and manning the cash register distribute it. And even the organizational work is mostly done by middle managers. All the billionaires do is get a cut of other people's work and occasionally destroy their livelihoods.
Sure, I can read an open-source book or listen to open-source music, but typically I prefer the commercial products.
And you think it takes a billionaire to write a book or a song?
In other words, if you give a man a hammer, all he will see are nails.
And if you give him a billion dollars, all he will see are the serfs he's entitled to.
No amount of discussion on the topic is going to sway me to believe otherwise.
Now extend this attitude to every side of every issue and you'll understand why politics is so dysfunctional.
Also, it is a sad testament to our culture that you can publicly confess that you'll stick to your initital prejudice no matter what facts or logic you might encounter, and apparently see that as a source of pride rather than a serious cognitive flaw.
Manufacturing is a piss-poor job. It pays really low, is really boring, repetitive and has very strict quotas. Basically you're putting tab A into slot B for 8 hours straight, and you have under a second to do it. Take 1.1 seconds and you'll be called out for being less productive.
And with all that, it still beats Wal-Mart and McDonald's, not to mention unemployment. The obsession with manufacturing is that it's the least miserable job people who aren't artistic, engineers or psychopaths can do, and the only one that actually pays decently. That's why it's emergence brought the masses into middle class, and it's disapperance is dropping them down to poverty again.
Consider an (non-JITing) interpreter. The interpreter is a standard piece of software, which is not obfuscated. The program being interpreted can be obfuscated, and no part of it will ever be run directly on the CPU - every machine instruction that runs is part of the interpreter.
Consider your browser. It has a Javascript interpreter, which executes the scripts downloaded from the Web. Notice how the CPU usage goes up when it encounters a particularly bad page? It's because the Javascript is, in fact, executing on the CPU, even if it rides atop several layers of abstraction.
I thought it was based on "you are a slave of the country you are born in, with no rights they don't bestow upon you, unless you move elsewhere." That seems to be the practical application of the "social contract" these days. I don't consent to the US operations. I moved. I recommend everyone else with means does so before the fall (and no, not autumn).
Do you actually know what slavery means? Because being able to simply walk away whenever you want is pretty much the antithesis of slavery.
But yes, that pretty much is what the social contract is: others agree to behave towards you as if you had certain rights - not bestow them, but simply modify their own behaviour - in exchange of you modifying yours. Do you have better ideas about how to go about it?
Any decent compiler will recognize tail recursion, and optimize out the function call.
And any decent programmer ensures that their code works even if the compiler doesn't fix the bugs for them. The rest break the specs of whatever language they use and then whine that C/Java/whatever isn't portable, when it's their own damn fault for writing programs with undefined behaviour in the first place.
Everything in cryptography relies on the impracticality of brute-force attacks, which are never impossible. That's why we talk about security in terms of hundreds of years.
Brute-force attacks are impossible against one-time pads.
Anyway, the problem is that the processor must be able to figure out what instruction to execute first, then what to execute next, etc. So you can trace the execution path for any given input without brute-forcing anything. Can you trace every possible path without brute-forcing? Dunno, but if you can't, all that stops is completely automated disassembly.
Some people get drunk with power, and some people become assholes when drunk. But what's sad is that it takes such a petty amount of perceived power for some people to lose it.
"I can code! I failed to be properly socialized as a kid! Bend over, world!"
Clearly, he didn't have a reason for every single document.
Perhaps. But then again, he had no way to go through them all, and had a reason to suspect that at least some contained evidence of wrongdoing. So at that point it becomes a question of which is more important, holding the secrets (only publishing those documents that he had personally verified to be evidence) or exposing every single crime (publishing it all).
Slashdot Mirror
Laws are easily and cheaply bought. But that's meaningless without enforcement. And as the pretty much total disregard the copyright nowadays gets and the graffiti artists the parent mentioned prove, enforcement in this area is simply not possible.
Also, copyright laws are cheap to buy precisely because no one cares about them. An effective law to stop people from creating would lead to a civil war, one its makers would quickly lose. There are too many people who would be hurt by such guilds, and politicians aren't stupid enough to accept bribes for a suicide (and quite possibly not just a political one, either).
