I find land that is unused, I develop it in some way (farm, natural resource, home, office, whatever) and I maintain it. That is my land from a physical property stance.
By your reasoning, your ownership of the land is essentially control over the minds and bodies of anyone else who goes through it. If I want to do something with the land you own, I'll have to gain your permission, regardless of whether you still actually use or maintain that piece of land in any way yourself. It's a legal grant of authority - not a natural right, or a direct compensation.
Copyrights, by their intent, are there to ensure compensation for someone whose work isn't a craft directly related to the physical reproduction of an object. The labour for an artist, musician or software developer is the production itself, which requires an expertise all of its own - reproduction of a piece, especially when talking about digital media, is an entirely different process. Indeed, all manner of problems present themselves if you forcibly tack the two together.
All in all, it's quite simple as long as you talk about persons in singular. The real problems we currently face come from groups of people getting together and forming big social and financial entities, which we like to call corporations. They grow, and while the artists remain valuable to the whole, the value of their work does seem to get closer to the effort involved in its reproduction. As such it would seem useful to keep a tight control over the means of reproduction, as opposed to making the works themselves more available. The rest of the mess is mainly legal word-twisting and blatant use of over-abstraction.
I'm quite singularly against century-long copyrights and the DMCA. However, it still wouldn't be much use being an artist in a world where art is worth nothing.
Patents are a somewhat different matter. They were devised with the intent that inventing things and making them available can be a good idea. Your private lab creates a new kind of electric light or a combustion engine? Great - patent it and you get exclusive rights now, but you'll have to publish the details and grant public use later. However, an electric light or a combustion engine were clearly new kinds of product, both representing a significant development effort. "Intellectual" patents, on the other hand, forbid you the use of certain specific tools of creative production, and in that way counteract the entire purpose of the system.
Fixed wiring Ethernet is probably the most secure of the lot- HPNA and HomePlug
suffer from people being able to tap in
Meh. If you're worried about someone having the resources and motivation to tap into your wired network, you might as well go straight for fibre optics. Putting switching and routing equipment behind locked doors and in places that are rigged to alarm you when anyone goes in might be a good idea too.
For your basic home networking, just putting the WLAN AP outside the firewall will do plenty.
Not a word about the far right examples, guess I offended the far left eh?
Heh. Oversimplifying a bit, are we?
N. Korea: I was talking about the reality of far left politics, not the naive idealism that leads to it.
I mentioned the cold war because people seem to be using old propaganda pamphlets as authoritative references.
I don't think of North Korea, China or the Soviet Union as communist states simply because they are and were not. The clearest hint should be that wealth is quite strictly centralised and controlled by a ruling class, obviously isolated from the rest of the population. What that ruling class calls their system is about as relevant as medieval monarchies' rhetoric about them being the benefactors of the peasantry, or saying that the western world is a free market economy.
Making sense can be a matter of context. "Working" can be a matter of execution. In any case even extremists can bring good ideas to the table.
An example from the far left: N. Korea ('nuff said).
Ah yes, what would be closer to the Marxist ideal than a militant state capitalism hell-bent on taking over the world.
The cold war ought to be over by now; the remnants of the Soviet Union ought to be taken for what they are, instead of labeling them with an ideology they've only ever had a superficial relationship with.
An example from the green far left: The government should kill the economy to save the planet.
I wouldn't be so hasty as to say making more efficient use of energy and material resources would be a killing blow - more like a long-term gain, although it's an odd concept where nobody can see farther than the next quarterly report.
If it could interface directly with the auditory nerves that would be cool.. Sounds far off, but many current hearing aids can do this.
It's called a cochlear impant and it's not quite as common as hearing aids are. Seeing as it requires surgery, replaces natural hearing and (currently) lacks in resolution, I wouldn't see it as very desirable unless you do have a serious hearing impairment.
The problem is that a black box is always running in an unknown state - it's entirely a trust issue between you and the vendor, regarding the solidity of their authentication methods, security protocols and limitations on execution privileges. If a key is compromised, a way is found to bypass the authentication process or there's a suitably buggy driver, all bets are off again.
Of course, proclaiming "no unknown code may run in kernel mode" does make security a much simpler issue; you can bet the farm on how the gate holds, instead of putting locks on doors.
