If you have a nest-egg, like ownership of your house, you can consider moving to some 3rd world country. Like Costa Rica. The typical $400K American home can be replaced with an equal if not nicer $100K home in a lot of these countries. Then get a job teaching CS at the local university. I'm sure they will love to have a native english speaker with real-world industry experience. The pay won't be much, but combined with the rest of your nest egg you should be able to live comfortably with a low-stress, high-reward job in a really nice climate.
It is clear you made the inference that disregarding something because of the people who funded it is appropriate, Damn! How MANY times do I have tell you to fucking QUIT IT with that strawman? I NEVER said that, it's only your single-minded desire to joust with windmills. What I said over and over again in many different forms is it is apropriate to question the vermisilitude of a report based on its funding.
You seem to be lacking skill on some area. I'm not sure exactly were but the data can be found. Bada Bing! Bada Bum! You keep right on talking out of your ass there. When you ARE sure where the data can be found, then you get back to me. Otherwise, STFU already.
But I think it's hard to implement in practice. Who would do the paying? Who would decide how much creative work had been done? I don't think its terribly hard. In a nutshell, it would be a modern form of patronage. A creator offers a description of the work he would like to produce along with an asking price. People who are interested in seeing that work completed pay into an escrow fund as they see fit. When the balance in the fund reaches the asking price, the creator gets to work and and collects the escrowed funds on release of his work. If the balance never reaches the asking price, he can lower his asking price or the money is returned to the original patrons.
Works are released to the public domain or a license extremely close to it and act as advertisements for the creator's next project. Thus enabling him to collect significant amounts of money if his work is exceptionally popular. The subscription model - automatically pay $10/month for regularly scheduled productions would probably work well, just as it does now for premium channels like HBO where people subscribe specifically for a series like The Sopranos.
You are correct that overhead for financial transactions is a problem - paypal takes way too large of a cut to make one million $5 deposits feasible. But, as far as I can tell, there is nothing about the financial system that requires that sort of overhead - it is primarily a result of paypal mimicing the credit card model which wasn't designed for small transactions. It ought to be possible for paypal, or some other service provider to escrow a couple of million single digit deposits with very little overhead.
I think the only reason that the advertising model will continue to be popular is inertia, the infrastructure is already in place and the flaws have not been exploited enough to force people to seek alternatives.
With less well-known companies, perhaps, but not with Gootube. Any short-term gains would be easily outweighed by the damage to the company's reputation. I think you missed my point. It is not that google would do it, it is that individual users of google would do it in order to defraud google. How can google possibly distinguish between 50,000 virus infected systems downloading a video clip and 50,000 real people downloading a video clip?
Then you enter with the with a challenge on Cato's integrity because they received funding from groups you don't agree with. I think you need to hit the parent button a few times yourself. Either that or work on your reading comp. Name one group I mentioned as providing funding to Cato that I disagree with, or even agree with for that matter.
The raw data will be used in other studies. It isn't like they are creating a set of numbers specifically for the purpose of making something up. Unless it is an opinion or conclusion in the study, everything should be verifiable in other places. You make me laugh. Really. Obviously you have never tried to run down the raw data from a cato report or any other "think tank" - you'll be lucky if you can even get complete citations for the data, much less access to it.
I think maybe your picking the option of ignoring things because of the funder so you can be intellectually lazy. You keep repeating that strawman, do you love it so much you took it behind the barn and got it pregnant?
I've never heard of any of those video sites. Is this an actual problem affecting well-known sites, or just these no-names? I don't think it matters. With yoogle poised to do "revenue sharing" for videos hosted on their systems, the described abuse seems likely to become more popular. Both directly for profit and indirectly as "clumsy" joe-jobs to deprive the 'competition' from receiving valid income.
I believe the fundamental question about building an advertising based economy on untrustable numbers is indeed key. This attack is the equivalent of someone figuring out how to plant a remote-controlled tv remote-control in every Nielson living room and using it to fool Nielson's tracking into thinking the families where all watching certain shows - ones for which the producers had paid the remote-control controller a fee. If that were to happen, billions of dollars of tv advertisment revenue would be at risk.
