Re:Files they've just taken and not bought or dele
on
The File Sharing Report
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· Score: 2, Insightful
No tangable loss my ass.
No. See, loss means something that you once had, and now don't. For instance, if you had a pony, and it died at some point, you lost that pony.
If you sung a little song that you thought might bring you the cash to buy a pony in the future, but everyone "stole" your song before you could buy the horsemeat, well, you didn't "lose" the pony - you never had it. As for the song, well, you were gambling a bit. It is hard to say that me and my buddy flickering flashlights at someone else is equivalent to stealing from you, and fucked if I know what you wanted with a pony in the first place.
Learn to make money from your "IP". The trick is, it isn't what you think it is - you make money by sharing it. I have. It rocks. If you can't, well, there's a long, well worn history of people who can't. Try starting with "Gutenburg" at the Wikipedia, and if it doesn't sink in, try "buggy whip".
Then they raise the max. Seems pretty straightforward to me.
Sounds good. Maybe even is. But I don't think you've lived with nurses and EMCs, like I have (my parents, see.) I talked to them about this, and they said two words: private practice.
Pushing for such a change in law would make other changes the IP cartels want much easier... like turning copyright infringement into a criminal matter as well. Or do you _want_ your tax money to be used to hunt down file swappers?
Note: I'm not calling for dismantling the military, or any such thing. I'm pointing out that, when the general populace gets a clear picture of the awfulness of war, it is much less likely to get in to them, which is generally a good thing. No matter how you view the particular wars of choice (Viet Nam, Iraq I and II), I fail to see how educating the public about what goes on in them (compared with the Mom & Apple Pie crap we get currently) can be a bad thing.
This is just adapting the old ways to a new medium. And to be honest, I'd rather have kids who might go into combat getting that propaganda from something that encourages real teamwork and somewhat useful training than glorious tales of a single man killing hundreds. Any little thing that forces their mindset into something more useful is an improvement.
Um... how about using the new medium to illustrate stories of how awful warfare is, in order to discourage the use?
No, I don't fault the military for marketing itself; it exists to perpetuate itself, like any institution, and at times actually does fight for a reasonable reason (unlike some other institutions).
It has a tough marketing challenge; once a generation or so, it gets involved in something so awful that everyone knows it does awful things (last time around, it was Viet Nam, before that, WWII). Much better when you're "winning"; the proles are willing to shrug off things like sensless torture.
I'd rather see combat vets use the medium (blogs, for one thing, would be interesting here, although "support group" sorts of things like forums are probably more useful) to talk about all the reasons the military isn't an antiseptic display of manlyness than my tax money financing "army of one" style inducements. "Army of one" my ass - the reality of military operations are all about massive numbers of unimportant people willing to eat dirt, kill other unimportant people, and die on command (and more loosely, generating those people, financing the operations, and thinking about the strategy of how to use them). Show the reality of war, and perhaps the people who are responsible for electing those who chose to wage it will think twice.
The only problem I can think of with using triggers to refresh materialized views, is that you cannot defer the refresh. It's rare, but some people do not want their M.V.'s refreshed in near-real-time. They prefer a daily full refresh.
I've done this with triggers, two ways: (1) via a "changes" relation. The trigger informs the change relation of the PK of the tuple that changed, and a batch job (or however you want to trigger it) runs the trigger that updates. (2) In some circumstances, you can add an attribute to indicate that a tuple changed - a date, or a hash, depending on circumstance. Crawl that nightly (or whenever) that of the changes relation.
Not as "pretty" as Oracle, in that you don't have the CREATE MATERIALIZED VIEW... syntax, but nothing all that different is going on, functionally speaking.
I'm not claiming that dodging the cat was the correct decision, nor am I claiming that there is One True decision theoretic method by which everyone should abide. That's missing the point.
The point is that, while investing in prisons may have positive outcomes for your family, it still places you in the position of having a vested interest the continued viability of the prison business. One does not cancel the other; the principal of observability of outcome holds (your family isn't "37 wrongfully imprisoned people" less well off, etc). This isn't a personal morality issue, it is a fundamental fact of action and consequence. Confusing the range of considerations that go into making a choice for the outcomes of a choice is a common, but serious, mistake.
