Payroll taxes go directly to Social Security and Medicare. In other words, they go to that taxpayers retirement and health care. Everybody pays them whether they use the services or not.
Yes... so what? Point is, they pay taxes, and under Obama's plan they'll end up paying less in taxes overall (thanks to a negative income tax bill). The GP tried to paint this as some kind of absurd promise, when in fact it's quite straightforward.
The link you provided says Social Security will run out of money in 30 years and will not be able to pay benefits to 25% of the recipients. That sounds like a train wreck to me.
Then you're not thinking very hard about it. In 2041, the trust fund reserves will run out and Social Security will be able to pay 78% of benefits from tax revenue alone; it will still be able to pay 75% of benefits in 2082. That doesn't mean 25% of people get nothing - it means everyone gets a smaller check than they're expecting.
But that's only if nothing changes. The solution is simple: collect more revenue. Raising the cap on the payroll tax would be one way; Obama's plan is slightly different but still boils down to collecting more from higher income earners.
Obama plans to take money from the "rich" and give to everyone else. To "everyone else" it appears free. However, the "rich" take the money they otherwise would pay to Obama and invest it in things like alternative energy and in innovative businesses that create jobs. Google? Started with VC money from the "rich". Get the point?
Raising the top tax bracket from 36% to 39%, where it was during the Clinton years, is not going to spell the end of investment. Besides, you can't run an economy on investment alone: you need consumption too, and to do that you need to get money in the hands of lower income earners.
They also say they are going to ease taxes while providing bailouts for every failing industry and providing every man, woman, and child in America with unlimited free health care, a bullet-proof retirement, unlimited free energy, and a magical flying puppy(okay, I'm exaggerating a little---they never actually promised the puppy would fly).
They never promised to lower taxes across the board, or that health care would be free or unlimited, retirement would be bulletproof, or energy would be free or unlimited either.
But hey, you wouldn't have gotten modded up if you'd just stuck to the facts, right?
Now, in just about everything else in life, we are entitled to (a majority of) the sweat of our brow. There is good economic and moral rational behind this which I will gladly go into should you require it.
Please do. I'd love to hear how this philosophy applies to, say, a house painter who spends the sweat of his brow putting paint on someone else's house, yet ends up owning neither the paint, nor the house, nor the abstract fact that the house is now that color. Or a hired farm hand who spends the sweat of his brow planting and harvesting crops, yet owns neither the seeds, nor the plants, nor the harvested crops.
I contend that we are not entitled to "the sweat of our brow". Expending effort on some process is not sufficient to grant ownership of whatever happens to come out of that process, and real-world examples bear this out.
Instead, we're generally only entitled to retain ownership of the things we already own, and to gain ownership of the things we're given by their rightful owners. The farm hand doesn't own the crops he worked so hard on because they grew out of seeds, fertilizer, and land that all belonged to someone else, and applying effort to them doesn't change their ownership.
Tell the artists they are not necessary by not consuming their goods. Just like it would be a useless service that no-one will pay for if I do web searches for you, prove to artists that they are an unnecessary component of the artistic work distribution system. Don't buy, don't copy, and don't download anything from an artist.
No, that doesn't follow; that's like asking you to stop doing web searches altogether if you don't want to pay me to do them for you.
In order to prove that artists are an unnecessary component of the artistic work distribution system, I don't have to abstain from enjoying artistic works: I just have to find another distribution channel. If I download a torrent instead of buying a CD from the artist, then voila, I've shown that distribution is possible without the artist's involvement.
Artists are, of course, a necessary component of the artistic work production system. I would be delighted to see artists get out of the distribution business and charge for production instead.
You know what also resolves that dispute? Communism. We could have the state allocate to us when we may use what.
True. Ownership isn't the only solution, it's just the best one we've found. (OTOH, you could say that in a communist society, the state is the owner.)
Why work, when everything can be provided for you through someone else's? That's exactly the reason why we want copyright: to be an incentive.
