The funny thing is, what would be a "threat to intellectual property" (in other words, the right to own an idea) is the outlawing of open source. If something is my property, I can do what I want with it. If what I happen to choose to do with it is allow others to look at it and modify it under certain conditions, I have a right to do that with my property if I own it.
Restricting that right threatens intellectual property a hell of a lot more than someone who happens not to make money on a piece of software.
There's a board game called Settlers of Catan which I think would be more appropriate to test on business and econ majors, because the game itself is economic (rather than military such as freeciv and starcraft). Each player controls settlements on an island, and each of these settlements produces resources. Combinations of these resources can be spent on new settlements, or spent upgrading your old settlements. The object of the game is to build the largest empire. Accumulating these combinations of resources faster than your competitors requires shrewd strategy as well as trading with other players.
Each board is randomly generated at the beginning of each game, so each game is different; in one game, resource A might be very hard to find, and in the next everyone will want to trade it away. Refined strategies involve such things as cornering markets, specializing and trading, etc. Much more appropriate for a business major than a war game, don't you think?
...as long as it's not New Years Day. How would database software and the like account for a day that is not in any week or month? It's Naughtday, the 0th day of the 0th month? And you'd have to have two of the damn things every fourth year. If it were ancient times, and I were a god-emporer of my country, I might adopt such a system, and declare Naughtday to be devoted to alcoholic celebration or some such, but implementing this sort of thing today? Makes y2k look like a missing semicolon.
Why is it inappropriate, when it's much less expensive and more enforcable than your proposal
It's inappropriate because it goes beyond the rights granted by ownership of the air. It controls the use of metal and plastic that the car companies own, rather than the use of the air which the public owns.
And how is your policy more enforceable and less expensive? Pollution tests already take place, and people already have to register their cars in order to get license plates -- this simply adds another step to the process. And, it generates revenue via the fees charged. It can use that revenue to pay for the pollution testers, and spend the rest in other ways.
If the Public which owns the air decides it wants to charge poor people less for its use, well it can do that if it wants. That'll probably lessen the pollution prevention, it all depends on where priorities lie.
The point is, environmental protection needs to be limited to what the government is justified in protecting. And the government only has the right to use force to protect what it owns.
What you are talking about is a regulation regarding air pollution, and the atmosphere is one of my examples of necessarily public property. So in that case, some sort of government regulation is necessary.
I've never found much official Libertarian literature that says that any property is necessarily public, by the way, this is all me talking, not necessarily the party. I have a feeling though, that if any of them were ever elected they'd try to 'privatize the air', find that they can't, and act accordingly.
But the kind of regulation that you're talking about, where we force auto companies to have a certain average gas mileage, is inappropriate, and mandates that those companies produce this or that. A simpler, direct, and philosophically justified solution is the following.
If I drive a car, I use the air (public property) as an exhaust trash can. Since the public owns that air, it has the right to charge me for using it in that manner. So run my car through a pollution tester every year, and I get charged a fee proportional to how much crap I dump in the air. I'll then have an incentive to pollute less, so I'll want to buy cars that pollute less, and GM will want to sell cars that pollute less.
Pollution is an example of a socialized cost that is passed off to everyone else while the polluter has no incentive to clean up.
The reason why they have no such incentive, is because what they are polluting is public property. The Libertarian solution is to simply privatize as much of this property as possible, because people don't tend to pollute their own backyards.
Of course, some property is extremely difficult to privatize, such as the atmosphere or the oceans. While some may disagree, and the issue gets mired in a fair bit of philosophy here, where the property is necessarily public the government has a right to intervene, as a representative of The People.
Much of the regulation I'm talking about, however, has little to do with the maintenance of public property.
I'm a Libertarian, my absentee vote has already been cast for Harry Browne -- but I can't really say I dislike Ralph Nader himself. It seems to me that he decided to run for president on one singular crusade: to make government less corrupt. To get the corporate money out of government, and to get the government out of funding corporations. Not a bad ideal, as far as it goes.
But there's two big problems I have with Nader. The first is that he's with the Green Party. Let's examine a few Green Party ideals, all on display at their website.
"We support a sustainable society that utilizes resources in such a way that future generations will benefit and not suffer from the practices of our generation. To this end we must have agricultural practices that replenish the soil; move to an energy efficient economy; and live in ways that respect the integrity of natural systems."
