You'd be surprised - I attended (as a 3rd-party observer) a software presentation at an FBI data center once, and _all_ of the attendees were packing. (Made the presentation a little surreal.)
This is a greatly simplified explination of public debt. The important thing to remember is that the government typically borrows the extra money it needs from the citizens who MAKE MONEY off this arrangment.
A debt is a debt, whether it is owed to your citizens or not. Millions of normal households pinch pennies & scrape by to build enough of a bank account so they can deal with unexpected expenses. Even idiot squirrels instinctively know that you're supposed to save nuts in expectation of tough times. Apparently, legislators don't even have the economic sense of idiot squirrels when they're spending billions of dollars of other peoples' money.
The reason I am bothered by this is that no one ever bothers to mention who the loan holders are.
Is it okay to borrow as much as you can from family & friends, just because you don't think they'll punish you if you default?
Do you _really_ think the debt & interest payments can keep growing indefinitely without something breaking? What do you think will happen if the U.S. government is forced to default on those bonds? (And don't answer "the government will print more money" - the amount of new money necessary would cause hyperinflation which would completely obliterate the real value of any return from the bonds.)
I'd also like to point out that 1) a significant fraction of bonds are owned by foreign interests, not U.S. citizens, and 2) any benefit of investments like bonds help primarily people who have extra money to spend, i.e., not the people who really need the help.
If U.S. national legislators were less concerned about looting the economy to push pork to their own voters, and more about the overall long-term health of the country, they'd pay attention to their own lip service about keeping the budget balanced. (The U.S. _really_ needs a strong Balanced-Budget Constitutional amendment.) I'm concerned that it's going to take a catastrophe that makes the Great Depression look like a picnic before anybody is convinced to do anything about it.
Dunno about quantum entanglement, but I thought it would be darn interesting if it were possible to either genetically engineer neurons (or implant devices I guess) that act as short-range radio transmitters & receivers.
Aside from allowing humans to communicate directly to each other's speech centers (and perhaps visual centers, although I'd want tight control over that:-), you could put transmitters into various pets so that when you were near them, you could get a sense of what they were sensing & feeling. (I'd probably limit what I was receiving about what they were tasting though =P
I have read some theories that there might be some interaction between the electric fields from adjacent neurons (the electric field from a neuron changing potential might be enough to "tickle" the connections or neurons around that one). Can't find a reference though...
Re:Wrong. People can learn new things at any age.
on
That's Using Your Head
·
· Score: 1
Do you really think that some 10-year-old who was born into a world with computer-brain interfaces is gonna be able to *out-think* a forty or fifty-year-old?
If you're talking using using real-world experience, no. But if using an interface like this is anything like learning how to play video games, those 10 year olds are going to kick yours & my butts in pure reaction time & eye-to-machine coordination.
Dunno, I always thought of greed as being driven by personal insecurity - trying to gain more material possessions so that you don't worry about being crushed by external forces. The "I deserve this!" attitude is more of a rationale for _why_ they're so desperate to grab all those resources.
For some people, though, there doesn't appear to be any form of feedback which says "enough!" I personally think that the "greed is good" meme which is constantly echoed & reinforced throughout the U.S. society has a great deal to do with this loss of feedback.
Luke, in particular, has proven himself a better and more critical historian than a lot of more honored contemporaries.
History has also proven that someone with an agenda can use a lot of true facts to bolster their propaganda, but can still be mistaken or lying.
In other words, just because someone has put forth a few facts that happen to be corroborated by other sources, doesn't mean that you should automatically believe _everything_ that purpose says (or has written). When the Bible lists something historical that is corroborated by independent evidence, the _only_ thing you can conclude is that the Bible has some independently-corroborated historical facts listed in it - you can't honestly conclude that anything else the Bible says is true.
Make it like some of the public toilets in Paris - when you leave the toilet, the door closes automatically & _everything_ is sprayed, disinfected & the waste is washed down the drain. After a quickie dry cycle, the door can be opened again.
