"Uh Hacker told Uh Panel Uh thing, and now we're all gonna die". I dunno, I might have appreciated some links to sources discussing the events in more detail or filling in some, any of the gaping informational holes.
"Routing errors also blocked Internet access in different parts of the world, often for millions of people, in 2001, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2008 and 2009." ORLY? Certainly you could name these incidents or link somewhere, or do you expect me to google "routing error 2004" and figure out which event you are talking about? Or are you just pulling dates out of your ass? Occam's Razor suggests the latter theory.
"Soon, even Internet users in the U.S. were deprived of videos of singing cats and skateboarding dogs for a few hours."
8I
Well why didn't you let us know how much was at stake from the get go, then? Holy shitballs, something must be done right away!
The simplest explanation I can offer is that, at the quantum level, moving bare information (yes, even abstract ones and zeros) from one location to another to perform calculations runs into a bottleneck due to the Heisenberg uncertainty principal. The simple act of measuring (for example, reading a bit out of RAM or out of a CPU register) gets more and more disruptive to increasingly small systems.
Quantum computing is not magic, but it does differ from the classical approach in that you perform a lot of your calculating horsepower inside of closed systems wherein, afterwards, reading the result destroys the system — much like smashing a piggy-bank. You introduce your input data into a system at a certain quantum ground state, and as each input is introduced the system transforms from one wave-function to another, performing your calculation in a manner that might even be considered "analog", as quantization only occurs at the time of measurement. Once all the input is introduced, you then measure the system to obtain your output. This measurement destroys the system, and only provides an "answer", none of the interim calculations survive.
The seeming magic is in the fact that the interim calculations are carried out in a system entirely isolated from outside causality. We are accustomed to measuring the effectiveness of a system component such as an integrated circuit by reading from and writing to it, and combining it's efforts in realtime with efforts from all across the machine in question. We are accustomed to thinking of information as entirely abstract, and that is a foundation of classical computing. In quantum computing, engineers understand that information is instead bulky, and at smaller scales you reach diminishing returns moving it across your machine. Performing calculations in localized, potentially mind-numbingly tiny closed systems neutralizes this drawback to moving information (in a word, causality) and allows otherwise incalculable gains in the speed and parallelization of information processing.
Let me try this from a different angle. If you are comfortable with simple physics concepts such as not being able to communicate faster than the speed of light, then you can easily grok the information processing bottleneck that fairly homogeneous physical principal imposes upon computing. For example, if you wired a CPU in New York to a stick of RAM in China, then it's just not possible to surpass seek times of 38 milliseconds. In practical terms you'd never be close, routing and switching and non-geodesic data paths would stymie your efforts so you might optimize those, but the bare fact of the bad design decision in placing your components murders your ultimate capability. If you became used to that level of computing limitation, you would probably even design your algorithms to make the best of that situation and rely as little upon seek time as possible.
Then, when a friend walks up to you using a relatively poorly constructed laptop whose CPU is located inches from the RAM, running an OS chock full of algorithms that don't fear seek time, then it's processing power and capabilities would simply knock you out of your chair by comparison. That cheap laptop is obviously not magic, but you are ham-strung by the expectations your New York / China computer has left you with.
Classical vs. Quantum computing is very much like that. We are, all of us, hamstrung by the implicit computational limitations of relative causality. We want to fetch data from the RAM and take it to the CPU to be processed. We want to move data from this portion of the CPU to that portion for more processing. The bottleneck we face is very related to the "speed of light" bottleneck, but it's not strictly the same. It is the bottleneck of causality itself: The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principal. Information IS causality. Sending a message, be it by yelling across the house or making an example out of a fired employee or pumping electrons down copper wire always involves forcing one thing to cause th
I was afraid you might have felt that way. Among the greater challenges to reform or political change is when folk have a hard time agreeing on what destination to approach while changing, and when in-fighting undermines solidarity. As an abolitionist I end up in a fair number of arguments against the 7-14'ers, but it sure would be nice if we could somehow pool our efforts so as not to Life-Of-Brian each other.
Among 7-14'ers, you sound pretty open minded so I'm happy to let you know my position a little better.
While I think it's possible that circumstances could result in it being impossible for there to be any possible copyright law that is better than no copyright law at all, in terms of the benefit to the public, which is the only valid metric, I don't think that we're currently in that situation. I'm happy to listen to arguments otherwise, though.
I thank you for being able to comprehend such a possibility, and formally submit that we are there now.
There have been few times in history when the effects of Copyright law could really be compared empirically with the creative output of areas with zero copyright. One such time is the late 1700s, when Brittian had copyright and the rest of the world did not. Thomas Jefferson wrote his opinion on the subject, while the ink on the constitution was still dry, and clarified that he detected no less or greater creative output from countries lacking copyright law than from Great Brittian. It appears as though we chose to side with copyright from the beginning merely because it was a novel idea, and it might lead to greater creativity. I submit that whatever great creativity we have output cannot be reliably credited to the presence of Copyright.
Little data can be gathered beyond that point, as the Berne convention and others has forced the entire globe to honor our fragile IP system or risk rendering it meaningless. Since certain entities such as The Pirate Bay have had success flouting the Berne Convention, the balloon has effectively been punctured. Right now, today, any person on the internet can obtain high fidelity digital copies of every popular, copyright protected work for free, instantly, and conveniently. This may not be legal, but legal consequences are less likely to befall you than when you drive 5mph over the speed limit so that is of little consequence.
