Fine. I just wrote a song. It took me 100 hours. I calculate my rate at $100/hr. Please pay me $10000. Yes, you personally, "Mr2001". Please pay me $10000, because in your fantasyland, the market has no role. I should just be paid fot the hours I put in. Where the money actually comes from doesn't actually seem to enter into your equation.
You seem to have noticed something I didn't cover in detail, then filled it with the most ridiculous assumptions you could come up with instead of being reasonable or even just asking. If you don't want a serious discussion, why are you wasting my time and yours?
Of course the market has a role. You, the musician, find customers who want you to write a song--or they find you. There's your market! You negotiate with them to agree on a price for the service of writing the song they want. If they're not willing to pay you as much as you think your time and effort is worth, then tell them to find some more friends to chip in, or walk away.
If you spend 100 hours writing a song and then no one wants to pay you for it, too bad for you. You made the mistake of working for free. If I build a 50 foot sculpture of Carrot Top and no one wants to buy it, I have no one to blame for that waste of time but myself.
That can work, but it's tricky. Will people commit to something before they see it? How do they know whether my word processor will meet their needs?
How do I know whether Microsoft Word will meet my needs? I can't test it before I buy it (unless I know some other sucker who's willing to buy software without testing it first), and if I tried to return an opened software package for a refund, I'd be laughed all the way out of the store, through the parking lot, down the freeway, and right back into my apartment.
I simply can't see the average company (or individual) wanting to be in that system. If you come to me with an offer of "pay $100 to help fund the development of this software, and then aftwards I'll give it away free" then my immediate reaction will be, "I'll just let some other sucker pay the $100 and at the end I'll get it for nothing".
And you'd be well within your rights to do that. Of course, if everyone did it, no software would ever get written. If you aren't that serious about wanting the software written, then don't pay, but don't be surprised when it never gets made.
The guts of it is, that even if everyone switched to your model, then eventually someone would come along and they would offer a model more like what we have now, and the market would switch to it.
Not if we get rid of copyright first. I can make all the promises I want about how the software I write at your request will never make it into anyone else's hands, but if at the end of the day, neither of us has the power to punish anyone for making copies, those promises are meaningless. As they should be.
Should I pay for someone to design a word processor specifically for me? Should that person pay someone to design a set of development tools? Is that really what you're arguing for?
No...
The alternative is that we share that design cost amongst a number of people. Each person pays a share of that cost, and in return receives rights in accordance with that share.... this is. Sort of.
Here's my plan: everyone who wants a program to be written pays a share of the cost. Then, once it's written, everyone gets to use it. The ones who pay aren't paying for copies of a program, or even the right to use a program - they're paying programmers to use their time and skill to write a program.
Free software proponents seem to think that software companies are tying to play some dirty trick - charging everyone for something that has already been paid for. They're not. The license cost is just your way of paying for a share in the development.
No, not really. See, the cost of development is the same no matter how many customers end up buying the program. If I spend $10,000 worth of my time writing a program that I expect 100 people to buy, I might charge $100 for it. But if only 50 people buy it, I've only covered half of my costs.
Solution? Charge for my time. Whether it's one person who gives me $10,000 or a thousand people who each give me $10, I'm getting paid for my work, and since my costs are fixed no matter how many people end up using the program, I don't have to worry about collecting money from all my users.
but what you're proposing is that he personally absorbs that cost.
1/ Contrary to what happens if you steal a can of soup in a supermarket, when you download an mp3, you do not prevent anybody else from having it.
Indeed. And although people like to forget this, the reason stealing is wrong is exactly what separates it from copyright infringement: stealing deprives someone else of the thing you stole. There's nothing inherently wrong with getting something for free; stealing is wrong only because it involves taking something away from someone else.
If we had the technology to let someone point a magic cloning ray at any object and instantly have a copy of their own, there'd be nothing wrong with doing so. Such a tool could eliminate hunger and material poverty, just as P2P can eliminate informational poverty by giving everyone access to the same knowledge, tools, and entertainment.
