What we need is for one man - hell, even Dubya - to stand up say "This country commits itself to putting a man on Mars and bringing him back safely by the end of this decade. Make it happen."
No, it also needs the support of the Congress to fund it, and therefore the support of the people in the country to spend the billions or trillions of dollars it'll take to make it happen. And that doesn't seem like it's going to happen any time soon. There's just not the sense that it's worthwhile, like we thought going to the moon was because of the Russians. With Mars, sure, we could probably do it if we wanted, but in general we don't really want to that badly.
So, he doesn't like government regulation of the airwaves, but can't find a way around it if the radio spectrum is scarce. And, he says he's found that there's a way to actually add bandwidth by adding more receivers, so maybe radio spectrum isn't scarce after all, although, "to be sure, there are experts who disagree with him." Maybe it's true, but it sounds like wishful thinking to me. Plus, how expensive would these new systems be, and would we have to scrap all our old systems?
Re:Just read the Constitution, fer chrissakes.
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Fair IP Laws?
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If a band or song-writer wanted to, could they let EMI negotiate this permission-grating (i.e. licensing) for them? Could they, if they wanted to, agree to give EMI exclusive rights to license their song, in exchange for EMI's agreeing to promote it? You seem to want to make this illegal - why?
The whole IP-for-individuals-only idea just seems unworkable, as well as un-free. I want to be able to let a company do my marketing and licensing for me - I'm not very good at that. And how come you can tell me what kind of contract I can or cannot sign with a recording company? Like I said, if I don't have a choice because there's a monopoly (either in the recording or the broadcast industry) then that's another matter, that anti-trust should solve. But if I have a choice, then what's the problem?
Re:There ARE other ways
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Without IP, I wouldn't be worried about the Bachs or Shakespeares, or the Stephen Kings or Ansel Adams, of the world. A small number of the most popular artists would be able to make enough money through contributions, patronage, endorsements, etc. to do fine. It's the millions of other writers, artists, programmers, analysts, etc. that I'm more worried about. They're livelyhood would all be based on either (1) somehow keeping close tabs on their works so they're not copied, or (2) hoping that they're under the radar so that nobody would bother to make their stuff easily available for copying. That doesn't sound like a fun world to me.
Re:The concept of intellectual property has got to
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Trying to take Stephen King, and scale him to the average-popularity author, doesn't make for a good argument. Just because Stephen King can do it once doesn't mean that thousands of average authors can do it for a career.
EULA's for commercial software must be agreed to BEFORE the software can be purchaced. If software companies do not provide a mechanism for this then they must allow users to return the software for a full refund.
I think this is how it works now isn't it? The EULA says that if you don't agree, return it for a refund.
The general idea of the EULA seems pretty reasonable - if you want to buy my software, I need you to agree with certain terms first. The fact that you don't have to send me a signed contract by US Mail for this to happen is probably a good thing, it would be pretty impractical.
If you think about it, the problem is almost that most of the time the license is fine, so after a while people just agree instead of reading them. So something that they probably wouldn't agree to can slip in so easily. Maybe we need some sort of readability requirements for these things. There would be a list of standard, fairly non-objectionable requirements that may be used in the license without a hitch, but everything else must be clearly explained in one sentence at the top. Like:
- You agree not to show the data retrieved by this program to anyone outside of your company. - You agree that we can audit your company for license compliance whenever we want.
... and then the actual license follows in its entirety. You could get a UCITA-like body to decide the list of unobjectionable requirements. If you didn't use this format, you could still sell the software, but you'd need a written signature and not an electronic EULA.
Hmmm, I actually kind of like this idea...
Re:Just read the Constitution, fer chrissakes.
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Fair IP Laws?
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That way, those people that want to keep their ideas to themselves can, and those that want to allow their stuff to be availible can.
