I think it's a combination of both, though I for the most part wouldn't call it "human error" to kill with a gun or otherwise. I say this because while there certainly are a number of accidental deaths by gun in various countries, the presiding concern of most people is murder and wars. Now, blaming people for the act of murder is really to point out that guns don't have any control over themselves. The majority of killings by gun are intentional. So, it's hard to argue that guns are the trigger.
Instead, most people who are against gun either try to enlarge the threat of children shooting themselves or the easy access of a gun making a person more apt to commit murder (say, in a rage, which is often considered manslaughter and not murder). The former seems for the most part an invalid concern, as the same logic would say that children should be castrated until they're of "sufficient age" to prevent pregnancy--I'm deeply aware that pregnancy creates life, not destroys it, but sex, like guns, is dangerous to one's life if one isn't educated to take steps to understand and respect it. The latter is often based on statistics that show a higher murder rate, especially by guns, in the US vs other countries with stricter gun laws. The problem with that is some countries have basically a 180 vs the US. That is, for every US gun murder, there is a non-gun murder in an other country and vice versa for US non-gun murders.
So, maybe quick access to *any* weapon is likely to cause murder/manslaughter. Or maybe a strong part of the many murders is based on many countries, including the US, having a long history of settling disputes with weapons instead of words. It's sadly the case that some people in the US still feel justified in punching or worse a person for the words they say. Words can be ignored, but assault can not.
Back to the original form, most linking verbs form tautologies in self-reference. Chicken tastes like chicken and computers are made out of computers (the latter is true because while it's silly to make the statement, one member of the subset of something is itself). You're correct in that the form is intent on trying to place the second sentence as the main statement by placing a negative in the first instead of minimizing it. So, while guns do kill people, people kill people by more than guns. The conclusion that's intended to be drawn is that removing guns won't stop killing. Whether it reduces killing is another matter. The sentences are in effect a sound bite to validate why guns being banned isn't a complete solution to murder. But as such, you're right that not every idiom that fits the form makes sense. The form in itself is a contrivance and is not a proof. Proof comes from the reader self-validating what they read.
Chicken doesn't taste like chicken. People taste like chicken.
There's no sensical direct conversion (beyond stating P is ~P; P is P), but here's one that uses a few of the components:
People don't taste like chicken. Chicken tastes like chicken.
Computers aren't made of silicon. People are made of silicon.
Computers aren't made out of silicon. Computers are made out of computers.
People don't make mistakes. People make mistakes.
People don't make mistakes. Mistakes make mistakes.
His example is "Technology doesn't fail [people]. People fail [people]." which fits the form. Your only real argument against that is to claim that the implied words aren't "people" but something else in which case you'd be right it fails the form.
I suggest taking that idea one step further and all Representative offices being done by lottery. Who better to represent the average American then a variety of Americans over time. And before you make mention that you'll end up getting some ineffective person or lunatic in office, realize this is exactly why the government and governmental offices should be strictly limited as eventually some lunatic will get elected in a democracy. Hitler was really good at seeming like a nice guy to the average person. Imagine if Hitler had very little real power to start wars and the like, though?
Two things. One, while modern TCP/IP stacks have hypothetically rather unspoofable connection establishment, programs like nmap show that not enough OSs take advantage of that in a meaningful way allow for short bursts of fake connection and do some action spoofs. Two, while it sounds like there's various issues with this rateless protoocol, the idea of a standard, faster protocol for larger pipes doesn't mean an end to TCP. It does mean that people have realized that single tcp connections have issues saturating bandwidth at very high speeds and that alternative protocols for that situation seem appropriate. To act like an alternative to tcp is somehow a doom to tcp is to act like no one uses udp because tcp has all these wonderful features that overcome limitations to udp. There's clearly the case that a new standard protocol that does have better file transfer features wouldn't be such a bad idea to consider as a third primary protocol. In OS terms, I'd liken it to how a Windows NT/X environment has messages (udp), streams (tcp), and random file access (new protocol, which will probably not be rateless).
I agree with some of your points. There is definitely a "party line" most mods follow, and they will often mod down upon that bias. I agree that such is a bad thing. Now, that all being said..
I have never once heard anyone point out a reasonable model for producing film/music/software and giving it away for free.
Neither have I. On the same token, I don't see why one would actually give away film/music/software for free except out of charity. In this world there is something called the free market. In years past, publication of goods was where the majority of the money went. This is precisely the basis upon which Samuel Clemens (aka Mark Twain) wanted unlimited copyright. He realized the publishing companies wouldn't decrease the price when there's an end to some copyright. They'd just make more money on it as it's unreasonable for most people to publish books on non-copyrighted books.
Now, fast forward to the present where anyone with the time/energy/money can publish (for lack of a better word) at a much lower cost than the past. It's now the case (and I'd say was to a lesser extent since the VCR) that anyone can pirate and the group it most hurts is the publisher and still not the copyright holder. Where is this all leading?
Well, this is all leading to the fact that with hard-media publishers out of the loop, copyright holders are in a pretty bad condition too. It's not from a lack of copyright but a finite inability to limit piracy. Now, you've taken this to mean that copyright holders would freely give away their works to compete in the free market with piracy. But you're ignoring one main thing. Places like Slashdot have found out a way in which they can exist and compete against pirates.
In the end, pirates too have to pay for the computer and bandwidth. With chielf one-way tunnels (ie, server-client), the pirate has to cover the burden of the cost. In this case, pirates do exactly like other websites do: they put up advertisement for money. Now, clearly these people are profiting from their piracy, are big targets, and copyright holders have a pretty firm basis legal to attack them.
But, P2P is the real threat, of course. Without a single target and with everyone in part bearing the cost, the burden on each individual is relatively small and fixed (thanks to universal pricing on various internet options in most countries). Now, competing financially against such a target might be near impossible directly. The sad truth is, the RIAA is even showing that legally trying to combat the problem isn't working that great.
