I did mention that it wasn't binding, if it was things would for certain be very different.
The members of the are not elected, however they do act on a mandate from the elected government.
Another treaty that discusses this which the United Statse also has signed but not ratified is the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights which if ratified would be binding.
This was done under the administration of president Carter.
There are no rights that people have simply by their existence other than what they can take and defend by themselves. Things such as freedom of speech is something that modern society has decided is something that every person have a right to but freedom of speech has not been an obvious right during most of mankinds existence, it is something we have created quite recently.
By your reasoning the only right we have simply by existing would be the right to freedom of thought because you can't control the thoughts of anyone.
I suggest you reread the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, particularly Article 25
Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
While the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is not a binding document for members of the United Nations most nations including the United States voted for this declaration and hence recognize what is listed in the declaration as essential human rights.
As most nations did vote for this declaration except for saudi arabia and a few communist regimes the right to health care is an internationally recognized human right.
I wonder how long it takes for them to announce their new cloud computing interface conveniently named Skynet
or perhaps their Cylon line of robotic factory workers.
As long as the photo posted cannot be classed as offensive you can pretty much post anything you want in most jurisdictions.
But if along with said photo you post any personally identifiable information such as license plate numbers, name, SSN etc, there might be additional rules and regulations you must follow concerning how you handle and spread that information because as that combination of information makes it possible for anyone to identify the person in the image and many jurisdictions(outside the US anyway) consider that person's right to privacy more important than your right to post your party pictures online.
If you find such a photo and personally identifiable information on facebook you can send them a takedown notice or can sue them in your jurisdiction if they do not comply in a resonable amount of time.
Reelections is pretty rare in most european countries but a multiparty system forces the parties to cooperate so even the smaller parties have a chance at getting involved in making policy because the larger parties often end up needing their support in votes. Also european countries usually have alot less "campaign contributions"(bribes!), which is also a very good thing.
It's not like this political instability you speak of is the kind that prevents countries from operating in this case.
Exactly how does it benefit the rest of the world that the bureaucrats is from the United States instead of the United Nations? Sure it obviously benefits the United States but why should the rest of the world give a damn about that?
The rest of the world actually has more to say about who gets a post in the United Nations than in the United States which ofcourse is right since the rest of the world should not have any say in the internal workings of another government.
But do not try to make it sound as if the world is better off with a bunch of bureaucrats from the United States than a different bunch of bureaucrats from the United Nations.
A private or non-profit organisation suffers from the same problem, they have to be based somewhere and will thus fall under the sole jurisdiction of one particular country.
It's still very much illegal though because you're not allowed to circumvent DRM.
The content creators does their very best to rob their users of the right to make personal copies aswell as the right of first sale plus the measures they include to enforce those limitations of the customers rights screws with the customers computer and as long as they keep disrespecting their customers they don't deserve that customers respect their rights.
Yes geography is a significant factor, it's not so much the actual distance that is significant but the population density and how difficult laying the cable is. I agree with you on your points about Japan and South Korea since they have a population density far outreaching the United States, Sweden on the other hand has a popolation density that is roughly 2/3rd's of the United States' and a terrain that on average is much harder to lay cable in.
So if you include the fact that the United States has about 300 Million inhabitants compared to Sweden's 9 Million which you so conveniently left out and then add to that the fact that it's not significantly more expensive to lay down a cable that supports more throughput thanacable with less throughput.
The sum of that ought to mean that Sweden should have broadband costs that are significantly higher than those of the united States, however that is obviously not the case.
Yes and then the people on the other side will find a way to block the ads in a manner that is harder to detect. As long as the advertisers insist on using intrusive/tracking ad systems there will be an armsrace over this issue.
You should not blame those that create these services since there is obviously a demand for them. You should be blaming the people that makes the ads that drives the people to go to these measures.
Yes there is probably a legal recourse unless the system is opt-in which according to the article this system is then I don't see what they could do against it as the user actively requested it, I am not a lawyer though.
Hopefully this development will drive site ads towards textads and regular image ads without tracking capabilities. Getting rid of overlay ads, flashing gif animations and flash ads and every other intrusive/tracking advertisements will make the internet a better place.
Yes but they should also scale with the size of the copyright owner. so if it's your scale for a regular person it should be just as onerous for a companies like Microsoft and the **AA members.
Not everyone can make a profit in 5 years, especially if they are a person and not a corporation so a system with extensions allows for the possibility of giving you extra time to show a profit because you usually have to find somone who's willing to invest in your idea.
