If musicians want to get paid, then they should work for it like every other craftsman & performer on the planet. Anyone who wants to get paid over and over for the work it takes to create something once is just being damn greedy.
As they say, ignorance of the law is no excuse - except, apparently, if you're a rich, "upstanding" member of the community.
If they were worried enough about the legality of their operation to check with legal, then they damn well _knew_ that they were walking a dangerous line.
And where are these "homegrown ISPs" going to get THEIR connections? From the the monopoly telecom & cable-network providers? The same providers who can, in the absence of net neutrality, choose what to charge anyone trying to provide services on their network? The same providers who would be providing rival ISP services?
Tell me the fairy tale about the hordes of customers switching again, Daddy...it was such a funny story!
Maybe you think that connectivity to the house across the street is good enough?
For that so-called 35-years, sitting on your hands _was_ the best action to take. Only idiots would escalate a tense situation and potentially get dozens of people killed unnecessarily when the highest probability outcome was that the passengers would get a short vacation in another country. There's a chance that you would've been one of those idiots, but I suspect you'd be more likely trying not to piss your pants.
Once the Flight 93 passengers discovered via cell phones that this wasn't going to be the case, they fought. I haven't heard of any other attempted hijackings (or even mistaken attempted hijackings) in the U.S. since then where the passengers have just sat on their hands, and haven't helped to incapacitate whoever they perceived as a threat.
So, basically, you're full of bullshit, and should really stay hiding in your basement where mommy and daddy can protect you. Those of us with a much better grasp of reality will be perfectly happy to live our lives without having to deal with cretins like you.
If the 3rd parties were actually intelligent, they'd insert "5th Column" candidates into the two main political parties, get them elected, and then those newly-elected officials could change the various election laws that make it so hard for 3rd party candidates to get elected in a straightforward way.
But, most of them are so boneheaded that they keep spouting the "don't vote for the lesser of two evils" line rather than trying to fix the systemic bias. It's no wonder that the two main parties have no fear of any 3rd party except as a spoiler influence.
I think you're underestimating "average" people, especially people who have every reason to believe that their plane is going to be flown into a building (and that they will _all_ die) if they don't do something.
The people on Flight 93 were just "average" people, but when they fully realised the situation they still fought their captors. I don't think that the character of the "average" person has changed that much between now and then.
I often daydream that bills shouldn't be allowed to be passed into law unless they can be read aloud by the relevant representatives, by memory, on the floor of both Congressional houses.
You'd probably be able to fit the entire legal system on an index card.
(Then you'd have to tackle all those agency regulations...)
I think our technology at the moment better supports building big (~miles in diameter) space colonies, perhaps dug into a big asteroid for radiation protection, perhaps orbiting around the Sun. Once the colony is built, not only do you not have to worry about going in & out a planet's gravity well, but you have absolute control over the getting energy (no clouds or weather to obscure the solar panels), the internal climate/environment & spinning the colony for desired level of gravity.
You also have the limited ability to get your colony out of the way of incoming big rocks (if you see them in time).
Such habitats are physically possible to build even given our current state of technology, although it would certainly be insanely expensive as far as necessary resources was concerned.
Unless we came up with a cheap form of artificially controlling gravity, then just about every sort of living arrangement becomes possible, planetary or not.
It's a threat to Microsoft because if Microsoft can't control the data format, then they can't lock users into their suite of Office products - and then they can't stop their customers from using other vendor's office suites.
Don't forget the entire concept of "intellectual property". It always amazes me to hear the number of peole who will defend copyright/patent/trademark as being "free market".
What about DJ mix tapes? Hip-hop artists who depend on manipulating samples? Most people would consider those kinds of activities legimate creative expression (although I'm sure they'd argue about the "quality").
How about products which are found to conflict with patents (and the ideas weren't "stolen"), and the company can't afford the licensing fees (perhaps because the patent holder was being anticompetitive)? That's a fairly direct & easy-to-imagine scenario of a product which won't make it into the marketplace where the patent law did nothing to help the innovation of that product, and instead prevented that product from reaching the marketplace.