Copyright law is unjust? Very well. I'll go take a copy of Linux, rebrand it, make some improvements, and sell it without releasing the source.
Ah, the old "but the GPL depends on copyright!" red herring. Getting the source code is nice, but if it were legal to disassemble/decompile any binary program, modify it, and redistribute the modified version--i.e. if copyright didn't apply--the GPL would be largely unnecessary.
Sorry, copyright law is not unjust. It's fair.
Sorry, but no. Artificially restricting the flow of information and culture just so a service (programming, writing music, etc.) can be forced into the same economic niche as a physical good is neither fair nor just.
The big dirty secret of Free Software that no one is willing to admit, is that Free Software eliminates software itself as a product. There's not anything wrong with that, but I've never once seen anyone argue in favor of it.
Of course it does. Perhaps you've never heard anyone state it so bluntly before, but that's because it's so obvious that it goes without saying. I've argued in favor of it, and I'll continue to do so.
You see, the dirty secret of commercial software and other works that people want to protect with copyright is that those works are not products at all, and any artificial attempt to treat them like products is on shaky ground from the start. A song or a program isn't something that you can manufacture in finite quantities on an assembly line. The real value is in the original design, not the copies that are made later, and new technology is only making that more clear.
Any minimum wage worker can run a CD duplicator; you could even train a monkey to do it and pay him in bananas. But only a skilled human being can write a program or a song, so it makes sense to pay him for his labor, not the number of copies he can sell.
Ok, so it's still only about front-ends and some kind of on-the-fly decryption strategy.The data itself is encrypted in the same or similar way as it would with PGP, right?
Right. The point is, the encryption and decryption happens automatically, so it's feasible to just set the encryption bit on every folder that might have sensitive data in it. You can encrypt your browser cache, history, and cookies folders, and your browser will keep working.
The same is not true of the PGP method that was suggested earlier, which was my original point. If you use PGP to archive and encrypt your cache folder, then delete your original cache, the browser will just create another (unencrypted!) cache folder the next time you start it.
If you had a front end for PGP that could hook into your OS and let you access your encrypted files from any application (whether or not the app was written to be PGP-aware), then it'd serve the same purpose. But PGP alone does not.
So can't somebody spoof a particular user's authentication informationin windoze? I read somewhere that it can be done in windoze w/out knowing passwords. Isn't it safer to encrypt important data using keys that are generated in a way that is independent of any of the OS's native authentication modules?
I don't believe you can get at the contents of those files without having the key. If you have a link to a process that can supposedly do it, I'd like to see it - the one I saw in another comment here simply changes the owner of the file, but it's still encrypted with the original owner's key, so it still isn't readable.
If I encrypted a folder in windoze using windoze explorer, will I be able to read the file using some third party file manager software that is not developed by microsoft or uses any of their SDK's or whatever?
Yes, that's what makes it transparent. Applications can read and write encrypted files using exactly the same functions they use for regular files, even DOS/Win9x apps that were written before encryption was even part of the file system. All the encryption and decryption is done on the fly by the OS using the key that's associated with your account.
I'm sure there's a better description out there somewhere, but it's easy enough to explain. The purpose of a transparently encrypted file system is to automatically encrypt and decrypt files on the fly, so you get the security of encryption with the convenience of regular file access.
The encryption is transparent to applications. Encrypted files look and work just like regular unencrypted files, as long as you're logged in as the correct user. They're encrypted with a key that is itself encrypted with your password; when you log in, the key is retrieved and used to access your encrypted data. If someone steals your hard drive but doesn't know your password, they can't decrypt the files.
In Windows, you can apply transparent encryption (or transparent compression) to files and folders by clicking "Advanced" on the properties page. I'm sure there are similar tools for Mac, Linux, and any other OS that matters.
The other poster's suggestion of using "encrypt & archive files with PGP", however, is not transparent. The encrypted files go into a PGP archive and can't be accessed until you decrypt them with PGP. The extra step of having to encrypt a file when you save it and decrypt the file when you want to read it again leaves your data vulnerable while it's in an unencrypted state (not to mention the inconvenience).
