If you want to live in a country where there's a majority of backwards religious nuts, and you don't want their opinions affecting national policy, the only way to do that is to have an authoritarian government.
Or a constitution which specifically disallows the government from supporting the establishment of religion.
We work much less now than we used to, and we do meaningful work MUCH less than we used to. The hordes of retail clerks, marketers, etc. are all repurposed farmers. And probably the make-workish profession of all? The people who play games with numbers on stock markets.
In summary, we DO pay people to have fun, enjoy themselves and frolic. Except not in the park... people like to think they're useful.
For your implied scenario to have any reality to it, you would need to accept that capitalism works by paying employees MORE than they are worth. That capitalists intentionally create useless jobs and reduce profitability simply to keep unemployment levels at a reasonable level and to increase their costs and reduce efficiency.
It's only terrifying if you are some kind of luddite.
Everything is getting faster, with greater degree of computer involvement. Deal with it mentally or sell everything you own and go live in a cabin in the woods somewhere.
if only the woods could actually support 7 billion human beings, we could all go live there. But since they can't, we'll need to figure out a way to be more productive than machines which are increasingly capable of performing more and more work that only a few years ago required a human being to do.
Just how many new occupations has the economy created in the past 20 years? How many occupations have been automated and rendered obsolete?
Unless we start paying people to have fun, enjoy themselves and frolick in the park there is not going to be much work left for anyone to do.
If I have an original X (and all the rights), and make a copy X' and upload X' to you and give you exclusive rights to X', that will let you decide how X' is copied or distributed, but it doesn't say anything about any rights on the original X.
"this content" in the Craiglist agreement refers to the content which you UPLOADED, not the original from where you derived it. this agreement only really prevents you or someone else from downloading your ad from Craiglist and republishing it without their permission. And it ensures Craiglist can publish that material anywhere they want. It doesn't prevent you from continuing to use your originals and make copies of your originals.
The original is NOT the content which you uploaded, even if it looks the same.
The original is the original, and as it is worded, the agreement does not mention anything about you giving craigslist any rights over the original. It only refers to "this content" which means whatever you post to craiglist -- not more than that.
This guy's mistake is selecting too few winners and giving them too much.
You know what? YOU can go out and become an internet billionaire, and then do a physics prize right. Imagine how embarrassed he'll be when you do it the right way.
~Loyal
You miss the point.
It isn't about whether or not he has the RIGHT to give away his money. It is about whether giving away money in this way is going to promote or actually REDUCE the amount of science being done.
And the "victim" chose to be in that public place.
Presumably you use the same argument for rape. The victim chose to go out at night, clearly it was her own fault she was raped.
There is a difference between rape and free speech. Rape is wrong, and free speech it not.
Nobody should rape you ever, no matter whether it is night or day or where you are.
On the other hand, since there is nothing immoral about saying what you think, if you go some place where people have the ability to say what they think, you better brace yourself because its coming your way!
The first humans cured of the HIV virus, and they get the reward of taking immunosuppressive medications, possibly for the rest of their life. This is the medical equivalent of napalming the village in order to save it...
There's this other even better method I heard of: don't catch it in the first place. It's really easy and inexpensive compared to the other 2 major treatments. Seriously, you can only do things to lower your odds of catching a cold or the flu but for HIV, it's 100% human caused and human spread via direct actions that if people stopped taking them, it would go away in 1 generation. But whatever, stupid, reckless, careless people will find some way to get themselves killed, HIV or otherwise.
if people stopped having sex it really would wipe out AIDS in 1 generation. it would also wipe out humankind, but who's counting.
Mac addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Mac over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
Flame me if you'd like but I'd rather hear some intelligent arguments based on CURRENT product lines, not from 15 years ago because if that's where you are going, my Amiga 4000 could beat your pentium and your mac.
By increasing manufacturing efficiency, lowering prices for everyone (including products that aren't produced with automation by increasing the available labor pool for other industries). If you care about giving people jobs more than you care about making products efficiently, why not just have everyone build a giant brick pyramid in the middle of Nebraska. Oh, and make sure they do it by hand, wouldn't want any pesky earth moving equipment costing people their jobs.
