Bayesian filters sometimes find weird words to do filtering on. Obviously there is 'Viagra' and 'Manhood' but there are also words like 'Republic' that have very high correlations with phishing spam- because any email that from the 'Democratic People's Republic of $Country' is likely to be as bogus as the countries name. If a country needs to add 'Democratic' or 'Republic' to its name, you know something's wrong.
In a similar way, any easily compressed text (like
boing boing boing boing boing boing ) is most likely someone hitting cut and past over and over again. AND I THINK WE CAN AGREE THAT TALKING IN ALL CAPS/-\|\||) |_33+ |5 |_/-\|V|3.
And not one that most people on/. have had experience with. What I find most interesting about it are two things:
1. It's easy to turn off a chat window or go to a different webpage, something you can't do in real life.
2. It's trackable- meaning that if the harrassment becomes bad enough you can easily show authorities what's going on. If someone is threatinging you in a hallway at school, there isn't really any proof you can give the authorities.
Fist, Judicial solutions are Law-based, i.e. legislative.
The real problem is tracing the idiots who send the spam- while we can sue the pants off the few people we can find, we can't find everyone. Also, we have very limited jurisdiction over most of the world- we may be able to identify some Spammer's IP, but we need cooperation with the authorities to do anything about it.
Basically, sueing spammers works great when they are in the U.S. and identifable, but that is not going to stop Spam. Obviously we should sue the buggers we can find- but thinking that will solve the problem is far too optimistic.
Several websites make the same attribution that I do. If I'm crediting the wrong person it at least seems to be a common mistake. Also, some evidence that we're wrong would be good- do you know where he got it from?
Your post advocates a
( ) technical (*) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
(*) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
(*) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(*) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(*) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(*) Asshats
(*) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(*) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
(*) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(*) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(*) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(*) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(*) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
Thanks to Cory Doctorow for his excellent form post.
Since internet bandwidth has limits (it can be clogged with enourmous amounts of material) those paying the most money can get the biggest chunk of that bandwidth. If the demand for bandwidth is high enough, that means the people on the low end of the scale get 'choked' for bandwidth.
I find it fair that people who pay more get more bandwidth and less latency. What would be unfair is if the phone companies claimed to give customers a certain bandwidth and latency and then didn't- something that falls under 'breach of contract' or 'fraud'.
The market converged to IBM compatible PCs running Windows.
Apple/Linux may eventually get enough market share to make Windows cease being a monopoly, but as far as hardware standards go the market has converged.
The Audio Home Recording Act only applies to analog recordings made off the radio. However, looking at the act itself I don't see that.
From The U.S. Copyright Office:
1008. Prohibition on certain infringement actions
No action may be brought under this title alleging infringement of copyright based on the manufacture, importation, or distribution of a digital audio recording device, a digital audio recording medium, an analog recording device, or an analog recording medium, or based on the noncommercial use by a consumer of such a device or medium for making digital musical recordings or analog musical recordings.
It looks like this is saying that you can't sue the makers of any recording device based no the noncommercial use of an infringing consumer. (Not it doesn't stop them from suing the consumer).
I realize there are several problems with it in practice- and that pirates taking the effort to do so can break this. However, this leaves us with a copyright protection scheme that:
A. Isn't a hassle (it doesn't restrict the customer)
B. Is at least as effective at discouraging piracy as anything else they've thought of.
This means that it is the best Protection racket^H Scheme people have come up with yet.
There is the danger of the MPAA sueing some innocent people, but I doubt they'll sue anymore innocents than they already do.
The game I've been spending too much time on recently is Battle For Wesnoth which is an open-source game that runs on Linux, OSX and Windows. Not surprisingly, it's on this list...
Rudolph is still under copyright. "Little Drummer Boy" might also be under copyright, I don't know about that one. Silent Night and Jingle Bells (I think) are old enough that their copyrights have expired. Now to check Wikipedia to see how correct I am!
