However, can you please find anything revolving around the definitions of "Free Market" that establishes artificial monopolies, and artificial scarcity in the form of copyright law?
Copyright law is not part of the free market. In fact, it makes the market less free by imposing further restrictions on people's actions in the market.
Without copyright, in a true free market - the financial incentive to create these closed systems would diminish and they would be unable to compete with freedom alternatives.
What do you mean by saying that my ideals do not fit the real world? The vast amounts of Free Software that exists despite copyright law proves that it is unnecessary. Can you even imagine how much more free software we would have without copyrights restricting software?
I believe that proprietary software places unreasonable limits on the freedom of users. If we could simply ignore such software and thus avoid its harmful effects completely, I'd be okay with the dubious copyright law that allows such abuse. However, by not-buying/ignoring proprietary software, I still suffer from it in multiple ways:
I am forced to use it, am affected by it, or otherwise am restricted from services - when it monopolizes markets.
Proprietary software makers have huge incentive to break standards, create a net effect and put huge effort into making it hard to reverse-engineer. As such, Free Software developers have to waste their time reverse engineering these obstacles, in order to have useful word processors, operating systems, etc. All this, instead of improving the state of the art.
Developers would have far more incentive to create freedom software if the proprietary alternatives did not exist. As such, the proprietary software diminishes the power I enjoy when using free software.
Developers are lured by the large amounts of money these abuses of copyright law provides, and have yet more incentive to spend their time and skills developing restricted, closed, and standards-breaking software that is hard to reverse-engineer for compatibility. All this, rather than them working on Free Software that improves the users' power.
You must understand, however, that whether or not you have a "right" to restrict what I do is a question that has different answers from different people. Its not "zealotry" to believe either way.
I believe that we should strive to maximize human happiness, and thus we need to find the right legal setting that maximizes peoples exposure to useful works, and the amount of usefulness that they can extract from those works.
I see rewarding authors as merely a means towards the above end. I believe software's barrier to entry is so low, that the "extra incentive" made possible by restricting users so badly (which goes directly against the above-stated primary goal), is simply not worth it.
Also, I believe that the main productive outlet of people is creating derivative works, and that proprietary works completely block this main creative outlet. So not only do they work against the happiness people can derive from works in the name of making more works possible, they also block creativity and make less works possible! That is absurd.
All this, when free software is repeatedly proving that the extra incentive in the form of restricting user freedoms is not absolutely necessary.
To the latter I say, just because I let you in my home to have all the free stuff you want (assuming you don't steal it from me) but if I say you can't go into my bedroom then you must accept that it is off limits. So restricting the freedoms of users to use the software, modify it for their needs and sharing it with their neighbors is like preventing them from destroying your bedroom privacy?
Israel kills Palestinians as part of a military conflict. My question was what the hell was he talking about, when he said "genocide", and I still haven't received my answer.
When you're comparing Python, Lisp, Smalltalk, Java, C# and to a certain degree, even C/C++ then you have a point. These languages have significant productivity differences, but those are often dwarfed by other things.
However, completely different languages, such as Haskell do indeed offer a very different approach, that may completely change the way you program, the productivity of your practice and in the (near?) future, the scalability of the program to multiple processors.
coroutines, closures and continuations Given that coroutines are trivial to implement once you have continuations - wouldn't that be the 2 C's of a "good language"?
(Note I think that's a pretty weird way to define these features as a must for a good language and is obviously biased by a narrow world view).
Long copyright periods produce income streams that can be lived off I think this is the minor thing stifling progress.
The much more important issue is that virtually all progress is a derivative work. Long copyrights disallow the creation of derivative works of anything under copyright.
Thus, virtually all potential progress is inhibited by long copyrights.
In a rare moment of foresight, lawmakers actually came up with a forward solution to a future problem.
When I read this, I was seriously convinced you were a troll there. I think you need to go back to do some reading about the history of copyright.
Copyright was not foresight, it was meant to make publishing possible (and empiric studies suggest that even then, authors that distributed works without copyright often made more money).
About money and motivation - copyright is not required for those. Performances make money. A limited copyright that applies for a short term (such as 5 years) and to profit-based organizations only (theaters, as an example) will allow money to be made by movie makers.
Maybe less money, who knows. But consider that even if significantly less work is created in total, the fact that it is all public domain as far as people are concerned, the net effect is that people will have and be exposed to more culture. This, combined with the fact that anyone will be able to make incremental improvements and derivative works may actually mean that we will have the best of both worlds (more culture for everyone, AND more creation).
