No, you can't steal an idea, because after I stole that idea from you, you no longer had the ability to steal ideas. I, on the other hand, protect my idea to steal ideas, so no one will never steal it from me.
I'll sell it back to you for $595, though. (But can you be sure you're really getting my idea, and not an unauthorized copy?)
any change, currently, would require both parties to cooperate
It'll require either that, or people voting for those other parties. Now that I think of it, for the parties to cooperate, will require people voting too. They have to be losing, in third place or lower, to ever have incentive to support election systems which don't give advantages to the top two.
I'm not going to cast a vote for a non-Republican unless the Republican candidate is similarly harmful (in that case, an awful Democrat president at odds with Congress is a better alternative).
It sounds like you've decided to vote against overthrowing the Republicrats. It may not be your desire, but it's what you're going to reluctantly do. It's ok, I understand. Lots of people face that terrible decision.
I hope to see that changed in my lifetime
Hoping that the change will happen, in spite of your voting against it? Oh dear... we have a problem.
but at the same time, I have to deal with the current reality.
By "deal with" I think you mean "endorse and support" with your vote to maintain the status quo.
Tell ya what. I have a solution.
Come over half way. Go ahead and vote for the Republicrats, but advocate against them when you're outside the voting booth. (Don't tell anyone you're going to vote against election reform; keep that a secret.) Find one other person, and convince them to vote against the Republicrats, in order to cancel out your vote for the Republicrats. Then you can say you did the safe thing, while also saying you did no net harm. Sound good?
However if I have $100K and buy $100K worth of $10 dollar stocks then when I sell them after the stock goes up to $12, I will have a profit of $20K which would then allow me to buy more of the same and turn the same deal.
Your plan to make money sounds good, but of course you know the only reason investments make a profit (you sell at $12 instead of $1.20) is that they have risk. Some investments lose money. I think what your plan needs, to make it reliable and truly serve the interests of the wealthy, is for government to
Enact new laws so that even if the business you invested in doesn't try to do things like appeal to customers, they'll still make money
bail you out if your investments lose money in spite of the strange new laws
But this is just hypothetical; government wouldn't really do those things in real life.
The wealthy don't need any help from the government to capture more wealth.
Whether they need that help or not, they ask for it and most of us vote for a government that gives it to them. For example: SOPA.
If we had a limited government, we could get back to debating the relative merits of conservatism and progressivism, and a limited government could implement policies to serve one of those philosophies. Without a constitution to limit the boundaries of government, though, left and right are off the table, and the only goal of government is to advance the "philosophy" of corruption.
When you vote against constitutional limitations, you're voting for corporate welfare. You can call the corporate welfare "social services" if it makes you feel better, though. Or you can call a censorship and blacklist-maintenance-cost-distribution bill a Stop Online Piracy Act.
"Your money was well-spent, sonny. She's been cheating on you."
"I suspected as much, that's why I hired a private dick. But it's proof I need."
"You're not gonna like it..."
"I can take it. I have to know, for sure."
PD slides an envelope across the table. Man opens it. He stares, aghast.
"Oh my god."
"I'm sorry, sonny. Been workin' this line of business twenty years, but I never get used to the look of guy's faces. Some guys, they don't really want to know. They want to hold on to a forlorn hope that maybe, just maybe, the dame really was visiting her sister, see?"
"YOU BASTARD! HOW COULD YOU?"
"Look, I'm not proud of what I do. But you hired me, sonny. If you didn't want to know, y-"
"You used a flash! Where's the artistry? It's so unnatural. Her form intermingled with my soon-to-be-dead friend's.. look at their bodies. There's no depth. The lighting, good god man, the lighting! I'm supposed to believe this was a romantic interlude? They're like lifeless puppets!"
Your concept for geolocated pages is possible to become the final solution. Expect it to be done quietly and without the fanfare of the current situation.
That would be a completely disaster, because there's nothing special about Facebook here, other than the fact that they can afford to do what you discuss and 99% of the rest of Internet can't.
Perhaps the most legally justifiable answer might be to geolocate the IP address, find the correct trademark owner for a given country, and then redirect to MSD's or EMD's Facebook page as appropriate.
Do your website(s) do that? Should all websites scan their own URLs for trademarks, and redirect some of those URLs to other sites, and then give the previous content some other URL that is guaranteed to not look like someone else's name? Maybe all websites should be search engines, with of course the trademark name database being top priority.
