This is exactly as bad as it looks. There is a difference between possessing information, and using that information to do harm to others.
For instance, if I play a video game that teaches me how to use various weapons, and skills for killing others, I am in fact 'training' to use those weapons and tactics.
Having recipes, notes, price-lists, anonymous letters is no different. You can argue that either is in some way preparation for committing crimes.
Yes, I agree it is scary to think that someone else might be 'thinking' of committing a crime, however stepping over the bounds and making 'thinking' about a crime the same as committing a crime makes us ALL guilty, depending on the imagination of the court.
This is super-dangerous because then laws are no longer 'objective', but become more about how creative the prosecution is, and IF they want to go after you or not.
If you are young and without dependents, quit immediately.
If you are older, and/or have people you are supporting, make an objective plan with objective milestones of how you are going to quit, then act on that plan.
A job is soul-sucking only if you don't know what you are getting out of it, and can't see a way out. So prove to yourself that you're not trapped by quitting, or are actively working towards quitting. The trick here is that one needs to align one's actions with one's goals. Acting is easy, once you know what your goals are.
Goals: The truth is that nobody knows anything about why we are here or what this place is.
I suspect however, that this 'Being alive and conscious' thing is rather a unique opportunity, and that spending these few precious moments we are given doing something one hates is not a very wise decision. Take some time. Figure out what you _really_ want in life. Then spend as close as possible 100% of your time striving to make what you want a reality.
Simple question: Is a slave acting to gain his freedom a slave?
Actually, this was exactly the reason why I switched from linux to mac (and I've been a linux user from the slackware install-via-floppy days). It was do to a gradual change as my life priorities changed, and my desire to _create_ rather than be annoyed because X,Y, and/or Z either broke, or wouldn't work without jumping through many hoops.
I still think linux is great for servers where the environment is more controlled. For the desktop though Mac currently rules. I'm constantly amazed at how everything just _works_. I say go for it, to anyone who is thinking about switching. You won't be disappointed.
I understand the desire to get people to click through to the site, and so create 'jazzed up' titles.
This seems to have really gotten out of hand lately. So much so that I am starting to automatically assume the title has nothing to do with the story.
I fail to see how this is going to bode well for slashdot in the long term. Perhaps they have even jumped the shark as I'm sure I'm not alone.
Are there any communities/comment systems similar to slashdot out there in the wild-internet that I maybe haven't run across yet? The community/comments are the real reason to visit slashdot, and if the editors of slashdot can't provide decent 'story-seeds' around which to have a conversation. Perhaps it is time to move on.
Who gives a damn what Bush/Kerry et all know/think?
This is a democracy (ok technically a democratically elected republic).
In such the people have the power.
With more and more advanced communications methods (think internet) the need for 'leaders' had diminished proportionally. The population as a whole it seems just hasn't quite figured that out yet. Inertia is a powerful force I guess.
The real problem it seems to me is people who get so focused on personalities. Instead of using their time/effort to discuss things like creative solutions to problems. They try to figure out ways for 'their' guy to look good and for the 'other' guy to look like an idiot.
Want to fix the off-shoring of jobs problem? (or find out if it actually is a problem?)
Debate the issues themselves.
Figure out what the pros and cons of differing courses of action are and do your level best to convince others to do the same.
The only reasons that political parties/personalities have power is because we pay attention to them.
When a significant portion of the population wants something it happens. No amount of 'spin' can disproportionally influence a person who has actually thought about an issue.
Remember the important thing isn't who signed what into law, the important this is what is being signed into law.
Yes, electronics have some nasty metals/chemicals in them.
However imposing a government fee isn't going to do anything but make things more expensive without solving anything.
Real solutions:
1. Put a heavy enough protective barrier under the land-fill so that the chemicals don't leach into water-supply. Or, sort out the 'bad' items and deal with them in such a mannor as to render them harmless before putting them in land-fill.
2. For those items that can be economically recycled, people have an incentive to do so and will.
For solution #1 basically everyone in that city/county share the additional cost just like they share the benifits of having all those electronic devices.
For solution #2 the end user or landfill operator actually makes money.
I think it is time for the 'forced recycling meme' to fade away.
You can't justify a system by using selected negative examples from other systems and saying "see, that didn't work, so my way must be best".
Since you don't seem to accept that contra-examples disproving the oposing sides argument are a good basis for proving the supierority of one point of view over another I'm afraid that I find it pointless to continue this discussion.
Thanks for your time and effort.
Thank you for your time and effort. Hopefully others reading this thread will have been edified by its content as well.
I'm not opening a new topic of conversation but I did just want to set the facts straight on this point:
when researching philosophical topics there are better places to begin than wikipedia
I used wikipedia simply because it seemed to be the most neutral and would be a good starting point for anyone unfamiliar with the concept. Neither of the links you provided adhere to this criteria as one is obviously an anti-moral-relativism argument and the other is a bit too geared towards the academic reader and in my mind doesn't do a very good job of explaining the concept to the average reader.
Why do you accept as a given that the best model for an economy relies on the fundamental goal of greed?
You didn't answer any of my previous questions but I will answer yours:
If you truly read and understood the link on the previous post you would understand that the driving factor of market economics isn't greed but balance. How many widgets should I make vs how many people want. That is the fundamental question that the current free-market system addresses. Also no other economic system for dealing with scarce resources that I've been exposed to performs as efficiently for all involved. Please feel free to show me one I may have over looked.
What's so hard to understand about pricing an item according to its value?
You seem to have an overly simplistic idea of value. Lets say I own some land that is rich in mineral deposits and I spend several hours/days digging to come up with a pound of ore. How much do I charge for this ore?
Lets say I go by your principles and set the price at some arbitrary amount (say the cost of production + 10%).
What if there are 100 people who would buy my pound of ore at that price but I only have one pound. Who do I choose to sell it to?
Lets explore some possiblities:
Lets say I gave it randomly to one of the people who wanted it. I hope you can see that if I did this then the economy wouldn't be very efficient. Its very likely that I would give my ore to someone who isn't going to make very good use out of it (maybe they want it for a door-stop where someone else needs it because it is a critical component of their product that many other people want)
Lets say I exhaustively researched how each person who wanted to use the ore was going to do so, in order to give it to the person who I thought was going to put it to the best use. There are two problems here: 1. This will take a large amount of my time. 2. because I am very unlikly to be an expert in all the ways in which my ore can be used I am very unlikly to pick a good end user of my ore anyway.