Why pay them to build useless brick pyramids? I could just as easily pay them to learn how to draw, eat nutritiously, write poetry, appreciate the wonders of the universe, and socialize with their friends. I could pay them to have a happy life. Oh wait.. that would be socialism.
With any luck it will also lead to automatic education systems that will allow all those people learn new skills to better deal with the new world.
Gosh.. I sure hope we get lucky! Because if we don't get lucky we're looking forward to the collapse of the economy and major violent civil unrest.
No doubt it will be hard, and impossible for some, but such are any major shifts in economy and production.
You are envisioning the economy is going to shift to something that robots can not do but people can? shift to what? Poetry? Erotic massage? Surrogate motherhood for the ultra wealthy? Sperm donation? Organ sales?
All the signs point to the economy shifting towards ever more automation, and ever more accumulation of wealth into the hands of fewer and fewer owners, and there are no signs or reason to suspect this trend is ever going to stop until there is absolutely nothing that anyone can do that a robot can't do better, at which point on what side of the fence are you going to be on when surgical robots show up to harvest your organs at age 18 to pay back all the money you've been borrowing to survive through your childhood but can not possibly repay?
I might agree with this conclusion, but I'm compelled to ask whether or not we still really live in a moral world, since the popular conception in industrialized societies these days seems to be to view ideas like "good" and "bad" as culturally subjective, rather than absolutes that exist for all human beings.
The opposite of 'subjective' is 'objective' not 'absolute'.
If you believe that the consequences and motives behind your actions matter then there can not be absolute morality. Consequences depend on circumstances and absolute morality makes no allowances for circumstances. Likewise motives are directed towards a desired consequence, and that depends on circumstance.
Cultural relativists generally seem to deny the existence of objective reality. To them it is nonsensical to say that the world is more or less moral today than yesterday.
I generally dismiss cultural relativists as nihilists. Their philosophical views are lazy and disorganized. They think that's a virtue on account of the massive amounts of weed they have been smoking.
Important difference: The LHC was built to be massively powerful because there were (apparently accurate) calculations of what would be needed. Ignition of a fusion reaction has been Real Soon Now for decades. Evidently, the theory behind nuclear fusion reactions is not nearly as good as that behind the Higgs boson. That is the point of my snarky remark.
Ignition of a fusion reaction was done a long time ago. The theory is sound. The problem was never theoretical. It is technical: how to keep the hot plasma contained without using up more power generating magnetic fields than the amount of power produced by the reaction. And then actually building such a containment devices with such powerful magnets that are flawless. And then finally making the device with such low tolerances that it could be feasible in a commercial environment and maintained with very long duty cycles and very little maintenance. which means materials that can resist gama rays for many years, and can be easily replaced and maintained etc. its a huge engineering problem -- not a scientific one.
Nuclear fusion has been real soon now for decades because the theory is so sound and so simple that its easy to underestimate the technical challenges.
The only faith in science is that the universe behaves in a predictable fashion.
This is not faith. This is a reasonable conclusion based on extensive observation. And it is a tentative hypothesis that is tested each and every single time you take a single breath of air and your face doesn't turn into a giant banana.
I explicitly clarified "IF THE SALE OF USED SOFTWARE IS CLEARLY LEGAL".
Your example of "encouraging a reduction in liabilities" has nothing to do with the scenario I presented. Unless you are trying to say that shareholders are so naive and passive that they are willing to put up with any degree of oppression simply by hearing the magic words "encouraging a reduction in liabilities" whether or not it has any basis in plausible reality.
As far as encouraging other parts of the business...... How many NEW software titles have you purchased on Ebay? For that matter, what software vendors sell NEW software on Ebay? Get real!
I think you're a troll. I'm not going to bother reading your reply.
The problem is with point #4. Ebay will not allow sales of software that violate the Terms of Use from the author. They are a private company, and have the right to do so.