Yes corporations will try to find loopholes but that isn't a reason not to try.
I suggested it should scale with company size because that burdens the small and large company just as much.
Preferrably it should be tied companywide net revenue as those have to be reported publicly and cheating with those numbers already carries very stiff fines and possibly jailtime for the responsible persons.
Also something should be done to prevent transfer of the copyright to low profit subsidiaries.
Perhaps I was unclear but I meant that the extensions should cost money. The initial period of 5-10 years should be free but any extensions will cost money.
So in the examples you mentioned they would still get the basic copyright period.
Yes the small company shouldn't be unfairly obstructed by the cost but the huge media conglomerates needs to feel the cost just as much as that small company, hence why it needs to scale.
Any nonscaling fee is unfair because it burdens small companies more than large.
The initial copyright period should only be as long as what it takes on average to get return on your invstments. After that it should be very expensive to maintain copyright as that is not what the system was designed for.
The argument here is not wether he was wrong to gain financialprofit from the works of somone else, most people would agree that that is wrong.
The argument instead becomes wether we as a society should allow copyright durations to be so long that the product have long gone out of sale before it's released to the public and wether products that aren't availible from the copyright owner should benefit from copyright.
It is my personal opinion that unless the copyright owner is actively selling the product(and at a competitive price) they shouldn't be eligble for copyright on that particular product, the competitive pricing part should be there to prevent the copyright owner from simply putting the product on some obscure webshop at ridiculous price to claim they're still selling it. If the copyright owner has a derivative work this should not be reason enough to extend copyright on the original product but the franchise should still be protected. That way people could for example distribute the original mario games but be prevented from making derivative works from them as nintendo is still selling games under the mario franchise.
The fee needs to be large and onerous not a small fee but the fee also needs to scale with the company seeking prolonged copyright on their wokrs.
This way it will only be the works that the copyright owner intend to keep selling that will be economically feasible to extend copyright on.
Alternatively you put an initial limit on say 5 years on the copyright that can be extended for a relatively small price(though this also needs to scale with the size of the company seeking the copyright) for another 5 years, and then another extension for another 5 years at a much steeper scaling price. and then another 5 year extension that is much steeper than the 2nd extension and so on.
Under this system copyrighted works would generally become public much faster than with the current system but companies could also extend the protection up to a certain point where it'd be so expensive to maintain the copyright that they would have to release it.
The South Ossetians want to be an independent country. The voted overwhelmingly to do so in 2006. The Russians respect that. The Georgians and their allies (read: us) do not.
The right of a people to choose their leadership should not be overlooked here.
Ok, time for a reality check here, have you ever heard about a place called Chechnya? If you haven't it's a place in russia that also wants to be free, the russian response to that was to viciously supress that with military force and by installing a puppet regime in that province.
Having respect for human lives and not wanting to destroy the whole world yourself included are two quite different although distantly related things.
Your assumptions about an eventual nuclear war is quite flawed as you include only the immediate effects and discard that the US had the numerical advantage when it came to nukes.
Things like nuclear fallout and nuclear winter would take care of everyone who didn't have the fortune of dying instantly.
The point is not what US would do if 2000 americans were murdered but what US would do if say 2000 mexicans got killed. Would US still go apeshit, I don't think so.
Yes and all those games are GREAT games which is why atleast I am willing to pay for them.
Except for when the developer does something incredibly stupid like Bioware did with the PC verion of Mass Effect, add a draconic DRM system that completely erases any value of the time and money they spent on making a truly great game.
And no I didn't pirate Mass Effect I borrowed the game from a friend along with his 360 to play it because I don't have a console of my own, only my computer and I would have paid for a copy of the game if not for that stupid DRM crap they put in the game. I own several of Black Isle and Obsidian Entertainment's games but Mass Effect will not be joining them in my bookshelf anytime soon.
For sure the manufacturers make a whole bundle of money but they also make a mhuge bundle of money on the enterprise deals, maybe not on the computers themselves but on the very juicy support contracts that inevitably come with them.
Ok I can buy that the graphics market wouldn't have been what it is without gaming because thats the single biggest use of high end cards.
But the manufacturers have very little incentive to give part of their profits to the game developers because even though graphics card sales might depend heavily on gaming the manufacturers know that the game producers have to make games for their own benefit since otherwise they go out of business and they are well aware that the consumers demand shiny new graphics in a game so the developers can't exactly come with an ultimatum tp not make graphic heavy games either.
