Although if you learn enough to recognize such phrases as colloquialisms, then being able to use those phrases in the target language in a correct manner can be a great source of amusement when spoken to a native speaker of that language. Just make sure you know what is considered profanity before repeating phrases:-)
"Failed business model" applies to things like releasing security patches for money and then someone offers them for free. It doesn't apply when people willingly break the law.
If a law isn't performing its intended function of providing for the general good of society, but a minority has managed to keep it on the books & enforced for their own personal enrichment, then what should be thrown out first - the rights of the society, or the stupid law?
I'm making my argument in the context of REAL capitalism: "law" of supply & demand. Basically, if you provide a good or service that people desire at a cost that people think is worth it, then people will buy it. If you want people to keep paying you, then you have to keep producing a good or service at a cost they are willing to pay for.
Relying on government enforcement to make people pay you money that they wouldn't be willing to pay you in the context of a fair trade is just greedy.
What do you say to the investors that took enormous financial risk in funding the production of the movie you are copying?
It would be like any other business venture depending on a failed business model: time to find a new way to make money. That's one of the risks of being a real capitalist instead of using the government to force people to give you money: if you can't provide a good or service at a price that people are willing to pay for, then you don't get paid.
Produce a popular new multi million dollar feature film.
Of course, your first assumption _is_ the real problem. If it becomes a bad business model to make multi-million dollar films, then people shouldn't make multi-million dollar films. Why should people be forced to subsidize bad business models?
OTOH, if enough people want multi-million dollar films, then they'll figure out a way to pay for it. And there will probably be lots of less-expensive forms of entertainment created to fill any leftover demand.
Catch a clue (or maybe just RTFA) - they're not talking about flying a single kite at 30k. They're talking about flying a whole stack of kites in a big loop. The only tension you need to worry about is from each kite to the next in the stack.
As long as each kite in the stack is capable of lifting its own weight plus the weight of the cable to the next kite in the stack, the "tension" on all of the pieces of cable will not necessarily accumulate from segment to segment. As long as it's engineered correctly, they could use strong fishing line as the cable (although that probably wouldn't handle the wear of going through the electrical generator ground station).
The overall tension will be whatever is needed to maintain the kites going up one side of the loop and coming down the other.
As far as safety is concerned, if you read more about their thoughts at www.laddermill.com, their ultimate intention is to make each "kite" a computer-controlled wing (complete with GPS). If the cables snap, the wings could control their glides down.
I _liked_ the 300 baud modems - I could write out the entire USENET news feed to the console every day & read it as it went by (no binaries being posted then, of course). Took a couple of hours, with interesting posts from a lot of crazy comp sci professors & grad students.
When I got my first 1200 baud modem, I was hard pressed to keep up (although I did end up improving my reading speed quite a bit).
USENET & NNTP traffic has grown a bit since then...
Can someone please explain to me who feeds the family when everyone is doing work for free?
You get paid for providing a good or service that someone desires. If you want to keep getting paid, you keep on producing. That's called true capitalism. It's how a lot of people make an honest living.
You are basically denying the premise of capitalism with this attitude.
You've got a funny idea of what capitalism means. _My_ idea of capitalism is this: you get paid just compensation for providing a desired good or service. I expect to get paid only when I provide a good or service that someone else desires.
What part of _your_ idea of capitalism requires government enforcement to make sure that an idea "owner" is paid over and over every time that idea is copied/used, even though the effort of creating that idea was expended only once?
No, people are _forced_ to pay more for it by copyright laws & government enforcement. Don't confuse "don't want to go to jail" with "willing to pay more".
The effort of cleaning the room once can only be done once. I would only be expected to be paid once for the act of cleaning the room once. If I clean the room again, then I would expect to be paid again for the effort to clean the room the second time. If I'm cleaning the room on a regular basis, then I would be expected to be paid regularly for the regular effort.
