Yes, let's all go to DeVry. Who needs to be "broadly educated" when we have Republicrats and Demicans to tell us how to run our lives and run our country?
Ah, the "I was forced to do something so everybody else should be forced to do it too" argument.
Which is why we all need to get a master's degree in mathematics and spend 20+ years of our lives studying math before we should be allowed to use calculus. Why we all need to go deaf before we can play the melody from Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" and why weall need to become astronauts before we can look at pictures of the moon's surface.
No, it doesn't, as the BBC currently makes money selling content to foreign stations, which would dry up if the BBC gave the content away for free. It would also go away if the foreign stations just stopped buying the programming too. There is no guarantee that the BBC will make a dime from foreign sales.
Unlike most of the rest of the entertainment business, the BBC works on the model of getting paid first and then producing content - which allows them much greater freedom to produce quality programming rather than having to pander to the lowest common denominator. They ought to be maximizing the potential of their business model rather than trying to dilute it by trying to force themselves into 'venture capital' model, with all of its drawbacks, of the rest of the entertainment industry.
The problem is why should UK taxpayers pay for people in other countries to have free media that they didn't pay for? No, the real problem is that some UK taxpayers don't understand that it costs them the same whether or not anyone else watches the shows too.
At best, an argument can be made that there are additional bandwidth costs for internet distribution. In which case, the BBC should just limit downloads to people in the UK. But there is absolutely no need to restrict distribution - if someone else wants to pay for the bandwidth to share a show worldwide, then they should not be stopped from doing so.
It's not like we don't know that there are folks who will create mayhem, given an opportunity. Just how much mayhem has been created by such people so far? A one-off case of a rented truck full of explosives in the basement parking lot of the twin towers. Nor could this surveillance system have done a thing to stop that either.
there are certain places, certain densely populated places that are so valuable to our existence as a country, that it makes sense so be aware of who's moving multi-ton machines through there. Just because you say it, does not make it true. When we start to have an actual problem of reasonable size, then we can worry about wasting our money and our heritage of freedom on the problem, OK?
US and Greece are NOT unusual in all this. IF you knew what you were talking about, you would know that Greece deliberately chose not to purchase the "centralized wiretaping" option for their telecom switches. It was only because of software "modularity" that the software was still in the switch, it was just disabled without the proper licensing codes. The eavesdroppers in the Greece case were able to hack the switches and enable the centralized wiretapping functions for their own purposes.
If Greece really were doing the centralized wiretapping thing like the CIA is asking for here, they would at least have the pretense of doing it with some sort of oversight, just as the CIA is trying to get official permission here too.
There is also the problem that Spector is on trial for murder right now. This makes no difference to the validity of his theories, but it would have been nice if the RIAA had tapped a famous producer who was not at risk of going to San Quentin. Don't you think it's actually completely apropos? If he is convicted, I think we should start an online petition to have Phil Spector assume the role of president and ceo of the RIAA.
Bonds are rivalrous and excludabe because the government says so, not because of any natural law. No, no, no. Why you do keep trying to equate proxies to fictions? Bonds are a promissory note, just another form of cash. The closest of your examples to an actual fiction is cash that is not tied to a gold-standard, but even that is still a proxy for a nation's wealth in general. A government can issue more bonds than it can make good on, just as a government can issue more cash than it's economy can support and in each case there are consequences -- bankruptcy, inflation -- that directly derive from the physical assets that underlie those promises.
But you can not give away an idea too many times - no matter how many times you give it away, you still have it. Furthermore, once you give it away, you can't prevent the receiver from also giving it away.
If you are the only one who knows how to play the guitar, than you have an exclusive and rivalrous talent. If you're the only one who knows how to make secret sauce than you have an exclusive and rivalrous bit of information. I give up. You obviously do not understand the meaning of the words you are using. If I am the only one who knows how to play a guitar and I sell that knowledge to someone else, then I still know how to play the guitar - thus the talent of guitar playing is not rivalrous. And once he knows how to play the guitar, I can't stop him from showing anyone else either. Thus it is not excludable either.