Let's do this. Let's imagine for a second that a popular piece of software in the Windows world was released as free software under the GPL. Let's pick PaintShop Pro or DOOM or WinZip or TextPad or any other one. Now, explain to us how exactly the authors of those products would have made any money if they were licensed under the GPL.
In other words, let's take a few examples of closed-source software, force them into a completely different development paradigm, and then see how they'd do without adjusting their business models accordingly? I'm not exactly the economical mastermind of the century, but otherwise it sounds just like the sort of question that's rigged to have only one answer.
For that matter, I'm continuously baffled by the fact that Windows users still would pay in the tens of dollars for such basic packages as an archival utility or a text editor. Games are luckily a much simpler issue, seeing as you don't have to license the content under the GPL.
Specifically after some kid in Romania with loads of time in his hand decided to put up his own version for download and give it away for free.
You probably wouldn't get the same level of service from the Romanian kid. If it did turn out that the kid was actually more interested and capable in developing the application than the original author, would money paid to the latter be going in the right place?
Oh, and I live how you spell "MicroSoft". Hilarious.
Microsoft used to spell itself that way, as well as a hyphenated Micro-Soft which I'm sure is sending you rolling on the floor just now.
I'm not claiming that games are great works of fiction yet, but they are developing methods where the "author" (designers) produce the story and allow the gamer to discover it.
You're perhaps thinking of too recent productions. Interactive fiction is a somewhat more specific term than "fiction and interactivity within games". Since the primary media is text, IF games can at best be just as immersive as traditional literary fiction, and the (perceived) interactivity with items in the game universe can also be very extensive.
Graphics can be a hindrance in the same way, but even in more recent games there have been exceptions; Planescape: Torment immediately comes to mind. The Storytron thing seems to be more like a buzzword vehicle, but if it raises a dialogue about these things, it isn't completely bad.
It's not as if it's a trend specific to the.ie domain - just look at movie ratings, or remember the recentish ruckus about GTA's hidden game content. A pair of nipples is apparently worse content than any body count.
Newton's laws of motion were superceded by relativity. But does that mean that in the 300 years between Newton and Einsten everyone should have dismissed Newton because at some point a more refined theory is going to come along? No, of course not; in Newton's age his laws were the best science could offer, were well-supported by evidence, and thus were eventually universally accepted by Scientists.
This may be slightly beside the point, but I'd like to add that Newton's laws of motion are also no less relevant today because of general relativity. It all depends on the scales of things and the precision required; even if Newton doesn't work very well for astronomical or microscopic proportions, it can give a pretty damn good approximation in-between.
What I don't quite grasp either is the notion that erring on the side of safety would be a miscalculation of some sort. There's all to gain and nothing to lose in the long term by making our technology more energy-efficient and climate-friendly, while ignoring the potential issue effectively means betting the future of mankind over the use of a cheap energy source (which is bound to run out in a few centuries anyway). It doesn't take a scientist to say it - any gambler would tell you that choosing the latter option would be pure madness.
I beg to differ: how you market an operating system can also have a significant impact. Lack of pre-installation is only one issue, and with lack of real use experiences the perceived difficulty can be very important. Simply the notion that Linux and other Unix-like operating systems seem to be favored by technically-apt elitist geeks can make them seem less easily approachable than they really are.
It's not that people with such attitudes are just hurting the reputation of free operating systems though, they should have no business talking to users at all. There's people who do much of their jobs with computers but probably couldn't even correctly name the part of their software setup called "Windows". Guess what? It's not their area of expertise. They have every right not to be interested.
To be bluntly, you don't seem to be a software engineer either. It wouldn't be the first time that rumour sites would be mixing up technical terms and concepts, though.
A graphical user interface would most likely sit completely in userland, while the Linux kernel would only contain a device driver for communicating with the hardware. The user-mode parts can be as proprietary as Nintendo wants them to be, but any changes to the kernel itself must be released or they'll be violating the terms of use of the GPL.
To be fair, this is something true of many platforms (try getting DOS games working on modern PCs, or remember the Turbo button?).
