Ideas could not be "stolen" until the invention of intellectual property. Before that, we just had ideas.
We also had secrecy. A lot of the world knowledge used to be available only to tiny fractions of the world population.
Throughout history, most artists of any kind - musician, painter, author, whatever you take - lived and died poor. Throughout history, a very small fraction of them made it, and made it big. Celebrity status is not a modern invention.
So copyright, neither in its absence nor in its presence, didn't change anything about that, ever.
What it did change is the creation of a media industry. And a media industry was necessary to get the mass entertainment media we have today. There would be no 100+ mio. dollar movies without it.
And with a big industry comes greed. If we were to abolish copyright, do you really think it would benefit the authors? My guess is that they would get paid even less, because big media would rip them off even more, and they'd have no law to at least theoretically threaten the MAFIAA with. Meanwhile, the copyright industry would find other ways to control access and continue with the same business model.
'You don't have to keep your Bitcoins online with someone else.
In fact, why in all hells would you even think of storing your wallet with someone else??? I'm fairly new to bitcoin, but the thought was so far from my mind that it took me a while to understand what the problem with these kinds of attacks was.
Don't people get it that Bitcoin is money? Storing your wallet on someone elses server is like giving them your money. You do that with a bank, but not with some random Internet site.
With the whole thing becoming predictably smaller, it won't be long until either Googles or someone elses Glasses will be inconspicuous.
So all the policies are only bridging the time until we as society have figured out how to deal with the consequences of this technology.
Which, if the past is any indication and it usually is, might be a while. Here in the west, we still haven't figured out a proper cell phone handling etiquette and it's been about 20 years.
So when I found myself single again at 40, a web site was preferable than an "over 30's" Friday at a mega-pub. Also a lot more physically comfortable, since those places usually have the heaters turned up high to make the punters thirsty (also makes old farts sweat like a pigs).
For most of my life, clubs were the primary location to meet people, both romantically and socially. However, that's changed during the past 4-5 years, and why? For who-knows reasons, all the clubs in my area seem to have turned up the volume, and considerably so. It used to be possible to have a perfectly good conversation in a club. Not any more. You can yell a few sentences in each others ears and that's about it. For meaningful conversation, you need to find a chill-out zone, which thanks to anti-smoking laws (which I'm a big fan of, don't get me wrong, being able to dance without inhaling half a pack of cigarettes passively is a massive boon) have mostly been turned into smoking lounges by the clubs.
I'm the kind of guy who loves attractive women with an equally attractive mind. If I can't verify one of these then the place is of no use for dating purposes. Which makes things difficult because in clubs you can't have a good conversation anymore, and online you find out who has a good photographer but not who's stunning in reality.
That's what is missing from these algorithms. What about those who are attracted by some other factor than physical appearance?
Not aside, but in addition.
I met the girl I would spend the next 6 years with at a club and since she was only visiting a friend, e-mail and telephone was all we had for the next weeks. By the time we met again six weeks later, I was already very much in love and had a weekend that I still remember clearly now, 9 years later. Yes, she was hot and she could dance and that's why I chatted her up initially, but what made her special was the mostly e-mail conversation we had afterwards, which revealed this utterly amazing woman and a brilliantly creative mind.
In some respects, online interactions can actually help in screening for these things. If her profile, facebook or e-mail (whatever your mode of contact) is riddled with spelling mistakes and primary-school level language, for example, you can just not bother without having to waste five minutes figuring out that she's hot but dumb.
It's an interesting article, but the truth is a lot simpler:
If you pay for membership by time, the site has no economic interest that you actually find a partner. They profit from you searching for one, but not from you actually finding one.
And that's all you need to know. A site that actually helps you find a partner will - economically speaking - lose out against a site that just keeps you looking for one. Thus, by the beautiful logic of the evil of free market capitalism, a sort of evolution results in all surviving dating sites being of the kind where you will not find a partner, but where you will always be kept in just enough hope that you keep searching.
is it really realistic to expect someone to be so desperate to live in the US that they will drop a relevant, career-progressing and decently paid job in another Western country to work in the kitchen of a golf club as an illegal immigrant?
