I don't think we actually disagree that much. I'm not claiming that it is never possible to create a hemmed in-property; I simply wanted to give some examples to point out how property rights are limited in scope and thought an example from Anglo-saxon common law would be illustrative. No, not every state applies common law the same way, and, for that matter, Louisiana doesn't use it at all because their system is derived from the French Napoleonic code.
I still sorta disagree with your assessment of common-law right-of-way as being a catch-all concept for various sorts of easements. It really is the other way around: Easments are a rationalization and codification of the common-law right-of-way. The distinction is subtle and, these days, almost purely theoretical. There is now so much statutory law establishing and disclosing documented easements that a court almost never has to resort to common-law priciples to resolve disuputes of this sort. That Forida case is one of the rare exceptions (rare enough that even the trial court tripped up and applied statutory law inappropriately).
I still stand by my original claim, read narrowly, that in the case of a land buyer aggressively hemming in another property, and in the absence of documented easements, most courts under the realm of Anglo-saxon common law would grant some sort of right-of-way based on common-law principles. Though in truth the "absence of documented easments" part is like a unicorn: Everyone knows what it looks like but no one seems to have seen one.
Now, to get back on topic, if we were talking about "intellectual property", I would agree with you (and RMS). There is no common law right to intellectual property (other than an author's right to first publication...you can't steal a draft manuscript and publish it). That term is a catch-all.
Re:Personally, I would go one step further.
on
Game with God
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· Score: 1
Galileo's real crime was not keeping his mouth shut at a time when others used his ideas to undermine the political establishment. Sure it was unfair but really he should have known better.
Martha Stewart could have learned a lesson from him: when in the midst of a crack-down, you shuts yer yap!
Re:Personally, I would go one step further.
on
Game with God
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· Score: 1
Einstien was a jew. You shouldn't need a Google for that.
His family wasn't particularly devout, but during his teenage years he went through a spell of religious devotion. German high schools of the time period sent Christians and Jews to separate schools, so that was his first exposure to practicing Judaism. He seems to have later reverted back to being a not-very-jewish jew.
Yes, I read the book (*sheesh*). I was still in school then and wrote a book report. The book report format required character write-ups, and, lakcing anything interesting to say about the characters, I hit the realization that, golly, there weren't any interesting characters in the whole flippin' book. Not to say the book(s) sucked, I found it an interesting mental game of "what if?". Sure the mathematical psychohistory plan was unrealistic, but so is Gandalf's magic; unrealistic is OK if you are consistent with the premise.
I find Asimov a competent Sci-Fi writer; he stays consistent with his premises, is logical in story development, and finds interesting angles to explore but doesn't ramble. Middle of the pack. Inspiring he is not. His best work was his non-fiction, as a popularizer of science.
I don't have much hope for this I, Robot movie. Movies rely much more on characterization than books, so Asimov's stories won't fare the transition well. They will either be weak on screen but true to the book, or standard Hollywood eye-candy that stray far from the book which means they aren't Asimov's stories anymore, so why bother?
And that something, if no documented easment is present, is a common law right-of-way, or a statutory method to create a right of way. Faison v. Smith is an apellate opinion to that effect. They say that a hemmed in property is granted a right-of-way, by virture of (for example) being subdivided from some other, acessible property. (They go on to say that a certain Florida statute was not intended to apply when a common-law right can be found, so that the common-law principles, not the statutory law, was the appropriate way to resolve the dispute. The trial court applied the statutory law.)
It appears that the only way to produce a hemmed-in property is for the government to subdivide and sell that way, or for a change in the shape of the land to cut some property off. Resolving those cases was the purpose of the Florida statute.
A consistent copyright law would be for a fixed period of time, since the fraction of economic value retained by the author dpepends only on the length of copyright, not the time of his death. The life+X terms are a way of pacifying authors who complain when they see the works published in their youth (and for some of them, their pension) fall into public domain. The irony is that life+X favors young authors by giving them longer terms, age discrimination! (Only a tiny amount these days, since with today's super-long terms, copyright holders only forfeit a tiny amount of economic value, no matter what their age.)
