As someone who doesn't seem to know the difference between 'now' and 'to know', you give quite an impression of lacking the required education for saying anything meaningfull about this.
I think the solution for an OS level concurrency model with ostensibly single threaded applications is to read all of the instructions in one pass, building a matrix that identifies which instructions touch which memory locations. Where there is no conflict, you can safely partition those parts of the code at the low level out of hand.
Modern CPUs already do this at the assembler or micro operation level. Making this kind of thing explicit seems to be one of the ideas behind the Ithanium and similar CPU designs. When doing this in say a virtual machine, you can go quite a bit further, and achieve something similar to what you describe on the OS level.
Of course, the algorithm to handle this would be far more complex to get more efficiency out of it - perhaps identifying portions of code that could be handled via resource locking etc. These bundles of instructions would be wrapped by the OS to perform as individual threads within the framework of the modified executable in memory to get the most benefit from this approach. As I've stated before (and Amdahl's law implies), some things are just serial - you can't chop them into pieces - those parts of the program would remain serial; beyond a certain percentage of these serial elements, and the OS would simply run it as a single thread - diminishing returns...
Well, one (somewhat limited) attempt at such an environment that I am aware of is DGD/MP by Dworkin (http://www.dworkin.nl/dgd).
The problem in the end is that 'hand crafting' parallelism is difficult and expensive, and actually also error-prone due to the complexity. That means that from a developmet perspective, this kind of solution works well. It results in relatively efficient and reliable execution that supports some level of concurency. If you are willing to go to the expense of hand-crafting the concurency, and are capable of doing the design and implementation of it, the end result is bound to be better however when executed.
I use asterisk connected to a BRI. Lots of fun, and pretty convenient.
I have cheap international calls from my landline, and free calls to my landline from my cellphone.. hence I have cheap international calls from my cellphone (thanks to having 2 channels on a BRI isdn line)
I'm often abroad (my girlfriend lives in a different country), and I can use my landline from there with help of a voip client
Forwarding telemarketers to some nice voice response (aka telemarketer torture) script is another 'fun' application of it indeed.
Wondering how well voip is going to work over UMTS once I get a reasonably priced unlimited plan for that.
The weakness of the architecture is that the component handling any one message queue is automatically single threaded and tied to a single processor. Which is OK for 2 or four processor systems but in 16 or 34 processor systems 12 or 30 of your processors are wasted.
Why should a message queue tie up an entire cpu? Sure, you want to prevent the situation where the message that is currently posted to the queue gets read before the posting is finished, but for the rest message passing can be lockless, and doesn't need to be single threaded either as long as you prevent that condition.
The alternative is fine-grained locking and critical sections. That one scales badly to large numbers of cpus as well as being rather complex to implement (think about how easy it is to mess up locking order for example)
Now, I'm not saying MS got their message passing implementation right, I simply don't know enough to judge that either way, but it doesn't have to be as bad as you describe.
Why bother talking about multi core supporting operating systems when we still haven't embraced 64-bit technology yet. Why bother pushing for a new technology when the current 'new' technology hasn't even been implemented yet.
Maybe because they are different solutions solving a different set of problems?
Concurrent programming today will be the 'Assembly Language' of tomorrow. Everyone knows about it, but rarely if ever use it.
Agreed.
Developers should be focusing on makeing an application that works well; concurrency makes that much more difficult.
An application that makes good use of concurrancy works better from almost any perspective I can think of. Its more difficult to make, sure.
At some point we'll reach a cut off where the added instability of the code will not justify concurrency inside of an application (and I know I don't want every application built to have to conform to concurrency - because the skills to do that consistently well are not consistently in the marketplace). I see two things happening: we'll continue happily along using interprocess communication with multiple applications - letting the OS assign processes to individual CPUs, or the OS will become smart enough to multithread the application at a lower level of abstraction (or both).
Yes, but doing that requires knowledge of potential conflicts within the application, and without some thorough thought and some way to indicate those conflicts to the OS, its not going to work.
Matter of fact is that you have to put in that thought regardless of what solution for concurrency you use.
And by the way, concurrency is not a 'one time process'. Every new application will have to be sliced up logically - which data is global and requires locking? Which data is local to the thread? Is it even feasible to parallelize the application?
For a single application that is a one time process, as opposed to running said application.