What is a personal morality issue is making that choice. And, indeed, "to each his own". But untangling that confusion isn't just some abstract philosophical question, it is the basis of, for instance, a large chunk of liability law.
That's amusing, but a fatally flawed argument. Lots of different rebuttals are available, but I'll just pick two.
First, the logical fallacy: you treat the decision to invest in prison stock as a binary choice, with the operative decision variable being your family's well being. Leaving aside the assumed perfect knowledge ("If you know for a fact that"), the choice is not a binary; you could invest in: prisons, starting a business, a drug habit, a house... Attempting to pick the right option is extremely complicated, as anyone making those choices knows, and hardly a binary choice.
The ethics-based reason this line of thought is flawed stems from choice theory and arguments against moral relativism. Without getting in to all the details,
- the harm of an injustice is constant, whether it happens to me or to someone else. The "damage factor" of an injustice done is therefor nonvariant.
- Making a choice may well be a gradient operation, but the consequences of that choice is not - actions are observable things with observable consequences, and don't become "more bad" or "more good" due to other consequences of the same action.
This becomes obvious if you pick a different hypothetical: suppose someone gives you a big red button, announces that pressing it will kill some random person you've never met. They then offer you some huge some of money to press it. No matter what amount of pressing (ahem) need you or your family may have (feel free to stack this scenario out with a child dying of a treatable disease, etc.), pressing the button doesn't somehow become more morally acceptable. It may have a positive (saving your kid) as well as a negative (cold, calculated murder) outcome, but it doesn't somehow "cancel out".
Now, various attempts have been made to quantify gradients of acceptability ("if you could go back in time and kill Hitler's mom..."), and accord for doing nasty things can and sometimes is given for twisted situations (notions such as justifiable homicide), but that doesn't change the base proposition: namely, doing wrong that has positive externalities is just that; both an immoral act and a moral act.
Without all the philosophy, I learned this lesson shortly after I started driving. That I dodged a cat improved the world, in that there was a cat with a longer lifespan. That I hit a telephone pole harmed the world, in that I knocked out power and screwed up my car. My car wasn't "one cat's worth" less harmed, nor was the cat "one twisted bumper's worth" more alive.
Now, add in imperfect knowledge, acknowledgement of responsibility for harm, and the full range of choices for investment decisions... you see where I'm headed.
No, you are mixing up cause and effect. Investing money in to companies or sectors that benefit from an increase in inmates does not cause more people to be thrown in jail. It just means you are able to recognize future trends and benefit from them.
Actually, the poster isn't the one confusing cause and effect, you are.
If you build a prison, you have an interest in prisoners being produced to lock up.
If you pay someone else to build a prison, you have the same interest.
If you buy a prison, you have the same interest.
If you buy a portion of a prison, you have a (presumably diluted amount of) the same interest.
Divorcing ownership from management works well for liquidity, but do not pretend that somehow that divorce also provides absolution from the moral responsibility for the actions performed by the company of which you are buying ownership. If your dog bites someone, claiming that you co-own the dog, and anyway you don't and can't manage the dog's every move isn't a convincing argument for abdicating responsibility.
Unless you are willing to assert that prison builders would prefer to go out of business, and are simply acting from sad necessity thrust upon them, your logic does not hold. And if believe that is the case, I encourage you to post links to examples of the profits from prison-management going to any sort of effort, useful or not, to reduce the inmate population (other than clever new laws that lead to executions, which would technically fit the bill, but... you get the idea.)
Legally speaking, things are different, in terms of actionable responsibility (tort claims, etc.) following from ownership of public firms. As I don't believe there are many who will advance the notion that our current legal regime is the embodiment of perfect moral authority, I don't feel the need to defend the contrast. I'm referring to moral responsibility in this post.
First, let me say that I hate Java, with a passion, as a language. The bugs, behavioural oddity, and general shoddy crap one has to put up with in a "modern" language that is supposed to have support for all the neat new bells and whistles appalls me. Also, I'll say I like Perl. There, that should have cut down on most of the readership...