You seem to be trying very hard not to explain why you think it's poisonous. Let's review the definition of poison (M-W):
1 a : a substance that through its chemical action usually kills, injures, or impairs an organism b (1) : something destructive or harmful (2) : an object of aversion or abhorrence 2 : a substance that inhibits the activity of another substance or the course of a reaction or process
Caffeine does not usually kill, injure, or impair humans. It is not significantly destructive or harmful in regular doses. It does not inhibit the activity of the human body; it stimulates the nervous system.
If you made a program that many people wanted, as opposed to either working for a programming house or doing one-off custom work, You would be able to write one program and get paid for it multiple times.
I suppose I could. And then I could worry about whether people are using my program without paying for it. I could waste my time writing code to validate registrations, fighting an arms race against crackers, collecting all the serial numbers that show up on web sites and diligently locking them out of the next version. I could release new versions every week just to try to stay a step ahead of everyone else. I could set myself up in opposition to the very people who want to use my software.
And, because you can count on getting paid multiple times, you can lower the price by spreading the cost. After all, if one charges say $100/hr for a program that takes say 100 hrs, you end up charging 1 person $10,000, or you can charge 10 people $1000, or 1000 people $10, etc.
I can do that anyway. I could go up to one person and say "I'll write this program if you pay me $10,000", or I could go up to a thousand people and say "I'll write this program if you each pay me $10". I could put a graph and a PayPal link on my web site, and say "When the total donations reach $10,000, I'll release the program right here."
Or does that not make sense to you?
Makes perfect sense.. it just seems like a bad idea. If I just get paid for my time, then I keep a roof over my head, I can focus on actually writing the software instead of keeping it out of other people's hands, and everyone who wants to use it can do so.
How can you call it a poison, then? If it works the same on insects as it does on humans, then it reduces their appetite simply by being a stimulant. It'll kill you if you consume enough of it, but so will water.
First, they should arrange to be compensated before they start working on such a big project. It's ridiculous to spend months or years creating something that you expect to make money from when you don't even know if anyone will pay you for it.
Once they've found an audience, they simply have to negotiate a price for their time.
"This project is gonna be great. Here are some samples of my previous work; this one will be even better, with twice as many dragons and a double reverse twist ending. I expect it'll take X months to finish. Pay me $Y a month and I'll start working on it right now."
Naturally, for a work that's going to be popular, the audience will be large, and able to afford large values of $Y by pooling their money together.
Who sets the rate? The whole point of free trade is to get paid for something what someone thinks it's worth. You can't turn an entrepeneur into an employee of the state by legislating some arbitrary writer's salary. That's a serious attack on basic rights.
You're right. Complain to the GGP, since he set forth the dubious requirement that authors must continue to earn as much money as they do today. I personally have no problem with letting the free market determine the value of an author's time, whether that makes him richer or poorer.
However the population in general has no right to force content producers to sell/provide their works in any particular way.
I agree. The flip side of that, though, is that content producers have no legitimate right to force the population in general not to redistribute their works.
I like your idea and see where you're coming from; however I cannot support forcing content producers to behave in a certain way. No matter how desirable that may be.
I cannot support forcing content consumers to behave in a certain way, which is exactly what copyright tries to do.
Authors rely on sales for their livelyhood. How many of your favorite books would not have been written if the author had to wait tables or work construction to put food on the table and a roof over their head? Would you do your job for free?
No, I would not.
And yet, my job doesn't require me to hunt down everyone who uses what I created and trying to extract money from them. I get paid for my time, that's it - and that's the way it should be. If I write one program, I get paid once. If I want to get paid twice as much, I have to work twice as much, not just find some other sucker to pay me again for the work I already did.
Eliminating copyright doesn't mean artists wouldn't get paid; it only means they'd have to arrange to get paid for their time, instead of writing something for free and then hoping they can find enough customers to compensate them for their past labor.
That sounds suspiciously like the Labour Theory of Value. That the worth of something is dependent solely on the amount of labour put in to creating it. It's one of the pillars of Marxism and has proved to be an catastrophic failure when put in to practice.