That is not a cookie cutter process, except for the most trivial applications (which few will use anyway). Then there is Amdahl's Law, which essentially states that the more serialized a process is, the less benefit you get from a concurrent approach.
I never said it is easy, I know it isn't. I wrote my first multithreaded code in the mid 80s, and while I am no longer workign as a developer, I have some 15 years of development experience, including OS development (OS/2). The issue is that in many cases, the benefit from proper use of concurency is huge, and makes that the application is better scalable and has a better lifetime.
It is not easy, or simple - so get that right out of your head. Developers, as a group, can't do the simple stuff well, and you want them to abandon everything that works now in the name of concurrency? Insanity!
I want them to grow with what technology has to offer. If after many decades, concurency is still out of the pcture for most developers, they should go look for another job and leave their current one to more capable people.
As an application developer, one of the biggest problems I've encountered in developing multi-threaded applications is the ability to easily control what can run concurrently, and what can't. I have almost no ability to tell the operating system which threads I want to run concurrently, and which I want it to time-share.
But you can even in most of the more primitive threading models.
All it takes is having a resource and a lock...
If there is anything that really annoys me as an administrator and 'power' user, it is those developers who think they know better what else is happening on my machine then the OS or me as its admin. This is why resource based decisions on concurency are strongly prefered over the developer being able to enable/disable concurency at a whim. Sure, it forces you as a developer to think a lot more about it, but know what, that is a one time process. The consequences of not putting in that thought occur everytime the program is used.
Its not so much about features, but about calling something 'home', and most people not being inclined to drop whatever they decided to call 'home' that easily.
And since there is nothing wrong with saying so when you disagree with a policy, and trying to get a policy changed in a direction you like more, I fail to see the point of your posts at all.
If you don't like people doing that, there is nothing forcing you to listen to them.
What you are advocating however is a 'shut up and move on' attitude, which usually doesn't get one very far at all.
Unfortunately, there are others who don't care. And it's important for all individuals to understand that this is a possibility if they they do not provide for themselves.
Well, it is also a possibility when people provide for themselves with disregard for the needs of others.
In cases where it is impossible for a large enough group to provide, they will eventually revolt, but it's better to be active politically before it comes to that.
The thing is that most of the advantage humans have over other animals comes from what humans can do as a group, not so much from what they can do as individuals. Economics of scale also make it a lot easier to have a group provide for itself then having individuals provide for itself.
Hence, while you are ultimately responsible for yourself, and noone else is, striving for a society where everyone can have their basic needs forfilled requires striving for the group to provide for the group. You can strive for equal oppertunity for everyone, you can strive for enough food for everyone, but you can't force me to eat, or to work for and obtain my share, that is my own responsibility.
In older times, the king owned everything, yet there weren't long lines outside the castle of people waiting to get anally raped for their supper, and we all know what wonderful people royalty were/are
Some were good, some were bad. A system of absolute monarchy does not offer protectin against those who are bad, and no encouragement to those who are good, the system is in fact completely neutral with regards to that.
The effect however is that many bad absolute monarchs have existed, and that gave the whole thing a bad name.
An anarcho-capitalist system such as many hardcore libertarians advocate is in itself also neutral to the behavior of people, it doesn't deal with the bad, neither does it encourage the good.
If you go back to the absolute monarchy system, it is easy to see why it brought as many bad things as it did, it is a consequence of human nature and a system refusing to take that nature into account for the benefit of the people living under it.
The anarcho-capitalist syste makes the exact same mistake, and is a bad idea because of that.
, so it wasn't because the king felt their pain.
In fact some did, but that had nothing whatsoever to do with the system and everything with their personality. Matter of fact is that those were (and are) the exceptions. There is absolutely no reason to assume that this has all of a sudden changed now.
In addition, you are assuming that being anally raped is beneficial to you. I don't want to question your sexuality (hey, that's your business), but personally, I don't think that getting ass-slammed for food is beneficial.
If the alternative is no food, then it is an easy choice really.
As an aside, how did you come by having nothing, unless the government took it away from you, in the first place?
...and given that life inherently requires sex for its inception, any "non-thinker" would be foolish to exclude a right to sex. And given that women typically look at guys without the means to support themselves as losers, that also means a "right to wealth" is needed in order to propagate the "right to sex". That or send people to Thailand and pay for it via a government subsidy.