Lets say the opposite happens however. Lets say that no-one wants to purchase my ore at my arbitrary price. I 'played by the rules' and produced something that I am selling for a set amount yet no-one is buying. Should buyers be compelled to purchase my ore even though they don't want it at that price?
Lets look at the possibilities:
If the government (who is really the only credible entitity that can force people to do things they don't want to do) forces people to buy my ore then everyones cost of production goes up. Maybe they would prefer to use some other ore in their product because it does the same thing but costs less.
But then what do you do with that 'other cheaper ore' that now isn't being used? Obviously some other industry must be compelled to use it and so on down the line.
Well this isn't very efficient the government realizes. We can't just have people producing stuff that no-one wants if we have to insure a market for it. So you end up having the government control who produces what. Basically this is a command economy and history has shown these don't work very well.
There is never a discussion of the right and wrong of a thing, only its potential for profit or loss.
I would say this is because there is no such thing as objective morality. What I may consider to be the 'right' thing you may very well consider to be the 'wrong' thing.
It is true that certain packages tend to dominate if they are clearly better than the others (such as Gimp or Apache) However in some areas their is still no clear 'winner' such as the battle between KDE/Gnome. This is just natural evolution in progress.
Prices are not determined by fair value but by what the market will bear.
And what is the fair value of an item if it isn't what the market determines it is?
Who determines what a 'fair value' is?
What if there is only one of these items left and yet you have many people who want it?
What if there are several more of the items produced than people want?
What if we created a system where the value of a good is determined by the producer of the good as you seem to suggest? What would the effects of such a system be if the consumer valued the good differently from what the producer determined?
By the way telephone calls cost more at different times not because it costs more to switch them but because of the nature of the phone system lines/connections are a limited resource.
Asprin costs $4 a pill because of the nature of how we choose to pay for health-care via insurance rather than pay-as-you-go. This is a whole topic of debate in and of itself.
The most efficient employee, in terms of work per unit of compensation, is a slave laborer...
Actually the best employee from an employers standpoint is a non-existent one that has been replaced completely via automation.
We are rapidly moving into such a society. Every year more and more jobs are being done by some form of automation including the servicing and production of those automations.
I think it is not too bold to predict that in the next 50 years most jobs related to the production of physical goods will in fact be done by machine. Everything from digging the ore out of the mines to the friendly fedex robot that will deliver it to your doorstep.
In my mind labor laws are just accellerating this change by making the cost of human workers that much more expensive. But really it is going to happen no matter what bacause machines are quite simply getting better and better than men at producing goods and services more cheaply, faster and with higher quality.
So the real question then is how does a person get what he desires in the way of physical goods and services in an environment of increasing competition and falling costs for goods and services?
Ultimately we seem to be moving away from a monetary physical goods trading economy and into what some are calling an 'attention economy':
However until we are safely in that future how does one survive now?
1. buy imported/auto-produced goods/services cheaply. 2. find some facet of the current economy that is hard to outsource and/or automate and/or that you have a special talent for such as: (artist, musician, blogger, podcaster, plumber, engineer, cook, etc...) 3. if you don't like what you are currently doing then do something else.
This article backs up the notion that we should be exporting, rather than giving our IT industry to India and then paying to import all the software we would have been importing.
No it doesn't. It says that in the special case that a country can produce a good more economically than its competition both that country and the market it is importing into will benefit. However if a country such as the US can't produce a good economically it will be bad both for the country forced to import the good and for the country that is exporting (basically everyone pays higher prices for a lower-quality good). So if we can produce the good cheaper we should export it and if we can't we should import it and spend our time and resources making things that we can make cheaper/better than anyone else (which won't be software because in our country it is more expensive to do so because of things like software patents).
You also forgot to mention how "free" software does anything but reduce the amount a given country can export and reduce the number of options in the market place as businesses go under trying to compete with $0.
'free' and open software does make competition for comercial software. There is nothing in the laws of nature however that state that software production must be a comercial and proprietary only enterprise. If that mode of production can't compete successfully then it should cease and the people involved in that industry should find work doing something that actually pays money if they desire money. Also I take exception to your comment about open source 'reducing the number of options'. More competition always increases the number of options almost by definition. So while there may be fewer commercial software packages they will be replaced with more 'free' ones.
'free' sunlight is competition for outdoor lighting manufacturers yet no one I know of is calling for us to build a giant dome over the US so that we can protect the outdoor lighting manufacturers from 'free' competition.
Your evidence really says we should be restricting free software and exporting more of our own software to the rest of the world.
And how can we export software if the cost of producing it due to software patent issues is much higher than anywhere else? Are you proposing that we somehow force the rest of the world to recognize any silly patent system we devise? What would stop them from doing the same to us?
Basically you seem to be missing the big point of the article. I will restate it to make it clear:
The benefit to both producers and consumers greatly outweighs any negative impacts from trade.
Unless you want to argue that the above point is false then I see no validity in your argument.
I think there are a lot of people who for one reason or another think that competition from other countries is a bad thing.
They seem to think that it is somehow 'unfair' that people in other contries can make product X cheaper. I don't know how many times I've heard the 'rush to the bottom' argument from people who obviously have no grasp of basic economics.
The reason competition is good in this particular case is because the US government is clearly not acting in its citizens best interest in regards to software patents.
The contries that have a more rational intelectual property policy will obviously benefit. This will do one of two things:
1. Businesses and citizens who create software will be forced to move to these 'enlightened' contries if they aren't there already. Basically the US will find itself locking itself out of the software market because producing software in the US will become too expensive or in some instances maybe even impossible.
2. Because of pressure from 1. the US will be forced to adopt better laws.
Basically if you can squash competition by making everyone obey your rules then you can force through productivity and creativity limiting laws such as software patents.
However in a free marketplace countries that have chosen not to incorporate such laws will naturally do better than countries that have. I'm assuming here of course that software patents stifle creativity and productivity but I think this is a pretty safe assumtption.
If you don't understand why software patents are bad please read this:
In short this is good for everyone because it will garantee that consumers of software will continue to benefit from the explosion of creativity and productivity in the software industry. Also for those of us who produce software this helps by putting real pressure on our government to change its tune in regards to software patents.