DOS games aren't actually that difficult to manage through emulation, except for the very late era games that overlapped the transition to DirectX (and the improvement of DirectX to a usable state). I'd say they were sometimes more difficult on the actual hardware of the age since you had the joy of managing memory and hardware resources completely by hand. The Amiga hardware allowed for a wider range of hairy trickery despite being more uniform.
But yeah, it's a common sympton of the times. I was more trying to make the point that breaking the habit would've been more difficult with such a homogenous platform.
Now (and only now) we are finally reaching the stage where the Amiga has been replaced.
Amiga has been replaced for a good long while now in terms of what can be done with the hardware. I would be among the first to say that the PC hardware and firmware architecture has extra weight and quirks that could be gotten rid of, but that's of little importance in a world where software thrives to be platform-independent.
As I understand it, Amiga was a very tightly-knit architecture, which left little room for improvement besides redesiging of the hardware. You can do neat tricks when you know exactly what you write for - which is why Amiga games are also tied to working with the chipsets, firmware versions and memory configurations they were originally designed for. Modularity can also be a form of elegance.
You forgot to add one variable, the artist. I've seen lots of people buy music they first downloaded for free, but unfortunately (for record companies) it tends to require more from the artist than just one hit song.
You can't even compare this to an entry-level PC! It's worthless and hardly a wonder tht it's free.
You may not have noticed, but it's not meant to compete with the "entry-level" of the high-end gaming rig crowd, and certainly it's a far cry from worthless. Just about any box from the Pentium era would be well enough for browsing the web with a graphical browser, and this seems like it can do much more besides that.
That Intel card is a decent graphics card, good enough for web browsing
Really now, anything with 3D acceleration is already serious overkill for that purpose.
You couldn't even have space for documents. Sure, there are USB ports, but flash drives aren't good enough for bulk storage, and external hard drives are just bulky.
I suppose by "documents" you actually mean your gigantic MP3 and DivX collections, or that you live in a different reality from this one.
Pardon my skepticism, but there appears to be no-one watching the ruling experts and making sure they actually are experts on the fields of the said articles. As the current front page of Citizendium states, just about anyone will be able to become one, and they'll mainly be there to resolve content disputes. Lack of self-judgment unfortunately isn't constrained to anonymous users on Wikipedia either.
Also: "Solution" is something that solves a problem.
A mosquito is biting me. I squash it. My problem is solved, but a Jain would protest that I've solved anything at all.
Trivialisation goes both ways. A fringe group taking matters into their own hands might make their righteous agenda seem like a mass of hypocrisy. An act of violence to end such actions, on the other hand, might be interpreted as a confirmation that their just cause is indeed faced with a ruthless and inhumane opposition, in turn making it easier to raise more extremists. It's of course possible for neither effect to be obvious to the one taking action even after it has been done, making it seem like an effective solution.
Both actions are also common in that they attempt to tackle effects instead of their causes. The fringe group is attempting to make their agenda known, perhaps even widely accepted, but they attack the people who they believe to be wrong instead of confronting society with their point of view. The retributionist is taking action against action without halting to consider its reasons - perhaps the society isn't open enough for debate or possibly otherwise provoking such a response.
Mosquitoes are indeed not people. Making them an example, where the core of the discussion is human behaviour, is a moot point.
Unless you have a master plan in your bedroom detailing what you should work on and why, and unless that master plan is informed by near-flawless reasoning (since even a slight flaw in a logical path renders everything that follows in error,) and perfect information (since logic applied to inaccurate information is the same as the poor step in logic,) then you are jumping into rash conclusions based on emotional responses to incomplete pieces of information. Nobody is inerrant.
Not quite. I am using a varying combination of rationality and intuition to arrive at decisions, yet that does not imply rash conclusions of the magnitude we're talking about here.
If I were a prospective animal rights extremist, I might one day find out about animal testing through some rather terse and single-sided information sources. I wouldn't have nearly enough information to have even a moderate picture of what might really be happening, but perhaps enough provocative material to get me infuriated and blind me to contrary evidence. It might make extreme harrassment and violence toward a researcher - whose actions are already restricted through strict guidelines - seem like a noble act.
However, even though such a progression portrays several features of "human" thinking, the fact that it portrays them in an extreme hardly makes it a prime example. But then, I never was the sort who calls pessimism a form of realism.
But you would refuse to look into that, no?