Yes that is one alternative but the time would still be alot longer than most people would accept.
Atleast for the initial product since that would have to include things like engine design and things like that(sometimes you can license then engine from another company but they still have to be made and funded from time to time) and the initial cost in this case would be quite high meaning you have to charge more for the first episode, which would probably not be a price the consumers are not willing to pay for such a short game.
The consumers would also expect a lower price on the conscutive episodes because "the developer doesn't have the same costs for development costs" or we would run into the same problem with piracy again.
I don't think there is any easy solution to this situation.
Mostly, the people who want a product they can play.
(Also, the people who benefit in some other way from the existence of new games. NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel would have an incentive to fund game development, for example, since new games drive the sales of new graphics cards and processors.)
Without computer games there would still be a market for computers but without computers computer games wouldn't exist so actually it's the other way around.
Doesn't the current system already fund this development?
Not well enough, it seems. Why would they be worried about piracy if the current system is doing such a great job?
Piracy is a threat because the current business model requires the developer to be the sole source of copies. The reality, however, is that anyone can make and distribute their own copies: after over 20 years of game development, they're still trying fruitlessly to stop it. Copying is only getting easier.
You can't change the nature of information to make it uncopyable, but you can switch to a business model that isn't threatened by copying.
No it's not that easy, if people pay for a product they expect to get it within a resonable timeframe and computer games takes years to produce and the only things people would wait that long for are things like Ferraris and yachts, things that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars per copy, not something that costs 50 dollars.
Unlike the resturant analogy you won't get your product in what most people would consider a resonable timeframe from when they part with their money.
People are shortsighted and won't pay for a product that won't see the light in a year or more.
Somone has to pay for the software ahead of time yes, because the programmers won't accept to go without pay until the game is released but it won't ever be the end users because they don't have the patience to pay for something and then wait 2 years for the product to be produced.
The difference would be that taxes is something the government can do something about, the local prices of a global product is something that would be very hard to affect except maybe through subsidizing the price though thats something I doubt the US government could afford at the moment due to the Iraq war and all that.
The only price the government might be able to influence is any nationally produced oil.
Slashdot Mirror
I did mention that it wasn't binding, if it was things would for certain be very different.
The members of the are not elected, however they do act on a mandate from the elected government.
Another treaty that discusses this which the United Statse also has signed but not ratified is the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights which if ratified would be binding.
This was done under the administration of president Carter.
There are no rights that people have simply by their existence other than what they can take and defend by themselves. Things such as freedom of speech is something that modern society has decided is something that every person have a right to but freedom of speech has not been an obvious right during most of mankinds existence, it is something we have created quite recently.
By your reasoning the only right we have simply by existing would be the right to freedom of thought because you can't control the thoughts of anyone.
Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
While the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is not a binding document for members of the United Nations most nations including the United States voted for this declaration and hence recognize what is listed in the declaration as essential human rights. As most nations did vote for this declaration except for saudi arabia and a few communist regimes the right to health care is an internationally recognized human right.
I wonder how long it takes for them to announce their new cloud computing interface conveniently named Skynet
or perhaps their Cylon line of robotic factory workers.
As long as the photo posted cannot be classed as offensive you can pretty much post anything you want in most jurisdictions.
But if along with said photo you post any personally identifiable information such as license plate numbers, name, SSN etc, there might be additional rules and regulations you must follow concerning how you handle and spread that information because as that combination of information makes it possible for anyone to identify the person in the image and many jurisdictions(outside the US anyway) consider that person's right to privacy more important than your right to post your party pictures online.
If you find such a photo and personally identifiable information on facebook you can send them a takedown notice or can sue them in your jurisdiction if they do not comply in a resonable amount of time.
And exactly how is that a bad thing?
Reelections is pretty rare in most european countries but a multiparty system forces the parties to cooperate so even the smaller parties have a chance at getting involved in making policy because the larger parties often end up needing their support in votes. Also european countries usually have alot less "campaign contributions"(bribes!), which is also a very good thing.
It's not like this political instability you speak of is the kind that prevents countries from operating in this case.
Exactly how does it benefit the rest of the world that the bureaucrats is from the United States instead of the United Nations? Sure it obviously benefits the United States but why should the rest of the world give a damn about that?