In the end, what does this mean? Well, first, here's your relevant comments:
The material you wish to pirate comes from somewhere and those people deserve to be paid for their work. If you don't want to pay then don't listen to the music or use the software or watch the film....for music listen to the radio and for films watch broadcast TV or get cable.
Ie, you offer the moralistic approach. Ironically, most music (no offense intended towards Indy music) on radio is pushed by payola, which actually *costs* the artist money. And most films on TV, short of the made-for-TV movies, already grossed the majority of their money in theaters. The latter survive through TV networks who are paid by advertisements and/or cable/satellite service money. In other words, most such examples are the result of conglomerates pooling money through advertisement, for advertisement, or service fees.
Two comments that disturb me are:
There's a small amount of software and such being produced for free but it represents a small percentage of what people use every day. and For software use only open source free software.
Please realize that Free software isn't free. It's software that's copyleft. Redistribution can burden the distributor, as the GPL requires you not hold your source responsible upon your distributing. Many people release software under t
Not to be a complete ass, but one of those innovation, the turning headlight, is a bit older than the 60s. Perhaps you've heard the story of Preston Tucker? It does seem a bit ironic that Microsoft was never charged with fraud for all their vaporware. In any case, there is little innovation in most established industry since most such companies are more interested in a steady income than anything. I don't know the French automotive industry or Citroen, though.
Welcome to the global market, where not only can companies can get their supply (outsourced labor) from overseas but so can consumers. As others have stated, pharmaceutical companies receive various large subsidies for their work and yet they routinely sell drugs at a lower rate in Canada. The latter is because Canada regulates drug prices. That's only half the truth, though, because the free market is self-regulating and would take care of pricing if most patents were revoked/never granted.
Now, before you say that pharmaceutical companies could never do R&D, nor would be willing, on the small sums of money from production, I would point out the previously mentioned subsidies which already favor the production of drugs. It would seem to clear to me that the people of the US (and other countries with subsidies) have more than paid for the work and related patents of such drugs and shouldn't be forced (for drugs of life or death) for the production and the exorbitant prices. So, for all their whining about not making as much money in America because of imports from African countries, I say "go cry me a river" and to start removing patents. Companies that did work solely on their own (and I'm not talking about a company that shells for a pharmaceutical company), I'm more apt to accept their moaning for such demands.
And charging a uniform price is what we accuse Microsoft of.
Of this claim, I wish to know of what you speak? The only thing Microsoft as of late has been accused and convicted of his anti-competitive practices. To that end, Microsoft's action was that of *not* having uniform pricing but instead favoring companies that went along with its policy of inhibiting the installation of specific programs on computers also installed with Windows. Uniform pricing would have meant that there would have been no penalty for choosing to install a competitors product or not their product (Windows) at all on some computers.
If all of the above is not what you were talking about, I apologize for the trite remarks.
What happens if the majority of people are incarcerated for the same felony? It may be hard to commit a felony now, but what about government makes it hard to change that? What about government makes it so they couldn't extend it to misdemeaners as well?
My fundamental point is that our country isn't founded on the idea of the government being able to remove the most simple of rights, unless necessary and prudent, after being found guilty by a group of peers. It is necessary and prudent to limit a felon's movement and their gun ownership for the duration of this incarceration. There's no reasonable basis to allow the government the right to prevent voting. Just like there's no reasonable basis to prevent gun ownership after punishment; if you don't want a person who committed a violent crime to ever own a gun again, call the punishment what it is: lifetime imprisonment.
So long as you empower the government to label felons, you empower the government to intentionally affect the outcome of voting. This is also a reason why income tax was originally not in the Constitution, as the power to tax is the power to destroy (the basis behind not taxing religious groups, as it would allow violate the 1st amendment's by establishing a religion de facto-ly)
Maybe you're trying to be a troll? The people who most keenly are aware of government are those incarcerated by it. And the government's ability to take away the rights of those who conceivably oppose them is exactly one of the things that defines a tyranny. Everyone should have the right to vote, especially felons. It is only because the majority of people believe in "lawfulness" that will keep felons in jail until the end of their term. If people do not vote and felons are freed, the people to blame are those who did not stand up and speak when their chance occurred. Of course to that end, I think a different voting system (instant run-off) as well as same-day registration should be allowed, since the voter should be allowed to choose how they vote and they shouldn't be restricted by bureaucracy to prevent them from voting.
A closer analogy would be finding the child after killing a puppy but before killing a homeless person. The kid was still gambling. They just weren't gambling with money. The worry is this quasi-gambling will turn into real gambling, like killing animals might lead to being a serial killer. The point is, in either case the parent should have already told the kid about gambling (as well as not killing puppies).
You can't ban the world of people encouraging the murder of homeless people or documents on why such is a good idea. Why? Because you can't destroy ideas. You can only suppress them (any idea "destroyed" will be recreated eventually). It's the job of parents to teach their kids why going along with such ideas is bad for them and others. There's no quick fixes. There's no one to blame but the parents.
The only way for a person to know their limits is to test those limits. The best time in life to do that is when you have someone to protect you while you do it. The biggest risk to children is when a parent or a friend's parent does something but hides it from the child, and the child gets into it and hurts themselves. Adulthood is when you have the intellectual and emotional maturity to say no and moderate yourself. It's not a magical switch time; it's something you develop, hopefully with the help of your parents.
So, it's like she would be a good parent to find her kid after he had shot the homeless guy? And the answer isn't to blame the kid or herself for not being active *sooner*. It's to pat herself on the back and blame the gun owner or the government for leaving homeless people in the streets. No, no parent can be everywhere all the time. But, a good parent will teach a child what is good/bad so they can leave the child alone for short bursts.
