Why should it vary? If its popular than the authors have more than recouped the costs of production.
On the other hand, it doesn't make any sense for Sundog(1984) to be still under copyright 70+ years from now, when people will be hard pressed to tell you what the Apple ][ was. Why? Who judges what is popular? If an author's work is not recognized till years after he writes it should his family be shortchanged because it wasn't popular for 2 years after he wrote it? Should large companies be able to have infinite copyright by simply pumping money into a product?
By that definition copyright should be infinite for everything, after all who knows if in 6 million years society won't suddenly find massive interest in "Girls Gone Wild 7".
I have come to the conclusion that this is all bullshit, everyone wants to blame the education system one way or another since thats the easy answer. If it was the education system then you wouldn't have Asians and Eastern Europeans being 4 times as prevalent in magnet schools as they are in the population. On the other hand if in reality US society has devolved to a point where parents simply don't do their fucking "job" then that fits very well. A school cannot be educator, parent and removed of bad parenting even if its hands weren't tied (as they are today, schools can't do jack shit to students or they get sued). Worse society doesn't value education much with some parts being much worse than others (ie: inner city). Even worse parents don't realize there is a problem, their kids can't possibly be spoiled brats who couldn't study for 10 minutes if the universe depended on it because of horrid parenting. It must be the system. So legislators pander to them, either putting in worthless "fixes" to please voters or lowering tests scores (or else 3/4 of the students get held back which is bad for votes).
Reform won't do much, it'll be half assed to please voters then dropped half way through when people stop caring. I think the last time people cared was due to the threat of the evil red soviets but even that didn't last long enough for them to even get half decent solutions into place.
At my high school the grading system was the only thing that (to the best of my knowledge) wasn't hacked in one way or another. Oddly enough the one incident I do know of that had grades changed involved a student altering the marks on the grad submission piece of paper they were asked to bring to the main office.
Well the problem if you call it that is that intelligent people think rationally and long terms. It makes little sense in our society to have many kids as we cannot provide the best for each of them (education, time, etc, etc.) as to give them the best chance at success. Furthermore children provide no direct benefit to parents till they're in their late 20s at the earliest but have a substantial cost. The potential benefit (helping the parents when they grow old) is also highest the fewer children you have (each is likely to earn more thus have money to give to the parents).
In some ways the problem is that there is no really bad place in modern society, there is no starvation to prevent or counter this behaviors as there was in the past. Hell in some cases its better to have more kids even but in general there isn't enough disincentive for having many kids.
If I have a heart condition or a neurological defect that's going to kill me sometime between 55-70, that can really give the actuaries something to chew on. While not 100% certain of when I'll die, they know when I'm most likely to die, and the rest is all accident insurance. Many genetic factors simply alter the odds, very few will defiantly cause something at age X (oddly enough even those at risk for these do not always want to be tested even when tests exist). Your enviroment (current and past, including when you were still a fetus) matters a great deal. It may be that you have a genetic risk for ulcers but require exposure to an environmental factor (say a virus) for it to happen.
There should be some limits, but who wouldn't want to get rid of conditions that produce people who are a burden on society? (retards, etc.) By the standards of someone who has say a 350 IQ we're all retards, there is no line to draw in the sand. Worse look at how "fads" spread through society and now imagine whole generations of kids who look almost identical. Genetic diversity is essential for the survival of a species and humans already have relatively little of it.
As it stands now society is favoring, genetically, those who are poor, superstitious and don't plan ahead. I would guess that there is some genetic component to these, likely indirectly by other less than socially desirable inclinations. The rich you see, who by our social standards are the unsuccessful ones thus by your logic have better genes, do not reproduce as much.
They use an interface that literally emulates an ancient teletype. Thank god for that, doing my job would be a real pain in the ass otherwise. I mean christ, if it weren't for piping alone I'd probably spend 10 times as much time (if not more) coding some of the things I do.