The internet makes such an otherwise impossible attack relatively easy. I suspect the only long-term solution is to not base the economy on advertising. Find another way, my personal favorite being something along the lines of "global co-op comissioned work with release to the public domain." In other words, pay for actual creative work done, not unreliable statistics about eyeballs and promotion.
I don't really want to get into an argument over health care, which I don't know very much about. It sounds to me like you have some policy disagreements with our health care scholars. That's rather different from them telling "bold faced lies." Retric made the mistake of spurious elaboration. He should have left his response at, "At the end of the year with HSA's the government will give that person ~300$." That's not a policy disagreement, that's a clearcut point that HSA's are socialized when the Cato report takes it as a given that they are not.
It would be interesting to find out where the money came from for the specific work that produced those findings wrt HSAs. Did it come out of a general fund, or did it only nominally come from a general fund, or is the money trail completely in the open. Where the people doing the research even aware of the source of funding? Where they directed to do work on the topic of HSAs versus some other areas of research? What sort of editorial control was applied? How about peer reviews from people who might not really be peers?
As for the reports you wrote, just because they are in line with majority slashdot groupthink doesn't mean that there are no vested interests who stand to benefit from promotion of your conclusions. For example, look at how Verizon fought the DMCA not-really-subpoenas - they didn't give a rat's ass about their customer's privacy, they cared about the increased workload that they had to shoulder the costs of with no benefit to their bottom line.
I will now proceed to commit spurious elaboration myself... In the post 9/11 era (and the pre 9/11 era for that matter) there have been a lot of bogus "security" measures that were essentially one group trying to push their costs off onto another group and still claim the benefits for themselves. The TSA is one huge "cover your ass by making it someone else's problem" organization - all of the overhead costs for "flight safety" that are born by the flying public are just the most obvious manifestation, a bazillion people removing their shoes in order to fly adds up to a lot of wasted time with little to no actual safety benefits - a cost almost totally carried by the public for a benefit almost totally carried by the TSA (look ma, no shoe bombs, gives another $1B in budget because are doing so good!)
It continues up the ladder of sophistication from there, for example, in order to be given certain types of security clearances - the investigation is farmed out to your own employer who is required to pay for commercial background checks because the US government is unwilling to pay for the investigation themselves. For large defense contractors all those expensive background checks add up.
So, the question comes down to: were your pro-slashdot-groupthink reports funded by people who earnestly believe in said groupthink, or were they funded by those who stand to gain personally (financially or otherwise) by wide-spread acceptance of said groupthink. If the former, than any errors or omissions should be considered innocent until proven guilty, if the later than they should be considered guilty until proven innocent.
And no, That wasn't a strawman. It is a direct transliteration of your statement. I did what you said was entirely appropriate. Lol, if you say so. Personally I can't figure out what fuck all yer democratic paranoia fantasies have to do with LOC and THOMAS.
I can check the facts and truth about what is being said to verify the accuracy of any statements regardless of who is funding who. Yeah, good luck with that. Let me know as soon as you get a hold of the raw data behind one of these 'studies.'
Thus, the argument comes back to where I started, protection of an author's work is what incentivizes an author to create.
That is the heart of your argument, and it is categorically wrong.
Ignoring the people who create for creation's sake, as you have, what really incents creation is the opportunity for compensation for the work done. Copyright protection is one possible way to provide an opportunity for compensation.
It may not even be the best way, it certainly has its downsides, not the least of which is that it requires considerable risk on the creator's part - he has to invest in the creation completely up front without any guarantee of compensation, just the chance that he will be able to resell it afterwards. This extremely high risk directly lead to the creation of "venture capitalists" like movie and music studios that will shoulder (some of) that risk for the artist in exchange for total control of the creation. Thus the current copyright model actively encourages the creation of cartels such as the RIAA and MPAA.
