Copyright exists to address the free rider problem. If you wish to do away with copyright you need to come up with an alternative for dealing with the free rider problem.
No it doesn't. Copyright exists for only one reason: to create an environment where people will create more content. It's all about the benefit to society, not about the creator "getting what he deserves". Whatever definition of copyright creates the "best" society is the optimum definition. More liberal copyright rules promote wider use of material, but more restrictive rule promote more creation of material. A balance must be struck, but there are no sacred cows. If it turns out the best balance exists when all books can be copied without any payment to anyone, then so be it... not that I think that's the right model. I'm nearly certain that a balanced copyright system would allow a lot of free riders and still promote plenty of content creation. Michelangelo was funded by the Medici family (among others), even though there was no copyright law to compel them to pay him.
But what about those "tell-all" books written by someone trying to cash in on their 15 minutes of fame? Think of the loss to the world if those stop getting written.
On a more serious note, you would be surprised how many people are unable to think beyond the writer-paid-by-the-publisher business model..
Creators of music have realized that the sale of recorded music won't be their primary source of income at some point in the future, so they now stress concerts and merchandise (and have been moving in this direction for a long time). Authors are going to have to find a place in a world where book distribution is frictionless. I don't know what the answer is, but I'm not in favor of creating legislation that props up their old business model until they are settled into a new one.
This isn't an idle question. Propping up today's business model delays the Star Trek like future of free access to information. There's no technical reason this future can't happen soon, but it will require society to find a way to entice people to write. Ebook lending and resale sounds like a good first step in the right direction to me.
But, it's priced pretty much the same as if it were a sale of a physical good. It would be hard to justify giving users less value for the same money when distribution costs are smaller, unless some sort of systematic abuse of customers is going on.
I saw those instructions and it did make it a bit more reliable. However, I still have workouts where the HR goes off a cliff after 20 minutes or so. I generally know it happened when I push the button and the summary says my average HR was around 100, but my entire shirt is completely soaked with sweat. As for stride, this usually happens to me on a stationary bike. I make enough wind to not get soaked with sweat if I'm moving. But on a bike, I sweat enough to have two small puddles under where I'm holding the hand grips.
They also seem to hate sweat. When I work out on a stationary bike, my Charge HR records my heart rate slowly rising up until I start perspiring heavily. Once my wrist is wet, the heart rate reading plummets by about 30 bpm and stays low for the rest of the workout. The rate seems to lock onto the pedal speed as the RPM displayed on the bike is almost identical to the heart rate being recorded. When I run it sometimes locks onto my foot strikes instead of heartbeats.
At the end of the day, it doesn't matter to me. I find value in the resting heart rate readings I get from my fitbit and those seem to be accurate. I don't use peak heart rate for any meaningful purpose, I run whatever speed I can maintain. I find my Garmin ForeRunner as a much more useful tool during running because keeping a steady pace is much more important to me than getting my heart at the right rate.
I never said I want them stopped, I said it's sad that they work. In my ideal world, drug companies would simply stop making ads because they wouldn't result in increased sales. Everyone who should be on their stuff would already be on it, and no one who shouldn't be on it would start taking it.
Why do you even think the words I wrote advocate the doctor dismissing all of the patient's input? I only said that the doctor shouldn't take the patient's advice on treatments.
Makes sense... why would driving a few mph faster lead to more accidents? I have no idea why so many people think going over the speed limit is so dangerous. Compare to the insane level of "unsafeness" of other behaviors like driving through the middle of a red light (not the first two seconds that red light cameras collect money for).
Speeding fines were set back in the days when it required a cop to catch them. The fines were considered fair back then. Deterrent math works out like this:
Deterrent factor = (Likelihood of getting caught) X (fine when caught)
Another reason for fines might be to pay for the cost the society must bear for the fallout from the transgression. This math works out to:
Money available to fix mess = (fine amount) - (cost of catching and processing violators)
In both cases, automating the process of issuing speeding tickets should result in lower fines. If the fine is being used as a deterrent, the likelihood of being caught went up, so the deterrent capability of a given fine amount is greater. If the fine is being used to compensate society, automation should reduce the cost, therefore reducing the amount that needs to be collected.
Here's where your attitude comes in: if the fine amount was acceptable twenty years ago, then it is outrageous in areas with cameras. We should all be fighting against them.
Another thing - these traps don't actually work so well. Violators have much less recourse to address mistakes in the system, and every time someone looks into one of these systems, they are rife with mistakes. Also, they tend to hit the same people over and over again. If they put a camera on your path from home to work, you are thousands of times more likely to be caught than if your path to work didn't happen to go by a camera. Where to put them is a political process, not an engineering process, so it is always abused. Also, going ten mph over the speed limit doesn't raise reduce road safety very much. Almost all of these tickets are bureaucratic victories, not safety victories. Finally, because the same people tend to get hit over and over again, there has been a recent trend of people simply letting the state take their license instead of paying the fines. Once they are driving without a license, there is really not much to hold over them. It's either let them go or put them in jail. Letting them go is admitting that the fines aren't worth it, and jailing them costs way more than the societal cost of speeding was in the first place, so everybody loses.
