I take issue with the word "artificial". It is very central to the functioning of money that it is scarce, this is why gold used to be used. With modern currency the precise amount of scarcity is controlled by people (banks) and so in this sense is artificial, however it is fundamental to the concept of money that there is some amount of scarcity.
If someone counterfeits X units of currency, where there are a total of Y units in circulation, then the value of 1 unit of currency gets revalued by a factor of Y/(X+Y). This means that if someone else previously held W units of currency, then the act of counterfeiting has made them W - WY/(X+Y) = WX/(X+Y) > 0 poorer (in pre-counterfeit units). So basically this means that someone counterfeiting money illegally reduces everybody else's ability to buy things.
There isn't really any comparison to music, since there is no resale value for copied music, and most people (IMO) who download music would not have bought the music at full price if they couldn't get it for free. For these two reasons, me copying track X has not reduced the ability of the record company to sell their track, and so has not taken any value away from the company.
I agree, some privatisations are good, some are bad. There are many borderline cases; perhaps nowadays EM spectrum is one of them.
You did yourself a disservice by painting a very simplistic black and white (not to mention biased) picture of what is actually quite a complicated problem requiring attention to the subtleties.
Since you appear to be a person who knows a lot about free markets, monopolies and government regulation, perhaps you could also explain how the deregulation of the salt monopoly in 1930's India (you know, Gandhi's march and all that) was also a terribly bad idea. Or perhaps how life was so much better in England between 1636 and 1852 when there was a monopoly on the production of soap. Tea tax anybody?
I'm not sure how these particular events represent the rich and powerful filching from the wallets of the poor, I always thought the contrary. But maybe you're onto something here, perhaps Gandhi was a dirty oligopolist after all...
In my experience, there always are competitors. In my university degree every recommended text had another similar text that you could also buy, even when the professor had written his own book for the course. I suppose it depends on what course you are doing - maybe the university i went to had ethics on this kind of thing.
But still, if there is a problem of anti-competitiveness it is obviously not to do with the license because it already exists with paper books. Since they are free to price their paper books however they choose, i think the real question is: Does e-publishing increase or decrease the competitiveness of the market?
Which works well until the publisher goes bust when they don't sell any books because everyone knows they don't represent good value, and buys them from the competitor instead. The competitor who has realised that the DRM that prevents the book being resold enables them to sell electronic copies of their book at a quarter of the paper price. Or perhaps the competitor who still sells the paper version at the usual price, but includes a free digital version that can't be copied, resold and expires after a certain time.
You seem to be ignoring the fact that our economy functions by being a free market that fosters competition, and that competition is what prevents people getting ripped off, not the morality of the competitors nor a totalitarian government dictating what products companies can and can't sell.
If you have some reason to think that publishers operate outside this model, then perhaps commenting on that would be more useful to us all than repeating that tired old cliche.
People DON'T want: - To not be able to resell after reading
Actually I disagree, I think. If you take the case of student textbooks where the same title gets sold over and over again, the publisher relies on the fact that books degrade over time and so can't be resold infinitely often, and also that some of the people who have no further use of the book are too lazy to resell it. This means there is a constant demand for new copies of the books, which they make a profit on. If everyone resold their books then the publisher would make no money beyond the first 20 or so copies (per class).
Now suppose there was a book that whilst it couldn't be copied, it didn't degrade over time and was extremely easy to resell. There would be a much higher percentage of graduates who would resell their old 'books' (especially given the higher resale value since it doesn't degrade). This would massively reduce the revenue generated by the publisher, who would have to respond by increasing the unit price. Thus, having an unrestrictive license (which only prevents copying) results in the cost of owning a book being huge, whereas the cost of 'renting' (which is equivalent to buying and reselling) a book goes down (and presumably would be equivalent to the current interest rates).
This would have the effect that libraries would get screwed, since the cost of the book has gone up and they don't benefit from being able to resell. It could also mean that the students who have to 'rent' the book would have to take out large loans to cover the cost of the initial outlay; they could have the loan secured on the value of the book of course, but these arrangements are expensive to set up.