Of course you can take about any argument and pursue it into absurdity, doesn't mean that it was what I was saying.
Hell, you might even win election with a platform like that, even if it is as ridiculous as the the "right to food" and the "right to shelter".
That you can't see the difference between your argument and the 'right to food' for example is telling for you and a good indication of why I can't be bothered to take you serious as a 'thinker'.
How about a novel idea -- equal opportunity not equal outcome?
How about the fact that history shows again and again that equal oppertunity requires a level of coercion because there are always individuals who think you should not have an equal oppertunity?
How about the idea that ensuring everyone in your society CAN obtain food actuallty being equal oppertunity and not equal outcome? Equal outcome would be forcing everyone to eat the same amounts, which is not what anyone has been arguing in this discussion.
So you mean to tell me that there aren't any people living in "rather primitive and generally not too nice conditions" with the full benefit of centralized government?!?
There definitely are. They also without exception live in places where said government isn't working very well if at all.
On top of that, compared to the 'no government at all' situation, there is a much bigger part of the people not living in such circumstances now exactly due to the existance of centralized government.
Last but not least, please go learn to make a proper argument.
In fact, one can very easily make the argument that, historically, the societies that have the highest standards of living are precisely those that have the least amount of government involvment.
You could, but the only thing you prove with it is that you are stupidly ignorant of human history.
Secondly, if government is such a wonderful mechanism to achieve everything that we want, then why is it always mandatory? There is nothing in the ideology of libertarianism that states that people can't form voluntary alliances. You can't say the same for those people who don't want the government's "help".
If you don't like your government, go live somewhere else. The few places on the planet without a government aren't very attractive to live in of course, but maybe, just maybe that has some kind of reason related to my earlier post, and it is yet another reason why people like you are considered stupidly ignorant. The proof of your extremist libertarian ideas not working is really out there and it is extremely obvious if only you stop refusing to see it.
It does not mean that we are required to feed, cloth or shelter you. Doing those things would be a moral, just and nice thing to do, but not doing them is not depriving anyone of the right to live.
It does mean that you are required to strive for a society where everyone can at least have those things however. No, you are not personally required to provide me with them, but striving for a society that is extremely likely to deny those to part of its members IS denying people the right to life.
The difference is subtle, and maybe difficult to grasp for those who prefer to think in simple solutions, but then, the world isn't exactly simple.
Adding 2 meaningless options doesn't make your answer less simplistic.
If you are so interested in voluntarely interaction between people, it might be a good idea to not think that everyone who has his own ideas (that might be different from yours) is by definition stupid, else you are just arguing everyone should be like you, and this whole voluntary interaction thing becomes pretty meaningless.
Something else, untill the invention of centralized government, humanity was stuck living in rather primitive and generally not to nice conditions. Government is the answer to a number of problems. That said, there is quite some discussion possible about what those problems are, and it should be clear that where it isn't the right answer, it shouldn't be used. You can also discuss how to optimize government so it works best. Believing that government is by definition evil and not needed however is showing gross ignorance of human (pre)history.
You should really think about differentiating between "rights" like (life, speech, etc), and consumer products.
Good call.
Given that life at least requires food, and according to many, also clothing and shelter. having a right to life implies having a right to those things as well.
That sets them apart from whatever_you_want
Hence. maybe you should follow your own advice before starting to sound like a fanatical non-thinker.
In the old days, artists had patrons who paid/supported their endeavors -- both parties benefitted from such arrangements.
In the old days concepts like vacation, spare time and such were unheard of.
Many people in todays world have enough spare time besides their job to ceate art without having to "starve". What is more, there are many who do, and the quality of their art is not seldom above the quality of commercial "art".
Many artists make use of the works of those who came before them, either as source of inspiration, or by deriving from it.
Many modern stories are created that way, which could not have happened if the original works were still covered by copyright.
Since the purpose of copyright is to promote art, perpertual copyright directly conflicts with the one single part of the US constitution that allows for it, and it conflicts with the entire reason for copyright to exist.
This doesn't mean I think copyright itself is a bad idea, rather not. I do however think it serves its purpose best when giving the artist time to gain something while not lasting so long that the work is not going to be part of the public domain.