How will a political party go about accomplishing this? By LAW. By FORCE. Laws telling you and your business what resources you can use and how you can use them. The amount of authority over property the Green Party proposes here was rivaled only during the height of communism.
"Social Justice", "Decentralization (of wealth)" and "Non-violence".
Anyone looking at the history of socialism, and the very nature of taxation, knows that no government program designed to promote "Social Justice" and the decentralization (== redistribution) of wealth can do so in a non-violent way.
The fact is, the Green Party's commitment to an economy-by-government-fiat makes tax-and-spend Republicrats look like anarchists.
The second problem I have, is that I see Nader's attempts at getting corporations out of government to be entirely wronghanded. The question that must be asked is, "Why do corporations influence government?" The obvious answer is, because it's profitable for them to do so. And the reason why it's profitable for them to do so is because our current government exerts an incredible amount of unconstitutional authority over the way people run their businesses. The corporation that doesn't lobby Congress, that doesn't contribute to Al Gore's political campaign, that doesn't offer a compromise of accepting a subsidy in exchange for a regulation, the company that doesn't do all those things Nader doesn't want them to do -- that company gets regulated into the ground by the EPA, the FDA, and a million other bureaucracies.
And guess who passes those laws, and creates those bureaucracies? Anti-corporatists just like Nader!
I like Nader's stance on the War on Drugs, and he makes some very good points on intellectual property. But the only way we're going to have a government free from corporate influence is to have a government that refuses to use its power of violence to benefit OR harm corporations.
And I'll bet you can guess which presidential candidate wants that kind of government.
This is, in fact, the inevitable consequence of the Federal Government being allowed to "fund" something it does not have the constitutional authority to directly control. As soon as that institution, in this case the school system, becomes dependent on that funding, the government can threaten to withdraw the funding if the school doesn't follow orders.
And voila, the federal government suddenly controls something it didn't and couldn't before. So when your presidential or congressional candidate promises to help pay for your state or local program, what he's really saying is that he wants to control it.
Since when is looking at the big picture Offtopic?
Clarke stressed that "propaganda is needed" to re-educate the public about the provisions of the bill and asked the House with help in promoting "the interests of this country's businesses when the time comes."
He actually called it propaganda... Here's something I'll frame in the form of a question because I don't want to think about the answer. Since the internet is global, won't they be spying on communications from outside Britain that just happen to pass through British routers?
Hmmmm.... $5 million? That sounds like a lot more money than Napster has made in its entire existence. I smell a silver lining for napster...smells like....sniff....a RAT.
snip I very much doubt that it will be stopped unless it receives major mainstream media coverage snip
But it WON'T. There are a lot more people out there than you'd think who are against the drug war, but you never hear of them (other than as a much of hippies) in mainstream media. In fact, if you think you'll EVER hear a pro-drug statement out of a major television network or newspaper, you're just wrong. Why?
Because the major networks and newspapers receive advertising revenue from the Partnership for a Drug-Free America. (read: the DEA) When a news outlet deals with a government bureaucracy, if it does anything to anger that agency, it can kiss the advertising revenue goodbye along with any interviews with or information from that bureau's personnel. You can read about that and a lot of other stuff here. No television station or newspaper will cross the DEA. It's up to us.
Perhaps their plan is to get the language into mainstream use, then in a few years, start asking for patent royalties... Judging from MS's other practices, it'll be easy for them to "make it in developers' best interests" to use C#.
So suppose my MS operating system goes down, and I have to delete data to get it back...is MS not liable for the loss of my software since their faulty code caused its destruction? Until Windows software fails to work on my current Win95 software, how they bundle their software means little to me from an OS perspective. Economically, making a product inconvenient to use simply makes it less desirable, and the only way that a product's quality can go down while its price goes up is with a monopoly. Monopolies invite competition, especially when they do this sort of thing, so if MS and Adobe and whoever else decides that they want their OS and Office software to be hardware-specific, they're just telling people, "Look! Our software sucks! Buy someone else's! We DARE you!"
Despite the logic to the contrary, I doubt this ruling will allow anti-piracy companies to take down ftp, irc, and cp. They're simply too widely used for other purposes to be taken away because of music piracy.
