There's a direct correlation between grades and later economic success, and most decent parents manage to translate this into more concrete terms that kids, almost all of whom are delightfully stupid, can understand.
I'll ignore that offensive generalization for now.
Remember, correlation is not causation. I've never heard of an employer requesting a high school transcript, which leads me to believe the cause here is one of two things:
1. Better high school grades lead to easier college enrollment, and a degree leads to higher pay. However, getting high grades in HS isn't the only route to college - anyone who can sign his name can get into community college, and once you've finished that, transferring to a real college isn't difficult.
AND/OR
2. Students who are internally driven to perform well in school, for whatever reason, are also driven to perform well at work, and thus they earn more. In this case, external pressure to get higher grades won't change a thing, because it won't change the student's internal drives.
When I was young, my mom would pay me based on how good my grades were. She used to say, "Good grades are money in the bank. You'll earn scholarships for college, and once you're out in the working world, you'll make a lot more." She was so very right, and to make the point that good grades are money in the bank, she tied it to my allowance, so it was literally money in my bank.
Good. This positive reinforcement, and the negative reinforcement you mention later, provide very real motivations to achieve in school, mirroring the real world. Unfortunately, not every student's parents are so involved, and of the ones who are, many of them are only focused on negative reinforcement. If the school district would set up a similar reward program, I think we'd see students with a lot more motivation to do well.
Buuuutt.... I guess you would need to compile two versions of the same thing and put it on the same game disk, or figure out some kind of neat system so that translations are done in real time with hardware (much faster than the soft approach).
Two (or four) words: just-in-time compilation.
Put a metadata tag on each graphics API function that says "this function can be implemented as an opcode". Then, when the game is JIT compiled (at install time, load time, or on demand), invocations of those functions are compiled as single graphics opcodes if the hardware supports it, or library calls otherwise.
Of course, you have to write for a JIT-capable platform to make that work, but there are several reasons why you might want to do that anyway (besides the one or two reasons why you wouldn't).
Well, many students don't, and that's the problem. If you want someone to put effort into learning about, for example, the Indian tribes that lived in his region two hundred years earlier, and he doesn't see any benefit in learning it, then you aren't going to convince him just by saying "education is important" or "you need this credit to graduate". Sometimes it's a case of not making the effort to show students how the knowledge is useful, but sometimes the knowledge just isn't that useful and the curriculum needs to be reexamined.
In any case, the point is you can't look at how hard someone works in school, and then apply that to how hard he'll work when he's being paid for his time. He may or may not have been motivated to work in school (due to his interest in the subject, the value he placed on graduating or getting high grades, the pressure applied by his parents or coaches, etc.), but he will be motivated to work at work because that's how he gets paid.
You're not going to get anything out of a test or project if you only put in is the bare minimum. You get what you put in back. You can have the greatest teachers in the world, but you're not going to get anything out of it if you're not willing to put your fair share of work in.
Often, you won't get anything out of it no matter what you do (other than a passing grade and some knowledge which you'll gradually forget over the next few months). You cannot motivate an uninterested student by telling him "maybe if you work really hard at this you'll get something out of it" when (1) you can't even tell him what it is he'll get, and/or (2) he's tried it before and found it a waste of time.
while our perception of "purple" is partially activated by very short wavelength visible light, to perceive a strong purple signal, you also need some red in there
Hrm. If this is true, then why do we see violet light in the rainbow created by a prism? The red light is all down at the other end.
I think a lot of the reasons things "get better after high school" is because of the age you are when in high school. [...] it just seems like a lot of those feelings stem from puberty and the social environment created by forcing kids of those ages to interact.
I think that's true to an extent, but there's at least one other aspect: the age you are when you're in high school doesn't just affect your own thoughts and behavior, it also affects how you're treated by others. When you're in high school, you're generally looked down upon by society because of your age. There are huge categories of things you can't do, things you can't buy, jobs you can't have, places you can't go, etc. When you graduate high school, most of those magically go away within a year - not because you're out of high school, but because you're over 18.