But, if you live in the EU, you could sell the copy of Windows to your neighbor, or to some chick you met in a bar, and it would be totally legal. I know that's not quite as exciting, but... uh... chick in a bar!
Ebay is not a private company. It is privately owned, but by many separate shareholders who were enticed by the promise that the board of directors would attempt to maximize profits. Consequently the board of directors has a fiduciary duty to every shareholder to doing everything reasonable to maximize profits.
Since Ebay has no commercial interest in clinging to a policy which is not longer rational. Then if the sale of used software is clearly legal, and there is no public relations purpose for continuing to ban it, or some technological limitation, they will amend their policies eventually. If they cling to an irrational policy which loses profits the board of directors can be sued for breech of trust.
As far as I know, until now there has been no such concept in law that a licensee can transfer a license without consent of the licensor. I really doubt ebay has been banning such transactions out of some kind of moral stance. It was probably just complying with what it perceived as the law at the time.
We don't have to do anything. We just sit back and watch the various factions of Corporate Earth (it's not just America) kill each other off.
That isn't what happens. Corporations are not like natural human beings. When a human kills another human, you end up less than what you started with.
When 1 corporations kills another, the victor often becomes more powerful than both corporations were as separate entities. This is the accumulation of capital. The trend is that, in time, there will be only 1 corporation left, and it will own absolutely everything.
Slashdot Mirror
Not to mention this simple fact : those computers were what the particular scientist or engineer WANTED TO USE.
So you're advocating an authoritarian government?
It sounds more like you are advocating an authoritarian government. You keep pointing out all these horrible things about democracy.
If you want to live in a country where there's a majority of backwards religious nuts, and you don't want their opinions affecting national policy, the only way to do that is to have an authoritarian government.
Or a constitution which specifically disallows the government from supporting the establishment of religion.
I have an ACER Iconia tablet. very happy with it.
We work much less now than we used to, and we do meaningful work MUCH less than we used to. The hordes of retail clerks, marketers, etc. are all repurposed farmers. And probably the make-workish profession of all? The people who play games with numbers on stock markets.
In summary, we DO pay people to have fun, enjoy themselves and frolic. Except not in the park... people like to think they're useful.
For your implied scenario to have any reality to it, you would need to accept that capitalism works by paying employees MORE than they are worth. That capitalists intentionally create useless jobs and reduce profitability simply to keep unemployment levels at a reasonable level and to increase their costs and reduce efficiency.
It's only terrifying if you are some kind of luddite.
Everything is getting faster, with greater degree of computer involvement. Deal with it mentally or sell everything you own and go live in a cabin in the woods somewhere.
if only the woods could actually support 7 billion human beings, we could all go live there. But since they can't, we'll need to figure out a way to be more productive than machines which are increasingly capable of performing more and more work that only a few years ago required a human being to do.
Just how many new occupations has the economy created in the past 20 years? How many occupations have been automated and rendered obsolete?
Unless we start paying people to have fun, enjoy themselves and frolick in the park there is not going to be much work left for anyone to do.
If I have an original X (and all the rights), and make a copy X' and upload X' to you and give you exclusive rights to X', that will let you decide how X' is copied or distributed, but it doesn't say anything about any rights on the original X.
"this content" in the Craiglist agreement refers to the content which you UPLOADED, not the original from where you derived it. this agreement only really prevents you or someone else from downloading your ad from Craiglist and republishing it without their permission. And it ensures Craiglist can publish that material anywhere they want. It doesn't prevent you from continuing to use your originals and make copies of your originals.
The original is NOT the content which you uploaded, even if it looks the same.
The original is the original, and as it is worded, the agreement does not mention anything about you giving craigslist any rights over the original. It only refers to "this content" which means whatever you post to craiglist -- not more than that.
This guy's mistake is selecting too few winners and giving them too much.
You know what? YOU can go out and become an internet billionaire, and then do a physics prize right. Imagine how embarrassed he'll be when you do it the right way.
~Loyal
You miss the point.