(5 minutes later) Rudolph is copyrighted. Drummer boy is copyrighted if it was renewed (which I assume it would be). The other 2 are not.
First, I'm obviously going for funny.
Secondly, I feel I should be able to discuss illegal actions without fear of reprisal. If someone is doing something illegal, I would like to be able to point out what they are doing (and where and how they do it) without being an accessory to the crime.
Thirdly, How am I overreacting? Posting pictures of someone else's product for the purposes of discussing said product should be fair use. Next you'll be telling me that the logo they have on Apple Stories is a copyright violation.
By Apple's reasoning, if I published an article that mentioned that The Pirate Bay has copies of OSX you can dowload, they would sue me. Good thing that no pro-Apple people read Slashdot, otherwise I would have to post anonymously...
I'm trying to explain something obvious to you. Ask yourself "Is the average person today richer than they were 50 years ago". If you think the answer is yes, ask yourself how that is possible without the creation of wealth, since clearly there are more people today than there were 50 years ago, so how could they all be richer?.
If you think the answer is no, then ask yourself if you would rather be an average american in the 1950s or an average American today. If an American today has a higher standard of living than they did 50 years ago, aren't they richer?
You're confusing short-term, small-scale economics with long-term, large-scale economics. It's possible for the entire world to have a standard of living much higher than America does now- but it can't happen tomorrow. For 2000+ years every person who predicted that we were about to run out of food/resources/space/wealth has been proven wrong by history. Quality of life (and the creation of wealth) have been rising for thousands of years, and if you can't see the trend and predict that it will continue It's pointless talking to you.
There are several problems with your rant.
First, You call Star Wars I and II 'Top cinema productions'.
Then, you assume that HD-DVD is now superior to Blu-Ray in some meaningful way. (And no, that 1 GB of space it gains with a new format doesn't count)
Last, you assume that most people would be willing to pay $1000+ for a HD LCD Television.
If you wanted to make sense, you might say "People who are willing to pay a few thousand for a home movie experience should upgrade to HD". Then I don't think anyone would disagree.
It looks like the base program comes from Iowa, which gave the program to Wisconsin under the condition that it not be sold commercially. Thus, the trooper cannot sell this program anymore than Microsoft could sell Red Hat Linux without releasing the source code for free. The trooper quite possibly has copyrights to the changes he made, but if so he can only sell the changes he made to someone who already has Iowa's program.
A fair solution would be the officer gives the rights to his employer, and his employer gives him a nice bonus for overtime work ($10,000-$20,000, depending on the amount of time he spent and the quality of the changes he made). If I were him I'd try to settle out of court.
The problem is that I can't tell you which CEOs earn their money and which don't. Some CEOs- like Steve Jobs- seem to earn their paycheck. Others, of course, don't. The same could be said for almost every profession, though. In the long run, though, the companies that overpay their CEOs will do worse than those that don't, and the market will figure this out.
Your statement is only correct with regard to things for which there is a potentially unlimited supply.
Amazingly enough, almost everything is in potentially unlimited supply. For instance, the more people that have enough to afford a Wii, the more Wiis are made. Everyone (especially Nintendo) wins. The only things in limited supply are unique items (like the Mona Lisa), and things artificially restricted (like 'limited edition' cars). If you wanted an excellent look-alike, thoguh, you could get it for a fraction of what the Mona Lisa awould cost. Even things like 'living space' can be manufactured (we can build up with skyscrapers, or down with bigger basements). The more wealth other people have the easier it is to get things from them. For instance, without the wealthiness of Japan, we wouldn't be able to purchase a Wii in he first place.
For most goods- cars, beef, Wiis- there is a finite supply today, but if there is enough demand for the goods, the supply will be greater tomorrow. Farmers will raise more cattle, Nissan will build more cars, Nintendo will build more Wiis.