Simply put, if you don't know to use specific programs, the employer sees other candidates as more qualified than you (whether or not this is true) and you may not even get a chance at an interview. From experience it doesn't much matter for most things and given how damn little I've seen people know about MS * despite getting hired I don't think there is any way knowing Open Office instead could make them less proficient at MS products (for many people). Most of them only learned a half dozen different things about the software and their ability to use it beyond that is below non-existent.
The exception to this would be in the tech field (ie network administration) where proficiency in Linux/Unix would be required. Or any programmer who works with data, when someone can do something in 15 seconds with a *nix shell that takes you 2 minutes to do by writing a program guess who isn't getting hired.
Only in one instance did OpenOffice come in useful to me, but this was for a non-profit organization and my choices were to install illegal copies of Office, install OpenOffice, or install nothing at all./quote
There are apparently very inexpensive license of MS products for some classes of non-profit organizations.
I fully agree with that, the same holds for the other software (even R despite it's wide usage in academia) sells for large amounts of money a reason (SAS for example is I think $15k per commercial license). Still the people who really need Photoshop or the other software are a niche so teaching on it is pointless to most students.
AutoCAD, for example? Mathematica? SAS/Stat? Websphere? Photoshop? Windows? Help me out here, I'm trying to come up with some other "now worthless non-free software" that I can recommend to my friends' kids not to touch. Especially "M$" software, because we all know no one uses that anymore. For a student all of that is worthless, especially when schools consider knowing the software more important than knowing the concepts. Worse much of the software you listed is a niche market which the majority of students will never use again nor be able to justify the price of. R can be used instead of SAS/Stat/Matlab for anything a high school or even college student could ever need. *nix is a lot more useful to learn than windows if you do data analysis or teach a class that does it. GIMP can be used instead of photoshop, again the missing features don't matter. I'm sure there is a free AutoCAD clone, god knows anything would be better than the dos version of AutoCAD I was forced to use in High School (only 6 years ago, no one gave a rats ass about the CAD class or it's equipment despite me being in a very good school. I got an A for keeping enough system running for the class to do it's work, the network admin simply didn't care). No idea about Mathematica but its probably only a matter of time.
And people still attack Microsoft sans-common sense. I don't get it. Welcome to human psychology, it's always the other guy whose an irrational zealot and never you.
If you believe that then you can get as much done with a summer intern as you can with someone with 20 years of programming experience. Give it a shot sometime. And you can find a company that doesn't have that philosophy. I wouldn't want to work for a company that thinks I'm just a body taking up space anyway. Yet the summer intern may cost a fourth of what a guy with 20 years experience costs (maybe even less than that counting all benefits).
That's more than this thing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat_126p had and that didn't have trouble hauling 3 people + roof filled with stuff hundreds of kilometers. Heck they can just remake that that or another cheap soviet car and help put a dent in the population growth as a byproduct (sell large trucks to half the population and death traps on wheels to the other half then stand back).
Currently, there is no market incentive, paying an author happens for two reasons: to avoid breaking the law, or altruism to support the author. That being said, I have years of experience with print newsletters I wrote and published, and I always told my subscribers to freely copy the newsletter for friends or family. Guess what happened? Friends and family subscribed for the express reason that they wanted to get a copy to read rather than wait for a copy or search for one.
My public blogs are free, my private e-newsletters are not, even though I allow people to forward them to others (and many do). My reader base increases still, even though I freely let people share all my writings, even republish them as their own. There are massive difference between something being done in a limited regard on a small scale catering to a supportive market and it begin done at a large scale. All someone needs to do is subscribe to all popular writers then republish the content on a website for free, maybe giving credit if they are generous. Heck, soon someone would make a firefox extension that automatically goes to a free version when a subscription only page is reached.
Modern society is not altruistic enough to support such a model at large scale, implying to them that the content is worthless (remember that to people free == less valuable) only make it worse.
If you mean W2 employees, I'll agree! If you can't sell your own labor yourself as a contractor, go get a job and you'll do fine and can basically ignore the whole issue of who owns your finished work. Even if you're not W2, let's say you're a writer. Unless your book is damn popular you will need to write books at a steady pace or your income will dry out, books don't continue to sell well indefinably. Even when they do unless you have income from many books with new ones being written to offset the decrease from older ones you won't continue to make money.
