I can't see how, even if all is your code, you could distinguish multiple licenses inside the same program.
GPLv2 says that in order for a program to legaly have some GPLv2 code, the entire program must be under GPLv2. GPLv3 says the exact same thing, so both can't coexist legaly inside the same program, even if you wrote it all.
It can be both in the sense you can say: Here is two licenses: GPLv2 and GPLv3. I offer my code on either license. You just pick one. Thus, the mutual incompability never comes into play.
However, you are right that the code is not covered by both licenses as once. Thus, for code to be dual licensed, all the code it derives from must be available dual-licensed, too. In other words, choosing the dual license makes less code available to you for inclusion than picking either one. On the other hand, it is easier for other people to use your dual licensed code, as they can use it if they can accept just one of the licenses.
2) I suspect that the definition of liter is based on the volume of 1 kg of pure water at standard temperature and pressure, and not the other way around.
No. liter is a volume, which is based on length, which is based on the speed of light in vacuum. Going the other way (from volumne->weight) is essentially what they are attempting with silicon. Apparantly, silicon is easier than e.g. water due to a simple molecular structure, though I am no expect in that field.
The same argument could be applied to every other industry, for better or worse. Which is my only point.
A patent system that is not consistently applied is worse than useless.
It should be applied to exactly those fields where it translates into bigger growth. Current research indicates that such fields are far between.
This shouldn't about fair. It shouldn't be about what "deserves" protection. It should solely be a matter of what gets the most growth. And every bit of research in this area I have seen indicates that for software, the effect is large and negative. Thus, software would be a good area to abolish the patents as a test balloon.
that you have sufficient insurance to the level of medical attention you will need.
So in other words, he should be punished for failing to predict that you'd hit him? How is that different from the other examples?
Is it punishment to have to pay for medical bills after being hit by lightning? No. It's just life. Likewise, you might get hit by a car. Unfortunately, such things happens.
How about his insurance company, which in the real world would turn around and sue you for causing the damages they had to pay for?
They wouldn't in most of the civilized world. Since they wouldn't get anything out of that regress suit. That would require "gross negliences" (literal translation) on your part.
Should they be punished by being forced to raise the rates for their customers because you can't be bothered to keep your eyes on the road for 5 seconds? Maybe if YOU had been insured against the damage YOU did, then the insurance company would be able to take their damages out on you, but then you'd have to face the responsibility for your own failures.
Relax. Everyone blinks. Sometimes, it just isn't anybodys fault, and besides, everyone makes mistakes. I am not speaking of gross neglience here.
Look up the definition of mis/malfeasance, I think you'll find that your failure to properly operate a vehicle that you have been trained and licensed to operate falls in this category regardless of whether you think that insurance companies grow money on trees.
Why should I look up legal terms for an 3rd-rate legal system that I am unlikely to ever get in contact with? I have plenty to know in the not-too-great-either system I live in. And nice straw-man there at the end. I never claimed it was free. Whether by insurance or public health, big medical bills get paid by spreading the cost out across a big part of the population. Where do you think the (relatively innocent) guy that blinked or got distracted or whatever for 5 seconds will get the money to pay damages from, especially those ridiculous ones Americans spew out? Emotional stress, my shiny behind! He gets it from his insurance company, which might well be the same that you uses in the event you blink. So you get to pay just the same amount, + the attorneys fees... which doesn't grow on trees either.
[...]it's a bias to the right, but they aren't NEARLY as far to the right as their competition is biased to the left.
Doesn't that rather depend on where you peg the middle at? To me, you seem to be saying that yes, 5 is a small natural number, but it isn't as small as 204 is big. Or something like that.
Spoken as someone who doesn't watch CNN, Fox or television at all:)
You're saying that if you don't see that stop sign and cause me ten million dollars of medical bills that since it's an honest mistake you (or rather your insurance company; the same company that insures doctors) shouldn't have to pay?
That's what I would say. Damages should only be awarded for something very deliberate, like rape. The other line of thought gets sillier by the minute. What's next, suing the weather forecast man who fails to predict a thunderstorm? The man that falls out of his window and hits you? Suing the thunderstorm or gravity itself?
In my opinion, it is your responsibility to ensure that you have sufficient insurance to the level of medical attention you will need. For most of the civilized world, taxes already provides this ensurance, but for the rest, I'm sure the lower taxes would afford you the insurance.