Just imagine having to find back the current heirs of the person who wrote something 500 years ago that you want to derive from.
First of all, this is impossible in many cases Second, those heris did not create the work and do not deserve compensation for anything. They already inherited whatever 'fortune' the original artist might have made with the work.
1. When you do something wrong by accident, an appology to the person who incured damage due to this is THE LEAST you should offer. 2. Money was made from those pictures. Offering the person who created them at least some kind of compensation would be in order.
The initial response seems to have failed at least on the second one, and an indirect appology isn't a good waz of dealing with problem 1.
An art printing company should really be aware that photographers are just people, usually quite creative people also, and people with feelings. Besides the economic damage, there is also emotional damage.
We took legal advice, they told us say nothing more than we had, not recommending we contact the claimant and tell her what had happened, by the way we were very keen to do that, but we were told to avoid all contact.
Well, seems that caused some quite bad publicity, and in tis case it turns out to be bad advice really.
What it does is create an impression of not caring. It is a really good idea to tell lawyers what you want to accomplish, if you don't then they will set the agenda, and that will not always bein your advantage.
In the meantime we started our own investigation into the above company's contacts and sources but have since found nothing more because the telephone doesn't get answered, mobiles are permanently off and emails are getting bounced back, it seems we were conned too.
Interesting. I have a small business and whenever I get to deal with a customer spending a few thousand euros, they insist on seeing a government provided ID (passport is usually demanded) and will register its number. Not foolproof (since fake IDs do exist) but it makes it quite a bit easier to find back con artists and the like.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, English is my third language. How many languages do you speak?
Dutch, German and English, Dutch being my native language.
As someone who doesn't seem to know the difference between 'now' and 'to know', you give quite an impression of lacking the required education for saying anything meaningfull about this.
I think the solution for an OS level concurrency model with ostensibly single threaded applications is to read all of the instructions in one pass, building a matrix that identifies which instructions touch which memory locations. Where there is no conflict, you can safely partition those parts of the code at the low level out of hand.
Modern CPUs already do this at the assembler or micro operation level. Making this kind of thing explicit seems to be one of the ideas behind the Ithanium and similar CPU designs. When doing this in say a virtual machine, you can go quite a bit further, and achieve something similar to what you describe on the OS level.
Of course, the algorithm to handle this would be far more complex to get more efficiency out of it - perhaps identifying portions of code that could be handled via resource locking etc. These bundles of instructions would be wrapped by the OS to perform as individual threads within the framework of the modified executable in memory to get the most benefit from this approach. As I've stated before (and Amdahl's law implies), some things are just serial - you can't chop them into pieces - those parts of the program would remain serial; beyond a certain percentage of these serial elements, and the OS would simply run it as a single thread - diminishing returns...
Well, one (somewhat limited) attempt at such an environment that I am aware of is DGD/MP by Dworkin (http://www.dworkin.nl/dgd).
The problem in the end is that 'hand crafting' parallelism is difficult and expensive, and actually also error-prone due to the complexity. That means that from a developmet perspective, this kind of solution works well. It results in relatively efficient and reliable execution that supports some level of concurency. If you are willing to go to the expense of hand-crafting the concurency, and are capable of doing the design and implementation of it, the end result is bound to be better however when executed.
I use asterisk connected to a BRI. Lots of fun, and pretty convenient.
I have cheap international calls from my landline, and free calls to my landline from my cellphone.. hence I have cheap international calls from my cellphone (thanks to having 2 channels on a BRI isdn line)
I'm often abroad (my girlfriend lives in a different country), and I can use my landline from there with help of a voip client
Forwarding telemarketers to some nice voice response (aka telemarketer torture) script is another 'fun' application of it indeed.
Wondering how well voip is going to work over UMTS once I get a reasonably priced unlimited plan for that.
The weakness of the architecture is that the component handling any one
message queue is automatically single threaded and tied to a single processor.
Which is OK for 2 or four processor systems but in 16 or 34 processor
systems 12 or 30 of your processors are wasted.
Why should a message queue tie up an entire cpu?
Sure, you want to prevent the situation where the message that is currently posted to the queue gets read before the posting is finished, but for the rest message passing can be lockless, and doesn't need to be single threaded either as long as you prevent that condition.