As the only tech there (and part time at that) it is much easier to suspend them than to re-image all 420 laptops, password protect the bios and prevent booting from anything but hd! So you're simply letting the 20 people the suspended kid tells his method to do as they please while knowing they will be covering their tracks better? It's somewhat amazing just how quickly information can spread between students, only a matter of time till ti gets to someone who is an utter nitwit (like the guy at my HS who started sending out emails using the principals account, destroyed hardware and initiated a school wide dos attack using a window's vulnerability that was beforehand only use to mess around between friends). The nitwit of course never got caught even after that lovely letter placed everyone by the sys admin demanding to know what a-hole stole a cpu from a library computer.
I mean instead of suspending them why the f*** don't you just get them to help you as punishment, make them the IT monkeys if you can judge them as sane enough for it. Warnings would be even more effective even for semi-serious offenses and they wouldn't resent you as much afterwards. My HS didn't even bother suspending students unless it was something really bad (attempting to change grades), they'd have had to suspend a quarter of the student body probably. Granted I don't think they realized (despite being competent and all that) just how many holes existed, the master student database got copied more than once (including by people who barely knew anything about computers but by luck got access to the right machine) and the unix passwd file was copied every other week (and half of it got cracked at least). I know a lot of people would have been laughing their asses of if someone got suspended for using a proxy while they were merrily looking up passwords for school administrators.
Writers will make their money on subscriptions (and advertising) for those who appreciate the writing, rather than writing a book once and hoping it sells enough over years (and is quickly outdated). It's apparently always been a pain in the backside to make a living as an author, short of selling yourself out basically. Why would I subscribe to something when I can get the same content for free (or with less ads) from 100+ different websites within 10 minutes of it coming out? All those websites really need to cover is the cost of hosting not the cost of creation so they will always win in terms of price.
Copyright is the great un-equalizer -- it protects "one-time work" rather than the ongoing labor that most other markets require for consistent long-term income. Huh? I'm sure that 99% of professionals artists would laugh at you as they work continuously just like everyone else.
Um, this sentence comes right after a long diatribe about sending in hundreds (if not thousands) of applications just to try to get 1 person to say "Ok, I'll take a risk on you". Applications? Uhmm, all I sent out for research was emails and most of those were similar to each other. Research programs were apps but those were free and I only sent out a couple. Worst thing was fighting the BS middle and high school administrators but that was also free.
It's called investment, if spending 10 hours to save 100s of hours of work in the future isn't considered "working smart" by you then you're simply lazy.
It was much easier to send out 3-4 resumes and get a job. It's even easier to work minimum wage at the local pizza joint.
In fact, I didn't even have to send out a resume, I was doing some contract work on the side while in school and I caught the eye of a company and they came straight to me and offered me a job. While my professors at university while acknowledging that I had extraordinary talent and was smart, continually said "no you can't advance faster than X". *shrug* Not my fault if you can't find the right professor or properly argue your point. My HS principal said to my face that I shouldn't be graduating (due to some BS about how no one ever graduates early from that school) but he couldn't stop me (he'd already signed the paperwork and I've secretly made sure to meet all the reqs). If you accept what someone says then you've already lost, you need to fight for what you want.
Besides the fact that every application I ever filled out had an application fee (usually 200-300 bucks) and suddenly filling out 100 applications becomes completely impossible, much less thousands. Only apps I ever had to pay for were college apps and standardized tests (AP, SAT, etc.). The rest was free.
The schools I went to were not crappy, my high school was listed in the top 100 high schools in the country while I was there, the university I attended while not Ivy league is the top school in the state, and certainly in the top 5 in the region (Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Idaho, Arizona). When you picked colleges did you try to find one that was accommodating to gifted students? Did you email a dozen professors before hand to see if any were interested in doing research with you when you got there? On pre-admit weekend did you do all the BS activities or did you meet with professors?