Similarly, if I put forth the effort _once_ to create some idea, then I should expect to be paid only _once_ for that idea. If I want to be paid more, then I will have to put forth the effort to generate more ideas that have value.
Yes, Open Source & FSF people comes out with some AMAZING stuff. However, I don't think the computer industry would be anywhere near its current state without software companies pushing the bar.
The _retail_ software industry would not be as profitable (reduced to the profit margins of software redistribution), but the computer _services_ industry would be just fine. Instead of handing over a copy of shrink-wrapped piece of software to a customer, software companies or developers would provide services (accounting, data mining, database maintenance, custom application development, etc.) to other companies & would write software to help provide those services. But they would be paid for act of providing _service_, not because they dumped a copy of a software package on a customer & expect to be paid every time the customer makes a copy of that software package.
"Free" software is just infrastructure, the common stuff that everyone takes for granted & uses to get the job done (like highways). Stuff like cheap word processors/text editors/spreadsheets/paint programs/etc. that everyone uses & which anyone can assume is available. More sophisticated stuff represents a competitive advantage, and would be kept in-house where trained employees would use it to provide special services to customers.
So that inherently means that you don't believe in any copyright, patents, trademarks, etc., correct?
Trademarks are a slightly different matter (more related to fraud, or somebody pretending to be somebody they aren't), but yes: I believe that copyrights & patents are causing more damage to society then their theoretical benefits.
Let's say that while sweeping, you came up with a great new type of broom that would reduce sweeping time in half!
Assuming: 1) it's not something as simple as doubling the width and 2) it took some time & real creativity on your part;
So you decide to sell your new super broom & start making $100 a pop. Stihl sees it and thinks it would be a great addition to their new line of power cleaning equipment. They "copy" your design to a 'T.' Since they have mass-production capabilities, they can offer it for $50 (remember, it's a 2-way street: we can take from them, but "they" can take from us as well). After all, after you created the first one already, why should you be paid for an idea over and over?
You are still thinking greedily. You think just because you had a clever idea, you should be able to force people to pay you every time they use it.
I'm thinking straight capitalism: if you can't think of a good way to make money off that idea, even if people learn about it, then you shouldn't expect the government to use its enforcement powers to prop up your bad business model. You are not _entitled_ to make money, just because of a clever idea. If you _know_ you can't execute the clever idea better than any competitor, then you should just sell the idea to someone who can.
If this is the case, no company would be able to make something unique. As soon as they do, some schmuck will copy it, nail something else onto it and sell it as the "60K model" or some other such marketin
but I've yet to meet a single lawyer who's principles extend to doing legal work for free
Actually, a lot of lawyers do free work - that's why they have a term for it called "pro bono". My brother said that the firm he used to work for actually required that x% of their time be spent doing pro bono work, and that was pretty typical for large, established firms.
However, I suspect that most of such work is restricted to things which won't rock the boat (like doing paperwork for nonprofit organizations, etc), since that would probably scare off their big clients.
It takes an organization with a charter like the ACLU to throw lawyers into the teeth of the legal system, hoping that they'll be able to do something to preserve basic human rights against the forces of tyranny & ignorance.
The poorest person in the country ought to have the same ability to defend their legal rights as the mightiest corporation.
Actually, the poor person should have _MORE_ support to defend their legal rights than a non-reality-based legally-created entity like a corporation (no matter how "mighty").
My personal feeling is that corporations shouldn't have any "rights" other than what can be derived from the collective rights of their owners & employees, although I am aware that the U.S. legal system has been engineered with the meme of corporate "personhood".
I think that you get deserved to be paid by me when you provide me with a good or service that I value. If you don't, then I don't see why I should be forced to pay you anything.
But that doesn't give you the right to buy it with a stolen credit card, put it up on a web page and make sure lots and lots of people can get a non-free product for free.
Credit card fraud involves "real" property, stuff which is transferred from person to person, but which normal people (i.e., not the government), can't create copies for themselves. Copyright infringement is orthogonal to the issue of fraud, and you are being disingenuous by trying to mix the two issues.
