Most people expect to get paid when they provide a desired good or service. Only "intellectual property" owners expect to get paid every time one of their "products" is distributed, even though they did the work to create it only once.
I understand now why having copyright last for at least the duration of the author's life is important: people who produce art (or content, or however you want to look at it) may have dependants to support.
Non-authors have to keep producing to support their dependents. Why should authors be any different?
Yeah, bend over & try to enjoy what the corporations do to you. Remember, if you push back against people trying to wipe out your personal liberties, you'll be hurting the children and helping the terrorists.
Patents encourage innovation in a quite simple and straightforward manner, by providing financial incentive to innovate.
No, patents prevent competition. Supposedly, this will encourage innovation by making it easy for people to make money using the idea in the patent, but that is not the direct or necessary effect of patents.
Since the _only_ valid societal rationale for patents to exist is to promote the public good, it would be a LOT more simple & straightforward to promote innovation if society collectively paid a lot of smart people to create useful ideas (i.e., community-supported basic & applied R&D), and then any entrepreneur could take the results & run with it.
The anti-competitive effect of patents just turns out to be prone to abuse.
Another idea would be to only allow an absolute, finite number of valid patents (like about 10,000 or so).
Then institute some kind of system which allows the patents to compete with each other based on a merit ranking (maybe auctions to determine how much companies think the patents are worth?) - patents which get bumped out of the valid slots become public domain.
Obviousness & prior art would still invalidate patents (and would therefore make them worthless).
Well, not completely - at certain times of the day, and with certain optical conditions, parts of the sky have certainly appeared green to me. It didn't last long though.
To see adverts for it in the job market. To find it hard to work as a professional programmer without using it.
Eh? You must've been looking for different types of jobs than I was - there was an entire decade where every listing I ever looked at always required knowledge of C++ (I've usually gotten jobs in system-tools development & CAD tools). And now, when I ask recruiters why they aren't asking for C++, they usually say something like "we assume every competent developer knows basic C++".
You can simply turn on the XP firewall that comes with XP out of the box.
I vaguely remember that for early versions of XP, even if you enable the firewall, the firewall wasn't actually activated until a little later in the boot process, leaving your machine "naked" in the meantime. There were many anecdotes about getting infected in the 30 or so seconds it took for the firewall to start up.
To protect yourself, you had to either use a hardware firewall (in which case the software one was kind of irrelevant) or disconnect the machine from the network until the firewall had started up.
Getting paid for providing a good or service will pay your rent. That's the way every honest worker made their living until "intellectual property" laws came into existence.
It's greedy to expect to be paid whenever something gets copied when you did the work to create it only once.
Except 1) timber companies don't want the small crap that results in the most fire danger - they want to cut the big profitable trees that usually survive the fires and which slow down the growth of all the little burnable bushes, and 2) the actual process of being burned causes interesting ecological effects which can improve the long-term health of the forests - effects which _aren't_ produced by "disciplined and smart logging".
Its a win-win situation really.
There is no win-win situation as far as the forest's health is concerned which would allow humans to "harvest" all we want out of it. All we can do is try to keep the damage low enough (through limits & techniques) so that the forest will heal itself fast enough to keep up.
Sure, it's perfectly legal for companies to ask to see my reciept - and also perfectly legal for me to refuse.
I suppose it would also be legal for them to refuse to let you on their property in the future if you didn't follow their rules, although I doubt most companies would go to the trouble.
Well, another possible part of a solution is to allow whoever to donate however much money to whoever they want, but we should at least require that all such transactions be completely transparent, traceable & easily available to the public so that we can all find out who has been "bought". Make some really stiff penalties for any "under the table" transactions which might occur by people attempting to be anonymous.
I also don't think that any non-person entities like corporations should be allowed to donate money for political purposes - only real individuals should be allowed to do that. Combined with the previous condition, then the public should have an easier time figuring out who's responding to who's financial interest.
Actually, it says "well regulated", not organized. You did read it yourself, right? And according to the historials, "well regulated" had a different meaning to the founders than "organized".
There is lots of historical evidence (editorials, personal letters, memos, etc) to suggest that the phrase "well regulated militia" was _NOT_ meant by the founders to mean the same thing as the modern concept of an "organized militia", and that it actually means something a little closer to what the NRA thinks it means (i.e., _everyone_ should be able to own & use a weapon).
See this link for a reasonable analysis of the subject.
Whether or not the founders' reasoning seems valid with today's relatively easy access to implements of mass murder is a whole other discussion.
Seems illogical that I have a right to political speech, but my wife and I do not.
You have a right to political speech. Your wife has a right to political speech. You might even be saying the same thing in both of your political speeches.