Of course, that's not to take away from the very real problems with school itself. Students are forced to attend classes they have no interest in, given no real reward for their work and thus no motivation for doing it, and tested on a curriculum that's often nothing but meaningless trivia which they'll forget a week later (you probably took a local/regional history class - when was the last time you used anything you learned there?).
There's a big difference between your statistical observation about the average salaries of high school graduates vs. dropouts, and the actual exchange of money for time worked that takes place in the real world. Students aren't directly rewarded for going to school.
If you're not willing to do the bare minimum of what it takes to get through high school, I don't care how smart you are, I don't want you working for me. If I'm an employer looking to hire someone, there's a pretty good chance that they'll be bored to tears at some point with their job. I don't want them skipping out on me just because they have to be amused and entertained the whole time I'm paying them.
The problem with this theory is there isn't really much motivation to do well in high school. If you do well in your job, you get a promotion; if you do poorly, you get fired. Those have meaning because they translate into the amount of money you're taking home, which has a direct impact on your life.
OTOH, what are the consequences of doing well in school? The piece of paper you take home at the end of the quarter has an "A" on it. What are the consequences of doing poorly? The piece of paper has a "D" on it. If you do really poorly, it has an "F" on it, and you have to take the same class again next year.. but after a few years of that, you get to leave anyway and take control of your own life.
Point is, to the student who doesn't have some other motivation to do well in school, none of those consequences have any meaning. So all you can really conclude from a dropout is "this person won't expend effort for no reason" - you can't conclude that he won't be a good employee, because you pay your employees, giving them a reason to expend effort.
US children suffer from an epidemic and acute case of lack of self-discipline. Everything's got to be me, me, me, and it's got to be now, now, now. I don't want to study for that test! I don't want to work on my project!
Again, in light of the above, it's a mistake to attribute this to a lack of self-discipline. If you aren't going to get anything out of studying for a test or working on a project, why should you want to do it?
[quoted: It's quite possible that fewer works will be produced when creators have to find their audience before starting (to arrange payment for their time) instead of afterward (to sell copies).]
Then you agree with me and your point is invalid from the beginning.
Er, not really. My point in the beginning was that people will pay for things they want; if they want a book to be written, someone will pay for it.
Value is not a collective thing. Most books would not be published.
Now you're just guessing. I contend that most books would be published, because most authors aren't so lazy that they'd give up on writing just because they had to find someone to pay them for their time. After all, that's what everyone else does: in just about every other field of endeavor, you find an employer or a customer before you expend the effort, not afterward. I don't think authors as a whole are lazier than everyone else - but I suppose I could be wrong, eh?
That they are published and sell means they had value to someone and a willful exchange of value occured between the author/publisher/editor "team" and an individual reader.
Yes, that's true. Congratulations, you understand why people buy things... but you seem to be missing the point that not everything has the same value. A book that can be used more freely has more value. Rational buyers will be willing to pay more for its creation, and the people who end up reading it will be able to extract more benefit. The latter is more important than the former when we consider the purpose of copyright, which is to promote artistic creation for the benefit of the public: if the public can benefit more overall from fewer, more useful works, then perhaps the purpose of copyright is best served by repealing it.
[quoted: how many people could there possible be who import text files from Unix systems]
Answer: EVERY SINGLE F**KING ONE OF THE WINDOWS USERS HERE.
Whoa, settle down there, cowboy! That sentence wasn't done. Continue reading it and you'll discover there are more words at the end which change its meaning!
Yes, lots of us slashdotters use Unix text files. But we're also clever enough to realize that Windows comes with more than one text editor, so we can open them with Wordpad or edit.com if we just need to read them, or download a decent editor if we need to write them too. So I repeat, how many Windows users do you think there are who need to work with Unix text files but are too stupid to figure out how to do it?
