But then again, I suppose cyberpunk is more about a "dirty and gritty" than believable future.
.. Future, eh? You could make a tidy business today melting down nickels and pennies to increase their value, so why do hypothetical business models about defacing currency into bogroll interest you more than real life opportunities defacing currencies into shiny metals?
I have an address to receive payments (1D3ojVLNgD7D5WEKdq37m291N3Cai5CHTU) but it seems I'll have to wait a while to generate a "coin" myself. When that's done I don't know what I'll do with it -- how could I spend it? Why would you accept it?
Not to endorse the software, because we're all trying to confirm it does what's advertised, but people who don't want to wait around burning CPU cycles to create a coin might buy one from you in USD. It's value would rest upon it's alleged mathematical rareness as a proof of sacrifice.. really the same reason fiat currency has value. Then I could transfer that coin anonymously back and forth with other parties online in excahnge for shady goods or services without being traced, and they could sell it back to someone in their local currency to convert it back to classical value.
In Snowcrash, after hyperinflation the federal govermnet had to post threatening signs in the restrooms about how defacing currency is illegal, specifically because the toilet paper cost more per square foot than the bills.:S
I look at this very simply: there is nothing in copyright law that requires someone making creative work to build their business model around it. If other models were similarly or more effective as an incentive, copyright law doesn't prevent someone from adopting them.
I on the other hand look at it equally simply and from a different perspective.
Copyright law doesn't force a business to use it, it is a government labor subsidy and a regulation in favor of IP holders. Exercising Copyright (or bluffing your customer base into behaving as though you exercise it) effectively represents extorting money from the public that they might not have otherwise paid you at pain of punishment from the government.
Assuming the immorality of this act is not perceived by it's practitioners, of course they will misinterpret the approach as "more successful" than not relying upon the distorted market. Of course you'll get more money this way, given that if you don't extort the money your competition will instead.
On the other hand if copyright law is repealed, then the total amount of money in users' pockets available to entertainment will initially shrink by some factor, as some of that money will be directed towards non-entertainment goals. Gross creative output will also shrink, as many producers go out of business or downsize having their illicit revenue stream embellishments removed from them.
This shrinking effect can only continue so far before customers begin to notice the reduced entertainment output and begin asking one another who they need to wave money in front of to get the new material they want. Most customers would have identical disposable income (save those employed in producing and broad marketing of canned digital content) and enriched lives outside of entertainment due to their newfound ability to self-invest. They used to pay money for copies of the material they wanted, now they would need to learn how to instead pay money to finance the production of the material they want. The results of which would immediately enrich the public domain.
The title of this slashdot discussion is "Has Any Creative Work Failed Because of Piracy?", and the consensus so far is "No, unless you count works that never got bankrolled due to unfounded fears of the impact of piracy". The counterquestion is rife with examples however: "Has Any Creative Work Failed Because of Copyright?" Thousands upon thousands of content creators have been sued or threatened due to their work either actually or arguably borrowing from past work. Men Down Under just lost a suit because 5 bars of their song matched an old folk song in a different key. TMBG cannot upload many of their own 1990's videos to Youtube because they get DMCA threats from the label. AVGN tried to publish his work to DVD, but he was forced to gut his first attempt due to C&D from the rights holders of the games he was reviewing, and he lacked the warchest to defend his fair use pardoy/review rights. Obviously he hasn't tried that again since 2007. And those are only examples based on cases impacting the primary livelihood of people I have met in person.
The indentured servitude model and Big Media middlemen that add little value need to die, but I think market forces are already closing in on them anyway.
Unfortunately, while it may appear as though Big Media is on the ropes, they are not. As other points in this thread have mentioned, they are not being hurt in any statistically significant manner by piracy and it might actually be helping their cold-byte sales. Even though artists can now more easily direct-market, the studios still have vast reservoirs of cash, a warchest of government-backed IP, and the lawyers to sick on virtually anyone they please. Not to mention a majority of the public mindshare as to whether IP is rented or owned by the rights holders, and whether that licence had ought to be revoked.
If you casually dismiss the copyright model, you'd better have a good alternative that still allows that amortisation one way or another...
