If you're correct and music really does involve more than "rather robotic computational ability", then don't worry. This attempt, and all attempts to find the mathematical basis of beauty will fail. However it's clear from your defensive (almost paranoid) tone that you don't really believe that's the case. You can see that the universe is a huge mathematical puzzle, a puzzle so complex that it includes beings who are trying to solve it. But because of your blinkered distinction between "science" and "art", you don't want to admit that anything mathematical can be beautiful.
I think you're afraid that this might work, that science might invade the realm of art. What you don't realise is that science and art are two ways of expressing the same truth.
If a mathematical mechanism can produce art, it doesn't mean that art is fundamentally ugly. It means that mathematics is fundamentally beautiful.
(And no, I don't buy the whole "Fossils were there to test us" crap, either...that makes God out not only to be a complete ratbastard, but a troll and a cruel ratbastard who gets his jollies off sending people to Hell for basically his idea of a practical joke. In which case, He can go straight to Hell, if you pardon the expression.)
There's also the entertaining possibility that the Bible is "there to test us", and God wants us to exercise our free will by rejecting it and believing in the evidence of our senses.:)
I suggest using the analogy of office stationery. Everybody knows that office stationery is free as in beer - it's just lying around all over the place, after all - but not many people realise that it's also free as in speech. That's because it's not under the control of any single entity. Your boss can't stop you from "redistributing" it. Neither can the stock controller. No company can take away your freedom to "redistribute" stationery, though many have tried. That's because, unlike most physical objects, office stationery can be replicated at almost zero cost. That's why no matter how much you steal, there's always enough left in the office for everybody. And office stationery guarantees its own freedom, just like the GPL: when you "redistribute" it, you guarantee others the freedom to "redistribute" it too. For example, how often do you steal pencils from work only to have them stolen from you by your kids? (If you don't have kids and you don't work in an office, socks and paperbacks are also good examples.)
Get them to write a Playstation game as a class project.
Dev tools and information are available online here, here and here.
The hardware's inexpensive (very cheap compared to PCs).
You can introduce abstract concepts like pointers and pipelining without boring them, because they can see where it's leading.
MIPS assembly language is quite sane, and there's an excellent text book which teaches architecture and assembly programming using MIPS.
Splitting up a large project like a game into managable chunks, then sitting down and writing one of them in C/assembler and seeing how your decisions affect the game as a whole will be a much better introduction to OO analysis and design than cramming Java down their throats.
The amount of performance you can get out of 2 Mb of RAM and a 33 MHz processor should make them think a bit about OS bloat.
Last but not least, when they finish their project they'll have something to play with.
(You'll need to fit the Playstations with mod chips if you want to test CDR copies of your game. For simpler/earlier testing a MIPS simulator is available here.)
Uprizer will profit from helping small and unsigned bands. But how will it attract customers? Illegal MP3s of Britney Spears. MP3.com can't offer you those.
Uprizer will distribute its music through Freenet, and as Ian Clarke has said, "nobody - including myself - can shut down Freenet". When the music industry discovers that *shock horror* Freenet is being used to trade pirated MP3s, Clarke will shrug his shoulders and say "there's nothing I can do about it - I just set it up to run my indie label".
BTW you spelt Britney correctly. I'm sure you knew that and you were just embarrassed to admit that you have her CD case in front of you.;)
1) You are assuming that because it is true in the current situation that if Intel were to go to sleep for 6 months, they would get clobbered by the likes of AMD, that it must also be true that any technology older than 6 months is worthless. This simply isn't the case.
Good point. But the fact that Intel benefits in some way from its IP does not prove that the semiconductor industry could not survive deregulation of IP, which is the leap of reasoning that you seem to be making. (By deregulation I mean that information sharing should be a matter of private contract.)
My aim in pursuing the previous poster's point about Intel and AMD was not to prove that nothing would change if IP were deregulated, but to deflate the argument that IP provides the only incentive to innovate. This argument is based on the false assumption that any product can be copied at a cost which is negligible compared to the cost of innovation, and in a time frame which is negligible compared to the lifetime of the product. I was simply pointing out that in the real world reverse-engineering is neither free nor instant, which leaves innovators with the possibility of making a profit. Maybe not the same profit that they can make today, and as you say it is possible that margins would be reduced to the point where innovation is not economical. However we can only speculate about the amount of change which would be caused.