Of course, if this judge wants to be on solid legal ground, he has to make a distinction stating just why Napster is responsible for the actions of its users and, say, Microsoft is not.
Trying to state what distinction is myself would require be to both be a lawyer and know a lot more than I do about the inner workings of Napster software. So I can only speculate.
It could be that since Napster promises to regulate the actions of its users in terms of whether they violate copyrights, when it fails to do so (which happens 1000 times a second or so), that could constitute negligence.
This could also have a lot to do with the mp3.com ruling: since they don't have a license / contract / whatever to distribute music, even if both parties own the cd, napster isn't allowed to let them exchange mp3's from it. So now, even the 'archival purposes' loophole goes out the window for Napster, and any time anything copyrighted goes up, Napster is violating the law. If that's the case, and the RIAA could be on pretty solid legal ground here, it might be the end of the road for Napster.
Of course, the judge might have made the ruling because he just doesn't understand the first thing about how napster works.
How did Metallica track down all 300k+ users who shared their mp3's? (That sure is a lot.) The only information I ever provide to napster is a user-name, and an email address, that being anon@napster.com or something. Do they run a port-scan or something? Sure they know lots of user names, but suppose napster doesn't ban them -- do they have 300 thousand IP's logged? It makes me wonder how many napster users really thought they were anonymous.
Anyway, has anyone with more skillz than me tried to track down a napster user?
Okay, so I've tried all the American mirrors, and none have them have gotten me anywhere...ftp's won't accept anonymous logins or simply have an empty pub directory, and the http links are to the front pages of cnet and zdnet, which say nothing at all about BeOS. Free.be.com simply points back to their mirror list.
Here is the conclusion I am drawing: Be posted the links to mirrors before actually having the program ready for download.
Bad, bad Be.
Unless anyone has managed to find the file, in which case, post a working mirror please!!
I'm a total cryptograph novice, but did anyone else notice how the lower-case 's' looks almost exactly like the small-uppercase 's'? Are they the same character, maybe?
Maybe this is a minor thing. But I don't see any free speech troubles with a college banning Napster. Saying that my university is censoring me by denying me Napster is like saying that a book publisher is censoring me by choosing not to publish my book. It's not censorship; if I dial into another ISP from my dorm, I can use Napster.
However, couldn't the way that colleges are banning Napster be considered a breach of contract? Maybe I'm mistaken, but if I sign a contract to pay for services offered by the colleges, services including internet access, doesn't that mean that I am entitled to those services? Mid-semester, why can one party of the contract change "internet access" to "internet access, except for stuff that uses a lot of bandwidth, which we reserve the right to block whenever we want"?
Is there something in university internet access contracts that allows universities to do this? If not, then savenapster.com may have some real ammunition.
IANA Nutritionist, but I remember picking up from various sources a suspicion that all the vitamins and minerals are more effective when they are in their natural state; i.e., as part of a piece of broccoli. It probably has to do with absorption. I doubt that eating nothing but Doritos and multivitamins can really make you healthy, but that doesn't mean those Centrums are a crock.
There's only so many hours in the day
on
LonelyNet
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· Score: 1
Yawn. I cam sum up both these studies, and probably a thousand more on video games and television.
Whenever I do something, I don't do something else.
It's about opportunity cost. The hour I a day reading news pages, I could be talking to my family, studying, or doing half a billion things. But I don't want to. I want to rant on slashdot. Is that so frightening? The internet is an interesting place (and especially time-consuming if you're on a modem), and dogs take a large amount of attention and care. So you have to spend a few of your 24 allotted daily hours on them, if you're going to spend any at all. That's a few less hours you could spend doing other things. "Other things" include social interaction.
The analog sticks are tough to get used to because they're so loose, but the idea is that they let you point yourself in any direction (not just one of 8) and with variable magnitudes in that direction (as opposed to all or nothing.) They do have a purpose, and in some games (NOT fighting games) they are superior to a directional pad. Think polar coordinates, if you've been exposed to them...
The main flaws I've seen with the DC controllers is not as much the analog thingy, but:
-The triggers are poorly designed from a mechanical standpoint. You have to push them down a long way before anything happens, and they just feel like they're going to break at any moment. -The fact that there are only six buttons, so no px3 buttons as you said. -The angle at which a DC controller puts your hands is uncomfortable compared to the psx. It's like this: | | rather than this / \. Get it?