Not the only alternative of course, but you did only ask for one: Assurance Contracts. These are financial instruments specifically designed to circumvent the "free rider problem" and allow massive numbers of people to fund startup costs for projects whose benefits are not easily meterable — such as the production of any canned digital content. Of specific interest is the form listed at the bottom of the article, "Dominant Assurance Contracts". The lesson here is that when the playing field changes you need to examine your new environment and form suitable strategies in order to stay in play.
That, and focus on selling things that have value. Copies have no value. The work and creativity that goes into mastering the original is where the value is, so that is what you should focus on funding. But you know what else has value? Convenience, authenticity, aftermarket support and interaction.
Convenience: You sell your canned digital goods at a modest rate even though it's available for free. Example: ITunes profits heavily even when music is easy for anyone to download for free with no statistically significant risk of consequence. ITunes is just easier. People who know better aren't exchanging their money for music, but for the simple delivery mechanism.
Authenticity/Support: How do you know the thing you've downloaded is free from malware? How do you know you really have the latest version? If it's music, how do you know the fidelity is the best? Even when fans get better at distribution than the creators, you can profit from having authorized channels. Post-copyright you can't force people to use them, but people will come to you to confirm the product they get is official and as the director intended. People know they have redress if their product is defective. For software, you can (and many companies already do) turn profit on selling the contracts to support the platform.
Interaction: Canned software runs completely on a user's machine, which means they can control it and barring DRM obfuscation they can replicate and share it. Turn your product into a service and focus on the enhanced ability for clients to connect with one another via your offering. (MMORPG, cloud computing, concerts, theater) Such experiences are difficult to replicate and if you do your job well the communities spawned from them are impossible to replicate.
Using artificially restricted supply to inflate demand always has a negative macroeconomic effect. In our case, we end up with copyrights being traded as property so that both artist and consumer suffer. Perhaps the intent is to spread the cost over portions of the public who appreciate the work, but the effect is the indentured servitude of most popular artists to their financiers.
.. or a whole lot of stuff you like isn't going to get made any more.
I don't know.. this part does sound like 19th century slave owners arguing that the world would have no T-shirts if they were not allowed to protect their human-property rights. First off, we have more T-shirts than ever before and secondly I see tossing my T-shirt or not watching blockbusters as small potatoes in the face of allowing the entire domain of human knowledge to continue to be sliced up and auctioned. Just my thought, though I can't wrap my head around the opposing view.
Well then, I'm glad you said Integers instead of Positive, Natural Numbers because as we all know the integer ordinally preceding one is zero.
If you have a specific date on which your calendar starts (and we do), figuring out what a century and what a millennium is -- exactly, and without ambiguity -- is elementary math. It isn't a matter of opinion, or fashion. It is simply a matter of adding numbers, in precisely the way they are usually added.
You seem pretty sure of yourself there, as well. According to you, Jan 1 2001 is the official beginning of a new millenium because it commemorates precisely 2000 years elapsed after... after what, again?
Oh yes, that's right! Contemporary scholars have found evidence of the date of the Christian Messiah's birth to be inaccurate, and now put best estimates at early fall, 4 BCE. Kind of hard to celebrate two millenia past an indeterminate event with any accuracy is it? No matter how many numbers you simply add together?
But I'll tell you what I think. I think flipping the large dials on the chronometer is a more momentous occasion than trying to precisely count how many years have elapsed since a possibly fictional event was supposed to have occurred. I think being able to say "we're in a new millennium, because the digit which delineates which millennium we are in has now incremented" is more important than trying to account for the fact that the people who constructed the calendar we currently used punched a whole in the number line.
Me too. My big problem was that even after it was explained to them, most people seemed to either actively deny the obvious logic, or just ignored it completely.
Bah, humbug. There's nothing "obvious" nor "logical" about it. The Calendar is just notation. It's power is in keeping track of dates, of guaranteeing a consistently understood sequence of events. Bitching about archane confluences just proves that you care more about being pedantic and unhelpful than you do about harmony with your fellow man.
When arbitrary definitions are dischordant with common understanding, it's an order of magnitude easier to alter the definitions to fit the established understanding than the other way around. So why do we not do that?