The "legal entity" which is represented by your marriage is not a real person, and does not need a right to political speech. I see no conflict in saying that only individuals need and/or deserve the "right" to political speech. Giving artificially-defined legal entities the rights of individuals is just asking for major societal dysfunction (as we are in the process of discovering).
Yeah, but what does that have to do with being able to pay off the commitments? I was pointing out that, theoretically, if you use simple financial constraint, you CAN meet the whatever commitments have been made to Social Security participants.
It's just that our duly-elected boobs have let the government finances get into such a mess, they probably do not have the cajones to USE the required financial constraint - which basically means that a lot of people are going to get royally screwed sometime in the near future.
Actually, I think that this kind of "intelligent evolution" (either cybernetics and/or genetic engineering) is almost required if we (the human race) wants to survive in some form.
At some point in the near future (= ~100 years), somebody is going to figure out how to make a machine which can teach itself. When that happens, we had better know how to self-evolve ourselves, or else we will be rapidly outevolved by our own creations.
I have no idea why you think "until you've caught up" is a condition that can't be met. Social Security is not a Ponzi scheme.
Step 1: Decide who has paid into the program, and how much. Include future commitments (if you are planning on continuing the program).
Step 2: Decide how much you're going to need to meet the commitment, and pick a date when you'll break even.
Step 3: Cut back spending on EVERYTHING else so that your rate of savings will enable you to meet the required amount of cash at the selected break-even date.
This isn't rocket science, any half-decent accountant can do this kind of calculation in their sleep.
Whether or not there is the _political_ will to cut back both future promised benefits &/ other spending in order to meet those commitments is a completely-different issue, and one which has the potential to destroy the world's economy.
Well, you could do what MOST individuals have to do when they've overcommitted their income - cut back on spending until you've caught up.
Unfortunately, it looks like the government has chosen the other typical route that U.S. individuals take: keep spending yourself into a hole until you have to declare bankruptcy. Except when the U.S. government has to declare bankruptcy, it's going to cause a whole lot more problems than when an individual does.
Trademark law isn't really an IP law (unless you count the ability to "sell" a trademark as property). I would consider it more of a fraud/identity phenomenon, in that it exists & is defined to prevent people from pretending that they are associated with the "owners" of the trademark.
Slashdot Mirror
Most people expect to get paid when they provide a desired good or service. Only "intellectual property" owners expect to get paid every time one of their "products" is distributed, even though they did the work to create it only once.
Non-authors have to keep producing to support their dependents. Why should authors be any different?
The power to exude the smell of different kinds of cheese!
Yeah, bend over & try to enjoy what the corporations do to you. Remember, if you push back against people trying to wipe out your personal liberties, you'll be hurting the children and helping the terrorists.
If you want people to innovate, then pay them to do so.
You don't need to give people the power to stop OTHER people from innovating in order to encourage THEM to innovate.
No, patents prevent competition. Supposedly, this will encourage innovation by making it easy for people to make money using the idea in the patent, but that is not the direct or necessary effect of patents.
Since the _only_ valid societal rationale for patents to exist is to promote the public good, it would be a LOT more simple & straightforward to promote innovation if society collectively paid a lot of smart people to create useful ideas (i.e., community-supported basic & applied R&D), and then any entrepreneur could take the results & run with it.
The anti-competitive effect of patents just turns out to be prone to abuse.
Another idea would be to only allow an absolute, finite number of valid patents (like about 10,000 or so).
Then institute some kind of system which allows the patents to compete with each other based on a merit ranking (maybe auctions to determine how much companies think the patents are worth?) - patents which get bumped out of the valid slots become public domain.
Obviousness & prior art would still invalidate patents (and would therefore make them worthless).
Well, not completely - at certain times of the day, and with certain optical conditions, parts of the sky have certainly appeared green to me. It didn't last long though.
Eh? You must've been looking for different types of jobs than I was - there was an entire decade where every listing I ever looked at always required knowledge of C++ (I've usually gotten jobs in system-tools development & CAD tools). And now, when I ask recruiters why they aren't asking for C++, they usually say something like "we assume every competent developer knows basic C++".
I vaguely remember that for early versions of XP, even if you enable the firewall, the firewall wasn't actually activated until a little later in the boot process, leaving your machine "naked" in the meantime. There were many anecdotes about getting infected in the 30 or so seconds it took for the firewall to start up.
To protect yourself, you had to either use a hardware firewall (in which case the software one was kind of irrelevant) or disconnect the machine from the network until the firewall had started up.
Getting paid for providing a good or service will pay your rent.
That's the way every honest worker made their living until
"intellectual property" laws came into existence.