Java is just as patent-encumbered as.Net is. Hell, Sun sued *Microsoft* over some Java patents shortly ago. Who is to say they wouldn't do the same to gcj if it served their interests?
You have a nice bundle of assumptions there, but when picked apart, they don't hold.
patents. Yes, I believe Sun owns some, and Microsoft also owns some. A significant difference is that (a) Sun has a history of promoting open standards whereas Microsoft has a history of abusing them, and (b) Sun has no stated plan to extract growth via patents, whereas Microsoft does, and is clearly actively persuing those plans. Any large company that didn't hold a portfolio would not exist as a large company, and any company that wants to do something like Java would do well to defend it. Acting shocked that Sun is protecting a 10 year development and branding effort is either naive or disingenuous.
Sun sued Microsoft over a contract dispute, not a patent dispute. I know many slashot denizens are not aware of the difference, but there is one, much like the difference between cows and rats - they're both mammals as opposed to reptiles (legal disputes vs. cameros and baseball bats), but you woudn't want to milk the wrong one. I'll be generous and assume you don't know the difference.
Raising the spectre of the fact that someone with a history of open sharing might someday sue someone else as a defense of a monopolist who is going on an intellectual property hording rampage puts you in company with such staunch innovationists as Jack "VCRs are the Boston Stranger" Valenti. Is that really a point you'd like to push on with?
Attempting to dress dot-net up as something that will be a vibrant, open platform (one that thrives with or without Microsoft) is silly. Everyone knows it isn't. If sun dies tomorrow, Java will live on -- just look at it. I hope that Miguel knows what he is doing, and if he doesn't, fails to distract too many people. Java has warts, plenty of them. It works for many people, and the fact that dot-net is such a big talking-point is a great confirmation of this fact- why would MSFT bother if they had the market sewn up like they do with IE?
Just an addendum...
For my part, I do Java when I have to, and Perl the rest of the time. (C for interfacing with DBs, modifying code, whatever.) Perl's absolutely the best kept secret of development. I have Perl running in a couple top-100 sites. and many more instances elsewhere. Ask Amazon (I mention them because I've never done any work for them, and they use Perl -- HTML::Mason, actually). Desktop Perl is getting traction, too, lately... I built a Windows installer for a Perl desktop app the other day that, so far, the client is thrilled with. I expect this to be cheap growth for my company. So, from my perspective, please - keep writing PHP and VB. Please make my consulting gigs that much easier to land! The gaggles of people who hate Perl are my company's best competitve advantage.
You acknowledged that you can afford to decline work if the conditions are unfair. I know less than a dozen people who can do that and none of them are poor. I don't know anyone with a $50-$100k/year salary who can afford to challenge their boss because even a month without pay would leave them in debt they could never recover from.
I currently make significantly less than your low-end figure, and have for the last three years, as I build my business. I simply choose not to take on bosses when they want unrealistic things.
You can preach about pride and standing up for yourself all you want but your haughty attitude, pretty words and pride won't buy bread when you live under the bridge.
I have been homeless, albiet briefly. If you won't stand up for yourself and choose to settle for whatever people want to give you, that's fine with me, but don't then turn around and get pissed off at people who aren't that weak.
Great. How much do I make a year? Name the figure.
Or are you pulling out some bullshit "if you make more than an illiterate in the Gobi desert, you're rich" line?
It's easy to improve your negotiating position: be a silver spoon fed troll on/.
You don't know anything about me or my background. If you did, that silver spoon bit would be hilarious; as is, you're just a boring troll, ignoring everything I actually said and attacking me instead.
These employee agreements are not negotiable unless you're willing to reject the job offer and face the consequences of spending another month sending out resumes, scheduling interviews, and waiting for hiring committees to have a good day.
Um. That's what "negotiable" means. Both people can walk away. If you choose not to walk away, that's your choice. Thus, you are negotiating.
Most Americans can't afford an extra week worth of debt, much less another month. Your self-smug stance is nauseating at best.