Facebook doesn't represent their URL components as being company names, just like your site probably doesn't. In fact, for most of http://facebook.com/$WORD, $WORD is not anyone's trademark.
If force is being used against Facebook over this, then 1) that's an outrage 2) they did the right thing in response to it: have http://facebook.com/$WORD do a 404 or something like that.
It obviously belongs to the German company that originally registered it on Facebook
No, it obviously belongs to Facebook (or at least as much as facebook.com belongs to Facebook, except that isn't quite as clear). Whatever Facebook decides to do with it, is defined as the right answer.
Fantastic, so now Facebook has the right of determining valid trademarks, on top of all the personal data it collects
It's is Facebook's namespace (and you can have on too, right now, if you want). They get to decide whether or not trademarks are even relevant within this namespace, let alone top priority at the expense of all other concerns. Why would it be anyone else's decision?
Just because some random arbitrary private namespace out there happens to get popular, doesn't mean the rest of society needs to "officially" recognize it, legitimize it, adopt it, regulate it, or take it seriously. It's just a pathname component in someone's website, and it's their site, just like a hypothetical "Apple" directory on my computer which contains a file called "Disney" is my file in my directory on my computer, and no one else deserves.0000001% say in the matter.
When today's fools finally learn this, then they won't be afraid of new TLDs, BTW.
Of course it costs jobs. That's what computers are for. If you don't free someone to be able to do something else, then your automation has failed. Where he goes wrong is with stuff like this:
Trouble is we did not create a single long term job during this crusade.
You saved money. How is that "trouble?" If you were "creating jobs" and all else were equal, that would have wasted money.
May be the US Government was right when it once famously saw the Free Open Source movement as nothing more than a 'bunch of Commies'
Whoever said that didn't understand anything about economics.
Free Markets vs Central Planning: Free Software is about extremified free markets. You hire anyone you want to get your maintenance, instead of a single source. This is basically opposition to commie ideals, IMHO (though I realize there are other ways to look at Communism; they just happen to be ways that I disagree with). On the commie centralization scale of color, GPLed software is blue as the zenith sky, proprietary is crimson as blood, and stuff like BSD is an intense purple blur as it bounces between the two on a case-by-case basis like a Republican talking about federal spending.
Control of the Means of Production: Free Software is about code reuse and code reuse is neutral toward this, but in a way that subverts the whole question with its explosive torrent of wealth. It's like millions of factories falling out of the sky, right during an argument between a Communist and Capitalist about who should own the previously-limited number of factories. Without the need for expensive capital, nobody cares who controls it. Both the management and workers look on helplessly, as whoever used to buy the old factories' output says they don't need either one of 'em anymore.
If paychecks for programming are your main source of income, then code reuse may be a Capitalist Running Dog Murder of Brotherhood. If software company dividends (as opposed to consulting fees) are your main source of income, then code reuse may be a Ruthless Communist Plot to Impurify your Precious Bodily Fluids. If you do something else but use software, then you're shrugging and saying "whatever" to those so last-century luddites.
This really depends on what your non-tech skills and personality are. It's a great idea if you can do it, but there are plenty of us who just aren't cut out for that, and if you don't understand that, well, lucky you.
Isn't this pretty much the opposite of an Geek IQ test? This tests knowledge (to be nice) or trivia (to not be nice), whereas an IQ test would test reason, logic, problem-solving.
It means that web developers need tools which, by default, save in formats that other tools can't use (PSD), or which few other tools can partially use (SWF), text which can't even reflow when you change the window size or display device's aspect ratio (PDF), and they need otherwise-working streams crippled so that nothing else can play them (RTMPE).
In other words, people are getting spoiled and need someone like Adobe to come rescue them from big scary world of interoperative and Just-Works technology.
I tried it once. I went to a Microsoft web site (their version of Google's "Webmaster tools") which required that I download and execute their code. I did it. You wouldn't believe how shitty that site turned out to be, all in the name of avoiding HTML. You couldn't select and copy text, and you couldn't open links in another tab.
I'm convinced the only reason they did it, was to make suckers like me install silverlight. It was truly worse-than-useless garbage, every bit as bad as Flash.