How are above minimum wage are the immigration officers paid?
You know, they could simply lack the concept of a "decently paid job".
There's open source alternatives for just about anything you can think of.
Wrong.
There are an incredible number of incredibly cool Free Software projects. That doesn't mean they cover everything, because that is just a lie.
I founded a small company two years ago. There is no Free Software on the market that could handle my finance and business administration. I looked really hard.
One of the products of my company is a piece of software that also doesn't exist as Free Software, nor does anything even close to it.
And let's not even get started about the whole games area where despite laudable amateur efforts, even the best Free Software games are just pathetic amateurish half-done crap compared to the AAA titles.
It is similar in the area of business software. There's no Free Software to control your assembly line. There's no Free Software to run your HR, or to do the heavy lifting for a corporate financial statement.
$50 million in tax money could have paid for a whole lot of open source software development, instead.
Maybe, but then again maybe they needed something that works today, so funding development of something that will work in two years simply wasn't an option? Not everything in this world is a conspiracy, you know?
Whenever you hear of the philantropic efforts of multi-millionaires, always keep in mind that they took that money of theirs out of the local economy. It's not like it appeared out of nowhere, you know?
Really? How do you use almost one plastic bag per day? My personal use is maybe 2 per month, whenever I'm shopping and it turns out the bag(s) I brought aren't enough.
And I'm not an eco freak. I don't even seperate my waste. So it really takes very, very little to be considerable under that number, so if that's an average, and I assume most of the eco-minded people are somewhere around my level or even lower, who are the fucking morons who use more than a bag every fucking day ??.
...he's right! If you use Arial, you are quite obviously a stupid windows user who doesn't give a 2nd thought about font choice, so you're unlikely to think about anything else in your life.
Arial, think about it! The Wannabe-Helvetica used because Microsoft was too cheap to buy a Helvetica license.
Seriously, I'm right there with him. People who use Arial can't be trusted. People who use Arial in a letter rightfully deserve to get everything they ask in it denied.
Oh... I wonder where the 35 cent number comes from then, that is the number that Forbes provided. Does it vary much from one part of Germany to another?
If you are looking for a sensational story, I'm pretty sure that somewhere on the german energy market you can find a provider who has a 35 cents offer.
And yes, energy efficiency has many reasons. Mostly it is how you build. The house I live in is almost a hundred years old, but it is built from bricks, not wood and aluminium.
my average electric/gas bill has dropped to under $400 a month
Wow. I pay around $100 a month for electricity.
So, maybe energy is cheaper for you if you measure by kwh, but taking everything into consideration, I pay a lot less for power than you do.
Even taking into consideration that I currently live by myself in an appartment (90 sqm) and not a house with a family, total energy cost is probably lower even if the living conditions were similar.
Democracy, no we must be more precise: Representative Democracy has failed us.
If you lump 300 mio. people into 600 representatives (each one representing half a million people) then the main unintended consequence is that you have just created a massively optimized corruption center.
And if the income inequality is large enough that the very rich can spend more money on lobbying their wishes than half a million people can, then they always win.
So what I've read about the 35 cents per kwh is correct?
No, see my other reply. I copied the wrong number. I pay 25 cents.
And the main reason for that is that our corrupt government has "exempted" pretty much every big industrial consumer of electrical energy from the taxes, so the private consumers have to share the whole burden. It could be much lower if everyone, including those who buy/bribe/fuck our politicians would pay their fair share, too.
because last month my house used 1812 kwh, it would be expensive at 35 cents.
Germany is generally a lot more energy-efficient. One of the reasons is that power is more expensive and the other reason is that we don't run A/C 24/7 and such stuff. A 4-person home is estimated to use on average 5000 kwh per year here.
So in a yearly sum, most germans pay a lot less than you do.
In no other job on this planet is there a lower correlation between performance and salary than in the executive positions of international corporations. Just look at all the utterly failures who've destroyed a company only to get the next comparably position at a different one. Try doing that in any other job with responsibilities.
Does anyone really believe laws like that that would lead to net improvements in those areas, or for society in general?