_By definition_, all of these intellectual property laws as currently implemented are suppressive - i.e., they try to restrict the free usage of ideas. Frankly, I find this to be an anti-common sense way of encouraging "innovation", which is supposedly the oft-stated motivation behind these laws.
He was describing an actual situation where someone is making money based on "intellectual" creation without relying on the aspects of "intellectual property" law that proponents insist are absolutely required for anyone to be able to make a living off creativity. That point is quite relevant to this discussion.
Wasn't Sweden the country that required every able man to go through the military for a few years, then gave them a military weapon when they were done & required them to keep it handy just in case they had to join a militia on short notice? Or am I thinking of some other Scandinavian country?
I addressed that in my description of the system. Small inventors can submit all the patent ideas they want into the auction system. If their patent idea is selected as the winner of the auction system, then they (the inventors) will get the payoff from the winning bidder. If the patent competition is fierce, this payoff could be humongous (especially if the auction participants have deep pockets).
From society's viewpoint, it's a perfect solution: there's a really strong incentive for every "inventor" in the society to contribute their patentable ideas in the hopes they'll get the big jackpot, and the ownership of the patent will end up in the hands of those organizations that actually have the resources to fully exploit the ideas described by the patent.
Actually, there's some pretty active development on biologically-safe miniature fuel cells which generate electricity from the energy stored in your blood sugar. Not only could you power all those implants, but you could lose weight by using them a lot!
Aside from completely abolishing the patent system, my suggested patent scheme is to put a total limit N on the # of currently-valid patents (to make it both easier to search to see if you are violating a patent, and to put bounds on the "slow-down" effect that patents have on the smaller innovations that occur on a regular basis in society).
Once you've got a strict limit on total # of patents valid (making them a fairly rare resource), then you can use a competitive process to play off the merits of each potential patent against each other, and to leave only the best ones valid. An obvious way to do that is to hold an auction: allow anyone to submit patent applications for each patent "slot" which becomes available, and allow everyone to bid on all of the patent applications. Whoever has the highest bid will have the patent application that they were bidding on become valid, and they will get all the rights that a patent owner usually gets.
Patent "slots" will become available either due to expiration, or being thrown out due to the usual obviousness or prior art criteria. This means that each bidder will have to perform extensive due diligence on anything they bid on, since they can potentially waste a lot of money if they buy ownership of a patent & then have it thrown out.
To make things a lot more interesting for the "small" innovators, all of the money that was paid by a bidder to win ownership of a patent, should go to the submitter of that patent. It's a big win-win for society: small innovators can win a big jackpot (and have a big incentive to contribute a steady stream of new ideas), and the people who end up purchasing ownership of the ideas are exactly the kind of people who have the resources to take fully exploit them. (You just have to make sure that bidder & the submitter aren't the same people, otherwise the auction idea breaks down).
He/she might get their wish; with another decade or so of the current ridiculous borrow-and-spend policies, the U.S. government is poised to go the way of Soviet Russia: spending itself into oblivion, without a single military action on U.S. soil performed against it.
Just because a bunch of atoms don't have a net electrical charge doesn't mean there isn't a current flowing - it's just a current of electrically-neutral atoms (similar to the way water is net-electrically-neutral but still can form a current).
As long as you've got some force (the pressure on the atoms) causing movement, there will be "work" done, which will cause energy usage (i.e., power) - whether or not there is an external electrical field involved. Basic Newtonian physics.
The last thing you should want while standing on a high-altitude flying thin-walled tank of highly-explosive jet fuel is to encourage a shootout ala the OK Corral between many passengers & a group of hijackers.