If a corporation gets too old, has an unfortunately accident, or just had an unlucky roll of the genetic dice when it was founded, then its corporate spinoffs don't get to live high on the hog simply due to the accident of who spun them off.
Who wouldn't support a politician who enacted such a tax? Who would lobby against it?
Slashdot Mirror
No, you can't steal an idea, because after I stole that idea from you, you no longer had the ability to steal ideas. I, on the other hand, protect my idea to steal ideas, so no one will never steal it from me.
I'll sell it back to you for $595, though. (But can you be sure you're really getting my idea, and not an unauthorized copy?)
Awww, your first "there are potentially-murderous nutjobs out there." That is so cute!
It'll require either that, or people voting for those other parties. Now that I think of it, for the parties to cooperate, will require people voting too. They have to be losing, in third place or lower, to ever have incentive to support election systems which don't give advantages to the top two.
It sounds like you've decided to vote against overthrowing the Republicrats. It may not be your desire, but it's what you're going to reluctantly do. It's ok, I understand. Lots of people face that terrible decision.
Hoping that the change will happen, in spite of your voting against it? Oh dear... we have a problem.
By "deal with" I think you mean "endorse and support" with your vote to maintain the status quo.
Tell ya what. I have a solution.
Come over half way. Go ahead and vote for the Republicrats, but advocate against them when you're outside the voting booth. (Don't tell anyone you're going to vote against election reform; keep that a secret.) Find one other person, and convince them to vote against the Republicrats, in order to cancel out your vote for the Republicrats. Then you can say you did the safe thing, while also saying you did no net harm. Sound good?
Your plan to make money sounds good, but of course you know the only reason investments make a profit (you sell at $12 instead of $1.20) is that they have risk. Some investments lose money. I think what your plan needs, to make it reliable and truly serve the interests of the wealthy, is for government to
But this is just hypothetical; government wouldn't really do those things in real life.
Whether they need that help or not, they ask for it and most of us vote for a government that gives it to them. For example: SOPA.
If we had a limited government, we could get back to debating the relative merits of conservatism and progressivism, and a limited government could implement policies to serve one of those philosophies. Without a constitution to limit the boundaries of government, though, left and right are off the table, and the only goal of government is to advance the "philosophy" of corruption.
When you vote against constitutional limitations, you're voting for corporate welfare. You can call the corporate welfare "social services" if it makes you feel better, though. Or you can call a censorship and blacklist-maintenance-cost-distribution bill a Stop Online Piracy Act.
And with its built-in pardoning power, its crew won't ever have to worry about crimes, so it will require fewer security personnel.
They're known associates with a driver. Drivers are bad. Therefore, they are bad.
He didn't call protesting wrong; he called littering wrong.
Why shouldn't the predator strike be a public performance? You want to be the sole witness? You selfish bastard.
I won't take it for free.
"Your money was well-spent, sonny. She's been cheating on you."
"I suspected as much, that's why I hired a private dick. But it's proof I need."
"You're not gonna like it..."
"I can take it. I have to know, for sure."
PD slides an envelope across the table. Man opens it. He stares, aghast.
"Oh my god."
"I'm sorry, sonny. Been workin' this line of business twenty years, but I never get used to the look of guy's faces. Some guys, they don't really want to know. They want to hold on to a forlorn hope that maybe, just maybe, the dame really was visiting her sister, see?"
"YOU BASTARD! HOW COULD YOU?"
"Look, I'm not proud of what I do. But you hired me, sonny. If you didn't want to know, y-"
"You used a flash! Where's the artistry? It's so unnatural. Her form intermingled with my soon-to-be-dead friend's.. look at their bodies. There's no depth. The lighting, good god man, the lighting! I'm supposed to believe this was a romantic interlude? They're like lifeless puppets!"
People are going to be in for such a surprise, when the all-male population of dinosaurs start laying eggs. Life finds a way.
I know a site that you do use, which will show you exactly the same situation. Look at this page and its URL.
That would be a completely disaster, because there's nothing special about Facebook here, other than the fact that they can afford to do what you discuss and 99% of the rest of Internet can't.
Do your website(s) do that? Should all websites scan their own URLs for trademarks, and redirect some of those URLs to other sites, and then give the previous content some other URL that is guaranteed to not look like someone else's name? Maybe all websites should be search engines, with of course the trademark name database being top priority.