Not really, even if I were being interpreted as a single-minded person who is blind to his surroundings and detached from reality. For what it's worth in terms of "gazing into the abyss", I've done my share of army service, among other things.
It's not very likely for a society to accept your values if you try to force them down peoples' throats, just as a person isn't likely to agree with you more if you beat him with a stick or put a gun to his head. The "solution" might be that of an act of obedience, or in effect a convenient lack of counterarguments, but that's all you're likely to get.
And to make it clear, I'm not ignoring your point at all, I agree with it for a large part. But I don't think that understanding the decisions behind acts of violence requires agreeing with them. In any case, I thank you for sharing your view and for the discussion.
"Jumping into rash conclusions based on emotional responses to incomplete pieces of information" refers to the totality of all actions humanity has ever commit.
No, it doesn't. Certainly many notable actions have been such, but then the contrary doesn't make as exciting reading.
To abolish the idea of violence in your mind, is to handicap your thinking.
Thinking of violence as a "solution" is naïve, and perhaps refusing to see why some people share that view means handicapping one's thinking. Not sharing their view myself hardly is.
Sorry, but it's not all black and white, as they say.
Slashdot Mirror
By your reasoning, your ownership of the land is essentially control over the minds and bodies of anyone else who goes through it. If I want to do something with the land you own, I'll have to gain your permission, regardless of whether you still actually use or maintain that piece of land in any way yourself. It's a legal grant of authority - not a natural right, or a direct compensation.
Copyrights, by their intent, are there to ensure compensation for someone whose work isn't a craft directly related to the physical reproduction of an object. The labour for an artist, musician or software developer is the production itself, which requires an expertise all of its own - reproduction of a piece, especially when talking about digital media, is an entirely different process. Indeed, all manner of problems present themselves if you forcibly tack the two together.
All in all, it's quite simple as long as you talk about persons in singular. The real problems we currently face come from groups of people getting together and forming big social and financial entities, which we like to call corporations. They grow, and while the artists remain valuable to the whole, the value of their work does seem to get closer to the effort involved in its reproduction. As such it would seem useful to keep a tight control over the means of reproduction, as opposed to making the works themselves more available. The rest of the mess is mainly legal word-twisting and blatant use of over-abstraction.
I'm quite singularly against century-long copyrights and the DMCA. However, it still wouldn't be much use being an artist in a world where art is worth nothing.
Patents are a somewhat different matter. They were devised with the intent that inventing things and making them available can be a good idea. Your private lab creates a new kind of electric light or a combustion engine? Great - patent it and you get exclusive rights now, but you'll have to publish the details and grant public use later. However, an electric light or a combustion engine were clearly new kinds of product, both representing a significant development effort. "Intellectual" patents, on the other hand, forbid you the use of certain specific tools of creative production, and in that way counteract the entire purpose of the system.
Meh. If you're worried about someone having the resources and motivation to tap into your wired network, you might as well go straight for fibre optics. Putting switching and routing equipment behind locked doors and in places that are rigged to alarm you when anyone goes in might be a good idea too.
For your basic home networking, just putting the WLAN AP outside the firewall will do plenty.
I can think of at least one: people are already concerned about speed issues.
Heh. Oversimplifying a bit, are we?
I mentioned the cold war because people seem to be using old propaganda pamphlets as authoritative references.
I don't think of North Korea, China or the Soviet Union as communist states simply because they are and were not. The clearest hint should be that wealth is quite strictly centralised and controlled by a ruling class, obviously isolated from the rest of the population. What that ruling class calls their system is about as relevant as medieval monarchies' rhetoric about them being the benefactors of the peasantry, or saying that the western world is a free market economy.
Making sense can be a matter of context. "Working" can be a matter of execution. In any case even extremists can bring good ideas to the table.
Ah yes, what would be closer to the Marxist ideal than a militant state capitalism hell-bent on taking over the world.
The cold war ought to be over by now; the remnants of the Soviet Union ought to be taken for what they are, instead of labeling them with an ideology they've only ever had a superficial relationship with.
I wouldn't be so hasty as to say making more efficient use of energy and material resources would be a killing blow - more like a long-term gain, although it's an odd concept where nobody can see farther than the next quarterly report.