Yes.
Turn it around. Try to justify both a belief that all humans are created equal - or in whatever words you would phrase the basic principle that the inherent value of humans as humans is more ore less identical - and the fact that the only hard limited resources we all share - time - is valued at X, where X is identical to one hour of life-time for one human and one month of life-time for the other.
Your available set of arguments is very small. You can pay back investments he made previously, like time and money for university study required for the job. You can pay for higher productivity and lower error rate due to more experience. You can pay more for dangerous or dirty work, or work requiring specific experience or knowledge that is rare.
None of the ultra-high incomes fall into any of these categories. Very few CEOs are really worth a thousand of their employees. Maybe Musk.
The reason these CEOs are so expensive is the same reason that the top movie stars, the top rock stars and the top sports heroes are so expensive: Positive feedback loop. If everyone wants one of the stars, and is willing to pay more for them than the competition, the price will explode. Or, in simpler terms: They are so expensive simply and solely because they are so expensive.
And that is why a ceiling limit does make sense, can be justified, and would give society a net improvement. In fact, several. a) a return to value-based salaries for the top dogs and b) less money wasted on pointless luxury items^H^H^H heads.
We've seen a lot of this propaganda in the past years and I refuse to believe it. What I mean is the attempt to spread a meme that says "post-privacy" or "privacy is done for anyways".
Look who the proponents of this meme are. Always, always the people who want it to be the case - Zuckerberg, government spy units, advertisers.
No, the battle isn't over while one side still fights. And there is quite a lot you can do to maintain your privacy. And like everywhere, there's a law of diminishing returns, which means the first steps, that bring you a ton of privacy back, are really, really easy.
Step No. 1: Don't post all your life to Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Security researchers have demonstrated years ago how from that data alone they can create extensive profiles on you, including movement data that police would need a search warrent for your mobile provider for.
Step No. 2: Keep your secrets secret. If you want to share them with someone because you just have to talk with someone about the guy you murdered last week, or the hot chick you cheated on your wife with last month, or how you really hate your grandma even though you always play nice at the family events because she's rich - or whatever is on your conscious, do it in person, face-to-face only.
And that's about it. 80% of your privacy restored right there.
Whine about the NSA all you want, but if I can reconstruct where and with whom you have been with at what time on which day from your social media data, the biggest threat to your privacy is yourself.
I've not seen where we've benefited from this glut of oil from there
The US$ is still the official currency on the oil market.
Before the invasion, Iraq and a few other countries were flirting with the idea of selling in Euros. Haven't heard anyone talk about that since then.
That is massively more important than the vast oil reserves in Iraq itself, because as long as the USA can buy oil in a currency that it can print, if need be, they don't have to be afraid of the market, because they essentially own it.
Those numbers are only because you (the USA) are behind.
I live in Germany, and over here solar + wind power have already taken a large share of the energy market. In fact, our energy companies are in panic and bribi^H^H^H lobbying the government to cut tax benefits for clean energy (and, like in the US, they conveniently "ignore" that they also get subsidies for their fossile and nuclear energy).
In fact, there is so much sun and wind energy on the market, that recently during the summer, the exchange price for electricity went negative for a few hours.
I'm with you when it comes to dumping the irrational fear of nuclear power. Personally, I think the future should be powered by a mix of solar, wind and nuclear energy. But don't assume that solar and wind can't be a big part, because they can and we over here prove it every day.
Slashdot Mirror
Ideas could not be "stolen" until the invention of intellectual property. Before that, we just had ideas.
We also had secrecy. A lot of the world knowledge used to be available only to tiny fractions of the world population.
Throughout history, most artists of any kind - musician, painter, author, whatever you take - lived and died poor. Throughout history, a very small fraction of them made it, and made it big. Celebrity status is not a modern invention.
So copyright, neither in its absence nor in its presence, didn't change anything about that, ever.
What it did change is the creation of a media industry. And a media industry was necessary to get the mass entertainment media we have today. There would be no 100+ mio. dollar movies without it.