Fact is, if you could improve on the design and ergonomics of the psx controller, Sony would have done it for the psx2. But they didn't. Other than making them black, taht is.
The truth is, if the CCA had used really good, uncrackable encryption, this whole issue wouldn't have come up for years.
Suppose the MPAA made the DVD encryption weak on purpose?
Think about it. Suppose the MPAA, perhaps in conjunction with other companies, wants to achieve a state of oligopoly through formatting. Not just in DVD, but in all kinds of media. To do this, they would have to create a legal precedent that makes reverse engineering illegal. So they make an easy-to-decrypt format, DVD, and then when people crack it, they litigate their collective ass off in the name of stopping piracy, hoping that the judge can rule reverse engineering in general illegal.
Now here is the question I want answered: Is HDTV encrypted?
If it is, this could get real big, real nasty, and real profitable for the MPAA real fast. The scenario goes like this. The MPAA wins, reverse engineering of media encryption is banned internationally. Afterwards, HDTV sets drop in price, so that people besides the ultra-rich will actually buy them. Soon all the tv stations go HD, and HD-DVD's enter the market. Suddenly, to do ANYTHING with the new standard, high definition television: broadcast it, record it, produce movies for it, anything, you have to get a license, just like you do now to make a legitimate DVD player.
Slashdot Mirror
Restricting that right threatens intellectual property a hell of a lot more than someone who happens not to make money on a piece of software.
Each board is randomly generated at the beginning of each game, so each game is different; in one game, resource A might be very hard to find, and in the next everyone will want to trade it away. Refined strategies involve such things as cornering markets, specializing and trading, etc. Much more appropriate for a business major than a war game, don't you think?
...as long as it's not New Years Day. How would database software and the like account for a day that is not in any week or month? It's Naughtday, the 0th day of the 0th month? And you'd have to have two of the damn things every fourth year. If it were ancient times, and I were a god-emporer of my country, I might adopt such a system, and declare Naughtday to be devoted to alcoholic celebration or some such, but implementing this sort of thing today? Makes y2k look like a missing semicolon.
It's inappropriate because it goes beyond the rights granted by ownership of the air. It controls the use of metal and plastic that the car companies own, rather than the use of the air which the public owns.
And how is your policy more enforceable and less expensive? Pollution tests already take place, and people already have to register their cars in order to get license plates -- this simply adds another step to the process. And, it generates revenue via the fees charged. It can use that revenue to pay for the pollution testers, and spend the rest in other ways.
If the Public which owns the air decides it wants to charge poor people less for its use, well it can do that if it wants. That'll probably lessen the pollution prevention, it all depends on where priorities lie.
The point is, environmental protection needs to be limited to what the government is justified in protecting. And the government only has the right to use force to protect what it owns.
I've never found much official Libertarian literature that says that any property is necessarily public, by the way, this is all me talking, not necessarily the party. I have a feeling though, that if any of them were ever elected they'd try to 'privatize the air', find that they can't, and act accordingly.
But the kind of regulation that you're talking about, where we force auto companies to have a certain average gas mileage, is inappropriate, and mandates that those companies produce this or that. A simpler, direct, and philosophically justified solution is the following.
If I drive a car, I use the air (public property) as an exhaust trash can. Since the public owns that air, it has the right to charge me for using it in that manner. So run my car through a pollution tester every year, and I get charged a fee proportional to how much crap I dump in the air. I'll then have an incentive to pollute less, so I'll want to buy cars that pollute less, and GM will want to sell cars that pollute less.
The reason why they have no such incentive, is because what they are polluting is public property. The Libertarian solution is to simply privatize as much of this property as possible, because people don't tend to pollute their own backyards.
Of course, some property is extremely difficult to privatize, such as the atmosphere or the oceans. While some may disagree, and the issue gets mired in a fair bit of philosophy here, where the property is necessarily public the government has a right to intervene, as a representative of The People.
Much of the regulation I'm talking about, however, has little to do with the maintenance of public property.
But there's two big problems I have with Nader. The first is that he's with the Green Party. Let's examine a few Green Party ideals, all on display at their website.