Thus exclusivity *is* rivalrous and exclusive. Only if everybody agrees to play by those rules, but agreement has nothing to do with any of your other examples. The treasury can print more cash than the economy can support, a local government can issue more bonds than it could ever make good on, a company can issue more shares than there is value in the company, a homeowner can fool two banks into issuing separate mortgages for his home. But in no case can any sort of agreement prevent reality from eventually crashing down on their heads. Agreements can forestall the inevitable consequences, but they do not define the limits of the system.
The best any agreement can do is to enable an economy to approach the limits of the potential that is "locked up" in their assets. The "agreements" of copyright, patents, trademarks all do the reverse - they take an infinite resource and attempt to impose limits on it. The complete and total opposite of the kind of agreements that de Soto writes about.
So that's really my point: Capitalism does more than recognize natural ownership and make it fungible. It also recognizes and creates abstractions that are not directly tied to the physical world. And your point is absolutely false. All examples you have provided are simply proxies for physical items.
If I transfer money from your account to my account has anything physically changed? No. It's just the idea of currency. Similarly, if I *create* money by hacking my account and just adding a couple of zeros to the balance, who have I excluded from having money? No one. Are you serious? Do you really believe what you wrote? I think you gotta be trolling.
our legal system has shown to be friendly to those who implemented this system. again, i state, what do you expect the OS to do? ignore it? Yes, ignore it. That's the whole point of the "tough shit" paragraph in my original response. Vista does not come with support for playing SACDs, it need not support BD or HD-DVD either.
I think he is saying that he would rather that his OS doesn't play HD content at all if it won't let him watch movies he steals. Once again, people... stop stealing shit and your lives will become much easier. Lol, if only you knew what you were talking about. The "stolen" movies play just fine.
It's the "legit" movies that have problems, I again refer you to the "tilt bits" mentioned in my original post. They don't affect the playback of stolen movies, only the ones that must go through MS's protected path.
I think the whole thing is stupid as well, but this is an integral part of the hd formats. Reporting that Vista respects what is required to play these DRM laden formats "legally" is just pointless. Define 'integral' - because all of OTA HDTV has no such restrictions. Furthermore, it is quite possible to record your own BLU-RAY and/or HD-DVD without DRM.
Get a proper hdmi supporting card and a proper hdmi monitor and you won't get down sampled output. That would be false. Read the article, read the part about 'tilt bits' being set on spurious errors. Furthermore, understand that all the work to support HDCP (what you really meant when you wrote HDMI) is a cost without benefit to the consumer. Vista compatibility is a must for all future video cards, so all future video cards will have their cost increased by the amount to support the anti-value of HDCP and "protected-path."
What did you think they would do? Can you imagine the lawsuits? Tell the MAFIAA, "tough shit" these anti-features are not in the interest of our paying customers. They didn't have to support playback of DRM'd content - the computer industry is an order of magnitude larger than the entertainment industry. Without MS on board with the MAFIAA, the sooner the MAFIAA would have to give up on DRM. After all, entertainment is a luxury, not a requirement, unlike the work most PCs do.
So the government doesn't enforce property rights? Or is their equipment our property now? Can't have it both ways. Right of way, like condemnation, is the government taking control away from the property owner. Sauce of the goose.
No, that's stupid us. But what do you expect when you give government money? Can't have it both ways. If they didn't like the implications of taking public money, they should not have taken it.
Stupid 'them' for using 'their' money to buy 'their' materials and pay people to do what 'they' asked to put in place 'their' network that we want to use. Stupid them for using OUR government to enforce 'their' right of way on OUR property. Stupid them for using OUR government to enforce 'their' monopoly on 'their' rights of way. Stupid them for using OUR government to subsidize 'their' networks with billions of OUR tax dollars.
Did you get that? "Thousands of pieces of legislation, statutes, regulations and institutions... a legal morass". Where's your anarchist vision of capitalism now? In order for the market to function in requires ORDER. The government has a role in capitalism: provide that order. I got that plain and simple. His point is far from what you want it to mean. All he does is state the obvious - if you want to extract the maximum potential of out of physical assets, then you need a social system in place that facilitates it. But when all is said and done, it all about maximizing the potential of PHYSICAL PROPERTY.