But we don't need copyright for that. There already is an incentive for working, one that we're all familiar with: it's called a wage.
If you want a maid to clean your house, you don't have to promise her some wacky new form of ownership over the fact that your house is clean. You just need to pay her for the task. She'll weigh the money you're offering against the other things she could be doing with that time, and if the price is right, she'll accept the offer. Then, once she's finished, the transaction is complete, and you don't have to worrying about paying her royalties or whatever on your house's newfound cleanliness.
The same goes for just about every other job in existence. Lawyers, accountants, code monkeys, truck drivers, barbers, factory workers... they get paid for working. That's all the incentive they need. An accountant doesn't demand ownership of the numbers on your tax form; you just pay him for the time he spends coming up with them.
Why should it be any different for artists, authors, and other producers of copyrightable works? Are they so greedy that being paid for their time isn't enough of an incentive? Do they lack the courage to negotiate a price for their labor, like everyone else manages to do? Is the average artist's labor simply so worthless that a sweepstakes-style market (many will enter, few will win) is the only way for any artist to turn a profit?
But many artists need the money from those works. If they spread without payment, then it is most certainly is harming them.
No, there's a difference between being harmed and not receiving a benefit. If you think there isn't, then I guess you're harming me by not giving me the keys to your house and car, right?
I might like to get your house and car, just like an artist might like to get money from everyone who enjoys his work. But that doesn't mean either of us are entitled to it, or that we're being harmed when our wishes don't come true.
It's not like there's some meaningful difference here. In fact, it seems, by these definitions, a poorly selling album would be "private information". Feel free to tell me your definitions, if you disagree.
The difference is quite meaningful, and I've already explained it several times.
Here it is once more: private information is that whose spread is inherently harmful, and so you don't want people to have access to it. Medical records, financial details, classified military plans, and so on. You keep your PIN secret not so you can sell it for the maximum profit, but because it's dangerous for that information to become widely known.
Commercial copyrighted works, on the other hand, are not private. They're distributed to (potentially) millions of anonymous customers whose only qualification is that they have money in their hands. If I want to know how the latest Beyonce song goes, all I have to do is spend 99 cents on iTunes: no one could say with a straight face that that information is still, somehow, a secret, or that Beyonce is afraid of what might happen if it falls into the wrong hands. She wants to get it into as many hands as possible, as long as she's getting paid.
A poorly selling album still isn't private. It stopped being private the moment it was offered for sale to arbitrary members of the public.
(Now, if you want a gray area, consider a piece of private information that you'd still be willing to divulge for the right price. Who wouldn't give up their bank PIN for a billion dollars, for example?)
That still doesn't prove that sharing public information is not harmful. It is possible that an artist could be (and often is) far better off distributing himself, rather than leaving distribution to the anonymous masses.
Certainly, just like I'd be better off if you stopped doing your own web searches for free and instead paid me $5 each time to do them for you. So what? I don't get to insert myself into the information-distribution process just because it would put money in my pocket.
Either the information is private, in which case its spread should be stopped to prevent harm, or it isn't, in which case the government has no reason to restrict people from sharing it.
When we own a physical object, we can expect the (legally sanctioned) right to decide who the object is used by, how it's used, and when it's used (should we choose to decide that at all).
Yes, that's true, but think about why we have that form of ownership. It's not because ownership is automatically good. It's because physical objects can only be in one place at a time: one person's use can interfere with another person's use, so we need some way to decide which use will prevail. That's where the owner comes in, to make that decision.
In other words, ownership is a solution to the problem of needing some way to decide how an object will be used.
Information, on the other hand, is not subject to the same rules: it can be in any number of places at once, so no one needs to decide which use will prevail. Ownership of information is a solution to a problem that doesn't exist.
If I scream out your mother's name in the streets (I think there's a "your mum" joke in there somewhere), there would be no penalty. It's a word, and it isn't tied to you or your mother. If I use th
OK then. Let's apply this to copyright. We won't call it the dreaded "O" word (ownership) or the dreaded "P" word (property), but we will "recognize that they'll [the artists] be harmed by its spread." Clear?