It might be an acceptable risk to have a couple of trained, armed Air Marshals (and a bunch of passengers willing to risk their lives dogpiling any attackers who the Marshals can't get immediately), but allowing any undertrained, overeager gun-crazy yahoo to carry onto a plane makes me much MUCH more scared than any terrorist threat.
Without some kind of wealth redistribution mechanism, a capitalistic economy is most likely to devolve into a highly-class stratified society, where "research" will be directly mainly on the wasteful frivolities that only the obscenely rich can imagine. This would probably be an even worse situation for progress than depending on the crumbs from a military-industrial complex.
It is fairly straightforward to argue that the current implementation of the welfare system does not work very well, but you'd better be prepared to propose an entirely different economic system before you can argue that not having such a system would be good for society-benefitting progress.
Just imagine how advanced our technology would be if all that money spent on preparing for warfare was actually spent on applied research and development. Certainly much more than feeling good about the "crumbs" falling from a warfare-prioritized R&D program.
You don't have much of a imagination if you can't visualize any scenarios.
Even today, at the company I work at, I've seen situations where negotiations over license fees have taken a little too long and leave a few departments of highly-paid engineers twiddling their thumbs (I'm assuming they end up taking care of paperwork or something) for a few days.
Think of any large-scale software deployment with a proprietary or encrypted database format (which will be pretty much required for DRM), and what would happen to your company if (for whatever reason), the software vendor decided to shut all that software down.
What would happen if your company's accounting system gets shut down?
What happens if you lose the license to your company-wide Business Office Suite and it refuses to allow anyone access to any company documents?
What about the huge database server that you've got all your client and sales information stored in?
Making access to your own company's data dependent on the whims of a 3rd party is a HUGE risk, and it's a risk that many businesspeople who don't understand the consequences of DRM aren't taking into account.
DRM _will_ start to matter to corporate the first time a software vendor shuts down a mission-critical business application due to some sort of misunderstanding over payment terms.
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If musicians want to get paid, then they should work for it like every other craftsman & performer on the planet. Anyone who wants to get paid over and over for the work it takes to create something once is just being damn greedy.
As they say, ignorance of the law is no excuse - except, apparently, if you're a rich, "upstanding" member of the community.
If they were worried enough about the legality of their operation to check with legal, then they damn well _knew_ that they were walking a dangerous line.
Uh huh.
And where are these "homegrown ISPs" going to get THEIR connections?
From the the monopoly telecom & cable-network providers?
The same providers who can, in the absence of net neutrality, choose what to charge anyone trying to provide services on their network?
The same providers who would be providing rival ISP services?
Tell me the fairy tale about the hordes of customers switching again, Daddy...it was such a funny story!
Maybe you think that connectivity to the house across the street is good enough?
Wow, it's amazing how full of bullshit you are.
For that so-called 35-years, sitting on your hands _was_ the best action to take. Only idiots would escalate a tense situation and potentially get dozens of people killed unnecessarily when the highest probability outcome was that the passengers would get a short vacation in another country. There's a chance that you would've been one of those idiots, but I suspect you'd be more likely trying not to piss your pants.
Once the Flight 93 passengers discovered via cell phones that this wasn't going to be the case, they fought. I haven't heard of any other attempted hijackings (or even mistaken attempted hijackings) in the U.S. since then where the passengers have just sat on their hands, and haven't helped to incapacitate whoever they perceived as a threat.
So, basically, you're full of bullshit, and should really stay hiding in your basement where mommy and daddy can protect you. Those of us with a much better grasp of reality will be perfectly happy to live our lives without having to deal with cretins like you.
If the 3rd parties were actually intelligent, they'd insert "5th Column" candidates into the two main political parties, get them elected, and then those newly-elected officials could change the various election laws that make it so hard for 3rd party candidates to get elected in a straightforward way.
But, most of them are so boneheaded that they keep spouting the "don't vote for the lesser of two evils" line rather than trying to fix the systemic bias. It's no wonder that the two main parties have no fear of any 3rd party except as a spoiler influence.