It's greedy to expect to be paid whenever something gets copied
when you did the work to create it only once.
Except 1) timber companies don't want the small crap that results in the most fire danger - they want to cut the big profitable trees that usually survive the fires and which slow down the growth of all the little burnable bushes, and 2) the actual process of being burned causes interesting ecological effects which can improve the long-term health of the forests - effects which _aren't_ produced by "disciplined and smart logging".
There is no win-win situation as far as the forest's health is concerned which would allow humans to "harvest" all we want out of it. All we can do is try to keep the damage low enough (through limits & techniques) so that the forest will heal itself fast enough to keep up.
I suppose it would also be legal for them to refuse to let you on their property in the future if you didn't follow their rules, although I doubt most companies would go to the trouble.
Well, another possible part of a solution is to allow whoever to donate however much money to whoever they want, but we should at least require that all such transactions be completely transparent, traceable & easily available to the public so that we can all find out who has been "bought". Make some really stiff penalties for any "under the table" transactions which might occur by people attempting to be anonymous.
I also don't think that any non-person entities like corporations should be allowed to donate money for political purposes - only real individuals should be allowed to do that. Combined with the previous condition, then the public should have an easier time figuring out who's responding to who's financial interest.
Actually, it says "well regulated", not organized. You did read it yourself, right? And according to the historials, "well regulated" had a different meaning to the founders than "organized".
There is lots of historical evidence (editorials, personal letters, memos, etc) to suggest that the phrase "well regulated militia" was _NOT_ meant by the founders to mean the same thing as the modern concept of an "organized militia", and that it actually means something a little closer to what the NRA thinks it means (i.e., _everyone_ should be able to own & use a weapon).
See this link for a reasonable analysis of the subject.
Whether or not the founders' reasoning seems valid with today's relatively easy access to implements of mass murder is a whole other discussion.
You have a right to political speech. Your wife has a right to political speech. You might even be saying the same thing in both of your political speeches.
The "legal entity" which is represented by your marriage is not a real person, and does not need a right to political speech. I see no conflict in saying that only individuals need and/or deserve the "right" to political speech. Giving artificially-defined legal entities the rights of individuals is just asking for major societal dysfunction (as we are in the process of discovering).
Yeah, kind of funny (not ironic) that research which isn't being funded well can't produce a single cure, whereas the research that _is_ does. Duh.
I think a lot of USERS would like to slap DEVELOPERS (including some users who are developers), for making truly stupid design/coding decisions.
Yeah, but what does that have to do with being able to pay off the commitments? I was pointing out that, theoretically, if you use simple financial constraint, you CAN meet the whatever commitments have been made to Social Security participants.
It's just that our duly-elected boobs have let the government finances get into such a mess, they probably do not have the cajones to USE the required financial constraint - which basically means that a lot of people are going to get royally screwed sometime in the near future.
Actually, I think that this kind of "intelligent evolution" (either cybernetics and/or genetic engineering) is almost required if we (the human race) wants to survive in some form.
At some point in the near future (= ~100 years), somebody is going to figure out how to make a machine which can teach itself. When that happens, we had better know how to self-evolve ourselves, or else we will be rapidly outevolved by our own creations.
I have no idea why you think "until you've caught up" is a condition that can't be met. Social Security is not a Ponzi scheme.
Step 1: Decide who has paid into the program, and how much. Include future commitments (if you are planning on continuing the program).
Step 2: Decide how much you're going to need to meet the commitment, and pick a date when you'll break even.
Step 3: Cut back spending on EVERYTHING else so that your rate of savings will enable you to meet the required amount of cash at the selected break-even date.
This isn't rocket science, any half-decent accountant can do this kind of calculation in their sleep.
Whether or not there is the _political_ will to cut back both future promised benefits &/ other spending in order to meet those commitments is a completely-different issue, and one which has the potential to destroy the world's economy.
Well, you could do what MOST individuals have to do when they've overcommitted their income - cut back on spending until you've caught up.
Unfortunately, it looks like the government has chosen the other typical route that U.S. individuals take: keep spending yourself into a hole until you have to declare bankruptcy. Except when the U.S. government has to declare bankruptcy, it's going to cause a whole lot more problems than when an individual does.
You don't make money by selling "free" software. You make money by providing services using free software.
Which is as it should be, instead of insisting that people give you money for something which can be copied for pennies.
Trademark law isn't really an IP law (unless you count the ability to "sell" a trademark as property). I would consider it more of a fraud/identity phenomenon, in that it exists & is defined to prevent people from pretending that they are associated with the "owners" of the trademark.
Of course, IANAL.