History proves that there is money to be made by culture even without or with extremely limited copyrights. Also see the case of British publishers making their dime in the early US market, which had no copyright protection for them (they often made more money in that market than in the British market which did offer them copyrights).
Copyright was supposed to balance incentive for artists to produce, and the ability for artists to produce.... The "invasiveness" was never really an issue.
Again, you need to do some more reading about the history of copyright.
Copyright's purpose is to promote science and useful arts - in other words its meant to help society. Restricting society's access to works is obviously an "evil", even if considered by some to be a necessary evil.
The balance is not between the ability to produce and the incentive to produce. The balance is between the restriction of freedom on society, and the incentive to produce.
Invasiveness was a major issue, and the founding fathers who framed copyright into the constitution and later into law also considered it a necessary evil exactly because it intrudes on freedoms.
Yeah, growing up in a society where demand for a product almost instantly implies the existence of a supplier, I guess you may not realise this, but if you fuck around with the money supply, there may not be such services for you to enjoy. In the past, we've had ways to make such things worthwhile to the service providers, which allowed them to provide the service, but you simply can't guarantee that with music/movies if you take away the money source.
I believe the free market will allow the demand for products to give incentives to suppliers, with or without copyrights. As I explained before, copyrights are not the only way to make money off works.
Most music artists make most of their money from performing, and not from copyrighted content (the distributors make their money from the copyrights, not the artists). So claiming it will destroy that kind of artistic creation is simply empirically wrong.
Movies make a significant portion of their money from theaters, even though the movies are often easily accessible in other forms. This will remain true even if personal copyrights are abolished, and short 5-year copyrights remain on theater runners. Also, such short copyrights will mean that movie makers will have to compete with past movies, and not just new currently marketed movies, and this will generate an incentive for better work.
Opensource software is yet more empiric evidence that copyrights are not necessary to create financial compensation.
The British publishers selling books in the states without the protection of copyrights is anoth
The technological difference between then and now is all the more reason that copyrights should be abolished. Back then, copyrights barely restricted people, and now their restrictions are extremely intrusive. Back then, creating music and derivative works was hard and required a lot of incentives, and now the barriers of entry are lower, and thus less incentive is needed.
Copyright is a balance between the need of incentive and the invasiveness of the restrictions - and both parameters of this balance were changed against copyright because of technology.
People "don't need to go to live concerts", but they do anyway. People also don't need to go to the theater, and they do. Its a social experience and one that people will continue experiencing, and its unlikely even future technology will change that.
Also remember that having stronger copyrights does not even necessarily mean creating more content, as copyrights disallow a major form of creativity: Derivative works. Having 100 year copyrights and longer means that nobody can create derivative works of most of the major creations, severely crippling creative expression.
Most creative work is derivative work, and we would have far more creative work without restrictions on these derivatives.
I haven't bought or downloaded any illegal music in the last year. I probably listened to some previously copied "illegal music" a couple of times, though I could have easily avoided that.
So I already fit your criteria of "living without illegal music for a year".
Music thrived before copyright restrictions, it will thrive without it in the future as well.
The reason we need binary-level processor compatibility - is actually closed-source software.
Its yet another way we are being harmed by it.
If Opensource was prevalent and closed-source rare or never used, then we could have better processors and more competition without worrying about that kind of compatibility.
I like KDE better than I like Gnome (due to KIOSlave/KParts being available in all URL/file prompts, etc). I really miss using "ggl:blah" in my run dialog.
However, two things have been keeping me with Gnome lately:
KDE applications start slowly.
Ubuntu is much more mature than Kubuntu.
The second is inevitable, I guess, and is being worked on, so there's less to complain about.
But the first really annoys me - launching one of the smallest KDE applications I could find (kate) as a benchmark of app startup time shows that it takes 3 seconds to start, whereas gedit takes about 1 second to start in Gnome, and notepad takes unnoticable time to start in Windows.
I am really puzzled by these weird startup times. What is it that these programs waste their time on at startup? Can't those things happen "lazily" later in the run of the program, when they are actually needed? Are there inherent penalties of Linux executables that have lots of dynamic libraries, and in the case of KDE, C++ mangled symbols?
Actually, installing grub on the MBR is the right choice. It just needs to let you run Windows from its MBR loader.
If grub is broken, that's a serious bug, but the correct solution is fixing that bug, not having grub sit on a non-mbr, and hope Windows is nice enough to let you boot from that hard drive (which it isn't).