It isn't about whether or not he has the RIGHT to give away his money. It is about whether giving away money in this way is going to promote or actually REDUCE the amount of science being done.
And the "victim" chose to be in that public place.
Presumably you use the same argument for rape. The victim chose to go out at night, clearly it was her own fault she was raped.
There is a difference between rape and free speech. Rape is wrong, and free speech it not.
Nobody should rape you ever, no matter whether it is night or day or where you are.
On the other hand, since there is nothing immoral about saying what you think, if you go some place where people have the ability to say what they think, you better brace yourself because its coming your way!
Saying I'm an atheist is ok, saying you are stupid because you believe in god is not.
That is exactly the kind of stupid thing some dumb idiot like you would say.
In what way?
You really think they did not include some fine print in the EULA about how the user was consenting to this?
An illegal action (not sure if this is or not) remains illegal, even if both parties agree to it.
What's your point? It's not illegal to put a rootkit on a machine with permission of the owner.
The first humans cured of the HIV virus, and they get the reward of taking immunosuppressive medications, possibly for the rest of their life. This is the medical equivalent of napalming the village in order to save it...
it worked in Vietnam!
There's this other even better method I heard of: don't catch it in the first place. It's really easy and inexpensive compared to the other 2 major treatments. Seriously, you can only do things to lower your odds of catching a cold or the flu but for HIV, it's 100% human caused and human spread via direct actions that if people stopped taking them, it would go away in 1 generation. But whatever, stupid, reckless, careless people will find some way to get themselves killed, HIV or otherwise.
if people stopped having sex it really would wipe out AIDS in 1 generation. it would also wipe out humankind, but who's counting.
Mac addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Mac over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
Flame me if you'd like but I'd rather hear some intelligent arguments based on CURRENT product lines, not from 15 years ago because if that's where you are going, my Amiga 4000 could beat your pentium and your mac.
By increasing manufacturing efficiency, lowering prices for everyone (including products that aren't produced with automation by increasing the available labor pool for other industries). If you care about giving people jobs more than you care about making products efficiently, why not just have everyone build a giant brick pyramid in the middle of Nebraska. Oh, and make sure they do it by hand, wouldn't want any pesky earth moving equipment costing people their jobs.
Why pay them to build useless brick pyramids? I could just as easily pay them to learn how to draw, eat nutritiously, write poetry, appreciate the wonders of the universe, and socialize with their friends. I could pay them to have a happy life. Oh wait.. that would be socialism.
fuck it. let them starve to death.
With any luck it will also lead to automatic education systems that will allow all those people learn new skills to better deal with the new world.
Gosh.. I sure hope we get lucky! Because if we don't get lucky we're looking forward to the collapse of the economy and major violent civil unrest.
No doubt it will be hard, and impossible for some, but such are any major shifts in economy and production.
You are envisioning the economy is going to shift to something that robots can not do but people can? shift to what? Poetry? Erotic massage? Surrogate motherhood for the ultra wealthy? Sperm donation? Organ sales?
All the signs point to the economy shifting towards ever more automation, and ever more accumulation of wealth into the hands of fewer and fewer owners, and there are no signs or reason to suspect this trend is ever going to stop until there is absolutely nothing that anyone can do that a robot can't do better, at which point on what side of the fence are you going to be on when surgical robots show up to harvest your organs at age 18 to pay back all the money you've been borrowing to survive through your childhood but can not possibly repay?
I might agree with this conclusion, but I'm compelled to ask whether or not we still really live in a moral world, since the popular conception in industrialized societies these days seems to be to view ideas like "good" and "bad" as culturally subjective, rather than absolutes that exist for all human beings.
The opposite of 'subjective' is 'objective' not 'absolute'.
If you believe that the consequences and motives behind your actions matter then there can not be absolute morality. Consequences depend on circumstances and absolute morality makes no allowances for circumstances. Likewise motives are directed towards a desired consequence, and that depends on circumstance.
Cultural relativists generally seem to deny the existence of objective reality. To them it is nonsensical to say that the world is more or less moral today than yesterday.