I'd like to know how they managed to add utf-8 support to Notepad, remove that 64K barrier you mentioned, and still not fix the linefeed problem.
They didn't add it to Notepad, they added it to the multiline edit control - Unicode support and the removal of the 64k barrier were some of the improvements made in NT. Linefeeds weren't a priority, presumably because the multiline edit control isn't supposed to be a complete text editor, and it's not difficult for apps to convert line breaks themselves.
And why Word and wordpad and VC++ IDE and every single other program I try on Windows has no problem handling bare linefeeds
Easy: they don't use the standard multiline edit control, they use the rich edit control or their own custom controls.
Also the "standard textbox" displays linefeeds as newlines. It has to, considering you can give it a constant string from in-memory in a C program.
I think you're mistaken. According to MSDN and the MS developer blogs, you need to use \r\n for a line break, not just \n. See, for one example, the comments here.
What you are talking about is a specialized widget that edits file contents only.
Something tells me you aren't a Windows developer.
[RMS] lives in an ideal world where there is no pragamatism, no compromise, where everyone can do what they love without having to worry about putting food on the table.
What a strange thing to say. I've seen no evidence of that in anything he's said. Care to explain?
He believes that because many people in the US are willing to work crap jobs for no money, that programmers should be willing to work for $35,000 a year(that's not an exaggeration).
I'm sure it isn't an exaggeration; it doesn't sound unreasonable at all. Maybe you live in an area with an unusually high cost of living, but around here, you can put food on the table for $35k a year, and plenty of people would be happy to earn that much. Hell, I am a programmer and I make less than that. How much do you think a programmer should make?
Wow, talk about paranoid. Notepad exhibits that behavior because it's just a thin wrapper around the standard text box control. Remember when you couldn't load any files bigger than 64k in Notepad? That was because of an OS limit too. The standard text box isn't meant to be a full-featured text editor. Notepad's flaws are the result of laziness, not malice.
Here's another nail in the coffin of your theory: how many people could there possible be who import text files from Unix systems--or who even know what Unix is--but still aren't sophisticated enough to figure out how to open them with Wordpad (or good old EDIT.COM), which has no problem with Unix line breaks?
Do you think that this many books and this many authors would exist
is not a good measure of whether artificial scarcity is a positive thing. A book that's encumbered by copyright is less desirable than a book you can freely download, read, copy, share, and use as a base for derived works. You can't just look at the number of works that have been created without also considering how free the public is to enjoy them.
It's quite possible that fewer works will be produced when creators have to find their audience before starting (to arrange payment for their time) instead of afterward (to sell copies). However, it's unlikely that there would be so few as to offset the added value of the works that are created.
Do you think that this many books and this many authors would exist if each author had to find one person willing to spend $40k for the book so that the person and everyone else could read it for free, or to find 2700 people willing to pay $15 for the book?
The author already has to find 2700 people willing to pay $15 for the book, or else he will have wasted all the time he put into writing it. The only difference is when he'd have to find them.
It's also consistent with our status as an independent nation-state.
It's incredibly funny that the WTO is being used to abuse the sovereignty of the US.
Er, we gave up that little bit of "sovereignty" when we joined the WTO. Treaties are the law of the land, according to the Constitution. The WTO isn't being used to abuse us; the whole point of treaties is that we give up something in exchange for getting something from the other signatories.
Without copyright, I could take a computer program whose source code is available, introduce some improvements and then distribute only the binaries while I make a business of supporting my improved version of the program.
And then everyone who gets those binaries can disassemble them, find your changes, and introduce them back into the publically available source code. If you've obfuscated it well enough that that doesn't work, they can just reimplement your changes in the public branch... or distribute your binaries themselves and provide their own support. Next?
GPL *forces* me to give the source code to whomever I give the binaries.
Would Leonardo's "Mona Lisa" or Van Gogh's "Starry Night" be anything special if it could be duplicated?