In spite of the fact that the availability and knowledge of Piracy has met a saturation point, the profits of multi-million dollar films remains secure. People will continue to pay for media they can get for free, so long as the price is fair to provide convenience and guaranteed quality with a little extra to express their patronage. So long as they are not forced into uncomfortable formats or hassling DRM.
Example. We discussed Avatar before, right? My wife wanted to watch it. I did not simply tell her it could be downloaded for free, she knows I'm a pirate and watches TV shows and many movies I download, even asks me to get things for her. I did not simply tell her I can download it, I told her I had already downloaded it. I pointed to the media center and told her she was two clicks away from watching it, and she still bought the DVD while she was out.
She's not a videophile, we've got a miserable video pipeline anyway (composite video through an analogue switch to a 27" 4:3 CRT) she even hates widescreen letterboxing because everything is made too small. No, she was just out and had to wonder if the copy I downloaded had hardsubs baked in it, so she conveniently grabbed the copy at Wal-Mart.
Doesn't bother me any. In the end, writing, acting, and directing are important. The rest of it is nice, but not essential.
I couldn't agree more (mod parent up xP), I've been wanting to say precisely this in other copyright related slashdot threads but JS bugs kept gagging me.
I am beginning to think I'm only one in 10% of the population not dazzled by Avatar's popcorn factor. And the only one who willfully hasn't seen it yet. (Yeah, can you imagine? I've downloaded it and everything, but can't be arsed to spend the block of time required to watch it!) I'm not that enthused by another rehash of Pocahontas or The Smurfs. 8I
I've watched 2 movies in "3d" in the theaters. I barely even go to the theaters anymore because the price is so high to begin with, why would I want to pay 50% more for eyestrain and a headache? Is the "future of entertainment" really that objects flying at your head gimmick that was done to death in the 50's with Anaglyph? Does anyone really believe this is the most important improvement to home entertainment since color television? How can a generation of people who couldn't figure out Magic Eye decouple their monocular focus from their binocular so easily without an aneurysm?
And the funny thing is, I wouldn't give a damn if the rest of the world wanted to waste their money on bullshit, except that I'll be dragged into court should I chose to download ineffable information just to keep track of what everyone else is talking about, or if I produce a video of my own that coincidentally contains four bars from some 1963 crooner off of the ice cream truck passing outside.
Copyright has absolutely nothing to do with compensation. I'd like one copyright holder to come forward and tell me when they've ever had to sue someone, and then perhaps illustrate how the court costs actually shielded their bottom line without dipping into the unprovable "lost sales" schtick. "Oh, anyone could have gotten my material for free had I not acted quickly!" Of course, anyone CAN get your material for free right now, so that argument is not admissible.
No. Copyright is only used in today's society — and only by very wealthy interests with the resources to invoke it indiscriminately — for the sole purpose of laying land rights over every permutation of thoughts individuals are allowed to think so that they can charge a toll. Our natural evolution as a society is driving us to communicate in memes. Name dropping, movie quoting, television show referencing, and textbook citing have become the new parable. Today's copyright industry exists solely to force us to pay to participate in this new language.
So I back kangarooski in saying, bring on the copyright free world where "no content will ever be created again". Seriously, I'm calling your bluff. Because if none of y'all will create anything without charging per view, then I will and I don't mind being the only one at the mic. There is value in creating beyond tithing your audience. Anyone who doesn't see that can go without and leave more room for people with vision.
I can't find a simple quote, so I'll sum up. You're saying "I've noticed slashdotters like Saas as a possible copyright sidestep for Software, but seem to enjoy having offline, bit-level (or nysquist-sampling-level) control over their music. Is this a double standard?"
Firstly, thank you for the astute observation. I don't believe this is a double standard, however. The mechanics of playing a game or using software vs listening to music are very different. In order to use software you must be at a computer, in order to play a game you must be at a game console, and in all of these scenarios we normally also want internet access. We appreciate the realtime connectedness (both social and infrastructural) online infrastructure allows us in virtually all software/game settings.
For example, rare is the time you want to work on a document or spreadsheet that you won't show it to someone when you are finished, so Google Docs (one example) beats Word/XL because the person (or more tellingly, the people) you will show it to can view it while you are working on it, make changes, version control is baked in for you, the social element is integral to that application. MMorpg players must be online, both to collaborate with other players and to interact with a realtime, globally persistent environment. Even puzzle gamers enjoy competing against one another, posting high scores, easy access to forums to get them unstuck, etc.
This is a generalization. I don't want all my software in the cloud, there are many swiss army knives (for example) I just want on my machine. I am a network engineer, so there are times I want bit-level control over a certain toolkit of software: where by definition I have no access to the internet. The generalization does cover a vast majority of todays profit centers in software however.
Finally, at issue with software is that the customer is not really interested in the bits, but in the service provided. One drawback to owning the bits is the administrative hassles of bit-rot: your software needs security updates, feature additions to remain competitive, UI improvements, etc over time. All things equal, the less you as a consumer have to do stay on this treadmill the better.