If you expect things to be handed to you on a silver plate then that's your shortcoming not the worlds. You will get screwed over at some point and have no idea what to do.
School is just 100% about becoming a drone and following the herd. People who get out of line are punished. Unless you have lots of connections, or the time, money, and energy to pester the institution for months on end you aren't going to get anywhere. If you don't want to fight for what you believe in then you are a sheep even if you don't notice it yourself. God knows I learned more from fighting against my middle and high school administrators then I did from anything else in life.
What you've described is a system which is easily defeated by flooding. You're asserting that Congress has no duty to stay within its defined boundaries and that it is the Supreme Court's job to strike down illegitimate legislation. I think the problem is obvious when there are only seven supreme court justices and over five hundred congressional members. I guess you've never dealt with more than 2 people at once. It is easier for 5 out of 9 to agree on something than 250 out of 500. add in presidential vetos and filibusters and you need to essentially convince most of them. Like others have said there are also lesser courts which I forgot about. Not to mention that you also need to convince the voters, and to flood the system you'd also need to do that for every single law.
Likewise since that is the system in place, it has been in place for over 200 years and there isn't that much flooding what exactly is your point anyway?
Well, the mistake was in putting all the responsibility on the Supreme Court. Any lower court can knock laws down, or change the way they must be interpreted. But in general the system works as described. Yeah that was a mistake on my part, I should have spent some more time thinking before posting.
Wow, I've actually managed to make a name for myself.
If you've paid attention you'd have noticed that I don't support these systems but rather simply find most conspiracies silly in general. I find it stupid to attribute things to massive complex conspiracies when simpler answers exist. Likewise I find it even more stupid to attribute it to a cause that cannot be fought (such a conspiracy would by definition be intelligent enough to stop any counter-effort) when other causes imho much more plausible causes exist that can be fought.
The insults are there for my own entertainment and stress relief.
Also, I am somewhat confrontational and devil's advocate-ish in these debates as I mostly find it more educational. After all, how can you find the validity of a position except by questioning flaws in it and arguing against it? I don't do this on purpose but I simply point out flaws in any argument (that I see) even if I support that position (yes, I'll argue against my own position if the poster I'm replying to said something silly).
You've managed to attribute to some concisions conspiracy of mine what is in reality due to nothing of the kind (I don't much consider my posting history, I just post in whatever way I find rational). In other words, thank you for illustrating why conspiracy theories are so silly.
Of course personal rights are being eroded, I find that a sadly inherent consequence of our current society and its direction. My only point is that saying it is a conspiracy is stupid to me, if you don't identify the true reason for something then how can you fight it? I mean if its a grand conspiracy then the only solution is a civil war and anarchy. If those in power are capable of this much organization nothing else would work as they'd easily figure it out.
On the other hand if its due to stupidity, ignorance and greed then other solutions are possible.
My point was that voters are irrelevant for laws that break the bill of rights or constitution. Thats the whole point of those things, they're there so it doesn't matter if you can convince the voters to support a bill since the courts will strike it down anyway. Checks and balances.
As for conspiracies, I believe in small scale short term greed and stupidity causing large scale long term effects (when combined that is). I don't disagree with behind the scenes actions or anything like that but the person I replied to seemed to imply a downright massive conspiracy.
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By that definition copyright should be infinite for everything, after all who knows if in 6 million years society won't suddenly find massive interest in "Girls Gone Wild 7".
I have come to the conclusion that this is all bullshit, everyone wants to blame the education system one way or another since thats the easy answer. If it was the education system then you wouldn't have Asians and Eastern Europeans being 4 times as prevalent in magnet schools as they are in the population. On the other hand if in reality US society has devolved to a point where parents simply don't do their fucking "job" then that fits very well. A school cannot be educator, parent and removed of bad parenting even if its hands weren't tied (as they are today, schools can't do jack shit to students or they get sued). Worse society doesn't value education much with some parts being much worse than others (ie: inner city). Even worse parents don't realize there is a problem, their kids can't possibly be spoiled brats who couldn't study for 10 minutes if the universe depended on it because of horrid parenting. It must be the system. So legislators pander to them, either putting in worthless "fixes" to please voters or lowering tests scores (or else 3/4 of the students get held back which is bad for votes).