I hardly believe I am alone in smiling when he spews out those one-liners
It seems it's generally people from outside the nordic countries that get offended by him. Maybe it's in our mannerisms to say provocative things on purpose in order to emphasize our point.
Heh. You could be right. I tend to do that myself, now that you mention it.
I'm still highly dumbfounded by this whole remote access thing. I can't imagine anything worse for Web apps. I can't imagine a more restrictive license that takes away all of my freedoms for a Web app licensed under gplv3. Let me give an example.
I think you look at it a bit too bleakly. I am not a lawyer, and if I were I would not a a danish one, but this is what I understand would be the consequences.
A client of mine wanted a shopping cart that could take an uploaded CVS and charge people by how ever many data lines were in the file. I took Zen-Cart and made some plugins for it to handle the file upload. But I couldn't override the price functionality. There was no proper plugin for changing that behavior. So I modified some of the function calls to check for prices and had them examine the size of the file. Done and done. I installed the site on the client's server and charged him for the services of code modification.
Now, let's examine what would happen if Zen Cart were licensed under the GPLv3. I have made modifications to the system *and* I am now "redistributing" the code by allowing people on the Internet to see it. I must allow them to obtain my changes.
So far so good. Of course, the smart thing might have been to make those changes acceptable for the upstream, and submit it to them, but let's stick to your story:)
I've effectively forked the project and now I must maintain my changes and supply them to the world.
Why must you maintain the changes? Just having the sourcecode available for download in whatever version you happen to use is enough. Since you have to have that sourcecode to build the site, there is no extra cost. Furthermore, if I recall correctly, this is only relevant if the code already contain the facility to provide the download link, so presumably even that part would be trivial to do. Pretty cheap software, eh?
There have got to better acronyms out there to choose from. Whoever came up with this was a worthless git.
The manpage discusses the name.
DISCUSSION "git" can mean anything, depending on your mood..sp
· random three-letter combination that is pronounceable, and not actually used by any common UNIX command. The fact that it is a mispronunciation of "get" may or may not be relevant.
· stupid. contemptible and despicable. simple. Take your pick from the dictionary of slang.
· "global information tracker": you’re in a good mood, and it actually works for you. Angels sing, and a light suddenly fills the room.
· "goddamn idiotic truckload of sh*t": when it breaks This is a stupid (but extremely fast) directory content manager.
Yeah and luckily the whole "haves versus have nots" on who gets CVS commit access rights has never, ever, been a problem in *BSD or XFree86. Right?
I'm sure it has been a big problem, but e.g. in KDE (which is also quite large), getting commit access isn't exactly hard. And anyway, SVK provides decentralized versioning backed by a central repository, so SVN doesn't preclude this.
Seriously, centralized version control fails for large open source projects for political reasons, not technical ones.
I agree completely, if it fails at all.
That's really Linus' main point, although his lack of tact in presentation is going to cause many people to miss that insight.
His lack of tact is legendary. But his lack of tact is what makes people read his every comment, and I hardly believe I am alone in smiling when he spews out those one-liners.
With a changeset-based distributed version control system, you only have to trust patches and code, not people. The whole concept of "the chosen few who get commit access" goes away, and problems like the XFree86/X.org fork or the EGCS/GCC semi-fork disappear.
Disappear? Hardly, the patches still need to be accepted. But decentralized repositories are wonderful to work with, and as such removes a technical hindrance.
Each man differs in his opinion of versioning software. For fun, here is mine: (only those I've tried)
"Milk it" how? Without copyright, they'll only be able to sell the software exactly once. In that environment, they'd go out of business before being able to "milk" anything.
One way would be to offer the application as a web service. Less effective, but maybe-viable, are various anti-copying techniques, phone-home, dongle and so on.
Now that you mention this, how hard would it be to write a simple readline-based interface for pretty much any RDBMS? If you've got an API in which you can plug directly into, and if you've got a list of all the possible things that can be done with the database (or at least a general method to finding them from the database itself), it should be rather trivial to create something like this.
mysql and postgres both use readline, I believe. Oracle, db/2 and that ilk cannot:
Readline is free software, distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2.
MySQL has command line completion in the Enterprise versions of their software:
mysql> select * from t
t1 t1.i t1.j t1.k test
It depends on the differences between readline and libedit libraries..