That is what this fight is all about.
No, the fight is about whether or not letting an idea "owner" control (through government enforcement) how anyone can use that idea is better for society than just letting normal market forces dictate the value of provided goods & services.
The argument point is: in the absence of government-enforced "intellectual property" laws, people would normally expect to be compensated only in return for providing a good or service. I make hamburgers. You give me enough money, I'll give you a hamburger. Or, I sweep floors. You pay me enough on a regular basis, and I'll keep your floors clean.
Unless they sign some sort of contract, they _don't_ expect to have to keep paying me everytime they walk on that clean floor.
Similarly, I'd be a fool to believe that I could make people pay me money every time they walked on a floor that I had cleaned for them, no matter how difficult it was for me to clean that floor. An honest businessperson would call that a "stupid business model".
"Intellectual property owners", however, believe that they deserve to get paid _every_ time somebody copies their work, even though they put forth the effort to create that work only once. Sure, it might have been a lot of effort, and if they didn't force everyone to keep paying them money over and over to watch the product, then they wouldn't be able to afford to create the common "blockbuster" film - but that's why it's called a bad business model.]
Providing government protection & enforcement for such bad business models is just providing a industrial subsidy, when the people involved should _really_ be finding other ways they can sell their skills to make an honest living.
Your scaling factors of warez vs. human life has got to be one of the most idiotic comparisons I've ever seen.
How many illegal copies of software does someone have to make to kill a person (not counting possibilities like whether all those copies would fall on someone & smother them to death)?
The impact may not be as large as the xxIA say it is, but it is stealing.
No it's not.
It does cost a real loss of real income to intellectual property rights holders.
No it doesn't.
It's still amazing to me how so many people think "intellectual property" holders _deserve_ to get money every time one of their works is copied. If I managed to get a U.S. Federal law passed which forced people to give me a little money every time they made a sandwich, I (and the people who let such an law be passed) would be tarred and feathered long before anyone got around to applying a little White-Out to the law books.
But somehow, people believe that they have a _right_ to get money every time someone _else_ does the work to copy something, even though the original authors did the work to create that thing only once.
People should expect to receive just compensation for providing a good or service. Expecting the government to force people to give you money for doing no extra work is just greed.
It wasn't really a stink demon, though (although the bathhouse tenants though it was at first) - it was supposedly a very powerful and important spirit of some kind, but it had gotten "infected" by human trash. The girl was able to loosen the trash which was jammed up in the spirit, and then it freed itself from the rest.
I don't think the central tenet of the movie was environmental, but there did seem to be a fairly regular pattern of appreciation of nature & criticism of human excesses.
Uh, what capitalist business model that does not use intellectual property law can deal with a product that costs $2 billion to R&D (that is probably what is spent for each drug that makes it to market) and 5 cents per unit to manufacture and is commonly sold to maybe 1,000,000 unique people in a year?
Whoever wants the drugs most would pay to have the research done (or a group of companies/organizations/government/individuals would pool resources to pay for the research). Once the research was done, whoever could produce the drugs most cost-effectively would be the winner in the capitalistic market. They might not be able to make the gross profits that the current drug companies make, but they'd at least be making an honest living.
In a true capitalist market, you get compensated for providing a good or service. If you can't figure out a way to make a living using that principle, then you're using the wrong business model.
For some reason, a lot of people seem to feel that they're entitled to make a lot of money with broken business models - and they're quite comfortable with using the government to _make_ people pay them that money.
There were two main scenarios relating to the environment: the really huge, powerful, stinky slime monster she had to bathe (and released all kinds of human junk from), plus the boy/dragon she befriended (who used to be a river spirit before his river got filled in for development).
I think there were some incidental comments (by Yubaba?) about how humans don't treat the environment very kindly.