Reform won't do much, it'll be half assed to please voters then dropped half way through when people stop caring. I think the last time people cared was due to the threat of the evil red soviets but even that didn't last long enough for them to even get half decent solutions into place.
At my high school the grading system was the only thing that (to the best of my knowledge) wasn't hacked in one way or another. Oddly enough the one incident I do know of that had grades changed involved a student altering the marks on the grad submission piece of paper they were asked to bring to the main office.
Well the problem if you call it that is that intelligent people think rationally and long terms. It makes little sense in our society to have many kids as we cannot provide the best for each of them (education, time, etc, etc.) as to give them the best chance at success. Furthermore children provide no direct benefit to parents till they're in their late 20s at the earliest but have a substantial cost. The potential benefit (helping the parents when they grow old) is also highest the fewer children you have (each is likely to earn more thus have money to give to the parents).
In some ways the problem is that there is no really bad place in modern society, there is no starvation to prevent or counter this behaviors as there was in the past. Hell in some cases its better to have more kids even but in general there isn't enough disincentive for having many kids.
As it stands now society is favoring, genetically, those who are poor, superstitious and don't plan ahead. I would guess that there is some genetic component to these, likely indirectly by other less than socially desirable inclinations. The rich you see, who by our social standards are the unsuccessful ones thus by your logic have better genes, do not reproduce as much.
Under the keyboard? That's a rarity, mostly they seem to be stuck to the monitor.
There are apparently very inexpensive license of MS products for some classes of non-profit organizations.
I fully agree with that, the same holds for the other software (even R despite it's wide usage in academia) sells for large amounts of money a reason (SAS for example is I think $15k per commercial license). Still the people who really need Photoshop or the other software are a niche so teaching on it is pointless to most students.
China has a lower population growth rate and birth rate than the US.
That's more than this thing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat_126p had and that didn't have trouble hauling 3 people + roof filled with stuff hundreds of kilometers. Heck they can just remake that that or another cheap soviet car and help put a dent in the population growth as a byproduct (sell large trucks to half the population and death traps on wheels to the other half then stand back).
My public blogs are free, my private e-newsletters are not, even though I allow people to forward them to others (and many do). My reader base increases still, even though I freely let people share all my writings, even republish them as their own. There are massive difference between something being done in a limited regard on a small scale catering to a supportive market and it begin done at a large scale. All someone needs to do is subscribe to all popular writers then republish the content on a website for free, maybe giving credit if they are generous. Heck, soon someone would make a firefox extension that automatically goes to a free version when a subscription only page is reached.
Modern society is not altruistic enough to support such a model at large scale, implying to them that the content is worthless (remember that to people free == less valuable) only make it worse. If you mean W2 employees, I'll agree! If you can't sell your own labor yourself as a contractor, go get a job and you'll do fine and can basically ignore the whole issue of who owns your finished work. Even if you're not W2, let's say you're a writer. Unless your book is damn popular you will need to write books at a steady pace or your income will dry out, books don't continue to sell well indefinably. Even when they do unless you have income from many books with new ones being written to offset the decrease from older ones you won't continue to make money.
I mean instead of suspending them why the f*** don't you just get them to help you as punishment, make them the IT monkeys if you can judge them as sane enough for it. Warnings would be even more effective even for semi-serious offenses and they wouldn't resent you as much afterwards. My HS didn't even bother suspending students unless it was something really bad (attempting to change grades), they'd have had to suspend a quarter of the student body probably. Granted I don't think they realized (despite being competent and all that) just how many holes existed, the master student database got copied more than once (including by people who barely knew anything about computers but by luck got access to the right machine) and the unix passwd file was copied every other week (and half of it got cracked at least). I know a lot of people would have been laughing their asses of if someone got suspended for using a proxy while they were merrily looking up passwords for school administrators.