It's called a cochlear impant and it's not quite as common as hearing aids are. Seeing as it requires surgery, replaces natural hearing and (currently) lacks in resolution, I wouldn't see it as very desirable unless you do have a serious hearing impairment.
The problem is that a black box is always running in an unknown state - it's entirely a trust issue between you and the vendor, regarding the solidity of their authentication methods, security protocols and limitations on execution privileges. If a key is compromised, a way is found to bypass the authentication process or there's a suitably buggy driver, all bets are off again.
Of course, proclaiming "no unknown code may run in kernel mode" does make security a much simpler issue; you can bet the farm on how the gate holds, instead of putting locks on doors.
In other words, let's take a few examples of closed-source software, force them into a completely different development paradigm, and then see how they'd do without adjusting their business models accordingly? I'm not exactly the economical mastermind of the century, but otherwise it sounds just like the sort of question that's rigged to have only one answer.
For that matter, I'm continuously baffled by the fact that Windows users still would pay in the tens of dollars for such basic packages as an archival utility or a text editor. Games are luckily a much simpler issue, seeing as you don't have to license the content under the GPL.
You probably wouldn't get the same level of service from the Romanian kid. If it did turn out that the kid was actually more interested and capable in developing the application than the original author, would money paid to the latter be going in the right place?
Microsoft used to spell itself that way, as well as a hyphenated Micro-Soft which I'm sure is sending you rolling on the floor just now.
And not to forget Xenix, their first operating system product.
You're perhaps thinking of too recent productions. Interactive fiction is a somewhat more specific term than "fiction and interactivity within games". Since the primary media is text, IF games can at best be just as immersive as traditional literary fiction, and the (perceived) interactivity with items in the game universe can also be very extensive.
Graphics can be a hindrance in the same way, but even in more recent games there have been exceptions; Planescape: Torment immediately comes to mind. The Storytron thing seems to be more like a buzzword vehicle, but if it raises a dialogue about these things, it isn't completely bad.
It's not as if it's a trend specific to the .ie domain - just look at movie ratings, or remember the recentish ruckus about GTA's hidden game content. A pair of nipples is apparently worse content than any body count.
This may be slightly beside the point, but I'd like to add that Newton's laws of motion are also no less relevant today because of general relativity. It all depends on the scales of things and the precision required; even if Newton doesn't work very well for astronomical or microscopic proportions, it can give a pretty damn good approximation in-between.
What I don't quite grasp either is the notion that erring on the side of safety would be a miscalculation of some sort. There's all to gain and nothing to lose in the long term by making our technology more energy-efficient and climate-friendly, while ignoring the potential issue effectively means betting the future of mankind over the use of a cheap energy source (which is bound to run out in a few centuries anyway). It doesn't take a scientist to say it - any gambler would tell you that choosing the latter option would be pure madness.
I've heard of this great, simple test for finding out whether you are truly irreplaceable. It goes like this:
If you now see a visible dent in the water, congratulations!
I beg to differ: how you market an operating system can also have a significant impact. Lack of pre-installation is only one issue, and with lack of real use experiences the perceived difficulty can be very important. Simply the notion that Linux and other Unix-like operating systems seem to be favored by technically-apt elitist geeks can make them seem less easily approachable than they really are.
It's not that people with such attitudes are just hurting the reputation of free operating systems though, they should have no business talking to users at all. There's people who do much of their jobs with computers but probably couldn't even correctly name the part of their software setup called "Windows". Guess what? It's not their area of expertise. They have every right not to be interested.
Serves me right for posting in the wee hours.
To be bluntly, you don't seem to be a software engineer either. It wouldn't be the first time that rumour sites would be mixing up technical terms and concepts, though.
A graphical user interface would most likely sit completely in userland, while the Linux kernel would only contain a device driver for communicating with the hardware. The user-mode parts can be as proprietary as Nintendo wants them to be, but any changes to the kernel itself must be released or they'll be violating the terms of use of the GPL.
That must've been some conversation!
Woe are the times when FPSs are considered "in-depth" games.
DOS games aren't actually that difficult to manage through emulation, except for the very late era games that overlapped the transition to DirectX (and the improvement of DirectX to a usable state). I'd say they were sometimes more difficult on the actual hardware of the age since you had the joy of managing memory and hardware resources completely by hand. The Amiga hardware allowed for a wider range of hairy trickery despite being more uniform.