The economic model that preceded copyright was simple comissioned works. The people most directly to benefit from the creation would hire the creator. With a contract in hand, the risk to the artist was reduced and the consumers of the creation could get exactly what they wanted. No middle-men cartels.
It is entirely possible for a modern comission model, making use of the connectivity of the internet to bring together thousands or even millions of patrons to comission the creation of any sort of digital creation, to provide equal or even better incentive than copyright protection does without the downsides of copyright. Thus not only incenting the creation of Free as in liberty software as much as copyright does today, but possibly going even further and producing a n internet cottage industry of creators not just for software, but music, video even real-world designs like 3D cad templates in conjunction with companies like mymachineshop.com.
The opportunity for creative incentive in a copyright-free world is vast, we just need for enough people to climb out of rut of the last 200 years of pre-internet creation.
So when I find some organization that believes in much of the same stuff I do and I then donate or do something to support that organization, It makes anything they do suspect because of my funding?
It does when your funding is directed at a specific project in that organization. It means you expect the results of that specific project to be particularlly beneficial to you specifically. Especially if that specific project would not have been undertaken without your funding.
Whenever I see someone discount something specifically because of funding when they organization survives on donations, I see it as that person looking for a reason to be in denial. It s just that simple.
And here's my counter-strawman -- whenever I see someone discount the source of funding as a source of bias, I see it as that person as being in denial. It's just that simple.
You can accuse Cato of a lot of things... lacking principles and being anyone's lap dog is roughly the last. Being principled means two things - being consistent in the causes you advocate for and being consistent in the causes you do not advocate. Cato is pretty consistent in the first case, but the causes they choose to advocate for seem to be driven by their sponsors, perhaps leaving behind other causes that are not so beneficial for their sponsors, but may be more idealogically important to their principles.
Sure, the line has to be drawn somewhere, resources are not infinite. But that doesn't mean the line is drawn without an agenda.
I don't think my education was particularly well rounded
Really? Then what other possible interpretation should I have taken when you wrote: "Just how well rounded am I supposed to be in addition to all that?" Especially when "all that" is just science?
So basically you had classes in your major and math and physics and you consider THAT to be well-rounded? Did you even read my original post? If anything, you've just demonstrated my exact point about narrow educations.
(This happened to a client-- I don't pay for my porn.) Riiiiiiiight... What, you didn't know the internet contains more free porn than it does for-pay porn? Sucker -- and not in a good way.
Maybe Slashdot posts articles like this to give us a poke and see what our reaction will be. That reminds me of a certain thing I can't quite remember, I think it starts with a "t". Testicles?
last I read, copyright law explicitly states that it is perfectly legal for students attending an educational institution to make a copy of any copyrighted work for educational purposes.
And what country where you in when you read that? Because it sure ain't the USA. You probably just heard someone somewhere say something about the component of the fair use defense that involves an educational exemption and then totally stretched it into something way, way larger than it really is.
If you don't know who makes it (which means it wasn't a DIY project), and it has both a wireless tablet and on-the-wall controls, chances are it is Crestron and costs a boatload.
(case in point biology is required for my PROGRAMMING degree...I hate biology, much rather would take physics...you know, that think I'm very likely to program for any game/simulation...)
Are you studying at a university, or at a technical college? Because at a university you are suppossed to get a well-rounded education, so not only should some biology be mandatory, but also some English and Foreign Literature, history of philosophy and religion, economics, psychology, music theory, etc.
On the other hand, a technical college's job is to churn out good little worker bees fully trained for their jobforlife. In which case there is no need to be well-rounded.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
The Government doesn't give me any rights.
I think you missed the part about "certain rights" - its not ALL rights, only certain ones. The government is completely capable of giving people rights beyond those certain rights - like copyright for example. The right to ownership of all copies of a creation is definitely not inalienable - else how would you explain copyright expiration? Hell, even real property rights are not inalienable, they are subject to squatting, rights of way, even being condemned.