Uh, that's already the way it is. Anyone can do anything they want with the things they create, as long as they haven't signed a contract with anyone agreeing not to do so. The only argument against this is if the RIAA members are a monopoly, in which case the right way to solve this is to use existing anti-trust laws, not by futzing with copyright.
Are you suggesting that a songwriter needs to run his own private record label if he wants to retain his copyright?
A SLAPP suit is a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation, which doesn't really apply here. I doubt there's anything illegal about what they're doing. Even the patent would probably be overturned if it ever went to court, they were still granted a valid patent, which they can try to get people to license and threaten to sue them. That's exactly how it's supposed to work, but we see that it's not a perfect system.
My beagle, whose job description is "scan roadsides for squirrels," is in the back, moving from one side window to the other. Each time he shifts, sensors in the seat take note, and the right rear headrest whirrs up as the left one whirrs down. For the next two hours, the headrests dance in tandem, as if trying to provide comfort for restless spirits.
One of the cool thinks about the iMac is that it had no fan, so it was very quiet. I assume this one does, because it doesn't say one way or the other.
All the studies show that not sleeping is extreamly bad for you in the long run.
I don't think that this is true. I read a New Yorker article a few months ago about the same drug. It said that not getting enough sleep will impair your performance at the time, but it doesn't cause any long-term effects. It talked about Randy Gardner who stayed awake for 11 days straight. He didn't experience any real problems during the experiment, and was completely back to normal after sleeping for something like 14 hours after the experiment.
And the really interesting thing about this new drug is that you can stay awake for long periods of time without any performance impairment, or even any sleepiness. Cool and scary at the same time...
You're simultaneously using two different defintions of "cost" here.
This is also right, but I suspect there are a lot of folks who are thinking something along the lines of ``If we can, we should, and damn the cost''.
These people would of course be talking about the actual current monetary cost of oil vs. alternative energy. They're saying that the one that costs less dollars is not necessarily the best.
If we use high-priced solar or fusion energy rather than cheap oil, we're wasting resources. That's BAD.
And here you're talking about the theoretical "cost" of oil, somehow taking into account the environmental problems, dependency on foreign nations, etc. Of course, the problem is, how exactly do you measure these costs and turn them into monetary costs? If we did this, then it would be true that it's always best to choose the cheaper alternative. But nobody agrees on the monetary value of these costs, so there's no way to do this.
The real questions, in my mind, are, what are the possible legal and illegal uses of the product, what is the likely ratio of legal to illegal uses, and how is the product pitched? Here's how I would rate these products, in order of having the most reasonably legal uses to having the least reasonably legal uses:
garden hoe kitchen knife VCR ... CD burner (because currently it's much easier for most people to copy a CD than a VCR tape) rifle handgun ... Kazaa Napster (because it can only swap music files, unlike Kazaa)
I draw these lines in between because I think that, currently, the vast majority of the uses of the first group are legal, while the vast majority of the uses of the last group are illegal (according to the copyright laws of most countries). Not sure about the middle group, but there are certainly at least a large minority of legal uses for the products in the second group, while I would guess that the ratio of legal to illegal MP3s swapped over Napster-like products is somewhere around 1%.
Then the only remaining question is, where do you draw the line of legality of the product?
It really looks like Sun went above and beyond the call of duty here. I doubt Apache expected them to use $3 million of their own money to help fix this, but they did it anyway because it turned out that that was the only way to fix issue #4 on their list. Pretty cool. Chalk up one Open Source Brownie Point for Sun.
Of course, having everything derive code from the same source is a risk
Depends on how you look at it. If there were N completely independent TCP/IP implementations out there, wouldn't there be N times as many bugs (each one affecting 1/N as many systems, on average). Homogeneity means only one codebase to debug and fix. But of course when a bug is found, it affects everyone.
This doesn't even suggest that the world might be better off if we got rid of patents. It says that smaller and/or less developed countries might be better off without patents, because they can "borrow" inventions made elsewhere. In other words, good for the country, not necessarily good for people in general. If you think that patents encourage invention, then you can't have very many countries being the "leeches" for patents to do their job.