If you've had some history, you might remember back when "A chicken in every pot and a car in every garage (Hoover, 1928)" was a campaign slogan. Now, do you know anyone who can't afford to eat chicken and whose family doesn't have a car? Unless you work in a homeless shelter, probably not. Back then, though, most people didn't have those things. How do you assume that Economics is Zero-Sum when Americans today have so much more than they did then? I'm sure people back then said brilliant things like "Only 30,000 cars were made this year- there will never be enough made for everyone to have access to one" or "There will never be enough chickens for everyone". As it happens, those people were wrong.
If you just print up a bunch of money and hand it out to people, your logic makes sense- the price of goods rises when the money supply is artifically enhanced. What you are missing, though, is that WORK CREATES WEALTH. If I turn $50 of hardwood into a $200 table, and I sell the table to a customer for $150, both the customer and I have gained value- I have $100 more than when I started, and my customer has a table that is worth $200 (at least to her). That's what Capitalism is all about. This also means that if the rest of the world is doing well, they can make more transactions with us that benefit both of us. A sustinance farmer can't offer me anything of value, while a manufacturer, a programmer, or a mechanized farmer can.
Bottom line: You have the economic comprehension of a five-year old. You are more concered with eliminating competition to your 'front row concert seats' than increasing the number of concerts worth going to. You want to keep 90% of the world poor and uneducated so there is no competition to your job, not realizing that the more educated people we have the more luxuries we can build (and the better we can build them). Mostly, you don't realize that you aren't in competition with everyone else. Life is a game everyone can win. If you have the time and money to post this much on/. you're already one of the winners.
I've yet to see a DRM scheme that didn't interfere with legal uses and was remotely effective. If we invented a DRM scheme that only stopped illegal use without any negative side effects, then I would definitely support it. I would also support building a perpetual motion machine for everyone to fufill all our energy needs.
Some people can generate more wealth than other people, therefore they get paid more. It's only fair. If I can turn $10,000 of raw materials into $21,000 of goods each day, I'm worth 20x someone who can turn $10,000 of raw materials into $10,500 of goods each day. Even though I only produce twice as much, I generate 20x the profit, and I should be compensated accordingly.
There is a limited amount of wealth in our society. It is not an entirely zero-sum game, but it is true that the more wealth the richest have, the less the rest of us have.
For proof that you're incorrect, I ask you to compare America today to America 50 years ago. I posit that we are immensly richer now than we were then as a society- the improvements in medicine, technology, and manufacturing allow us to have much better goods for a smaller percentage of our income now than ever before in human history. What is that but the creation of wealth? How, then, can you say that wealth in our society is limited? The amount of wealth in our society is constantly rising, and it is possible to increase your own wealth without taking it from anyone else. Capitalism creates wealth in addition to redistributing it.
So what you're saying is that if Japan becomes a nicer place to live, that hurts U.S. people? And if Japan becomes as nice a place to live as America, then that's a nightmare for America? Furthermore, you seem to be thinking that once Japan becomes as nice to live as America, then suddenly Japanese will start buying American property because it's just as cheap as theIr own?
Relative Economic strength does affect how good or bad it is to travel abroad, but Japan doing well does not hurt the U.S.
Suppose the quiz were worded like this:
You and your neighbor both get a raise. Which is better for you?
A. You get a 4% raise and your neighbor gets 12%
B. You get a 2% raise and your neighbor gets 1%
Only an idiot (or someone who really hated his neighbor) would choose option B. This is because you are 4% richer instead of 2% richer. Even if the neighbor ends up with a nicer car than yours with A, you're still better off than you are with option B. This is because YOU ARE NOT IN COMPETITION WITH YOUR NEIGHBOR. YOU DON'T 'WIN' BY HAVING MORE MONEY THAN HIM. YOUR INCOME MATTERS TO YOU, HIS INCOME SHOULDN'T.
Fortunately for me, that's how I have a job (and a well paying one, at that). The reason they pay me money is not to compensate for my time lost, it's because they expect my ingenuity to improve the company and make them more money.