You must be mistaken - I didn't say anything about the worth of the items that are created.
The labor theory of value treats everyone's labor as equal, AFAICT. I, however, am perfectly happy to let the value of a writer's labor, an artist's, a musician's, a barber's, a mechanic's, and the labor of anyone else who performs a service be set by the market in real life. I only said "Set their hourly rate to the total amount they currently earn per item [...] divided by the number of hours of work they put into each item" because of the GGP's dubious requirement that everyone continue to earn the same amount they currently do.
I'm simply suggesting that we ought to view an artist's work as what it really is: a service. An intellectual work like a song or a book is not some mass produced object that's created on an assembly line in limited quantities. It's designed once and can then be reproduced indefinitely.
The copies aren't scarce--any trained monkey can operate a CD duplicator--but the designer's talent is scarce, so it makes perfect sense to pay the designer directly for the use of his talent. An hourly wage is only one way to do that; you could also offer to pay a fixed amount for each work, or whatever.
How, then, would you propose to sell "digital media"? If you don't like the per-copy scheme, describe a scheme that will work and allow all people involved to be making the same amount of money they're making now (not an unreasonable stipulation, I think).
Let those people get paid for their time, just like everyone else whose job is providing a service. Set their hourly rate to the total amount they currently earn per item (book, song, etc.) divided by the number of hours of work they put into each item. Let customers group together to hire people to create new items, rather than paying for copies of items that have already been made.
Actually, psilocybin has no harmful physical effects. It can have the same psychological effects as any other hallucinogen (i.e. you can be traumatized if you're unprepared or you have a latent mental illness), but the only danger magic mushrooms pose to the body is the chance that you might them get confused with a different species of mushroom that is poisonous.
AFAIK, opium also has no harmful effects short of overdose. Morphine addicts can live long, healthy lives as long as they can control their dose and don't have to do anything dangerous to get it.
You're entirely correct, however, that these properties have nothing to do with whether a drug is naturally occurring or man-made, and I share your frustration with hippies who think the closer something is to their idea of "nature", the healthier it must be.
Any substance that, when withdrwn from, gives you headaches, the sweats and severe drowsiness can be classified as a toxin to the body.
No, it cannot. "Toxin" has a precise definition, and it doesn't mean "anything that might cause negative effects in some situation". Merriam-Webster defines it as a poisonous substance that is a specific product of the metabolic activities of a living organism and is usually very unstable, notably toxic when introduced into the tissues, and typically capable of inducing antibody formation.
Caffeine is a drug, and an addictive one at that, but it isn't poisonous. Please stop watering down our language.
As others have commented, they only run on one platform, someone also said it's easy to embark native code in.Net, this might make a huge difference.
Others are wrong..NET apps can be run on other operating systems, including Linux and OS X, with Mono and similar projects. Mono doesn't fully support all the.NET Framework classes yet, but if you use Gtk# instead of Windows Forms, it's easy to write cross-platform.NET apps.
Embedding native code in a.NET app is possible if you use Managed C++, but it comes with some performance overhead of its own. I doubt many apps actually use native code - no one likes writing in MC++ with all its ugly underscore keywords when C# is just a few clicks away.;)
The whole source code for the JVM is available (free as in beer), anybody can have a look once they register with Sun. I don't know if the same applies to the.Net runtime, somehow I doubt it. Some partners might have portions of it, maybe.
Here's the Rotor source code from MS. Feel free to pore over it looking for vulnerabilities.
True, it's not the exact same source code that's in the downloadable.NET runtime, and it's missing a lot of the libraries that make.NET what it is. However, it does implement some of the most fundamental parts, including the security model.
Slashdot Mirror
Fine. I just wrote a song. It took me 100 hours. I calculate my rate at $100/hr. Please pay me $10000. Yes, you personally, "Mr2001". Please pay me $10000, because in your fantasyland, the market has no role. I should just be paid fot the hours I put in. Where the money actually comes from doesn't actually seem to enter into your equation.