Perhaps what you don't understand is that there is often half a dozen different drugs that can manage some problem equally well, and the one that is used will depend on patient tolerance, availability, cost, and doctor education.
I've been on some of the most expensive ones on the commercials: Enbrel and Humira, I would have been on Orencia if it had been available back then. The day I walked into my doctor's office, he had a treatment plan. First, try topicals - starting with the least invasive and most likely to succeed. If no response, go to systemics (pills). We tried a half dozen pills - with follow-up visits to check if they were working. When that was exhausted, we went to subcutaneous injections. We would have moved on to blood infusions, but it turned out not to be necessary.
The entire time, he knew more about my condition and the available treatments than I could have possibly picked up from commercials or magazine ads. My input on medical issues would have just been noise. Of course he was receptive to hear how I was feeling and reacting to the medication, but he didn't need to know about treatment options.
And if your patient comes in and says "How about Orencia? I saw a commercial for it yesterday" and you say anything other than "I would have put you on it already if I thought it was right for you", then you shouldn't be practicing.
... then your doctor is working outside his specialty. Go to the proper specialist, he probably knows what the entire pallet of treatment options available to you.
In order for direct advertisements to work, doctors must be listening to their patients about treatment instead of the other way around. That sounds like a dysfunctional system to me.
The problem is that it's hard for the average consumer to manage usage. They fire up Netflix and it "optimizes" to get the best quality picture. There's no way to ask "If I were to do this four hours a day for the entire month, would I have to pay extra?".
Adaptive clients were invented to be used on a network where you pay for the pipe size and use it as much as you want. Data caps screw up the introduction of next generation services - as they are intended to.
There would still be factory-authorized service stations. They ride on the dealership concept today, but are essentially a separate business responsible for their own profit. No reason to think that half of the business would fail, since they have a captive market.
Slashdot Mirror
I see you've applied the unassailable argument of "If anything is wrong with Star Trek, then everything is".
Copyright exists to address the free rider problem. If you wish to do away with copyright you need to come up with an alternative for dealing with the free rider problem.
No it doesn't. Copyright exists for only one reason: to create an environment where people will create more content. It's all about the benefit to society, not about the creator "getting what he deserves". Whatever definition of copyright creates the "best" society is the optimum definition. More liberal copyright rules promote wider use of material, but more restrictive rule promote more creation of material. A balance must be struck, but there are no sacred cows. If it turns out the best balance exists when all books can be copied without any payment to anyone, then so be it... not that I think that's the right model. I'm nearly certain that a balanced copyright system would allow a lot of free riders and still promote plenty of content creation. Michelangelo was funded by the Medici family (among others), even though there was no copyright law to compel them to pay him.
But what about those "tell-all" books written by someone trying to cash in on their 15 minutes of fame? Think of the loss to the world if those stop getting written.
On a more serious note, you would be surprised how many people are unable to think beyond the writer-paid-by-the-publisher business model..
Creators of music have realized that the sale of recorded music won't be their primary source of income at some point in the future, so they now stress concerts and merchandise (and have been moving in this direction for a long time). Authors are going to have to find a place in a world where book distribution is frictionless. I don't know what the answer is, but I'm not in favor of creating legislation that props up their old business model until they are settled into a new one.
This isn't an idle question. Propping up today's business model delays the Star Trek like future of free access to information. There's no technical reason this future can't happen soon, but it will require society to find a way to entice people to write. Ebook lending and resale sounds like a good first step in the right direction to me.
But, it's priced pretty much the same as if it were a sale of a physical good. It would be hard to justify giving users less value for the same money when distribution costs are smaller, unless some sort of systematic abuse of customers is going on.
I saw those instructions and it did make it a bit more reliable. However, I still have workouts where the HR goes off a cliff after 20 minutes or so. I generally know it happened when I push the button and the summary says my average HR was around 100, but my entire shirt is completely soaked with sweat. As for stride, this usually happens to me on a stationary bike. I make enough wind to not get soaked with sweat if I'm moving. But on a bike, I sweat enough to have two small puddles under where I'm holding the hand grips.
They also seem to hate sweat. When I work out on a stationary bike, my Charge HR records my heart rate slowly rising up until I start perspiring heavily. Once my wrist is wet, the heart rate reading plummets by about 30 bpm and stays low for the rest of the workout. The rate seems to lock onto the pedal speed as the RPM displayed on the bike is almost identical to the heart rate being recorded. When I run it sometimes locks onto my foot strikes instead of heartbeats.