Slashdot Mirror
Bayesian filters sometimes find weird words to do filtering on. Obviously there is 'Viagra' and 'Manhood' but there are also words like 'Republic' that have very high correlations with phishing spam- because any email that from the 'Democratic People's Republic of $Country' is likely to be as bogus as the countries name. If a country needs to add 'Democratic' or 'Republic' to its name, you know something's wrong.
/-\|\||) |_33+ |5 |_/-\|V|3.
In a similar way, any easily compressed text (like boing
boing
boing
boing
boing
boing
) is most likely someone hitting cut and past over and over again. AND I THINK WE CAN AGREE THAT TALKING IN ALL CAPS
And not one that most people on /. have had experience with. What I find most interesting about it are two things:
1. It's easy to turn off a chat window or go to a different webpage, something you can't do in real life.
2. It's trackable- meaning that if the harrassment becomes bad enough you can easily show authorities what's going on. If someone is threatinging you in a hallway at school, there isn't really any proof you can give the authorities.
Fist, Judicial solutions are Law-based, i.e. legislative.
The real problem is tracing the idiots who send the spam- while we can sue the pants off the few people we can find, we can't find everyone. Also, we have very limited jurisdiction over most of the world- we may be able to identify some Spammer's IP, but we need cooperation with the authorities to do anything about it.
Basically, sueing spammers works great when they are in the U.S. and identifable, but that is not going to stop Spam. Obviously we should sue the buggers we can find- but thinking that will solve the problem is far too optimistic.
Several websites make the same attribution that I do. If I'm crediting the wrong person it at least seems to be a common mistake. Also, some evidence that we're wrong would be good- do you know where he got it from?
Possibly- but I got it from his site to begin with, so I am crediting my source (even if it is not the original).
Your post advocates a
( ) technical (*) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
(*) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
(*) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(*) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(*) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(*) Asshats
(*) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(*) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
(*) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(*) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(*) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(*) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(*) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
Thanks to Cory Doctorow for his excellent form post.
Since internet bandwidth has limits (it can be clogged with enourmous amounts of material) those paying the most money can get the biggest chunk of that bandwidth. If the demand for bandwidth is high enough, that means the people on the low end of the scale get 'choked' for bandwidth.
I find it fair that people who pay more get more bandwidth and less latency. What would be unfair is if the phone companies claimed to give customers a certain bandwidth and latency and then didn't- something that falls under 'breach of contract' or 'fraud'.
The market converged to IBM compatible PCs running Windows.
Apple/Linux may eventually get enough market share to make Windows cease being a monopoly, but as far as hardware standards go the market has converged.
From The U.S. Copyright Office:
1008. Prohibition on certain infringement actions No action may be brought under this title alleging infringement of copyright based on the manufacture, importation, or distribution of a digital audio recording device, a digital audio recording medium, an analog recording device, or an analog recording medium, or based on the noncommercial use by a consumer of such a device or medium for making digital musical recordings or analog musical recordings.
It looks like this is saying that you can't sue the makers of any recording device based no the noncommercial use of an infringing consumer. (Not it doesn't stop them from suing the consumer).
I may be missing something... any ideas?
I realize there are several problems with it in practice- and that pirates taking the effort to do so can break this. However, this leaves us with a copyright protection scheme that: A. Isn't a hassle (it doesn't restrict the customer) B. Is at least as effective at discouraging piracy as anything else they've thought of. This means that it is the best Protection racket^H Scheme people have come up with yet. There is the danger of the MPAA sueing some innocent people, but I doubt they'll sue anymore innocents than they already do.
The game I've been spending too much time on recently is Battle For Wesnoth which is an open-source game that runs on Linux, OSX and Windows. Not surprisingly, it's on this list...