It seems like it would be much more straightforward to simply have books that can't be resold. After all, they can be sold for much less by the publisher since he can be assured of repeat sales the following year.
I can't speak for everyone, but I would say that some people are worried about the fact that many developing countries with large surpluses of forests just cut them down without replanting. Usually there are laws against this and the land is owned by the government, but the (illegal) trade is so lucrative that criminal gangs do it anyway, and they become rich enough to buy off the government, so basically it becomes unstoppable without outside help.
Personally i think it would be more useful to lobby our own governments to do more to stop the importing of this illegal timber than it is to stop buying books, but nevertheless there is more to it than you might think. See here for more details.
And then there is the third side of how it could actually benefit the end user. I know that at least some of my friends would quite like the idea of paying a monthly subscription to a music service allowing them to listen to any music they like, under the condition that they don't get to keep it. Basically like radio but being customized to exactly the music you want and without the adverts. Supposing this service was affordable (£20/month?), i reckon it would be quite attractive. And since most people (that i know) don't spend that much on music anyway, it actually benefits both the customers and the suppliers.
Of course, not everybody wants this kind of licence, some prefer a buy once keep forever model, but there is nothing to say that companies won't offer this AS WELL. I mean, this is why we have free markets - companies compete to provide the best product at the lowest cost.
I realise it might sound a bit like Orwellian doublespeak to say that DRM can benefit the consumer, but I think it is a similar situation to insurance - if you agree to answer their questions then you can end up getting a cheaper policy. Of course some customers lose out; in car insurance it is the young male drivers whereas in digital media it will probably be linux users. That's bad for me, and probably many others here, and I truly hope that there are ways to bypass it, but I think the doomsday scenario that geeks forecast will turn out to be plain wrong.
ok, sorry about misquoting you, i did honestly think you were trying to imply that property rights (and in particular owning what you discover) are a consequence of libertarian thought.
I also didn't dishonestly insert socialist at all. Since you were using a pronoun, you could have been referring to either belief. Sorry for the misunderstanding.
Thus the Europeans will not build their own root servers unless they could destroy the authority of the existing root servers, because this would be a division of authority.
So by your logic Europe won't create a trading block that would divide the existing American authority on trading agreements? And they wouldn't create their own common currency to rival the size (and in effect authority) of America's? And they wouldn't go against the current (american) military authority when it comes to war?
It's an interesting idea you have but i would say that:
The assumptions are wrong.
The conclusions are wrong.
other than that, it's great.
Moving on to why libertarian is so great...
I believe that people own what they buy, build, discover, or contract, and that people are the authorities over what they own...I also believe that it would be immoral to try to force these [socialist] beliefs on anyone else. This is IMO the most important distinction between libertarians and fascists, that a true libertarian lets others walk their own paths.
I see, so it is ok for a 'libertarian' to force their belief that they own 'what they discover' on all others, whereas it is not ok for a socialist to force their belief on others that society owns what they discover. This is blatant hypocrisy.
Suppose I go and 'discover' some lake that is upstream of your house. Since I've discovered it, I own it along with all the water in it, and if i want to block off the outlet, I will. Too bad for you, who has used this water to live on all your life...it's mine now and you're going to have to pay me for it. Does this sound fair? Clearly not.
Personally I consider myself as a soft libertarian. I think that people should be as free as possible, but I realise that 'freedom' is a complicated issue that no magic bullet of government non-intervention can cure. I also think that the value of freedom has to be balanced against the other things people have every reason to value, such as the ability to feed themselves during unemployment, the possibility of educating themselves etc etc.
Organisations evolve. Just because it was orignally intended merely to fight the occasional dangerous governments, it certainly doesn't imply that that is what it does now.
Basically it does what it's members want it to, and that includes things like UNHCR, UNICEF, UNESCO, etc etc. If it's members want to point their computers at the UN controlled root servers then they will do this.