The rest of the world actually has more to say about who gets a post in the United Nations than in the United States which ofcourse is right since the rest of the world should not have any say in the internal workings of another government.
But do not try to make it sound as if the world is better off with a bunch of bureaucrats from the United States than a different bunch of bureaucrats from the United Nations. A private or non-profit organisation suffers from the same problem, they have to be based somewhere and will thus fall under the sole jurisdiction of one particular country.
It's still very much illegal though because you're not allowed to circumvent DRM.
The content creators does their very best to rob their users of the right to make personal copies aswell as the right of first sale plus the measures they include to enforce those limitations of the customers rights screws with the customers computer and as long as they keep disrespecting their customers they don't deserve that customers respect their rights.
Yes geography is a significant factor, it's not so much the actual distance that is significant but the population density and how difficult laying the cable is. I agree with you on your points about Japan and South Korea since they have a population density far outreaching the United States, Sweden on the other hand has a popolation density that is roughly 2/3rd's of the United States' and a terrain that on average is much harder to lay cable in.
So if you include the fact that the United States has about 300 Million inhabitants compared to Sweden's 9 Million which you so conveniently left out and then add to that the fact that it's not significantly more expensive to lay down a cable that supports more throughput thanacable with less throughput.
The sum of that ought to mean that Sweden should have broadband costs that are significantly higher than those of the united States, however that is obviously not the case.
Yes and then the people on the other side will find a way to block the ads in a manner that is harder to detect. As long as the advertisers insist on using intrusive/tracking ad systems there will be an armsrace over this issue.
You should not blame those that create these services since there is obviously a demand for them. You should be blaming the people that makes the ads that drives the people to go to these measures.
Yes there is probably a legal recourse unless the system is opt-in which according to the article this system is then I don't see what they could do against it as the user actively requested it, I am not a lawyer though.
Hopefully this development will drive site ads towards textads and regular image ads without tracking capabilities. Getting rid of overlay ads, flashing gif animations and flash ads and every other intrusive/tracking advertisements will make the internet a better place.
Yes but they should also scale with the size of the copyright owner. so if it's your scale for a regular person it should be just as onerous for a companies like Microsoft and the **AA members.
Not everyone can make a profit in 5 years, especially if they are a person and not a corporation so a system with extensions allows for the possibility of giving you extra time to show a profit because you usually have to find somone who's willing to invest in your idea.
Yes corporations will try to find loopholes but that isn't a reason not to try.
I suggested it should scale with company size because that burdens the small and large company just as much.
Preferrably it should be tied companywide net revenue as those have to be reported publicly and cheating with those numbers already carries very stiff fines and possibly jailtime for the responsible persons.
Also something should be done to prevent transfer of the copyright to low profit subsidiaries.
Perhaps I was unclear but I meant that the extensions should cost money. The initial period of 5-10 years should be free but any extensions will cost money.
So in the examples you mentioned they would still get the basic copyright period.
Yes the small company shouldn't be unfairly obstructed by the cost but the huge media conglomerates needs to feel the cost just as much as that small company, hence why it needs to scale.
Any nonscaling fee is unfair because it burdens small companies more than large.
The initial copyright period should only be as long as what it takes on average to get return on your invstments. After that it should be very expensive to maintain copyright as that is not what the system was designed for.
The argument here is not wether he was wrong to gain financialprofit from the works of somone else, most people would agree that that is wrong.
The argument instead becomes wether we as a society should allow copyright durations to be so long that the product have long gone out of sale before it's released to the public and wether products that aren't availible from the copyright owner should benefit from copyright.
It is my personal opinion that unless the copyright owner is actively selling the product(and at a competitive price) they shouldn't be eligble for copyright on that particular product, the competitive pricing part should be there to prevent the copyright owner from simply putting the product on some obscure webshop at ridiculous price to claim they're still selling it. If the copyright owner has a derivative work this should not be reason enough to extend copyright on the original product but the franchise should still be protected. That way people could for example distribute the original mario games but be prevented from making derivative works from them as nintendo is still selling games under the mario franchise.
The fee needs to be large and onerous not a small fee but the fee also needs to scale with the company seeking prolonged copyright on their wokrs.
This way it will only be the works that the copyright owner intend to keep selling that will be economically feasible to extend copyright on.
Alternatively you put an initial limit on say 5 years on the copyright that can be extended for a relatively small price(though this also needs to scale with the size of the company seeking the copyright) for another 5 years, and then another extension for another 5 years at a much steeper scaling price. and then another 5 year extension that is much steeper than the 2nd extension and so on.