And with a big industry comes greed. If we were to abolish copyright, do you really think it would benefit the authors? My guess is that they would get paid even less, because big media would rip them off even more, and they'd have no law to at least theoretically threaten the MAFIAA with. Meanwhile, the copyright industry would find other ways to control access and continue with the same business model.
'You don't have to keep your Bitcoins online with someone else.
In fact, why in all hells would you even think of storing your wallet with someone else??? I'm fairly new to bitcoin, but the thought was so far from my mind that it took me a while to understand what the problem with these kinds of attacks was.
Don't people get it that Bitcoin is money? Storing your wallet on someone elses server is like giving them your money. You do that with a bank, but not with some random Internet site.
With the whole thing becoming predictably smaller, it won't be long until either Googles or someone elses Glasses will be inconspicuous.
So all the policies are only bridging the time until we as society have figured out how to deal with the consequences of this technology.
Which, if the past is any indication and it usually is, might be a while. Here in the west, we still haven't figured out a proper cell phone handling etiquette and it's been about 20 years.
So when I found myself single again at 40, a web site was preferable than an "over 30's" Friday at a mega-pub. Also a lot more physically comfortable, since those places usually have the heaters turned up high to make the punters thirsty (also makes old farts sweat like a pigs).
For most of my life, clubs were the primary location to meet people, both romantically and socially. However, that's changed during the past 4-5 years, and why? For who-knows reasons, all the clubs in my area seem to have turned up the volume, and considerably so. It used to be possible to have a perfectly good conversation in a club. Not any more. You can yell a few sentences in each others ears and that's about it. For meaningful conversation, you need to find a chill-out zone, which thanks to anti-smoking laws (which I'm a big fan of, don't get me wrong, being able to dance without inhaling half a pack of cigarettes passively is a massive boon) have mostly been turned into smoking lounges by the clubs.
I'm the kind of guy who loves attractive women with an equally attractive mind. If I can't verify one of these then the place is of no use for dating purposes. Which makes things difficult because in clubs you can't have a good conversation anymore, and online you find out who has a good photographer but not who's stunning in reality.
That's what is missing from these algorithms. What about those who are attracted by some other factor than physical appearance?
Not aside, but in addition.
I met the girl I would spend the next 6 years with at a club and since she was only visiting a friend, e-mail and telephone was all we had for the next weeks. By the time we met again six weeks later, I was already very much in love and had a weekend that I still remember clearly now, 9 years later. Yes, she was hot and she could dance and that's why I chatted her up initially, but what made her special was the mostly e-mail conversation we had afterwards, which revealed this utterly amazing woman and a brilliantly creative mind.
In some respects, online interactions can actually help in screening for these things. If her profile, facebook or e-mail (whatever your mode of contact) is riddled with spelling mistakes and primary-school level language, for example, you can just not bother without having to waste five minutes figuring out that she's hot but dumb.
It's an interesting article, but the truth is a lot simpler:
If you pay for membership by time, the site has no economic interest that you actually find a partner. They profit from you searching for one, but not from you actually finding one.
And that's all you need to know. A site that actually helps you find a partner will - economically speaking - lose out against a site that just keeps you looking for one. Thus, by the beautiful logic of the evil of free market capitalism, a sort of evolution results in all surviving dating sites being of the kind where you will not find a partner, but where you will always be kept in just enough hope that you keep searching.
is it really realistic to expect someone to be so desperate to live in the US that they will drop a relevant, career-progressing and decently paid job in another Western country to work in the kitchen of a golf club as an illegal immigrant?
How are above minimum wage are the immigration officers paid?
You know, they could simply lack the concept of a "decently paid job".
There's open source alternatives for just about anything you can think of.
Wrong.
There are an incredible number of incredibly cool Free Software projects. That doesn't mean they cover everything, because that is just a lie.
I founded a small company two years ago. There is no Free Software on the market that could handle my finance and business administration. I looked really hard.
One of the products of my company is a piece of software that also doesn't exist as Free Software, nor does anything even close to it.
And let's not even get started about the whole games area where despite laudable amateur efforts, even the best Free Software games are just pathetic amateurish half-done crap compared to the AAA titles.