It's called investment, if spending 10 hours to save 100s of hours of work in the future isn't considered "working smart" by you then you're simply lazy. It was much easier to send out 3-4 resumes and get a job. It's even easier to work minimum wage at the local pizza joint. In fact, I didn't even have to send out a resume, I was doing some contract work on the side while in school and I caught the eye of a company and they came straight to me and offered me a job. While my professors at university while acknowledging that I had extraordinary talent and was smart, continually said "no you can't advance faster than X". *shrug* Not my fault if you can't find the right professor or properly argue your point. My HS principal said to my face that I shouldn't be graduating (due to some BS about how no one ever graduates early from that school) but he couldn't stop me (he'd already signed the paperwork and I've secretly made sure to meet all the reqs). If you accept what someone says then you've already lost, you need to fight for what you want. Besides the fact that every application I ever filled out had an application fee (usually 200-300 bucks) and suddenly filling out 100 applications becomes completely impossible, much less thousands. Only apps I ever had to pay for were college apps and standardized tests (AP, SAT, etc.). The rest was free. The schools I went to were not crappy, my high school was listed in the top 100 high schools in the country while I was there, the university I attended while not Ivy league is the top school in the state, and certainly in the top 5 in the region (Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Idaho, Arizona). When you picked colleges did you try to find one that was accommodating to gifted students? Did you email a dozen professors before hand to see if any were interested in doing research with you when you got there? On pre-admit weekend did you do all the BS activities or did you meet with professors?
If you expect things to be handed to you on a silver plate then that's your shortcoming not the worlds. You will get screwed over at some point and have no idea what to do. School is just 100% about becoming a drone and following the herd. People who get out of line are punished. Unless you have lots of connections, or the time, money, and energy to pester the institution for months on end you aren't going to get anywhere. If you don't want to fight for what you believe in then you are a sheep even if you don't notice it yourself. God knows I learned more from fighting against my middle and high school administrators then I did from anything else in life.
Likewise since that is the system in place, it has been in place for over 200 years and there isn't that much flooding what exactly is your point anyway?
Wow, I've actually managed to make a name for myself.
If you've paid attention you'd have noticed that I don't support these systems but rather simply find most conspiracies silly in general. I find it stupid to attribute things to massive complex conspiracies when simpler answers exist. Likewise I find it even more stupid to attribute it to a cause that cannot be fought (such a conspiracy would by definition be intelligent enough to stop any counter-effort) when other causes imho much more plausible causes exist that can be fought.
The insults are there for my own entertainment and stress relief.
Also, I am somewhat confrontational and devil's advocate-ish in these debates as I mostly find it more educational. After all, how can you find the validity of a position except by questioning flaws in it and arguing against it? I don't do this on purpose but I simply point out flaws in any argument (that I see) even if I support that position (yes, I'll argue against my own position if the poster I'm replying to said something silly).
You've managed to attribute to some concisions conspiracy of mine what is in reality due to nothing of the kind (I don't much consider my posting history, I just post in whatever way I find rational). In other words, thank you for illustrating why conspiracy theories are so silly.
Of course personal rights are being eroded, I find that a sadly inherent consequence of our current society and its direction. My only point is that saying it is a conspiracy is stupid to me, if you don't identify the true reason for something then how can you fight it? I mean if its a grand conspiracy then the only solution is a civil war and anarchy. If those in power are capable of this much organization nothing else would work as they'd easily figure it out.
On the other hand if its due to stupidity, ignorance and greed then other solutions are possible.
My point was that voters are irrelevant for laws that break the bill of rights or constitution. Thats the whole point of those things, they're there so it doesn't matter if you can convince the voters to support a bill since the courts will strike it down anyway. Checks and balances.
As for conspiracies, I believe in small scale short term greed and stupidity causing large scale long term effects (when combined that is). I don't disagree with behind the scenes actions or anything like that but the person I replied to seemed to imply a downright massive conspiracy.