You do realise that the whole concept of the gravitational 'force' is one which is dependant on the choice of a reference frame, or coordinates, or in your words PoV?
One of Einstein's great insights was that physical laws stay the same irrespective of changes of coordinates. This implies that you can choose your frame as you like, to maximise the physical intuition and mathematical simplicity of the calculation at hand.
You criticise centrifugal force as something which doesn't exist because it requires a particular frame of reference to manifest itself, but you should realise that ANY gravitational force is the same in this way. If you take the reference frame of the falling lift, then there is no gravitational force whatsoever; this is the equivalence principle IIRC.
If you were to ignore gravity and take quantum mechanics into account instead then it gets even worse for you. There is certainly no concept of force here, except in the h->0 classical limit.
I think that Linux/OS is innovative, it's just that it innovates in different areas than the desktop. Apple and MS are very good at coming up with good ways of making previously complex tasks achievable by the masses, and software that abstracts away the underlying mechanisms for people who frankly don't care how the computer goes about doing its tasks. Linux/OS OTOH is good at creating software that can be extended by other programmers.
Of course the hackers don't particularly care, and maybe don't even realise that application X is now way easier to use by the average person, because he could already use it before and now just ignores the irritating wizards, interactive help (clippy) etc. Likewise the average person doesn't notice the power of embedding lisp into a text editor (because they can't program anyway) and so just see the ugly as hell interface.
To say that one party is innovative and the other is not is just narrow minded.
If all you want from the home internet connection is to be able to watch Brazilian HDTV news broadcasts whilst you're expatriated to NY, then i would say the 'experience' would be far more than 50x better.
It may sound like a contrived example, but only if you see the internet merely as the thing that gives you webpages, email, and a remote terminal.
And about win98, this is almost an irrelevant detail. Personally i don't know anybody still using it on their main computer (eg my family has an old comp lying around that is not worth upgrading, but it doesn't get used much). I don't know the statistics, but I guess the install base is about 10%.
6 months ago, when many of us on/. were being introduced to the EU software patent directive I had *very* little faith in the EU. Nonetheless, I emailed several of the london MEP's lobbying them to reject the bill, and was actually quite surprised at the outcome. Every single email got a reply, and all but one of these emails were individually written. Not everyone agreed with my position, but it seemed as though some of the ones who didn't agree could be brought round by a good argument or a strong show of public will.
IMO, the default position of politicians on a complicated issue will be the corporate view, but only because corporations spend lots of money on PR etc and so get to them first. If objections are raised in a civil and coherent way they appear to be willing to consider them. The recent demolition of the software patents bill reinforces my belief.
So in conclusion I would strongly advise anybody who is dissatisfied with some bill going through parliament to find out who is representing them and email them.
Strangely, I'm actually quite happy with that moderation into oblivion, although i'm a little surprised it was under the name "Offtopic". Perhaps "Flaimbait" would have been more appropriate.
As soon as i clicked "Submit" I was regretting it; why would anyone care that 1 user out of the several million Fedora users has issues with the desktop crashing?
OTOH, I haven't seen many reviews of fedora, so it could have been useful to somebody wondering whether to upgrade to fc4 (or indeed gnome 2.10 or gcc4). Stability is a statistical thing, and if my post was viewed in a statistical way then maybe it is useful in that sense.
Do you actually have any evidence that the insurance companies are ripping you off? Is there some reason why you might think that this extremely competitive sector is cartelling to raise the prices of your bracket and not others?
Actually, insurance companies like to have more information so that they can more precisely price each persons insurance and gain an advantage over the competition (which is, I am told, rather fierce).
Personally, (if we ignore issues of privacy for the moment), I am quite happy for insurance companies to have even more information about the people they insure because *I* don't want to have to subsidise any group of people who drive dangerously, be they young, old, male, female, black, white or whatever.
Workers that are paid fairly are indeed less likely to cheat their employers, but you should remember that 'fair' is a relative term. I'm told that the people working in these outsourced offices earn far more than the average wage of the local area, and have better working conditions. So under these conditions, it's unlikely that they consider their pay to be 'unfair' as you put it.