Yes, of course they would. We know that because we live in a world where they can be duplicated, and they are - we all know what the Mona Lisa looks like, but few of us have gone to see the original painting in person. Those paintings are still special, don't you think?
Would those artists even bothered creating those masterpieces if they can easily be duplicated?
I don't see why not. After all, that's exactly what they did.
Part of art is to create something that has never existed before, which means it is the instance and the design.
That doesn't make sense at all. Something that has never existed before can still be duplicated.
If you paid $1M for your hat and everyone else got it for free, you may feel like you have been taken advantage of.
Not really.. if having the hat is worth $1 million to me, it doesn't matter who else has one, because I've gotten good value for my money already.
It's like you buying a $100 gift certificate for your friend's birthday and everyone else at the party that didn't pitch in for the gift putting their name on it.
Well, what's my motivation for buying my friend a birthday present: is it just to give him an extra $100, or is it to gain recognition for being the one who gave it to him? Probably both, and in that case, everyone else putting their name on it does harm me, because it dilutes the recognition I get. However, everyone else having a copy of the hat I paid for doesn't harm me if I don't care how many people wear the same hat.
You may be a little upset that you are the one that footed the cost for everyone else's benefit or you may be happy that everyone else that didn't buy a gift is now covered. If it is the latter, how happy would you be if you were the one that is always picking up the check?
Why would it always be me picking up the check? Is it just always that much more important to me to get whatever it is I'm paying for? If so, I'm getting good value for my money. If not, there's no reason for me to pick up the check all the time; most of the time, it'll be more important to someone else than it is to me, so they'll pay and I'll ride along for free. It all balances out.
You assume it is all about showing off. Maybe it is about supporting local business or creating something unique and special. I'm sure you just rolled your eyes, but if you can play idealist, so can I:)
I don't think I'm being idealistic. Everything I've said here is based on nothing more radical than the idea that people will pay for things they want if they can't get them any other way, which is the basis of capitalism in general.
But why would anyone pay for anything, when they can just wait until someone ELSE pays for it and then copy it for free?
Because if no one pays for it, it won't get created at all. It doesn't take long to notice that the thing you're waiting for isn't happening, and at that point, you realize you'll have to make a move if you ever want to see it happen.
Seriously, are YOU going to pay top dollar to have something created, when it would cost you exactly nothing to sponge off someone else?
If I knew I could wait and get it for free, then of course not. But the only way I can know that is if I know there's someone else who values that creation enough that he's willing to pay for it, which solves the problem quite nicely: the creator gets paid and everyone gets to use what he created.
So you basically think that anyone who took a federal student loan should never be able to patent anything that is based on the education they got with that loan.
No, I don't. The difference--besides the fact that student loans are loans, and I think you mean grants--is that I consider education funding a service provided by the government for the benefit of students (even though it often benefits the rest of us, indirectly, to live in a country with more educated citizens).
Medical research grants, on the other hand, aren't provided for the benefit of universities or drug companies, but for the benefit of all citizens in the form of better health care. If many of us don't actually get access to better health care because the high prices enforced by patents keep new treatments out of our reach, the grants have failed.
How about all the tax breaks the federal gvt gives (not taking healtcare benefits or IRAs)? Should these be considered subsidies that make a company not able to patent anything.
If those tax breaks are given for the specific purpose of researching something for our benefit, yes, but I don't think many of them are.
Your tax dollars are not buying you the right to any products that company happens to make, it is paying encourage that company to make products the gvt likes.
There's no point in encouraging them to make a product I like if I'm not going to have access to it.
If you don't care about legality or quality control, you can already buy all kinds of knockoff drugs.
I do care about quality control. I think a reputable maker of generic drugs is a lot more likely to make quality "knockoffs" than a company that has to fly under the radar because what they're doing is illegal.