A lot of our laws especially concerning things that businesses have historically provided for the population are not geared towards how individuals behave but rather large business entities. So there is a sort of 'impedence mismatch' between certain sets of laws and how society is evolving. Intellectual property laws being one of those 'sets'.
Historically large businesses produce goods which ordinary people then consumed.
Now ordinary people are starting to produce goods for orther ordinary people (blogs/podcasts/software/web services/etc...). Thanks to modern technological advances you no longer need huge investments of capital to create, market, and sell things. I can market and sell all by myself thanks to the web. If my product is information-related odds are I can create it cheaply either by myself or with a small group as well.
So while laws regarding copyright, patents, and trademarks work well for businesses that have access to large amounts of capital (what is 50k for filing a patent when it costs us millions to create/market our product) they work against the individual or less capital-intensive businesses.
While personally I think all IP related laws need to be abolished (with the possible exception of trademark but even there I'm not 100% convinced) they definitely need to be made easier to deal with for smaller business entities that don't have ready access to lots of capital(aka money).
But it does have a scalability and longevity issue that's human-scale, and so it shouldn't be a final design.
I don't understand your 'scalability and longevity issue'. There is enough uranium in sea water with the use of breeder reactors to potentially last us billions of years.
We've proven over the decades from the hundreds of nuclear reactors have been providing power all over the world that we can handle the process safely (more people die in coal-mining cave-ins than ever died from nuclear power plants. There is no such thing as a 100% safe energy system, or car, or soft-cushy-pillow for that matter. However compared to _any_ other energy source currently available nuclear seems very clearly to be the safest.)
However the 'Green Religion' people have successfully scared people away from it.
So really it is the 'Greens' who are causing the high energy prices and high levels of air polution that we have today.
Of course if we had low energy prices and low polution the 'Green Religion' wouldn't be able to spread as well so you really can't blame the green people. They are just looking out for themselves just like everyone else.
The thing that really disturbs me though is to see so many people on a technology site such as this who seem to have absorbed their position without reflection.
It seems from reading the wimax technical information that they can do 1-3 miles WITHOUT line of sight.
That is HUGE and is basically the 'next step' for the Internet. Within 1 mile of my house there are probably at least 10-100 people ( I live near downtown Dallas, Tx ) that I could connect directly with almost immediately once the hardware comes onto the market. With a density that large we could form our own 'spontaneous' internet that would have all sorts of advantages over the current model:
1. Several different network types(IP4,IP6,IP????) running simultaniously would allow me to migrate to the 'better' network topology and still be backwards compatable in an easier way than the current system where I am locked into whatever my ISP wants.
2. Becouse there are potentially multiple networks running in my area competition could flurish with some networks perhaps being more secure or anonymous or faster or whatever so the end result would be a 'better' type of Internet for me.
3. After equipment costs the 'local internet' would essentially be free(in all senses of that word). Most likely a type of peering relationship would develop so the 'cost' of being allowed into a 'local internet' would be carrying traffic for others (that is just a guess but seems reasonable based on how sucessful p2p apps work).
4. Since the 'local internet' would be totally decentralized it would be many orders of magnitude more difficult for any government to regulate (bad if you think others should be telling you what to read/publish but good for that small portion of society who happen to think that more freedom is a good thing)
This is of course all my opinion but that is the reason why this article definitely sparked my interest and why I think WiMax has the potential of being the 'next big thing'.
It's the primary function of a society to guarantee the welfare of the weak
I respectfully disagree:
The primary purpose of government/society is to protect its members from physical violence from other governments/societies and to some degree from physical violence of other members of ones own society.
Once a government (basically the people with guns/military organisation) achieves this first objective then perhaps it can go on to other things but it can not do anything until it garuntees physical safety.
Just my opinion but I think it is pretty broadly shared.
Some who tries to conserving energy may be said to be an "anti-consumer", because if one conserves energy, then that person is not being the best possible consumer.
The reason such persons are objects of derision is because we Americans have been socialized to be the best possible consumers we can be: years of corporate media propaganda have been directed towards encouraging us to spend as much on food as possible, as much on transportation as possible, as much on healthcare as possible.
I don't care about anyone being an 'anit-consumer'.
Consume less all you want I really don't mind, in fact since less demand = lower prices I'm all for it.
The problem that I personally have (and I think that most anti-green/socialist types have) is that the only way they (enbormentalists/socialists) can force their utopian agenda on the rest of the world is by government action (people with guns forcing me to do stuff I don't want to do).
In other words it is a freedom issue. I think we all want clean air/water, good health care, nice work environments, etc. The argument is how to get there not on what the goals are.
The way I see it enviromentalists/socialists are objects of derision (at least in my mind) because they either truely don't understand how the world works (they want stuff for free as in free beer with no thought on who pays the bill) or they do know the cost and are more than happy for me to pay it for them even though I don't agree with their plan.
Socialism (and most environmentalist groups I've read about seem to fit here too) doesn't work because you have to have a strong central government forcing people to behave in ways they don't want to. It is inefficient and the people who live under it feel oppressed. You don't get good results for society as a whole or for individuals within that society. Everyone loses.
All of this is my opinion but perhaps you will find it usefull to understand how the 'oposition' thinks. It isn't that we don't want those things it is that the price of the system that you are advocating (my freedom) is too high.
A recent survey indicates that companies who use outsourcing are only saving around 20 to 40 percent, if they save money at all. This is roughly equivalent to the de-facto tax breaks obtained by outsourcing in avoiding payroll taxes. In other words the only reason anyone on average saves money outsourcing is because they avoid US payroll taxes.
This is correct. Unfortunately it is a basic flaw with our (and most other nations) tax policy. You should also note that having a 'flat tax' or taxing consumption (National Sales Tax) also suffer from this flaw that our nation isn't the only nation on earth. There is also the large grey/black markets which don't get taxed at all in this country.
There is only one tax that is unavoidable in the modern world:
Property tax.
The sooner we drop consumption/income taxes in favor of real-estate taxes the sooner our economy will start to function much smoother and we can all enjoy the benifits. It is eventually what we will have to go with anyway. Computers/Information technology/Information 'culture' is rapidly advancing to the point where more and more economic transactions will take place without relying on the US Dollar. It isn't hear yet but you can feel it coming around the corner. Once economic transactions are no longer in a form where the government has access to them then the only other thing that can be easily taxed that is somewhat based on your ability to pay is the land that you own. It is very simple. Removes the need for complex artificial tax structures and is at the end of the day unavoidable.