Copyrights are actually the one form of property that you can reasonably claim: "Nobody would ever have this if I didn't create it....So, it might actually be reasonable to give infinite ownership to the creator."
Even if you insist on treating copyrights as the moral equivalent of property (which is not the Anglo-saxon model, of course), perpetual copyright is still inconsistent with our notions of conventional property. Limits on the scope of property claims have had limits for centuries.
Ownership of real property (real property==land) gives the right to refuse admittance. But you cannot buy up every piece of property surrounding someone who won't sell, and then hold the isolated property hostage; you have to provide reasonable accomodation for travel. Right of property is limited by right of way (the right to travel over another's property), or we would all be prisoners on our own land. That common law priciple has since refined into things like easments (the right to string power lines over your land, etc.). Others have mentioned mineral rights, which separate from ordinary property rights when a mineral deposit stretches under many separate properties and it is impractical to negotiate with many individual owners.
Even personal (non-land) property is subject to limits. A taxicab, for example, can be commandeered in times of public emergency. Personal effects can be siezed for evidence in a criminal investigation.
In this light, a time limit on copyrights (which represent something like 1% of the value to the creator, when adjusted for present value) are a perfectly reasonable limit on copyright-as-property, a sort of easment, if you will. Whereas perpetual copyright would be unique among property rights in its absoluteness.
...The characters were pretty one-dimensional,... ...the book degenerates into a Socialist wet-dream...
That pretty much describes all of Asimov's writing. In fact, his contemporaneous Foundation trilogy is pretty much the embodiment of one-dimensional character-ism. A thousand-year historic plotline with no human creativity making any of that history. The story's premise doesn't permit any character-driven plot; all history is predicted by a mathematical model. You do have an elite group dutifully planning a sort of meta-history, like some sort of enlightened socialist central planners; otherwise there wouldn't be any story.
I wouldn't include the "sucked" comment as applying to all his writing, but I definitely mod him as "overrated."
Living in NYC has it's own advantages. Here, I can go Tango Dancing every day of the week, see the best museums,
NYC's advantages on this front are overbilled. To take the tango example, in Rochester, a city one twenty-fifth the size, tango dancing is available 3 nights a week (though not easy to find for a newcomer). Big-name theatre productions and museum exhibits are available when they are on tour, so you gotta see it when they are here, but, that said, it is easier to get a good seat when you are not bidding against the likes of Ted Turner & Richard Branson.
In fairness, Rochester punches above its weight in this regard. Syracuse, only slightly smaller, disappoints Rochestarians who move there and look for "culture."
Or to say it more accurately, the US has public health care, but not national health care. The programs are funded by a combination of federal, state, & local money. Direct subsidies are means-tested (you gotta be poor to get it). Capital subsidies usually take the form of matching grants, so if a hospital puts up $1 for some mega-expensive machine, and they get $2 from the county, $2 from the state, and $6 from the feds. The idea is to leave at least some trace of market forces so that the bureaucrats follow market demand.
It works fairly well for the rich, middle-class & the poor. The real losers are the "working poor" who aren't destitute enough to get free healthcare, they have (albeit low-paying) jobs so can't wait all day at the walk-in clinics, but they can't afford to buy at market prices.
One way economists simplify this sort of math is, instead of listing all sorts of tax rates, they compute government spending as a fraction of GDP. And if I weren't lazy I would provide a link comparing USA and Canada in this regard.
That points up the limitations of closed-source software. I did try to work the native Win3.1 install but got stuck without a paddle rather quickly. Not many copies of MS Word 5 at the local Comp*USA.
I pulled out a floppy of Winsock & Netscape 1.1 from my closet. Winsock could connect but it crashed before I could do anything. It is easy to forget: Win 3.1 crashes like Atlanta in a blizzard on anything less than a Pentium; this is a 50 MHz 486. By contrast, Linux never crashed in all my tinkering (not counting floppy read errors during boot-up).
Well, Abiword is billed as lightweight, but it won't load without opening audio libraries. Not saying the sound won't work; the program won't load. I would have rather had the 2 MB of disk space. (My happy little Amiga, built from hardware not much more powerful, won't load libraries until they are needed, a feature that has vastly improved her longevity.) But Abiword is the smallest thing I know of (besides Ted) that can interoperate with MS Word 2000.