But yeah, it's a common sympton of the times. I was more trying to make the point that breaking the habit would've been more difficult with such a homogenous platform.
Amiga has been replaced for a good long while now in terms of what can be done with the hardware. I would be among the first to say that the PC hardware and firmware architecture has extra weight and quirks that could be gotten rid of, but that's of little importance in a world where software thrives to be platform-independent.
As I understand it, Amiga was a very tightly-knit architecture, which left little room for improvement besides redesiging of the hardware. You can do neat tricks when you know exactly what you write for - which is why Amiga games are also tied to working with the chipsets, firmware versions and memory configurations they were originally designed for. Modularity can also be a form of elegance.
You forgot to add one variable, the artist. I've seen lots of people buy music they first downloaded for free, but unfortunately (for record companies) it tends to require more from the artist than just one hit song.
You may not have noticed, but it's not meant to compete with the "entry-level" of the high-end gaming rig crowd, and certainly it's a far cry from worthless. Just about any box from the Pentium era would be well enough for browsing the web with a graphical browser, and this seems like it can do much more besides that.
Really now, anything with 3D acceleration is already serious overkill for that purpose.
I suppose by "documents" you actually mean your gigantic MP3 and DivX collections, or that you live in a different reality from this one.
Pardon my skepticism, but there appears to be no-one watching the ruling experts and making sure they actually are experts on the fields of the said articles. As the current front page of Citizendium states, just about anyone will be able to become one, and they'll mainly be there to resolve content disputes. Lack of self-judgment unfortunately isn't constrained to anonymous users on Wikipedia either.
Trivialisation goes both ways. A fringe group taking matters into their own hands might make their righteous agenda seem like a mass of hypocrisy. An act of violence to end such actions, on the other hand, might be interpreted as a confirmation that their just cause is indeed faced with a ruthless and inhumane opposition, in turn making it easier to raise more extremists. It's of course possible for neither effect to be obvious to the one taking action even after it has been done, making it seem like an effective solution.
Both actions are also common in that they attempt to tackle effects instead of their causes. The fringe group is attempting to make their agenda known, perhaps even widely accepted, but they attack the people who they believe to be wrong instead of confronting society with their point of view. The retributionist is taking action against action without halting to consider its reasons - perhaps the society isn't open enough for debate or possibly otherwise provoking such a response.
Mosquitoes are indeed not people. Making them an example, where the core of the discussion is human behaviour, is a moot point.
Not quite. I am using a varying combination of rationality and intuition to arrive at decisions, yet that does not imply rash conclusions of the magnitude we're talking about here.
If I were a prospective animal rights extremist, I might one day find out about animal testing through some rather terse and single-sided information sources. I wouldn't have nearly enough information to have even a moderate picture of what might really be happening, but perhaps enough provocative material to get me infuriated and blind me to contrary evidence. It might make extreme harrassment and violence toward a researcher - whose actions are already restricted through strict guidelines - seem like a noble act.
However, even though such a progression portrays several features of "human" thinking, the fact that it portrays them in an extreme hardly makes it a prime example. But then, I never was the sort who calls pessimism a form of realism.
Not really, even if I were being interpreted as a single-minded person who is blind to his surroundings and detached from reality. For what it's worth in terms of "gazing into the abyss", I've done my share of army service, among other things.
It's not very likely for a society to accept your values if you try to force them down peoples' throats, just as a person isn't likely to agree with you more if you beat him with a stick or put a gun to his head. The "solution" might be that of an act of obedience, or in effect a convenient lack of counterarguments, but that's all you're likely to get.
And to make it clear, I'm not ignoring your point at all, I agree with it for a large part. But I don't think that understanding the decisions behind acts of violence requires agreeing with them. In any case, I thank you for sharing your view and for the discussion.
No, it doesn't. Certainly many notable actions have been such, but then the contrary doesn't make as exciting reading.
Thinking of violence as a "solution" is naïve, and perhaps refusing to see why some people share that view means handicapping one's thinking. Not sharing their view myself hardly is.
Sorry, but it's not all black and white, as they say.