You say there is no "Year Zero", so I just say "Yes there is." You say "Haha, when was it?" so I say "The year before Year 1". You say "Nya nya, that year was 1 BCE" so I just say "Who cares? 1 BCE = 0 CE, now get off my lawn".
I focused on trains because that was the part of your post that lit me off. Your statement about trains that I quoted is really the only point in your original post I disagree with.
You stated trains are more efficient "in almost any aspect you can imagine", so I simply imagined up at least a half a dozen ways in which they are not.
I even did you a favor and listed the only major aspect in which they are: "Less energy per ton per mile".
I've listed a larger number of more impactful negative repercussions to over-reliance upon rail transport than you have listed positive benefits (eg: you haven't mentioned any) so are we going to discuss the actual points, or are you running low on ammo after the ad hominem and astroturfing insinuations?:/
yelling 'fire' in a crowded theatre is the trite example. There are other good ones.
I haven't had an opportunity to discuss this confusing point with anyone yet, so I hope you'll indulge me. But I don't think the immoral component of yelling "fire" in a crowded theater has anything to do with speech. To me, "Speech" is the sharing information. In a crowded theater, it's not revealing the alleged presence of a fire that causes a stampede, it is the method of delivery (a startling shout inciting inappropriate emergency response) whereby the word is used as part of a powerful action.
Compare to the word "Fire" spoken by a general to his platoon aiming at a peaceful protest. It's not speech, it's action.
Some people might see this as splitting hairs, but laws which practicably limit speech by their nature also limit one's ability to discuss or re-enact the controversial events in question. For example, if we can't say the word "Fuck", then I cannot effectively communicate to you which word you are not allowed to say without saying it myself. If I spell it out letter by letter, or play charades then I am simply "encrypting" the offensive communique.
I contend that there aren't any situations where free speech (specifically, the right to voluntarily express something you know to any person(s) you are already capable of communicating with) is socially profitable to abridge. Selectively restricting speech is simply fraud, in every case.
It probably won't even come to that. Even if it is legal to host these servers within the parliament building, I don't think there is any obligation on anyone to provide a connection for them to the outside world, and that's where things could get difficult.
So, what, Swedish companies are going to refuse all data services to their own parliament over this? Sounds like the US "Kill Switch" fiasco, to me. 8I
That would make it Sturgeon's Paradox: non-crap is impossible. Was he a friend of Zeno?
Perhaps, the trap door to the paradox is similar too. "90% of everything is crap" applies equally well to the "crap" part too.
so 10% of all things are non-crap. including the 90% which you dismissed as crap.
I guess it does more to point a finger at our inability to categorize things (including categorizing them as "crap") compared to the quality we should expect from our categorizations than it does provide a statistical model for stripmining to get rid of the crap, which is by it's very nature pervades (but doesn't quite dominate) all things. 8I
Let's give an example, trains are more efficient means of transportation than roads in almost any aspect you can imagine.
I know, in the same way that circuit switched voice is more efficient for transferring digital data than the packet switched internet. Right, Ma bell?
Take MAX Light Rail in Portland. It cost billions of dollars, the tracks and surrounding environment eat 6 lanes worth of real estate and complicate road traffic all over the city. It stops at 20 times fewer locations than the buses and about half as often.. and to be honest, no matter how frustrating it is to be caught in a lane behind a bus that stops a lot, it's nothing compared to driving 5 stoplights past where I want to be just to get to a train crossing. Traintracks are as disruptive to non-train transportation (including pedestrians and cyclists) as canals.
Why don't you try shopping for a week's worth of groceries for a household of 4, wait around an hour for a train, and then lug 50 pounds of cargo onboard? Then walk it home a mile and a half from the nearest train departure point to your house?
I strongly support public transportation in general, but A> the technologies aren't ready to replace cars in all cases due to requiring riders to timeshift, spaceshift and carry minimum luggage and B> I am not a fan of Trains in particular due to their greediness of real estate. Ground-level trains block and disrupt regular traffic patterns. They generate terrific amounts of noise, can only travel along the most braindead straightaways and long bends and can't reach the places people already have reasons to go. Elevated and underground trains trade the real-estate blocking for exponentially greater expense. All forms of train right of way technology eventually fall into disrepair and promote urban decay due to not only public expense of maintenance, but changing city plans, priorities and technological considerations. (see the phrase, "wrong side of the tracks").