Your analysis is flawed because you are missing one fundamental concept: that the cost of creating a piece of information bears little or no relation to the cost of reproducing it. It might cost a few dollars, it might cost $100M dollars in the case of a movie, burning a DVD of it costs the same.
I'm not 'missing' this and this is not how capitalism works.
A friend of mine who used to live in Cuba explained the difference to me very clearly once:
100 people spend a year digging a whole in the ground (could be that maybe they make a movie, what they do isn't important).
In the communist/socialist system the 'value' of the hole is how much time/effort was spent in digging it.
In the capitalist system the 'value' of the hole is how much someone else is willing to pay for it.
There is a perfectly workable mechanism: make IP behave economically like physical goods.
Actually it isn't a workable mechanism and that is what my post was about. The only way to make it 'workable' is to somehow make it impossible for people to copy the information (make it more physical-like). Basically the only way to do that is to get rid of general-purpose computers entirely. Like all-over-the-world entirely. It is too late for that unless very draconian measures are taken. I honestly think that is a fantasy/nightmare and will never happen. If anything computers will become more flexible and general-purpose because that is what people want and more importantly is what they buy.
Do you actually have an alternative?
Yes. Basically just get rid of all of the copyright/patent laws. This will create an explosion of creativity and new wonderous things. It will be the roaring 90's all over again only this time without the bubble. Productivity would continue once again to expand at near exponential rates (notice how it has kind of slowed down lately as everyone becomes more and more afraind of being sued?).
Lots of people will suffer but those will be the unproductive/uncreative people who add no value to the creative work. There will no longer be a government-backed free lunch.
Would people stop makeing movies/songs/software/books? No. If anything more would be made as the legal costs would be drastically reduced and people with talent and a drive to create would no longer be hampered by government enforced monopolies (want a decent star-wars movie without Lucas butchering it?).
How could they sell what they create? The same way they do now:
Movies: viewed in theaters just as they are now. If somebody makes a cheap vid-cam recording so what? I'm still going to pay more for a high-quality movie experience which only the controler of the movie can provide. DVD sales would probably be hurt but I would still pay more for a 'autorized' copy that I know isn't a cheap rip-off and may not work so I'm not sure about that even.
Songs: Most bands make most of their money in concerts anyway. This is really a non-issue. recorded music is entirely an advertising thing or just brings in slight revenue.
Software: Like the movie-dvd above I will pay more to get the information from a trusted source that I know won't contain virii, spy-ware, ect...
Books: I admit that this one seems tougher than the others but isn't really. If I spend 4-12 hours reading a book I want to know that it is what the author intended so I will pay more for an 'authorized copy' that I know I got straight from the author.
Will there be distribution methods that circomvent the author of the information? Yes. But it really doesn't matter. If anything it acts as good advertising and happens now anyway and there is no way to get rid of it.
Basically it all boils down to the fact that the economic model has changed and some people are desperately clinging to the 'old way' of doing things. Without government sanctioned monopolies certain activities will no longer be profitable and will have to change with
This is just my personal opinion so if you don't agree feel free.
There is a fundimental difference between information and physical property.
Information can generally be used simultainiously by multiple people without interfering with any of the other users of the information (we can all listen to the same song/hear the same joke/run the same program without 'taking away' from anyone else who 'uses' the information).
Physical property can generally only be utilized by a single person simultainiously (Only I can use my car/socks/toothbrush during a specific point in time).
This is a big fundamental difference.
It would be nice if information could fit into the physical-property category but it simply doesn't.
The reason it sorta-kinda did for so long was that the copying mechanisms were rather slow/expensive and the end result was always a physical item (paper-book, chemical-film, etc).
Now we have finally gotten to a point where the information is more-or-less 'free' from the physical information-carrier.
The major publishing-house people (those that make the physical items that are used to carry information) seem to be hopelessly trying to re-combine the physical with the informational. This isn't going to happen but they are currently causing a lot of harm in attempting to do so. The longer this 'transitional period' takes the longer all the misery is extended.
The really funny thing in my opinion is that so many people in general also buy into the concept of 'information as physical-type property'.
I would ask that you honestly think about the harm this idea causes vs the 'good' that results from it. I think that if you really truely honestly evaluate it you will see that these laws are causing much more harm than any good that they could ever do from this point forward.
I feel that slowly we are outgrowing this outdated idea just like we outgrew other ideas that no-longer worked in our society. The only real question is how long it will take and how much suffering will be caused during this transition.
In my opinion the actions of the students in this article are much more helpful than harmful. They help bring to light the fact that this system is hopelessly broken.
I flat out reject the argument that just because a law exists that it is somehow a 'moral imperitive' that it is followed. Laws have no inherent moral function. Morals in themselves are not objective but always subjective. Think about the laws on slavery that used to exist if you need a point of reference.
I would also like to state that I make my living as a software developer and physical-media artist. I think/read a lot about history and economic issues and consider myself very much a pro-capitalist strong-physical-property-rights sort of person. I am NOT any sort of socialist hippie tree-hugger type that doesn't understand how the world works and wants everything for free.
Slashdot Mirror
This is exactly as bad as it looks. There is a difference between possessing information, and using that information to do harm to others.
For instance, if I play a video game that teaches me how to use various weapons, and skills for killing others, I am in fact 'training' to use those weapons and tactics.
Having recipes, notes, price-lists, anonymous letters is no different. You can argue that either is in some way preparation for committing crimes.
Yes, I agree it is scary to think that someone else might be 'thinking' of committing a crime, however stepping over the bounds and making 'thinking' about a crime the same as committing a crime makes us ALL guilty, depending on the imagination of the court.
This is super-dangerous because then laws are no longer 'objective', but become more about how creative the prosecution is, and IF they want to go after you or not.
If you are young and without dependents, quit immediately.
If you are older, and/or have people you are supporting, make an objective plan with objective milestones of how you are going to quit, then act on that plan.