2) Intel is a large company. But, without decent IP protection, who is to say the larger and better capitalized company couldn't come along and rape them? I could see someone like Microsoft finding it perhaps advantageous to prevent Intel from developing non-PC chips that might turn the market against. They may even be willing to do it at a loss!
This makes no sense. How could Microsoft force Intel to stop development of a particular product? Only through a hostile takeover. That scenario is equally (un)likely today, but with the current IP laws Intel's new owner would also own Intel's IP, and would be able to stop anyone from developing the product by refusing patent licenses. If reverse engineering were legal, this would not be possible - another company could continue development based on Intel's most recently released product. So you have provided another argument in favour of allowing reverse-engineering.
In many industries, simply proving that a thing can be done, or the creation of a market is sufficient to bring about further innovation. So while that patent may grant exclusive use to the holder, it does not, in reality offer the protection it claims, nor does it hold back meaningfull progress.
I'm glad that we agree that neither innovation nor profitability is necessarily dependent on intellectual property. I'm sure we will continue to disagree on whether the semiconductor industry is a case in point.
You are already running a distributed application whenever you run a threaded application on a SMP box. Writing applications for a distributed operating system is no easier and no harder than this.
Yes, that was the point he was making. Writing distributed apps for a distributed operating system is not hard, because the job of the distributed OS is to give you the illusion of a single machine. Without this abstraction, writing distributed apps is hard. You have to consider a lot more than synchronisation and concurrency. For example, one of the nodes in the system may go down while others carry on working. How do you ascertain the state of all the shared objects it was using? One of the nodes may be cracked or there may be eavesdroppers on the network. Even the problems of synchronisation and concurrency are a lot harder than they are on a single machine. You can't pass pointers between cooperating threads - they may be running in different address spaces. Changes made to a shared data structure may take time to propagate to other nodes. There are no atomic lock operations (messages take time to propagate). Etc etc.
So, I'm a bit puzzled as to what you think needs to be developed. It looks like we have distributed computing already.
This is like saying we have software already. Look, my hard disk's full of the stuff! Why do you think this means there is no room for improvement?
You and me.. what does that mean? Always.. what does that mean?
My mother... does not need the problems associated with attempting a distOS. What she does would not benefit from the extra resources.
On the contrary, I think non-technical or casual computer users have the most to gain from distributed operating systems. A distributed OS has the following advantages:
Remote administration The system administrator could log in remotely to fix problems (apart from network problems). This would be a huge improvement over technical support lines for non-technical users (and tech support workers!). Of course this assumes that the OS protects users' private data from the administrator - but any sane OS does that.;p
Cheaper client hardware Most of the files on the average PC are duplicates of files stored on every other PC - the operating system and common applications, for example. How many hundreds of gigabytes of storage worldwide are devoted to storing copies of WINMINE.EXE? A distributed OS could cut down on redundant storage, booting from the network and caching files on the client which were frequently/recently used. Less storage means cheaper (and lighter, and less power hungry) clients.
Automatic updates Software could be updated simultaneously across the whole system. This would greatly reduce the support burden. (Free) software could be made available to hundreds of users by installing it in one location. Think package dependency headaches. Think never again. Mmmmmmm.
Most of these benefits are things that users of academic or corporate networks take for granted, but the cost of managing a network of workstations is high. If every workstation was in a different building it would be even higher. A distributed operating system could offer the same benefits to home users at a much lower administrative cost.
You and me.. what does that mean? Always.. what does that mean?
Your first two points would be better directed at the author of the post I was replying to, who chose the example of Intel and AMD. I was simply pointing out that chip manufacturers possess a lot more than their static IP portfolios - they are in a fast-moving field where a 6-month R&D lead is a substantial advantage, and they have enormous manufacturing assets which, as you point out, keep smaller companies from competing effectively with them.