Not exactly - the U.S. Constitution says that the U.S. Congress can allow you to temporarily restrict other people's use of the expression of ideas, for the purpose of promoting the progress of Science & the Arts.
It _doesn't_ say that you actually "own" the expression of those ideas - that's just the meme which has been encoded into laws by the special interests pushing for the corporate control of what should be a free-flowing exchange of ideas.
_Most_ people feel that you should get paid for something _only_ if you did something to earn it. Only greedy people think they should get paid over and over every time something is distributed even though they did the work to create it only once.
Being a capitalist (yes how evil) I understand how important property rights are.
If you were a _real_ capitalist, you wouldn't be supporting government enforcement of "intellectual property" laws over the rights of people to do whatever they damn well feel like with their own real, private property.
I also support the pharma industry in their fight against rip-offs in the 3rd world.
Uh huh - a _real_ capitalist would just laugh at the pharma industry at not being able to compete.
Sounds like you're more of a fascist than a capitalist.
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That's because they could see that lip service is all Dubya is good for. Competence is not one of his strong suits.
What does your chair example have to do with "intellectual property"?
Although if you learn enough to recognize such phrases as colloquialisms, then being able to use those phrases in the target language in a correct manner can be a great source of amusement when spoken to a native speaker of that language. Just make sure you know what is considered profanity before repeating phrases :-)
Microwaves are _not_ necessarily non-directional. How do you think they make radar "beams"?
If a law isn't performing its intended function of providing for the general good of society, but a minority has managed to keep it on the books & enforced for their own personal enrichment, then what should be thrown out first - the rights of the society, or the stupid law?
I'm making my argument in the context of REAL capitalism: "law" of supply & demand. Basically, if you provide a good or service that people desire at a cost that people think is worth it, then people will buy it. If you want people to keep paying you, then you have to keep producing a good or service at a cost they are willing to pay for.
Relying on government enforcement to make people pay you money that they wouldn't be willing to pay you in the context of a fair trade is just greedy.
It would be like any other business venture depending on a failed business model: time to find a new way to make money. That's one of the risks of being a real capitalist instead of using the government to force people to give you money: if you can't provide a good or service at a price that people are willing to pay for, then you don't get paid.
Of course, your first assumption _is_ the real problem. If it becomes a bad business model to make multi-million dollar films, then people shouldn't make multi-million dollar films. Why should people be forced to subsidize bad business models?
OTOH, if enough people want multi-million dollar films, then they'll figure out a way to pay for it. And there will probably be lots of less-expensive forms of entertainment created to fill any leftover demand.
Catch a clue (or maybe just RTFA) - they're not talking about flying a single kite at 30k. They're talking about flying a whole stack of kites in a big loop. The only tension you need to worry about is from each kite to the next in the stack.
As long as each kite in the stack is capable of lifting its own weight plus the weight of the cable to the next kite in the stack, the "tension" on all of the pieces of cable will not necessarily accumulate from segment to segment. As long as it's engineered correctly, they could use strong fishing line as the cable (although that probably wouldn't handle the wear of going through the electrical generator ground station).
The overall tension will be whatever is needed to maintain the kites going up one side of the loop and coming down the other.
As far as safety is concerned, if you read more about their thoughts at www.laddermill.com, their ultimate intention is to make each "kite" a computer-controlled wing (complete with GPS). If the cables snap, the wings could control their glides down.
I _liked_ the 300 baud modems - I could write out the entire USENET news feed to the console every day & read it as it went by (no binaries being posted then, of course). Took a couple of hours, with interesting posts from a lot of crazy comp sci professors & grad students.
When I got my first 1200 baud modem, I was hard pressed to keep up (although I did end up improving my reading speed quite a bit).
USENET & NNTP traffic has grown a bit since then...
Unfortunately, 6-million doesn't go very far these days. We figure we might be able to replace a few fingers for that amount.
You get paid for providing a good or service that someone desires. If you want to keep getting paid, you keep on producing. That's called true capitalism. It's how a lot of people make an honest living.