I think you're underestimating "average" people, especially people who have every reason to believe that their plane is going to be flown into a building (and that they will _all_ die) if they don't do something.
The people on Flight 93 were just "average" people, but when they fully realised the situation they still fought their captors. I don't think that the character of the "average" person has changed that much between now and then.
I often daydream that bills shouldn't be allowed to be passed into law unless they can be read aloud by the relevant representatives, by memory, on the floor of both Congressional houses.
You'd probably be able to fit the entire legal system on an index card.
(Then you'd have to tackle all those agency regulations...)
I think our technology at the moment better supports building big (~miles in diameter) space colonies, perhaps dug into a big asteroid for radiation protection, perhaps orbiting around the Sun. Once the colony is built, not only do you not have to worry about going in & out a planet's gravity well, but you have absolute control over the getting energy (no clouds or weather to obscure the solar panels), the internal climate/environment & spinning the colony for desired level of gravity.
You also have the limited ability to get your colony out of the way of incoming big rocks (if you see them in time).
Such habitats are physically possible to build even given our current state of technology, although it would certainly be insanely expensive as far as necessary resources was concerned.
Unless we came up with a cheap form of artificially controlling gravity, then just about every sort of living arrangement becomes possible, planetary or not.
It's a threat to Microsoft because if Microsoft can't control the data format, then they can't lock users into their suite of Office products - and then they can't stop their customers from using other vendor's office suites.
Don't forget the entire concept of "intellectual property". It always amazes me to hear the number of peole who will defend copyright/patent/trademark as being "free market".
Same thing that keeps most people from doing the same: the possibility of being caught & punished for such actions.
What about DJ mix tapes? Hip-hop artists who depend on manipulating samples? Most people would consider those kinds of activities legimate creative expression (although I'm sure they'd argue about the "quality").
How about products which are found to conflict with patents (and the ideas weren't "stolen"), and the company can't afford the licensing fees (perhaps because the patent holder was being anticompetitive)? That's a fairly direct & easy-to-imagine scenario of a product which won't make it into the marketplace where the patent law did nothing to help the innovation of that product, and instead prevented that product from reaching the marketplace.
_By definition_, all of these intellectual property laws as currently implemented are suppressive - i.e., they try to restrict the free usage of ideas. Frankly, I find this to be an anti-common sense way of encouraging "innovation", which is supposedly the oft-stated motivation behind these laws.
He was describing an actual situation where someone is making money based on "intellectual" creation without relying on the aspects of "intellectual property" law that proponents insist are absolutely required for anyone to be able to make a living off creativity. That point is quite relevant to this discussion.
Wasn't Sweden the country that required every able man to go through the military for a few years, then gave them a military weapon when they were done & required them to keep it handy just in case they had to join a militia on short notice? Or am I thinking of some other Scandinavian country?
I addressed that in my description of the system. Small inventors can submit all the patent ideas they want into the auction system. If their patent idea is selected as the winner of the auction system, then they (the inventors) will get the payoff from the winning bidder. If the patent competition is fierce, this payoff could be humongous (especially if the auction participants have deep pockets).
From society's viewpoint, it's a perfect solution: there's a really strong incentive for every "inventor" in the society to contribute their patentable ideas in the hopes they'll get the big jackpot, and the ownership of the patent will end up in the hands of those organizations that actually have the resources to fully exploit the ideas described by the patent.
Actually, there's some pretty active development on biologically-safe miniature fuel cells which generate electricity from the energy stored in your blood sugar. Not only could you power all those implants, but you could lose weight by using them a lot!
Aside from completely abolishing the patent system, my suggested patent scheme is to put a total limit N on the # of currently-valid patents (to make it both easier to search to see if you are violating a patent, and to put bounds on the "slow-down" effect that patents have on the smaller innovations that occur on a regular basis in society).