The citizens are immoral for asking their government to establish no copyright laws.This is so because copyright laws (some form of them; not necessarily what we have here today) are demonstrably strongly conducive to the development of valuable intellectual achievements.
Holy shit! I can't believe you wrote that with a straight face. That argument leads to some dark places. For example fascism is strongly conducive to law and order (ever been to Phnom Penh, its probably the absolute safest city in the world, and Mussolini was praised for making the trains run on time), so citizens who ask their governments to not be fascist are immoral.
But just as fascism isn't the only way to attain at least a reasonable level of law and order, neither are copyrights the only way to attain at least a reasonable level of intellectual development. The world certainly did just fine without them until a couple of centuries ago.
It's wrong for china to steal stuff like Shrek or whatever else they've developed in recent years.
Is it really wrong for the Chinese goverment to do that? Copyright is purely a creation of each state - if the state decides not to honor it for certain authors that are not even citizens of that state is that truely immoral? Wouldn't that mean that copyright was somehow moral in the first place, thus a natural right and not a state-granted right?
Slashdot Mirror
If you have a nest-egg, like ownership of your house, you can consider moving to some 3rd world country. Like Costa Rica. The typical $400K American home can be replaced with an equal if not nicer $100K home in a lot of these countries. Then get a job teaching CS at the local university. I'm sure they will love to have a native english speaker with real-world industry experience. The pay won't be much, but combined with the rest of your nest egg you should be able to live comfortably with a low-stress, high-reward job in a really nice climate.
I'm not sure exactly were but the data can be found. Bada Bing! Bada Bum!
You keep right on talking out of your ass there. When you ARE sure where the data can be found, then you get back to me. Otherwise, STFU already.
Works are released to the public domain or a license extremely close to it and act as advertisements for the creator's next project. Thus enabling him to collect significant amounts of money if his work is exceptionally popular. The subscription model - automatically pay $10/month for regularly scheduled productions would probably work well, just as it does now for premium channels like HBO where people subscribe specifically for a series like The Sopranos.
You are correct that overhead for financial transactions is a problem - paypal takes way too large of a cut to make one million $5 deposits feasible. But, as far as I can tell, there is nothing about the financial system that requires that sort of overhead - it is primarily a result of paypal mimicing the credit card model which wasn't designed for small transactions. It ought to be possible for paypal, or some other service provider to escrow a couple of million single digit deposits with very little overhead.
I think the only reason that the advertising model will continue to be popular is inertia, the infrastructure is already in place and the flaws have not been exploited enough to force people to seek alternatives.
I believe the fundamental question about building an advertising based economy on untrustable numbers is indeed key. This attack is the equivalent of someone figuring out how to plant a remote-controlled tv remote-control in every Nielson living room and using it to fool Nielson's tracking into thinking the families where all watching certain shows - ones for which the producers had paid the remote-control controller a fee. If that were to happen, billions of dollars of tv advertisment revenue would be at risk.
The internet makes such an otherwise impossible attack relatively easy. I suspect the only long-term solution is to not base the economy on advertising. Find another way, my personal favorite being something along the lines of "global co-op comissioned work with release to the public domain." In other words, pay for actual creative work done, not unreliable statistics about eyeballs and promotion.
It would be interesting to find out where the money came from for the specific work that produced those findings wrt HSAs. Did it come out of a general fund, or did it only nominally come from a general fund, or is the money trail completely in the open. Where the people doing the research even aware of the source of funding? Where they directed to do work on the topic of HSAs versus some other areas of research? What sort of editorial control was applied? How about peer reviews from people who might not really be peers?
As for the reports you wrote, just because they are in line with majority slashdot groupthink doesn't mean that there are no vested interests who stand to benefit from promotion of your conclusions. For example, look at how Verizon fought the DMCA not-really-subpoenas - they didn't give a rat's ass about their customer's privacy, they cared about the increased workload that they had to shoulder the costs of with no benefit to their bottom line.
I will now proceed to commit spurious elaboration myself...