They do not owe the current students a tuition subsidy, but they do owe compensation to the professors and institution that developed the drug. No drug is developed entirely by government grants.
And yet you want to treat them as if they're not developed with any government grants at all, which isn't true either.
Exactly. "The GPL depends on copyright" is a big red herring when it comes up in discussions on copyright, because the GPL turns copyright against itself - that's what "copyleft" means. It essentially uses copyright law to force you to give your users the same rights they'd have anyway if copyright didn't exist in the first place.
Supposed you *could* put a car on a Xerox machine and get a real copy of it. It still takes a lot of time to design the car (aerodynamics, mechanical design, etc.). So, do you want to go pay the salaries of 10 engineers for 6 months to get your unique car? and then let everyone else have it for free?
It doesn't matter whether or not anyone else can have it for free. If I'm paying for a custom-designed car, it's because I want to have a cool new kind of car, not because I want to laugh at everyone else who doesn't have one.
So, with that in mind, your question becomes kind of pointless. If I think having a cool new car is worth paying 10 engineers, and I have the money to do it, then I'll do it. If I can't afford to pay that much but I still want the cool new car, then I'll find 9 friends who like cars and say, "Hey, I'd like to hire a design team. If we each pay one engineer for 6 months, we can all enjoy this great new design."
And, since my friends aren't the kind of assholes who'd get upset just because someone else has the same thing they have, they wouldn't care whether or not anyone else had access to it for free either - they'd make their decision based on whether having this cool new car design was worth paying one engineer's salary for 6 months.
Who would want to pay average salaries (10-100 times previous costs) for something that they cannot enjoy unless they lock it up. (or choose to wear/carry it in public and therefore donate it to the world as it will be copied instantly beyond your control).
Do you realize how selfish and anti-social that sounds? "I can't enjoy this unless I can lock it up! If anyone else has one, it's worthless to me!"
If a person with that mindset suddenly isn't able to afford something, who cares? Fuck him. Maybe he should quit being such a bastard, and learn to derive pleasure just by having something, rather than by keeping something away from everyone else.
How is it still unique when as soon as you walk outside with it anyone else can have it too?
What's unique is not the instance, but the design.
Let's say I have a few million Linden bucks to spend, and I want a giant sculpture of myself. I pay a sculptor to build it for me. Now everyone else can have a copy, but so what? I don't mind everyone having a statue of me in front of their house.
Or let's say I have the idea for a new kind of hat. I pay a hat designer to make one for me, and after a while I start seeing people wearing copies of that hat. Am I upset because they're getting the hat for free... or am I happy because I've started a fashion trend?
Those that WERE willing to pay prices for unique wares are no longer as copybot kills the ability to be unique and show off.
I, for one, won't mourn the loss of certain people's ability to "show off" the fact that they have something no one else can have. Scarcity is generally a bad thing.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll ignore that offensive generalization for now.
Remember, correlation is not causation. I've never heard of an employer requesting a high school transcript, which leads me to believe the cause here is one of two things:
1. Better high school grades lead to easier college enrollment, and a degree leads to higher pay. However, getting high grades in HS isn't the only route to college - anyone who can sign his name can get into community college, and once you've finished that, transferring to a real college isn't difficult.
AND/OR
2. Students who are internally driven to perform well in school, for whatever reason, are also driven to perform well at work, and thus they earn more. In this case, external pressure to get higher grades won't change a thing, because it won't change the student's internal drives.
Good. This positive reinforcement, and the negative reinforcement you mention later, provide very real motivations to achieve in school, mirroring the real world. Unfortunately, not every student's parents are so involved, and of the ones who are, many of them are only focused on negative reinforcement. If the school district would set up a similar reward program, I think we'd see students with a lot more motivation to do well.
Two (or four) words: just-in-time compilation.
Put a metadata tag on each graphics API function that says "this function can be implemented as an opcode". Then, when the game is JIT compiled (at install time, load time, or on demand), invocations of those functions are compiled as single graphics opcodes if the hardware supports it, or library calls otherwise.