While you admit that there is only room for a few competitors in the chip manufacturing business, you say that a reformation of IP law would splinter the market into many different competitors. This is nonsense. A reformation of IP law would not change the cost of a fab plant.
I think you are also confusing trade secrets with publicly available information which is nevertheless considered to be some entity's intellectual property. I am not saying that Intel should be required to reveal its latest R&D secrets to its competitors. I am saying that Intel's competitors have a right to use whatever information they can gain by reverse engineering Intel's publically available products. The lead time from coming up with a viable chip design (whether by R&D or by reverse engineering) to selling cheap, reliable chips based on that design is substantial - this lead time would give Intel its competitive edge in a market undistorted by IP restrictions. As long as that edge exists there will be innovation in the semiconductor industry.
I didn't say it should be legal to steal another person's secrets and sell them. I believe that secrets are the one form of intellectual proerty which should be protected. What I did say was that once information is published (for example, by releasing a product which can be reverse-engineered), the government shouldn't force companies to act as if the information was still private.
In the example you gave, Intel could require its employees to sign a contract stating that if they reveal Intel's trade secrets, it can sue their arses off. This voluntary agreement to keep a secret is completely different from what IP laws impose, which is the non-voluntary requirement that you treat all published information as secret (ie, don't share it) without ever having agreed to do so.
Please don't encourage people to switch to Freenet immediately. It's about to undergo a compatibility-breaking version change and the developers are concerned that the fall of Napster will lead to a surge in downloads of immature Freenet clients. Please wait until version 0.3 is out before encouraging people to hammer on Freenet.
(Speaking as someone who reads the freenet-dev list, not as one of the developers!)
Obviously we cannot know how many innocent people are awaiting execution, or have already been executed. That's the whole crux of the argument against execution: the justice system makes mistakes, and it's likely that some of those mistakes go undetected. If we knew which people on death row were innocent, we could release them. Since we don't, I advocate revokable punishments such as imprisonment, which minimise the damage when mistakes are made without reducing the effectiveness of the solution (the removal of a dangerous individual from society).
This comes to the crux of my feelings on copyright. As well as my computer work I am also a short story writer. I have no objections to people having copies of my work and distributing them, I distribute most of my stuff for free as it's just an interest for me and not a source of income. What I do object to and would invoke the law to prevent is someone else claiming ownership of something I have written or charging for it's distribution.
The original purpose of copyright law was not to allow authors to profit from their works, but to protect their right to be identified as the author of their works. Ironically, without IP laws other people would have no incentive to "steal" your work since they would not be able to distribute it under restrictive terms and make money from it. The only reason they need to claim that they created your work is so that they can claim the right to distribute it. Without copyright, everyone would have the right to distribute information and their incentive to claim ownership would be removed.
After all, how many people make Metallica's songs available on Napster but claim that they are their own work?
Perhaps some of the brilliant chemists and biologists currently working for Glaxo-Wellcome-SmithKline-Beecham-Pfizer-Aventis-B ayer (or whatever the drug industry is calling itself today) will have to take jobs at government-funded institutions finding cures for malaria and multi-drug-resistant TB instead of working on anti-flatulence gelcaps. What a shame that would be.
Of course competition works. That's why the IP system needs to be reformed.
Without IP restrictions, Intel would have to innovate a lot more than it does now. Anybody would be able to take an Intel chip, reverse engineer it in a couple of months, tool up a production line in another month, and start turning out identical chips. After another few months their quality control levels would have approached Intel's, as they came to understand the reverse-engineered manufacturing process a little better. So maybe six months after Intel shipped its chip, Obscurotech would be shipping copies with the same performance and yield.
Six months is a long time at Intel. They do not stand still for six months. While Obscurotech was busy copying the Pentium III, Intel would be working on the Pentium IV. By the time Obscurotech understood what was going on in the Pentium IV, Intel would be one step ahead again. Each innovating company, selling cutting-edge products at a premium, would be followed by a pack of carbon-copiers, cloning its products and competing with each other to provide the cheapest, most up-to-date clone. Innovation would survive, and prices would fall.