The contrast to music is that music (again, generalization..) represents a static piece of artwork. I want to hear that one song. I do not need to socialize to hear it, I do not need access to anything that changes in realtime, there is no bitrot or administrative updates required, a static string of bits will continue representing that song (assuming I either always know how to decode the bits, or else assuming I can transcode them over time) for perpetuity. I am not limited to experiencing this media on equipment where I already want interent connectivity, either. Sometimes I want to hear it in my car. Sometimes to lul me to sleep. Sometimes as I'm jogging, and I don't want the song interrupted by "dead zones". For music, it is virtually always advantageous to have the bits, and always relatively disadvantageous to tether to the net.
The important illumination here is that these are two invaluable data points in understanding consumer expectations. They are not at odds with one another, and both serve to demonstrate the disruptive role of copyright in a consumer's relationship with creative works. In short, it is sane to sell me software as a service. That provides me value which cannot easily be duplicated. It is sane to offer bits for sale, and people will still buy them without DRM. It is not sane to pitch a fit that those bits will then be freely shared, and so try to ruin the experience for your customers. After all, I am not really paying you for the bits, am I? I am paying for you to conveniently provide me with the media I want. I am buying a satisfaction guarantee. I am funding your continued efforts. I am seriously not going to do that if you treat me like a criminal.
@b4dc0d3r
no one has found an acceptable method of selling a product with z
What do you expect will become of most good, but R&D-intensive, ideas if we accept your proposal?
They'll find a different business model instead of relying upon state granted monopolies on distribution.
Maybe, just maybe, if it takes 3 years of marketing to convince me that I can't live my life without your widget, it's because I can darn tootin' live my life without your widget. Lestwise, how in hell did I survive those 3 years?
The 2-3 years of R&D doesn't have to be made public, so nobody can really copy what you are doing until you have a product to examine. And anyone who pitches a fuss about industry devolving into dangerous "trade guilds" without patents should really send Steve Jobs that memo after the Gizmodo/Iphone debacle.
Was he super good at spatial relationships and packing because he was a Tetris champ? Or was he a Tetris champ because he was a savant at spatial relationships and packing?
I think in Last Starfighter that distinction wasn't relevant. Be it nature or nurture, the high score certifies that that dude sure splows him up some aliens.
So what you are saying is because software is so easy to copy duplicate and distribute, no one values their work so it's not really worth anything..
I don't know if he is saying that or not. But nobody is paying you to read your post. I didn't even have to pay to replicate the entirety of your post by quoting it in this post.
So which is it, is your argument flawed, or "not really worth anything"? I vote C) All of the above.:3
Srsly though, everyone who wants to "sell unused IP space" needs to take a CCNA course and lurn up on some routing facts.
IPv4 space is divided into large blocks,/22 or larger (aka 1024 address blocks) which are listed in the Global Routing Table (several hundreds of megabytes long) and then distributed to EVERY BORDER GATEWAY on the planet, including mine.
Getting traffic routed to one IP means knowing which very large block it is in, and sending the traffic down the right path to that ISP.
Thus, you cannot just sell off small blocks of IP addresses without the Global Routing Table balooning hundreds or thousands of times, which means everyone would have to upgrade routers, which would (shock and surprise) all be IPv6 compliant at that point anyway.
What it does not give this guy is the right to say to that girl "hey we can die together it's alright" when he had no plans whatsoever to go through with it.
So "meet me in heaven" is a bribe today, is it? He isn't saying "trust me with your money" or "trust me with your life", he's saying "I promise if you kill yourself then I will too". How does it make a difference to the other person that he doesn't go through with it, once they're already dead? Will they get the seventh circuit court of the afterlife to press charges?
Sounds like virtually every religion to me. "Hey, waste all your time and money and reputation on our doctrine until you die, and you will be storing up fabulous prizes in heaven." 8I
Counterexample: try engaging in witty reparte with an arbitrarily chosen coder, and then repeat experiment with an arbitrarily chosen jock. Pro tip: you're subject should not get points for being "sharp" just because the wedgie you receive leads to stabbing pains.
LanMan04, unfortunately, if there is one thing I have learned from studying how/why/when people cling to certain religions or other superstitious beliefs, it is that rational analysis consistently cannot reach them. They have sealed themselves into an emotive faith, and even attacking the fidelity of their faith becomes meaningless. Finding what they claim to love (their texts, their church, their families) and then clearly demonstrating to them how their clinging to their personal superstitions actually fly in the face of their texts, the advice of their church and the welfare of their families nets zero impact because the people in question blissfully close their minds and tune out your demonstrations.
I think Carl Sagan put it best in his Cosmos series (ep 3, "Harmony of the Worlds", ~28:47) when he said "Superstition is a natural refuge for people who are powerless". Once people feel sufficiently disconnected from the job of empirical information gathering, insulated from the realities around them, they turn inwards and perceive what is in their hearts as the ultimate arbiter of truth. Whence comes "Truthiness".
So religious proponents care not for either facts in the observable universe, or even internal consistency. They would be content to preach peace at the precise same moment as they jab out their parents' eyes with a #2 pencil. It doesn't even rate as "doublethink" or "cognitive dissonance" as it requires neither effort nor discomfort to be inconsistent when one honestly lacks the presence of mind required to compare one's claims with one's behavior.