Buses travel along roads with cars. Roads fall apart when unmaintained, but they can also be ground up and discarded or ignored when no longer relevant or repaved like new for a few thousand dollars and a few weeks labor per mile. They can and do reach out like capillaries to serve the most disparate geographic needs. They support a heterogeneous set of vehicles (like the internet, delivering a variety of traffic types instead of only voice) including cars, trucks, buses, bicycles, mopeds and pedestrians. Roads can navigate sharp corners and, when they have to, steep inclines. Road vehicles adhere to a standard width much narrower than virtually all trains, which allows relatively narrow roadlanes to sip real estate per traversable mile compared to train tracks.
Finally, at the end of the day, in every country around the world, no matter if the decisions are made by the market or by strict government mandate, no matter how energy is moved from one place to another or how advanced or backwards the technology, and even though steam locomotives predate automobiles by a hundred years, there are more roads than train tracks in every country and in every city and more people traveling the roads (by automobile, motorcycle, bicycle or foot) than the trains.
I guess markets optimize through the eyes of the consumer, and consumers see themselves as too important to be herded into train stations at locations and schedules that you would choose, fighting over artificially overvalued home and business real estate next to the tracks that you lay, and paying higher taxes to get the tracks layed in order to participate in the indignity, merely to meet whatever energy or environmental standards of efficiency you are citing in your hollow little post. Put simply, personal productivity and convenience provides more value to society than conserving units of fuel, so the one is not worth sacrificing in the name of the other.
when a crowd of humans get together, everyone just sort of assumes that "the others" have already thought of everything, and that everyone can sort of coast along like lemmings.
Facepalm.
Please don't troll the newbs by revealing the Flat Earth Myth and then trying to perpetuate the Kamakaze Lemmings Myth in the same breath.
There has got to be a point where the snide recursion bottoms out and we're left with honesty. Yes? No? Or is it just Turtles all the way down?;P
The question is if we want to waste the rest of our once prosperous society by building tariff walls around our entrenched interests instead of changing with the times.
The former, duh. Those who have money don't give a rat's ass about enriching the public domain, they don't give a rat's ass about shooting themselves in the foot so long as everyone else gets shot in both feet and a shoulder, leaving them relatively ahead of the curve.
Most of the public doesn't care because they've been brainwashed into believing that culture must be dispensed from a vending machine to be legal or moral. And quite frankly, who needs to subvert freedom of speech when you can simply draw property lines over the words instead?
The explanation is bullshit. We are supposed to believe that this blaster having, light speed exceeding, strong AI using galactic society can not figure out and duplicate the 'quirk of physics' embodied in midichlorians? The explanation is magical precisely because it can not be duplicated or even explained technologically by a sufficiently advanced civilization.
Pfft, what's advanced AI and cybernetics when you can't bring back the dead? If they still don't know how the organic brain works well enough to have established immortality, then there's just got to be some limits to their knowings, don't there?:P
And how strong are the AI really if they aren't running the place?
Not quite infinite, but maybe a GOOGOL permutations.
You mean GOOGOOOAL?
In other news, there are strikingly few permutations of the pattern/G(O+A+L+)+/ to really brute force against. You can't have too many single letters repeat in a row or folk wouldn't remember how many they've already typed.
Anyway, Real Men choose passwords by forcing Youtube's transcribe audio feature to decode the vuvuzela hum.
Slashdot Mirror
But then again, I suppose cyberpunk is more about a "dirty and gritty" than believable future.
.. Future, eh? You could make a tidy business today melting down nickels and pennies to increase their value, so why do hypothetical business models about defacing currency into bogroll interest you more than real life opportunities defacing currencies into shiny metals?
I have an address to receive payments (1D3ojVLNgD7D5WEKdq37m291N3Cai5CHTU) but it seems I'll have to wait a while to generate a "coin" myself. When that's done I don't know what I'll do with it -- how could I spend it? Why would you accept it?
Not to endorse the software, because we're all trying to confirm it does what's advertised, but people who don't want to wait around burning CPU cycles to create a coin might buy one from you in USD. It's value would rest upon it's alleged mathematical rareness as a proof of sacrifice .. really the same reason fiat currency has value. Then I could transfer that coin anonymously back and forth with other parties online in excahnge for shady goods or services without being traced, and they could sell it back to someone in their local currency to convert it back to classical value.