Why don't you ever bitch about Windows overwriting the MBR without even asking?
Now I'm not supporting the idea that the installer bricked his unit. It didn't. I'm saying that making this sort of error and letting it stand for years without being addressed and then tossing it back into the face of the user (who just might be a retired friend who knows little about computers) is not the way to go about marking your product. It worked for Windows, which just eliminates the previous MBR without asking any questions at all.
Somehow, Ubuntu is being flamed for this, even though it puts a lot more effort into playing nice with other OS's than Windows - which nobody seems to criticize here at all.
Slashdot Mirror
What do you mean by Apartheid?
What features of Apartheid does Israel have?
You repeat the mantra: "Free market".
However, can you please find anything revolving around the definitions of "Free Market" that establishes artificial monopolies, and artificial scarcity in the form of copyright law?
Copyright law is not part of the free market. In fact, it makes the market less free by imposing further restrictions on people's actions in the market.
Without copyright, in a true free market - the financial incentive to create these closed systems would diminish and they would be unable to compete with freedom alternatives.
What do you mean by saying that my ideals do not fit the real world? The vast amounts of Free Software that exists despite copyright law proves that it is unnecessary. Can you even imagine how much more free software we would have without copyrights restricting software?
You must understand, however, that whether or not you have a "right" to restrict what I do is a question that has different answers from different people. Its not "zealotry" to believe either way.
I believe that we should strive to maximize human happiness, and thus we need to find the right legal setting that maximizes peoples exposure to useful works, and the amount of usefulness that they can extract from those works.
I see rewarding authors as merely a means towards the above end. I believe software's barrier to entry is so low, that the "extra incentive" made possible by restricting users so badly (which goes directly against the above-stated primary goal), is simply not worth it.
Also, I believe that the main productive outlet of people is creating derivative works, and that proprietary works completely block this main creative outlet. So not only do they work against the happiness people can derive from works in the name of making more works possible, they also block creativity and make less works possible! That is absurd.
All this, when free software is repeatedly proving that the extra incentive in the form of restricting user freedoms is not absolutely necessary.
I don't think so.
Israel kills Palestinians as part of a military conflict. My question was what the hell was he talking about, when he said "genocide", and I still haven't received my answer.
Actually you are pissing Muslims off by not being Muslim. God hates the non-believers, and it is their job to kill you.
Also, god hates the Jews, according to the last released tape from Al Queda, and they will try to kill them all over the world.
So yes, its basically hate for merely "existing" - unless you convert to Islam, then you are allowed to exist.
It does require some belief.
:-)
Belief in Occam's razor.
Belief that if things behaved a certain way in the past, they will continue to behave that way in the future.
Of course, everyone (including YEC's) believe in these principles and apply them to their lives all the time (so I guess I am just nitpicking
Actually, Flash doesn't work very well. It still crashes, and running it in a 64-bit Firefox is a pain.
And this is a direct result of it being closed-source software.
Putting pressure on the OSS community to solve these needs with opensource code could help us get rid of these closed-source trouble makers.
When you're comparing Python, Lisp, Smalltalk, Java, C# and to a certain degree, even C/C++ then you have a point. These languages have significant productivity differences, but those are often dwarfed by other things.
However, completely different languages, such as Haskell do indeed offer a very different approach, that may completely change the way you program, the productivity of your practice and in the (near?) future, the scalability of the program to multiple processors.
(Note I think that's a pretty weird way to define these features as a must for a good language and is obviously biased by a narrow world view).
Really? Which people you know have mysteriously disappeared lately?
What about nuclear energy?
Do you support that or do you prefer existing solutions?
The much more important issue is that virtually all progress is a derivative work. Long copyrights disallow the creation of derivative works of anything under copyright.
Thus, virtually all potential progress is inhibited by long copyrights.
In a rare moment of foresight, lawmakers actually came up with a forward solution to a future problem.
When I read this, I was seriously convinced you were a troll there. I think you need to go back to do some reading about the history of copyright.
Copyright was not foresight, it was meant to make publishing possible (and empiric studies suggest that even then, authors that distributed works without copyright often made more money).
About money and motivation - copyright is not required for those. Performances make money. A limited copyright that applies for a short term (such as 5 years) and to profit-based organizations only (theaters, as an example) will allow money to be made by movie makers.