Noone disputes mysql has commandline completion. It's just not a very good command line completion, as your example above shows... right there, you need a table, so t1.j (a column, I presume) makes no sense. In other words, the completion has no regard for context, and doesn't complete on the sql itself. Compare to psql:
vetty_development=# SE SELECT SET vetty_development=# SELECT * FROM appointments clients information_schema. patients_id_seq pg_temp_1. public. appointments_id_seq clients_id_seq patients pg_catalog. pg_toast. schema_info vetty_development=# SELECT * FROM clients WHERE address email first_name home_telephone id last_name mobile_telephone work_telephone
Actually, I find that the psql could also use some improvements... it often fails to find any completions.
Seeing as you seem to know a thing or two about MySQL...
So how does its procedural code, trigger capability, and user defined functions compare to Oracle?
Sorry, I've always avoided the use of stored procedures and their ilk, so I wouldn't know. Small triggers are pretty easy in either. Again, I avoid heavy usage of triggers, since I like my database to be dumb (aka predictable)
Is it possible to port between them without jumping through too many hoops?
Does MySQL support partitioning?
How about performance with large dbs?
Sorry, I have no idea. In general, mysql performs well with simple queries and poorly with complicated ones. Oracle is a steady mid-level performer, but suffers (like mysql) from heavy tendency to deadlock.
Finally, I am really not an oracle expert. Most of my knowlegde of Oracle comes from the steady stream of curses from our local "Oracle man".:)
I assume you have not used sql+ with oracle. Command line completion would be a dream! It doesn't even have command history.
I was bashing mysql at the time. Oracle is also a piece of crap, no question about it, making a similar list would not be hard. The memory footprint, the closed source, sequence "support", the very-poor-excuse-for-a-command-line-client... just horrible. I would not use oracle if I can use postgres.
5. You have delegated the decision to a well-funded, trusted team of veteran IT decision makers.
I covered delegation above. Veteran is usually means "expensive and outdated", so you might want to go elsewhere for information.
Businesses live and die by information, so the severity of your list of relatively insignificant defects rather depends on the criticality of the data in question.
My lists directly translates into bugs... and therefore downtime. Failing to understand this is very typical of out-of-date (veteran) decision makes --- and people who rely on them.
When lives are at stake (economically, physically or medically), when every hour of system downtime costs your operation tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, decisions are based on higher level concerns. The integrity of the data is paramount. Data moving between mart and warehouse needs to cost as little as possible.
Noone disputes that uptime and data integrity is important. It's just that this is offered by all databases you might consider, if properly setup. In fact, in my career, I have never seen a database-caused downtime. Plenty of other software, and even more so (expensive) hardware. Trying to solve uptime problems with db is trying to optimize the 10% rather than the 90%, I'd wager.
Not to rain on your parade, but _you_ are the suspect DBA the author recommended CIOs ignore when weighing the facts -- that is not to vet his weakly argued list of criticisms, I just couldn't let these posts sit at +5 unchallenged.
Well, challenging is good, and I appreciate it. You are somewhat off the mark here, though: I am a mathematician, not a database administrator. (I drive the computer science people nuts because I regard relation databases as set relations). The above 7-list was just to illustrate how bad that list was... even a mathematician can do better.
I almost included that one, but they have actually fixed that 5.02. You can still specify ALLOW_INVALID_DATES as an sqlmode for that nostalgic feeling, though.
It is called fat. You have quite a bit of overhead when it comes to handling the tables for the object abstractions. Don't get me wrong, I like some of those features, but it comes at a price. And of course, forget templates.
You only pay for what you use (in C++). If you don't write "virtual" anywhere, there is no tables for object abstractions. Templates are free, in a certain sense, though their correct use in a highly constrained environment requires skill and thought
Still, I'd write device drivers in C, too. C is a much smaller language, and far more easily mapped into assembler. As I've said for years.. C is an excellent assembler. In fact, I know none better. C++ is an excellent general purpose language, especially suited for high-speed, complicated endeavours, like desktop environments (KDE), browsers (Firefox, Konqueror) and games (UT2004). It is not well suited for low-skilled application developers, though. It is a language that gives you a lot of rope... plenty to build whatever you need, and still hang yourself.
People saying C is dieing are pretty clueless. Or mean something else than the "not used for new stuff" that is usually meant.
That would mostly benefit the very rich, no?:) Many people (like me) do not own huge fortunes. Enough to repair the roof, if need be I think, but not enough that a bit lower inflation would mean anything to me:)
On the other hand, a bit lower taxes would be nice:)
Of course, the entire *point* with a fine is that the copyright holder doesn't get a dime. The entire fine goes to whatever the local democracy.