Sorry to be a hard-ass here, but if you can't run your own life, that's nobody's problem but your own. It sucks if "most Americans", by your measure, apparently can't do that, but that isn't my problem. By standard measures, I'm pretty poor at the moment, and I choose not to take on some work becuase of bad terms. If you are going to whine about how living on credit cards made you a chattel slave to The Man, and how they want to own your ideas, poor you, fine. Have fun. But the fact remains, if you don't like the terms you're getting for yourself, you have two choices: learn how to improve your negotiating position, or live with it.
The theory behind exempt status is based on the notion that there exists a category of professionals who are employed to provide a given function, or solve a certain problem, and are paid for providing that function rather than their hourly effort expended in providing that function.
The notion comes from the days of when, say, a factory owner or a ship owner would hire a factory manager or a captain to be in charge of the factory or ship. They were paid for doing that, not for how many hours they spent doing that. (Frequently, that included the cost of hiring the people who worked for them, too, as well as repairs, security, etc.) That's the notional different between management and owner.
These days, a lot of people are called "exempt" when their role has no relation to that sort of arrangement. But, the arrangement still applies today, where many of your interactions with contractors are frequently on a basis of "lump of cash for given service", rather than a strictly hourly rate, and does bear some relation to the original notion for real management roles (as opposed to the Assistant Night Manager at the Quickie-Mart, you know, the cashier).
If you think about it, strictly hourly employment makes no more inherent sense than any other contractual arrangement. It is an artifact of how labor relations have worked out over time. It may have some benefits for some who would do a poor job negotiatiing for themselves otherwise, in that it decomposes the cost/benefit choice in to easily digestible nuggets (and organized labor likes it for various reasons), but it isn't inherently "better" than other ways.
Just another reason I like working for the company that I happen to (co)own. The value of my labor is decided in several different ways, depending on what was negotiated with the individual client.
They're not going to install cameras inside your car to see what you're doing inside the car.
Be careful with your assertions.
I think, if you had suggested to the proud owner of a brand new '55 model whatever, that the day would come when little boxes would be stuck in their cars that could tell the police everything they did on the road, they'd laugh and say that would never happen.
I have three machines I use as desktops. One Thinkpad, one Dell tower, and one whitebox tower. The Thinkpad came with Windows, which was wiped and replaced with Debian. The Dell came with Windows, I bought it used, replaced Win with Debian. The whitebox went straight to Debian.
I know I'm not the only one who does stuff like this.
And my point was that, just because we're discussing bits doesn't mean they aren't property.
If you disagree, then consider that, if I burn the only copy of your thesis one week before you're due to defend it, by your standards I've only harmed you insofar as I've torched 100 or so pages of paper, and so your material loss is maybe 50 cents or so.
So, if malicious code does no property damage, those who break in to machines without the owner's consent are also causing no property damage, and we need to repeal all those silly laws that say otherwise.
In either case, the net effect will be what taxation most always causes: a reduction in the behavior taxed or increased negative economic fallout (bankrupcies, debt, default on that debt, etc.) for the group that finds the taxed behavior difficult to curb.
I don't think either of those points apply in this case.
I can't find a reference, but someone did a study on the amount of IP produced before and after various countries made changes to (almost always increases to the value of) IP laws, and saw essentially zero change. Now, sure, studies "prove" all sorts of things, and since I can't find a cite, I wouldn't blame you for discounting this. But I do not take it as a given that all IP generating activities would be discouraged if IP laws went away. Most would almost certainly change from the present form, and some (drug research being a majorly problematic one) would probably decrease. But merely taxing it, rather than abolishing it, would likely not effect the generation of IP in any significant way - profitable IP generation could afford a small fee (and note that patents already cost nontrvial amounts of money), and labors of love need not be covered by copyright.
As to negative economic fallout, I don't see it. If the (for instance) copyright you hold on a book isn't generating sufficient revenue to pay a yearly fee, you are free to drop your claim to the copyright on that book.
Which is, of course, the point of this sort of tax; to expand the public domain.