I don't really want to draw out this argument any longer than necessary, so I'll just note a couple of quick points:
How can you possibly back this statement up, when you consider that piracy is not as rampant here in NA. Clearly, those who can afford the full price are more likely to deam it fair, and pay it.
Well, software piracy is very tolerated and out in the open in Asian, but here it's prosecuted. In Hong Kong you can go into dozens of shops and buy pirated programs for a few bucks. In NA, probably 90% of computer users don't know how to get pirated software (unless a friend has it). My mom certainly doesn't know how to find warez. (Neither do I, to be honest.) So I don't think that argument proves anything.
My point was that, between free -> X% -> 'unfair' price, unless X% is offered, people will naturally go for the free. But if your argument is to be accepted, nobody would pay for software, as it is easily available for free. You still cant disprove that its easy to scam the system, and yet, for whatever reason (I condend the desire not to freeload coupled with the desire to live with minimal social friction), people volountarily do not.
(1) I said many people would take the software for free, not all. (2) See above - it's not easily available for free.
By fair, I mean for the consumer. If people threaten to pirate, instead of forking over the full price, I'd say thats a pretty good indication that your consumers deem the price unreasonable, for whatever reason.
Uh, no, that's an indication that many people like getting things for free more than they like having to pay money for them.
is a fundamental human value to want to give something back in return for a product or service.
Well, it is a fundamental human value for some people, but not for others. There are a lot of selfish and/or dishonest people in this world. Are you suggesting that the unselfish, honest people should voluntarily pay money for software, to subsidize the selfish or dishonest ones? Even for the average "upright citizen", it's really hard to do the right thing and be honest and give up as much money as you think something's worth. Remember years ago when shareware was always full-featured, and it was up to each downloader to be honest and send in money if they thought that the software was useful? Well, those days didn't last very long, because very few people could make any money that way. Since then, nearly all shareware was crippled or had an annoying reminder until you registered, or was time-bombed. If people get to decide how much to pay for something, a lot of them will pay zero. And if I paid something and my selfish neighbor didn't, I'd feel like I was being taken advantage of (by him).
the economy is designed to benifit everyone, not a select few.
I agree! If all software development stopped now, then I agree, it would be great for everyone if Adobe lowered their prices, because people would get the software for less. But software development continues, and Adobe can fund it better if they make more money. And the more money that can be made from software, the more new, innovative software companies will be created to take advantage of that.
Not to mention (in capitalist countries) the money that the shareholders make from higher profit margins - not only the millionaires, but also the millions of average people with 401k accounts, etc.
suggested that each commodity category would have two state-enforced boards, one of consumers, one of producers. Nothing could be sold until the board of consuemrs agreed with the board of producers on a price.
Sounds kinda unworkable to me... How do they agree on the price? What keeps one side from holding the other hostage until they get the price they want? How do you prevent corruption? How do you assess quality of these products? What about non-commodities? I sure don't want the price I pay for my car to be determined by which government board happens to have better negotiators. I assume that if I read more about it, it'd make more sense, but for physical goods (that can't be copied for free), the US/Canada's current free-market system seems way more practical to me... No company can arbitrarily jack up their prices by xx% like you say, because their competition would get all their business.
What I fear is that with copyable products, is that this free market system that works so well for physical goods will break down, and we'll have to resort to some kind of government-enforced pricing like you mentioned. That would replace a system that works really well, IMO, with one that seems pretty flawed to me...
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What we need is for one man - hell, even Dubya - to stand up say "This country commits itself to putting a man on Mars and bringing him back safely by the end of this decade. Make it happen."
No, it also needs the support of the Congress to fund it, and therefore the support of the people in the country to spend the billions or trillions of dollars it'll take to make it happen. And that doesn't seem like it's going to happen any time soon. There's just not the sense that it's worthwhile, like we thought going to the moon was because of the Russians. With Mars, sure, we could probably do it if we wanted, but in general we don't really want to that badly.