As long as some of those people you hire are good Project Managers, they will be able to find ways to use more people efficiently.
_Blindly_ adding more people is not a good idea - but if your employees are working 80+ hour/week to meet deadlines, then you've either got to slip the deadline or use more people to meet the deadline with less work/individual.
As the saying goes, you can get quality, speed or cheap - pick two of three.
I'm not sure that applies to _all_ NP-Complete problems - but it certainly applies to the main concepts used for public-key encryption (large prime factors, Diffie-Helman(sp?), etc).
If merit & productivity can be used to dictate salary, then I want those standards applied to management & executives as well. There are a fair number of idiots who are earning large amounts of money which they don't deserve, and it's only by their subordinates' damage control which prevents these idiots from destroying any organization they touch.
In fact, the employees should be the ones casting judgement on the operational competency of the executives, since the employees have a better idea than anyone at how well the big brass is running the company.
Show them how to do it in a way more consistent with your environmental views and convince them that the new laws and taxes will remain constant for at least a decade so they can get a return on their investiment and they'll come along.
If some rich bastard is poisoning the air I breath, the water I drink, the food I eat, and setting the world up for an environmental disaster which will force my descendants to live like war refugees while the perpetrator hides in a some luxury hi-tech bunker, and _insists_ that he/she has a right to get PAID for doing all that, then I don't really feel like "showing them how to do it in a way more consistent with [my] environmental views" - I feel like taking their factories & shoving them where the sun don't shine.
Contrary to some peoples' desire & propaganda, individuals really _don't_ have the right to screw over the rest of the society just because they're can make a buck - if they think they do, I have no empathy when they face the resultant slapdown by enraged mob action.
I believe that quantum computatino makes symmetric encryption only an order of magnitude or so easier to crack - you're still safe if you have a decent key size.
On the other hand, I believe that most of the commonly-used methods of public-key encryption could be cracked in polynomial time, if quantum computation becomes practically implemented. This would, indeed, compromise quite a bit of currently-encrypted net traffic.
Lets say you download a book and get caught by the authors. Under your model they do not have protection because you didn't sign a contract...what contract is that?
How did the book become available to be downloaded? If the authors put it up for anyone to download, then they shouldn't expect to have any control over what people do with it once it gets downloaded. If it got put up by someone else who signed a contract with the author, then they violated their contract and the author should go after them.
The contract to steal?
It's not stealing.
You do not have to sign anything - it is the law - you do not have to agree with it - you have to follow it or suffer the consequences...you can fight the law - but it is highly recommended that you do so in a legal manner.
I know what the law is. I do actually follow copyright law, but only because of the threat - not because I think the law is "moral". I believe that people who support the copyright law are either greedy or have an overly-inflated sense of the value of their own creations.
I also believe that copyright & patent law is, and will be, a steadily increasing drag on the vitality of our economy, stifles innovation, concentrates wealth instead of creating it, and will cause our society to have a significant competitive disadvantage against societies which allow the free transfer of ideas.
Copyright law is out there - sitting and waiting. The creators/owners of a product can either default to the copyright law, or go to contract law (which is what many organizations *like companies that develop open source content* use). Either way, something needs to be stated so there is no confusion.
Copyright & patent law should be abolished. They have not been proven to provide any net societal benefit, and they interfere with the straightforward functioning of a market economy.
Now I am hoping you made a typo- i did not say I have the right to control how *I* use *your* own property - I said *I* have the right to control how *you* use *my* property. If you do not like it - don't use it.
I do not believe in the concept of "intellectual property". Property should be based on reality-based, non-copyable objects. Once I've bought something, it's MY property - not yours. And without a contract agreement, you should not have the right to tell me what to do with my property. Copyright law violates that principle.
Why must an author keep his material secret (by not distributing) his product to keep it protected? So if someone writes a book and wants to sell it they can't or otherwise they give up their IP rights? That makes no sense. I wrote a book, I want to sell the book, and I want the book to be utilized ONLY by people who pay me for it. What is so wrong with that?