You've got a funny idea of what capitalism means. _My_ idea of capitalism is this: you get paid just compensation for providing a desired good or service. I expect to get paid only when I provide a good or service that someone else desires.
What part of _your_ idea of capitalism requires government enforcement to make sure that an idea "owner" is paid over and over every time that idea is copied/used, even though the effort of creating that idea was expended only once?
No, people are _forced_ to pay more for it by copyright laws & government enforcement. Don't confuse "don't want to go to jail" with "willing to pay more".
The effort of cleaning the room once can only be done once. I would only be expected to be paid once for the act of cleaning the room once. If I clean the room again, then I would expect to be paid again for the effort to clean the room the second time. If I'm cleaning the room on a regular basis, then I would be expected to be paid regularly for the regular effort.
Similarly, if I put forth the effort _once_ to create some idea, then I should expect to be paid only _once_ for that idea. If I want to be paid more, then I will have to put forth the effort to generate more ideas that have value.
The _retail_ software industry would not be as profitable (reduced to the profit margins of software redistribution), but the computer _services_ industry would be just fine. Instead of handing over a copy of shrink-wrapped piece of software to a customer, software companies or developers would provide services (accounting, data mining, database maintenance, custom application development, etc.) to other companies & would write software to help provide those services. But they would be paid for act of providing _service_, not because they dumped a copy of a software package on a customer & expect to be paid every time the customer makes a copy of that software package.
"Free" software is just infrastructure, the common stuff that everyone takes for granted & uses to get the job done (like highways). Stuff like cheap word processors/text editors/spreadsheets/paint programs/etc. that everyone uses & which anyone can assume is available. More sophisticated stuff represents a competitive advantage, and would be kept in-house where trained employees would use it to provide special services to customers.
Trademarks are a slightly different matter (more related to fraud, or somebody pretending to be somebody they aren't), but yes: I believe that copyrights & patents are causing more damage to society then their theoretical benefits.
You are still thinking greedily. You think just because you had a clever idea, you should be able to force people to pay you every time they use it.
I'm thinking straight capitalism: if you can't think of a good way to make money off that idea, even if people learn about it, then you shouldn't expect the government to use its enforcement powers to prop up your bad business model. You are not _entitled_ to make money, just because of a clever idea. If you _know_ you can't execute the clever idea better than any competitor, then you should just sell the idea to someone who can.
Actually, a lot of lawyers do free work - that's why they have a term for it called "pro bono". My brother said that the firm he used to work for actually required that x% of their time be spent doing pro bono work, and that was pretty typical for large, established firms.
However, I suspect that most of such work is restricted to things which won't rock the boat (like doing paperwork for nonprofit organizations, etc), since that would probably scare off their big clients.
It takes an organization with a charter like the ACLU to throw lawyers into the teeth of the legal system, hoping that they'll be able to do something to preserve basic human rights against the forces of tyranny & ignorance.
Actually, the poor person should have _MORE_ support to defend their legal rights than a non-reality-based legally-created entity like a corporation (no matter how "mighty").
My personal feeling is that corporations shouldn't have any "rights" other than what can be derived from the collective rights of their owners & employees, although I am aware that the U.S. legal system has been engineered with the meme of corporate "personhood".
I think that you get deserved to be paid by me when you provide me with a good or service that I value. If you don't, then I don't see why I should be forced to pay you anything.
Credit card fraud involves "real" property, stuff which is transferred from person to person, but which normal people (i.e., not the government), can't create copies for themselves. Copyright infringement is orthogonal to the issue of fraud, and you are being disingenuous by trying to mix the two issues.
No, the fight is about whether or not letting an idea "owner" control (through government enforcement) how anyone can use that idea is better for society than just letting normal market forces dictate the value of provided goods & services.
You're missing the "argument point".