Maybe less money, who knows. But consider that even if significantly less work is created in total, the fact that it is all public domain as far as people are concerned, the net effect is that people will have and be exposed to more culture. This, combined with the fact that anyone will be able to make incremental improvements and derivative works may actually mean that we will have the best of both worlds (more culture for everyone, AND more creation).
History proves that there is money to be made by culture even without or with extremely limited copyrights. Also see the case of British publishers making their dime in the early US market, which had no copyright protection for them (they often made more money in that market than in the British market which did offer them copyrights).
Copyright was supposed to balance incentive for artists to produce, and the ability for artists to produce. ... The "invasiveness" was never really an issue.
Again, you need to do some more reading about the history of copyright.
Copyright's purpose is to promote science and useful arts - in other words its meant to help society. Restricting society's access to works is obviously an "evil", even if considered by some to be a necessary evil.
The balance is not between the ability to produce and the incentive to produce. The balance is between the restriction of freedom on society, and the incentive to produce.
Invasiveness was a major issue, and the founding fathers who framed copyright into the constitution and later into law also considered it a necessary evil exactly because it intrudes on freedoms.
Yeah, growing up in a society where demand for a product almost instantly implies the existence of a supplier, I guess you may not realise this, but if you fuck around with the money supply, there may not be such services for you to enjoy. In the past, we've had ways to make such things worthwhile to the service providers, which allowed them to provide the service, but you simply can't guarantee that with music/movies if you take away the money source.
I believe the free market will allow the demand for products to give incentives to suppliers, with or without copyrights. As I explained before, copyrights are not the only way to make money off works.
The technological difference between then and now is all the more reason that copyrights should be abolished. Back then, copyrights barely restricted people, and now their restrictions are extremely intrusive. Back then, creating music and derivative works was hard and required a lot of incentives, and now the barriers of entry are lower, and thus less incentive is needed.
Copyright is a balance between the need of incentive and the invasiveness of the restrictions - and both parameters of this balance were changed against copyright because of technology.
People "don't need to go to live concerts", but they do anyway. People also don't need to go to the theater, and they do. Its a social experience and one that people will continue experiencing, and its unlikely even future technology will change that.
Also remember that having stronger copyrights does not even necessarily mean creating more content, as copyrights disallow a major form of creativity: Derivative works. Having 100 year copyrights and longer means that nobody can create derivative works of most of the major creations, severely crippling creative expression.
Most creative work is derivative work, and we would have far more creative work without restrictions on these derivatives.
I haven't bought or downloaded any illegal music in the last year. I probably listened to some previously copied "illegal music" a couple of times, though I could have easily avoided that.
So I already fit your criteria of "living without illegal music for a year".
Music thrived before copyright restrictions, it will thrive without it in the future as well.
Severely damaging?
I would never pay someone for content which I am not free to use, modify and distribute, as a matter of principle.
Given that payment will never come out of me - what difference does it make whether I make and use a copy for me or not?
The reason we need binary-level processor compatibility - is actually closed-source software.
Its yet another way we are being harmed by it.
If Opensource was prevalent and closed-source rare or never used, then we could have better processors and more competition without worrying about that kind of compatibility.
Who cares what .NET calls? The discussion is about the API's - usable and elegant, or ugly and inconsistent.
I really miss using "ggl:blah" in my run dialog.
However, two things have been keeping me with Gnome lately:
- KDE applications start slowly.
- Ubuntu is much more mature than Kubuntu.
The second is inevitable, I guess, and is being worked on, so there's less to complain about.But the first really annoys me - launching one of the smallest KDE applications I could find (kate) as a benchmark of app startup time shows that it takes 3 seconds to start, whereas gedit takes about 1 second to start in Gnome, and notepad takes unnoticable time to start in Windows.
I am really puzzled by these weird startup times. What is it that these programs waste their time on at startup? Can't those things happen "lazily" later in the run of the program, when they are actually needed?
Are there inherent penalties of Linux executables that have lots of dynamic libraries, and in the case of KDE, C++ mangled symbols?
What's the updated size of Skynet now?
Actually, installing grub on the MBR is the right choice. It just needs to let you run Windows from its MBR loader.
If grub is broken, that's a serious bug, but the correct solution is fixing that bug, not having grub sit on a non-mbr, and hope Windows is nice enough to let you boot from that hard drive (which it isn't).
Why don't you ever bitch about Windows overwriting the MBR without even asking?
Somehow, Ubuntu is being flamed for this, even though it puts a lot more effort into playing nice with other OS's than Windows - which nobody seems to criticize here at all.