In the post 9/11 era (and the pre 9/11 era for that matter) there have been a lot of bogus "security" measures that were essentially one group trying to push their costs off onto another group and still claim the benefits for themselves. The TSA is one huge "cover your ass by making it someone else's problem" organization - all of the overhead costs for "flight safety" that are born by the flying public are just the most obvious manifestation, a bazillion people removing their shoes in order to fly adds up to a lot of wasted time with little to no actual safety benefits - a cost almost totally carried by the public for a benefit almost totally carried by the TSA (look ma, no shoe bombs, gives another $1B in budget because are doing so good!)
It continues up the ladder of sophistication from there, for example, in order to be given certain types of security clearances - the investigation is farmed out to your own employer who is required to pay for commercial background checks because the US government is unwilling to pay for the investigation themselves. For large defense contractors all those expensive background checks add up.
So, the question comes down to: were your pro-slashdot-groupthink reports funded by people who earnestly believe in said groupthink, or were they funded by those who stand to gain personally (financially or otherwise) by wide-spread acceptance of said groupthink. If the former, than any errors or omissions should be considered innocent until proven guilty, if the later than they should be considered guilty until proven innocent.
Ignoring the people who create for creation's sake, as you have, what really incents creation is the opportunity for compensation for the work done. Copyright protection is one possible way to provide an opportunity for compensation.
It may not even be the best way, it certainly has its downsides, not the least of which is that it requires considerable risk on the creator's part - he has to invest in the creation completely up front without any guarantee of compensation, just the chance that he will be able to resell it afterwards. This extremely high risk directly lead to the creation of "venture capitalists" like movie and music studios that will shoulder (some of) that risk for the artist in exchange for total control of the creation. Thus the current copyright model actively encourages the creation of cartels such as the RIAA and MPAA.
The economic model that preceded copyright was simple comissioned works. The people most directly to benefit from the creation would hire the creator. With a contract in hand, the risk to the artist was reduced and the consumers of the creation could get exactly what they wanted. No middle-men cartels.
It is entirely possible for a modern comission model, making use of the connectivity of the internet to bring together thousands or even millions of patrons to comission the creation of any sort of digital creation, to provide equal or even better incentive than copyright protection does without the downsides of copyright. Thus not only incenting the creation of Free as in liberty software as much as copyright does today, but possibly going even further and producing a n internet cottage industry of creators not just for software, but music, video even real-world designs like 3D cad templates in conjunction with companies like mymachineshop.com.
The opportunity for creative incentive in a copyright-free world is vast, we just need for enough people to climb out of rut of the last 200 years of pre-internet creation.
So when I find some organization that believes in much of the same stuff I do and I then donate or do something to support that organization, It makes anything they do suspect because of my funding?
It does when your funding is directed at a specific project in that organization. It means you expect the results of that specific project to be particularlly beneficial to you specifically. Especially if that specific project would not have been undertaken without your funding.
Whenever I see someone discount something specifically because of funding when they organization survives on donations, I see it as that person looking for a reason to be in denial. It s just that simple.
And here's my counter-strawman -- whenever I see someone discount the source of funding as a source of bias, I see it as that person as being in denial. It's just that simple.
Sure, the line has to be drawn somewhere, resources are not infinite. But that doesn't mean the line is drawn without an agenda.
In this case it means "In God we trust, everyone else pays cash."
True, too many people find it too easy to dismiss the importance of things they don't even understand.
So basically you had classes in your major and math and physics and you consider THAT to be well-rounded? Did you even read my original post? If anything, you've just demonstrated my exact point about narrow educations.
If you don't know who makes it (which means it wasn't a DIY project), and it has both a wireless tablet and on-the-wall controls, chances are it is Crestron and costs a boatload.
On the other hand, a technical college's job is to churn out good little worker bees fully trained for their jobforlife. In which case there is no need to be well-rounded.
But just as fascism isn't the only way to attain at least a reasonable level of law and order, neither are copyrights the only way to attain at least a reasonable level of intellectual development. The world certainly did just fine without them until a couple of centuries ago.