The definition of "lightweight" shifts with time to mean, "one-tenth as bloated as the similar MS products." By the standrds of ten-year-old hardware, that's still a lot of bloat.
there are better solutions for internet accessable servers
My biggest beef with Slack is its use of sendmail, not known for being secure. Not everybody needs all of its 569,876 features. Exim & QMail aren't even included, even in Slack 10.
If you want to fit a complete linux system into a small (say 500MB) space then slack is probably your best bet.
I was able to put Slack on a laptop with 340 MB hard drive. Installed just enough to get Abiword working, plus Pine & Links and just about nothing else. It barely fits. Abiword and its Gnome library dependencies take almost half of the drive space. A smaller but less capable alternative is Ted, a *.rtf editor. I had to use XFree86 version 3.3.6 (from Slack 7.1) because the newer versions don't support the obsolete video chip set.
The ldd command is your friend when doing a minimal Slack install. It will tell you which *.so files you need to run a particular program. Oh, and rm -r/usr/doc/*, and ln var/log/syslog -> dev/nul; every byte counts!
who's going to force a private carrier to provide reasonable mail service to RFD 2 in Scuffboot, Nebraska
The customers do. There are many places in rural Nevada, etc., that UPS serves despite losing money on every delivery. It is better to lose money on a small number of deliveries than construct a complex fee schedule that insures every delivery is profitable.
The European countries of high growth are all small and most of them are on the edge of Europe. That seems to suggest a migration of economic output from the large "anchor" ecomomies. According to that same page, FR, DE, UK, & IT all score in the bottom third. It doesn't take many factory relocations from England to boost Ireland's small, still-quite-agrarian economy.
And the time period ('98-'02) covers the late tech-boom years, too atypical to make much of a conclusion about the effectiveness of any particular economic policy
You can take "endowed by their creator" either literally or as a rhetorical flourish, as in, "You are not God, George III." Surely both points of view were present at the Continental Congress. The phrase has punch either way. The main thrust is that rights are not granted by a government (or king), but exist as a natural consequence of being free-willed beings.
Don't get hung up on theistic phrasing of legal concepts. The US form of goverment is compatible with but not dependent upon a theistic worldview. And that's the way it should be.
Rights are actions that protected or otherwise unhindered by the laws of our society.
Thomas Jefferson would have disagreed. Rights, by the natural rights view that underpins US legal theory, are...well...natural. Or as TJ put it, "endowed by their Creator" and "inalienable". The Constitution is supposed to be merely a detailing specification of the form of those rights.
Being able to play a CD in your car clearly falls under the category of being able to use what you own, a long-recognized common-law right. No license required. The analogy equivocating that to public drinking is spurious.
It is not easy to make a software emulation of hardware that is exact without taking a huge performance hit. The processor, yes, but all that peripheral hardware is where the real emulation work is. Early versions of the UAE Amiga emulator emulated the video scan in the Amiga custom chips pixel-by-pixel, and it was so slow that UAE stood for "Useless Amiga Emulator." They later settled on refeshing the video on the (emulated) horizontal scanline flyback, which broke some exotic plasma-screen demos (which manipulated the palette in the middle of a scanline...try doing that on a PC!) but at least made UAE useful.
Of course some partisan wankers had to write sofware that detected the emulation evironment & refused to run, apparently in the belief that emulation would kill the Amiga hardware market (not admitting that it was already cold & dead).
What you describe can be done in hardware though, consisting of an FPGA + CPU board that plugs into the CPU socket and a communication cable to a separate debuggging PC. They are called In-Circuit Emulators (ICE) and are expensive, but very powerful, tools popular for embedded development.
But how do you know the function value returns on EAX? Unless the docs actually say that, and you believe them, it could be at the address pointed to by EAX, or the top of the stack. Or maybe different places depending on how the function was called. Or maybe some other handler that wraps around the function affects the value or how it is passed, or depends on EAX having the correct value.