At the end of the day, it doesn't matter to me. I find value in the resting heart rate readings I get from my fitbit and those seem to be accurate. I don't use peak heart rate for any meaningful purpose, I run whatever speed I can maintain. I find my Garmin ForeRunner as a much more useful tool during running because keeping a steady pace is much more important to me than getting my heart at the right rate.
... but it's pretty good at making sure that ex-cons have few other viable sources of income than a continuing life of crime.
Sorry - "would start taking it" should have been "wouldn't start taking it"
You want them stopped so that source is gone.
I never said I want them stopped, I said it's sad that they work. In my ideal world, drug companies would simply stop making ads because they wouldn't result in increased sales. Everyone who should be on their stuff would already be on it, and no one who shouldn't be on it would start taking it.
Why do you even think the words I wrote advocate the doctor dismissing all of the patient's input? I only said that the doctor shouldn't take the patient's advice on treatments.
Speeding certainly leads to accidents.
Are you sure about that?
Makes sense... why would driving a few mph faster lead to more accidents? I have no idea why so many people think going over the speed limit is so dangerous. Compare to the insane level of "unsafeness" of other behaviors like driving through the middle of a red light (not the first two seconds that red light cameras collect money for).
Need citation showing that getting people to slow down to a posted (and usually chosen politically, not scientifically) speed limit increases safety.
Speeding fines were set back in the days when it required a cop to catch them. The fines were considered fair back then. Deterrent math works out like this:
Deterrent factor = (Likelihood of getting caught) X (fine when caught)
Another reason for fines might be to pay for the cost the society must bear for the fallout from the transgression. This math works out to:
Money available to fix mess = (fine amount) - (cost of catching and processing violators)
In both cases, automating the process of issuing speeding tickets should result in lower fines. If the fine is being used as a deterrent, the likelihood of being caught went up, so the deterrent capability of a given fine amount is greater. If the fine is being used to compensate society, automation should reduce the cost, therefore reducing the amount that needs to be collected.
Here's where your attitude comes in: if the fine amount was acceptable twenty years ago, then it is outrageous in areas with cameras. We should all be fighting against them.
Another thing - these traps don't actually work so well. Violators have much less recourse to address mistakes in the system, and every time someone looks into one of these systems, they are rife with mistakes. Also, they tend to hit the same people over and over again. If they put a camera on your path from home to work, you are thousands of times more likely to be caught than if your path to work didn't happen to go by a camera. Where to put them is a political process, not an engineering process, so it is always abused. Also, going ten mph over the speed limit doesn't raise reduce road safety very much. Almost all of these tickets are bureaucratic victories, not safety victories. Finally, because the same people tend to get hit over and over again, there has been a recent trend of people simply letting the state take their license instead of paying the fines. Once they are driving without a license, there is really not much to hold over them. It's either let them go or put them in jail. Letting them go is admitting that the fines aren't worth it, and jailing them costs way more than the societal cost of speeding was in the first place, so everybody loses.
Perhaps what you don't understand is that there is often half a dozen different drugs that can manage some problem equally well, and the one that is used will depend on patient tolerance, availability, cost, and doctor education.
I've been on some of the most expensive ones on the commercials: Enbrel and Humira, I would have been on Orencia if it had been available back then. The day I walked into my doctor's office, he had a treatment plan. First, try topicals - starting with the least invasive and most likely to succeed. If no response, go to systemics (pills). We tried a half dozen pills - with follow-up visits to check if they were working. When that was exhausted, we went to subcutaneous injections. We would have moved on to blood infusions, but it turned out not to be necessary.
The entire time, he knew more about my condition and the available treatments than I could have possibly picked up from commercials or magazine ads. My input on medical issues would have just been noise. Of course he was receptive to hear how I was feeling and reacting to the medication, but he didn't need to know about treatment options.
And if your patient comes in and says "How about Orencia? I saw a commercial for it yesterday" and you say anything other than "I would have put you on it already if I thought it was right for you", then you shouldn't be practicing.
Yes, one missing "e" on a web site that doesn't allow comment editing means that I meant nonsense, rather than just being a simple typographic error.
I did say "about treatment", not "about symptoms".
... then your doctor is working outside his specialty. Go to the proper specialist, he probably knows what the entire pallet of treatment options available to you.
In order for direct advertisements to work, doctors must be listening to their patients about treatment instead of the other way around. That sounds like a dysfunctional system to me.
I'm pretty sure posting a large sign doesn't make unconstitutional actions legal. That's kind of the point of the Bill of Rights.
The problem is that it's hard for the average consumer to manage usage. They fire up Netflix and it "optimizes" to get the best quality picture. There's no way to ask "If I were to do this four hours a day for the entire month, would I have to pay extra?".
Adaptive clients were invented to be used on a network where you pay for the pipe size and use it as much as you want. Data caps screw up the introduction of next generation services - as they are intended to.
gym memberships
There would still be factory-authorized service stations. They ride on the dealership concept today, but are essentially a separate business responsible for their own profit. No reason to think that half of the business would fail, since they have a captive market.