Of course, you have to write for a JIT-capable platform to make that work, but there are several reasons why you might want to do that anyway (besides the one or two reasons why you wouldn't).
Well, many students don't, and that's the problem. If you want someone to put effort into learning about, for example, the Indian tribes that lived in his region two hundred years earlier, and he doesn't see any benefit in learning it, then you aren't going to convince him just by saying "education is important" or "you need this credit to graduate". Sometimes it's a case of not making the effort to show students how the knowledge is useful, but sometimes the knowledge just isn't that useful and the curriculum needs to be reexamined.
In any case, the point is you can't look at how hard someone works in school, and then apply that to how hard he'll work when he's being paid for his time. He may or may not have been motivated to work in school (due to his interest in the subject, the value he placed on graduating or getting high grades, the pressure applied by his parents or coaches, etc.), but he will be motivated to work at work because that's how he gets paid.
Often, you won't get anything out of it no matter what you do (other than a passing grade and some knowledge which you'll gradually forget over the next few months). You cannot motivate an uninterested student by telling him "maybe if you work really hard at this you'll get something out of it" when (1) you can't even tell him what it is he'll get, and/or (2) he's tried it before and found it a waste of time.
Hrm. If this is true, then why do we see violet light in the rainbow created by a prism? The red light is all down at the other end.
I think that's true to an extent, but there's at least one other aspect: the age you are when you're in high school doesn't just affect your own thoughts and behavior, it also affects how you're treated by others. When you're in high school, you're generally looked down upon by society because of your age. There are huge categories of things you can't do, things you can't buy, jobs you can't have, places you can't go, etc. When you graduate high school, most of those magically go away within a year - not because you're out of high school, but because you're over 18.
Of course, that's not to take away from the very real problems with school itself. Students are forced to attend classes they have no interest in, given no real reward for their work and thus no motivation for doing it, and tested on a curriculum that's often nothing but meaningless trivia which they'll forget a week later (you probably took a local/regional history class - when was the last time you used anything you learned there?).
There's a big difference between your statistical observation about the average salaries of high school graduates vs. dropouts, and the actual exchange of money for time worked that takes place in the real world. Students aren't directly rewarded for going to school.
The problem with this theory is there isn't really much motivation to do well in high school. If you do well in your job, you get a promotion; if you do poorly, you get fired. Those have meaning because they translate into the amount of money you're taking home, which has a direct impact on your life.
OTOH, what are the consequences of doing well in school? The piece of paper you take home at the end of the quarter has an "A" on it. What are the consequences of doing poorly? The piece of paper has a "D" on it. If you do really poorly, it has an "F" on it, and you have to take the same class again next year.. but after a few years of that, you get to leave anyway and take control of your own life.
Point is, to the student who doesn't have some other motivation to do well in school, none of those consequences have any meaning. So all you can really conclude from a dropout is "this person won't expend effort for no reason" - you can't conclude that he won't be a good employee, because you pay your employees, giving them a reason to expend effort.
Again, in light of the above, it's a mistake to attribute this to a lack of self-discipline. If you aren't going to get anything out of studying for a test or working on a project, why should you want to do it?
Er, not really. My point in the beginning was that people will pay for things they want; if they want a book to be written, someone will pay for it.
Now you're just guessing. I contend that most books would be published, because most authors aren't so lazy that they'd give up on writing just because they had to find someone to pay them for their time. After all, that's what everyone else does: in just about every other field of endeavor, you find an employer or a customer before you expend the effort, not afterward. I don't think authors as a whole are lazier than everyone else - but I suppose I could be wrong, eh?