You seem to have noticed something I didn't cover in detail, then filled it with the most ridiculous assumptions you could come up with instead of being reasonable or even just asking. If you don't want a serious discussion, why are you wasting my time and yours?
Of course the market has a role. You, the musician, find customers who want you to write a song--or they find you. There's your market! You negotiate with them to agree on a price for the service of writing the song they want. If they're not willing to pay you as much as you think your time and effort is worth, then tell them to find some more friends to chip in, or walk away.
If you spend 100 hours writing a song and then no one wants to pay you for it, too bad for you. You made the mistake of working for free. If I build a 50 foot sculpture of Carrot Top and no one wants to buy it, I have no one to blame for that waste of time but myself.
That can work, but it's tricky. Will people commit to something before they see it? How do they know whether my word processor will meet their needs?
How do I know whether Microsoft Word will meet my needs? I can't test it before I buy it (unless I know some other sucker who's willing to buy software without testing it first), and if I tried to return an opened software package for a refund, I'd be laughed all the way out of the store, through the parking lot, down the freeway, and right back into my apartment.
I simply can't see the average company (or individual) wanting to be in that system. If you come to me with an offer of "pay $100 to help fund the development of this software, and then aftwards I'll give it away free" then my immediate reaction will be, "I'll just let some other sucker pay the $100 and at the end I'll get it for nothing".
And you'd be well within your rights to do that. Of course, if everyone did it, no software would ever get written. If you aren't that serious about wanting the software written, then don't pay, but don't be surprised when it never gets made.
The guts of it is, that even if everyone switched to your model, then eventually someone would come along and they would offer a model more like what we have now, and the market would switch to it.
Not if we get rid of copyright first. I can make all the promises I want about how the software I write at your request will never make it into anyone else's hands, but if at the end of the day, neither of us has the power to punish anyone for making copies, those promises are meaningless. As they should be.
Should I pay for someone to design a word processor specifically for me? Should that person pay someone to design a set of development tools? Is that really what you're arguing for?
... this is. Sort of.
No...
The alternative is that we share that design cost amongst a number of people. Each person pays a share of that cost, and in return receives rights in accordance with that share.
Here's my plan: everyone who wants a program to be written pays a share of the cost. Then, once it's written, everyone gets to use it. The ones who pay aren't paying for copies of a program, or even the right to use a program - they're paying programmers to use their time and skill to write a program.
Free software proponents seem to think that software companies are tying to play some dirty trick - charging everyone for something that has already been paid for. They're not. The license cost is just your way of paying for a share in the development.
No, not really. See, the cost of development is the same no matter how many customers end up buying the program. If I spend $10,000 worth of my time writing a program that I expect 100 people to buy, I might charge $100 for it. But if only 50 people buy it, I've only covered half of my costs.
Solution? Charge for my time. Whether it's one person who gives me $10,000 or a thousand people who each give me $10, I'm getting paid for my work, and since my costs are fixed no matter how many people end up using the program, I don't have to worry about collecting money from all my users.
but what you're proposing is that he personally absorbs that cost.
I hope I've dispelled this misconception.
1/ Contrary to what happens if you steal a can of soup in a supermarket, when you download an mp3, you do not prevent anybody else from having it.
Indeed. And although people like to forget this, the reason stealing is wrong is exactly what separates it from copyright infringement: stealing deprives someone else of the thing you stole. There's nothing inherently wrong with getting something for free; stealing is wrong only because it involves taking something away from someone else.
If we had the technology to let someone point a magic cloning ray at any object and instantly have a copy of their own, there'd be nothing wrong with doing so. Such a tool could eliminate hunger and material poverty, just as P2P can eliminate informational poverty by giving everyone access to the same knowledge, tools, and entertainment.
Copyright law is unjust? Very well. I'll go take a copy of Linux, rebrand it, make some improvements, and sell it without releasing the source.
Ah, the old "but the GPL depends on copyright!" red herring. Getting the source code is nice, but if it were legal to disassemble/decompile any binary program, modify it, and redistribute the modified version--i.e. if copyright didn't apply--the GPL would be largely unnecessary.