All it takes for evil to win is for good men to do nothing, but that only applies until said evil starts telling evil people to bend over and take one for team evil. At that point they're just as willing to fight it as good men are.
You are free to create or not create. You are free to give or not give your creations away, should you make any. What you are not free to do is lord it over not only people you give one to, but also third parties that have never had any kind of direct dealings with you. Simply because I happen to heard something that was first thought up by you does not mean you own whatever ideas it might inspire in me.
Car analogy: I bought a used car. Does that mean that the manufacturer is within his rights to deny me the right to resell it? Or drive certain routes? Or pimp it up?
Either become so good you'll get patronage (the Wikipedia model), or people will commission works from you (the Deviantart model), or get a job that pays your bills (the Joe Average model).
Being a creator does not entitle you to have power over anyone else's actions. Nor does it entitle you to be paid for the same work over and over and over again. Why on Earth would it?
How would they do that, though? I mean, if you can't make a profit selling it because people can get it for free, why would it be any different for anyone else?
Glory? Being commissioned to produce something specific? Simply wanting to create and let your creations spread?
Profit motive becomes the less important the higher you move in the Maslow's hierarchy of needs. That is arguably the biggest failing of economics today: it assumes everyone is permanently stuck operating on survival mode.
Once you're safe, warm, and more likely to be harmed by obesity than starvation, the opinion of strangers starts mattering more than their money. Which is why we're having this discussion on Slashdot rather than working a second or third job.
We choose to treat intellectual property like real property because the system works. Or I guess I should say that it works better than pure anarchy.
Rather than just say it, you should offer some evidence. Do you have some examples of such "pure anarchy"? Do you have some data to show their cultural output is inferior compared to ours, and evidence that this cannot be accounted with by other factors?
Slashdot? Every single web forum in existence? The fanfic/art/music/whatever community (for absolutely anything that has them - they always end up producing things superior to the original through the inverse of Sturgeon's Law (also known as the Million Monkey Theorem))?
Wikipedia offers its database in a convenient format for download, with an explicit permission to reuse on other websites, commercial or noncommercial, as is or in an altered form. So what, exactly speaking, does copyright contribute here? Aside from the legal hassle of explicit licensing, I mean?
Commissions for artists and photographers, concerts for musicians. Writers are trickier, but not impossible; the problem is largely because of the false dichotomy between "eternal absolute copyright" and "free for all". Bookstores are still in business, after all, and there's no reason why "copyright" couldn't simply mean that the author gets a mandatory cut of the sales, for example.
And that's another possibility. No one's forcing them to practice their profession, and many others have been made unprofitable in the course of history. If culture becomes the realm of people who do it for love of the craft rather than money, is that really so bad?
In other words: why should I have artificial restrictions applied to me just so you don't have to get a "day job"? Why should your profits trump over my freedom?
Customers do give a damn about the availability of apps, though. You can get Angry Birds on any platform, thus it's not a selling point; but the presence of niche applications is, and those are too low-profit for companies to bother. That leaves geeks as suppliers, and as you said: a % of geeks care about open source.
Unlike desktop, mobile actually has real competition, so can Google afford to give up an advantage just because a primadonna chip maker feels like acting up?
You don't need to care about guns themselves to be excited about this. It's quite sufficient to be interested in 3D printing itself. After all, a gun combines high pressures, high temperatures, sudden shocks of both and corrosive substances (from the burnt propellant) with low tolerances so if you can print a working gun, chances are that you can print pretty much anything.
On the other hand, companies know this too, so it's only natural that there's scaremongering around the issue. "You wouldn't print a car..."
Specifically, you're smarter than other people and have less sex - not because you're arrogant, antisocial and out of shape but because you're more responsible than them.
"Idiocracy" is a cynical attempt to prey on geeks ego and self-deception, nothing more.
Or it could be productive enough to provide a high standard of living for everyone, but all the resources are directed towards providing the elite with an ultra-high one. You know, the same reason we have economic problems now.
So... you're saying that we should stop talking and simply loot a few mansions?
