Folks have been conditioned to believe they are entitled to get whatever they want for free.
RIAA and MPAA have been sending me stuff for free for years, by radio and TV. What's up with them now? The internet makes them think they should be able to charge for every copy, despite not having done so for decades? Why?
I am completely opposed to any form of "eminent domain". What I would propose is for all existing copyrighted works, they would get 14 years from the passage of the new copyright rules.
Since the rights to those currently existing works are currently considered property for much longer than 14 years, for the government to remove those rights and place them in the public domain IS a form of eminent domain, if they are compensated. If not, it's just outright seizure, a dangerous thing to let the government do.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eminent_domain
Eminent domain (United States of America), compulsory purchase (United Kingdom, New Zealand, Ireland), resumption/compulsory acquisition (Australia) or expropriation (South Africa and Canada's common law systems) is the inherent power of the state to seize a citizen's private property, expropriate property, or seize a citizen's rights in property with due monetary compensation, but without the owner's consent.
The jury is tainted when they reach a conclusion before they know all of the facts as presented by both sides in the courtroom. The idea is that the jury is supposed to enter the case without a preconceived notion of which side is in the right.
I don't personally understand why these sorts of court actions need to be secret, but I assume there is a reason for it.
The reason given is because it may taint the jury pool. When knowing facts makes the jury unsuitable, you've got a problem (Due process arguments notwithstanding). It's also because if effective defence of this type of court action becomes widely known, the RIAA will find it harder to get their way.
In short, it had to be secret so the justice can be more easily perverted.
Each textbook has a teacher's edition that has all the answers in it. Any open source book would logically have to have the same, if it as a product is to provide the same utility. And if it's available to the teacher, by the definition of open source it would be available to the students as well. Suddenly you'd see a lot of people getting 100% on their homework - they'd just copy it out of the teacher's edition.
I'm trying to figure out a way around this but I think that textbooks may be in that rare class of problems that open source and full disclosure doesn't solve.
Many of the textbooks I used had the answers in the back. Doesn't help you pass a test since you can't have the book there. As far as mathematics goes, people have calculators anyway, and then there's the net. No point trying to hide the answers outside a controlled testing environment.
Except if the requirements are such that no vendor can afford to meet them... for example, if the requirement is that the vendor provide a free, open source product.
Re-introduce truly limited copyright terms. If copyright was 14 years, all the textbooks I used in school would be public domain now. As it is, it would be very difficult to reduce copyright terms. People who have published under those terms would be sure to challenge it in court. Perhaps some form of eminent domain argument could be used, I don't like the chances though.
Without the current plundering of the public domain by the copyright barons, we'd already have free textbooks. As it is, the best I see is to make better use of old materials and publish new materials under a CC license. Most likely to happen among home-schoolers or developing nations that don't have an established education system.
If everyone can get a copy of a movie as soon as it's released in Russia and share it for other people to download, won't that negatively affect attendance in cinemas and DVD sales in other regions?
Yes, or rather, probably. Potentially, the portions of the entertainment industry that rely on sales of infinitely copyable information may wither and die. However that pales into insignificance when you consider the issues of how copyright is affecting education, for example. Compulsory schools using copyrighted texts for material that is already in the public domain, such as school level mathematics, amounts to an education tax.
Screw the movie industry, give me an educated population without draining the economy. I've recently begun buying out of copyright textbooks. Composition & Rhetoric, Arithmetic, Algebra and a few other topics so far. Basic mathematics doesn't change, so will be online soon, along with anything else I find that is still educationally relevant.
We know from past experiences that government mandated controls on the free economy lead to ruin.
You'll need to support that with evidence, because from where I'm sitting, the places in the world with well-regulated market economies (Western Europe, Australia, Europe, Japan) are among the best places on earth to live, and measure better on virtually every quality-of-life index than less-regulated places like China and the United States.
I'm an Australian, so I will not comment on the other markets you mention. The Australian market is completely dependent on trade with China and the US. What prosperity we have is arguably the benefit we have from the more unregulated markets of the US and China, not from our own regulated economy.
A look at the history of our country will reveal that the development of infrastructure that made us an industrialised nation rather than a 3rd world economy was largely the result of the wool industry. This industry was developed illegally by the use of land that the colonial government was refusing to open up. http://www.eurekacouncil.com.au/Australia-History/History-Pages/1820-Squatters.htm If government regulation had been more successfully enforced in Australia's history, we would likely be receiving foreign aid rather than giving it.
I'm a C# [doze] developer, but I'm with the Linux/GNU crowd when it comes to FOSS ideologies.