It's why children should learn about sex as early as possible, so they can protect themselves. It's why they need to learn about gambling as early as possible, so they can protect themselves. Waiting until a kid is 13 or 18 to start teaching them the birds and bees or that you should never call if you think your opponent has a flush (unless you have a royal flush, obviously), is waiting way too late. Parents trying to keep their children naive/innocent or being unable to talk about things because of their own emotional problems *hurts* the child. Not only that, but the side effect of keeping an ever-present eye on their children because their children are too ignorant to know better just makes the child resentful especially in teenage years.
So, good for the parent for final catching on to what their child was doing. It's about fucking time.
Monopoly (aka The Tenet (sp?) Game) was produced originally to show the amorality of renting tenets. Monopoly shows how to exploit others by buying lots of property and building houses/hotels on them. It shows how the real world works much more than it teaches good money management. Or have you not seen how people will go out of their way to buy up property then turn around and mortgage it for more property? It's things like this that made me realize that owning land is amoral. Making land non-transferable until death and after death auctioned to non-family with money going to the government and partially to the victim's family if murdered (excluding the murderer if they're part of the family, which seems probable) seems to be steps in the right direction.
Yeah, look at that huge media outcry. Oh, you're reading this on/.? I guess the media is in Bush's pocket. I don't think he really has to worry short of someone capturing him skull fucking someone and that video being distributed on the internet. Even then, I'm sure the Bush administration would be able to convince most Republicans it's a fake. The media is there either to inform the public or control them. Has the media been informing you? Right, it must be doing the other.
He couldn't do any worse, is I think the statement. Chances are, they could do better since they're not tied to spending whatever the other two parties want them to spend. They can veto 90% of spending to grind the whole process to a halt until Congress approves a spending bill that moves to balance the budget. It's in a 3rd party's best interest to actually make progress because they don't have the clout to be assured election next year. That's exactly *why* more than two parties is good. And it's why more people should become actually interested in politics instead of just letting the Democrats or Republicans win by default.
It seems hard for me to believe the claim that they've made "a reasonable attempt to not inconvenience you *too* horribly". The fact is, most previous historical captures in the past in the US by the Secret Service and the FBI have centered around the simple (collection just the computer) to the absurd (collect anything remotely electronic). Part of this was in the past, the Secret Service and FBI were utterly paranoid on the power of phreaks (the legend phreaks propagated probably didn't help matters much); taking away their computers, et al seemed the best method to stop them I guess. The other part is that they didn't want to risk possibly ignoring information that might turn up to their advantage.
Ie, they were less going in to confirm suspicions of a crime and more fishing for any evidence they could gather, especially to the end of finding the plans/schemes in taking advantage of the phone system (and computer systems, later with hackers). The fact is, if the FBI was really only interested in having a copy of the information, as a source of evidence, they could either a) take a copy of the HD and give the original back to the owner or b) make a copy of the HD and leave it with the owner, while taking the original.
The primary reasons they didn't/don't do this is because they see the information as a threat itself, and they're trying their best to prevent further dissementation of this information regardless of having actually proven guilt (it's a de facto indefinite injunction). To me, it seems pretty obvious that the FBI or police do not have a right to take things away from you and inhibit your use of them without first arresting you, trying you, and having you convicted of a crime. To that end, it seems abundantly clear that if the FBI or police wish to take something away from you as evidence, they either need to a) arrest you pre hence or post hence, then your goods will be returned to you when you're freed be it for lack of evidence, being found innocent, or after serving your term or b) if they don't arrest you, have the goods returned to you within 48hrs (the maximal period of time allowed before they have to bring you up for inditement) while in the meantime providing you with comparable goods to use. In the latter case, a comparable good would be a copy of the original HD.
But, all in all, this is all talk about what should happen in the US. Seeing that the FBI was apparently involved somehow, these practices should play a role in their actions. And finally, these rules should apply throughout the US, as it's clearly outside the scope of the government to take goods indefinitely without paying you for said goods. The Constitution gives Eminent Domain powers. It doesn't give Eminent Indefinite Borrowing powers.
This change from specialized to general purpose registers came with the 386 and 32-bit. In reality, the only thing made general purpose about the registers is now instead of only a few being usable in memory references, any can be used. The rest are still stuck to various quirks from the 16-bit line. As such, the 386 and 686 will reference the registers the same. The only difference is that a 686 binary will reorder to maximize the internal register renaming of the CPU. The number of instructions, outside of MMX/SSE, added to the 686 line is moot. In reality, the 686 CPU is designed to internally reorder instructions to maximize the use of the processing pipelines; this was done to overcome the fact that not enough programs were being recompiled to recorder in favor of the 586, so Intel needed some way of advantaging all programs ran on their next generation CPU. So, any reordering that a 686 binary actually has is probably moot on performance. Now, taking advantage of the much larger cache of the 686 vs the 386 in compiling is another issue entirely...
Should we give a monopoly to one soft drink company? One car manufacturer? They all have to fight with each other and have complexity to gain money. Yet they all are still able to prosper. The free market gives a fair due by guaranteeing an optimal societal and supplier surplus. And the amount of money earn decides if such a company should exist or not. In the free market, the price is a combination of the supplier's willingness to sell and the consumer's valuation of the product. What is more fair than these two forces working together to set a price? To act like copyright is the only exception and should be elevated is your overvaluation of copyrighted works which merely overprices it for the rest of, decreasing consumer surplus. Unless you can actually *prove* that copyright is an exception and is worth more in external effects than the free market accounts for, I don't see why leaving copyrighted works companies/people to find a complex system to substain themselves is a bad thing.
And there were magazines that used to include either short stories or a chapter of a novel in the past (do they still?). My understand is that's how Charles Dickens did at least a few of his novels. But you bring up an interesting point. People might be willing to pay less for books if they included full-page advertisements.