A job is soul-sucking only if you don't know what you are getting out of it, and can't see a way out. So prove to yourself that you're not trapped by quitting, or are actively working towards quitting. The trick here is that one needs to align one's actions with one's goals. Acting is easy, once you know what your goals are.
Goals: The truth is that nobody knows anything about why we are here or what this place is.
I suspect however, that this 'Being alive and conscious' thing is rather a unique opportunity, and that spending these few precious moments we are given doing something one hates is not a very wise decision. Take some time. Figure out what you _really_ want in life. Then spend as close as possible 100% of your time striving to make what you want a reality.
Simple question: Is a slave acting to gain his freedom a slave?
Actually, this was exactly the reason why I switched from linux to mac (and I've been a linux user from the slackware install-via-floppy days). It was do to a gradual change as my life priorities changed, and my desire to _create_ rather than be annoyed because X,Y, and/or Z either broke, or wouldn't work without jumping through many hoops.
I still think linux is great for servers where the environment is more controlled. For the desktop though Mac currently rules. I'm constantly amazed at how everything just _works_. I say go for it, to anyone who is thinking about switching. You won't be disappointed.
I understand the desire to get people to click through to the site, and so create 'jazzed up' titles.
This seems to have really gotten out of hand lately. So much so that I am starting to automatically assume the title has nothing to do with the story.
I fail to see how this is going to bode well for slashdot in the long term. Perhaps they have even jumped the shark as I'm sure I'm not alone.
Are there any communities/comment systems similar to slashdot out there in the wild-internet that I maybe haven't run across yet? The community/comments are the real reason to visit slashdot, and if the editors of slashdot can't provide decent 'story-seeds' around which to have a conversation. Perhaps it is time to move on.
"...which is technology in Snow Leopard that makes it easier for developers to take advantage of multi-core parallelism..."
This seems pretty clear to me, not sure what more you want. Googling 'Grand Central Dispatch' comes up with lots of details.
Remember this is news for _nerds_. :)
Who gives a damn what Bush/Kerry et all know/think?
This is a democracy (ok technically a democratically elected republic).
In such the people have the power.
With more and more advanced communications methods (think internet) the need for 'leaders' had diminished proportionally. The population as a whole it seems just hasn't quite figured that out yet. Inertia is a powerful force I guess.
The real problem it seems to me is people who get so focused on personalities. Instead of using their time/effort to discuss things like creative solutions to problems. They try to figure out ways for 'their' guy to look good and for the 'other' guy to look like an idiot.
Want to fix the off-shoring of jobs problem? (or find out if it actually is a problem?)
Debate the issues themselves.
Figure out what the pros and cons of differing courses of action are and do your level best to convince others to do the same.
The only reasons that political parties/personalities have power is because we pay attention to them.
When a significant portion of the population wants something it happens. No amount of 'spin' can disproportionally influence a person who has actually thought about an issue.
Remember the important thing isn't who signed what into law, the important this is what is being signed into law.
Same text info as the refernced blog. Only difference being that this URL also contains a photo of the device.
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http://news.rpi.edu/update.do?artcenterkey=1358&s
Forced recycling of anything is a bad idea.
Yes, electronics have some nasty metals/chemicals in them.
However imposing a government fee isn't going to do anything but make things more expensive without solving anything.
Real solutions:
1. Put a heavy enough protective barrier under the land-fill so that the chemicals don't leach into water-supply. Or, sort out the 'bad' items and deal with them in such a mannor as to render them harmless before putting them in land-fill.
2. For those items that can be economically recycled, people have an incentive to do so and will.
For solution #1 basically everyone in that city/county share the additional cost just like they share the benifits of having all those electronic devices.
For solution #2 the end user or landfill operator actually makes money.
I think it is time for the 'forced recycling meme' to fade away.
You can't justify a system by using selected negative examples from other systems and saying "see, that didn't work, so my way must be best".
Since you don't seem to accept that contra-examples disproving the oposing sides argument are a good basis for proving the supierority of one point of view over another I'm afraid that I find it pointless to continue this discussion.
Thanks for your time and effort.
Thank you for your time and effort. Hopefully others reading this thread will have been edified by its content as well.
I'm not opening a new topic of conversation but I did just want to set the facts straight on this point:
when researching philosophical topics there are better places to begin than wikipedia
I used wikipedia simply because it seemed to be the most neutral and would be a good starting point for anyone unfamiliar with the concept. Neither of the links you provided adhere to this criteria as one is obviously an anti-moral-relativism argument and the other is a bit too geared towards the academic reader and in my mind doesn't do a very good job of explaining the concept to the average reader.
Why do you accept as a given that the best model for an economy relies on the fundamental goal of greed?
You didn't answer any of my previous questions but I will answer yours:
If you truly read and understood the link on the previous post you would understand that the driving factor of market economics isn't greed but balance. How many widgets should I make vs how many people want. That is the fundamental question that the current free-market system addresses. Also no other economic system for dealing with scarce resources that I've been exposed to performs as efficiently for all involved. Please feel free to show me one I may have over looked.
What's so hard to understand about pricing an item according to its value?
You seem to have an overly simplistic idea of value. Lets say I own some land that is rich in mineral deposits and I spend several hours/days digging to come up with a pound of ore. How much do I charge for this ore?
Lets say I go by your principles and set the price at some arbitrary amount (say the cost of production + 10%).
What if there are 100 people who would buy my pound of ore at that price but I only have one pound. Who do I choose to sell it to?
Lets explore some possiblities:
Lets say I gave it randomly to one of the people who wanted it. I hope you can see that if I did this then the economy wouldn't be very efficient. Its very likely that I would give my ore to someone who isn't going to make very good use out of it (maybe they want it for a door-stop where someone else needs it because it is a critical component of their product that many other people want)
Lets say I exhaustively researched how each person who wanted to use the ore was going to do so, in order to give it to the person who I thought was going to put it to the best use. There are two problems here: 1. This will take a large amount of my time. 2. because I am very unlikly to be an expert in all the ways in which my ore can be used I am very unlikly to pick a good end user of my ore anyway.
Lets say the opposite happens however. Lets say that no-one wants to purchase my ore at my arbitrary price. I 'played by the rules' and produced something that I am selling for a set amount yet no-one is buying. Should buyers be compelled to purchase my ore even though they don't want it at that price?