I have problems with government associating law enforcement with revenue collection. Much like a bear should never associate food with humans.
Better than the accusers associating accusing with revenue collection. At least, the government is under democratic controls, at least where the government represent the votes cast --- such as in Denmark, and not at all as in the US. Not that Denmark is fantastic, but at least that aspect is made rather well. If a party receives 25% of the votes, they will get 25% of the seats in the parlament.. or pretty close, anyway.
So RIAA estimated in 2002 that 2.6 billion files were illegally downloaded a month. They've sued less than 20,000 people, but were sueing about 750/month at the peak. 750/2.6billion = 1/3466666. Guessing roughly $10 for the price of the infringing material, that would be $69,333,320 in fines. That's even worse than the statutory damages we have now.
And you didn't even multiply with 2:o) Ok, I admit that would be rather insane --- though you'd admit it would sort of work!:o) So let's be generous, and say $5000 for downloading one movie illegally, and then progressing to maybe $30000 for the bad cases (many, many downloads?). Of course, the entire *point* with a fine is that the copyright holder doesn't get a dime. The entire fine goes to whatever the local democracy.
If someone won't or can't pay, there is always litter to be collected at the local wood/street/beach/subway:o)
Not that it really matters, because I can't really see a way to prove that person X did the downloading. Wish there was a way, but we really can't.
Slashdot Mirror
GPLv2 says that in order for a program to legaly have some GPLv2 code, the entire program must be under GPLv2. GPLv3 says the exact same thing, so both can't coexist legaly inside the same program, even if you wrote it all.
It can be both in the sense you can say: Here is two licenses: GPLv2 and GPLv3. I offer my code on either license. You just pick one. Thus, the mutual incompability never comes into play.
However, you are right that the code is not covered by both licenses as once. Thus, for code to be dual licensed, all the code it derives from must be available dual-licensed, too. In other words, choosing the dual license makes less code available to you for inclusion than picking either one. On the other hand, it is easier for other people to use your dual licensed code, as they can use it if they can accept just one of the licenses.
No. liter is a volume, which is based on length, which is based on the speed of light in vacuum. Going the other way (from volumne->weight) is essentially what they are attempting with silicon. Apparantly, silicon is easier than e.g. water due to a simple molecular structure, though I am no expect in that field.
A patent system that is not consistently applied is worse than useless.
It should be applied to exactly those fields where it translates into bigger growth. Current research indicates that such fields are far between.
This shouldn't about fair. It shouldn't be about what "deserves" protection. It should solely be a matter of what gets the most growth. And every bit of research in this area I have seen indicates that for software, the effect is large and negative. Thus, software would be a good area to abolish the patents as a test balloon.
So in other words, he should be punished for failing to predict that you'd hit him? How is that different from the other examples?
Is it punishment to have to pay for medical bills after being hit by lightning? No. It's just life. Likewise, you might get hit by a car. Unfortunately, such things happens.
How about his insurance company, which in the real world would turn around and sue you for causing the damages they had to pay for?They wouldn't in most of the civilized world. Since they wouldn't get anything out of that regress suit. That would require "gross negliences" (literal translation) on your part.
Should they be punished by being forced to raise the rates for their customers because you can't be bothered to keep your eyes on the road for 5 seconds? Maybe if YOU had been insured against the damage YOU did, then the insurance company would be able to take their damages out on you, but then you'd have to face the responsibility for your own failures.Relax. Everyone blinks. Sometimes, it just isn't anybodys fault, and besides, everyone makes mistakes. I am not speaking of gross neglience here.
Look up the definition of mis/malfeasance, I think you'll find that your failure to properly operate a vehicle that you have been trained and licensed to operate falls in this category regardless of whether you think that insurance companies grow money on trees.Why should I look up legal terms for an 3rd-rate legal system that I am unlikely to ever get in contact with? I have plenty to know in the not-too-great-either system I live in. And nice straw-man there at the end. I never claimed it was free. Whether by insurance or public health, big medical bills get paid by spreading the cost out across a big part of the population. Where do you think the (relatively innocent) guy that blinked or got distracted or whatever for 5 seconds will get the money to pay damages from, especially those ridiculous ones Americans spew out? Emotional stress, my shiny behind! He gets it from his insurance company, which might well be the same that you uses in the event you blink. So you get to pay just the same amount, + the attorneys fees... which doesn't grow on trees either.