It is similar in the area of business software. There's no Free Software to control your assembly line. There's no Free Software to run your HR, or to do the heavy lifting for a corporate financial statement.
You're assuming that what they got works today.
I'm not assuming any more than you do. ;-)
Some things in the world deserve to be treated more like a conspiracy, you know?
Never explain by malice what you can explain by ignorance, stupidity and greed.
$50 million in tax money could have paid for a whole lot of open source software development, instead.
Maybe, but then again maybe they needed something that works today, so funding development of something that will work in two years simply wasn't an option? Not everything in this world is a conspiracy, you know?
A hundred times this.
Whenever you hear of the philantropic efforts of multi-millionaires, always keep in mind that they took that money of theirs out of the local economy. It's not like it appeared out of nowhere, you know?
Really? How do you use almost one plastic bag per day? My personal use is maybe 2 per month, whenever I'm shopping and it turns out the bag(s) I brought aren't enough.
And I'm not an eco freak. I don't even seperate my waste. So it really takes very, very little to be considerable under that number, so if that's an average, and I assume most of the eco-minded people are somewhere around my level or even lower, who are the fucking morons who use more than a bag every fucking day ??.
...he's right! If you use Arial, you are quite obviously a stupid windows user who doesn't give a 2nd thought about font choice, so you're unlikely to think about anything else in your life.
Arial, think about it! The Wannabe-Helvetica used because Microsoft was too cheap to buy a Helvetica license.
Seriously, I'm right there with him. People who use Arial can't be trusted. People who use Arial in a letter rightfully deserve to get everything they ask in it denied.
Oh... I wonder where the 35 cent number comes from then, that is the number that Forbes provided. Does it vary much from one part of Germany to another?
If you are looking for a sensational story, I'm pretty sure that somewhere on the german energy market you can find a provider who has a 35 cents offer.
And yes, energy efficiency has many reasons. Mostly it is how you build. The house I live in is almost a hundred years old, but it is built from bricks, not wood and aluminium.
my average electric/gas bill has dropped to under $400 a month
Wow.
I pay around $100 a month for electricity.
So, maybe energy is cheaper for you if you measure by kwh, but taking everything into consideration, I pay a lot less for power than you do.
Even taking into consideration that I currently live by myself in an appartment (90 sqm) and not a house with a family, total energy cost is probably lower even if the living conditions were similar.
I'm actually with them, part of the way.
Democracy, no we must be more precise: Representative Democracy has failed us.
If you lump 300 mio. people into 600 representatives (each one representing half a million people) then the main unintended consequence is that you have just created a massively optimized corruption center.
And if the income inequality is large enough that the very rich can spend more money on lobbying their wishes than half a million people can, then they always win.
So what I've read about the 35 cents per kwh is correct?
No, see my other reply. I copied the wrong number. I pay 25 cents.
And the main reason for that is that our corrupt government has "exempted" pretty much every big industrial consumer of electrical energy from the taxes, so the private consumers have to share the whole burden. It could be much lower if everyone, including those who buy/bribe/fuck our politicians would pay their fair share, too.
because last month my house used 1812 kwh, it would be expensive at 35 cents.
Germany is generally a lot more energy-efficient. One of the reasons is that power is more expensive and the other reason is that we don't run A/C 24/7 and such stuff. A 4-person home is estimated to use on average 5000 kwh per year here.
So in a yearly sum, most germans pay a lot less than you do.
Lol, what a stupid mistake.
I pay 25 cents, not 35 cents. For some reason I took the number from the propaganda. The number on the linked page is, of course, correct.
Where do you even get so much propaganda?
I pay 35 cents/kwH and my provider is a local, clean energy one. You can probably find cheaper power easily.
Prices are falling:
http://www.heise.de/tp/artikel/40/40051/1.html
Solar is currently at almost 12%:
http://www.solarserver.de/solar-magazin/nachrichten/aktuelles/2013/kw37/photovoltaik-in-deutschland-119-solarstrom-anteil-im-august-2013.html
Really, where do you get your lies? Are they cheaper in bulk? :-)
Mod parent up.