In Snowcrash, after hyperinflation the federal govermnet had to post threatening signs in the restrooms about how defacing currency is illegal, specifically because the toilet paper cost more per square foot than the bills. :S
I look at this very simply: there is nothing in copyright law that requires someone making creative work to build their business model around it. If other models were similarly or more effective as an incentive, copyright law doesn't prevent someone from adopting them.
I on the other hand look at it equally simply and from a different perspective.
Copyright law doesn't force a business to use it, it is a government labor subsidy and a regulation in favor of IP holders. Exercising Copyright (or bluffing your customer base into behaving as though you exercise it) effectively represents extorting money from the public that they might not have otherwise paid you at pain of punishment from the government.
Assuming the immorality of this act is not perceived by it's practitioners, of course they will misinterpret the approach as "more successful" than not relying upon the distorted market. Of course you'll get more money this way, given that if you don't extort the money your competition will instead.
On the other hand if copyright law is repealed, then the total amount of money in users' pockets available to entertainment will initially shrink by some factor, as some of that money will be directed towards non-entertainment goals. Gross creative output will also shrink, as many producers go out of business or downsize having their illicit revenue stream embellishments removed from them.
This shrinking effect can only continue so far before customers begin to notice the reduced entertainment output and begin asking one another who they need to wave money in front of to get the new material they want. Most customers would have identical disposable income (save those employed in producing and broad marketing of canned digital content) and enriched lives outside of entertainment due to their newfound ability to self-invest. They used to pay money for copies of the material they wanted, now they would need to learn how to instead pay money to finance the production of the material they want. The results of which would immediately enrich the public domain.
The title of this slashdot discussion is "Has Any Creative Work Failed Because of Piracy?", and the consensus so far is "No, unless you count works that never got bankrolled due to unfounded fears of the impact of piracy". The counterquestion is rife with examples however: "Has Any Creative Work Failed Because of Copyright?" Thousands upon thousands of content creators have been sued or threatened due to their work either actually or arguably borrowing from past work. Men Down Under just lost a suit because 5 bars of their song matched an old folk song in a different key. TMBG cannot upload many of their own 1990's videos to Youtube because they get DMCA threats from the label. AVGN tried to publish his work to DVD, but he was forced to gut his first attempt due to C&D from the rights holders of the games he was reviewing, and he lacked the warchest to defend his fair use pardoy/review rights. Obviously he hasn't tried that again since 2007. And those are only examples based on cases impacting the primary livelihood of people I have met in person.
The indentured servitude model and Big Media middlemen that add little value need to die, but I think market forces are already closing in on them anyway.
Unfortunately, while it may appear as though Big Media is on the ropes, they are not. As other points in this thread have mentioned, they are not being hurt in any statistically significant manner by piracy and it might actually be helping their cold-byte sales. Even though artists can now more easily direct-market, the studios still have vast reservoirs of cash, a warchest of government-backed IP, and the lawyers to sick on virtually anyone they please. Not to mention a majority of the public mindshare as to whether IP is rented or owned by the rights holders, and whether that licence had ought to be revoked.
Legal instruments virtually
If you casually dismiss the copyright model, you'd better have a good alternative that still allows that amortisation one way or another...
Not the only alternative of course, but you did only ask for one: Assurance Contracts. These are financial instruments specifically designed to circumvent the "free rider problem" and allow massive numbers of people to fund startup costs for projects whose benefits are not easily meterable — such as the production of any canned digital content. Of specific interest is the form listed at the bottom of the article, "Dominant Assurance Contracts". The lesson here is that when the playing field changes you need to examine your new environment and form suitable strategies in order to stay in play.
That, and focus on selling things that have value. Copies have no value. The work and creativity that goes into mastering the original is where the value is, so that is what you should focus on funding. But you know what else has value? Convenience, authenticity, aftermarket support and interaction.
Convenience: You sell your canned digital goods at a modest rate even though it's available for free. Example: ITunes profits heavily even when music is easy for anyone to download for free with no statistically significant risk of consequence. ITunes is just easier. People who know better aren't exchanging their money for music, but for the simple delivery mechanism.