The alternative is fine-grained locking and critical sections. That one scales badly to large numbers of cpus as well as being rather complex to implement (think about how easy it is to mess up locking order for example)
Now, I'm not saying MS got their message passing implementation right, I simply don't know enough to judge that either way, but it doesn't have to be as bad as you describe.
Why bother talking about multi core supporting operating systems when we still haven't embraced 64-bit technology yet. Why bother pushing for a new technology when the current 'new' technology hasn't even been implemented yet.
Maybe because they are different solutions solving a different set of problems?
Concurrent programming today will be the 'Assembly Language' of tomorrow. Everyone knows about it, but rarely if ever use it.
Agreed.
Developers should be focusing on makeing an application that works well; concurrency makes that much more difficult.
An application that makes good use of concurrancy works better from almost any perspective I can think of. Its more difficult to make, sure.
At some point we'll reach a cut off where the added instability of the code will not justify concurrency inside of an application (and I know I don't want every application built to have to conform to concurrency - because the skills to do that consistently well are not consistently in the marketplace). I see two things happening: we'll continue happily along using interprocess communication with multiple applications - letting the OS assign processes to individual CPUs, or the OS will become smart enough to multithread the application at a lower level of abstraction (or both).
Yes, but doing that requires knowledge of potential conflicts within the application, and without some thorough thought and some way to indicate those conflicts to the OS, its not going to work.
Matter of fact is that you have to put in that thought regardless of what solution for concurrency you use.
And by the way, concurrency is not a 'one time process'. Every new application will have to be sliced up logically - which data is global and requires locking? Which data is local to the thread? Is it even feasible to parallelize the application?
For a single application that is a one time process, as opposed to running said application.
That is not a cookie cutter process, except for the most trivial applications (which few will use anyway). Then there is Amdahl's Law, which essentially states that the more serialized a process is, the less benefit you get from a concurrent approach.
I never said it is easy, I know it isn't. I wrote my first multithreaded code in the mid 80s, and while I am no longer workign as a developer, I have some 15 years of development experience, including OS development (OS/2). The issue is that in many cases, the benefit from proper use of concurency is huge, and makes that the application is better scalable and has a better lifetime.
It is not easy, or simple - so get that right out of your head. Developers, as a group, can't do the simple stuff well, and you want them to abandon everything that works now in the name of concurrency? Insanity!
I want them to grow with what technology has to offer. If after many decades, concurency is still out of the pcture for most developers, they should go look for another job and leave their current one to more capable people.
As an application developer, one of the biggest problems I've encountered in developing multi-threaded applications is the ability to easily control what can run concurrently, and what can't. I have almost no ability to tell the operating system which threads I want to run concurrently, and which I want it to time-share.
But you can even in most of the more primitive threading models.
All it takes is having a resource and a lock...
If there is anything that really annoys me as an administrator and 'power' user, it is those developers who think they know better what else is happening on my machine then the OS or me as its admin. This is why resource based decisions on concurency are strongly prefered over the developer being able to enable/disable concurency at a whim. Sure, it forces you as a developer to think a lot more about it, but know what, that is a one time process. The consequences of not putting in that thought occur everytime the program is used.
Its not so much about features, but about calling something 'home', and most people not being inclined to drop whatever they decided to call 'home' that easily.
And since there is nothing wrong with saying so when you disagree with a policy, and trying to get a policy changed in a direction you like more, I fail to see the point of your posts at all.
If you don't like people doing that, there is nothing forcing you to listen to them.
What you are advocating however is a 'shut up and move on' attitude, which usually doesn't get one very far at all.
Blahblahblah
You know what, people don't like what LJ does and talk about it. If you are not interested, don't read it.
Unfortunately, there are others who don't care. And it's important for all individuals to understand that this is a possibility if they they do not provide for themselves.
Well, it is also a possibility when people provide for themselves with disregard for the needs of others.
In cases where it is impossible for a large enough group to provide, they will eventually revolt, but it's better to be active politically before it comes to that.
The thing is that most of the advantage humans have over other animals comes from what humans can do as a group, not so much from what they can do as individuals. Economics of scale also make it a lot easier to have a group provide for itself then having individuals provide for itself.
Hence, while you are ultimately responsible for yourself, and noone else is, striving for a society where everyone can have their basic needs forfilled requires striving for the group to provide for the group. You can strive for equal oppertunity for everyone, you can strive for enough food for everyone, but you can't force me to eat, or to work for and obtain my share, that is my own responsibility.