Facebook doesn't represent their URL components as being company names, just like your site probably doesn't. In fact, for most of http://facebook.com/$WORD, $WORD is not anyone's trademark.
And God help review sites. If http://example.com/reviews/exodus is required to point to Exodus' site, then example.com has to post their review of Fabulous Disaster at http://example.com/reviews/butthead_astronomer. This is just silly.
If force is being used against Facebook over this, then 1) that's an outrage 2) they did the right thing in response to it: have http://facebook.com/$WORD do a 404 or something like that.
"Google mentions Slashdot moderation in patent" would be accurate. Hey, Unknown Lamer: WTF?
No, it obviously belongs to Facebook (or at least as much as facebook.com belongs to Facebook, except that isn't quite as clear). Whatever Facebook decides to do with it, is defined as the right answer.
It's is Facebook's namespace (and you can have on too, right now, if you want). They get to decide whether or not trademarks are even relevant within this namespace, let alone top priority at the expense of all other concerns. Why would it be anyone else's decision?
Just because some random arbitrary private namespace out there happens to get popular, doesn't mean the rest of society needs to "officially" recognize it, legitimize it, adopt it, regulate it, or take it seriously. It's just a pathname component in someone's website, and it's their site, just like a hypothetical "Apple" directory on my computer which contains a file called "Disney" is my file in my directory on my computer, and no one else deserves .0000001% say in the matter.
When today's fools finally learn this, then they won't be afraid of new TLDs, BTW.
You saved money. How is that "trouble?" If you were "creating jobs" and all else were equal, that would have wasted money.
Whoever said that didn't understand anything about economics.
Free Markets vs Central Planning: Free Software is about extremified free markets. You hire anyone you want to get your maintenance, instead of a single source. This is basically opposition to commie ideals, IMHO (though I realize there are other ways to look at Communism; they just happen to be ways that I disagree with). On the commie centralization scale of color, GPLed software is blue as the zenith sky, proprietary is crimson as blood, and stuff like BSD is an intense purple blur as it bounces between the two on a case-by-case basis like a Republican talking about federal spending.
Control of the Means of Production: Free Software is about code reuse and code reuse is neutral toward this, but in a way that subverts the whole question with its explosive torrent of wealth. It's like millions of factories falling out of the sky, right during an argument between a Communist and Capitalist about who should own the previously-limited number of factories. Without the need for expensive capital, nobody cares who controls it. Both the management and workers look on helplessly, as whoever used to buy the old factories' output says they don't need either one of 'em anymore.
If paychecks for programming are your main source of income, then code reuse may be a Capitalist Running Dog Murder of Brotherhood. If software company dividends (as opposed to consulting fees) are your main source of income, then code reuse may be a Ruthless Communist Plot to Impurify your Precious Bodily Fluids. If you do something else but use software, then you're shrugging and saying "whatever" to those so last-century luddites.
This really depends on what your non-tech skills and personality are. It's a great idea if you can do it, but there are plenty of us who just aren't cut out for that, and if you don't understand that, well, lucky you.
Isn't this pretty much the opposite of an Geek IQ test? This tests knowledge (to be nice) or trivia (to not be nice), whereas an IQ test would test reason, logic, problem-solving.
It means that web developers need tools which, by default, save in formats that other tools can't use (PSD), or which few other tools can partially use (SWF), text which can't even reflow when you change the window size or display device's aspect ratio (PDF), and they need otherwise-working streams crippled so that nothing else can play them (RTMPE).
In other words, people are getting spoiled and need someone like Adobe to come rescue them from big scary world of interoperative and Just-Works technology.
It's a more respectable title, created by conservative backlash against educologists.
I tried it once. I went to a Microsoft web site (their version of Google's "Webmaster tools") which required that I download and execute their code. I did it. You wouldn't believe how shitty that site turned out to be, all in the name of avoiding HTML. You couldn't select and copy text, and you couldn't open links in another tab.
I'm convinced the only reason they did it, was to make suckers like me install silverlight. It was truly worse-than-useless garbage, every bit as bad as Flash.
Corporate Inheritance Tax!
If a corporation gets too old, has an unfortunately accident, or just had an unlucky roll of the genetic dice when it was founded, then its corporate spinoffs don't get to live high on the hog simply due to the accident of who spun them off.
Who wouldn't support a politician who enacted such a tax? Who would lobby against it?