This allows Muslims to threaten cartoonists with the wrathful violence of pacifists. This allows Palins to claim that Christianity is the national religion of a country founded on the principal of the separation of church and state. This allows "Christians" to have a zeal of God, but not according to knowledge (Romans 10:2) and to call themselves Christians, even fight bloody wars over the matter, without so much as knowing what the word "Christ" refers to. They might say, "Oh, that's Jesus!" and many will even think that's his surname. None have the vaguest clue what a "Christ" or "Mesiah" is, or why Jesus and his followers through the centuries claim that title applies to him.
Instead, your average Christian simply thinks of their faith as "being patient and nice to people" and following certain traditions. They think that "Jesus" and "God" and in some cases Mary, saints, angels and cherubs are vague deities that love and protect them unconditionally. Church is just this place they can go to socialize with people as insecure and superstitious as they are. They find The Bible to be no more required reading than a computer's user manual, and simply bathe themselves (selectively) in the words of whatever preacher performs at their church to remain in step with the shared, agreed upon superstitions. Most entertaining of all, their favorite sport is to invent moral high horses against which to judge one another (in direct contradiction to Matthew 7:1-5)
No, we cannot hope to sway the fickle desires of such mislabeled neo-pagans with calls to logic or fidelity. I think they'll need to be rendered obscolete and neutralized via some other social or ecomomic process instead.:(
Joel (whom you link too) would rather start CS folk off at the bare metal.:3
This is why my view of teaching is that first year CS students need to start at the basics, using C and building their way up from the CPU. I am actually physically disgusted that so many computer science programs think that Java is a good introductory language, because it's "easy" and you don't get confused with all that boring string/malloc stuff but you can learn cool OOP stuff which will make your big programs ever so modular. This is a pedagogical disaster waiting to happen. Generations of graduates are descending on us and creating Shlemiel The Painter algorithms right and left and they don't even realize it, since they fundamentally have no idea that strings are, at a very deep level, difficult, even if you can't quite see that in your perl script. If you want to teach somebody something well, you have to start at the very lowest level. It's like Karate Kid. Wax On, Wax Off. Wax On, Wax Off. Do that for three weeks. Then Knocking The Other Kid's Head off is easy.
In short, if you're going to hack the code, AND if you're going to lurk for upwards of a decade in order to be recognized by the community as sentient so that you can re-contribute your changes, then you will prefer today's Open Source ecosystem.
If you are on a tight budget and you are willing to bend your processes like taffy around infrastructure that hackers thought would be a good idea years ago and then forgot to cook it all the way through, or support as the code began to age, then you'll eke by on Open Source. If you lack respect for IP, you might also mix in some pirated copies of closed source software.
If you fear IP, and/or have the money to sink into software then you are generally going to buy either closed source, or enterprise licensed software. Because your money acts like a class equalizer, you don't have to bear the brunt of financing a feature that millions of people (who aren't hackers) already want. Instead, authors who want your money are actively trying to guess what you would like in order to sell to you and millions who share your (common, probably easy to divine) preferences.
More Open Source communities really need to grow a bit of sophistication and learn to reward hackers for meeting aggregate needs in order to end the cycle of circle-jerk that's asphyxiating the industry. There will never be a "Year of the Linux Desktop" until the needs of common Desktop users are actually satisfied by a Linux distribution.
I've seen "code bounties" (normally only offered by medium to large businesses) and I've seen bug/feature trackers with voting mechanisms (where the developers pan straightforward fixes years old with more votes than all other entries combined), but I haven't yet seen these concepts combined: where users could donate money into separate code bounty pots to clarify their aggregate interest in fixing specific non-critical bugs or implementing specific features. I think that sort of approach might make a big difference. Let the patcher and the community's governing body share the bounty by some split, to encourage actually accepting patches in favor of thumb-sitting. In case the feature becomes obsolesced by changes elsewhere, perhaps an Escrowed Assurance Contract would be the way to go?
Then you don't have to personally bribe some entrenched developer by paying him $100/hr to write every line of code, test, and sublet-bribe every other impacted task leader just to see (for example) GIMP get some feature everyone already wants and every other graphics package has had since the dawn of time. Non-RGB colorspaces, perhaps? Honest, I used these in Photoshop v2.5 in 1992, and Jasc Paintshop Pro v4 in 1995. Wouldn't it be great if Linux X11 (I've tried Redhat, Debian and Ubuntu over the past decade) allowed you to specify monitor sizes without hacking text files? Parallel service bootstrapping? You know, I've always wanted a tagged filesystem. I think I could rally support for one easier than I could just raise the needed funds by hand.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know about you, but until Africa and Middle East get their asses online, I don't have a problem going on quests without them.
And that's what you'll get, lad. Our last, best hope for peace.
Now if you'll excuse me, it's going to take me a cartographer to figure out what the original topic was supposed to be. 8I
"exploding tube of toothpaste" ... "a pile of chunky red salsa"
You are just having way the hell too much fun describing this shit, aren't you? 8I
retconned? Data has an ultimate linear storage capacity of 800 quadrillion bits. That's the only reference I can remember. xD
Well this artical is pure BS
"Uh Hacker told Uh Panel Uh thing, and now we're all gonna die". I dunno, I might have appreciated some links to sources discussing the events in more detail or filling in some, any of the gaping informational holes.
"Routing errors also blocked Internet access in different parts of the world, often for millions of people, in 2001, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2008 and 2009." ORLY? Certainly you could name these incidents or link somewhere, or do you expect me to google "routing error 2004" and figure out which event you are talking about? Or are you just pulling dates out of your ass? Occam's Razor suggests the latter theory.