But the artists aren't harmed by its spread. Quite the opposite! If they wanted to keep their works secret, they wouldn't exhibit those works in public or sell copies of them.
It doesn't matter what you call it, but looking at privacy the same way that you look at copyright, you'll find, terminology aside, the two concepts are extremely similar.
I suppose they are, in the same sense that these two statements are extremely similar:
1. Two plus two is four. 2. Two plus two is five.
The two statements differ in only one word, right? But that word is key to the meaning of the statement. Change that one word, and it falls apart.
Privacy is about stopping the spread of private information. Copyright is about stopping the spread of public information, and that makes it completely different. The sharing of public information isn't harmful -- that's why it's intentionally made available to anonymous members of the public -- so the reasoning that supports privacy law falls apart if you try to apply it to copyright.
We could make copying like speech, but it'd rely on us redacting our rights to privacy.
Again, this just isn't true.
Credit card numbers, bank account numbers, medical details, etc. already aren't subject to copyright. You have the same right to copy (or speak) my credit card number as you do any other 16-digit number, and if you spread it all over town, the legal recourse I'll have has nothing to do with "owning" that sequence of digits. Does that mean I have no privacy?
But essentially, what you are suggesting is that information is not free, that it can be "tied to" (if not "owned by") a person (like your identity), but that anyone may copy that information, so long as they don't use it. It seems like a pretty broken way of guaranteeing privacy, and it offers no protection against the drunk doctor announcing you are HIV positive, but hey, you are entitled to your opinion. Good luck convincing others though.
Er.. no. Honestly, I'm a little puzzled at this criticism: have you somehow ignored or misunderstood everything I've said about private information and privacy laws?
Confidential medical details are obviously private information, and a drunken doctor who shares them without authorization would obviously have violated any law that restricts the sharing of private information. Open and shut case. That's no less protection than such information receives today. What's the problem?
Owning information doesn't imply ownership of anything physical. It just means you own the fact that you have parents named $MOTHER and $FATHER, as part of a large body of information that consists of your identity.
Wait, you're saying you own the basic facts of your birth? Who else shares ownership of this information: presumably your parents do, but what about your cousins and grandparents, the doctor who delivered you, your kindergarten teacher...? And what penalties do you propose for someone who violates this ownership by disclosing the fact that your mother is named $MOTHER without your permission?
Likewise, many artists do feel a sense of ownership over their works, even though the manifestation of their work is intangible.
If feelings are enough to grant ownership, then what's to stop me from claiming ownership of the money in your bank account if I start feeling like it should belong to me?
The question remaining is, why shouldn't we allow copyright? What makes it so different from things like privacy and identity?
If you have a bank account, someone (or something), somewhere has to know your personal details, even if only fleetingly. What if they took that data, and told everyone? By your argument, that data isn't yours.
That's right, it isn't -- data has no owner -- but that doesn't mean everyone else is free to share it. Not every law has to rest on property rights. It's perfectly OK to say "anyone who shares bank account details without the account holder's permission is guilty of a felony" without treating those details as a form of property.
The first is odd, because it's something you naturally wouldn't share.
Exactly! That's not odd, it's the fundamental difference between private and public information. Private information is guarded and intentionally restricted to as few people as possible, because the spread of that information is potentially harmful in itself.
While you may laugh at the statement "owns his pin", you wouldn't laugh so much if your bank decided to share it.
Er, my PIN is not my property no matter what the bank does; the statement is still laughable. Of course I'd be upset if the bank decided to violate my privacy by sharing that information with the wrong people, but that has nothing to do with property or ownership.
Again (for the upteenth time), this argument is designed not to prove the necessity of copyright, but to prove the necessity to abridge the right to copy.