Of course, that idea really cheapens my idea of books. I'm sure at least *some* people would agree with that. And why can't there be ad-ware books and non ad-ware books. It works for something like Opera. I certainly wouldn't mind paying a little extra to not get fed advertisements in my books. I certainly don't believe that that will kill all books because if nothing else the local shopkeep might have a machine to print your own ad free book after the short extent of copyright.
I'm hopeful, though, that electronic books develop far enough that I'll rarely have a need for real paper. I like a solid book from time to time, but having a single pad with a ton of books is more practical. And to that, I'll probably keep my analog copy of HHGttG. In between, maybe the whole "micropayment" plan will work. Then I can get lots of books for relatively cheap and stick them on my ePad (or whatever it ends up being called).
>>Copyright has basically turned into charging relatively lots of money for the embodiment of an idea
>And knives have turned into tools to kill people. but no one would argue that the abusing of knives is a reason to eliminate them. So why is the abusing of copyright seen differently?
Actually, that's not really an abuse of copyright. An abuse would be violating copyright or turning it into something that doesn't still meet the definition of copyright. I was merely pointing out what copyright is now for various companies (again, daily newspapers and the like excluded).
>>Why? To make more money because there's an inherent small mark-up available when companies turn a good into a commodity. But, copyright is different and can enjoy gross mark-ups by comparison.
>I would argue that the creation costs of copyrighted "goods" are more hidden (either out of ignorance, or simple apathy) than the creation costs of physical goods.
Last I checked, physical goods aren't created. They're constructed from raw goods. Creation would involve violating some conservation of matter/energy laws (given matter is energy of a different form, even claiming energy -> matter is creation seems as absurd to me as claiming you create iron by converting liquid iron to its solid form). The closet analogy to creation for a physical good is really the design of a good. The fact is, the design for most goods is so blatantly obvious in the good no trade secret would cover it, the trade secret for the good was lost, or the trade secret for the good still exists. But given that the copyright and the trade secret for a copyrighted work are the same, it seems clear that all copyrighted works would fall into the "blatantly obvious" category and there'd be no damages for redistribution.
>The main difference between the two is duplication costs, but economics dictates that both costs have to be made up.
Economics might dictate that costs have to be paid for, but it never dictated that copyrighted works as we know it had to exist. So, the Constitution plays an exception to allow many more copyrighted works to exist than conceivably would exist in a free market. That's not so bad, if copyright's length were proportional to the reward cycle which is proportional to the rate of communication. Copyright has gone so badly in the direction *opposite* of this, that having a breather of no or minimal copyright might be the right direction to give some perspective on what actually is good for our economy.
>>But you can't trade ideas or the embodiment of ideas as some sort of actually stable basis for an economy.
>Remember talk of the knowledge economy? And yes as long as certain things are true, we'll need physical goods.
We'll need physical goods, but if our country doesn't produce many physical goods and uses its IP as the main export for trade, then when other countries make their own IP we'll be in the situation that we no longer have a viable export nor anyone in the country to make the physical goods we need. Of course, eventually we might start making physical goods again. But the truth is that most other countries will probably still be more cost effective at it than we are. That seems to mean that the only main export we have is things like crops. I'll be glad to look more carefully, though, if you can come up with more specific examples of what other physical goods we make.
Ask newspapers. The print in bulk at $0.50/paper, often with many sections. They recycle paper, use pretty bad ink except on Sunday, and they don't give tons of royalties to anyone. Yet, newspapers still make enough money to stay in business (especially the bigger ones) and they share thinks like AP reports. The copyright on most newspaper isn't worth the paper it's printed on, as few people would buy a previous days newspaper (now, 30 years, maybe..). So, it's clear that it's possible to survive on such a system. Of course, for something that takes months to make and can be easily copied, you'd give your customer various "perks" without charging much above what "pirates" sell new stuff at.
Maybe people will still be d/ling things for free. But if you know you can sell a few copies at $0.10 and the publisher is selling it at $0.15, you'll sell it at $0.10 (more than likely). And the publisher will likely still get a lot of buyers because it's a more trusted source and $0.05 is piddly for that guarantee. Of course, I don't really know the price the free market will offer. But I find it hard to believe that absolutely all books and the like will fail to be produced. If anything, someone like Samuel Clemmens believed that it would just mean more profit for publishers and less for authors. But with the internet, the author can be the publisher..though maybe it won't be better for the creator without the huge available mark-up.
Sorry for responding to myself, but I just came up with a more valid point to why copyright in general is a bad idea.
Copyright has basically turned into charging relatively lots of money for the embodiment of an idea (daily writers to newspapers and the like excluded). In truth, most manufactured goods have been outsourced to other countries. Why? To make more money because there's an inherent small mark-up available when companies turn a good into a commodity. But, copyright is different and can enjoy gross mark-ups by comparison. Now, eventually this too will be outsourced (since it too will make more money), but in the meantime, the economy of the US will be based less on trading physical goods and more on trading ideas as currency (strictly speaking, copyright is the embodiment of ideas, but it's more succinct to say it that way).
But you can't trade ideas or the embodiment of ideas as some sort of actually stable basis for an economy. It's just asking for the economy to crumble and/or be taken over by countries which actually *do* make *real* goods. But, it's the obvious economic outcome as people will obviously turn to whatever is the largest profit maker per unit. The outcome is that the entertainment market is become well ballooned beyond what is healthy; this isn't good for the quasi-free market of the US. But with other countries without strong copyright terms yet able to copy the idea of mass entertainment, the entertainment bubble is sure to collapse in the future to foreign markets. And what else does the US have to trade to other countries with except maybe agricultural goods (some of which most of Europe now has banned)?
Slashdot Mirror
And just like the highway, people are more interested in driving faster than sucking up the cost of making roads wider "just in case".