Competition, as you rightly say, is the best way of making use of scarce resources (mental or mineral). IP stifles competition by stopping companies from using ideas that they know will work. Why do you think the US government is so worried about piracy in southeast Asia? It knows that a country without IP laws can out-compete a country with IP laws.
Secrets have always existed, but most IP laws do not concern secrets. They concern the "right" to tell someone an idea, and then control what they do with that idea.
If you want to keep your ideas secret, I support your right to do so. (Make sure you use strong crypto - once your secrets get out of the box you can't put them back in.) If you publish your ideas, then you are giving up control of those ideas. You are no longer the sole owner of those ideas - you share them with the person you told, and the people he told, and the people they told. You don't control the ideas anymore, even though you still own them in the sense that you still know them.
Say, for example, I come up with Invention X, a remarkable discovery that will benefit countless millions. However, I don't have a factory to produce the product, and I fear that without government protection, Big Company Y would steal my idea and immediately begin producing Invention X in their existing factory more efficiently than I could, thus capturing the market for my invention. Why, then, would I put in all the effort to develop and perfect Invention X, when I would never have the opportunity to recoup my costs (let alone make a profit)? I'd be better off just keeping my ideas to myself.
No, you'd be better off selling your invention to Company Y and using the profits to build your own factory to go into competition with them! (Or buy a yacht, I don't care, it's your money.) Remember, the idea is free (libre) so even though you sold a copy to them, you're still free to use your copy. They benefit because they can use their head start to get market share. You benefit because that market share's worth a lot, and they will pay you a lot for your idea. And you still get to compete with them, because there's no intellectual property system creating an artificial monopoly.
I want this to go to show that I have no qualms giving away intellectual property that I have created, but I want it to be my choice when I decide to do that. That, friends, is the real meaning of intellectual freedom.
You are free to keep your work secret if you wish to retain control of it. But if you publish it, you lose control of it, both practically and theoretically.
Intellectual property does not work like physical property because, unlike most physical objects, ideas reproduce themselves. Ideas don't change hands like money, they divide like bacteria.
If you create a beautiful table and give it to me, you lose a table and I gain a table. You can no longer give the table to anyone else. I can. You can no longer destroy the table. I can.
If you create a beautiful idea and tell it to me, you lose nothing and I gain an idea. Either of us can give the idea to someone else. Neither of us can destroy it.
Now of course you can argue that while you don't lose the idea itself, you lose control of it. You deserve something in return for your hard work. Fine, then sell me the idea. Keep it secret until I pay you to reveal it. But once you have revealed it, do not fool yourself that the idea still belongs to you alone. Now it belongs to both of us. If you want to carry on selling copies of your idea, you'd better make sure you charge less than I do. And as we both go around selling copies of the idea, the supply will grow exponentially and the price will drop. So make sure you charge enough for the first copy of your idea to compensate you for all your work.
I don't object to the idea that you should be able to decide whether to release your intellectual creations. They are yours. Keep them secret if you want to own them. But once you decide to release them, they are not yours any more. You cannot have them back. You should not be able to control what I do with the ideas in my head, however they got there and whoever told them to me.
Free software and other works certainly have their place, but it isn't something that should be foisted upon every author and programmer and artist.
Secrets have their place, but they aren't something that should be foisted upon every thinking being. You should not be able to force me to keep secrets for your benefit.
The Blair Witch Project only got away with its tight budget because of the premise that it was amateur documentary footage shot by film students. If the movie studios disappeared, I for one would quickly get tired of watching movies about people walking around the woods with camcorders.
But as a previous poster pointed out, mirrors do not reflect photons, they re-emit them. So the original photons (and their spin information) would not survive the journey.
I should amend my earlier suggestion of typing in the serial number on your CD case: the number would have to be hashed by the server, and the hash, not the serial number, would be used for blacklisting. Otherwise it would be easy to get hold of other people's serial numbers from blacklists and use them as disposable identities.
The reason this wouldn't work with current games is anonymity. As the article points out, even if you expose a cheat and get him kicked off the server, he can just set up a new identity and start cheating again.