I agree, the right to copy isn't absolute, but neither is any other right. One cannot excuse every abridgment simply by pointing out that the rights aren't absolute; we should presume that the rights apply in every situation by default, unless someone can show that it's necessary to abridge them in some circumstances.
Private information must belong to someone. Otherwise it wouldn't be private. I mean, what is privacy, if not an ownership of information?
Privacy is the recognition that harm will result if certain information is spread too widely. We don't have to grant "ownership" of that information to anyone in order to recognize that they'll be harmed by its spread.
For example, consider the classified details of a planned military operation: an obvious example of private information, right? If those plans become known to the wrong people, the success of the mission is in jeopardy, and lives may be lost. But who "owns" them? The soldiers whose lives may be lost? The generals who drew up the plans? The executive who ordered the plans to be drawn up? The taxpayers who ultimately foot the bill? No, no one owns them.
Ha! That's exactly right! That's my point! We have the freedom to copy, not copy every single thing we could copy.
Er, no, that's not what I'm saying.
Copying is analogous to speaking. Freedom of speech means there's no limit on what you can say, or even on who you can say it to: only on where and how you can say it. Saying "give me all your money or I'll kill you" is one thing if you're an actor in the play, but if you pull one of the audience members into an alley afterward and say the same words to him, it's something else entirely, because your meaning is different, and courts aren't stupid.
Freedom to copy, likewise, means there's no limit on what you can copy or who you can give the copies to (privacy laws notwithstanding). But that doesn't imply that you can do anything you want as long as a copy is somehow involved in the act.
Saying "here's the first page of Harry Potter: [JPEG attachment]" is quite different from saying "here's the first page of a book I wrote: [same JPEG attachment]". If you aren't J. K. Rowling, then the latter statement is fraudulent.
The freedom to share a scan of that page doesn't imply the freedom to lie about its origin, just like the freedom to share a credit card number (again, privacy laws notwithstanding) doesn't imply the freedom to make purchases on the account.
Just to point out, punishing fraud is punishing others from using your identity.
"Your identity" is the identity associated with you. It doesn't mean you own your name or the facts about your history, creditworthiness, etc., just like the phrase "your parents" doesn't imply that your mom and dad are your property.
If all information belonged as much to me as to the next person, then I would have no say in how other people used my name or my identity. Hence, fraud would not be crime.
Property and ownership don't enter into it: fraud is whatever the law says it is. If the law defines making unauthorized purchases on an account that someone else is responsible for paying as fraud, then it's fraud whether or not the account or the card number are "owned" by anyone.
Which, of course, they'd be allowed to do, because information doesn't belong to them, and those credit card details are just a sequence of digits and letters. If they're allowed to type 16 digits and a name into a text box, then why not some credit card info? It's not like the person who gave them the information "owns" that information.
I'll ignore the conflation of property with privacy here, since I just posted about it above.
The other problem with your line of argument, though, is that you're confusing the freedom to reproduce information with the freedom to perform every conceivable action that involves the reproduction of information.
Free speech generally allows you to say whatever you want, but not in every context. "Give me your money or I'll kill you" is legal when you're reciting a line in a play, but not when you're threatening someone in an alley. There's a difference between simply speaking words aloud and directing them at a person to achieve a goal. Threats, incitements to riot, false advertising, and fraud are all limitations on speech based on the greater context in which it's spoken.
Likewise, in the absence of any privacy laws, the freedom to reproduce information would allow you to share credit card details with other people, but using those credit card details to make a fraudulent purchase would still be fraud. By typing that number on the checkout page and clicking Submit, you're saying "this is my account and I'm authorized to make this purchase", which is a lie no matter how you say it.
That's actually not the argument. It's a counter argument to this notion that copying is trivial, and that preventing it is stupid. Naturally this doesn't necessarily lead straight to copyright, but like I said, it opens the door to applying property. [...] If you want arguments against copyright, I suggest you look at figuring out why we would be better off without applying property to intangible bits that represent art and entertainment, while apply property to intangible bits that represents private information.