So you are someone who lives contrary to their ideology then? Perhaps I've misunderstood your post. It appears to me that you are a proprietary software developer, yes?
Installing mono by default on all Linuxes I think is a great idea, because it gives me the opportunity to port my apps painlessly to the widest possible audience! This includes mac.
burisch_research, don't get me wrong, I have no problem with you earning your living that way. However, Free software is not made to cater to your ways, neither is your opinion on the direction Free software should take sought or valued.
If I've read too much into your post and got it wrong, my apologies.
Daemon simply means demon in mythology so I would bet in his eyes the term is interchangeable, it is in mine.
Um, no, this is pretty much the exact opposite of the truth. In modern usage they've become nearly synonymous, but in mythology "daemon" refers to the ancient Greek beings that are really more closely analogous with "angels" in modern usage. Daemons are intermediaries between men and the gods, including everything from minor divinities down to ghosts of dead heroes. Of particular interest was the "agathos daemon", which is rather like a Greek "guardian angel".
My understanding is that the "demon" of modern usage would be the same being as a "daemon" but from a viewpoint affected by Christianity rather than Greek polytheism. In Christianity, demons are fallen angels, so your point ancient Greek beings that are really more closely analogous with "angels" in modern usage really doesn't say anything about them being different.
...when it comes to genuinely smart people, they tend to be what Americans label as "liberal", and the rest of the world would call centrists or centre-left. There are intelligent people who are on the right, but they tend to use their smarts for business or personal gain, and as they benefit from their actions they fail to acknowledge the downsides of their actions. No doubt they recognise the downsides, but admitting it would probably be a death sentence for them or the businesses they run.
The policies of the left centre around collective control, that control being exercised by the educated. The genuinely smart liberals stand to benefit from their proposed policies every bit as much as the intelligent people on the right.
Nevertheless, wealth and education both tend to naturally increase the opportunity for the possessor, regardless of politics (unless you get a Pol Pot going around executing the rich and educated). Personally, I don't think the conservative/liberal dichotomy is an issue of intelligence so much as it is an issue of values, particularly perception of risk. As an example, I prefer the independence of being a contractor rather than the subservience of being an employee. Others prefer the lowered risk of being an employee. That doesn't mean I think an employee has to be unintelligent, but it seems to me that business owners and contractors tend towards more conservative politics, employees to more liberal politics.
Compulsory schooling and widespread employment (as contrasted to self-employment) ensure that a large proportion of the population are accustomed to living under someone else's orders. Possibly as a result, they are more comfortable with social solutions implemented by compulsion, such as nationalised health care. Perhaps I'm wrong about this, but as a conservative, I favour a system that promotes personal business ownership over large corporations for two main reasons: one, as you say, big corporations often screw the people and two, too many big corporations means a shift towards left wing compulsion politics due to the higher proportion of employees in the population.
Economics IS a difficult subject to understand, let alone interpret correctly. Even professional economists who do nothing but study the economy often get things wrong. Yet, everyone talks about the economy as if they are the expert and they actually know what's going on, even if they've had zero education on the subject.
Well, I'm no expert, I've seen video footage of people saying nothing was wrong even to just before the GFC, and others that were warning of collapse even decades earlier, Ron Paul being a notable example.
So you don't know why people expect a decent economic discussion here. I don't know why we allow our financial systems to be controlled by people who have just demonstrated their incompetence. What result are we expecting from this? What exactly is it you don't like about listening to people who have demonstrated understanding? Why do you prefer those who got it so wrong they crashed the whole worlds economy?
Explain to me how we are not economically viable, but companies like EA who often make a net loss somehow are?
We know that you are not financially viable as an indie developer because someone put your games online for download. Due to your incessant whining about this kind of thing, we know that this is theft. Therefore, due to the constant loss of your inventory that this theft would cause, your business would not be viable.
I didn't download it, BTW. I don't care about your games.
I don't see why he should expect a right to privacy. If you are going to make public accusations and attacks, then the other parties have a right to defend.
Next time you are doing well in a job interview, preferably with a small company, mention that you have some chronic condition that is really expensive to manage. Do this regardless whether you actually have the condition or not.
What do you think your chances are that you'll be getting an offer as compared to if you'd not mentioned it at all? Does your opinion change?
So the purpose of privacy is to allow you to deceive others into paying for your medical care? Or at least to allow you to promote yourself as being reliable when you know full well your condition will force your productivity down due to time off for medical care?
I'm in favour of strong privacy rights, but if I wasn't, your argument would definitely not persuade me.