Like I said, if the author wants a situation like that, then they can set up a network of agreements to enforce that kind of situation. The author shouldn't have the right to enforce control over _everyone_, even if they didn't sign anything with the author.
If you can't see the reason why it is useful to have an external viewpoint to "sanity check" your own assumptions, then you are exactly the kind of person who is at most danger of wandering off into a cult-like mindset & dragging your family along with you. If you're very lucky, your children and/or grandchildren may forgive you several decades later after reality has applied its own version of a "sanity check" (which may feel like a metaphorical 2x4 upside their heads) to their world view.
I'll be charitable & assume that you are making sure that your family has enough socialization to make sure that such a world-view divergence is not occurring. My mother is a elementary school teacher for learning-disabled kids, and a significant fraction of her workload is "repairing" the poor kids whose parents thought they could teach their kids "better" than the professionals. Unless at least one of those parents came from a professional educational background, the kids (almost without exception) end up significantly disadvantaged relative to their publicly-educated peers.
All the documents filed in court should still be public, unless there is some compelling national security reason why they should be. And corporations shouldn't be given the same rights as citizens as far as privacy is concerned.
You seem to have contract & copyright law confused. They are NOT the same thing, and your attempts to confuse the two are irrelevant to the discussion of the "morality" of copyright.
If I create a program (say finance software) and the terms require you to pay me a monthly fee - if you do not like these terms do not buy it. But just because you are not happy with the terms of a company does not give oyu the right to get the product without paying them.
That's fine - as long as the parties involved sign a contract agreeing to these terms. One aspect of the contract might be that you are not allowed to redistribute the product to anyone else. That's fine by me (barring fine print & deceptive legal language shenanigans, but that's all a typical part of dealing with contract law).
I disagree that you have the right to control how I use my own property without having signed a specific agreement between us. I do not believe that, once something has published in a manner where the members of the audience did NOT sign such an agreement or contract, that the publisher has any "right" to dictate how the recipients use the information that they received. When a song has been broadcast over the radio, it is in the public domain - unless the listeners have signed a contract with the radio station that they will not redistribute any material that they hear from the radio station, then the listeners are perfectly within their rights to make recordings of that song, trade their copies with their friends, do remixes of it, play it at parties, etc.
If the author doesn't want to allow such things, then he/she should either not distribute the product, or must build a network of contracts/agreements which specifically allow him/her such control.
I wonder - do you follow or ignore contracts? It seems that if you do not like a contract you probably don't follow it - unless there is some recourse.
I've got no problems with the straightforward application of contract law. As I stated at the beginning, however, copyright law doesn't have anything to do with contract law. Contract law involves upfront agreements between more than one party. Copyright law describes how private parties can use the power of the government to stop other people from doing what they would normally be able to do with their own property, without any such agreement being made.
If you're going to talk about the "morality" of copyright law, then you're going to have to address it in the context of whether or not copyright law results in a net benefit to the overall society. If there is no such net benefit, then copyright law should not be allowed to exist.
I created something. I want to keep it private, or limit distribution.
So, sign contracts containing those terms with everyone you distribute it to.
I invested my time and possibly my money - I want to recoup this investment.
So make sure you get a decent price when you sell your work. Why should the law force me to keep paying you money for making copies of something when you already got paid for the act of creating of it?
Someone out there likes my idea - my work - but they do not want to pay for it. I should be able to have my work protected from people like that.
So? I'd like the law to force people to give me a lot of money without my having to work for it, but unless there's some benefit in it for _them_, it's highly unlikely that I'd get such a law passed. People should be compensated for providing a desired good or service. Demanding money for any other activity is just greed.
Copyright infringement is stealing someone elses work - it may not be tangeable like a car - but that should not demean its value.
No, it's not stealing, no matter how much you may want it to be or repeat the phrase.
Or do you believe taking something that does not belong to you as morally correct?