"Soon, even Internet users in the U.S. were deprived of videos of singing cats and skateboarding dogs for a few hours."
8I
Well why didn't you let us know how much was at stake from the get go, then? Holy shitballs, something must be done right away!
The simplest explanation I can offer is that, at the quantum level, moving bare information (yes, even abstract ones and zeros) from one location to another to perform calculations runs into a bottleneck due to the Heisenberg uncertainty principal. The simple act of measuring (for example, reading a bit out of RAM or out of a CPU register) gets more and more disruptive to increasingly small systems.
Quantum computing is not magic, but it does differ from the classical approach in that you perform a lot of your calculating horsepower inside of closed systems wherein, afterwards, reading the result destroys the system — much like smashing a piggy-bank. You introduce your input data into a system at a certain quantum ground state, and as each input is introduced the system transforms from one wave-function to another, performing your calculation in a manner that might even be considered "analog", as quantization only occurs at the time of measurement. Once all the input is introduced, you then measure the system to obtain your output. This measurement destroys the system, and only provides an "answer", none of the interim calculations survive.
The seeming magic is in the fact that the interim calculations are carried out in a system entirely isolated from outside causality. We are accustomed to measuring the effectiveness of a system component such as an integrated circuit by reading from and writing to it, and combining it's efforts in realtime with efforts from all across the machine in question. We are accustomed to thinking of information as entirely abstract, and that is a foundation of classical computing. In quantum computing, engineers understand that information is instead bulky, and at smaller scales you reach diminishing returns moving it across your machine. Performing calculations in localized, potentially mind-numbingly tiny closed systems neutralizes this drawback to moving information (in a word, causality) and allows otherwise incalculable gains in the speed and parallelization of information processing.
Let me try this from a different angle. If you are comfortable with simple physics concepts such as not being able to communicate faster than the speed of light, then you can easily grok the information processing bottleneck that fairly homogeneous physical principal imposes upon computing. For example, if you wired a CPU in New York to a stick of RAM in China, then it's just not possible to surpass seek times of 38 milliseconds. In practical terms you'd never be close, routing and switching and non-geodesic data paths would stymie your efforts so you might optimize those, but the bare fact of the bad design decision in placing your components murders your ultimate capability. If you became used to that level of computing limitation, you would probably even design your algorithms to make the best of that situation and rely as little upon seek time as possible.
Then, when a friend walks up to you using a relatively poorly constructed laptop whose CPU is located inches from the RAM, running an OS chock full of algorithms that don't fear seek time, then it's processing power and capabilities would simply knock you out of your chair by comparison. That cheap laptop is obviously not magic, but you are ham-strung by the expectations your New York / China computer has left you with.
Classical vs. Quantum computing is very much like that. We are, all of us, hamstrung by the implicit computational limitations of relative causality. We want to fetch data from the RAM and take it to the CPU to be processed. We want to move data from this portion of the CPU to that portion for more processing. The bottleneck we face is very related to the "speed of light" bottleneck, but it's not strictly the same. It is the bottleneck of causality itself: The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principal. Information IS causality. Sending a message, be it by yelling across the house or making an example out of a fired employee or pumping electrons down copper wire always involves forcing one thing to cause th
Well, you may have gone a little far.
I was afraid you might have felt that way. Among the greater challenges to reform or political change is when folk have a hard time agreeing on what destination to approach while changing, and when in-fighting undermines solidarity. As an abolitionist I end up in a fair number of arguments against the 7-14'ers, but it sure would be nice if we could somehow pool our efforts so as not to Life-Of-Brian each other.
Among 7-14'ers, you sound pretty open minded so I'm happy to let you know my position a little better.
While I think it's possible that circumstances could result in it being impossible for there to be any possible copyright law that is better than no copyright law at all, in terms of the benefit to the public, which is the only valid metric, I don't think that we're currently in that situation. I'm happy to listen to arguments otherwise, though.
I thank you for being able to comprehend such a possibility, and formally submit that we are there now.
There have been few times in history when the effects of Copyright law could really be compared empirically with the creative output of areas with zero copyright. One such time is the late 1700s, when Brittian had copyright and the rest of the world did not. Thomas Jefferson wrote his opinion on the subject, while the ink on the constitution was still dry, and clarified that he detected no less or greater creative output from countries lacking copyright law than from Great Brittian. It appears as though we chose to side with copyright from the beginning merely because it was a novel idea, and it might lead to greater creativity. I submit that whatever great creativity we have output cannot be reliably credited to the presence of Copyright.
Little data can be gathered beyond that point, as the Berne convention and others has forced the entire globe to honor our fragile IP system or risk rendering it meaningless. Since certain entities such as The Pirate Bay have had success flouting the Berne Convention, the balloon has effectively been punctured. Right now, today, any person on the internet can obtain high fidelity digital copies of every popular, copyright protected work for free, instantly, and conveniently. This may not be legal, but legal consequences are less likely to befall you than when you drive 5mph over the speed limit so that is of little consequence.
In spite of the fact that the availability and knowledge of Piracy has met a saturation point, the profits of multi-million dollar films remains secure. People will continue to pay for media they can get for free, so long as the price is fair to provide convenience and guaranteed quality with a little extra to express their patronage. So long as they are not forced into uncomfortable formats or hassling DRM.