Show me evidence that playing rape games creates rapists.
1. Since I haven't made that assertion, I don't see why I should provide evidence to substantiate it.
2. Since my second sentence "Until such evidence is provided, this argument is on a par with the idea that rape games cause people to rape", uses that as another example of an assertion that is made without evidence, you ought to do some work to improve your reading comprehension.
Now, while I can't say that it definitely lowers the amount of rape that occurs,
Since jbacon directly implied that the availability of rape games decreases the incidence of rape, that is the information I required.
I think it's fairly safe to say that in Japan's case, it doesn't increase the number of rapes either.
As I already told jbacon, his argument is equivalent to theirs.
The pro-censorship mob make unsubstantiated assertions about the effects of whatever it is they are out to stop with monotonous regularity. What I'm hoping for is to persuade people to respond with facts or reason, rather than equal and opposite unsubstantiated assertions.
A false dichotomy is when two choices are presented, and others are ignored. In this scenarios, there really are only two choice: ban or not ban. Those are both mutually exclusive and exhaustive.
jbacon gave the choice "Which would you pick, Slashdot - a (creepy) guy getting his rocks off to a simulation, or the real thing?". Unless we accept that some people must engage in rape, either by action or in simulation, that is indeed a false dichotomy. While you are looking at our possible actions, limited to ban or not ban, jbacon was considering the possibilities of a hypothetical (creepy) guy who does have more options than the two offered of "simulated rape" and rape.
Which would you pick, Slashdot - a (creepy) guy getting his rocks off to a simulation, or the real thing? Ban the simulation out of existence, then tell me what's left.
Do you have any evidence that less rape is committed as a result of the availability of rape simulation? Until such evidence is provided, this argument is on a par with the idea that rape games cause people to rape.
Slashdot Mirror
Folks have been conditioned to believe they are entitled to get whatever they want for free.
RIAA and MPAA have been sending me stuff for free for years, by radio and TV. What's up with them now? The internet makes them think they should be able to charge for every copy, despite not having done so for decades? Why?
I am completely opposed to any form of "eminent domain". What I would propose is for all existing copyrighted works, they would get 14 years from the passage of the new copyright rules.
Since the rights to those currently existing works are currently considered property for much longer than 14 years, for the government to remove those rights and place them in the public domain IS a form of eminent domain, if they are compensated. If not, it's just outright seizure, a dangerous thing to let the government do.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eminent_domain
Eminent domain (United States of America), compulsory purchase (United Kingdom, New Zealand, Ireland), resumption/compulsory acquisition (Australia) or expropriation (South Africa and Canada's common law systems) is the inherent power of the state to seize a citizen's private property, expropriate property, or seize a citizen's rights in property with due monetary compensation, but without the owner's consent.
The jury is tainted when they reach a conclusion before they know all of the facts as presented by both sides in the courtroom. The idea is that the jury is supposed to enter the case without a preconceived notion of which side is in the right.
Like if the jury think that if you wouldn't steal a car, you shouldn't download, because downloading is theft? The other reply to my post is pretty good. http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1293609&cid=28605713
I don't personally understand why these sorts of court actions need to be secret, but I assume there is a reason for it.
The reason given is because it may taint the jury pool. When knowing facts makes the jury unsuitable, you've got a problem (Due process arguments notwithstanding). It's also because if effective defence of this type of court action becomes widely known, the RIAA will find it harder to get their way.
In short, it had to be secret so the justice can be more easily perverted.
Each textbook has a teacher's edition that has all the answers in it. Any open source book would logically have to have the same, if it as a product is to provide the same utility. And if it's available to the teacher, by the definition of open source it would be available to the students as well. Suddenly you'd see a lot of people getting 100% on their homework - they'd just copy it out of the teacher's edition.
I'm trying to figure out a way around this but I think that textbooks may be in that rare class of problems that open source and full disclosure doesn't solve.
Many of the textbooks I used had the answers in the back. Doesn't help you pass a test since you can't have the book there. As far as mathematics goes, people have calculators anyway, and then there's the net. No point trying to hide the answers outside a controlled testing environment.
Except if the requirements are such that no vendor can afford to meet them... for example, if the requirement is that the vendor provide a free, open source product.
Re-introduce truly limited copyright terms. If copyright was 14 years, all the textbooks I used in school would be public domain now. As it is, it would be very difficult to reduce copyright terms. People who have published under those terms would be sure to challenge it in court. Perhaps some form of eminent domain argument could be used, I don't like the chances though.