A possible solution to this would be to distribute unique user IDs with each copy of the game. You would need to supply the serial number from the sticker on your CD case when logging on to a server. The game would include a way for users to "blacklist" players who they suspected of cheating. Your blacklist would be checked against the list of logged-in players before joining a game, and you would be warned if suspected cheats were present. Also, your ID would be checked against the blacklist of each logged-in player, and if you were on someone's list you would be refused entry.
If you got onto a lot of players' blacklists, you would find it hard to find anyone willing to play against you. Make it easy for players to share their blacklists (over IRC etc), and you have the beginnings of a trust model. New players wouldn't be at a disadvantage, because everyone would be innocent until smeared.
Research into cold plasmas is to receive a further injection of funding from an unexpected source: the Texas Department of Cruel and Unusual Punishments. This little-known government department researches new ways of executing and torturing prisoners at its lab near Fort Worth, TX. For the first time, it will be outsourcing its research to another laboratory, providing $2 million for cold plasma research. DCUP officials are said to be excited by the ability of cold plasmas to break down cell membranes, seeing them as a possible means of executing death row prisoners.
DCUP spokesperson Dr Eric Mbunge sees a bright future for the penal application of cold plasmas. "With this technology we could execute prisoners by the batch, instead of one at a time," explains Dr Mbunge. "There would be this purple glow, and they'd all fall to the floor. Dead. It would be just like Star Trek."
When it was pointed out that Star Trek does not feature executions, Dr Mbunge responded, "It would if it was set in Texas."
The Department of Cruel and Unusual Punishments has not developed any new execution technologies since the introduction of the lethal injection in 1974. Its 1984 invention, the "microwave chair", was never used in Texas prisons because of fears that it might cause adverse health effects to prison wardens.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you're afraid that this might work, that science might invade the realm of art. What you don't realise is that science and art are two ways of expressing the same truth.
If a mathematical mechanism can produce art, it doesn't mean that art is fundamentally ugly. It means that mathematics is fundamentally beautiful.
My favourite music is Einstuerzende Neubauten, and anything else just isn't noise.
There's also the entertaining possibility that the Bible is "there to test us", and God wants us to exercise our free will by rejecting it and believing in the evidence of our senses. :)
I suggest using the analogy of office stationery. Everybody knows that office stationery is free as in beer - it's just lying around all over the place, after all - but not many people realise that it's also free as in speech. That's because it's not under the control of any single entity. Your boss can't stop you from "redistributing" it. Neither can the stock controller. No company can take away your freedom to "redistribute" stationery, though many have tried. That's because, unlike most physical objects, office stationery can be replicated at almost zero cost. That's why no matter how much you steal, there's always enough left in the office for everybody. And office stationery guarantees its own freedom, just like the GPL: when you "redistribute" it, you guarantee others the freedom to "redistribute" it too. For example, how often do you steal pencils from work only to have them stolen from you by your kids? (If you don't have kids and you don't work in an office, socks and paperbacks are also good examples.)
Funny coincidence - I was listening to Neil Young (Harvest) yesterday when I wrote that comment.
Dev tools and information are available online here, here and here.
The hardware's inexpensive (very cheap compared to PCs).
You can introduce abstract concepts like pointers and pipelining without boring them, because they can see where it's leading.
MIPS assembly language is quite sane, and there's an excellent text book which teaches architecture and assembly programming using MIPS.
Splitting up a large project like a game into managable chunks, then sitting down and writing one of them in C/assembler and seeing how your decisions affect the game as a whole will be a much better introduction to OO analysis and design than cramming Java down their throats.
The amount of performance you can get out of 2 Mb of RAM and a 33 MHz processor should make them think a bit about OS bloat.
Last but not least, when they finish their project they'll have something to play with.
(You'll need to fit the Playstations with mod chips if you want to test CDR copies of your game. For simpler/earlier testing a MIPS simulator is available here.)