If this sort of thing interests you, posting my original point here caused me to do a little write up on the topic (hey, a great way to procrastinate - I really don't want to do the work I need to get done. Plus, I'm generating intellectual property!).
Obviously you can't do that, because one could say that the post-it note on your monitor with the grocery list is IP and copyrightable (which it is) and therefore taxable. That would suck.
Trivially worked around - the tax only applies to published works, and doesn't apply at all if one renounces one's copyrights to a given work.
If you're going to talk about moral rights, it would be much better to explain how you reach your conclusions. Saying things like:
My moral threshold would be much higher actually (X=100 years maybe), but from an economic standpoint, I really hate to see a valuable work go to waste.
in a vaccum doesn't get anywhere.
Let me give you a different argument, based on some of your own reasoning: you recognize that physical property rights such as land ownership are limited in a number of ways. One of those ways is that land owners pay taxes on the land. Now, those taxes go to support all sorts of unrelated things, but one of the justifications for that tax is that society pays for defending your property rights.
If taxing your land to pay for defending your rights is sensible, then, especially as we move to more expansive IP protections including criminal sanctions against infringers, shouldn't IP be taxed?
One could, of course, abandon a copyright, allowing it to enter the public domain, and not have to pay the tax.
An aquisition is not a "transfer", contractually speaking - the new entity still owns the license and is covered by its terms.
Although it has never happened (yet), in cases of insolvency, the license is not a saleable asset.
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No tangable loss my ass.
No. See, loss means something that you once had, and now don't. For instance, if you had a pony, and it died at some point, you lost that pony.If you sung a little song that you thought might bring you the cash to buy a pony in the future, but everyone "stole" your song before you could buy the horsemeat, well, you didn't "lose" the pony - you never had it. As for the song, well, you were gambling a bit. It is hard to say that me and my buddy flickering flashlights at someone else is equivalent to stealing from you, and fucked if I know what you wanted with a pony in the first place.
Learn to make money from your "IP". The trick is, it isn't what you think it is - you make money by sharing it. I have. It rocks. If you can't, well, there's a long, well worn history of people who can't. Try starting with "Gutenburg" at the Wikipedia, and if it doesn't sink in, try "buggy whip".
Sounds good. Maybe even is. But I don't think you've lived with nurses and EMCs, like I have (my parents, see.) I talked to them about this, and they said two words: private practice.
Funny how the market works, eh?
All of these things should stay civil law.
Note: I'm not calling for dismantling the military, or any such thing. I'm pointing out that, when the general populace gets a clear picture of the awfulness of war, it is much less likely to get in to them, which is generally a good thing. No matter how you view the particular wars of choice (Viet Nam, Iraq I and II), I fail to see how educating the public about what goes on in them (compared with the Mom & Apple Pie crap we get currently) can be a bad thing.
Um... how about using the new medium to illustrate stories of how awful warfare is, in order to discourage the use?
No, I don't fault the military for marketing itself; it exists to perpetuate itself, like any institution, and at times actually does fight for a reasonable reason (unlike some other institutions).
It has a tough marketing challenge; once a generation or so, it gets involved in something so awful that everyone knows it does awful things (last time around, it was Viet Nam, before that, WWII). Much better when you're "winning"; the proles are willing to shrug off things like sensless torture.
I'd rather see combat vets use the medium (blogs, for one thing, would be interesting here, although "support group" sorts of things like forums are probably more useful) to talk about all the reasons the military isn't an antiseptic display of manlyness than my tax money financing "army of one" style inducements. "Army of one" my ass - the reality of military operations are all about massive numbers of unimportant people willing to eat dirt, kill other unimportant people, and die on command (and more loosely, generating those people, financing the operations, and thinking about the strategy of how to use them). Show the reality of war, and perhaps the people who are responsible for electing those who chose to wage it will think twice.
You're right. These things won't take off until they cost about $5000.
I've done this with triggers, two ways: (1) via a "changes" relation. The trigger informs the change relation of the PK of the tuple that changed, and a batch job (or however you want to trigger it) runs the trigger that updates. (2) In some circumstances, you can add an attribute to indicate that a tuple changed - a date, or a hash, depending on circumstance. Crawl that nightly (or whenever) that of the changes relation.