I think it's a combination of both, though I for the most part wouldn't call it "human error" to kill with a gun or otherwise. I say this because while there certainly are a number of accidental deaths by gun in various countries, the presiding concern of most people is murder and wars. Now, blaming people for the act of murder is really to point out that guns don't have any control over themselves. The majority of killings by gun are intentional. So, it's hard to argue that guns are the trigger.
Instead, most people who are against gun either try to enlarge the threat of children shooting themselves or the easy access of a gun making a person more apt to commit murder (say, in a rage, which is often considered manslaughter and not murder). The former seems for the most part an invalid concern, as the same logic would say that children should be castrated until they're of "sufficient age" to prevent pregnancy--I'm deeply aware that pregnancy creates life, not destroys it, but sex, like guns, is dangerous to one's life if one isn't educated to take steps to understand and respect it. The latter is often based on statistics that show a higher murder rate, especially by guns, in the US vs other countries with stricter gun laws. The problem with that is some countries have basically a 180 vs the US. That is, for every US gun murder, there is a non-gun murder in an other country and vice versa for US non-gun murders.
So, maybe quick access to *any* weapon is likely to cause murder/manslaughter. Or maybe a strong part of the many murders is based on many countries, including the US, having a long history of settling disputes with weapons instead of words. It's sadly the case that some people in the US still feel justified in punching or worse a person for the words they say. Words can be ignored, but assault can not.
Back to the original form, most linking verbs form tautologies in self-reference. Chicken tastes like chicken and computers are made out of computers (the latter is true because while it's silly to make the statement, one member of the subset of something is itself). You're correct in that the form is intent on trying to place the second sentence as the main statement by placing a negative in the first instead of minimizing it. So, while guns do kill people, people kill people by more than guns. The conclusion that's intended to be drawn is that removing guns won't stop killing. Whether it reduces killing is another matter. The sentences are in effect a sound bite to validate why guns being banned isn't a complete solution to murder. But as such, you're right that not every idiom that fits the form makes sense. The form in itself is a contrivance and is not a proof. Proof comes from the reader self-validating what they read.
Your counter-examples don't fit the form.
The form is: 'X (linking verb) not Y Z. Z Y Z.'
So,
Chicken doesn't taste like chicken. People taste like chicken.
There's no sensical direct conversion (beyond stating P is ~P; P is P), but here's one that uses a few of the components:
People don't taste like chicken. Chicken tastes like chicken.
Computers aren't made of silicon. People are made of silicon.
Computers aren't made out of silicon. Computers are made out of computers.
People don't make mistakes. People make mistakes.
People don't make mistakes. Mistakes make mistakes.
His example is "Technology doesn't fail [people]. People fail [people]." which fits the form. Your only real argument against that is to claim that the implied words aren't "people" but something else in which case you'd be right it fails the form.
I suggest taking that idea one step further and all Representative offices being done by lottery. Who better to represent the average American then a variety of Americans over time. And before you make mention that you'll end up getting some ineffective person or lunatic in office, realize this is exactly why the government and governmental offices should be strictly limited as eventually some lunatic will get elected in a democracy. Hitler was really good at seeming like a nice guy to the average person. Imagine if Hitler had very little real power to start wars and the like, though?
This a great way to ruin Earth's reputation, as a peeping tom. "I swear we weren't looking into your showers, aliens!"
Two things. One, while modern TCP/IP stacks have hypothetically rather unspoofable connection establishment, programs like nmap show that not enough OSs take advantage of that in a meaningful way allow for short bursts of fake connection and do some action spoofs. Two, while it sounds like there's various issues with this rateless protoocol, the idea of a standard, faster protocol for larger pipes doesn't mean an end to TCP. It does mean that people have realized that single tcp connections have issues saturating bandwidth at very high speeds and that alternative protocols for that situation seem appropriate. To act like an alternative to tcp is somehow a doom to tcp is to act like no one uses udp because tcp has all these wonderful features that overcome limitations to udp. There's clearly the case that a new standard protocol that does have better file transfer features wouldn't be such a bad idea to consider as a third primary protocol. In OS terms, I'd liken it to how a Windows NT/X environment has messages (udp), streams (tcp), and random file access (new protocol, which will probably not be rateless).
I agree with some of your points. There is definitely a "party line" most mods follow, and they will often mod down upon that bias. I agree that such is a bad thing. Now, that all being said..
...for music listen to the radio and for films watch broadcast TV or get cable.
I have never once heard anyone point out a reasonable model for producing film/music/software and giving it away for free.
Neither have I. On the same token, I don't see why one would actually give away film/music/software for free except out of charity. In this world there is something called the free market. In years past, publication of goods was where the majority of the money went. This is precisely the basis upon which Samuel Clemens (aka Mark Twain) wanted unlimited copyright. He realized the publishing companies wouldn't decrease the price when there's an end to some copyright. They'd just make more money on it as it's unreasonable for most people to publish books on non-copyrighted books.
Now, fast forward to the present where anyone with the time/energy/money can publish (for lack of a better word) at a much lower cost than the past. It's now the case (and I'd say was to a lesser extent since the VCR) that anyone can pirate and the group it most hurts is the publisher and still not the copyright holder. Where is this all leading?
Well, this is all leading to the fact that with hard-media publishers out of the loop, copyright holders are in a pretty bad condition too. It's not from a lack of copyright but a finite inability to limit piracy. Now, you've taken this to mean that copyright holders would freely give away their works to compete in the free market with piracy. But you're ignoring one main thing. Places like Slashdot have found out a way in which they can exist and compete against pirates.
In the end, pirates too have to pay for the computer and bandwidth. With chielf one-way tunnels (ie, server-client), the pirate has to cover the burden of the cost. In this case, pirates do exactly like other websites do: they put up advertisement for money. Now, clearly these people are profiting from their piracy, are big targets, and copyright holders have a pretty firm basis legal to attack them.