So, he doesn't like government regulation of the airwaves, but can't find a way around it if the radio spectrum is scarce. And, he says he's found that there's a way to actually add bandwidth by adding more receivers, so maybe radio spectrum isn't scarce after all, although, "to be sure, there are experts who disagree with him." Maybe it's true, but it sounds like wishful thinking to me. Plus, how expensive would these new systems be, and would we have to scrap all our old systems?
If a band or song-writer wanted to, could they let EMI negotiate this permission-grating (i.e. licensing) for them? Could they, if they wanted to, agree to give EMI exclusive rights to license their song, in exchange for EMI's agreeing to promote it? You seem to want to make this illegal - why?
The whole IP-for-individuals-only idea just seems unworkable, as well as un-free. I want to be able to let a company do my marketing and licensing for me - I'm not very good at that. And how come you can tell me what kind of contract I can or cannot sign with a recording company? Like I said, if I don't have a choice because there's a monopoly (either in the recording or the broadcast industry) then that's another matter, that anti-trust should solve. But if I have a choice, then what's the problem?
Without IP, I wouldn't be worried about the Bachs or Shakespeares, or the Stephen Kings or Ansel Adams, of the world. A small number of the most popular artists would be able to make enough money through contributions, patronage, endorsements, etc. to do fine. It's the millions of other writers, artists, programmers, analysts, etc. that I'm more worried about. They're livelyhood would all be based on either (1) somehow keeping close tabs on their works so they're not copied, or (2) hoping that they're under the radar so that nobody would bother to make their stuff easily available for copying. That doesn't sound like a fun world to me.
Trying to take Stephen King, and scale him to the average-popularity author, doesn't make for a good argument. Just because Stephen King can do it once doesn't mean that thousands of average authors can do it for a career.
EULA's for commercial software must be agreed to BEFORE the software can be purchaced. If software companies do not provide a mechanism for this then they must allow users to return the software for a full refund.
I think this is how it works now isn't it? The EULA says that if you don't agree, return it for a refund.
The general idea of the EULA seems pretty reasonable - if you want to buy my software, I need you to agree with certain terms first. The fact that you don't have to send me a signed contract by US Mail for this to happen is probably a good thing, it would be pretty impractical.
If you think about it, the problem is almost that most of the time the license is fine, so after a while people just agree instead of reading them. So something that they probably wouldn't agree to can slip in so easily. Maybe we need some sort of readability requirements for these things. There would be a list of standard, fairly non-objectionable requirements that may be used in the license without a hitch, but everything else must be clearly explained in one sentence at the top. Like:
- You agree not to show the data retrieved by this program to anyone outside of your company.
- You agree that we can audit your company for license compliance whenever we want.
... and then the actual license follows in its entirety. You could get a UCITA-like body to decide the list of unobjectionable requirements. If you didn't use this format, you could still sell the software, but you'd need a written signature and not an electronic EULA.
Hmmm, I actually kind of like this idea...
That way, those people that want to keep their ideas to themselves can, and those that want to allow their stuff to be availible can.
Uh, that's already the way it is. Anyone can do anything they want with the things they create, as long as they haven't signed a contract with anyone agreeing not to do so. The only argument against this is if the RIAA members are a monopoly, in which case the right way to solve this is to use existing anti-trust laws, not by futzing with copyright.
Are you suggesting that a songwriter needs to run his own private record label if he wants to retain his copyright?
A SLAPP suit is a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation, which doesn't really apply here. I doubt there's anything illegal about what they're doing. Even the patent would probably be overturned if it ever went to court, they were still granted a valid patent, which they can try to get people to license and threaten to sue them. That's exactly how it's supposed to work, but we see that it's not a perfect system.