In older times, the king owned everything, yet there weren't long lines outside the castle of people waiting to get anally raped for their supper, and we all know what wonderful people royalty were/are
Some were good, some were bad. A system of absolute monarchy does not offer protectin against those who are bad, and no encouragement to those who are good, the system is in fact completely neutral with regards to that.
The effect however is that many bad absolute monarchs have existed, and that gave the whole thing a bad name.
An anarcho-capitalist system such as many hardcore libertarians advocate is in itself also neutral to the behavior of people, it doesn't deal with the bad, neither does it encourage the good.
If you go back to the absolute monarchy system, it is easy to see why it brought as many bad things as it did, it is a consequence of human nature and a system refusing to take that nature into account for the benefit of the people living under it.
The anarcho-capitalist syste makes the exact same mistake, and is a bad idea because of that.
, so it wasn't because the king felt their pain.
In fact some did, but that had nothing whatsoever to do with the system and everything with their personality. Matter of fact is that those were (and are) the exceptions. There is absolutely no reason to assume that this has all of a sudden changed now.
In addition, you are assuming that being anally raped is beneficial to you. I don't want to question your sexuality (hey, that's your business), but personally, I don't think that getting ass-slammed for food is beneficial.
If the alternative is no food, then it is an easy choice really.
As an aside, how did you come by having nothing, unless the government took it away from you, in the first place?
You are born without anything, plain and simple.
...and given that life inherently requires sex for its inception, any "non-thinker" would be foolish to exclude a right to sex. And given that women typically look at guys without the means to support themselves as losers, that also means a "right to wealth" is needed in order to propagate the "right to sex". That or send people to Thailand and pay for it via a government subsidy.
Of course you can take about any argument and pursue it into absurdity, doesn't mean that it was what I was saying.
Hell, you might even win election with a platform like that, even if it is as ridiculous as the the "right to food" and the "right to shelter".
That you can't see the difference between your argument and the 'right to food' for example is telling for you and a good indication of why I can't be bothered to take you serious as a 'thinker'.
How about a novel idea -- equal opportunity not equal outcome?
How about the fact that history shows again and again that equal oppertunity requires a level of coercion because there are always individuals who think you should not have an equal oppertunity?
How about the idea that ensuring everyone in your society CAN obtain food actuallty being equal oppertunity and not equal outcome?
Equal outcome would be forcing everyone to eat the same amounts, which is not what anyone has been arguing in this discussion.
It is the solution for all cases where something is highly desirable but not economically viable.
[My parent comment to you] WOOOOOSH
It was intended as a jest to compliment the offensive politically decisive parents posts.
Sigh. well, at least I have the excuse that there are nutcases who would have made such a comment in all seriousness. Sorry for missing the joke.
So you mean to tell me that there aren't any people living in "rather primitive and generally not too nice conditions" with the full benefit of centralized government?!?
There definitely are. They also without exception live in places where said government isn't working very well if at all.
On top of that, compared to the 'no government at all' situation, there is a much bigger part of the people not living in such circumstances now exactly due to the existance of centralized government.
Last but not least, please go learn to make a proper argument.
In fact, one can very easily make the argument that, historically, the societies that have the highest standards of living are precisely those that have the least amount of government involvment.
You could, but the only thing you prove with it is that you are stupidly ignorant of human history.
Secondly, if government is such a wonderful mechanism to achieve everything that we want, then why is it always mandatory? There is nothing in the ideology of libertarianism that states that people can't form voluntary alliances. You can't say the same for those people who don't want the government's "help".
If you don't like your government, go live somewhere else.
The few places on the planet without a government aren't very attractive to live in of course, but maybe, just maybe that has some kind of reason related to my earlier post, and it is yet another reason why people like you are considered stupidly ignorant. The proof of your extremist libertarian ideas not working is really out there and it is extremely obvious if only you stop refusing to see it.
It does not mean that we are required to feed, cloth or shelter you. Doing those things would be a moral, just and nice thing to do, but not doing them is not depriving anyone of the right to live.
It does mean that you are required to strive for a society where everyone can at least have those things however. No, you are not personally required to provide me with them, but striving for a society that is extremely likely to deny those to part of its members IS denying people the right to life.