Doesn't that rather depend on where you peg the middle at? To me, you seem to be saying that yes, 5 is a small natural number, but it isn't as small as 204 is big. Or something like that.
Spoken as someone who doesn't watch CNN, Fox or television at all :)
That's what I would say. Damages should only be awarded for something very deliberate, like rape. The other line of thought gets sillier by the minute. What's next, suing the weather forecast man who fails to predict a thunderstorm? The man that falls out of his window and hits you? Suing the thunderstorm or gravity itself?
In my opinion, it is your responsibility to ensure that you have sufficient insurance to the level of medical attention you will need. For most of the civilized world, taxes already provides this ensurance, but for the rest, I'm sure the lower taxes would afford you the insurance.
Heh. You could be right. I tend to do that myself, now that you mention it.
I think you look at it a bit too bleakly. I am not a lawyer, and if I were I would not a a danish one, but this is what I understand would be the consequences.
A client of mine wanted a shopping cart that could take an uploaded CVS and charge people by how ever many data lines were in the file. I took Zen-Cart and made some plugins for it to handle the file upload. But I couldn't override the price functionality. There was no proper plugin for changing that behavior. So I modified some of the function calls to check for prices and had them examine the size of the file. Done and done. I installed the site on the client's server and charged him for the services of code modification.Now, let's examine what would happen if Zen Cart were licensed under the GPLv3. I have made modifications to the system *and* I am now "redistributing" the code by allowing people on the Internet to see it. I must allow them to obtain my changes.
So far so good. Of course, the smart thing might have been to make those changes acceptable for the upstream, and submit it to them, but let's stick to your story :)
I've effectively forked the project and now I must maintain my changes and supply them to the world.Why must you maintain the changes? Just having the sourcecode available for download in whatever version you happen to use is enough. Since you have to have that sourcecode to build the site, there is no extra cost. Furthermore, if I recall correctly, this is only relevant if the code already contain the facility to provide the download link, so presumably even that part would be trivial to do. Pretty cheap software, eh?
The manpage discusses the name.
I'm sure it has been a big problem, but e.g. in KDE (which is also quite large), getting commit access isn't exactly hard. And anyway, SVK provides decentralized versioning backed by a central repository, so SVN doesn't preclude this.
Seriously, centralized version control fails for large open source projects for political reasons, not technical ones.I agree completely, if it fails at all.
That's really Linus' main point, although his lack of tact in presentation is going to cause many people to miss that insight.His lack of tact is legendary. But his lack of tact is what makes people read his every comment, and I hardly believe I am alone in smiling when he spews out those one-liners.
With a changeset-based distributed version control system, you only have to trust patches and code, not people. The whole concept of "the chosen few who get commit access" goes away, and problems like the XFree86/X.org fork or the EGCS/GCC semi-fork disappear.Disappear? Hardly, the patches still need to be accepted. But decentralized repositories are wonderful to work with, and as such removes a technical hindrance.
Each man differs in his opinion of versioning software. For fun, here is mine: (only those I've tried)
"Milk it" how? Without copyright, they'll only be able to sell the software exactly once. In that environment, they'd go out of business before being able to "milk" anything.
One way would be to offer the application as a web service. Less effective, but maybe-viable, are various anti-copying techniques, phone-home, dongle and so on.
mysql and postgres both use readline, I believe. Oracle, db/2 and that ilk cannot:
Readline is free software, distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2.mysql> select * from t
t1 t1.i t1.j t1.k test
It depends on the differences between readline and libedit libraries..
Noone disputes mysql has commandline completion. It's just not a very good command line completion, as your example above shows... right there, you need a table, so t1.j (a column, I presume) makes no sense. In other words, the completion has no regard for context, and doesn't complete on the sql itself. Compare to psql:
Actually, I find that the psql could also use some improvements... it often fails to find any completions.So how does its procedural code, trigger capability, and user defined functions compare to Oracle?
Sorry, I've always avoided the use of stored procedures and their ilk, so I wouldn't know. Small triggers are pretty easy in either. Again, I avoid heavy usage of triggers, since I like my database to be dumb (aka predictable)
Is it possible to port between them without jumping through too many hoops?Does MySQL support partitioning?
How about performance with large dbs?
Sorry, I have no idea. In general, mysql performs well with simple queries and poorly with complicated ones. Oracle is a steady mid-level performer, but suffers (like mysql) from heavy tendency to deadlock.