Capitalism is the acknowedgment that in addition to the cows (property) there is the potential those cows have to make more cows. That *potential* is *NOT* property. It is seperate and distinct from the cows. So, you are saying that the means of production is not property. Gee. I guess Adam Smith had that all wrong.
Again, none of that potential exists without the physical property that underlies it and there is always a finite limit to that potential. Thus the potential of the property is just as rivalrous and excludable as the property itself. Stop trying to assert otherwise. Oh wait, you said, "illustrates how government intervention is absolutely necessary for capitalism to funtion:" which is some other argument in some other thread with some other poster. It has nothing to do with showing that rivalrousness and excludability are not fundamental characteristics of capital. You've gone off on some tangent that nobody here cares about.
My freedom to use Linux the way I want is indeed at stake. At the moment I can do what I want as long as I distribute the code Do you really think "distribute" is part of the definition of "use?"
If you mail a book to someone, are you using that book?
I've never heard anyone say GNU correctly in person (it's always G.N.U.) Sez who?
Stallman, who ought to know, does not spell it out, so why do you think it needs to be?
when it's the name of our system, the correct pronunciation is "guh-NEW" -- pronounce the hard "G". Free Software: Freedom and Cooperation
"Nu unh, you are!" isn't a good argument. Even with fanciful Olde Englishe spelling. I suppose it is a vice to assume that one can comprehend their own fallacies.
Stock is an abstraction for ownership. Please explain how owning ".0002% of Apple, Inc" translates to "real property". Can I claim a paperclip from their office? Are you serious? Shares in a company are simply a proxy for portions of that real entity. They are limited to a total sum of 1 of that company, the property they represent is rivalrous and excludable which is why the sum total of all shares in a company add up to 1 of that company. If they were non-rivalrous, like knowledge, a company could issue many multiples of itself in shares, when that happens today it breaks the abstraction because it specificly violates that 1:1 correspondence and that's fraud.
"The Mystery of Capital", You keep referencing that essay as if to say that legal fictions like copyrights are abstractions and as capital is an abstraction for the selling price plus the opportunity cost inherent in a physical asset, so copyright must be property too. That might work, if it weren't for that giant disconnect between all of de Soto's examples being real property - houses and so forth as a form of collateral, all based on the rivalrousness and excludability of the property.
Summary: capitalism is *not* restricted to only "natural state" economics. It not only includes non-natural ideas of property, the very essence of capitalism - capital - is a non-property according to your strict definition. So far you haven't shown that at all. De Soto's writings talk about extracting value from naturally rivalrous and excludable assets, making them fungible does not make them any less rivalrous nor excludable, no matter what sort of semantic games you play.
You are playing games with semantics. Again, how blacketh is thy pot?
From stocks and bonds to various royal priveleges and monopolies the idea of owning, exchanging, renting, buying and selling non-physical commodities is *not* a recent invention. Stocks, bonds and cash are just convenient abstractions that directly map to real property. Royal privileges and monopolies are the original definition of such legal fictions that and have no place in the definition of capitalism.
You can argue all you want that such "legal entitlements" have plenty of historical precedent, but that does not make them a part of capitalism. They may have been part of all kinds of other economic systems masquerading as capitalism and they may even have had an unquantifiable beneficial effect in the context in which they existed. But that doesn't make them a part of capitalism.
If you want to argue about "textbook" definitions, then you've gone far, far astray.
What *can* be owned are certain exclusive rights to the *use* of that property. These property rights *are* "excludable and rivalrous". Thus the term "property rights", while not referring to the ideas themselves, plainly can apply to the "legal entitlements" attached thereto. Your definitions of excludable and rivalrous are not anything like the textbook definitions which refer to the natural state - "legal entitlements" are a complete fiction, they have no natural existence on their own, and certainly no natural state of excludability or rivalrousness and thus are not property in the economic sense of the term.