Authenticity/Support: How do you know the thing you've downloaded is free from malware? How do you know you really have the latest version? If it's music, how do you know the fidelity is the best? Even when fans get better at distribution than the creators, you can profit from having authorized channels. Post-copyright you can't force people to use them, but people will come to you to confirm the product they get is official and as the director intended. People know they have redress if their product is defective. For software, you can (and many companies already do) turn profit on selling the contracts to support the platform.
Interaction: Canned software runs completely on a user's machine, which means they can control it and barring DRM obfuscation they can replicate and share it. Turn your product into a service and focus on the enhanced ability for clients to connect with one another via your offering. (MMORPG, cloud computing, concerts, theater) Such experiences are difficult to replicate and if you do your job well the communities spawned from them are impossible to replicate.
Using artificially restricted supply to inflate demand always has a negative macroeconomic effect. In our case, we end up with copyrights being traded as property so that both artist and consumer suffer. Perhaps the intent is to spread the cost over portions of the public who appreciate the work, but the effect is the indentured servitude of most popular artists to their financiers.
.. or a whole lot of stuff you like isn't going to get made any more.
I don't know.. this part does sound like 19th century slave owners arguing that the world would have no T-shirts if they were not allowed to protect their human-property rights. First off, we have more T-shirts than ever before and secondly I see tossing my T-shirt or not watching blockbusters as small potatoes in the face of allowing the entire domain of human knowledge to continue to be sliced up and auctioned. Just my thought, though I can't wrap my head around the opposing view.
Well then, I'm glad you said Integers instead of Positive, Natural Numbers because as we all know the integer ordinally preceding one is zero.
If you have a specific date on which your calendar starts (and we do), figuring out what a century and what a millennium is -- exactly, and without ambiguity -- is elementary math. It isn't a matter of opinion, or fashion. It is simply a matter of adding numbers, in precisely the way they are usually added.
You seem pretty sure of yourself there, as well. According to you, Jan 1 2001 is the official beginning of a new millenium because it commemorates precisely 2000 years elapsed after... after what, again?
Oh yes, that's right! Contemporary scholars have found evidence of the date of the Christian Messiah's birth to be inaccurate, and now put best estimates at early fall, 4 BCE. Kind of hard to celebrate two millenia past an indeterminate event with any accuracy is it? No matter how many numbers you simply add together?
But I'll tell you what I think. I think flipping the large dials on the chronometer is a more momentous occasion than trying to precisely count how many years have elapsed since a possibly fictional event was supposed to have occurred. I think being able to say "we're in a new millennium, because the digit which delineates which millennium we are in has now incremented" is more important than trying to account for the fact that the people who constructed the calendar we currently used punched a whole in the number line.
Yeah .. where in my post am I talking about audiophiles? Anywhere? 8I
Me too. My big problem was that even after it was explained to them, most people seemed to either actively deny the obvious logic, or just ignored it completely.
Bah, humbug. There's nothing "obvious" nor "logical" about it. The Calendar is just notation. It's power is in keeping track of dates, of guaranteeing a consistently understood sequence of events. Bitching about archane confluences just proves that you care more about being pedantic and unhelpful than you do about harmony with your fellow man.
When arbitrary definitions are dischordant with common understanding, it's an order of magnitude easier to alter the definitions to fit the established understanding than the other way around. So why do we not do that?
You say there is no "Year Zero", so I just say "Yes there is." You say "Haha, when was it?" so I say "The year before Year 1". You say "Nya nya, that year was 1 BCE" so I just say "Who cares? 1 BCE = 0 CE, now get off my lawn".
Careful there: a whole bunch of fanboys will start keeping their phones in the fridge for a better facebook experience.
Wait, Facebook-user darwinism is bad, how? :3
I focused on trains because that was the part of your post that lit me off. Your statement about trains that I quoted is really the only point in your original post I disagree with.
You stated trains are more efficient "in almost any aspect you can imagine", so I simply imagined up at least a half a dozen ways in which they are not.
I even did you a favor and listed the only major aspect in which they are: "Less energy per ton per mile".