Again, you're missing the distinction between property and privacy. We don't have to grant "ownership" of information in order to recognize that some information is private and shouldn't be shared.
It doesn't make sense to say that a patient "owns" the fact that he has HIV, for example, or that an account holder "owns" his PIN. Those things are not subject to ownership; they can never be taken away. They can, however, be used to the disadvantage of the patient and account holder if they're spread too widely, and so it makes sense to treat them as private.
I don't want too many people to know my account numbers, but on the other hand, Disney does want as many people as possible to have a copy of The Little Mermaid on DVD -- as long as they get paid for each one. It would be entirely possible and reasonable for the law to distinguish between private information like my bank account details, and public information like the contents of those DVDs.
Well, the movie is just electromagnetic radiation and variations of pressure in the air, right? Why aren't we allowed to reproduce them, huh?
The correct answer is that the whole thing is stupid.
Agreed. It's stupid to prohibit reproducing any of those.
Imagine if we did that with private data? I'm allowed to copy bits, so I can copy your bits off your hard drive, or off your bank account, or wherever your credit card details are stored. [...] I guess you have to take the good with the bad. You have to pay for your media, but then again, you get to keep the rest of your life savings.
No, that doesn't follow. Just like free speech doesn't entitle you to speak in my living room, freedom to reproduce information doesn't entitle you to break into my hard drive to obtain it, or to use it to withdraw from my bank account once you've got it.
And frankly, this argument that you can't have privacy without copyright is off-base to begin with. There's a clear difference between public information offered to anyone who pays for it, like a movie, and private information disclosed only on a need-to-know basis, like financial or medical details. The law could certainly distinguish between them; like you said, the courts aren't stupid.
As long as the sample is representative, the margin of error there is only about +/- 3.5%. (Sample Size Calculator)
Most national polls use sample sizes of 1000 or less, chosen from a population of 300 million. The whole point of polling is that you don't need to talk to a huge percentage of the population in order to be confident in your results.
I've only used eMule, so I don't know how much these problems affect other eDonkey clients, but in my experience these are the big issues:
1. You can only start sharing once you've downloaded an entire piece of the file. The same is true of BT, but eMule pieces are big and have a fixed size (around 9 MB). Torrent piece sizes are variable, and they're often less than 1 MB. This means you can start sharing sooner, especially since...
2....eMule severely limits the upload speed per connection. If you set your upload rate to 30 KB/sec, you'll end up with 10 connections, each uploading at 3 KB/sec. At that rate, it takes nearly an hour to transfer an entire piece of the file, and until that's finished, the peer can't share any of the data you've been sending him.
3. eMule's credit system is mostly only useful when you're downloading a group of files that are shared by the same users who are also interested in some similar files you have (i.e. you share S1E1 and gain credits that you redeem when downloading S1E2). BT provides immediate gratification: your uploads are almost always reciprocated right then and there.
You have to set the bar somewhere, and then stick to it. Sure, you can be more lenient on edge cases, but you still need to say "the limit is X", or the whole legal system is a farce made out of "fuzzy rules we're kind of supposed to follow".
No, you don't have to "set the bar somewhere". Age limits are never necessary, because age is an arbitrary measurement with only a vague correlation to the qualities that actually matter in terms of protecting people's rights. In every single case where age limits are currently used, we'd be better off replacing them with something more sensible (or in some cases, eliminating them -- the age limits on driving and running for office, for example).
And of course, moving away from age limits doesn't mean moving over to "fuzzy rules we're kind of supposed to follow". On this News For Nerds site, we might like to think that you can't be sure of anything unless a number is attached, but that's not really true. Look at all the other laws, the ones that don't involve age: are they fuzzy and impossible to enforce? Mostly, no. For example, the difference between voyeurism and consensual porn is pretty clear even when age isn't a factor, and so is the difference between rape and consensual sex.
You can get some pretty good 99% isopropyl from any good pharmacy (ask for it) or computer store (I get mine from Altex, it's $8 a bottle..).