Like the other poster said, you are making up your own definitions of "property" - controversial usages of the word that did not exist until just a few decades ago. For example you will not find the word property anywhere in the body of USC Title 17, the very law that defines said "legal entitlements" of copyright in the US, nor I suspect will you find it used in any substantial fashion in USC Title 35 which defines those "legal entitlements" for patents either.
If the laws of nation that is the biggest promoter of those "legal entitlements" don't refer to them as property, who are you to claim otherwise?
Thanks for clearing that up. Why people who have clearly never even seen an econ textbook are so confident about their definition of economic terms is entirely beyond me.
But then, the less you know the easier it is to be certain. Lo, behold the kettle that which is blackest.
The GP refers to "property rights" as if that concept applies to knowledge. The problem with that assumption is, as any econ textbook will tell you, "property" has two defining qualities - it is excludable and rivalrous. Knowledge is neither and so his whole premise that cloners are somehow violating the principles of pure capitalism is completely without merit.
There is a guy in the comments section of the blog who is giving out dangerous advice:
That thing might blind you if you stare at it but second or 2 blast won't do any damage. It took a bit to pop the balloon and your eyes are probably tougher than a balloon. That is so completely false.
If you can pop a balloon with it, it is probably in the 100mw range which is enough to do permanent eye damage in 1/100th of a second. That's faster than you can blink. You won't go blind instantly, you'll just burn out a bunch of optic nerves, producing a 'hole' in your vision. Chances are, your brain will correct for the hole and you won't even know its there, unless an object ends up right at that point in your field of view, at which point it will 'magically' disappear.
Better make corporate employees have the same standards--it's only fair. And now nobody has a right to privacy. A corporate employee has almost zero right to privacy from his employer with respect actions he take as part of his job.
You seem to want to say that a right to privacy is all or nothing. Well, in the context of a job, public or private, it is effectively nothing. But that does not extend outside a person's employment and no one here, other than yourself, is try to say otherwise.
It's good that in this particular case the reporter got it right--but what if he had received incorrect information that unfairly damned people? What about a right to privacy? The police force, as a public entity, has no right to privacy.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, let's all go to DeVry. Who needs to be "broadly educated" when we have Republicrats and Demicans to tell us how to run our lives and run our country?
Ah, the "I was forced to do something so everybody else should be forced to do it too" argument.
Which is why we all need to get a master's degree in mathematics and spend 20+ years of our lives studying math before we should be allowed to use calculus. Why we all need to go deaf before we can play the melody from Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" and why weall need to become astronauts before we can look at pictures of the moon's surface.
Unlike most of the rest of the entertainment business, the BBC works on the model of getting paid first and then producing content - which allows them much greater freedom to produce quality programming rather than having to pander to the lowest common denominator. They ought to be maximizing the potential of their business model rather than trying to dilute it by trying to force themselves into 'venture capital' model, with all of its drawbacks, of the rest of the entertainment industry.
At best, an argument can be made that there are additional bandwidth costs for internet distribution. In which case, the BBC should just limit downloads to people in the UK. But there is absolutely no need to restrict distribution - if someone else wants to pay for the bandwidth to share a show worldwide, then they should not be stopped from doing so.
If Greece really were doing the centralized wiretapping thing like the CIA is asking for here, they would at least have the pretense of doing it with some sort of oversight, just as the CIA is trying to get official permission here too.
But you can not give away an idea too many times - no matter how many times you give it away, you still have it. Furthermore, once you give it away, you can't prevent the receiver from also giving it away. If you are the only one who knows how to play the guitar, than you have an exclusive and rivalrous talent. If you're the only one who knows how to make secret sauce than you have an exclusive and rivalrous bit of information. I give up. You obviously do not understand the meaning of the words you are using. If I am the only one who knows how to play a guitar and I sell that knowledge to someone else, then I still know how to play the guitar - thus the talent of guitar playing is not rivalrous. And once he knows how to play the guitar, I can't stop him from showing anyone else either. Thus it is not excludable either. Thus exclusivity *is* rivalrous and exclusive. Only if everybody agrees to play by those rules, but agreement has nothing to do with any of your other examples. The treasury can print more cash than the economy can support, a local government can issue more bonds than it could ever make good on, a company can issue more shares than there is value in the company, a homeowner can fool two banks into issuing separate mortgages for his home. But in no case can any sort of agreement prevent reality from eventually crashing down on their heads. Agreements can forestall the inevitable consequences, but they do not define the limits of the system.