Not as "pretty" as Oracle, in that you don't have the CREATE MATERIALIZED VIEW... syntax, but nothing all that different is going on, functionally speaking.
...it would make more economic sense to not admit anyone, CGI the crowds in for broadcast, and pocket the 1.3B you didn't spend on security.
The point is that, while investing in prisons may have positive outcomes for your family, it still places you in the position of having a vested interest the continued viability of the prison business. One does not cancel the other; the principal of observability of outcome holds (your family isn't "37 wrongfully imprisoned people" less well off, etc). This isn't a personal morality issue, it is a fundamental fact of action and consequence. Confusing the range of considerations that go into making a choice for the outcomes of a choice is a common, but serious, mistake.
What is a personal morality issue is making that choice. And, indeed, "to each his own". But untangling that confusion isn't just some abstract philosophical question, it is the basis of, for instance, a large chunk of liability law.
First, the logical fallacy: you treat the decision to invest in prison stock as a binary choice, with the operative decision variable being your family's well being. Leaving aside the assumed perfect knowledge ("If you know for a fact that"), the choice is not a binary; you could invest in: prisons, starting a business, a drug habit, a house ... Attempting to pick the right option is extremely complicated, as anyone making those choices knows, and hardly a binary choice.
The ethics-based reason this line of thought is flawed stems from choice theory and arguments against moral relativism. Without getting in to all the details,
- the harm of an injustice is constant, whether it happens to me or to someone else. The "damage factor" of an injustice done is therefor nonvariant.
- Making a choice may well be a gradient operation, but the consequences of that choice is not - actions are observable things with observable consequences, and don't become "more bad" or "more good" due to other consequences of the same action.
This becomes obvious if you pick a different hypothetical: suppose someone gives you a big red button, announces that pressing it will kill some random person you've never met. They then offer you some huge some of money to press it. No matter what amount of pressing (ahem) need you or your family may have (feel free to stack this scenario out with a child dying of a treatable disease, etc.), pressing the button doesn't somehow become more morally acceptable. It may have a positive (saving your kid) as well as a negative (cold, calculated murder) outcome, but it doesn't somehow "cancel out".
Now, various attempts have been made to quantify gradients of acceptability ("if you could go back in time and kill Hitler's mom..."), and accord for doing nasty things can and sometimes is given for twisted situations (notions such as justifiable homicide), but that doesn't change the base proposition: namely, doing wrong that has positive externalities is just that; both an immoral act and a moral act.
Without all the philosophy, I learned this lesson shortly after I started driving. That I dodged a cat improved the world, in that there was a cat with a longer lifespan. That I hit a telephone pole harmed the world, in that I knocked out power and screwed up my car. My car wasn't "one cat's worth" less harmed, nor was the cat "one twisted bumper's worth" more alive.
Now, add in imperfect knowledge, acknowledgement of responsibility for harm, and the full range of choices for investment decisions... you see where I'm headed.
Actually, the poster isn't the one confusing cause and effect, you are.
If you build a prison, you have an interest in prisoners being produced to lock up.
If you pay someone else to build a prison, you have the same interest.
If you buy a prison, you have the same interest.
If you buy a portion of a prison, you have a (presumably diluted amount of) the same interest.
Divorcing ownership from management works well for liquidity, but do not pretend that somehow that divorce also provides absolution from the moral responsibility for the actions performed by the company of which you are buying ownership. If your dog bites someone, claiming that you co-own the dog, and anyway you don't and can't manage the dog's every move isn't a convincing argument for abdicating responsibility.
Unless you are willing to assert that prison builders would prefer to go out of business, and are simply acting from sad necessity thrust upon them, your logic does not hold. And if believe that is the case, I encourage you to post links to examples of the profits from prison-management going to any sort of effort, useful or not, to reduce the inmate population (other than clever new laws that lead to executions, which would technically fit the bill, but... you get the idea.)