I generally dismiss cultural relativists as nihilists. Their philosophical views are lazy and disorganized. They think that's a virtue on account of the massive amounts of weed they have been smoking.
Important difference: The LHC was built to be massively powerful because there were (apparently accurate) calculations of what would be needed. Ignition of a fusion reaction has been Real Soon Now for decades. Evidently, the theory behind nuclear fusion reactions is not nearly as good as that behind the Higgs boson. That is the point of my snarky remark.
Ignition of a fusion reaction was done a long time ago. The theory is sound. The problem was never theoretical. It is technical: how to keep the hot plasma contained without using up more power generating magnetic fields than the amount of power produced by the reaction. And then actually building such a containment devices with such powerful magnets that are flawless. And then finally making the device with such low tolerances that it could be feasible in a commercial environment and maintained with very long duty cycles and very little maintenance. which means materials that can resist gama rays for many years, and can be easily replaced and maintained etc. its a huge engineering problem -- not a scientific one.
Nuclear fusion has been real soon now for decades because the theory is so sound and so simple that its easy to underestimate the technical challenges.
I think you mean mean workers walk out of one failing business model and are replaced by computers and robots in a better business model.
The luddite's were not wrong, they were just overly optimistic. or haven't you noticed that the middle class is vanishing?
Oh good, the FTC said it was OK, so it must be on the level. Next, I will ask the USDA what I should eat and the FDA what I should take.
That would probably improve your health. If only more people would follow your sensible example.
The only faith in science is that the universe behaves in a predictable fashion.
This is not faith. This is a reasonable conclusion based on extensive observation. And it is a tentative hypothesis that is tested each and every single time you take a single breath of air and your face doesn't turn into a giant banana.
You've never heard of the doctrine of first sale?
Yes I have.
And that has nothing to do with transferring license. That has to do with transferring the copy of copyrighted material.
I explicitly clarified "IF THE SALE OF USED SOFTWARE IS CLEARLY LEGAL".
Your example of "encouraging a reduction in liabilities" has nothing to do with the scenario I presented. Unless you are trying to say that shareholders are so naive and passive that they are willing to put up with any degree of oppression simply by hearing the magic words "encouraging a reduction in liabilities" whether or not it has any basis in plausible reality.
As far as encouraging other parts of the business...... How many NEW software titles have you purchased on Ebay? For that matter, what software vendors sell NEW software on Ebay? Get real!
I think you're a troll. I'm not going to bother reading your reply.
The problem is with point #4. Ebay will not allow sales of software that violate the Terms of Use from the author. They are a private company, and have the right to do so.
But, if you live in the EU, you could sell the copy of Windows to your neighbor, or to some chick you met in a bar, and it would be totally legal. I know that's not quite as exciting, but ... uh... chick in a bar!
Ebay is not a private company. It is privately owned, but by many separate shareholders who were enticed by the promise that the board of directors would attempt to maximize profits. Consequently the board of directors has a fiduciary duty to every shareholder to doing everything reasonable to maximize profits.
Since Ebay has no commercial interest in clinging to a policy which is not longer rational. Then if the sale of used software is clearly legal, and there is no public relations purpose for continuing to ban it, or some technological limitation, they will amend their policies eventually. If they cling to an irrational policy which loses profits the board of directors can be sued for breech of trust.
As far as I know, until now there has been no such concept in law that a licensee can transfer a license without consent of the licensor. I really doubt ebay has been banning such transactions out of some kind of moral stance. It was probably just complying with what it perceived as the law at the time.
See, there's the beauty of this.
We don't have to do anything. We just sit back and watch the various factions of Corporate Earth (it's not just America) kill each other off.
That isn't what happens. Corporations are not like natural human beings. When a human kills another human, you end up less than what you started with.
When 1 corporations kills another, the victor often becomes more powerful than both corporations were as separate entities. This is the accumulation of capital. The trend is that, in time, there will be only 1 corporation left, and it will own absolutely everything.