Be sure and click on the "related article" too, Menus Behaving Badly:
My beagle, whose job description is "scan roadsides for squirrels," is in the back, moving from one side window to the other. Each time he shifts, sensors in the seat take note, and the right rear headrest whirrs up as the left one whirrs down. For the next two hours, the headrests dance in tandem, as if trying to provide comfort for restless spirits.
"The C++ Standard Template Library" by Nicolai M. Josuttis
Actually it's "The C++ Standard Library", it covers more than just the STL. I've heard it's very good (www.accu.org).
One of the cool thinks about the iMac is that it had no fan, so it was very quiet. I assume this one does, because it doesn't say one way or the other.
That's actually very non-Apple nowadays. For years they've been moving to more standard interfaces. PCI, USB, and FireWire, for example.
Pretty cool, the 17" CRT eMac is the same depth as the 15" CRT iMac (17.1 inches), and only .8 inches taller and wider. That's pretty impressive.
http://www.apple.com/education/emac/specs.html
http://www.apple.com/imac/g3/specs.html
(For some reason in the marketing description they say it's 8mm shorter, not sure why.)
A few cool mockups, and some more detailed maps.
http://www.monorails.org/tMspages/LasVegas.html
http://www.lvnvmonorail.com/
All the studies show that not sleeping is extreamly bad for you in the long run.
I don't think that this is true. I read a New Yorker article a few months ago about the same drug. It said that not getting enough sleep will impair your performance at the time, but it doesn't cause any long-term effects. It talked about Randy Gardner who stayed awake for 11 days straight. He didn't experience any real problems during the experiment, and was completely back to normal after sleeping for something like 14 hours after the experiment.
And the really interesting thing about this new drug is that you can stay awake for long periods of time without any performance impairment, or even any sleepiness. Cool and scary at the same time...
You're simultaneously using two different defintions of "cost" here.
This is also right, but I suspect there are a lot of folks who are thinking something along the lines of ``If we can, we should, and damn the cost''.
These people would of course be talking about the actual current monetary cost of oil vs. alternative energy. They're saying that the one that costs less dollars is not necessarily the best.
If we use high-priced solar or fusion energy rather than cheap oil, we're wasting resources. That's BAD.
And here you're talking about the theoretical "cost" of oil, somehow taking into account the environmental problems, dependency on foreign nations, etc. Of course, the problem is, how exactly do you measure these costs and turn them into monetary costs? If we did this, then it would be true that it's always best to choose the cheaper alternative. But nobody agrees on the monetary value of these costs, so there's no way to do this.
Another good overview, a little more recent, from Scientific American.
The real questions, in my mind, are, what are the possible legal and illegal uses of the product, what is the likely ratio of legal to illegal uses, and how is the product pitched? Here's how I would rate these products, in order of having the most reasonably legal uses to having the least reasonably legal uses:
garden hoe
kitchen knife
VCR
...
CD burner (because currently it's much easier for most people to copy a CD than a VCR tape)
rifle
handgun
...
Kazaa
Napster (because it can only swap music files, unlike Kazaa)
I draw these lines in between because I think that, currently, the vast majority of the uses of the first group are legal, while the vast majority of the uses of the last group are illegal (according to the copyright laws of most countries). Not sure about the middle group, but there are certainly at least a large minority of legal uses for the products in the second group, while I would guess that the ratio of legal to illegal MP3s swapped over Napster-like products is somewhere around 1%.
Then the only remaining question is, where do you draw the line of legality of the product?
It really looks like Sun went above and beyond the call of duty here. I doubt Apache expected them to use $3 million of their own money to help fix this, but they did it anyway because it turned out that that was the only way to fix issue #4 on their list. Pretty cool. Chalk up one Open Source Brownie Point for Sun.
Does anyone know how long these things usually take? I.e. will the actual vote on this happen tomorrow, or next week, or 3 months from now?
Of course, having everything derive code from the same source is a risk
Depends on how you look at it. If there were N completely independent TCP/IP implementations out there, wouldn't there be N times as many bugs (each one affecting 1/N as many systems, on average). Homogeneity means only one codebase to debug and fix. But of course when a bug is found, it affects everyone.