Lets look at the possibilities:
If the government (who is really the only credible entitity that can force people to do things they don't want to do) forces people to buy my ore then everyones cost of production goes up. Maybe they would prefer to use some other ore in their product because it does the same thing but costs less.
But then what do you do with that 'other cheaper ore' that now isn't being used? Obviously some other industry must be compelled to use it and so on down the line.
Well this isn't very efficient the government realizes. We can't just have people producing stuff that no-one wants if we have to insure a market for it. So you end up having the government control who produces what. Basically this is a command economy and history has shown these don't work very well.
There is never a discussion of the right and wrong of a thing, only its potential for profit or loss.
I would say this is because there is no such thing as objective morality. What I may consider to be the 'right' thing you may very well consider to be the 'wrong' thing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_relativism
How many open-source graphics packages are there? One (Gimp).
Actually there are two others that turned up in a simple google:
http://www.inkscape.org/
http://www.sodipodi.com/
Without OSX and Windows, there is only one operating system left.
There are in fact several open source OS's besides linux, some based on unix some not:
http://www.reactos.com/
http://www.freedos.org/
http://www.netbsd.org/
http://www.openbsd.org/
http://www.freebsd.org/
It is true that certain packages tend to dominate if they are clearly better than the others (such as Gimp or Apache) However in some areas their is still no clear 'winner' such as the battle between KDE/Gnome. This is just natural evolution in progress.
Prices are not determined by fair value but by what the market will bear.
And what is the fair value of an item if it isn't what the market determines it is?
Who determines what a 'fair value' is?
What if there is only one of these items left and yet you have many people who want it?
What if there are several more of the items produced than people want?
What if we created a system where the value of a good is determined by the producer of the good as you seem to suggest? What would the effects of such a system be if the consumer valued the good differently from what the producer determined?
By the way telephone calls cost more at different times not because it costs more to switch them but because of the nature of the phone system lines/connections are a limited resource.
Asprin costs $4 a pill because of the nature of how we choose to pay for health-care via insurance rather than pay-as-you-go. This is a whole topic of debate in and of itself.
I dare you to read this all the way through (should take about 10 minutes):
http://www.zeromillion.com/econ/how-the-market-sy
The most efficient employee, in terms of work per unit of compensation, is a slave laborer...
Actually the best employee from an employers standpoint is a non-existent one that has been replaced completely via automation.
We are rapidly moving into such a society. Every year more and more jobs are being done by some form of automation including the servicing and production of those automations.
I think it is not too bold to predict that in the next 50 years most jobs related to the production of physical goods will in fact be done by machine. Everything from digging the ore out of the mines to the friendly fedex robot that will deliver it to your doorstep.
http://www.plyojump.com/qrio.html
In my mind labor laws are just accellerating this change by making the cost of human workers that much more expensive. But really it is going to happen no matter what bacause machines are quite simply getting better and better than men at producing goods and services more cheaply, faster and with higher quality.
So the real question then is how does a person get what he desires in the way of physical goods and services in an environment of increasing competition and falling costs for goods and services?
Ultimately we seem to be moving away from a monetary physical goods trading economy and into what some are calling an 'attention economy':
http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue2_4/goldhab
However until we are safely in that future how does one survive now?
1. buy imported/auto-produced goods/services cheaply.
2. find some facet of the current economy that is hard to outsource and/or automate and/or that you have a special talent for such as: (artist, musician, blogger, podcaster, plumber, engineer, cook, etc...)
3. if you don't like what you are currently doing then do something else.
This article backs up the notion that we should be exporting, rather than giving our IT industry to India and then paying to import all the software we would have been importing.
No it doesn't. It says that in the special case that a country can produce a good more economically than its competition both that country and the market it is importing into will benefit. However if a country such as the US can't produce a good economically it will be bad both for the country forced to import the good and for the country that is exporting (basically everyone pays higher prices for a lower-quality good). So if we can produce the good cheaper we should export it and if we can't we should import it and spend our time and resources making things that we can make cheaper/better than anyone else (which won't be software because in our country it is more expensive to do so because of things like software patents).
You also forgot to mention how "free" software does anything but reduce the amount a given country can export and reduce the number of options in the market place as businesses go under trying to compete with $0.
'free' and open software does make competition for comercial software. There is nothing in the laws of nature however that state that software production must be a comercial and proprietary only enterprise. If that mode of production can't compete successfully then it should cease and the people involved in that industry should find work doing something that actually pays money if they desire money. Also I take exception to your comment about open source 'reducing the number of options'. More competition always increases the number of options almost by definition. So while there may be fewer commercial software packages they will be replaced with more 'free' ones.
'free' sunlight is competition for outdoor lighting manufacturers yet no one I know of is calling for us to build a giant dome over the US so that we can protect the outdoor lighting manufacturers from 'free' competition.
Your evidence really says we should be restricting free software and exporting more of our own software to the rest of the world.
And how can we export software if the cost of producing it due to software patent issues is much higher than anywhere else? Are you proposing that we somehow force the rest of the world to recognize any silly patent system we devise? What would stop them from doing the same to us?
Basically you seem to be missing the big point of the article. I will restate it to make it clear:
The benefit to both producers and consumers greatly outweighs any negative impacts from trade.
Unless you want to argue that the above point is false then I see no validity in your argument.
I think there are a lot of people who for one reason or another think that competition from other countries is a bad thing.
They seem to think that it is somehow 'unfair' that people in other contries can make product X cheaper. I don't know how many times I've heard the 'rush to the bottom' argument from people who obviously have no grasp of basic economics.
If you are one of those people please read this:
http://www.amosweb.com/cgi-bin/pdg.pl?fcd=dsp&ter
The reason competition is good in this particular case is because the US government is clearly not acting in its citizens best interest in regards to software patents.
The contries that have a more rational intelectual property policy will obviously benefit. This will do one of two things:
1. Businesses and citizens who create software will be forced to move to these 'enlightened' contries if they aren't there already. Basically the US will find itself locking itself out of the software market because producing software in the US will become too expensive or in some instances maybe even impossible.
2. Because of pressure from 1. the US will be forced to adopt better laws.
Basically if you can squash competition by making everyone obey your rules then you can force through productivity and creativity limiting laws such as software patents.
However in a free marketplace countries that have chosen not to incorporate such laws will naturally do better than countries that have. I'm assuming here of course that software patents stifle creativity and productivity but I think this is a pretty safe assumtption.