Uprizer will distribute its music through Freenet, and as Ian Clarke has said, "nobody - including myself - can shut down Freenet". When the music industry discovers that *shock horror* Freenet is being used to trade pirated MP3s, Clarke will shrug his shoulders and say "there's nothing I can do about it - I just set it up to run my indie label".
BTW you spelt Britney correctly. I'm sure you knew that and you were just embarrassed to admit that you have her CD case in front of you. ;)
Good point. But the fact that Intel benefits in some way from its IP does not prove that the semiconductor industry could not survive deregulation of IP, which is the leap of reasoning that you seem to be making. (By deregulation I mean that information sharing should be a matter of private contract.)
My aim in pursuing the previous poster's point about Intel and AMD was not to prove that nothing would change if IP were deregulated, but to deflate the argument that IP provides the only incentive to innovate. This argument is based on the false assumption that any product can be copied at a cost which is negligible compared to the cost of innovation, and in a time frame which is negligible compared to the lifetime of the product. I was simply pointing out that in the real world reverse-engineering is neither free nor instant, which leaves innovators with the possibility of making a profit. Maybe not the same profit that they can make today, and as you say it is possible that margins would be reduced to the point where innovation is not economical. However we can only speculate about the amount of change which would be caused.
2) Intel is a large company. But, without decent IP protection, who is to say the larger and better capitalized company couldn't come along and rape them? I could see someone like Microsoft finding it perhaps advantageous to prevent Intel from developing non-PC chips that might turn the market against. They may even be willing to do it at a loss!
This makes no sense. How could Microsoft force Intel to stop development of a particular product? Only through a hostile takeover. That scenario is equally (un)likely today, but with the current IP laws Intel's new owner would also own Intel's IP, and would be able to stop anyone from developing the product by refusing patent licenses. If reverse engineering were legal, this would not be possible - another company could continue development based on Intel's most recently released product. So you have provided another argument in favour of allowing reverse-engineering.
In many industries, simply proving that a thing can be done, or the creation of a market is sufficient to bring about further innovation. So while that patent may grant exclusive use to the holder, it does not, in reality offer the protection it claims, nor does it hold back meaningfull progress.
I'm glad that we agree that neither innovation nor profitability is necessarily dependent on intellectual property. I'm sure we will continue to disagree on whether the semiconductor industry is a case in point.
Yes, that was the point he was making. Writing distributed apps for a distributed operating system is not hard, because the job of the distributed OS is to give you the illusion of a single machine. Without this abstraction, writing distributed apps is hard. You have to consider a lot more than synchronisation and concurrency. For example, one of the nodes in the system may go down while others carry on working. How do you ascertain the state of all the shared objects it was using? One of the nodes may be cracked or there may be eavesdroppers on the network. Even the problems of synchronisation and concurrency are a lot harder than they are on a single machine. You can't pass pointers between cooperating threads - they may be running in different address spaces. Changes made to a shared data structure may take time to propagate to other nodes. There are no atomic lock operations (messages take time to propagate). Etc etc.
So, I'm a bit puzzled as to what you think needs to be developed. It looks like we have distributed computing already.
This is like saying we have software already. Look, my hard disk's full of the stuff! Why do you think this means there is no room for improvement?
You and me.. what does that mean?
Always.. what does that mean?
On the contrary, I think non-technical or casual computer users have the most to gain from distributed operating systems. A distributed OS has the following advantages:
Remote administration ;p
The system administrator could log in remotely to fix problems (apart from network problems). This would be a huge improvement over technical support lines for non-technical users (and tech support workers!). Of course this assumes that the OS protects users' private data from the administrator - but any sane OS does that.
Cheaper client hardware
Most of the files on the average PC are duplicates of files stored on every other PC - the operating system and common applications, for example. How many hundreds of gigabytes of storage worldwide are devoted to storing copies of WINMINE.EXE? A distributed OS could cut down on redundant storage, booting from the network and caching files on the client which were frequently/recently used. Less storage means cheaper (and lighter, and less power hungry) clients.
Automatic updates
Software could be updated simultaneously across the whole system. This would greatly reduce the support burden. (Free) software could be made available to hundreds of users by installing it in one location. Think package dependency headaches. Think never again. Mmmmmmm.