You don't even need to ask for it. I bought 99% isopropyl at Safeway just a couple days ago. It was right next to the 70% and only cost a few cents more.
I had all those problems with my *Bluetooth* MX1000. The double-click problem is why I replaced it, after about 3 years of clicks working fine - but it still lagged pretty often, especially when I had a lot of wifi traffic going.
Now I have an MX Revolution, and it's not giving me any trouble. Maybe yours is just defective.
The noise you hear when you leave your phone next to speakers is the phone transmitting. Every so often, the phone transmits a signal just to remind the tower that it's still there. If the tower doesn't get this signal, it assumes you've left the coverage area or your battery has died.
But the parent was talking about receiving. The "slotted mode" he mentioned allows the phone to turn off its receiver, so instead of listening constantly to know if it's receiving a call, it only has to wake up and listen every X milliseconds. The tower knows when each phone will be listening and saves its pages until then. This saves battery life, at the cost of potentially delaying your incoming messages and calls by a couple seconds.
So most of the phone can be sleeping all the time without constantly waking up every now and then. exept maybe the gsm chip itself will be powered down too to save even more battery, what i find hard to believe.
Believe it. That's exactly what the parent was saying: the radio receiver consumes power just to listen, so "slotted mode" actually turns off the receiver while waiting for the next slot to come around.
Is there anyone here who seriously believes that someone should be encouraged to sell crap under someone else's name and be able get away with it? Really?
No, but that's a trademark issue, not a copyright (piracy) issue.
Let the crap-mongers sell whatever crap they want under their own names. If they fraudulently use someone else's name, we can solve that problem in court, not in hardware.
Actually, his point has nothing to do with emotions.
Many people do, in fact, put off going to the doctor because they're worried about the cost. By the time the problem has gotten serious enough that they're willing to go in, it has often progressed to the point where it's more expensive to treat and/or less likely to be treatable.
That's one reason why high US health care costs don't lead to better patient outcomes: the structure of our system discourages prevention and early diagnosis. Even when you have insurance, many insurers hesitate to pay for preventive treatments because there's a good chance you'll have moved on to another insurer by the time it pays off.
In Poker all players put X amount of money in, and in the end leave with X - Y money, where Y is the cut. Unless you have some system to guarantee that your opponents will lose, only the house wins in the end.
Poker isn't a team game. It's not "all players" vs. the house; it's a bunch of individuals playing against each other, with the house skimming a few percent out of every pot.
Taken as a whole, yes, all the players at the table will walk away with less money than they started with. But as an individual, if you're one of the better players at the table, you're likely to walk away with more than you started with. Bad players will lose a lot of money, but the majority of that money goes to the good players, not the house.
Being a good player doesn't guarantee that your opponents will lose: there's still an element of chance. But it does tip the odds in your favor. A good poker player can make a consistent profit by being on the right side of those odds, just like the house does in games like blackjack.
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Payroll taxes go directly to Social Security and Medicare. In other words, they go to that taxpayers retirement and health care. Everybody pays them whether they use the services or not.
Yes... so what? Point is, they pay taxes, and under Obama's plan they'll end up paying less in taxes overall (thanks to a negative income tax bill). The GP tried to paint this as some kind of absurd promise, when in fact it's quite straightforward.
The link you provided says Social Security will run out of money in 30 years and will not be able to pay benefits to 25% of the recipients. That sounds like a train wreck to me.
Then you're not thinking very hard about it. In 2041, the trust fund reserves will run out and Social Security will be able to pay 78% of benefits from tax revenue alone; it will still be able to pay 75% of benefits in 2082. That doesn't mean 25% of people get nothing - it means everyone gets a smaller check than they're expecting.
But that's only if nothing changes. The solution is simple: collect more revenue. Raising the cap on the payroll tax would be one way; Obama's plan is slightly different but still boils down to collecting more from higher income earners.