Without the current plundering of the public domain by the copyright barons, we'd already have free textbooks. As it is, the best I see is to make better use of old materials and publish new materials under a CC license. Most likely to happen among home-schoolers or developing nations that don't have an established education system.
If everyone can get a copy of a movie as soon as it's released in Russia and share it for other people to download, won't that negatively affect attendance in cinemas and DVD sales in other regions?
Yes, or rather, probably. Potentially, the portions of the entertainment industry that rely on sales of infinitely copyable information may wither and die. However that pales into insignificance when you consider the issues of how copyright is affecting education, for example. Compulsory schools using copyrighted texts for material that is already in the public domain, such as school level mathematics, amounts to an education tax.
Screw the movie industry, give me an educated population without draining the economy. I've recently begun buying out of copyright textbooks. Composition & Rhetoric, Arithmetic, Algebra and a few other topics so far. Basic mathematics doesn't change, so will be online soon, along with anything else I find that is still educationally relevant.
We know from past experiences that government mandated controls on the free economy lead to ruin.
You'll need to support that with evidence, because from where I'm sitting, the places in the world with well-regulated market economies (Western Europe, Australia, Europe, Japan) are among the best places on earth to live, and measure better on virtually every quality-of-life index than less-regulated places like China and the United States.
I'm an Australian, so I will not comment on the other markets you mention. The Australian market is completely dependent on trade with China and the US. What prosperity we have is arguably the benefit we have from the more unregulated markets of the US and China, not from our own regulated economy.
A look at the history of our country will reveal that the development of infrastructure that made us an industrialised nation rather than a 3rd world economy was largely the result of the wool industry. This industry was developed illegally by the use of land that the colonial government was refusing to open up. http://www.eurekacouncil.com.au/Australia-History/History-Pages/1820-Squatters.htm If government regulation had been more successfully enforced in Australia's history, we would likely be receiving foreign aid rather than giving it.
They are not necessarily corrupt. The just adjust easily. Perhaps this is why they are called 'servants'.
"Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition."
Thomas Jefferson
I'm a C# [doze] developer, but I'm with the Linux/GNU crowd when it comes to FOSS ideologies.
So you are someone who lives contrary to their ideology then? Perhaps I've misunderstood your post. It appears to me that you are a proprietary software developer, yes?
Installing mono by default on all Linuxes I think is a great idea, because it gives me the opportunity to port my apps painlessly to the widest possible audience! This includes mac.
burisch_research, don't get me wrong, I have no problem with you earning your living that way. However, Free software is not made to cater to your ways, neither is your opinion on the direction Free software should take sought or valued.
If I've read too much into your post and got it wrong, my apologies.
Daemon simply means demon in mythology so I would bet in his eyes the term is interchangeable, it is in mine.
Um, no, this is pretty much the exact opposite of the truth. In modern usage they've become nearly synonymous, but in mythology "daemon" refers to the ancient Greek beings that are really more closely analogous with "angels" in modern usage. Daemons are intermediaries between men and the gods, including everything from minor divinities down to ghosts of dead heroes. Of particular interest was the "agathos daemon", which is rather like a Greek "guardian angel".
My understanding is that the "demon" of modern usage would be the same being as a "daemon" but from a viewpoint affected by Christianity rather than Greek polytheism. In Christianity, demons are fallen angels, so your point ancient Greek beings that are really more closely analogous with "angels" in modern usage really doesn't say anything about them being different.
...when it comes to genuinely smart people, they tend to be what Americans label as "liberal", and the rest of the world would call centrists or centre-left. There are intelligent people who are on the right, but they tend to use their smarts for business or personal gain, and as they benefit from their actions they fail to acknowledge the downsides of their actions. No doubt they recognise the downsides, but admitting it would probably be a death sentence for them or the businesses they run.
The policies of the left centre around collective control, that control being exercised by the educated. The genuinely smart liberals stand to benefit from their proposed policies every bit as much as the intelligent people on the right.
Nevertheless, wealth and education both tend to naturally increase the opportunity for the possessor, regardless of politics (unless you get a Pol Pot going around executing the rich and educated). Personally, I don't think the conservative/liberal dichotomy is an issue of intelligence so much as it is an issue of values, particularly perception of risk. As an example, I prefer the independence of being a contractor rather than the subservience of being an employee. Others prefer the lowered risk of being an employee. That doesn't mean I think an employee has to be unintelligent, but it seems to me that business owners and contractors tend towards more conservative politics, employees to more liberal politics.