Under this system copyrighted works would generally become public much faster than with the current system but companies could also extend the protection up to a certain point where it'd be so expensive to maintain the copyright that they would have to release it.
The South Ossetians want to be an independent country. The voted overwhelmingly to do so in 2006. The Russians respect that. The Georgians and their allies (read: us) do not. The right of a people to choose their leadership should not be overlooked here.
Ok, time for a reality check here, have you ever heard about a place called Chechnya? If you haven't it's a place in russia that also wants to be free, the russian response to that was to viciously supress that with military force and by installing a puppet regime in that province.
Having respect for human lives and not wanting to destroy the whole world yourself included are two quite different although distantly related things.
Your assumptions about an eventual nuclear war is quite flawed as you include only the immediate effects and discard that the US had the numerical advantage when it came to nukes. Things like nuclear fallout and nuclear winter would take care of everyone who didn't have the fortune of dying instantly.
The point is not what US would do if 2000 americans were murdered but what US would do if say 2000 mexicans got killed. Would US still go apeshit, I don't think so.
Yes and all those games are GREAT games which is why atleast I am willing to pay for them.
Except for when the developer does something incredibly stupid like Bioware did with the PC verion of Mass Effect, add a draconic DRM system that completely erases any value of the time and money they spent on making a truly great game.
And no I didn't pirate Mass Effect I borrowed the game from a friend along with his 360 to play it because I don't have a console of my own, only my computer and I would have paid for a copy of the game if not for that stupid DRM crap they put in the game. I own several of Black Isle and Obsidian Entertainment's games but Mass Effect will not be joining them in my bookshelf anytime soon.
For sure the manufacturers make a whole bundle of money but they also make a mhuge bundle of money on the enterprise deals, maybe not on the computers themselves but on the very juicy support contracts that inevitably come with them.
Ok I can buy that the graphics market wouldn't have been what it is without gaming because thats the single biggest use of high end cards.
But the manufacturers have very little incentive to give part of their profits to the game developers because even though graphics card sales might depend heavily on gaming the manufacturers know that the game producers have to make games for their own benefit since otherwise they go out of business and they are well aware that the consumers demand shiny new graphics in a game so the developers can't exactly come with an ultimatum tp not make graphic heavy games either.
Yes that is one alternative but the time would still be alot longer than most people would accept.
Atleast for the initial product since that would have to include things like engine design and things like that(sometimes you can license then engine from another company but they still have to be made and funded from time to time) and the initial cost in this case would be quite high meaning you have to charge more for the first episode, which would probably not be a price the consumers are not willing to pay for such a short game.
The consumers would also expect a lower price on the conscutive episodes because "the developer doesn't have the same costs for development costs" or we would run into the same problem with piracy again.
I don't think there is any easy solution to this situation.
Mostly, the people who want a product they can play.
(Also, the people who benefit in some other way from the existence of new games. NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel would have an incentive to fund game development, for example, since new games drive the sales of new graphics cards and processors.)
Without computer games there would still be a market for computers but without computers computer games wouldn't exist so actually it's the other way around.
Doesn't the current system already fund this development?
Not well enough, it seems. Why would they be worried about piracy if the current system is doing such a great job?
Piracy is a threat because the current business model requires the developer to be the sole source of copies. The reality, however, is that anyone can make and distribute their own copies: after over 20 years of game development, they're still trying fruitlessly to stop it. Copying is only getting easier.
You can't change the nature of information to make it uncopyable, but you can switch to a business model that isn't threatened by copying.
No it's not that easy, if people pay for a product they expect to get it within a resonable timeframe and computer games takes years to produce and the only things people would wait that long for are things like Ferraris and yachts, things that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars per copy, not something that costs 50 dollars.
Unlike the resturant analogy you won't get your product in what most people would consider a resonable timeframe from when they part with their money.
People are shortsighted and won't pay for a product that won't see the light in a year or more.
Somone has to pay for the software ahead of time yes, because the programmers won't accept to go without pay until the game is released but it won't ever be the end users because they don't have the patience to pay for something and then wait 2 years for the product to be produced.
The difference would be that taxes is something the government can do something about, the local prices of a global product is something that would be very hard to affect except maybe through subsidizing the price though thats something I doubt the US government could afford at the moment due to the Iraq war and all that.
The only price the government might be able to influence is any nationally produced oil.