But, P2P is the real threat, of course. Without a single target and with everyone in part bearing the cost, the burden on each individual is relatively small and fixed (thanks to universal pricing on various internet options in most countries). Now, competing financially against such a target might be near impossible directly. The sad truth is, the RIAA is even showing that legally trying to combat the problem isn't working that great.
In the end, what does this mean? Well, first, here's your relevant comments:
The material you wish to pirate comes from somewhere and those people deserve to be paid for their work. If you don't want to pay then don't listen to the music or use the software or watch the film.
Ie, you offer the moralistic approach. Ironically, most music (no offense intended towards Indy music) on radio is pushed by payola, which actually *costs* the artist money. And most films on TV, short of the made-for-TV movies, already grossed the majority of their money in theaters. The latter survive through TV networks who are paid by advertisements and/or cable/satellite service money. In other words, most such examples are the result of conglomerates pooling money through advertisement, for advertisement, or service fees.
Two comments that disturb me are:
There's a small amount of software and such being produced for free but it represents a small percentage of what people use every day. and For software use only open source free software.
Please realize that Free software isn't free. It's software that's copyleft. Redistribution can burden the distributor, as the GPL requires you not hold your source responsible upon your distributing. Many people release software under t
Not to be a complete ass, but one of those innovation, the turning headlight, is a bit older than the 60s. Perhaps you've heard the story of Preston Tucker? It does seem a bit ironic that Microsoft was never charged with fraud for all their vaporware. In any case, there is little innovation in most established industry since most such companies are more interested in a steady income than anything. I don't know the French automotive industry or Citroen, though.
Welcome to the global market, where not only can companies can get their supply (outsourced labor) from overseas but so can consumers. As others have stated, pharmaceutical companies receive various large subsidies for their work and yet they routinely sell drugs at a lower rate in Canada. The latter is because Canada regulates drug prices. That's only half the truth, though, because the free market is self-regulating and would take care of pricing if most patents were revoked/never granted.
Now, before you say that pharmaceutical companies could never do R&D, nor would be willing, on the small sums of money from production, I would point out the previously mentioned subsidies which already favor the production of drugs. It would seem to clear to me that the people of the US (and other countries with subsidies) have more than paid for the work and related patents of such drugs and shouldn't be forced (for drugs of life or death) for the production and the exorbitant prices. So, for all their whining about not making as much money in America because of imports from African countries, I say "go cry me a river" and to start removing patents. Companies that did work solely on their own (and I'm not talking about a company that shells for a pharmaceutical company), I'm more apt to accept their moaning for such demands.
And charging a uniform price is what we accuse Microsoft of.
Of this claim, I wish to know of what you speak? The only thing Microsoft as of late has been accused and convicted of his anti-competitive practices. To that end, Microsoft's action was that of *not* having uniform pricing but instead favoring companies that went along with its policy of inhibiting the installation of specific programs on computers also installed with Windows. Uniform pricing would have meant that there would have been no penalty for choosing to install a competitors product or not their product (Windows) at all on some computers.
If all of the above is not what you were talking about, I apologize for the trite remarks.
What happens if the majority of people are incarcerated for the same felony? It may be hard to commit a felony now, but what about government makes it hard to change that? What about government makes it so they couldn't extend it to misdemeaners as well?
My fundamental point is that our country isn't founded on the idea of the government being able to remove the most simple of rights, unless necessary and prudent, after being found guilty by a group of peers. It is necessary and prudent to limit a felon's movement and their gun ownership for the duration of this incarceration. There's no reasonable basis to allow the government the right to prevent voting. Just like there's no reasonable basis to prevent gun ownership after punishment; if you don't want a person who committed a violent crime to ever own a gun again, call the punishment what it is: lifetime imprisonment.
So long as you empower the government to label felons, you empower the government to intentionally affect the outcome of voting. This is also a reason why income tax was originally not in the Constitution, as the power to tax is the power to destroy (the basis behind not taxing religious groups, as it would allow violate the 1st amendment's by establishing a religion de facto-ly)
Maybe you're trying to be a troll? The people who most keenly are aware of government are those incarcerated by it. And the government's ability to take away the rights of those who conceivably oppose them is exactly one of the things that defines a tyranny. Everyone should have the right to vote, especially felons. It is only because the majority of people believe in "lawfulness" that will keep felons in jail until the end of their term. If people do not vote and felons are freed, the people to blame are those who did not stand up and speak when their chance occurred. Of course to that end, I think a different voting system (instant run-off) as well as same-day registration should be allowed, since the voter should be allowed to choose how they vote and they shouldn't be restricted by bureaucracy to prevent them from voting.
A closer analogy would be finding the child after killing a puppy but before killing a homeless person. The kid was still gambling. They just weren't gambling with money. The worry is this quasi-gambling will turn into real gambling, like killing animals might lead to being a serial killer. The point is, in either case the parent should have already told the kid about gambling (as well as not killing puppies).
You can't ban the world of people encouraging the murder of homeless people or documents on why such is a good idea. Why? Because you can't destroy ideas. You can only suppress them (any idea "destroyed" will be recreated eventually). It's the job of parents to teach their kids why going along with such ideas is bad for them and others. There's no quick fixes. There's no one to blame but the parents.
The only way for a person to know their limits is to test those limits. The best time in life to do that is when you have someone to protect you while you do it. The biggest risk to children is when a parent or a friend's parent does something but hides it from the child, and the child gets into it and hurts themselves. Adulthood is when you have the intellectual and emotional maturity to say no and moderate yourself. It's not a magical switch time; it's something you develop, hopefully with the help of your parents.
So, it's like she would be a good parent to find her kid after he had shot the homeless guy? And the answer isn't to blame the kid or herself for not being active *sooner*. It's to pat herself on the back and blame the gun owner or the government for leaving homeless people in the streets. No, no parent can be everywhere all the time. But, a good parent will teach a child what is good/bad so they can leave the child alone for short bursts.