"We support a sustainable society that utilizes resources in such a way that future generations will benefit and not suffer from the practices of our generation. To this end we must have agricultural practices that replenish the soil; move to an energy efficient economy; and live in ways that respect the integrity of natural systems."
How will a political party go about accomplishing this? By LAW. By FORCE. Laws telling you and your business what resources you can use and how you can use them. The amount of authority over property the Green Party proposes here was rivaled only during the height of communism.
"Social Justice", "Decentralization (of wealth)" and "Non-violence".
Anyone looking at the history of socialism, and the very nature of taxation, knows that no government program designed to promote "Social Justice" and the decentralization (== redistribution) of wealth can do so in a non-violent way.
The fact is, the Green Party's commitment to an economy-by-government-fiat makes tax-and-spend Republicrats look like anarchists.
The second problem I have, is that I see Nader's attempts at getting corporations out of government to be entirely wronghanded. The question that must be asked is, "Why do corporations influence government?" The obvious answer is, because it's profitable for them to do so. And the reason why it's profitable for them to do so is because our current government exerts an incredible amount of unconstitutional authority over the way people run their businesses. The corporation that doesn't lobby Congress, that doesn't contribute to Al Gore's political campaign, that doesn't offer a compromise of accepting a subsidy in exchange for a regulation, the company that doesn't do all those things Nader doesn't want them to do -- that company gets regulated into the ground by the EPA, the FDA, and a million other bureaucracies.
And guess who passes those laws, and creates those bureaucracies? Anti-corporatists just like Nader!
I like Nader's stance on the War on Drugs, and he makes some very good points on intellectual property. But the only way we're going to have a government free from corporate influence is to have a government that refuses to use its power of violence to benefit OR harm corporations.
And I'll bet you can guess which presidential candidate wants that kind of government.
And voila, the federal government suddenly controls something it didn't and couldn't before. So when your presidential or congressional candidate promises to help pay for your state or local program, what he's really saying is that he wants to control it.
Since when is looking at the big picture Offtopic?
I do get it, I was just being subtle...
He actually called it propaganda... Here's something I'll frame in the form of a question because I don't want to think about the answer. Since the internet is global, won't they be spying on communications from outside Britain that just happen to pass through British routers?
Hmmmm.... $5 million? That sounds like a lot more money than Napster has made in its entire existence. I smell a silver lining for napster...smells like....sniff....a RAT.
I very much doubt that it will be stopped unless it receives major mainstream media coverage
snip
But it WON'T. There are a lot more people out there than you'd think who are against the drug war, but you never hear of them (other than as a much of hippies) in mainstream media. In fact, if you think you'll EVER hear a pro-drug statement out of a major television network or newspaper, you're just wrong. Why?
Because the major networks and newspapers receive advertising revenue from the Partnership for a Drug-Free America. (read: the DEA) When a news outlet deals with a government bureaucracy, if it does anything to anger that agency, it can kiss the advertising revenue goodbye along with any interviews with or information from that bureau's personnel. You can read about that and a lot of other stuff here. No television station or newspaper will cross the DEA. It's up to us.
Perhaps their plan is to get the language into mainstream use, then in a few years, start asking for patent royalties... Judging from MS's other practices, it'll be easy for them to "make it in developers' best interests" to use C#.
So suppose my MS operating system goes down, and I have to delete data to get it back...is MS not liable for the loss of my software since their faulty code caused its destruction? Until Windows software fails to work on my current Win95 software, how they bundle their software means little to me from an OS perspective. Economically, making a product inconvenient to use simply makes it less desirable, and the only way that a product's quality can go down while its price goes up is with a monopoly. Monopolies invite competition, especially when they do this sort of thing, so if MS and Adobe and whoever else decides that they want their OS and Office software to be hardware-specific, they're just telling people, "Look! Our software sucks! Buy someone else's! We DARE you!"
Of course, if this judge wants to be on solid legal ground, he has to make a distinction stating just why Napster is responsible for the actions of its users and, say, Microsoft is not.
Trying to state what distinction is myself would require be to both be a lawyer and know a lot more than I do about the inner workings of Napster software. So I can only speculate.
It could be that since Napster promises to regulate the actions of its users in terms of whether they violate copyrights, when it fails to do so (which happens 1000 times a second or so), that could constitute negligence.