Legally speaking, things are different, in terms of actionable responsibility (tort claims, etc.) following from ownership of public firms. As I don't believe there are many who will advance the notion that our current legal regime is the embodiment of perfect moral authority, I don't feel the need to defend the contrast. I'm referring to moral responsibility in this post.
Java is just as patent-encumbered as .Net is. Hell, Sun sued *Microsoft* over some Java patents shortly ago. Who is to say they wouldn't do the same to gcj if it served their interests?
You have a nice bundle of assumptions there, but when picked apart, they don't hold.
- patents. Yes, I believe Sun owns some, and Microsoft also owns some. A significant difference is that (a) Sun has a history of promoting open standards whereas Microsoft has a history of abusing them, and (b) Sun has no stated plan to extract growth via patents, whereas Microsoft does, and is clearly actively persuing those plans. Any large company that didn't hold a portfolio would not exist as a large company, and any company that wants to do something like Java would do well to defend it. Acting shocked that Sun is protecting a 10 year development and branding effort is either naive or disingenuous.
- Sun sued Microsoft over a contract dispute, not a patent dispute. I know many slashot denizens are not aware of the difference, but there is one, much like the difference between cows and rats - they're both mammals as opposed to reptiles (legal disputes vs. cameros and baseball bats), but you woudn't want to milk the wrong one. I'll be generous and assume you don't know the difference.
- Raising the spectre of the fact that someone with a history of open sharing might someday sue someone else as a defense of a monopolist who is going on an intellectual property hording rampage puts you in company with such staunch innovationists as Jack "VCRs are the Boston Stranger" Valenti. Is that really a point you'd like to push on with?
Attempting to dress dot-net up as something that will be a vibrant, open platform (one that thrives with or without Microsoft) is silly. Everyone knows it isn't. If sun dies tomorrow, Java will live on -- just look at it. I hope that Miguel knows what he is doing, and if he doesn't, fails to distract too many people. Java has warts, plenty of them. It works for many people, and the fact that dot-net is such a big talking-point is a great confirmation of this fact- why would MSFT bother if they had the market sewn up like they do with IE?Just an addendum...
For my part, I do Java when I have to, and Perl the rest of the time. (C for interfacing with DBs, modifying code, whatever.) Perl's absolutely the best kept secret of development. I have Perl running in a couple top-100 sites. and many more instances elsewhere. Ask Amazon (I mention them because I've never done any work for them, and they use Perl -- HTML::Mason, actually). Desktop Perl is getting traction, too, lately... I built a Windows installer for a Perl desktop app the other day that, so far, the client is thrilled with. I expect this to be cheap growth for my company. So, from my perspective, please - keep writing PHP and VB. Please make my consulting gigs that much easier to land! The gaggles of people who hate Perl are my company's best competitve advantage.
I currently make significantly less than your low-end figure, and have for the last three years, as I build my business. I simply choose not to take on bosses when they want unrealistic things.
You can preach about pride and standing up for yourself all you want but your haughty attitude, pretty words and pride won't buy bread when you live under the bridge.
I have been homeless, albiet briefly. If you won't stand up for yourself and choose to settle for whatever people want to give you, that's fine with me, but don't then turn around and get pissed off at people who aren't that weak.
Great. How much do I make a year? Name the figure.
Or are you pulling out some bullshit "if you make more than an illiterate in the Gobi desert, you're rich" line?
It's easy to improve your negotiating position: be a silver spoon fed troll on /.
You don't know anything about me or my background. If you did, that silver spoon bit would be hilarious; as is, you're just a boring troll, ignoring everything I actually said and attacking me instead.
Have fun playing the victim.
Um. That's what "negotiable" means. Both people can walk away. If you choose not to walk away, that's your choice. Thus, you are negotiating.
Most Americans can't afford an extra week worth of debt, much less another month. Your self-smug stance is nauseating at best.
Sorry to be a hard-ass here, but if you can't run your own life, that's nobody's problem but your own. It sucks if "most Americans", by your measure, apparently can't do that, but that isn't my problem. By standard measures, I'm pretty poor at the moment, and I choose not to take on some work becuase of bad terms. If you are going to whine about how living on credit cards made you a chattel slave to The Man, and how they want to own your ideas, poor you, fine. Have fun. But the fact remains, if you don't like the terms you're getting for yourself, you have two choices: learn how to improve your negotiating position, or live with it.