If you don't understand why software patents are bad please read this:
http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/en/m/intro/index
In short this is good for everyone because it will garantee that consumers of software will continue to benefit from the explosion of creativity and productivity in the software industry. Also for those of us who produce software this helps by putting real pressure on our government to change its tune in regards to software patents.
A lot of our laws especially concerning things that businesses have historically provided for the population are not geared towards how individuals behave but rather large business entities. So there is a sort of 'impedence mismatch' between certain sets of laws and how society is evolving. Intellectual property laws being one of those 'sets'.
Historically large businesses produce goods which ordinary people then consumed.
Now ordinary people are starting to produce goods for orther ordinary people (blogs/podcasts/software/web services/etc...). Thanks to modern technological advances you no longer need huge investments of capital to create, market, and sell things. I can market and sell all by myself thanks to the web. If my product is information-related odds are I can create it cheaply either by myself or with a small group as well.
So while laws regarding copyright, patents, and trademarks work well for businesses that have access to large amounts of capital (what is 50k for filing a patent when it costs us millions to create/market our product) they work against the individual or less capital-intensive businesses.
While personally I think all IP related laws need to be abolished (with the possible exception of trademark but even there I'm not 100% convinced) they definitely need to be made easier to deal with for smaller business entities that don't have ready access to lots of capital(aka money).
But it does have a scalability and longevity issue that's human-scale, and so it shouldn't be a final design.
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I don't understand your 'scalability and longevity issue'. There is enough uranium in sea water with the use of breeder reactors to potentially last us billions of years.
http://www.nuclearfaq.ca/cnf_sectionG.htm#uranium
We've proven over the decades from the hundreds of nuclear reactors have been providing power all over the world that we can handle the process safely (more people die in coal-mining cave-ins than ever died from nuclear power plants. There is no such thing as a 100% safe energy system, or car, or soft-cushy-pillow for that matter. However compared to _any_ other energy source currently available nuclear seems very clearly to be the safest.)
Nuclear fission is not an unlimited resource.
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Wrong.
For all practical purposes it is an unlimited resource.
With breeder reactors and the ability to extract uranium from the sea we are looking at billions of years before we run out.
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/cohen
http://www.nuclearfaq.ca/cnf_sectionG.htm#uranium
One day, maybe we'll have some new, safe, and more plentiful energy "income" sources, but right now we don't
Actually we do.
Have for several decades.
It is called a nuclear reactor.
Wikipedia link to the latest design:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_reactor
However the 'Green Religion' people have successfully scared people away from it.
So really it is the 'Greens' who are causing the high energy prices and high levels of air polution that we have today.
Of course if we had low energy prices and low polution the 'Green Religion' wouldn't be able to spread as well so you really can't blame the green people. They are just looking out for themselves just like everyone else.
The thing that really disturbs me though is to see so many people on a technology site such as this who seem to have absorbed their position without reflection.
Honestly I don't know if I should laugh or cry.
What advantage does WiMax offer?
It seems from reading the wimax technical information that they can do 1-3 miles WITHOUT line of sight.
That is HUGE and is basically the 'next step' for the Internet. Within 1 mile of my house there are probably at least 10-100 people ( I live near downtown Dallas, Tx ) that I could connect directly with almost immediately once the hardware comes onto the market. With a density that large we could form our own 'spontaneous' internet that would have all sorts of advantages over the current model:
1. Several different network types(IP4,IP6,IP????) running simultaniously would allow me to migrate to the 'better' network topology and still be backwards compatable in an easier way than the current system where I am locked into whatever my ISP wants.
2. Becouse there are potentially multiple networks running in my area competition could flurish with some networks perhaps being more secure or anonymous or faster or whatever so the end result would be a 'better' type of Internet for me.
3. After equipment costs the 'local internet' would essentially be free(in all senses of that word). Most likely a type of peering relationship would develop so the 'cost' of being allowed into a 'local internet' would be carrying traffic for others (that is just a guess but seems reasonable based on how sucessful p2p apps work).
4. Since the 'local internet' would be totally decentralized it would be many orders of magnitude more difficult for any government to regulate (bad if you think others should be telling you what to read/publish but good for that small portion of society who happen to think that more freedom is a good thing)
This is of course all my opinion but that is the reason why this article definitely sparked my interest and why I think WiMax has the potential of being the 'next big thing'.
It's the primary function of a society to guarantee the welfare of the weak
I respectfully disagree:
The primary purpose of government/society is to protect its members from physical violence from other governments/societies and to some degree from physical violence of other members of ones own society.
Once a government (basically the people with guns/military organisation) achieves this first objective then perhaps it can go on to other things but it can not do anything until it garuntees physical safety.
Just my opinion but I think it is pretty broadly shared.
Some who tries to conserving energy may be said to be an "anti-consumer", because if one conserves energy, then that person is not being the best possible consumer.
The reason such persons are objects of derision is because we Americans have been socialized to be the best possible consumers we can be: years of corporate media propaganda have been directed towards encouraging us to spend as much on food as possible, as much on transportation as possible, as much on healthcare as possible.
I don't care about anyone being an 'anit-consumer'.
Consume less all you want I really don't mind, in fact since less demand = lower prices I'm all for it.
The problem that I personally have (and I think that most anti-green/socialist types have) is that the only way they (enbormentalists/socialists) can force their utopian agenda on the rest of the world is by government action (people with guns forcing me to do stuff I don't want to do).
In other words it is a freedom issue. I think we all want clean air/water, good health care, nice work environments, etc. The argument is how to get there not on what the goals are.
The way I see it enviromentalists/socialists are objects of derision (at least in my mind) because they either truely don't understand how the world works (they want stuff for free as in free beer with no thought on who pays the bill) or they do know the cost and are more than happy for me to pay it for them even though I don't agree with their plan.
Socialism (and most environmentalist groups I've read about seem to fit here too) doesn't work because you have to have a strong central government forcing people to behave in ways they don't want to. It is inefficient and the people who live under it feel oppressed. You don't get good results for society as a whole or for individuals within that society. Everyone loses.
All of this is my opinion but perhaps you will find it usefull to understand how the 'oposition' thinks. It isn't that we don't want those things it is that the price of the system that you are advocating (my freedom) is too high.