Sorry, copyright law is not unjust. It's fair.
Sorry, but no. Artificially restricting the flow of information and culture just so a service (programming, writing music, etc.) can be forced into the same economic niche as a physical good is neither fair nor just.
The big dirty secret of Free Software that no one is willing to admit, is that Free Software eliminates software itself as a product. There's not anything wrong with that, but I've never once seen anyone argue in favor of it.
Of course it does. Perhaps you've never heard anyone state it so bluntly before, but that's because it's so obvious that it goes without saying. I've argued in favor of it, and I'll continue to do so.
You see, the dirty secret of commercial software and other works that people want to protect with copyright is that those works are not products at all, and any artificial attempt to treat them like products is on shaky ground from the start. A song or a program isn't something that you can manufacture in finite quantities on an assembly line. The real value is in the original design, not the copies that are made later, and new technology is only making that more clear.
Any minimum wage worker can run a CD duplicator; you could even train a monkey to do it and pay him in bananas. But only a skilled human being can write a program or a song, so it makes sense to pay him for his labor, not the number of copies he can sell.
Ok, so it's still only about front-ends and some kind of on-the-fly decryption strategy.The data itself is encrypted in the same or similar way as it would with PGP, right?
Right. The point is, the encryption and decryption happens automatically, so it's feasible to just set the encryption bit on every folder that might have sensitive data in it. You can encrypt your browser cache, history, and cookies folders, and your browser will keep working.
The same is not true of the PGP method that was suggested earlier, which was my original point. If you use PGP to archive and encrypt your cache folder, then delete your original cache, the browser will just create another (unencrypted!) cache folder the next time you start it.
If you had a front end for PGP that could hook into your OS and let you access your encrypted files from any application (whether or not the app was written to be PGP-aware), then it'd serve the same purpose. But PGP alone does not.
So can't somebody spoof a particular user's authentication informationin windoze? I read somewhere that it can be done in windoze w/out knowing passwords. Isn't it safer to encrypt important data using keys that are generated in a way that is independent of any of the OS's native authentication modules?
I don't believe you can get at the contents of those files without having the key. If you have a link to a process that can supposedly do it, I'd like to see it - the one I saw in another comment here simply changes the owner of the file, but it's still encrypted with the original owner's key, so it still isn't readable.
If I encrypted a folder in windoze using windoze explorer, will I be able to read the file using some third party file manager software that is not developed by microsoft or uses any of their SDK's or whatever?
Yes, that's what makes it transparent. Applications can read and write encrypted files using exactly the same functions they use for regular files, even DOS/Win9x apps that were written before encryption was even part of the file system. All the encryption and decryption is done on the fly by the OS using the key that's associated with your account.
I'm sure there's a better description out there somewhere, but it's easy enough to explain. The purpose of a transparently encrypted file system is to automatically encrypt and decrypt files on the fly, so you get the security of encryption with the convenience of regular file access.
The encryption is transparent to applications. Encrypted files look and work just like regular unencrypted files, as long as you're logged in as the correct user. They're encrypted with a key that is itself encrypted with your password; when you log in, the key is retrieved and used to access your encrypted data. If someone steals your hard drive but doesn't know your password, they can't decrypt the files.
In Windows, you can apply transparent encryption (or transparent compression) to files and folders by clicking "Advanced" on the properties page. I'm sure there are similar tools for Mac, Linux, and any other OS that matters.
The other poster's suggestion of using "encrypt & archive files with PGP", however, is not transparent. The encrypted files go into a PGP archive and can't be accessed until you decrypt them with PGP. The extra step of having to encrypt a file when you save it and decrypt the file when you want to read it again leaves your data vulnerable while it's in an unencrypted state (not to mention the inconvenience).
That isn't transparent encryption. The encrypted folder is unusable until you decrypt it.
Caffeine certainly does impair humans.
I've seen no evidence of that. Do you have proof for this fascinating claim?