It's why children should learn about sex as early as possible, so they can protect themselves. It's why they need to learn about gambling as early as possible, so they can protect themselves. Waiting until a kid is 13 or 18 to start teaching them the birds and bees or that you should never call if you think your opponent has a flush (unless you have a royal flush, obviously), is waiting way too late. Parents trying to keep their children naive/innocent or being unable to talk about things because of their own emotional problems *hurts* the child. Not only that, but the side effect of keeping an ever-present eye on their children because their children are too ignorant to know better just makes the child resentful especially in teenage years.
So, good for the parent for final catching on to what their child was doing. It's about fucking time.
Monopoly (aka The Tenet (sp?) Game) was produced originally to show the amorality of renting tenets. Monopoly shows how to exploit others by buying lots of property and building houses/hotels on them. It shows how the real world works much more than it teaches good money management. Or have you not seen how people will go out of their way to buy up property then turn around and mortgage it for more property? It's things like this that made me realize that owning land is amoral. Making land non-transferable until death and after death auctioned to non-family with money going to the government and partially to the victim's family if murdered (excluding the murderer if they're part of the family, which seems probable) seems to be steps in the right direction.
Yeah, look at that huge media outcry. Oh, you're reading this on /.? I guess the media is in Bush's pocket. I don't think he really has to worry short of someone capturing him skull fucking someone and that video being distributed on the internet. Even then, I'm sure the Bush administration would be able to convince most Republicans it's a fake. The media is there either to inform the public or control them. Has the media been informing you? Right, it must be doing the other.
He couldn't do any worse, is I think the statement. Chances are, they could do better since they're not tied to spending whatever the other two parties want them to spend. They can veto 90% of spending to grind the whole process to a halt until Congress approves a spending bill that moves to balance the budget. It's in a 3rd party's best interest to actually make progress because they don't have the clout to be assured election next year. That's exactly *why* more than two parties is good. And it's why more people should become actually interested in politics instead of just letting the Democrats or Republicans win by default.
It seems hard for me to believe the claim that they've made "a reasonable attempt to not inconvenience you *too* horribly". The fact is, most previous historical captures in the past in the US by the Secret Service and the FBI have centered around the simple (collection just the computer) to the absurd (collect anything remotely electronic). Part of this was in the past, the Secret Service and FBI were utterly paranoid on the power of phreaks (the legend phreaks propagated probably didn't help matters much); taking away their computers, et al seemed the best method to stop them I guess. The other part is that they didn't want to risk possibly ignoring information that might turn up to their advantage.
Ie, they were less going in to confirm suspicions of a crime and more fishing for any evidence they could gather, especially to the end of finding the plans/schemes in taking advantage of the phone system (and computer systems, later with hackers). The fact is, if the FBI was really only interested in having a copy of the information, as a source of evidence, they could either a) take a copy of the HD and give the original back to the owner or b) make a copy of the HD and leave it with the owner, while taking the original.
The primary reasons they didn't/don't do this is because they see the information as a threat itself, and they're trying their best to prevent further dissementation of this information regardless of having actually proven guilt (it's a de facto indefinite injunction). To me, it seems pretty obvious that the FBI or police do not have a right to take things away from you and inhibit your use of them without first arresting you, trying you, and having you convicted of a crime. To that end, it seems abundantly clear that if the FBI or police wish to take something away from you as evidence, they either need to a) arrest you pre hence or post hence, then your goods will be returned to you when you're freed be it for lack of evidence, being found innocent, or after serving your term or b) if they don't arrest you, have the goods returned to you within 48hrs (the maximal period of time allowed before they have to bring you up for inditement) while in the meantime providing you with comparable goods to use. In the latter case, a comparable good would be a copy of the original HD.
But, all in all, this is all talk about what should happen in the US. Seeing that the FBI was apparently involved somehow, these practices should play a role in their actions. And finally, these rules should apply throughout the US, as it's clearly outside the scope of the government to take goods indefinitely without paying you for said goods. The Constitution gives Eminent Domain powers. It doesn't give Eminent Indefinite Borrowing powers.
This change from specialized to general purpose registers came with the 386 and 32-bit. In reality, the only thing made general purpose about the registers is now instead of only a few being usable in memory references, any can be used. The rest are still stuck to various quirks from the 16-bit line. As such, the 386 and 686 will reference the registers the same. The only difference is that a 686 binary will reorder to maximize the internal register renaming of the CPU. The number of instructions, outside of MMX/SSE, added to the 686 line is moot. In reality, the 686 CPU is designed to internally reorder instructions to maximize the use of the processing pipelines; this was done to overcome the fact that not enough programs were being recompiled to recorder in favor of the 586, so Intel needed some way of advantaging all programs ran on their next generation CPU. So, any reordering that a 686 binary actually has is probably moot on performance. Now, taking advantage of the much larger cache of the 686 vs the 386 in compiling is another issue entirely...
Should we give a monopoly to one soft drink company? One car manufacturer? They all have to fight with each other and have complexity to gain money. Yet they all are still able to prosper. The free market gives a fair due by guaranteeing an optimal societal and supplier surplus. And the amount of money earn decides if such a company should exist or not. In the free market, the price is a combination of the supplier's willingness to sell and the consumer's valuation of the product. What is more fair than these two forces working together to set a price? To act like copyright is the only exception and should be elevated is your overvaluation of copyrighted works which merely overprices it for the rest of, decreasing consumer surplus. Unless you can actually *prove* that copyright is an exception and is worth more in external effects than the free market accounts for, I don't see why leaving copyrighted works companies/people to find a complex system to substain themselves is a bad thing.