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I don't think we actually disagree that much. I'm not claiming that it is never possible to create a hemmed in-property; I simply wanted to give some examples to point out how property rights are limited in scope and thought an example from Anglo-saxon common law would be illustrative. No, not every state applies common law the same way, and, for that matter, Louisiana doesn't use it at all because their system is derived from the French Napoleonic code.
I still sorta disagree with your assessment of common-law right-of-way as being a catch-all concept for various sorts of easements. It really is the other way around: Easments are a rationalization and codification of the common-law right-of-way. The distinction is subtle and, these days, almost purely theoretical. There is now so much statutory law establishing and disclosing documented easements that a court almost never has to resort to common-law priciples to resolve disuputes of this sort. That Forida case is one of the rare exceptions (rare enough that even the trial court tripped up and applied statutory law inappropriately).
I still stand by my original claim, read narrowly, that in the case of a land buyer aggressively hemming in another property, and in the absence of documented easements, most courts under the realm of Anglo-saxon common law would grant some sort of right-of-way based on common-law principles. Though in truth the "absence of documented easments" part is like a unicorn: Everyone knows what it looks like but no one seems to have seen one.
Now, to get back on topic, if we were talking about "intellectual property", I would agree with you (and RMS). There is no common law right to intellectual property (other than an author's right to first publication...you can't steal a draft manuscript and publish it). That term is a catch-all.
Galileo's real crime was not keeping his mouth shut at a time when others used his ideas to undermine the political establishment. Sure it was unfair but really he should have known better.
Martha Stewart could have learned a lesson from him: when in the midst of a crack-down, you shuts yer yap!
Einstien was a jew. You shouldn't need a Google for that.
His family wasn't particularly devout, but during his teenage years he went through a spell of religious devotion. German high schools of the time period sent Christians and Jews to separate schools, so that was his first exposure to practicing Judaism. He seems to have later reverted back to being a not-very-jewish jew.
We could even call it Vindows NT.
Or call it Vindows MS, abbreviated VMS, and hit Windows, MS, and VMS all at the same time!
This is Win/Win
I would have called it a Win/Lin.
...sorry, couldn't resist.
Yes, I read the book (*sheesh*). I was still in school then and wrote a book report. The book report format required character write-ups, and, lakcing anything interesting to say about the characters, I hit the realization that, golly, there weren't any interesting characters in the whole flippin' book. Not to say the book(s) sucked, I found it an interesting mental game of "what if?". Sure the mathematical psychohistory plan was unrealistic, but so is Gandalf's magic; unrealistic is OK if you are consistent with the premise.
I find Asimov a competent Sci-Fi writer; he stays consistent with his premises, is logical in story development, and finds interesting angles to explore but doesn't ramble. Middle of the pack. Inspiring he is not. His best work was his non-fiction, as a popularizer of science.
I don't have much hope for this I, Robot movie. Movies rely much more on characterization than books, so Asimov's stories won't fare the transition well. They will either be weak on screen but true to the book, or standard Hollywood eye-candy that stray far from the book which means they aren't Asimov's stories anymore, so why bother?
And that something, if no documented easment is present, is a common law right-of-way, or a statutory method to create a right of way. Faison v. Smith is an apellate opinion to that effect. They say that a hemmed in property is granted a right-of-way, by virture of (for example) being subdivided from some other, acessible property. (They go on to say that a certain Florida statute was not intended to apply when a common-law right can be found, so that the common-law principles, not the statutory law, was the appropriate way to resolve the dispute. The trial court applied the statutory law.)
It appears that the only way to produce a hemmed-in property is for the government to subdivide and sell that way, or for a change in the shape of the land to cut some property off. Resolving those cases was the purpose of the Florida statute.
A consistent copyright law would be for a fixed period of time, since the fraction of economic value retained by the author dpepends only on the length of copyright, not the time of his death. The life+X terms are a way of pacifying authors who complain when they see the works published in their youth (and for some of them, their pension) fall into public domain. The irony is that life+X favors young authors by giving them longer terms, age discrimination! (Only a tiny amount these days, since with today's super-long terms, copyright holders only forfeit a tiny amount of economic value, no matter what their age.)