Rudolph is still under copyright. "Little Drummer Boy" might also be under copyright, I don't know about that one. Silent Night and Jingle Bells (I think) are old enough that their copyrights have expired. Now to check Wikipedia to see how correct I am! (5 minutes later) Rudolph is copyrighted. Drummer boy is copyrighted if it was renewed (which I assume it would be). The other 2 are not.
Now that would be a useful invention!
First, I'm obviously going for funny.
Secondly, I feel I should be able to discuss illegal actions without fear of reprisal. If someone is doing something illegal, I would like to be able to point out what they are doing (and where and how they do it) without being an accessory to the crime.
Thirdly, How am I overreacting? Posting pictures of someone else's product for the purposes of discussing said product should be fair use. Next you'll be telling me that the logo they have on Apple Stories is a copyright violation.
By Apple's reasoning, if I published an article that mentioned that The Pirate Bay has copies of OSX you can dowload, they would sue me. Good thing that no pro-Apple people read Slashdot, otherwise I would have to post anonymously...
I'm trying to explain something obvious to you. Ask yourself "Is the average person today richer than they were 50 years ago".
If you think the answer is yes, ask yourself how that is possible without the creation of wealth, since clearly there are more people today than there were 50 years ago, so how could they all be richer?.
If you think the answer is no, then ask yourself if you would rather be an average american in the 1950s or an average American today. If an American today has a higher standard of living than they did 50 years ago, aren't they richer?
You're confusing short-term, small-scale economics with long-term, large-scale economics. It's possible for the entire world to have a standard of living much higher than America does now- but it can't happen tomorrow. For 2000+ years every person who predicted that we were about to run out of food/resources/space/wealth has been proven wrong by history. Quality of life (and the creation of wealth) have been rising for thousands of years, and if you can't see the trend and predict that it will continue It's pointless talking to you.
There are several problems with your rant.
First, You call Star Wars I and II 'Top cinema productions'.
Then, you assume that HD-DVD is now superior to Blu-Ray in some meaningful way. (And no, that 1 GB of space it gains with a new format doesn't count)
Last, you assume that most people would be willing to pay $1000+ for a HD LCD Television.
If you wanted to make sense, you might say "People who are willing to pay a few thousand for a home movie experience should upgrade to HD". Then I don't think anyone would disagree.
It looks like the base program comes from Iowa, which gave the program to Wisconsin under the condition that it not be sold commercially. Thus, the trooper cannot sell this program anymore than Microsoft could sell Red Hat Linux without releasing the source code for free. The trooper quite possibly has copyrights to the changes he made, but if so he can only sell the changes he made to someone who already has Iowa's program.
A fair solution would be the officer gives the rights to his employer, and his employer gives him a nice bonus for overtime work ($10,000-$20,000, depending on the amount of time he spent and the quality of the changes he made). If I were him I'd try to settle out of court.
The problem is that I can't tell you which CEOs earn their money and which don't. Some CEOs- like Steve Jobs- seem to earn their paycheck. Others, of course, don't. The same could be said for almost every profession, though. In the long run, though, the companies that overpay their CEOs will do worse than those that don't, and the market will figure this out.
Your statement is only correct with regard to things for which there is a potentially unlimited supply.
/. you're already one of the winners.
Amazingly enough, almost everything is in potentially unlimited supply. For instance, the more people that have enough to afford a Wii, the more Wiis are made. Everyone (especially Nintendo) wins. The only things in limited supply are unique items (like the Mona Lisa), and things artificially restricted (like 'limited edition' cars). If you wanted an excellent look-alike, thoguh, you could get it for a fraction of what the Mona Lisa awould cost. Even things like 'living space' can be manufactured (we can build up with skyscrapers, or down with bigger basements). The more wealth other people have the easier it is to get things from them. For instance, without the wealthiness of Japan, we wouldn't be able to purchase a Wii in he first place.
For most goods- cars, beef, Wiis- there is a finite supply today, but if there is enough demand for the goods, the supply will be greater tomorrow. Farmers will raise more cattle, Nissan will build more cars, Nintendo will build more Wiis.