The difference is subtle, and maybe difficult to grasp for those who prefer to think in simple solutions, but then, the world isn't exactly simple.
Adding 2 meaningless options doesn't make your answer less simplistic.
If you are so interested in voluntarely interaction between people, it might be a good idea to not think that everyone who has his own ideas (that might be different from yours) is by definition stupid, else you are just arguing everyone should be like you, and this whole voluntary interaction thing becomes pretty meaningless.
Something else, untill the invention of centralized government, humanity was stuck living in rather primitive and generally not to nice conditions. Government is the answer to a number of problems. That said, there is quite some discussion possible about what those problems are, and it should be clear that where it isn't the right answer, it shouldn't be used. You can also discuss how to optimize government so it works best. Believing that government is by definition evil and not needed however is showing gross ignorance of human (pre)history.
You should really think about differentiating between "rights" like (life, speech, etc), and consumer products.
Good call.
Given that life at least requires food, and according to many, also clothing and shelter. having a right to life implies having a right to those things as well.
That sets them apart from whatever_you_want
Hence. maybe you should follow your own advice before starting to sound like a fanatical non-thinker.
Natural selection doesn't work according to your concepts of "weak". Would you regard Stephen Hawking as an asset or a burden to our society?
Which was pretty much impossible to tell when he was born and in the first years of his life.
The Nazis were keen practioners of eugenics, promoting the strong and removing the weak. It didn't help their long-term survival, did it?
Those two have absolutely zero to do with eachother, not to mention that nazism is still alive
In the old days, artists had patrons who paid/supported their endeavors -- both parties benefitted from such arrangements.
In the old days concepts like vacation, spare time and such were unheard of.
Many people in todays world have enough spare time besides their job to ceate art without having to "starve". What is more, there are many who do, and the quality of their art is not seldom above the quality of commercial "art".
Many artists make use of the works of those who came before them, either as source of inspiration, or by deriving from it.
Many modern stories are created that way, which could not have happened if the original works were still covered by copyright.
Since the purpose of copyright is to promote art, perpertual copyright directly conflicts with the one single part of the US constitution that allows for it, and it conflicts with the entire reason for copyright to exist.
This doesn't mean I think copyright itself is a bad idea, rather not. I do however think it serves its purpose best when giving the artist time to gain something while not lasting so long that the work is not going to be part of the public domain.
Just imagine having to find back the current heirs of the person who wrote something 500 years ago that you want to derive from.
First of all, this is impossible in many cases
Second, those heris did not create the work and do not deserve compensation for anything. They already inherited whatever 'fortune' the original artist might have made with the work.
There are two problems here:
1. When you do something wrong by accident, an appology to the person who incured damage due to this is THE LEAST you should offer.
2. Money was made from those pictures. Offering the person who created them at least some kind of compensation would be in order.
The initial response seems to have failed at least on the second one, and an indirect appology isn't a good waz of dealing with problem 1.
An art printing company should really be aware that photographers are just people, usually quite creative people also, and people with feelings. Besides the economic damage, there is also emotional damage.
We took legal advice, they told us say nothing more than we had, not recommending we contact the claimant and tell her what had happened, by the way we were very keen to do that, but we were told to avoid all contact.
Well, seems that caused some quite bad publicity, and in tis case it turns out to be bad advice really.
What it does is create an impression of not caring. It is a really good idea to tell lawyers what you want to accomplish, if you don't then they will set the agenda, and that will not always bein your advantage.
In the meantime we started our own investigation into the above company's contacts and sources but have since found nothing more because the telephone doesn't get answered, mobiles are permanently off and emails are getting bounced back, it seems we were conned too.
Interesting. I have a small business and whenever I get to deal with a customer spending a few thousand euros, they insist on seeing a government provided ID (passport is usually demanded) and will register its number. Not foolproof (since fake IDs do exist) but it makes it quite a bit easier to find back con artists and the like.
Well, as far as I know, it's not the artists the ones making all the fuss...
In this case it would be the song writers making a fuss. They do by means of an organisation acting as their agent.
I think it's unfair to demand people to share your own personal biases and tastes.
Just as it is unfair to force your personal taste or its consequences on someone else.
In other words, go piss yourself off and have a lot of fun doing so.