At Disney World, you can build your own roller coaster using a computer, and then ride in a simulator. It's really cool!
This doesn't even suggest that the world might be better off if we got rid of patents. It says that smaller and/or less developed countries might be better off without patents, because they can "borrow" inventions made elsewhere. In other words, good for the country, not necessarily good for people in general. If you think that patents encourage invention, then you can't have very many countries being the "leeches" for patents to do their job.
I don't really want to draw out this argument any longer than necessary, so I'll just note a couple of quick points:
How can you possibly back this statement up, when you consider that piracy is not as rampant here in NA. Clearly, those who can afford the full price are more likely to deam it fair, and pay it.
Well, software piracy is very tolerated and out in the open in Asian, but here it's prosecuted. In Hong Kong you can go into dozens of shops and buy pirated programs for a few bucks. In NA, probably 90% of computer users don't know how to get pirated software (unless a friend has it). My mom certainly doesn't know how to find warez. (Neither do I, to be honest.) So I don't think that argument proves anything.
My point was that, between free -> X% -> 'unfair' price, unless X% is offered, people will naturally go for the free. But if your argument is to be accepted, nobody would pay for software, as it is easily available for free. You still cant disprove that its easy to scam the system, and yet, for whatever reason (I condend the desire not to freeload coupled with the desire to live with minimal social friction), people volountarily do not.
(1) I said many people would take the software for free, not all. (2) See above - it's not easily available for free.
By fair, I mean for the consumer. If people threaten to pirate, instead of forking over the full price, I'd say thats a pretty good indication that your consumers deem the price unreasonable, for whatever reason.
Uh, no, that's an indication that many people like getting things for free more than they like having to pay money for them.
is a fundamental human value to want to give something back in return for a product or service.
Well, it is a fundamental human value for some people, but not for others. There are a lot of selfish and/or dishonest people in this world. Are you suggesting that the unselfish, honest people should voluntarily pay money for software, to subsidize the selfish or dishonest ones? Even for the average "upright citizen", it's really hard to do the right thing and be honest and give up as much money as you think something's worth. Remember years ago when shareware was always full-featured, and it was up to each downloader to be honest and send in money if they thought that the software was useful? Well, those days didn't last very long, because very few people could make any money that way. Since then, nearly all shareware was crippled or had an annoying reminder until you registered, or was time-bombed. If people get to decide how much to pay for something, a lot of them will pay zero. And if I paid something and my selfish neighbor didn't, I'd feel like I was being taken advantage of (by him).
the economy is designed to benifit everyone, not a select few.
I agree! If all software development stopped now, then I agree, it would be great for everyone if Adobe lowered their prices, because people would get the software for less. But software development continues, and Adobe can fund it better if they make more money. And the more money that can be made from software, the more new, innovative software companies will be created to take advantage of that.
Not to mention (in capitalist countries) the money that the shareholders make from higher profit margins - not only the millionaires, but also the millions of average people with 401k accounts, etc.
suggested that each commodity category would have two state-enforced boards, one of consumers, one of producers. Nothing could be sold until the board of consuemrs agreed with the board of producers on a price.
Sounds kinda unworkable to me... How do they agree on the price? What keeps one side from holding the other hostage until they get the price they want? How do you prevent corruption? How do you assess quality of these products? What about non-commodities? I sure don't want the price I pay for my car to be determined by which government board happens to have better negotiators. I assume that if I read more about it, it'd make more sense, but for physical goods (that can't be copied for free), the US/Canada's current free-market system seems way more practical to me... No company can arbitrarily jack up their prices by xx% like you say, because their competition would get all their business.
What I fear is that with copyable products, is that this free market system that works so well for physical goods will break down, and we'll have to resort to some kind of government-enforced pricing like you mentioned. That would replace a system that works really well, IMO, with one that seems pretty flawed to me...