Compulsory schooling and widespread employment (as contrasted to self-employment) ensure that a large proportion of the population are accustomed to living under someone else's orders. Possibly as a result, they are more comfortable with social solutions implemented by compulsion, such as nationalised health care. Perhaps I'm wrong about this, but as a conservative, I favour a system that promotes personal business ownership over large corporations for two main reasons: one, as you say, big corporations often screw the people and two, too many big corporations means a shift towards left wing compulsion politics due to the higher proportion of employees in the population.
"Talk to the hand"
Right or left hand?
Economics IS a difficult subject to understand, let alone interpret correctly. Even professional economists who do nothing but study the economy often get things wrong. Yet, everyone talks about the economy as if they are the expert and they actually know what's going on, even if they've had zero education on the subject.
Well, I'm no expert, I've seen video footage of people saying nothing was wrong even to just before the GFC, and others that were warning of collapse even decades earlier, Ron Paul being a notable example.
So you don't know why people expect a decent economic discussion here. I don't know why we allow our financial systems to be controlled by people who have just demonstrated their incompetence. What result are we expecting from this? What exactly is it you don't like about listening to people who have demonstrated understanding? Why do you prefer those who got it so wrong they crashed the whole worlds economy?
Explain to me how we are not economically viable, but companies like EA who often make a net loss somehow are?
We know that you are not financially viable as an indie developer because someone put your games online for download. Due to your incessant whining about this kind of thing, we know that this is theft. Therefore, due to the constant loss of your inventory that this theft would cause, your business would not be viable.
I didn't download it, BTW. I don't care about your games.
I don't see why he should expect a right to privacy. If you are going to make public accusations and attacks, then the other parties have a right to defend.
Well done, Dave.
...trustworthy investigative journalist...
BWAHAHAHA!
Next time you are doing well in a job interview, preferably with a small company, mention that you have some chronic condition that is really expensive to manage. Do this regardless whether you actually have the condition or not.
What do you think your chances are that you'll be getting an offer as compared to if you'd not mentioned it at all? Does your opinion change?
So the purpose of privacy is to allow you to deceive others into paying for your medical care? Or at least to allow you to promote yourself as being reliable when you know full well your condition will force your productivity down due to time off for medical care?
I'm in favour of strong privacy rights, but if I wasn't, your argument would definitely not persuade me.
The people will be so tired from jerking themselves off that they will be too drained to do any real raping.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/conjecture is not the same as http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/evidence
Show me evidence that playing rape games creates rapists.
1. Since I haven't made that assertion, I don't see why I should provide evidence to substantiate it.
2. Since my second sentence "Until such evidence is provided, this argument is on a par with the idea that rape games cause people to rape", uses that as another example of an assertion that is made without evidence, you ought to do some work to improve your reading comprehension.
Now, while I can't say that it definitely lowers the amount of rape that occurs,
Since jbacon directly implied that the availability of rape games decreases the incidence of rape, that is the information I required.
I think it's fairly safe to say that in Japan's case, it doesn't increase the number of rapes either.
As I already told jbacon, his argument is equivalent to theirs.
The pro-censorship mob make unsubstantiated assertions about the effects of whatever it is they are out to stop with monotonous regularity. What I'm hoping for is to persuade people to respond with facts or reason, rather than equal and opposite unsubstantiated assertions.
A false dichotomy is when two choices are presented, and others are ignored. In this scenarios, there really are only two choice: ban or not ban. Those are both mutually exclusive and exhaustive.
jbacon gave the choice "Which would you pick, Slashdot - a (creepy) guy getting his rocks off to a simulation, or the real thing?". Unless we accept that some people must engage in rape, either by action or in simulation, that is indeed a false dichotomy. While you are looking at our possible actions, limited to ban or not ban, jbacon was considering the possibilities of a hypothetical (creepy) guy who does have more options than the two offered of "simulated rape" and rape.
It so happens that rape occurs significantly less often in Japan than the countries criticizing Japan.
I refer you to my answer to the same comment from another AC.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1260351&cid=28248077
Surely if you're going to reply it wouldn't hurt to check the other replies to see if that point has already been made.
Japan has low rape rates compared to other countries.
If Japan's rape rate declined after the introduction of these games that could possibly be relevant, otherwise not.
Of course, that could just mean lots of rapes go unreported.
I suspect so, avoidance of stigma would be very important there, from the little I know of Japanese culture.
Which would you pick, Slashdot - a (creepy) guy getting his rocks off to a simulation, or the real thing? Ban the simulation out of existence, then tell me what's left.
Do you have any evidence that less rape is committed as a result of the availability of rape simulation? Until such evidence is provided, this argument is on a par with the idea that rape games cause people to rape.