Most of these benefits are things that users of academic or corporate networks take for granted, but the cost of managing a network of workstations is high. If every workstation was in a different building it would be even higher. A distributed operating system could offer the same benefits to home users at a much lower administrative cost.
You and me.. what does that mean?
Always.. what does that mean?
While you admit that there is only room for a few competitors in the chip manufacturing business, you say that a reformation of IP law would splinter the market into many different competitors. This is nonsense. A reformation of IP law would not change the cost of a fab plant.
I think you are also confusing trade secrets with publicly available information which is nevertheless considered to be some entity's intellectual property. I am not saying that Intel should be required to reveal its latest R&D secrets to its competitors. I am saying that Intel's competitors have a right to use whatever information they can gain by reverse engineering Intel's publically available products. The lead time from coming up with a viable chip design (whether by R&D or by reverse engineering) to selling cheap, reliable chips based on that design is substantial - this lead time would give Intel its competitive edge in a market undistorted by IP restrictions. As long as that edge exists there will be innovation in the semiconductor industry.
In the example you gave, Intel could require its employees to sign a contract stating that if they reveal Intel's trade secrets, it can sue their arses off. This voluntary agreement to keep a secret is completely different from what IP laws impose, which is the non-voluntary requirement that you treat all published information as secret (ie, don't share it) without ever having agreed to do so.
(Speaking as someone who reads the freenet-dev list, not as one of the developers!)
$ cat < /dev/mouse
$ cat < /dev/mouse
Oh the irony :)
$ cat < /dev/mouse
The original purpose of copyright law was not to allow authors to profit from their works, but to protect their right to be identified as the author of their works. Ironically, without IP laws other people would have no incentive to "steal" your work since they would not be able to distribute it under restrictive terms and make money from it. The only reason they need to claim that they created your work is so that they can claim the right to distribute it. Without copyright, everyone would have the right to distribute information and their incentive to claim ownership would be removed.
After all, how many people make Metallica's songs available on Napster but claim that they are their own work?
Perhaps some of the brilliant chemists and biologists currently working for Glaxo-Wellcome-SmithKline-Beecham-Pfizer-Aventis-B ayer (or whatever the drug industry is calling itself today) will have to take jobs at government-funded institutions finding cures for malaria and multi-drug-resistant TB instead of working on anti-flatulence gelcaps. What a shame that would be.
Without IP restrictions, Intel would have to innovate a lot more than it does now. Anybody would be able to take an Intel chip, reverse engineer it in a couple of months, tool up a production line in another month, and start turning out identical chips. After another few months their quality control levels would have approached Intel's, as they came to understand the reverse-engineered manufacturing process a little better. So maybe six months after Intel shipped its chip, Obscurotech would be shipping copies with the same performance and yield.
Six months is a long time at Intel. They do not stand still for six months. While Obscurotech was busy copying the Pentium III, Intel would be working on the Pentium IV. By the time Obscurotech understood what was going on in the Pentium IV, Intel would be one step ahead again. Each innovating company, selling cutting-edge products at a premium, would be followed by a pack of carbon-copiers, cloning its products and competing with each other to provide the cheapest, most up-to-date clone. Innovation would survive, and prices would fall.
Competition, as you rightly say, is the best way of making use of scarce resources (mental or mineral). IP stifles competition by stopping companies from using ideas that they know will work. Why do you think the US government is so worried about piracy in southeast Asia? It knows that a country without IP laws can out-compete a country with IP laws.
If you want to keep your ideas secret, I support your right to do so. (Make sure you use strong crypto - once your secrets get out of the box you can't put them back in.) If you publish your ideas, then you are giving up control of those ideas. You are no longer the sole owner of those ideas - you share them with the person you told, and the people he told, and the people they told. You don't control the ideas anymore, even though you still own them in the sense that you still know them.