What's more likely IMO is that offences are far more likely to make the press due to the sensitivity of the underlying issue. Did the Sun try to buy similar details from any UK call centres? The problem seems to be that there was no system preventing him from doing this, rather than anything to do with where he works.
Whilst wading through the various posts on why the hackers are to blame, or why the vendors are to blame blah blah blah, it occurred to me that the very existence of this thread with numerous +5 mods for each side probably means that blame is entirely the wrong concept to be using in this case.
I mean, sometimes the concept of 'blame' is useful because it means you can persuade a morally inclined person to do something that they wouldn't otherwise do, like "don't drive dangerously because if there is a crash it will be your fault; everyone will blame you." But in this case none of the parties really fall into this kind of classification. We have the vendor who is amoral and so only cares about blame as far as his marketing dept does, we have the cracker who knows he's doing the wrong thing already and the user who doesn't take part in the discussion and hence is not going to be influenced by the blame factor one way or the other.
But i guess this isn't compatible with slashdot's binary good/evil worldview.
When people ask me how they should organize their data I like to answer honestly:
"How the hell should I know?"
Well, it's not entirely necessary to answer in such an ill-tempered and non constructive way. Someone who doesn't spend a lot of time thinking about IT _may_ think that there are just one or two ways of _usefully_ organizing data.
I don't know much about this, but it seems as though most computer users store their data either flat, hierarchically in directories, or in a database. If this is true, then it would be a somewhat more useful answer than "How the hell do I know", mainly because it prompts for more questions.
And by the way, I implied nothing, not being the one who answered first. I only responded to your first misguided post.
Sorry, my mistake. I don't seem to be very good at the "you said this, he said that, I said the other" kind of stuff. Three things I consider important are:
There is more to civilization than men not raping women.
Don't judge people on the extrapolation of their comments because
One person can read posts like this and this and come to one set of conclusions about what the writer really meant, and another person can come to quite different conclusions.
I was trying to highlight the importance of (2) by giving an example of (3), which in this specific case could boil down to (1). I admit I didn't say this in a very clear way.
Slashdot Mirror
If someone counterfeits X units of currency, where there are a total of Y units in circulation, then the value of 1 unit of currency gets revalued by a factor of Y/(X+Y). This means that if someone else previously held W units of currency, then the act of counterfeiting has made them W - WY/(X+Y) = WX/(X+Y) > 0 poorer (in pre-counterfeit units). So basically this means that someone counterfeiting money illegally reduces everybody else's ability to buy things.
There isn't really any comparison to music, since there is no resale value for copied music, and most people (IMO) who download music would not have bought the music at full price if they couldn't get it for free. For these two reasons, me copying track X has not reduced the ability of the record company to sell their track, and so has not taken any value away from the company.
I already get my porn from xxx.lanl.gov
You did yourself a disservice by painting a very simplistic black and white (not to mention biased) picture of what is actually quite a complicated problem requiring attention to the subtleties.
I'm not sure how these particular events represent the rich and powerful filching from the wallets of the poor, I always thought the contrary. But maybe you're onto something here, perhaps Gandhi was a dirty oligopolist after all...
But still, if there is a problem of anti-competitiveness it is obviously not to do with the license because it already exists with paper books. Since they are free to price their paper books however they choose, i think the real question is: Does e-publishing increase or decrease the competitiveness of the market?
You seem to be ignoring the fact that our economy functions by being a free market that fosters competition, and that competition is what prevents people getting ripped off, not the morality of the competitors nor a totalitarian government dictating what products companies can and can't sell.
If you have some reason to think that publishers operate outside this model, then perhaps commenting on that would be more useful to us all than repeating that tired old cliche.