Finally, I am really not an oracle expert. Most of my knowlegde of Oracle comes from the steady stream of curses from our local "Oracle man". :)
I assume you have not used sql+ with oracle. Command line completion would be a dream! It doesn't even have command history.
I was bashing mysql at the time. Oracle is also a piece of crap, no question about it, making a similar list would not be hard. The memory footprint, the closed source, sequence "support", the very-poor-excuse-for-a-command-line-client... just horrible. I would not use oracle if I can use postgres.
5. You have delegated the decision to a well-funded, trusted team of veteran IT decision makers.
I covered delegation above. Veteran is usually means "expensive and outdated", so you might want to go elsewhere for information.
Businesses live and die by information, so the severity of your list of relatively insignificant defects rather depends on the criticality of the data in question.My lists directly translates into bugs ... and therefore downtime. Failing to understand this is very typical of out-of-date (veteran) decision makes --- and people who rely on them.
When lives are at stake (economically, physically or medically), when every hour of system downtime costs your operation tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, decisions are based on higher level concerns. The integrity of the data is paramount. Data moving between mart and warehouse needs to cost as little as possible.Noone disputes that uptime and data integrity is important. It's just that this is offered by all databases you might consider, if properly setup. In fact, in my career, I have never seen a database-caused downtime. Plenty of other software, and even more so (expensive) hardware. Trying to solve uptime problems with db is trying to optimize the 10% rather than the 90%, I'd wager.
Not to rain on your parade, but _you_ are the suspect DBA the author recommended CIOs ignore when weighing the facts -- that is not to vet his weakly argued list of criticisms, I just couldn't let these posts sit at +5 unchallenged.Well, challenging is good, and I appreciate it. You are somewhat off the mark here, though: I am a mathematician, not a database administrator. (I drive the computer science people nuts because I regard relation databases as set relations). The above 7-list was just to illustrate how bad that list was... even a mathematician can do better.
If you are in any position where you are choosing between databases, you have three cases:
Sorry about the M.P. reference there :o)
I almost included that one, but they have actually fixed that 5.02. You can still specify ALLOW_INVALID_DATES as an sqlmode for that nostalgic feeling, though.
Are those supposed to e reasons? How about
Only 7, but all of those are real real complaints :)
You only pay for what you use (in C++). If you don't write "virtual" anywhere, there is no tables for object abstractions. Templates are free, in a certain sense, though their correct use in a highly constrained environment requires skill and thought
Still, I'd write device drivers in C, too. C is a much smaller language, and far more easily mapped into assembler. As I've said for years.. C is an excellent assembler. In fact, I know none better. C++ is an excellent general purpose language, especially suited for high-speed, complicated endeavours, like desktop environments (KDE), browsers (Firefox, Konqueror) and games (UT2004). It is not well suited for low-skilled application developers, though. It is a language that gives you a lot of rope... plenty to build whatever you need, and still hang yourself.
People saying C is dieing are pretty clueless. Or mean something else than the "not used for new stuff" that is usually meant.
While I don't do professional support, I have actually been asked something very close to that. I almost couldn't believe my own ears.
...free as in beer.According to the article, free as in GPLv2.
That would mostly benefit the very rich, no? :) Many people (like me) do not own huge fortunes. Enough to repair the roof, if need be I think, but not enough that a bit lower inflation would mean anything to me :)
On the other hand, a bit lower taxes would be nice :)
I have problems with government associating law enforcement with revenue collection. Much like a bear should never associate food with humans.
Better than the accusers associating accusing with revenue collection. At least, the government is under democratic controls, at least where the government represent the votes cast --- such as in Denmark, and not at all as in the US. Not that Denmark is fantastic, but at least that aspect is made rather well. If a party receives 25% of the votes, they will get 25% of the seats in the parlament.. or pretty close, anyway.
And you didn't even multiply with 2 :o) Ok, I admit that would be rather insane --- though you'd admit it would sort of work! :o) So let's be generous, and say $5000 for downloading one movie illegally, and then progressing to maybe $30000 for the bad cases (many, many downloads?). Of course, the entire *point* with a fine is that the copyright holder doesn't get a dime. The entire fine goes to whatever the local democracy.
If someone won't or can't pay, there is always litter to be collected at the local wood/street/beach/subway :o)
Not that it really matters, because I can't really see a way to prove that person X did the downloading. Wish there was a way, but we really can't.