Once you've got a strict limit on total # of patents valid (making them a fairly rare resource), then you can use a competitive process to play off the merits of each potential patent against each other, and to leave only the best ones valid. An obvious way to do that is to hold an auction: allow anyone to submit patent applications for each patent "slot" which becomes available, and allow everyone to bid on all of the patent applications. Whoever has the highest bid will have the patent application that they were bidding on become valid, and they will get all the rights that a patent owner usually gets.
Patent "slots" will become available either due to expiration, or being thrown out due to the usual obviousness or prior art criteria. This means that each bidder will have to perform extensive due diligence on anything they bid on, since they can potentially waste a lot of money if they buy ownership of a patent & then have it thrown out.
To make things a lot more interesting for the "small" innovators, all of the money that was paid by a bidder to win ownership of a patent, should go to the submitter of that patent. It's a big win-win for society: small innovators can win a big jackpot (and have a big incentive to contribute a steady stream of new ideas), and the people who end up purchasing ownership of the ideas are exactly the kind of people who have the resources to take fully exploit them. (You just have to make sure that bidder & the submitter aren't the same people, otherwise the auction idea breaks down).
He/she might get their wish; with another decade or so of the current ridiculous borrow-and-spend policies, the U.S. government is poised to go the way of Soviet Russia: spending itself into oblivion, without a single military action on U.S. soil performed against it.
Just because a bunch of atoms don't have a net electrical charge doesn't mean there isn't a current flowing - it's just a current of electrically-neutral atoms (similar to the way water is net-electrically-neutral but still can form a current).
As long as you've got some force (the pressure on the atoms) causing movement, there will be "work" done, which will cause energy usage (i.e., power) - whether or not there is an external electrical field involved. Basic Newtonian physics.
The last thing you should want while standing on a high-altitude flying thin-walled tank of highly-explosive jet fuel is to encourage a shootout ala the OK Corral between many passengers & a group of hijackers.
It might be an acceptable risk to have a couple of trained, armed Air Marshals (and a bunch of passengers willing to risk their lives dogpiling any attackers who the Marshals can't get immediately), but allowing any undertrained, overeager gun-crazy yahoo to carry onto a plane makes me much MUCH more scared than any terrorist threat.
Not a valid comparison at all.
Without some kind of wealth redistribution mechanism, a capitalistic economy is most likely to devolve into a highly-class stratified society, where "research" will be directly mainly on the wasteful frivolities that only the obscenely rich can imagine. This would probably be an even worse situation for progress than depending on the crumbs from a military-industrial complex.
It is fairly straightforward to argue that the current implementation of the welfare system does not work very well, but you'd better be prepared to propose an entirely different economic system before you can argue that not having such a system would be good for society-benefitting progress.
Just imagine how advanced our technology would be if all that money spent on preparing for warfare was actually spent on applied research and development. Certainly much more than feeling good about the "crumbs" falling from a warfare-prioritized R&D program.
The other classic "low-tech" solution for that is to get one of those "drinking birds" and have its butt hit the shift key on a regular basis...
You don't have much of a imagination if you can't visualize any scenarios.
Even today, at the company I work at, I've seen situations where negotiations over license fees have taken a little too long and leave a few departments of highly-paid engineers twiddling their thumbs (I'm assuming they end up taking care of paperwork or something) for a few days.
Think of any large-scale software deployment with a proprietary or encrypted database format (which will be pretty much required for DRM), and what would happen to your company if (for whatever reason), the software vendor decided to shut all that software down.
What would happen if your company's accounting system gets shut down?
What happens if you lose the license to your company-wide Business Office Suite and it refuses to allow anyone access to any company documents?
What about the huge database server that you've got all your client and sales information stored in?
Making access to your own company's data dependent on the whims of a 3rd party is a HUGE risk, and it's a risk that many businesspeople who don't understand the consequences of DRM aren't taking into account.
DRM _will_ start to matter to corporate the first time a software vendor shuts down a mission-critical business application due to some sort of misunderstanding over payment terms.