The best any agreement can do is to enable an economy to approach the limits of the potential that is "locked up" in their assets. The "agreements" of copyright, patents, trademarks all do the reverse - they take an infinite resource and attempt to impose limits on it. The complete and total opposite of the kind of agreements that de Soto writes about. So that's really my point: Capitalism does more than recognize natural ownership and make it fungible. It also recognizes and creates abstractions that are not directly tied to the physical world. And your point is absolutely false. All examples you have provided are simply proxies for physical items. If I transfer money from your account to my account has anything physically changed? No. It's just the idea of currency. Similarly, if I *create* money by hacking my account and just adding a couple of zeros to the balance, who have I excluded from having money? No one. Are you serious? Do you really believe what you wrote? I think you gotta be trolling.
The "stolen" movies play just fine.
It's the "legit" movies that have problems, I again refer you to the "tilt bits" mentioned in my original post. They don't affect the playback of stolen movies, only the ones that must go through MS's protected path.
Stupid them for using OUR government to enforce 'their' monopoly on 'their' rights of way.
Stupid them for using OUR government to subsidize 'their' networks with billions of OUR tax dollars.
Again, none of that potential exists without the physical property that underlies it and there is always a finite limit to that potential. Thus the potential of the property is just as rivalrous and excludable as the property itself. Stop trying to assert otherwise. Oh wait, you said, "illustrates how government intervention is absolutely necessary for capitalism to funtion:" which is some other argument in some other thread with some other poster. It has nothing to do with showing that rivalrousness and excludability are not fundamental characteristics of capital. You've gone off on some tangent that nobody here cares about.
Lol, it's been years since I've heard someone spell it, everyone I know says it. I guess I don't hang with enough microsoft users.
If you mail a book to someone, are you using that book?
Stallman, who ought to know, does not spell it out, so why do you think it needs to be? when it's the name of our system, the correct pronunciation is
"guh-NEW" -- pronounce the hard "G".
Free Software: Freedom and Cooperation
You can argue all you want that such "legal entitlements" have plenty of historical precedent, but that does not make them a part of capitalism. They may have been part of all kinds of other economic systems masquerading as capitalism and they may even have had an unquantifiable beneficial effect in the context in which they existed. But that doesn't make them a part of capitalism.
If you want to argue about "textbook" definitions, then you've gone far, far astray.
Like the other poster said, you are making up your own definitions of "property" - controversial usages of the word that did not exist until just a few decades ago. For example you will not find the word property anywhere in the body of USC Title 17, the very law that defines said "legal entitlements" of copyright in the US, nor I suspect will you find it used in any substantial fashion in USC Title 35 which defines those "legal entitlements" for patents either.
If the laws of nation that is the biggest promoter of those "legal entitlements" don't refer to them as property, who are you to claim otherwise?
But then, the less you know the easier it is to be certain. Lo, behold the kettle that which is blackest.
The GP refers to "property rights" as if that concept applies to knowledge. The problem with that assumption is, as any econ textbook will tell you, "property" has two defining qualities - it is excludable and rivalrous. Knowledge is neither and so his whole premise that cloners are somehow violating the principles of pure capitalism is completely without merit.
If you can pop a balloon with it, it is probably in the 100mw range which is enough to do permanent eye damage in 1/100th of a second. That's faster than you can blink. You won't go blind instantly, you'll just burn out a bunch of optic nerves, producing a 'hole' in your vision. Chances are, your brain will correct for the hole and you won't even know its there, unless an object ends up right at that point in your field of view, at which point it will 'magically' disappear.
A Forbes article that isn't hyper-sensationalist and pro-status-quo?
What, was Daniel Lyons too busy impersonating Steve Jobs to do the piece?
You seem to want to say that a right to privacy is all or nothing. Well, in the context of a job, public or private, it is effectively nothing. But that does not extend outside a person's employment and no one here, other than yourself, is try to say otherwise.