And there were magazines that used to include either short stories or a chapter of a novel in the past (do they still?). My understand is that's how Charles Dickens did at least a few of his novels. But you bring up an interesting point. People might be willing to pay less for books if they included full-page advertisements.
Of course, that idea really cheapens my idea of books. I'm sure at least *some* people would agree with that. And why can't there be ad-ware books and non ad-ware books. It works for something like Opera. I certainly wouldn't mind paying a little extra to not get fed advertisements in my books. I certainly don't believe that that will kill all books because if nothing else the local shopkeep might have a machine to print your own ad free book after the short extent of copyright.
I'm hopeful, though, that electronic books develop far enough that I'll rarely have a need for real paper. I like a solid book from time to time, but having a single pad with a ton of books is more practical. And to that, I'll probably keep my analog copy of HHGttG. In between, maybe the whole "micropayment" plan will work. Then I can get lots of books for relatively cheap and stick them on my ePad (or whatever it ends up being called).
>>Copyright has basically turned into charging relatively lots of money for the embodiment of an idea
>And knives have turned into tools to kill people. but no one would argue that the abusing of knives is a reason to eliminate them. So why is the abusing of copyright seen differently?
Actually, that's not really an abuse of copyright. An abuse would be violating copyright or turning it into something that doesn't still meet the definition of copyright. I was merely pointing out what copyright is now for various companies (again, daily newspapers and the like excluded).
>>Why? To make more money because there's an inherent small mark-up available when companies turn a good into a commodity. But, copyright is different and can enjoy gross mark-ups by comparison.
>I would argue that the creation costs of copyrighted "goods" are more hidden (either out of ignorance, or simple apathy) than the creation costs of physical goods.
Last I checked, physical goods aren't created. They're constructed from raw goods. Creation would involve violating some conservation of matter/energy laws (given matter is energy of a different form, even claiming energy -> matter is creation seems as absurd to me as claiming you create iron by converting liquid iron to its solid form). The closet analogy to creation for a physical good is really the design of a good. The fact is, the design for most goods is so blatantly obvious in the good no trade secret would cover it, the trade secret for the good was lost, or the trade secret for the good still exists. But given that the copyright and the trade secret for a copyrighted work are the same, it seems clear that all copyrighted works would fall into the "blatantly obvious" category and there'd be no damages for redistribution.
>The main difference between the two is duplication costs, but economics dictates that both costs have to be made up.
Economics might dictate that costs have to be paid for, but it never dictated that copyrighted works as we know it had to exist. So, the Constitution plays an exception to allow many more copyrighted works to exist than conceivably would exist in a free market. That's not so bad, if copyright's length were proportional to the reward cycle which is proportional to the rate of communication. Copyright has gone so badly in the direction *opposite* of this, that having a breather of no or minimal copyright might be the right direction to give some perspective on what actually is good for our economy.
>>But you can't trade ideas or the embodiment of ideas as some sort of actually stable basis for an economy.
>Remember talk of the knowledge economy? And yes as long as certain things are true, we'll need physical goods.
We'll need physical goods, but if our country doesn't produce many physical goods and uses its IP as the main export for trade, then when other countries make their own IP we'll be in the situation that we no longer have a viable export nor anyone in the country to make the physical goods we need. Of course, eventually we might start making physical goods again. But the truth is that most other countries will probably still be more cost effective at it than we are. That seems to mean that the only main export we have is things like crops. I'll be glad to look more carefully, though, if you can come up with more specific examples of what other physical goods we make.
Ask newspapers. The print in bulk at $0.50/paper, often with many sections. They recycle paper, use pretty bad ink except on Sunday, and they don't give tons of royalties to anyone. Yet, newspapers still make enough money to stay in business (especially the bigger ones) and they share thinks like AP reports. The copyright on most newspaper isn't worth the paper it's printed on, as few people would buy a previous days newspaper (now, 30 years, maybe..). So, it's clear that it's possible to survive on such a system. Of course, for something that takes months to make and can be easily copied, you'd give your customer various "perks" without charging much above what "pirates" sell new stuff at.
Maybe people will still be d/ling things for free. But if you know you can sell a few copies at $0.10 and the publisher is selling it at $0.15, you'll sell it at $0.10 (more than likely). And the publisher will likely still get a lot of buyers because it's a more trusted source and $0.05 is piddly for that guarantee. Of course, I don't really know the price the free market will offer. But I find it hard to believe that absolutely all books and the like will fail to be produced. If anything, someone like Samuel Clemmens believed that it would just mean more profit for publishers and less for authors. But with the internet, the author can be the publisher..though maybe it won't be better for the creator without the huge available mark-up.
Sorry for responding to myself, but I just came up with a more valid point to why copyright in general is a bad idea.
Copyright has basically turned into charging relatively lots of money for the embodiment of an idea (daily writers to newspapers and the like excluded). In truth, most manufactured goods have been outsourced to other countries. Why? To make more money because there's an inherent small mark-up available when companies turn a good into a commodity. But, copyright is different and can enjoy gross mark-ups by comparison. Now, eventually this too will be outsourced (since it too will make more money), but in the meantime, the economy of the US will be based less on trading physical goods and more on trading ideas as currency (strictly speaking, copyright is the embodiment of ideas, but it's more succinct to say it that way).
But you can't trade ideas or the embodiment of ideas as some sort of actually stable basis for an economy. It's just asking for the economy to crumble and/or be taken over by countries which actually *do* make *real* goods. But, it's the obvious economic outcome as people will obviously turn to whatever is the largest profit maker per unit. The outcome is that the entertainment market is become well ballooned beyond what is healthy; this isn't good for the quasi-free market of the US. But with other countries without strong copyright terms yet able to copy the idea of mass entertainment, the entertainment bubble is sure to collapse in the future to foreign markets. And what else does the US have to trade to other countries with except maybe agricultural goods (some of which most of Europe now has banned)?