Actually I disagree, I think. If you take the case of student textbooks where the same title gets sold over and over again, the publisher relies on the fact that books degrade over time and so can't be resold infinitely often, and also that some of the people who have no further use of the book are too lazy to resell it. This means there is a constant demand for new copies of the books, which they make a profit on. If everyone resold their books then the publisher would make no money beyond the first 20 or so copies (per class).
Now suppose there was a book that whilst it couldn't be copied, it didn't degrade over time and was extremely easy to resell. There would be a much higher percentage of graduates who would resell their old 'books' (especially given the higher resale value since it doesn't degrade). This would massively reduce the revenue generated by the publisher, who would have to respond by increasing the unit price. Thus, having an unrestrictive license (which only prevents copying) results in the cost of owning a book being huge, whereas the cost of 'renting' (which is equivalent to buying and reselling) a book goes down (and presumably would be equivalent to the current interest rates).
This would have the effect that libraries would get screwed, since the cost of the book has gone up and they don't benefit from being able to resell. It could also mean that the students who have to 'rent' the book would have to take out large loans to cover the cost of the initial outlay; they could have the loan secured on the value of the book of course, but these arrangements are expensive to set up.
It seems like it would be much more straightforward to simply have books that can't be resold. After all, they can be sold for much less by the publisher since he can be assured of repeat sales the following year.
Personally i think it would be more useful to lobby our own governments to do more to stop the importing of this illegal timber than it is to stop buying books, but nevertheless there is more to it than you might think. See here for more details.
Of course, not everybody wants this kind of licence, some prefer a buy once keep forever model, but there is nothing to say that companies won't offer this AS WELL. I mean, this is why we have free markets - companies compete to provide the best product at the lowest cost.
I realise it might sound a bit like Orwellian doublespeak to say that DRM can benefit the consumer, but I think it is a similar situation to insurance - if you agree to answer their questions then you can end up getting a cheaper policy. Of course some customers lose out; in car insurance it is the young male drivers whereas in digital media it will probably be linux users. That's bad for me, and probably many others here, and I truly hope that there are ways to bypass it, but I think the doomsday scenario that geeks forecast will turn out to be plain wrong.
I also didn't dishonestly insert socialist at all. Since you were using a pronoun, you could have been referring to either belief. Sorry for the misunderstanding.
Thus the Europeans will not build their own root servers unless they could destroy the authority of the existing root servers, because this would be a division of authority.
So by your logic Europe won't create a trading block that would divide the existing American authority on trading agreements? And they wouldn't create their own common currency to rival the size (and in effect authority) of America's? And they wouldn't go against the current (american) military authority when it comes to war?
It's an interesting idea you have but i would say that:
- The assumptions are wrong.
- The conclusions are wrong.
other than that, it's great.Moving on to why libertarian is so great...
I believe that people own what they buy, build, discover, or contract, and that people are the authorities over what they own...I also believe that it would be immoral to try to force these [socialist] beliefs on anyone else. This is IMO the most important distinction between libertarians and fascists, that a true libertarian lets others walk their own paths.
I see, so it is ok for a 'libertarian' to force their belief that they own 'what they discover' on all others, whereas it is not ok for a socialist to force their belief on others that society owns what they discover. This is blatant hypocrisy.
Suppose I go and 'discover' some lake that is upstream of your house. Since I've discovered it, I own it along with all the water in it, and if i want to block off the outlet, I will. Too bad for you, who has used this water to live on all your life...it's mine now and you're going to have to pay me for it. Does this sound fair? Clearly not.
Personally I consider myself as a soft libertarian. I think that people should be as free as possible, but I realise that 'freedom' is a complicated issue that no magic bullet of government non-intervention can cure. I also think that the value of freedom has to be balanced against the other things people have every reason to value, such as the ability to feed themselves during unemployment, the possibility of educating themselves etc etc.
Basically it does what it's members want it to, and that includes things like UNHCR, UNICEF, UNESCO, etc etc. If it's members want to point their computers at the UN controlled root servers then they will do this.
Things are not set in stone.