If you've had some history, you might remember back when "A chicken in every pot and a car in every garage (Hoover, 1928)" was a campaign slogan. Now, do you know anyone who can't afford to eat chicken and whose family doesn't have a car? Unless you work in a homeless shelter, probably not. Back then, though, most people didn't have those things. How do you assume that Economics is Zero-Sum when Americans today have so much more than they did then? I'm sure people back then said brilliant things like "Only 30,000 cars were made this year- there will never be enough made for everyone to have access to one" or "There will never be enough chickens for everyone". As it happens, those people were wrong.
If you just print up a bunch of money and hand it out to people, your logic makes sense- the price of goods rises when the money supply is artifically enhanced. What you are missing, though, is that WORK CREATES WEALTH. If I turn $50 of hardwood into a $200 table, and I sell the table to a customer for $150, both the customer and I have gained value- I have $100 more than when I started, and my customer has a table that is worth $200 (at least to her). That's what Capitalism is all about. This also means that if the rest of the world is doing well, they can make more transactions with us that benefit both of us. A sustinance farmer can't offer me anything of value, while a manufacturer, a programmer, or a mechanized farmer can.
Bottom line: You have the economic comprehension of a five-year old. You are more concered with eliminating competition to your 'front row concert seats' than increasing the number of concerts worth going to. You want to keep 90% of the world poor and uneducated so there is no competition to your job, not realizing that the more educated people we have the more luxuries we can build (and the better we can build them). Mostly, you don't realize that you aren't in competition with everyone else. Life is a game everyone can win. If you have the time and money to post this much on
I've yet to see a DRM scheme that didn't interfere with legal uses and was remotely effective. If we invented a DRM scheme that only stopped illegal use without any negative side effects, then I would definitely support it. I would also support building a perpetual motion machine for everyone to fufill all our energy needs.
Some people can generate more wealth than other people, therefore they get paid more. It's only fair. If I can turn $10,000 of raw materials into $21,000 of goods each day, I'm worth 20x someone who can turn $10,000 of raw materials into $10,500 of goods each day. Even though I only produce twice as much, I generate 20x the profit, and I should be compensated accordingly.
For proof that you're incorrect, I ask you to compare America today to America 50 years ago. I posit that we are immensly richer now than we were then as a society- the improvements in medicine, technology, and manufacturing allow us to have much better goods for a smaller percentage of our income now than ever before in human history. What is that but the creation of wealth? How, then, can you say that wealth in our society is limited? The amount of wealth in our society is constantly rising, and it is possible to increase your own wealth without taking it from anyone else. Capitalism creates wealth in addition to redistributing it.
So what you're saying is that if Japan becomes a nicer place to live, that hurts U.S. people? And if Japan becomes as nice a place to live as America, then that's a nightmare for America? Furthermore, you seem to be thinking that once Japan becomes as nice to live as America, then suddenly Japanese will start buying American property because it's just as cheap as theIr own?
Relative Economic strength does affect how good or bad it is to travel abroad, but Japan doing well does not hurt the U.S.
Suppose the quiz were worded like this:
You and your neighbor both get a raise. Which is better for you?
A. You get a 4% raise and your neighbor gets 12%
B. You get a 2% raise and your neighbor gets 1%
Only an idiot (or someone who really hated his neighbor) would choose option B. This is because you are 4% richer instead of 2% richer. Even if the neighbor ends up with a nicer car than yours with A, you're still better off than you are with option B. This is because YOU ARE NOT IN COMPETITION WITH YOUR NEIGHBOR. YOU DON'T 'WIN' BY HAVING MORE MONEY THAN HIM. YOUR INCOME MATTERS TO YOU, HIS INCOME SHOULDN'T.
Fortunately for me, that's how I have a job (and a well paying one, at that). The reason they pay me money is not to compensate for my time lost, it's because they expect my ingenuity to improve the company and make them more money.