Yes, that's true. Congratulations, you understand why people buy things... but you seem to be missing the point that not everything has the same value. A book that can be used more freely has more value. Rational buyers will be willing to pay more for its creation, and the people who end up reading it will be able to extract more benefit. The latter is more important than the former when we consider the purpose of copyright, which is to promote artistic creation for the benefit of the public: if the public can benefit more overall from fewer, more useful works, then perhaps the purpose of copyright is best served by repealing it.
Whoa, settle down there, cowboy! That sentence wasn't done. Continue reading it and you'll discover there are more words at the end which change its meaning!
Yes, lots of us slashdotters use Unix text files. But we're also clever enough to realize that Windows comes with more than one text editor, so we can open them with Wordpad or edit.com if we just need to read them, or download a decent editor if we need to write them too. So I repeat, how many Windows users do you think there are who need to work with Unix text files but are too stupid to figure out how to do it?
They didn't add it to Notepad, they added it to the multiline edit control - Unicode support and the removal of the 64k barrier were some of the improvements made in NT. Linefeeds weren't a priority, presumably because the multiline edit control isn't supposed to be a complete text editor, and it's not difficult for apps to convert line breaks themselves.
Easy: they don't use the standard multiline edit control, they use the rich edit control or their own custom controls.
I think you're mistaken. According to MSDN and the MS developer blogs, you need to use \r\n for a line break, not just \n. See, for one example, the comments here.
Something tells me you aren't a Windows developer.
What a strange thing to say. I've seen no evidence of that in anything he's said. Care to explain?
I'm sure it isn't an exaggeration; it doesn't sound unreasonable at all. Maybe you live in an area with an unusually high cost of living, but around here, you can put food on the table for $35k a year, and plenty of people would be happy to earn that much. Hell, I am a programmer and I make less than that. How much do you think a programmer should make?
Wow, talk about paranoid. Notepad exhibits that behavior because it's just a thin wrapper around the standard text box control. Remember when you couldn't load any files bigger than 64k in Notepad? That was because of an OS limit too. The standard text box isn't meant to be a full-featured text editor. Notepad's flaws are the result of laziness, not malice.
Here's another nail in the coffin of your theory: how many people could there possible be who import text files from Unix systems--or who even know what Unix is--but still aren't sophisticated enough to figure out how to open them with Wordpad (or good old EDIT.COM), which has no problem with Unix line breaks?
"Bullshit! Witty sayings are the very essence of wisdom, and I should know." -- Oscar Wilde
It's quite possible that fewer works will be produced when creators have to find their audience before starting (to arrange payment for their time) instead of afterward (to sell copies). However, it's unlikely that there would be so few as to offset the added value of the works that are created.
The author already has to find 2700 people willing to pay $15 for the book, or else he will have wasted all the time he put into writing it. The only difference is when he'd have to find them.
They might be right in this case, but come on... Variety is the same publication that thinks Jack Valenti is a cyborg.
Er, we gave up that little bit of "sovereignty" when we joined the WTO. Treaties are the law of the land, according to the Constitution. The WTO isn't being used to abuse us; the whole point of treaties is that we give up something in exchange for getting something from the other signatories.
And then everyone who gets those binaries can disassemble them, find your changes, and introduce them back into the publically available source code. If you've obfuscated it well enough that that doesn't work, they can just reimplement your changes in the public branch... or distribute your binaries themselves and provide their own support. Next?
Source code is nice but not necessary.
Yes, of course they would. We know that because we live in a world where they can be duplicated, and they are - we all know what the Mona Lisa looks like, but few of us have gone to see the original painting in person. Those paintings are still special, don't you think?
I don't see why not. After all, that's exactly what they did.
That doesn't make sense at all. Something that has never existed before can still be duplicated.
Not really.. if having the hat is worth $1 million to me, it doesn't matter who else has one, because I've gotten good value for my money already.
Well, what's my motivation for buying my friend a birthday present: is it just to give him an extra $100, or is it to gain recognition for being the one who gave it to him? Probably both, and in that case, everyone else putting their name on it does harm me, because it dilutes the recognition I get. However, everyone else having a copy of the hat I paid for doesn't harm me if I don't care how many people wear the same hat.