Example. We discussed Avatar before, right? My wife wanted to watch it. I did not simply tell her it could be downloaded for free, she knows I'm a pirate and watches TV shows and many movies I download, even asks me to get things for her. I did not simply tell her I can download it, I told her I had already downloaded it. I pointed to the media center and told her she was two clicks away from watching it, and she still bought the DVD while she was out.
She's not a videophile, we've got a miserable video pipeline anyway (composite video through an analogue switch to a 27" 4:3 CRT) she even hates widescreen letterboxing because everything is made too small. No, she was just out and had to wonder if the copy I downloaded had hardsubs baked in it, so she conveniently grabbed the copy at Wal-Mart.
Then of course she got it home and it wouldn't play at all.
It is healthier for producers to accept that customers want media in whatever format is convenient, and after th
Doesn't bother me any. In the end, writing, acting, and directing are important. The rest of it is nice, but not essential.
I couldn't agree more (mod parent up xP), I've been wanting to say precisely this in other copyright related slashdot threads but JS bugs kept gagging me.
I am beginning to think I'm only one in 10% of the population not dazzled by Avatar's popcorn factor. And the only one who willfully hasn't seen it yet. (Yeah, can you imagine? I've downloaded it and everything, but can't be arsed to spend the block of time required to watch it!) I'm not that enthused by another rehash of Pocahontas or The Smurfs. 8I
I've watched 2 movies in "3d" in the theaters. I barely even go to the theaters anymore because the price is so high to begin with, why would I want to pay 50% more for eyestrain and a headache? Is the "future of entertainment" really that objects flying at your head gimmick that was done to death in the 50's with Anaglyph? Does anyone really believe this is the most important improvement to home entertainment since color television? How can a generation of people who couldn't figure out Magic Eye decouple their monocular focus from their binocular so easily without an aneurysm?
And the funny thing is, I wouldn't give a damn if the rest of the world wanted to waste their money on bullshit, except that I'll be dragged into court should I chose to download ineffable information just to keep track of what everyone else is talking about, or if I produce a video of my own that coincidentally contains four bars from some 1963 crooner off of the ice cream truck passing outside.
Copyright has absolutely nothing to do with compensation. I'd like one copyright holder to come forward and tell me when they've ever had to sue someone, and then perhaps illustrate how the court costs actually shielded their bottom line without dipping into the unprovable "lost sales" schtick. "Oh, anyone could have gotten my material for free had I not acted quickly!" Of course, anyone CAN get your material for free right now, so that argument is not admissible.
No. Copyright is only used in today's society — and only by very wealthy interests with the resources to invoke it indiscriminately — for the sole purpose of laying land rights over every permutation of thoughts individuals are allowed to think so that they can charge a toll. Our natural evolution as a society is driving us to communicate in memes. Name dropping, movie quoting, television show referencing, and textbook citing have become the new parable. Today's copyright industry exists solely to force us to pay to participate in this new language.
So I back kangarooski in saying, bring on the copyright free world where "no content will ever be created again". Seriously, I'm calling your bluff. Because if none of y'all will create anything without charging per view, then I will and I don't mind being the only one at the mic. There is value in creating beyond tithing your audience. Anyone who doesn't see that can go without and leave more room for people with vision.
I can't find a simple quote, so I'll sum up. You're saying "I've noticed slashdotters like Saas as a possible copyright sidestep for Software, but seem to enjoy having offline, bit-level (or nysquist-sampling-level) control over their music. Is this a double standard?"
Firstly, thank you for the astute observation. I don't believe this is a double standard, however. The mechanics of playing a game or using software vs listening to music are very different. In order to use software you must be at a computer, in order to play a game you must be at a game console, and in all of these scenarios we normally also want internet access. We appreciate the realtime connectedness (both social and infrastructural) online infrastructure allows us in virtually all software/game settings.
For example, rare is the time you want to work on a document or spreadsheet that you won't show it to someone when you are finished, so Google Docs (one example) beats Word/XL because the person (or more tellingly, the people) you will show it to can view it while you are working on it, make changes, version control is baked in for you, the social element is integral to that application. MMorpg players must be online, both to collaborate with other players and to interact with a realtime, globally persistent environment. Even puzzle gamers enjoy competing against one another, posting high scores, easy access to forums to get them unstuck, etc.
This is a generalization. I don't want all my software in the cloud, there are many swiss army knives (for example) I just want on my machine. I am a network engineer, so there are times I want bit-level control over a certain toolkit of software: where by definition I have no access to the internet. The generalization does cover a vast majority of todays profit centers in software however.
Finally, at issue with software is that the customer is not really interested in the bits, but in the service provided. One drawback to owning the bits is the administrative hassles of bit-rot: your software needs security updates, feature additions to remain competitive, UI improvements, etc over time. All things equal, the less you as a consumer have to do stay on this treadmill the better.
The contrast to music is that music (again, generalization..) represents a static piece of artwork. I want to hear that one song. I do not need to socialize to hear it, I do not need access to anything that changes in realtime, there is no bitrot or administrative updates required, a static string of bits will continue representing that song (assuming I either always know how to decode the bits, or else assuming I can transcode them over time) for perpetuity. I am not limited to experiencing this media on equipment where I already want interent connectivity, either. Sometimes I want to hear it in my car. Sometimes to lul me to sleep. Sometimes as I'm jogging, and I don't want the song interrupted by "dead zones". For music, it is virtually always advantageous to have the bits, and always relatively disadvantageous to tether to the net.