"Long periods of abuse [of caffeine] can lead to detrimental effects [...]"
Yes, any drug can have negative side effects when abused for a long time. If you believe all drugs are therefore poisons, you are a crackpot.
You seem to be trying very hard not to explain why you think it's poisonous. Let's review the definition of poison (M-W):
1 a : a substance that through its chemical action usually kills, injures, or impairs an organism b (1) : something destructive or harmful (2) : an object of aversion or abhorrence
2 : a substance that inhibits the activity of another substance or the course of a reaction or process
Caffeine does not usually kill, injure, or impair humans. It is not significantly destructive or harmful in regular doses. It does not inhibit the activity of the human body; it stimulates the nervous system.
If you made a program that many people wanted, as opposed to either working for a programming house or doing one-off custom work, You would be able to write one program and get paid for it multiple times.
I suppose I could. And then I could worry about whether people are using my program without paying for it. I could waste my time writing code to validate registrations, fighting an arms race against crackers, collecting all the serial numbers that show up on web sites and diligently locking them out of the next version. I could release new versions every week just to try to stay a step ahead of everyone else. I could set myself up in opposition to the very people who want to use my software.
And, because you can count on getting paid multiple times, you can lower the price by spreading the cost. After all, if one charges say $100/hr for a program that takes say 100 hrs, you end up charging 1 person $10,000, or you can charge 10 people $1000, or 1000 people $10, etc.
I can do that anyway. I could go up to one person and say "I'll write this program if you pay me $10,000", or I could go up to a thousand people and say "I'll write this program if you each pay me $10". I could put a graph and a PayPal link on my web site, and say "When the total donations reach $10,000, I'll release the program right here."
Or does that not make sense to you?
Makes perfect sense.. it just seems like a bad idea. If I just get paid for my time, then I keep a roof over my head, I can focus on actually writing the software instead of keeping it out of other people's hands, and everyone who wants to use it can do so.
How can you call it a poison, then? If it works the same on insects as it does on humans, then it reduces their appetite simply by being a stimulant. It'll kill you if you consume enough of it, but so will water.
First, they should arrange to be compensated before they start working on such a big project. It's ridiculous to spend months or years creating something that you expect to make money from when you don't even know if anyone will pay you for it.
Once they've found an audience, they simply have to negotiate a price for their time.
"This project is gonna be great. Here are some samples of my previous work; this one will be even better, with twice as many dragons and a double reverse twist ending. I expect it'll take X months to finish. Pay me $Y a month and I'll start working on it right now."
Naturally, for a work that's going to be popular, the audience will be large, and able to afford large values of $Y by pooling their money together.
Who sets the rate? The whole point of free trade is to get paid for something what someone thinks it's worth. You can't turn an entrepeneur into an employee of the state by legislating some arbitrary writer's salary. That's a serious attack on basic rights.
You're right. Complain to the GGP, since he set forth the dubious requirement that authors must continue to earn as much money as they do today. I personally have no problem with letting the free market determine the value of an author's time, whether that makes him richer or poorer.
However the population in general has no right to force content producers to sell/provide their works in any particular way.
I agree. The flip side of that, though, is that content producers have no legitimate right to force the population in general not to redistribute their works.
I like your idea and see where you're coming from; however I cannot support forcing content producers to behave in a certain way. No matter how desirable that may be.
I cannot support forcing content consumers to behave in a certain way, which is exactly what copyright tries to do.
Authors rely on sales for their livelyhood. How many of your favorite books would not have been written if the author had to wait tables or work construction to put food on the table and a roof over their head? Would you do your job for free?
No, I would not.
And yet, my job doesn't require me to hunt down everyone who uses what I created and trying to extract money from them. I get paid for my time, that's it - and that's the way it should be. If I write one program, I get paid once. If I want to get paid twice as much, I have to work twice as much, not just find some other sucker to pay me again for the work I already did.
Eliminating copyright doesn't mean artists wouldn't get paid; it only means they'd have to arrange to get paid for their time, instead of writing something for free and then hoping they can find enough customers to compensate them for their past labor.