In no other job on this planet is there a lower correlation between performance and salary than in the executive positions of international corporations. Just look at all the utterly failures who've destroyed a company only to get the next comparably position at a different one. Try doing that in any other job with responsibilities.
Does anyone really believe laws like that that would lead to net improvements in those areas, or for society in general?
Yes.
Turn it around. Try to justify both a belief that all humans are created equal - or in whatever words you would phrase the basic principle that the inherent value of humans as humans is more ore less identical - and the fact that the only hard limited resources we all share - time - is valued at X, where X is identical to one hour of life-time for one human and one month of life-time for the other.
Your available set of arguments is very small. You can pay back investments he made previously, like time and money for university study required for the job. You can pay for higher productivity and lower error rate due to more experience. You can pay more for dangerous or dirty work, or work requiring specific experience or knowledge that is rare.
None of the ultra-high incomes fall into any of these categories. Very few CEOs are really worth a thousand of their employees. Maybe Musk.
The reason these CEOs are so expensive is the same reason that the top movie stars, the top rock stars and the top sports heroes are so expensive: Positive feedback loop. If everyone wants one of the stars, and is willing to pay more for them than the competition, the price will explode. Or, in simpler terms: They are so expensive simply and solely because they are so expensive.
And that is why a ceiling limit does make sense, can be justified, and would give society a net improvement. In fact, several. a) a return to value-based salaries for the top dogs and b) less money wasted on pointless luxury items^H^H^H heads.
You forget that all these tricks are transparent and easily seen for what they are.
Attackers have wised up? rotfl.
We've known BGP is insecure for 15 years, pretty much since someone first thought of thinking "security" and "BGP" in the same sentence.
But the Telco industry is horrible at security. I should know, I've been the IT security dude for a major ISP.
I would be surprised if active attacks on BGP were younger than 5 years. It's more likely that someone has finally taken a look.
We've seen a lot of this propaganda in the past years and I refuse to believe it. What I mean is the attempt to spread a meme that says "post-privacy" or "privacy is done for anyways".
Look who the proponents of this meme are. Always, always the people who want it to be the case - Zuckerberg, government spy units, advertisers.
No, the battle isn't over while one side still fights. And there is quite a lot you can do to maintain your privacy. And like everywhere, there's a law of diminishing returns, which means the first steps, that bring you a ton of privacy back, are really, really easy.
Step No. 1: Don't post all your life to Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Security researchers have demonstrated years ago how from that data alone they can create extensive profiles on you, including movement data that police would need a search warrent for your mobile provider for.
Step No. 2: Keep your secrets secret. If you want to share them with someone because you just have to talk with someone about the guy you murdered last week, or the hot chick you cheated on your wife with last month, or how you really hate your grandma even though you always play nice at the family events because she's rich - or whatever is on your conscious, do it in person, face-to-face only.
And that's about it. 80% of your privacy restored right there.
Whine about the NSA all you want, but if I can reconstruct where and with whom you have been with at what time on which day from your social media data, the biggest threat to your privacy is yourself.
I've not seen where we've benefited from this glut of oil from there
The US$ is still the official currency on the oil market.
Before the invasion, Iraq and a few other countries were flirting with the idea of selling in Euros. Haven't heard anyone talk about that since then.
That is massively more important than the vast oil reserves in Iraq itself, because as long as the USA can buy oil in a currency that it can print, if need be, they don't have to be afraid of the market, because they essentially own it.
Those numbers are only because you (the USA) are behind.
I live in Germany, and over here solar + wind power have already taken a large share of the energy market. In fact, our energy companies are in panic and bribi^H^H^H lobbying the government to cut tax benefits for clean energy (and, like in the US, they conveniently "ignore" that they also get subsidies for their fossile and nuclear energy).
In fact, there is so much sun and wind energy on the market, that recently during the summer, the exchange price for electricity went negative for a few hours.
I'm with you when it comes to dumping the irrational fear of nuclear power. Personally, I think the future should be powered by a mix of solar, wind and nuclear energy. But don't assume that solar and wind can't be a big part, because they can and we over here prove it every day.