Copyrights are actually the one form of property that you can reasonably claim: "Nobody would ever have this if I didn't create it....So, it might actually be reasonable to give infinite ownership to the creator."
Even if you insist on treating copyrights as the moral equivalent of property (which is not the Anglo-saxon model, of course), perpetual copyright is still inconsistent with our notions of conventional property. Limits on the scope of property claims have had limits for centuries.
Ownership of real property (real property==land) gives the right to refuse admittance. But you cannot buy up every piece of property surrounding someone who won't sell, and then hold the isolated property hostage; you have to provide reasonable accomodation for travel. Right of property is limited by right of way (the right to travel over another's property), or we would all be prisoners on our own land. That common law priciple has since refined into things like easments (the right to string power lines over your land, etc.). Others have mentioned mineral rights, which separate from ordinary property rights when a mineral deposit stretches under many separate properties and it is impractical to negotiate with many individual owners.
Even personal (non-land) property is subject to limits. A taxicab, for example, can be commandeered in times of public emergency. Personal effects can be siezed for evidence in a criminal investigation.
In this light, a time limit on copyrights (which represent something like 1% of the value to the creator, when adjusted for present value) are a perfectly reasonable limit on copyright-as-property, a sort of easment, if you will. Whereas perpetual copyright would be unique among property rights in its absoluteness.
That pretty much describes all of Asimov's writing. In fact, his contemporaneous Foundation trilogy is pretty much the embodiment of one-dimensional character-ism. A thousand-year historic plotline with no human creativity making any of that history. The story's premise doesn't permit any character-driven plot; all history is predicted by a mathematical model. You do have an elite group dutifully planning a sort of meta-history, like some sort of enlightened socialist central planners; otherwise there wouldn't be any story.
I wouldn't include the "sucked" comment as applying to all his writing, but I definitely mod him as "overrated."
Living in NYC has it's own advantages. Here, I can go Tango Dancing every day of the week, see the best museums,
NYC's advantages on this front are overbilled. To take the tango example, in Rochester, a city one twenty-fifth the size, tango dancing is available 3 nights a week (though not easy to find for a newcomer). Big-name theatre productions and museum exhibits are available when they are on tour, so you gotta see it when they are here, but, that said, it is easier to get a good seat when you are not bidding against the likes of Ted Turner & Richard Branson.
In fairness, Rochester punches above its weight in this regard. Syracuse, only slightly smaller, disappoints Rochestarians who move there and look for "culture."
Or to say it more accurately, the US has public health care, but not national health care. The programs are funded by a combination of federal, state, & local money. Direct subsidies are means-tested (you gotta be poor to get it). Capital subsidies usually take the form of matching grants, so if a hospital puts up $1 for some mega-expensive machine, and they get $2 from the county, $2 from the state, and $6 from the feds. The idea is to leave at least some trace of market forces so that the bureaucrats follow market demand.
It works fairly well for the rich, middle-class & the poor. The real losers are the "working poor" who aren't destitute enough to get free healthcare, they have (albeit low-paying) jobs so can't wait all day at the walk-in clinics, but they can't afford to buy at market prices.
One way economists simplify this sort of math is, instead of listing all sorts of tax rates, they compute government spending as a fraction of GDP. And if I weren't lazy I would provide a link comparing USA and Canada in this regard.
AbiWord does NOT need GNOME! You can build a plain GTK version...
Ooh neat...gotta try that. Hopefully it will run faster too; it's sorta sluggish as it is now.
That points up the limitations of closed-source software. I did try to work the native Win3.1 install but got stuck without a paddle rather quickly. Not many copies of MS Word 5 at the local Comp*USA.
I pulled out a floppy of Winsock & Netscape 1.1 from my closet. Winsock could connect but it crashed before I could do anything. It is easy to forget: Win 3.1 crashes like Atlanta in a blizzard on anything less than a Pentium; this is a 50 MHz 486. By contrast, Linux never crashed in all my tinkering (not counting floppy read errors during boot-up).
Well, Abiword is billed as lightweight, but it won't load without opening audio libraries. Not saying the sound won't work; the program won't load. I would have rather had the 2 MB of disk space. (My happy little Amiga, built from hardware not much more powerful, won't load libraries until they are needed, a feature that has vastly improved her longevity.) But Abiword is the smallest thing I know of (besides Ted) that can interoperate with MS Word 2000.