That sounds suspiciously like the Labour Theory of Value. That the worth of something is dependent solely on the amount of labour put in to creating it. It's one of the pillars of Marxism and has proved to be an catastrophic failure when put in to practice.
You must be mistaken - I didn't say anything about the worth of the items that are created.
The labor theory of value treats everyone's labor as equal, AFAICT. I, however, am perfectly happy to let the value of a writer's labor, an artist's, a musician's, a barber's, a mechanic's, and the labor of anyone else who performs a service be set by the market in real life. I only said "Set their hourly rate to the total amount they currently earn per item [...] divided by the number of hours of work they put into each item" because of the GGP's dubious requirement that everyone continue to earn the same amount they currently do.
I'm simply suggesting that we ought to view an artist's work as what it really is: a service. An intellectual work like a song or a book is not some mass produced object that's created on an assembly line in limited quantities. It's designed once and can then be reproduced indefinitely.
The copies aren't scarce--any trained monkey can operate a CD duplicator--but the designer's talent is scarce, so it makes perfect sense to pay the designer directly for the use of his talent. An hourly wage is only one way to do that; you could also offer to pay a fixed amount for each work, or whatever.
How, then, would you propose to sell "digital media"? If you don't like the per-copy scheme, describe a scheme that will work and allow all people involved to be making the same amount of money they're making now (not an unreasonable stipulation, I think).
Let those people get paid for their time, just like everyone else whose job is providing a service. Set their hourly rate to the total amount they currently earn per item (book, song, etc.) divided by the number of hours of work they put into each item. Let customers group together to hire people to create new items, rather than paying for copies of items that have already been made.
Actually, psilocybin has no harmful physical effects. It can have the same psychological effects as any other hallucinogen (i.e. you can be traumatized if you're unprepared or you have a latent mental illness), but the only danger magic mushrooms pose to the body is the chance that you might them get confused with a different species of mushroom that is poisonous.
AFAIK, opium also has no harmful effects short of overdose. Morphine addicts can live long, healthy lives as long as they can control their dose and don't have to do anything dangerous to get it.
You're entirely correct, however, that these properties have nothing to do with whether a drug is naturally occurring or man-made, and I share your frustration with hippies who think the closer something is to their idea of "nature", the healthier it must be.
Somehow, I got the idea that when the GGP wrote "[caffeine] can be classified as a toxin to the body", he was referring to the human body.
Any substance that, when withdrwn from, gives you headaches, the sweats and severe drowsiness can be classified as a toxin to the body.
No, it cannot. "Toxin" has a precise definition, and it doesn't mean "anything that might cause negative effects in some situation". Merriam-Webster defines it as a poisonous substance that is a specific product of the metabolic activities of a living organism and is usually very unstable, notably toxic when introduced into the tissues, and typically capable of inducing antibody formation.
Caffeine is a drug, and an addictive one at that, but it isn't poisonous. Please stop watering down our language.
As others have commented, they only run on one platform, someone also said it's easy to embark native code in .Net, this might make a huge difference.
.NET apps can be run on other operating systems, including Linux and OS X, with Mono and similar projects. Mono doesn't fully support all the .NET Framework classes yet, but if you use Gtk# instead of Windows Forms, it's easy to write cross-platform .NET apps.
.NET app is possible if you use Managed C++, but it comes with some performance overhead of its own. I doubt many apps actually use native code - no one likes writing in MC++ with all its ugly underscore keywords when C# is just a few clicks away. ;)
Others are wrong.
Embedding native code in a
The whole source code for the JVM is available (free as in beer), anybody can have a look once they register with Sun. I don't know if the same applies to the .Net runtime, somehow I doubt it. Some partners might have portions of it, maybe.
.NET runtime, and it's missing a lot of the libraries that make .NET what it is. However, it does implement some of the most fundamental parts, including the security model.
Here's the Rotor source code from MS. Feel free to pore over it looking for vulnerabilities.
True, it's not the exact same source code that's in the downloadable
The magic keywords are "spanish fork canyon". Here's a link.