The argument point is: in the absence of government-enforced "intellectual property" laws, people would normally expect to be compensated only in return for providing a good or service. I make hamburgers. You give me enough money, I'll give you a hamburger. Or, I sweep floors. You pay me enough on a regular basis, and I'll keep your floors clean.
Unless they sign some sort of contract, they _don't_ expect to have to keep paying me everytime they walk on that clean floor.
Similarly, I'd be a fool to believe that I could make people pay me money every time they walked on a floor that I had cleaned for them, no matter how difficult it was for me to clean that floor. An honest businessperson would call that a "stupid business model".
"Intellectual property owners", however, believe that they deserve to get paid _every_ time somebody copies their work, even though they put forth the effort to create that work only once. Sure, it might have been a lot of effort, and if they didn't force everyone to keep paying them money over and over to watch the product, then they wouldn't be able to afford to create the common "blockbuster" film - but that's why it's called a bad business model.]
Providing government protection & enforcement for such bad business models is just providing a industrial subsidy, when the people involved should _really_ be finding other ways they can sell their skills to make an honest living.
Your scaling factors of warez vs. human life has got to be one of the most idiotic comparisons I've ever seen.
How many illegal copies of software does someone have to make to kill a person (not counting possibilities like whether all those copies would fall on someone & smother them to death)?
No it's not.
No it doesn't.
It's still amazing to me how so many people think "intellectual property" holders _deserve_ to get money every time one of their works is copied. If I managed to get a U.S. Federal law passed which forced people to give me a little money every time they made a sandwich, I (and the people who let such an law be passed) would be tarred and feathered long before anyone got around to applying a little White-Out to the law books.
But somehow, people believe that they have a _right_ to get money every time someone _else_ does the work to copy something, even though the original authors did the work to create that thing only once.
People should expect to receive just compensation for providing a good or service. Expecting the government to force people to give you money for doing no extra work is just greed.
It wasn't really a stink demon, though (although the bathhouse tenants though it was at first) - it was supposedly a very powerful and important spirit of some kind, but it had gotten "infected" by human trash. The girl was able to loosen the trash which was jammed up in the spirit, and then it freed itself from the rest.
I don't think the central tenet of the movie was environmental, but there did seem to be a fairly regular pattern of appreciation of nature & criticism of human excesses.
Whoever wants the drugs most would pay to have the research done (or a group of companies/organizations/government/individuals would pool resources to pay for the research). Once the research was done, whoever could produce the drugs most cost-effectively would be the winner in the capitalistic market. They might not be able to make the gross profits that the current drug companies make, but they'd at least be making an honest living.
In a true capitalist market, you get compensated for providing a good or service. If you can't figure out a way to make a living using that principle, then you're using the wrong business model.
For some reason, a lot of people seem to feel that they're entitled to make a lot of money with broken business models - and they're quite comfortable with using the government to _make_ people pay them that money.
There were two main scenarios relating to the environment: the really huge, powerful, stinky slime monster she had to bathe (and released all kinds of human junk from), plus the boy/dragon she befriended (who used to be a river spirit before his river got filled in for development).
I think there were some incidental comments (by Yubaba?) about how humans don't treat the environment very kindly.
Not exactly - the U.S. Constitution says that the U.S. Congress can allow you to temporarily restrict other people's use of the expression of ideas, for the purpose of promoting the progress of Science & the Arts.
It _doesn't_ say that you actually "own" the expression of those ideas - that's just the meme which has been encoded into laws by the special interests pushing for the corporate control of what should be a free-flowing exchange of ideas.
_Most_ people feel that you should get paid for something _only_ if you did something to earn it. Only greedy people think they should get paid over and over every time something is distributed even though they did the work to create it only once.
If you were a _real_ capitalist, you wouldn't be supporting government enforcement of "intellectual property" laws over the rights of people to do whatever they damn well feel like with their own real, private property.
Uh huh - a _real_ capitalist would just laugh at the pharma industry at not being able to compete.
Sounds like you're more of a fascist than a capitalist.