I've listed a larger number of more impactful negative repercussions to over-reliance upon rail transport than you have listed positive benefits (eg: you haven't mentioned any) so are we going to discuss the actual points, or are you running low on ammo after the ad hominem and astroturfing insinuations? :/
yelling 'fire' in a crowded theatre is the trite example. There are other good ones.
I haven't had an opportunity to discuss this confusing point with anyone yet, so I hope you'll indulge me. But I don't think the immoral component of yelling "fire" in a crowded theater has anything to do with speech. To me, "Speech" is the sharing information. In a crowded theater, it's not revealing the alleged presence of a fire that causes a stampede, it is the method of delivery (a startling shout inciting inappropriate emergency response) whereby the word is used as part of a powerful action.
Compare to the word "Fire" spoken by a general to his platoon aiming at a peaceful protest. It's not speech, it's action.
Some people might see this as splitting hairs, but laws which practicably limit speech by their nature also limit one's ability to discuss or re-enact the controversial events in question. For example, if we can't say the word "Fuck", then I cannot effectively communicate to you which word you are not allowed to say without saying it myself. If I spell it out letter by letter, or play charades then I am simply "encrypting" the offensive communique.
I contend that there aren't any situations where free speech (specifically, the right to voluntarily express something you know to any person(s) you are already capable of communicating with) is socially profitable to abridge. Selectively restricting speech is simply fraud, in every case.
It probably won't even come to that. Even if it is legal to host these servers within the parliament building, I don't think there is any obligation on anyone to provide a connection for them to the outside world, and that's where things could get difficult.
So, what, Swedish companies are going to refuse all data services to their own parliament over this? Sounds like the US "Kill Switch" fiasco, to me. 8I
Look, I'm skipping the rhetorical question turned pissing match, but for real. Sometimes we simply lack the power to protect the willfully ignorant from their own naiveté, especially when they abuse us for our troubles. Then it's the best we can do to simply hope beyond hope that they'll catch on.
You've never heard anyone say, "Hey man, this is some really good shit!"
But have you ever noticed that your shit is stuff, while everyone else's stuff is shit?
That would make it Sturgeon's Paradox: non-crap is impossible. Was he a friend of Zeno?
Perhaps, the trap door to the paradox is similar too. "90% of everything is crap" applies equally well to the "crap" part too.
so 10% of all things are non-crap. including the 90% which you dismissed as crap.
I guess it does more to point a finger at our inability to categorize things (including categorizing them as "crap") compared to the quality we should expect from our categorizations than it does provide a statistical model for stripmining to get rid of the crap, which is by it's very nature pervades (but doesn't quite dominate) all things. 8I
Let's give an example, trains are more efficient means of transportation than roads in almost any aspect you can imagine.
I know, in the same way that circuit switched voice is more efficient for transferring digital data than the packet switched internet. Right, Ma bell?
Take MAX Light Rail in Portland. It cost billions of dollars, the tracks and surrounding environment eat 6 lanes worth of real estate and complicate road traffic all over the city. It stops at 20 times fewer locations than the buses and about half as often.. and to be honest, no matter how frustrating it is to be caught in a lane behind a bus that stops a lot, it's nothing compared to driving 5 stoplights past where I want to be just to get to a train crossing. Traintracks are as disruptive to non-train transportation (including pedestrians and cyclists) as canals.
Why don't you try shopping for a week's worth of groceries for a household of 4, wait around an hour for a train, and then lug 50 pounds of cargo onboard? Then walk it home a mile and a half from the nearest train departure point to your house?
I strongly support public transportation in general, but A> the technologies aren't ready to replace cars in all cases due to requiring riders to timeshift, spaceshift and carry minimum luggage and B> I am not a fan of Trains in particular due to their greediness of real estate. Ground-level trains block and disrupt regular traffic patterns. They generate terrific amounts of noise, can only travel along the most braindead straightaways and long bends and can't reach the places people already have reasons to go. Elevated and underground trains trade the real-estate blocking for exponentially greater expense. All forms of train right of way technology eventually fall into disrepair and promote urban decay due to not only public expense of maintenance, but changing city plans, priorities and technological considerations. (see the phrase, "wrong side of the tracks").