This could also have a lot to do with the mp3.com ruling: since they don't have a license / contract / whatever to distribute music, even if both parties own the cd, napster isn't allowed to let them exchange mp3's from it. So now, even the 'archival purposes' loophole goes out the window for Napster, and any time anything copyrighted goes up, Napster is violating the law. If that's the case, and the RIAA could be on pretty solid legal ground here, it might be the end of the road for Napster.
Of course, the judge might have made the ruling because he just doesn't understand the first thing about how napster works.
Man, it would be sweet if someone could hack up an online multiplayer version of this game, and model it after the old BBS game TradeWars 2002.....
How did Metallica track down all 300k+ users who shared their mp3's? (That sure is a lot.) The only information I ever provide to napster is a user-name, and an email address, that being anon@napster.com or something. Do they run a port-scan or something? Sure they know lots of user names, but suppose napster doesn't ban them -- do they have 300 thousand IP's logged? It makes me wonder how many napster users really thought they were anonymous.
Anyway, has anyone with more skillz than me tried to track down a napster user?
Here is the conclusion I am drawing: Be posted the links to mirrors before actually having the program ready for download.
Bad, bad Be.
Unless anyone has managed to find the file, in which case, post a working mirror please!!
Not Celine Dion?
I'm a total cryptograph novice, but did anyone else notice how the lower-case 's' looks almost exactly like the small-uppercase 's'? Are they the same character, maybe?
However, couldn't the way that colleges are banning Napster be considered a breach of contract? Maybe I'm mistaken, but if I sign a contract to pay for services offered by the colleges, services including internet access, doesn't that mean that I am entitled to those services? Mid-semester, why can one party of the contract change "internet access" to "internet access, except for stuff that uses a lot of bandwidth, which we reserve the right to block whenever we want"?
Is there something in university internet access contracts that allows universities to do this? If not, then savenapster.com may have some real ammunition.
IANA Nutritionist, but I remember picking up from various sources a suspicion that all the vitamins and minerals are more effective when they are in their natural state; i.e., as part of a piece of broccoli. It probably has to do with absorption. I doubt that eating nothing but Doritos and multivitamins can really make you healthy, but that doesn't mean those Centrums are a crock.
Whenever I do something, I don't do something else.
It's about opportunity cost. The hour I a day reading news pages, I could be talking to my family, studying, or doing half a billion things. But I don't want to. I want to rant on slashdot. Is that so frightening? The internet is an interesting place (and especially time-consuming if you're on a modem), and dogs take a large amount of attention and care. So you have to spend a few of your 24 allotted daily hours on them, if you're going to spend any at all. That's a few less hours you could spend doing other things. "Other things" include social interaction.
Big deal.
The main flaws I've seen with the DC controllers is not as much the analog thingy, but:
-The triggers are poorly designed from a mechanical standpoint. You have to push them down a long way before anything happens, and they just feel like they're going to break at any moment.
-The fact that there are only six buttons, so no px3 buttons as you said.
-The angle at which a DC controller puts your hands is uncomfortable compared to the psx. It's like this: | | rather than this / \. Get it?
Fact is, if you could improve on the design and ergonomics of the psx controller, Sony would have done it for the psx2. But they didn't. Other than making them black, taht is.
Suppose the MPAA made the DVD encryption weak on purpose?
Think about it. Suppose the MPAA, perhaps in conjunction with other companies, wants to achieve a state of oligopoly through formatting. Not just in DVD, but in all kinds of media. To do this, they would have to create a legal precedent that makes reverse engineering illegal. So they make an easy-to-decrypt format, DVD, and then when people crack it, they litigate their collective ass off in the name of stopping piracy, hoping that the judge can rule reverse engineering in general illegal.
Now here is the question I want answered: Is HDTV encrypted?
If it is, this could get real big, real nasty, and real profitable for the MPAA real fast. The scenario goes like this. The MPAA wins, reverse engineering of media encryption is banned internationally. Afterwards, HDTV sets drop in price, so that people besides the ultra-rich will actually buy them. Soon all the tv stations go HD, and HD-DVD's enter the market. Suddenly, to do ANYTHING with the new standard, high definition television: broadcast it, record it, produce movies for it, anything, you have to get a license, just like you do now to make a legitimate DVD player.
Yikes. Someone tell me I'm wrong, please.