The notion comes from the days of when, say, a factory owner or a ship owner would hire a factory manager or a captain to be in charge of the factory or ship. They were paid for doing that, not for how many hours they spent doing that. (Frequently, that included the cost of hiring the people who worked for them, too, as well as repairs, security, etc.) That's the notional different between management and owner.
These days, a lot of people are called "exempt" when their role has no relation to that sort of arrangement. But, the arrangement still applies today, where many of your interactions with contractors are frequently on a basis of "lump of cash for given service", rather than a strictly hourly rate, and does bear some relation to the original notion for real management roles (as opposed to the Assistant Night Manager at the Quickie-Mart, you know, the cashier).
If you think about it, strictly hourly employment makes no more inherent sense than any other contractual arrangement. It is an artifact of how labor relations have worked out over time. It may have some benefits for some who would do a poor job negotiatiing for themselves otherwise, in that it decomposes the cost/benefit choice in to easily digestible nuggets (and organized labor likes it for various reasons), but it isn't inherently "better" than other ways.
Just another reason I like working for the company that I happen to (co)own. The value of my labor is decided in several different ways, depending on what was negotiated with the individual client.
Be careful with your assertions.
I think, if you had suggested to the proud owner of a brand new '55 model whatever, that the day would come when little boxes would be stuck in their cars that could tell the police everything they did on the road, they'd laugh and say that would never happen.
I know I'm not the only one who does stuff like this.
If you disagree, then consider that, if I burn the only copy of your thesis one week before you're due to defend it, by your standards I've only harmed you insofar as I've torched 100 or so pages of paper, and so your material loss is maybe 50 cents or so.
Like most of my better ideas, I can't claim it for my own. As far as I know, the first person to propose it is Lessig.
I don't think either of those points apply in this case.
I can't find a reference, but someone did a study on the amount of IP produced before and after various countries made changes to (almost always increases to the value of) IP laws, and saw essentially zero change. Now, sure, studies "prove" all sorts of things, and since I can't find a cite, I wouldn't blame you for discounting this. But I do not take it as a given that all IP generating activities would be discouraged if IP laws went away. Most would almost certainly change from the present form, and some (drug research being a majorly problematic one) would probably decrease. But merely taxing it, rather than abolishing it, would likely not effect the generation of IP in any significant way - profitable IP generation could afford a small fee (and note that patents already cost nontrvial amounts of money), and labors of love need not be covered by copyright.
As to negative economic fallout, I don't see it. If the (for instance) copyright you hold on a book isn't generating sufficient revenue to pay a yearly fee, you are free to drop your claim to the copyright on that book.
Which is, of course, the point of this sort of tax; to expand the public domain.
If this sort of thing interests you, posting my original point here caused me to do a little write up on the topic (hey, a great way to procrastinate - I really don't want to do the work I need to get done. Plus, I'm generating intellectual property!).
Trivially worked around - the tax only applies to published works, and doesn't apply at all if one renounces one's copyrights to a given work.
My moral threshold would be much higher actually (X=100 years maybe), but from an economic standpoint, I really hate to see a valuable work go to waste.
in a vaccum doesn't get anywhere.
Let me give you a different argument, based on some of your own reasoning: you recognize that physical property rights such as land ownership are limited in a number of ways. One of those ways is that land owners pay taxes on the land. Now, those taxes go to support all sorts of unrelated things, but one of the justifications for that tax is that society pays for defending your property rights.
If taxing your land to pay for defending your rights is sensible, then, especially as we move to more expansive IP protections including criminal sanctions against infringers, shouldn't IP be taxed?
One could, of course, abandon a copyright, allowing it to enter the public domain, and not have to pay the tax.
An aquisition is not a "transfer", contractually speaking - the new entity still owns the license and is covered by its terms.
Although it has never happened (yet), in cases of insolvency, the license is not a saleable asset.