Your "rhetorical question" is irrelevant, since copyright infringement is not theft.
Do you believe that it is morally correct to use the law to force people to pay you over and over for something that you should've been paid only once for?
What do you suppose would happen to the various entertainment industries?
Distributors of recordings (both audio & video) would probably go out of business, or at least be reduced to providing support to local and corporate-sponsored groups who wanted a large distribution of particular recorded performances. Local and/or touring, live performances (bands, theater, etc) would become more popular (and hopefully affordable) again (probably do wonders for diversity, if not quality).
The government would still have to enforce fraud laws, in case people tried to copy other people's work & pretend it was their own. (As long as they didn't pretend it was their own, then it should be okay.
The NSA has two mandates: tap the enemy's information, and figure out ways to stop the enemy from tapping ours. I would imagine that sometimes people within the agency are annoyed at the efforts of OTHER people in the same agency...
Instead of trying to find the man behind the curtain, start supporting a candidates who have more to offer than they aren't the other candidate. You might have a chance in the next election.
Not much of a point of choosing any candidate if your opponents control the voting machinery, is there?
Slashdot Mirror
You'd be surprised - I attended (as a 3rd-party observer) a software presentation at an FBI data center once, and _all_ of the attendees were packing. (Made the presentation a little surreal.)
A debt is a debt, whether it is owed to your citizens or not. Millions of normal households pinch pennies & scrape by to build enough of a bank account so they can deal with unexpected expenses. Even idiot squirrels instinctively know that you're supposed to save nuts in expectation of tough times. Apparently, legislators don't even have the economic sense of idiot squirrels when they're spending billions of dollars of other peoples' money.
Is it okay to borrow as much as you can from family & friends, just because you don't think they'll punish you if you default?
Do you _really_ think the debt & interest payments can keep growing indefinitely without something breaking? What do you think will happen if the U.S. government is forced to default on those bonds? (And don't answer "the government will print more money" - the amount of new money necessary would cause hyperinflation which would completely obliterate the real value of any return from the bonds.)
I'd also like to point out that 1) a significant fraction of bonds are owned by foreign interests, not U.S. citizens, and 2) any benefit of investments like bonds help primarily people who have extra money to spend, i.e., not the people who really need the help.
If U.S. national legislators were less concerned about looting the economy to push pork to their own voters, and more about the overall long-term health of the country, they'd pay attention to their own lip service about keeping the budget balanced. (The U.S. _really_ needs a strong Balanced-Budget Constitutional amendment.) I'm concerned that it's going to take a catastrophe that makes the Great Depression look like a picnic before anybody is convinced to do anything about it.
Yes, they're equally unimportant. Society would do just fine without the enforcement of either.
Dunno about quantum entanglement, but I thought it would be darn interesting if it were possible to either genetically engineer neurons (or implant devices I guess) that act as short-range radio transmitters & receivers.
:-), you could put transmitters into various pets so that when you were near them, you could get a sense of what they were sensing & feeling. (I'd probably limit what I was receiving about what they were tasting though =P
Aside from allowing humans to communicate directly to each other's speech centers (and perhaps visual centers, although I'd want tight control over that
I have read some theories that there might be some interaction between the electric fields from adjacent neurons (the electric field from a neuron changing potential might be enough to "tickle" the connections or neurons around that one). Can't find a reference though...
If you're talking using using real-world experience, no. But if using an interface like this is anything like learning how to play video games, those 10 year olds are going to kick yours & my butts in pure reaction time & eye-to-machine coordination.
Dunno, I always thought of greed as being driven by personal insecurity - trying to gain more material possessions so that you don't worry about being crushed by external forces. The "I deserve this!" attitude is more of a rationale for _why_ they're so desperate to grab all those resources.
For some people, though, there doesn't appear to be any form of feedback which says "enough!" I personally think that the "greed is good" meme which is constantly echoed & reinforced throughout the U.S. society has a great deal to do with this loss of feedback.