A recent survey indicates that companies who use outsourcing are only saving around 20 to 40 percent, if they save money at all. This is roughly equivalent to the de-facto tax breaks obtained by outsourcing in avoiding payroll taxes. In other words the only reason anyone on average saves money outsourcing is because they avoid US payroll taxes.
This is correct. Unfortunately it is a basic flaw with our (and most other nations) tax policy. You should also note that having a 'flat tax' or taxing consumption (National Sales Tax) also suffer from this flaw that our nation isn't the only nation on earth. There is also the large grey/black markets which don't get taxed at all in this country.
There is only one tax that is unavoidable in the modern world:
Property tax.
The sooner we drop consumption/income taxes in favor of real-estate taxes the sooner our economy will start to function much smoother and we can all enjoy the benifits. It is eventually what we will have to go with anyway. Computers/Information technology/Information 'culture' is rapidly advancing to the point where more and more economic transactions will take place without relying on the US Dollar. It isn't hear yet but you can feel it coming around the corner. Once economic transactions are no longer in a form where the government has access to them then the only other thing that can be easily taxed that is somewhat based on your ability to pay is the land that you own. It is very simple. Removes the need for complex artificial tax structures and is at the end of the day unavoidable.
Your analysis is flawed because you are missing one fundamental concept: that the cost of creating a piece of information bears little or no relation to the cost of reproducing it. It might cost a few dollars, it might cost $100M dollars in the case of a movie, burning a DVD of it costs the same.
I'm not 'missing' this and this is not how capitalism works.
A friend of mine who used to live in Cuba explained the difference to me very clearly once:
100 people spend a year digging a whole in the ground (could be that maybe they make a movie, what they do isn't important).
In the communist/socialist system the 'value' of the hole is how much time/effort was spent in digging it.
In the capitalist system the 'value' of the hole is how much someone else is willing to pay for it.
There is a perfectly workable mechanism: make IP behave economically like physical goods.
Actually it isn't a workable mechanism and that is what my post was about. The only way to make it 'workable' is to somehow make it impossible for people to copy the information (make it more physical-like). Basically the only way to do that is to get rid of general-purpose computers entirely. Like all-over-the-world entirely. It is too late for that unless very draconian measures are taken. I honestly think that is a fantasy/nightmare and will never happen. If anything computers will become more flexible and general-purpose because that is what people want and more importantly is what they buy.
Do you actually have an alternative?
Yes. Basically just get rid of all of the copyright/patent laws. This will create an explosion of creativity and new wonderous things. It will be the roaring 90's all over again only this time without the bubble. Productivity would continue once again to expand at near exponential rates (notice how it has kind of slowed down lately as everyone becomes more and more afraind of being sued?).
Lots of people will suffer but those will be the unproductive/uncreative people who add no value to the creative work. There will no longer be a government-backed free lunch.
Would people stop makeing movies/songs/software/books? No. If anything more would be made as the legal costs would be drastically reduced and people with talent and a drive to create would no longer be hampered by government enforced monopolies (want a decent star-wars movie without Lucas butchering it?).
How could they sell what they create? The same way they do now:
Movies: viewed in theaters just as they are now. If somebody makes a cheap vid-cam recording so what? I'm still going to pay more for a high-quality movie experience which only the controler of the movie can provide. DVD sales would probably be hurt but I would still pay more for a 'autorized' copy that I know isn't a cheap rip-off and may not work so I'm not sure about that even.
Songs: Most bands make most of their money in concerts anyway. This is really a non-issue. recorded music is entirely an advertising thing or just brings in slight revenue.
Software: Like the movie-dvd above I will pay more to get the information from a trusted source that I know won't contain virii, spy-ware, ect...
Books: I admit that this one seems tougher than the others but isn't really. If I spend 4-12 hours reading a book I want to know that it is what the author intended so I will pay more for an 'authorized copy' that I know I got straight from the author.
Will there be distribution methods that circomvent the author of the information? Yes. But it really doesn't matter. If anything it acts as good advertising and happens now anyway and there is no way to get rid of it.
Basically it all boils down to the fact that the economic model has changed and some people are desperately clinging to the 'old way' of doing things. Without government sanctioned monopolies certain activities will no longer be profitable and will have to change with
This is just my personal opinion so if you don't agree feel free.
There is a fundimental difference between information and physical property.
Information can generally be used simultainiously by multiple people without interfering with any of the other users of the information (we can all listen to the same song/hear the same joke/run the same program without 'taking away' from anyone else who 'uses' the information).
Physical property can generally only be utilized by a single person simultainiously (Only I can use my car/socks/toothbrush during a specific point in time).
This is a big fundamental difference.
It would be nice if information could fit into the physical-property category but it simply doesn't.
The reason it sorta-kinda did for so long was that the copying mechanisms were rather slow/expensive and the end result was always a physical item (paper-book, chemical-film, etc).
Now we have finally gotten to a point where the information is more-or-less 'free' from the physical information-carrier.
The major publishing-house people (those that make the physical items that are used to carry information) seem to be hopelessly trying to re-combine the physical with the informational. This isn't going to happen but they are currently causing a lot of harm in attempting to do so. The longer this 'transitional period' takes the longer all the misery is extended.
The really funny thing in my opinion is that so many people in general also buy into the concept of 'information as physical-type property'.
I would ask that you honestly think about the harm this idea causes vs the 'good' that results from it. I think that if you really truely honestly evaluate it you will see that these laws are causing much more harm than any good that they could ever do from this point forward.
I feel that slowly we are outgrowing this outdated idea just like we outgrew other ideas that no-longer worked in our society. The only real question is how long it will take and how much suffering will be caused during this transition.
In my opinion the actions of the students in this article are much more helpful than harmful. They help bring to light the fact that this system is hopelessly broken.
I flat out reject the argument that just because a law exists that it is somehow a 'moral imperitive' that it is followed. Laws have no inherent moral function. Morals in themselves are not objective but always subjective. Think about the laws on slavery that used to exist if you need a point of reference.
I would also like to state that I make my living as a software developer and physical-media artist. I think/read a lot about history and economic issues and consider myself very much a pro-capitalist strong-physical-property-rights sort of person. I am NOT any sort of socialist hippie tree-hugger type that doesn't understand how the world works and wants everything for free.