Buses travel along roads with cars. Roads fall apart when unmaintained, but they can also be ground up and discarded or ignored when no longer relevant or repaved like new for a few thousand dollars and a few weeks labor per mile. They can and do reach out like capillaries to serve the most disparate geographic needs. They support a heterogeneous set of vehicles (like the internet, delivering a variety of traffic types instead of only voice) including cars, trucks, buses, bicycles, mopeds and pedestrians. Roads can navigate sharp corners and, when they have to, steep inclines. Road vehicles adhere to a standard width much narrower than virtually all trains, which allows relatively narrow roadlanes to sip real estate per traversable mile compared to train tracks.
Finally, at the end of the day, in every country around the world, no matter if the decisions are made by the market or by strict government mandate, no matter how energy is moved from one place to another or how advanced or backwards the technology, and even though steam locomotives predate automobiles by a hundred years, there are more roads than train tracks in every country and in every city and more people traveling the roads (by automobile, motorcycle, bicycle or foot) than the trains.
I guess markets optimize through the eyes of the consumer, and consumers see themselves as too important to be herded into train stations at locations and schedules that you would choose, fighting over artificially overvalued home and business real estate next to the tracks that you lay, and paying higher taxes to get the tracks layed in order to participate in the indignity, merely to meet whatever energy or environmental standards of efficiency you are citing in your hollow little post. Put simply, personal productivity and convenience provides more value to society than conserving units of fuel, so the one is not worth sacrificing in the name of the other.
Understand, I am not trying to claim that market
when a crowd of humans get together, everyone just sort of assumes that "the others" have already thought of everything, and that everyone can sort of coast along like lemmings.
Facepalm.
Please don't troll the newbs by revealing the Flat Earth Myth and then trying to perpetuate the Kamakaze Lemmings Myth in the same breath.
There has got to be a point where the snide recursion bottoms out and we're left with honesty. Yes? No? Or is it just Turtles all the way down? ;P
Wait, Techno and Axle F? Are you certain he doesn't mean MIDI? 8I
The question is if we want to waste the rest of our once prosperous society by building tariff walls around our entrenched interests instead of changing with the times.
The former, duh. Those who have money don't give a rat's ass about enriching the public domain, they don't give a rat's ass about shooting themselves in the foot so long as everyone else gets shot in both feet and a shoulder, leaving them relatively ahead of the curve.
Most of the public doesn't care because they've been brainwashed into believing that culture must be dispensed from a vending machine to be legal or moral. And quite frankly, who needs to subvert freedom of speech when you can simply draw property lines over the words instead?
The explanation is bullshit. We are supposed to believe that this blaster having, light speed exceeding, strong AI using galactic society can not figure out and duplicate the 'quirk of physics' embodied in midichlorians? The explanation is magical precisely because it can not be duplicated or even explained technologically by a sufficiently advanced civilization.
Pfft, what's advanced AI and cybernetics when you can't bring back the dead? If they still don't know how the organic brain works well enough to have established immortality, then there's just got to be some limits to their knowings, don't there? :P
And how strong are the AI really if they aren't running the place?
How do you define what would be required to go in .xxx?
Should sensitive eyes then be allowed free reign on "the rest of the internet", or do we need a .nsfw TLD as well? 8I
.spoilers? .blasphemy? .holocaust-denial? .partly-out-of-copyright?
.athiest? .anarchist? .violent? .critical-of-the-government.cn?
Blah, why can't I get a good GPU accelerated Mandelbrot set viewer, then? z = z^2 + c meets all your criteria great, dun it? :P
Not quite infinite, but maybe a GOOGOL permutations.
You mean GOOGOOOAL?
In other news, there are strikingly few permutations of the pattern /G(O+A+L+)+/ to really brute force against. You can't have too many single letters repeat in a row or folk wouldn't remember how many they've already typed.
Anyway, Real Men choose passwords by forcing Youtube's transcribe audio feature to decode the vuvuzela hum.
"You're getting brutal, Sark. Brutal and needlessly sadistic."
"Thank you, Master Control"
-Sark and the MCP
Bwahaha, probably the best thing about this quote is that it's just David Warner talking to himself. EPIC!
We need a "+0 Meh" moderation.
Interesting idea. Should it burn one or two mod points in the process? ;D