Ah - maybe I was thinking of "NP-Incomplete" problems? Is there such a category?
History has also proven that someone with an agenda can use a lot of true facts to bolster their propaganda, but can still be mistaken or lying.
In other words, just because someone has put forth a few facts that happen to be corroborated by other sources, doesn't mean that you should automatically believe _everything_ that purpose says (or has written). When the Bible lists something historical that is corroborated by independent evidence, the _only_ thing you can conclude is that the Bible has some independently-corroborated historical facts listed in it - you can't honestly conclude that anything else the Bible says is true.
Make it like some of the public toilets in Paris - when you leave the toilet, the door closes automatically & _everything_ is sprayed, disinfected & the waste is washed down the drain. After a quickie dry cycle, the door can be opened again.
As long as some of those people you hire are good Project Managers, they will be able to find ways to use more people efficiently.
_Blindly_ adding more people is not a good idea - but if your employees are working 80+ hour/week to meet deadlines, then you've either got to slip the deadline or use more people to meet the deadline with less work/individual.
As the saying goes, you can get quality, speed or cheap - pick two of three.
I'm not sure that applies to _all_ NP-Complete problems - but it certainly applies to the main concepts used for public-key encryption (large prime factors, Diffie-Helman(sp?), etc).
If merit & productivity can be used to dictate salary, then I want those standards applied to management & executives as well. There are a fair number of idiots who are earning large amounts of money which they don't deserve, and it's only by their subordinates' damage control which prevents these idiots from destroying any organization they touch.
In fact, the employees should be the ones casting judgement on the operational competency of the executives, since the employees have a better idea than anyone at how well the big brass is running the company.
If some rich bastard is poisoning the air I breath, the water I drink, the food I eat, and setting the world up for an environmental disaster which will force my descendants to live like war refugees while the perpetrator hides in a some luxury hi-tech bunker, and _insists_ that he/she has a right to get PAID for doing all that, then I don't really feel like "showing them how to do it in a way more consistent with [my] environmental views" - I feel like taking their factories & shoving them where the sun don't shine.
Contrary to some peoples' desire & propaganda, individuals really _don't_ have the right to screw over the rest of the society just because they're can make a buck - if they think they do, I have no empathy when they face the resultant slapdown by enraged mob action.
I believe that quantum computatino makes symmetric encryption only an order of magnitude or so easier to crack - you're still safe if you have a decent key size.
On the other hand, I believe that most of the commonly-used methods of public-key encryption could be cracked in polynomial time, if quantum computation becomes practically implemented. This would, indeed, compromise quite a bit of currently-encrypted net traffic.
OTOH, of course, that never-ending stream of data being transmitted will make a nice homing beacon for someone with the right equipment...
How did the book become available to be downloaded? If the authors put it up for anyone to download, then they shouldn't expect to have any control over what people do with it once it gets downloaded. If it got put up by someone else who signed a contract with the author, then they violated their contract and the author should go after them.
It's not stealing.
I know what the law is. I do actually follow copyright law, but only because of the threat - not because I think the law is "moral". I believe that people who support the copyright law are either greedy or have an overly-inflated sense of the value of their own creations.
I also believe that copyright & patent law is, and will be, a steadily increasing drag on the vitality of our economy, stifles innovation, concentrates wealth instead of creating it, and will cause our society to have a significant competitive disadvantage against societies which allow the free transfer of ideas.
Copyright & patent law should be abolished. They have not been proven to provide any net societal benefit, and they interfere with the straightforward functioning of a market economy.
I do not believe in the concept of "intellectual property". Property should be based on reality-based, non-copyable objects. Once I've bought something, it's MY property - not yours. And without a contract agreement, you should not have the right to tell me what to do with my property. Copyright law violates that principle.
Like I said, if the author wants a situation like that, then they can set up a network of agreements to enforce that kind of situation. The author shouldn't have the right to enforce control over _everyone_, even if they didn't sign anything with the author.