Or did you mean it's every man for himself only when it benefits certain people?
No, what it shows is that the NSA is sneaky. "I don't understand why the NSA was so insistent about including Dual_EC_DRBG in the standard." Because it's a distraction. It has a visible flaw and thus draws attention away from the other methods in the standard which presumably have other, more subtle flaws.
Altough the real lesson is to not use a weapon supplied by your enemy to fight him.
You still can't replace an outdated public-key encryption key system with a symmetric system. Because, in real life, usage scenarios and key exchange systems actually matter - in fact, they are the most crucial aspect of the whole thing, otherwise we'd use true random one-time pads and be safe from any attack with any level of computing power forever.
I have the opposite problem: I have 16 gigabytes of memory but Firefox crashes when it hits 2 gigs, presumably because of heap fragmentation or something. Which is perfectly understandable, being a problem inherent in C/C++ due to the lack of ability to relocate heap objects, and data items of essentially random sizes allocated and freed at random.
But what is not understandable is that 32-bit is not only the default, but the only officially available build in 2013. How many people have 32-bit processors and operating systems at this point? Is there any reason to pander to dirty 32-bit peasants rather than embrace the glorious 64-bit master race and its vast open vistas of virtual memory space?
Thus replacing a minor irritant with every tyrant's wet dream. And it wouldn't even stop spam: spammers would simply use a virus to send their spam from your machine in your name.
No, the people working the fields grow the food and the people driving the trucks and manning the cash register distribute it. And even the organizational work is mostly done by middle managers. All the billionaires do is get a cut of other people's work and occasionally destroy their livelihoods.
And you think it takes a billionaire to write a book or a song?
And if you give him a billion dollars, all he will see are the serfs he's entitled to.
Now extend this attitude to every side of every issue and you'll understand why politics is so dysfunctional.
Also, it is a sad testament to our culture that you can publicly confess that you'll stick to your initital prejudice no matter what facts or logic you might encounter, and apparently see that as a source of pride rather than a serious cognitive flaw.
And with all that, it still beats Wal-Mart and McDonald's, not to mention unemployment. The obsession with manufacturing is that it's the least miserable job people who aren't artistic, engineers or psychopaths can do, and the only one that actually pays decently. That's why it's emergence brought the masses into middle class, and it's disapperance is dropping them down to poverty again.
Consider your browser. It has a Javascript interpreter, which executes the scripts downloaded from the Web. Notice how the CPU usage goes up when it encounters a particularly bad page? It's because the Javascript is, in fact, executing on the CPU, even if it rides atop several layers of abstraction.
Do you actually know what slavery means? Because being able to simply walk away whenever you want is pretty much the antithesis of slavery.
But yes, that pretty much is what the social contract is: others agree to behave towards you as if you had certain rights - not bestow them, but simply modify their own behaviour - in exchange of you modifying yours. Do you have better ideas about how to go about it?
But isn't that what this ultimately comes down to? Turning the whole country - indeed, the whole world - into a giant panopticon?
And any decent programmer ensures that their code works even if the compiler doesn't fix the bugs for them. The rest break the specs of whatever language they use and then whine that C/Java/whatever isn't portable, when it's their own damn fault for writing programs with undefined behaviour in the first place.
Brute-force attacks are impossible against one-time pads.
Anyway, the problem is that the processor must be able to figure out what instruction to execute first, then what to execute next, etc. So you can trace the execution path for any given input without brute-forcing anything. Can you trace every possible path without brute-forcing? Dunno, but if you can't, all that stops is completely automated disassembly.
Some people get drunk with power, and some people become assholes when drunk. But what's sad is that it takes such a petty amount of perceived power for some people to lose it.
"I can code! I failed to be properly socialized as a kid! Bend over, world!"
Your fork bomb fizzles due to running out of stack. Try this:
main() {
while(1) fork();
}
}
Perhaps. But then again, he had no way to go through them all, and had a reason to suspect that at least some contained evidence of wrongdoing. So at that point it becomes a question of which is more important, holding the secrets (only publishing those documents that he had personally verified to be evidence) or exposing every single crime (publishing it all).