The important illumination here is that these are two invaluable data points in understanding consumer expectations. They are not at odds with one another, and both serve to demonstrate the disruptive role of copyright in a consumer's relationship with creative works. In short, it is sane to sell me software as a service. That provides me value which cannot easily be duplicated. It is sane to offer bits for sale, and people will still buy them without DRM. It is not sane to pitch a fit that those bits will then be freely shared, and so try to ruin the experience for your customers. After all, I am not really paying you for the bits, am I? I am paying for you to conveniently provide me with the media I want. I am buying a satisfaction guarantee. I am funding your continued efforts. I am seriously not going to do that if you treat me like a criminal.
@b4dc0d3r
no one has found an acceptable method of selling a product with z
(with guns and horrendous megaviolence preferably)
Why stop at Megaviolence these days when you have Giga, Tera, and even Petaviolence at your disposal. :D
Also, that's why you simply don't mess with the animal activists. They will go all spatio-temporal distortion on your ass. 8I
I'm sorry, had speakers muted. Care to repeat?
I don't think anyone uses non-integer bases to write down fractions in positional notation.
Oh, I've seen it done. It's a marvelous, and frightening world out there, friend! :D
Speaking of which, soon it will be my 1120.0012002.. th birthday! And, bonus points to whoever can decode that back out of base e ;3
What do you expect will become of most good, but R&D-intensive, ideas if we accept your proposal?
They'll find a different business model instead of relying upon state granted monopolies on distribution.
Maybe, just maybe, if it takes 3 years of marketing to convince me that I can't live my life without your widget, it's because I can darn tootin' live my life without your widget. Lestwise, how in hell did I survive those 3 years?
The 2-3 years of R&D doesn't have to be made public, so nobody can really copy what you are doing until you have a product to examine. And anyone who pitches a fuss about industry devolving into dangerous "trade guilds" without patents should really send Steve Jobs that memo after the Gizmodo/Iphone debacle.
In short, get off my lawn.
Was he super good at spatial relationships and packing because he was a Tetris champ? Or was he a Tetris champ because he was a savant at spatial relationships and packing?
I think in Last Starfighter that distinction wasn't relevant. Be it nature or nurture, the high score certifies that that dude sure splows him up some aliens.
So what you are saying is because software is so easy to copy duplicate and distribute, no one values their work so it's not really worth anything..
I don't know if he is saying that or not. But nobody is paying you to read your post. I didn't even have to pay to replicate the entirety of your post by quoting it in this post.
So which is it, is your argument flawed, or "not really worth anything"? I vote C) All of the above. :3
James Rolph aka Angry Video Game Nerd made an ameture video lampooning the guy Mario was named after. :)
"Control the Spice, Control the World"
Srsly though, everyone who wants to "sell unused IP space" needs to take a CCNA course and lurn up on some routing facts.
IPv4 space is divided into large blocks, /22 or larger (aka 1024 address blocks) which are listed in the Global Routing Table (several hundreds of megabytes long) and then distributed to EVERY BORDER GATEWAY on the planet, including mine.
Getting traffic routed to one IP means knowing which very large block it is in, and sending the traffic down the right path to that ISP.
Thus, you cannot just sell off small blocks of IP addresses without the Global Routing Table balooning hundreds or thousands of times, which means everyone would have to upgrade routers, which would (shock and surprise) all be IPv6 compliant at that point anyway.
Media loves sensationalist headlines like this. "ZOMFG, The Interwebs killed 5 more people today. It's horrible!"
Srsly folks, just don't f$%^ing feed the trolls. 8I
What it does not give this guy is the right to say to that girl "hey we can die together it's alright" when he had no plans whatsoever to go through with it.
So "meet me in heaven" is a bribe today, is it? He isn't saying "trust me with your money" or "trust me with your life", he's saying "I promise if you kill yourself then I will too". How does it make a difference to the other person that he doesn't go through with it, once they're already dead? Will they get the seventh circuit court of the afterlife to press charges?
Sounds like virtually every religion to me. "Hey, waste all your time and money and reputation on our doctrine until you die, and you will be storing up fabulous prizes in heaven." 8I
Counterexample: try engaging in witty reparte with an arbitrarily chosen coder, and then repeat experiment with an arbitrarily chosen jock. Pro tip: you're subject should not get points for being "sharp" just because the wedgie you receive leads to stabbing pains.
Someone send Jobs to Avenue Q, stat! :P
LanMan04, unfortunately, if there is one thing I have learned from studying how/why/when people cling to certain religions or other superstitious beliefs, it is that rational analysis consistently cannot reach them. They have sealed themselves into an emotive faith, and even attacking the fidelity of their faith becomes meaningless. Finding what they claim to love (their texts, their church, their families) and then clearly demonstrating to them how their clinging to their personal superstitions actually fly in the face of their texts, the advice of their church and the welfare of their families nets zero impact because the people in question blissfully close their minds and tune out your demonstrations.
I think Carl Sagan put it best in his Cosmos series (ep 3, "Harmony of the Worlds", ~28:47) when he said "Superstition is a natural refuge for people who are powerless". Once people feel sufficiently disconnected from the job of empirical information gathering, insulated from the realities around them, they turn inwards and perceive what is in their hearts as the ultimate arbiter of truth. Whence comes "Truthiness".