The definition of "lightweight" shifts with time to mean, "one-tenth as bloated as the similar MS products." By the standrds of ten-year-old hardware, that's still a lot of bloat.
there are better solutions for internet accessable servers
My biggest beef with Slack is its use of sendmail, not known for being secure. Not everybody needs all of its 569,876 features. Exim & QMail aren't even included, even in Slack 10.If you want to fit a complete linux system into a small (say 500MB) space then slack is probably your best bet.
I was able to put Slack on a laptop with 340 MB hard drive. Installed just enough to get Abiword working, plus Pine & Links and just about nothing else. It barely fits. Abiword and its Gnome library dependencies take almost half of the drive space. A smaller but less capable alternative is Ted, a *.rtf editor. I had to use XFree86 version 3.3.6 (from Slack 7.1) because the newer versions don't support the obsolete video chip set.
The ldd command is your friend when doing a minimal Slack install. It will tell you which *.so files you need to run a particular program. Oh, and rm -r /usr/doc/*, and ln var/log/syslog -> dev/nul; every byte counts!
who's going to force a private carrier to provide reasonable mail service to RFD 2 in Scuffboot, Nebraska
The customers do. There are many places in rural Nevada, etc., that UPS serves despite losing money on every delivery. It is better to lose money on a small number of deliveries than construct a complex fee schedule that insures every delivery is profitable.
The European countries of high growth are all small and most of them are on the edge of Europe. That seems to suggest a migration of economic output from the large "anchor" ecomomies. According to that same page, FR, DE, UK, & IT all score in the bottom third. It doesn't take many factory relocations from England to boost Ireland's small, still-quite-agrarian economy.
And the time period ('98-'02) covers the late tech-boom years, too atypical to make much of a conclusion about the effectiveness of any particular economic policy
You can take "endowed by their creator" either literally or as a rhetorical flourish, as in, "You are not God, George III." Surely both points of view were present at the Continental Congress. The phrase has punch either way. The main thrust is that rights are not granted by a government (or king), but exist as a natural consequence of being free-willed beings.
Don't get hung up on theistic phrasing of legal concepts. The US form of goverment is compatible with but not dependent upon a theistic worldview. And that's the way it should be.
Rights are actions that protected or otherwise unhindered by the laws of our society.
Thomas Jefferson would have disagreed. Rights, by the natural rights view that underpins US legal theory, are...well...natural. Or as TJ put it, "endowed by their Creator" and "inalienable". The Constitution is supposed to be merely a detailing specification of the form of those rights.
Being able to play a CD in your car clearly falls under the category of being able to use what you own, a long-recognized common-law right. No license required. The analogy equivocating that to public drinking is spurious.
Moded fnny? Yu tink my tpos ar funy? I ty relly hrd!
It is not easy to make a software emulation of hardware that is exact without taking a huge performance hit. The processor, yes, but all that peripheral hardware is where the real emulation work is. Early versions of the UAE Amiga emulator emulated the video scan in the Amiga custom chips pixel-by-pixel, and it was so slow that UAE stood for "Useless Amiga Emulator." They later settled on refeshing the video on the (emulated) horizontal scanline flyback, which broke some exotic plasma-screen demos (which manipulated the palette in the middle of a scanline...try doing that on a PC!) but at least made UAE useful.
Of course some partisan wankers had to write sofware that detected the emulation evironment & refused to run, apparently in the belief that emulation would kill the Amiga hardware market (not admitting that it was already cold & dead).
What you describe can be done in hardware though, consisting of an FPGA + CPU board that plugs into the CPU socket and a communication cable to a separate debuggging PC. They are called In-Circuit Emulators (ICE) and are expensive, but very powerful, tools popular for embedded development.
But how do you know the function value returns on EAX? Unless the docs actually say that, and you believe them, it could be at the address pointed to by EAX, or the top of the stack. Or maybe different places depending on how the function was called. Or maybe some other handler that wraps around the function affects the value or how it is passed, or depends on EAX having the correct value.