If you can't see the reason why it is useful to have an external viewpoint to "sanity check" your own assumptions, then you are exactly the kind of person who is at most danger of wandering off into a cult-like mindset & dragging your family along with you. If you're very lucky, your children and/or grandchildren may forgive you several decades later after reality has applied its own version of a "sanity check" (which may feel like a metaphorical 2x4 upside their heads) to their world view.
I'll be charitable & assume that you are making sure that your family has enough socialization to make sure that such a world-view divergence is not occurring. My mother is a elementary school teacher for learning-disabled kids, and a significant fraction of her workload is "repairing" the poor kids whose parents thought they could teach their kids "better" than the professionals. Unless at least one of those parents came from a professional educational background, the kids (almost without exception) end up significantly disadvantaged relative to their publicly-educated peers.
All the documents filed in court should still be public, unless there is some compelling national security reason why they should be. And corporations shouldn't be given the same rights as citizens as far as privacy is concerned.
You seem to have contract & copyright law confused. They are NOT the same thing, and your attempts to confuse the two are irrelevant to the discussion of the "morality" of copyright.
That's fine - as long as the parties involved sign a contract agreeing to these terms. One aspect of the contract might be that you are not allowed to redistribute the product to anyone else. That's fine by me (barring fine print & deceptive legal language shenanigans, but that's all a typical part of dealing with contract law).
I disagree that you have the right to control how I use my own property without having signed a specific agreement between us. I do not believe that, once something has published in a manner where the members of the audience did NOT sign such an agreement or contract, that the publisher has any "right" to dictate how the recipients use the information that they received. When a song has been broadcast over the radio, it is in the public domain - unless the listeners have signed a contract with the radio station that they will not redistribute any material that they hear from the radio station, then the listeners are perfectly within their rights to make recordings of that song, trade their copies with their friends, do remixes of it, play it at parties, etc.
If the author doesn't want to allow such things, then he/she should either not distribute the product, or must build a network of contracts/agreements which specifically allow him/her such control.
I've got no problems with the straightforward application of contract law. As I stated at the beginning, however, copyright law doesn't have anything to do with contract law. Contract law involves upfront agreements between more than one party. Copyright law describes how private parties can use the power of the government to stop other people from doing what they would normally be able to do with their own property, without any such agreement being made.
If you're going to talk about the "morality" of copyright law, then you're going to have to address it in the context of whether or not copyright law results in a net benefit to the overall society. If there is no such net benefit, then copyright law should not be allowed to exist.
So, sign contracts containing those terms with everyone you distribute it to.
So make sure you get a decent price when you sell your work. Why should the law force me to keep paying you money for making copies of something when you already got paid for the act of creating of it?
So? I'd like the law to force people to give me a lot of money without my having to work for it, but unless there's some benefit in it for _them_, it's highly unlikely that I'd get such a law passed. People should be compensated for providing a desired good or service. Demanding money for any other activity is just greed.
No, it's not stealing, no matter how much you may want it to be or repeat the phrase.
Your "rhetorical question" is irrelevant, since copyright infringement is not theft.
Do you believe that it is morally correct to use the law to force people to pay you over and over for something that you should've been paid only once for?
Distributors of recordings (both audio & video) would probably go out of business, or at least be reduced to providing support to local and corporate-sponsored groups who wanted a large distribution of particular recorded performances. Local and/or touring, live performances (bands, theater, etc) would become more popular (and hopefully affordable) again (probably do wonders for diversity, if not quality).
The government would still have to enforce fraud laws, in case people tried to copy other people's work & pretend it was their own. (As long as they didn't pretend it was their own, then it should be okay.
And without any form of external-viewpoint quality assurance either.
The NSA has two mandates: tap the enemy's information, and figure out ways to stop the enemy from tapping ours. I would imagine that sometimes people within the agency are annoyed at the efforts of OTHER people in the same agency...
Not much of a point of choosing any candidate if your opponents control the voting machinery, is there?