So religious proponents care not for either facts in the observable universe, or even internal consistency. They would be content to preach peace at the precise same moment as they jab out their parents' eyes with a #2 pencil. It doesn't even rate as "doublethink" or "cognitive dissonance" as it requires neither effort nor discomfort to be inconsistent when one honestly lacks the presence of mind required to compare one's claims with one's behavior.
This allows Muslims to threaten cartoonists with the wrathful violence of pacifists. This allows Palins to claim that Christianity is the national religion of a country founded on the principal of the separation of church and state. This allows "Christians" to have a zeal of God, but not according to knowledge (Romans 10:2) and to call themselves Christians, even fight bloody wars over the matter, without so much as knowing what the word "Christ" refers to. They might say, "Oh, that's Jesus!" and many will even think that's his surname. None have the vaguest clue what a "Christ" or "Mesiah" is, or why Jesus and his followers through the centuries claim that title applies to him.
Instead, your average Christian simply thinks of their faith as "being patient and nice to people" and following certain traditions. They think that "Jesus" and "God" and in some cases Mary, saints, angels and cherubs are vague deities that love and protect them unconditionally. Church is just this place they can go to socialize with people as insecure and superstitious as they are. They find The Bible to be no more required reading than a computer's user manual, and simply bathe themselves (selectively) in the words of whatever preacher performs at their church to remain in step with the shared, agreed upon superstitions. Most entertaining of all, their favorite sport is to invent moral high horses against which to judge one another (in direct contradiction to Matthew 7:1-5)
No, we cannot hope to sway the fickle desires of such mislabeled neo-pagans with calls to logic or fidelity. I think they'll need to be rendered obscolete and neutralized via some other social or ecomomic process instead. :(
Joel (whom you link too) would rather start CS folk off at the bare metal. :3
This is why my view of teaching is that first year CS students need to start at the basics, using C and building their way up from the CPU. I am actually physically disgusted that so many computer science programs think that Java is a good introductory language, because it's "easy" and you don't get confused with all that boring string/malloc stuff but you can learn cool OOP stuff which will make your big programs ever so modular. This is a pedagogical disaster waiting to happen. Generations of graduates are descending on us and creating Shlemiel The Painter algorithms right and left and they don't even realize it, since they fundamentally have no idea that strings are, at a very deep level, difficult, even if you can't quite see that in your perl script. If you want to teach somebody something well, you have to start at the very lowest level. It's like Karate Kid. Wax On, Wax Off. Wax On, Wax Off. Do that for three weeks. Then Knocking The Other Kid's Head off is easy.
In short, if you're going to hack the code, AND if you're going to lurk for upwards of a decade in order to be recognized by the community as sentient so that you can re-contribute your changes, then you will prefer today's Open Source ecosystem.
If you are on a tight budget and you are willing to bend your processes like taffy around infrastructure that hackers thought would be a good idea years ago and then forgot to cook it all the way through, or support as the code began to age, then you'll eke by on Open Source. If you lack respect for IP, you might also mix in some pirated copies of closed source software.
If you fear IP, and/or have the money to sink into software then you are generally going to buy either closed source, or enterprise licensed software. Because your money acts like a class equalizer, you don't have to bear the brunt of financing a feature that millions of people (who aren't hackers) already want. Instead, authors who want your money are actively trying to guess what you would like in order to sell to you and millions who share your (common, probably easy to divine) preferences.
More Open Source communities really need to grow a bit of sophistication and learn to reward hackers for meeting aggregate needs in order to end the cycle of circle-jerk that's asphyxiating the industry. There will never be a "Year of the Linux Desktop" until the needs of common Desktop users are actually satisfied by a Linux distribution.
I've seen "code bounties" (normally only offered by medium to large businesses) and I've seen bug/feature trackers with voting mechanisms (where the developers pan straightforward fixes years old with more votes than all other entries combined), but I haven't yet seen these concepts combined: where users could donate money into separate code bounty pots to clarify their aggregate interest in fixing specific non-critical bugs or implementing specific features. I think that sort of approach might make a big difference. Let the patcher and the community's governing body share the bounty by some split, to encourage actually accepting patches in favor of thumb-sitting. In case the feature becomes obsolesced by changes elsewhere, perhaps an Escrowed Assurance Contract would be the way to go?
Then you don't have to personally bribe some entrenched developer by paying him $100/hr to write every line of code, test, and sublet-bribe every other impacted task leader just to see (for example) GIMP get some feature everyone already wants and every other graphics package has had since the dawn of time. Non-RGB colorspaces, perhaps? Honest, I used these in Photoshop v2.5 in 1992, and Jasc Paintshop Pro v4 in 1995. Wouldn't it be great if Linux X11 (I've tried Redhat, Debian and Ubuntu over the past decade) allowed you to specify monitor sizes without hacking text files? Parallel service bootstrapping? You know, I've always wanted a tagged filesystem. I think I could rally support for one easier than I could just raise the needed funds by hand.
I'd really like hell to freeze over and the gimp to get a human usable UI.
Nah, I like it toasty here in Hell. Why can't GIMP get a good UI, 8+bpc support, CMYK etc without first altering the @#$ing weather? 8I
Netpbm changes with the times. (<3 Netpbm! ;D) So why not the GIMP?