Why would it always be me picking up the check? Is it just always that much more important to me to get whatever it is I'm paying for? If so, I'm getting good value for my money. If not, there's no reason for me to pick up the check all the time; most of the time, it'll be more important to someone else than it is to me, so they'll pay and I'll ride along for free. It all balances out.
I don't think I'm being idealistic. Everything I've said here is based on nothing more radical than the idea that people will pay for things they want if they can't get them any other way, which is the basis of capitalism in general.
Because if no one pays for it, it won't get created at all. It doesn't take long to notice that the thing you're waiting for isn't happening, and at that point, you realize you'll have to make a move if you ever want to see it happen.
If I knew I could wait and get it for free, then of course not. But the only way I can know that is if I know there's someone else who values that creation enough that he's willing to pay for it, which solves the problem quite nicely: the creator gets paid and everyone gets to use what he created.
No, I don't. The difference--besides the fact that student loans are loans, and I think you mean grants--is that I consider education funding a service provided by the government for the benefit of students (even though it often benefits the rest of us, indirectly, to live in a country with more educated citizens).
Medical research grants, on the other hand, aren't provided for the benefit of universities or drug companies, but for the benefit of all citizens in the form of better health care. If many of us don't actually get access to better health care because the high prices enforced by patents keep new treatments out of our reach, the grants have failed.
If those tax breaks are given for the specific purpose of researching something for our benefit, yes, but I don't think many of them are.
There's no point in encouraging them to make a product I like if I'm not going to have access to it.
I do care about quality control. I think a reputable maker of generic drugs is a lot more likely to make quality "knockoffs" than a company that has to fly under the radar because what they're doing is illegal.
And yet you want to treat them as if they're not developed with any government grants at all, which isn't true either.
Exactly. "The GPL depends on copyright" is a big red herring when it comes up in discussions on copyright, because the GPL turns copyright against itself - that's what "copyleft" means. It essentially uses copyright law to force you to give your users the same rights they'd have anyway if copyright didn't exist in the first place.
But there is only one source for each drug. That's how patents work!
It doesn't matter whether or not anyone else can have it for free. If I'm paying for a custom-designed car, it's because I want to have a cool new kind of car, not because I want to laugh at everyone else who doesn't have one.
So, with that in mind, your question becomes kind of pointless. If I think having a cool new car is worth paying 10 engineers, and I have the money to do it, then I'll do it. If I can't afford to pay that much but I still want the cool new car, then I'll find 9 friends who like cars and say, "Hey, I'd like to hire a design team. If we each pay one engineer for 6 months, we can all enjoy this great new design."
And, since my friends aren't the kind of assholes who'd get upset just because someone else has the same thing they have, they wouldn't care whether or not anyone else had access to it for free either - they'd make their decision based on whether having this cool new car design was worth paying one engineer's salary for 6 months.
Do you realize how selfish and anti-social that sounds? "I can't enjoy this unless I can lock it up! If anyone else has one, it's worthless to me!"
If a person with that mindset suddenly isn't able to afford something, who cares? Fuck him. Maybe he should quit being such a bastard, and learn to derive pleasure just by having something, rather than by keeping something away from everyone else.
What's unique is not the instance, but the design.
Let's say I have a few million Linden bucks to spend, and I want a giant sculpture of myself. I pay a sculptor to build it for me. Now everyone else can have a copy, but so what? I don't mind everyone having a statue of me in front of their house.
Or let's say I have the idea for a new kind of hat. I pay a hat designer to make one for me, and after a while I start seeing people wearing copies of that hat. Am I upset because they're getting the hat for free... or am I happy because I've started a fashion trend?
I, for one, won't mourn the loss of certain people's ability to "show off" the fact that they have something no one else can have. Scarcity is generally a bad thing.