Say, for example, I come up with Invention X, a remarkable discovery that will benefit countless millions. However, I don't have a factory to produce the product, and I fear that without government protection, Big Company Y would steal my idea and immediately begin producing Invention X in their existing factory more efficiently than I could, thus capturing the market for my invention. Why, then, would I put in all the effort to develop and perfect Invention X, when I would never have the opportunity to recoup my costs (let alone make a profit)? I'd be better off just keeping my ideas to myself.
No, you'd be better off selling your invention to Company Y and using the profits to build your own factory to go into competition with them! (Or buy a yacht, I don't care, it's your money.) Remember, the idea is free (libre) so even though you sold a copy to them, you're still free to use your copy. They benefit because they can use their head start to get market share. You benefit because that market share's worth a lot, and they will pay you a lot for your idea. And you still get to compete with them, because there's no intellectual property system creating an artificial monopoly.
You are free to keep your work secret if you wish to retain control of it. But if you publish it, you lose control of it, both practically and theoretically.
Intellectual property does not work like physical property because, unlike most physical objects, ideas reproduce themselves. Ideas don't change hands like money, they divide like bacteria.
If you create a beautiful table and give it to me, you lose a table and I gain a table. You can no longer give the table to anyone else. I can. You can no longer destroy the table. I can.
If you create a beautiful idea and tell it to me, you lose nothing and I gain an idea. Either of us can give the idea to someone else. Neither of us can destroy it.
Now of course you can argue that while you don't lose the idea itself, you lose control of it. You deserve something in return for your hard work. Fine, then sell me the idea. Keep it secret until I pay you to reveal it. But once you have revealed it, do not fool yourself that the idea still belongs to you alone. Now it belongs to both of us. If you want to carry on selling copies of your idea, you'd better make sure you charge less than I do. And as we both go around selling copies of the idea, the supply will grow exponentially and the price will drop. So make sure you charge enough for the first copy of your idea to compensate you for all your work.
I don't object to the idea that you should be able to decide whether to release your intellectual creations. They are yours. Keep them secret if you want to own them. But once you decide to release them, they are not yours any more. You cannot have them back. You should not be able to control what I do with the ideas in my head, however they got there and whoever told them to me.
Free software and other works certainly have their place, but it isn't something that should be foisted upon every author and programmer and artist.
Secrets have their place, but they aren't something that should be foisted upon every thinking being. You should not be able to force me to keep secrets for your benefit.
The Blair Witch Project only got away with its tight budget because of the premise that it was amateur documentary footage shot by film students. If the movie studios disappeared, I for one would quickly get tired of watching movies about people walking around the woods with camcorders.
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I should amend my earlier suggestion of typing in the serial number on your CD case: the number would have to be hashed by the server, and the hash, not the serial number, would be used for blacklisting. Otherwise it would be easy to get hold of other people's serial numbers from blacklists and use them as disposable identities.
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A possible solution to this would be to distribute unique user IDs with each copy of the game. You would need to supply the serial number from the sticker on your CD case when logging on to a server. The game would include a way for users to "blacklist" players who they suspected of cheating. Your blacklist would be checked against the list of logged-in players before joining a game, and you would be warned if suspected cheats were present. Also, your ID would be checked against the blacklist of each logged-in player, and if you were on someone's list you would be refused entry.
If you got onto a lot of players' blacklists, you would find it hard to find anyone willing to play against you. Make it easy for players to share their blacklists (over IRC etc), and you have the beginnings of a trust model. New players wouldn't be at a disadvantage, because everyone would be innocent until smeared.
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DCUP spokesperson Dr Eric Mbunge sees a bright future for the penal application of cold plasmas. "With this technology we could execute prisoners by the batch, instead of one at a time," explains Dr Mbunge. "There would be this purple glow, and they'd all fall to the floor. Dead. It would be just like Star Trek."
When it was pointed out that Star Trek does not feature executions, Dr Mbunge responded, "It would if it was set in Texas."
The Department of Cruel and Unusual Punishments has not developed any new execution technologies since the introduction of the lethal injection in 1974. Its 1984 invention, the "microwave chair", was never used in Texas prisons because of fears that it might cause adverse health effects to prison wardens.
$ cat < /dev/mouse