One of Einstein's great insights was that physical laws stay the same irrespective of changes of coordinates. This implies that you can choose your frame as you like, to maximise the physical intuition and mathematical simplicity of the calculation at hand.
You criticise centrifugal force as something which doesn't exist because it requires a particular frame of reference to manifest itself, but you should realise that ANY gravitational force is the same in this way. If you take the reference frame of the falling lift, then there is no gravitational force whatsoever; this is the equivalence principle IIRC.
If you were to ignore gravity and take quantum mechanics into account instead then it gets even worse for you. There is certainly no concept of force here, except in the h->0 classical limit.
I guess you will hate me for this...but so you know there is no such thing as a force.
Of course the hackers don't particularly care, and maybe don't even realise that application X is now way easier to use by the average person, because he could already use it before and now just ignores the irritating wizards, interactive help (clippy) etc. Likewise the average person doesn't notice the power of embedding lisp into a text editor (because they can't program anyway) and so just see the ugly as hell interface.
To say that one party is innovative and the other is not is just narrow minded.
It may sound like a contrived example, but only if you see the internet merely as the thing that gives you webpages, email, and a remote terminal.
And about win98, this is almost an irrelevant detail. Personally i don't know anybody still using it on their main computer (eg my family has an old comp lying around that is not worth upgrading, but it doesn't get used much). I don't know the statistics, but I guess the install base is about 10%.
IMO, the default position of politicians on a complicated issue will be the corporate view, but only because corporations spend lots of money on PR etc and so get to them first. If objections are raised in a civil and coherent way they appear to be willing to consider them. The recent demolition of the software patents bill reinforces my belief.
So in conclusion I would strongly advise anybody who is dissatisfied with some bill going through parliament to find out who is representing them and email them.
As soon as i clicked "Submit" I was regretting it; why would anyone care that 1 user out of the several million Fedora users has issues with the desktop crashing?
OTOH, I haven't seen many reviews of fedora, so it could have been useful to somebody wondering whether to upgrade to fc4 (or indeed gnome 2.10 or gcc4). Stability is a statistical thing, and if my post was viewed in a statistical way then maybe it is useful in that sense.
Only if you think in binary.
Ubuntu for me now.
Actually, insurance companies like to have more information so that they can more precisely price each persons insurance and gain an advantage over the competition (which is, I am told, rather fierce).
Personally, (if we ignore issues of privacy for the moment), I am quite happy for insurance companies to have even more information about the people they insure because *I* don't want to have to subsidise any group of people who drive dangerously, be they young, old, male, female, black, white or whatever.
What's more likely IMO is that offences are far more likely to make the press due to the sensitivity of the underlying issue. Did the Sun try to buy similar details from any UK call centres? The problem seems to be that there was no system preventing him from doing this, rather than anything to do with where he works.
I mean, sometimes the concept of 'blame' is useful because it means you can persuade a morally inclined person to do something that they wouldn't otherwise do, like "don't drive dangerously because if there is a crash it will be your fault; everyone will blame you." But in this case none of the parties really fall into this kind of classification. We have the vendor who is amoral and so only cares about blame as far as his marketing dept does, we have the cracker who knows he's doing the wrong thing already and the user who doesn't take part in the discussion and hence is not going to be influenced by the blame factor one way or the other.
But i guess this isn't compatible with slashdot's binary good/evil worldview.
"How the hell should I know?"
Well, it's not entirely necessary to answer in such an ill-tempered and non constructive way. Someone who doesn't spend a lot of time thinking about IT _may_ think that there are just one or two ways of _usefully_ organizing data.
I don't know much about this, but it seems as though most computer users store their data either flat, hierarchically in directories, or in a database. If this is true, then it would be a somewhat more useful answer than "How the hell do I know", mainly because it prompts for more questions.
Sorry, my mistake. I don't seem to be very good at the "you said this, he said that, I said the other" kind of stuff. Three things I consider important are:
I was trying to highlight the importance of (2) by giving an example of (3), which in this specific case could boil down to (1). I admit I didn't say this in a very clear way.