Obama plans to take money from the "rich" and give to everyone else. To "everyone else" it appears free. However, the "rich" take the money they otherwise would pay to Obama and invest it in things like alternative energy and in innovative businesses that create jobs. Google? Started with VC money from the "rich". Get the point?
Raising the top tax bracket from 36% to 39%, where it was during the Clinton years, is not going to spell the end of investment. Besides, you can't run an economy on investment alone: you need consumption too, and to do that you need to get money in the hands of lower income earners.
He promised a tax cut to 95 percent of the population, even though close to 40 percent don't actually even pay federal income taxes.
They do, however, pay federal payroll taxes.
He promised universal coverage, and free coverage below a certain income level.
Yup - subsidized by everyone above that level. No one expects the money to appear out of thin air.
He promised not to touch Social Security, regardless of the looming financial train wreck it's becoming.
That "train wreck" is a myth.
Free energy is precisely what he promised with his pledge to spend billions of tax dollars on "free" energy sources, wind and solar.
That's pretty funny. Pledging to spend billions on energy is the opposite of promising energy for free!
They also say they are going to ease taxes while providing bailouts for every failing industry and providing every man, woman, and child in America with unlimited free health care, a bullet-proof retirement, unlimited free energy, and a magical flying puppy(okay, I'm exaggerating a little---they never actually promised the puppy would fly).
They never promised to lower taxes across the board, or that health care would be free or unlimited, retirement would be bulletproof, or energy would be free or unlimited either.
But hey, you wouldn't have gotten modded up if you'd just stuck to the facts, right?
Now, in just about everything else in life, we are entitled to (a majority of) the sweat of our brow. There is good economic and moral rational behind this which I will gladly go into should you require it.
Please do. I'd love to hear how this philosophy applies to, say, a house painter who spends the sweat of his brow putting paint on someone else's house, yet ends up owning neither the paint, nor the house, nor the abstract fact that the house is now that color. Or a hired farm hand who spends the sweat of his brow planting and harvesting crops, yet owns neither the seeds, nor the plants, nor the harvested crops.
I contend that we are not entitled to "the sweat of our brow". Expending effort on some process is not sufficient to grant ownership of whatever happens to come out of that process, and real-world examples bear this out.
Instead, we're generally only entitled to retain ownership of the things we already own, and to gain ownership of the things we're given by their rightful owners. The farm hand doesn't own the crops he worked so hard on because they grew out of seeds, fertilizer, and land that all belonged to someone else, and applying effort to them doesn't change their ownership.
Tell the artists they are not necessary by not consuming their goods. Just like it would be a useless service that no-one will pay for if I do web searches for you, prove to artists that they are an unnecessary component of the artistic work distribution system. Don't buy, don't copy, and don't download anything from an artist.
No, that doesn't follow; that's like asking you to stop doing web searches altogether if you don't want to pay me to do them for you.
In order to prove that artists are an unnecessary component of the artistic work distribution system, I don't have to abstain from enjoying artistic works: I just have to find another distribution channel. If I download a torrent instead of buying a CD from the artist, then voila, I've shown that distribution is possible without the artist's involvement.
Artists are, of course, a necessary component of the artistic work production system. I would be delighted to see artists get out of the distribution business and charge for production instead.
You know what also resolves that dispute? Communism. We could have the state allocate to us when we may use what.
True. Ownership isn't the only solution, it's just the best one we've found. (OTOH, you could say that in a communist society, the state is the owner.)
Why work, when everything can be provided for you through someone else's? That's exactly the reason why we want copyright: to be an incentive.
But we don't need copyright for that. There already is an incentive for working, one that we're all familiar with: it's called a wage.
If you want a maid to clean your house, you don't have to promise her some wacky new form of ownership over the fact that your house is clean. You just need to pay her for the task. She'll weigh the money you're offering against the other things she could be doing with that time, and if the price is right, she'll accept the offer. Then, once she's finished, the transaction is complete, and you don't have to worrying about paying her royalties or whatever on your house's newfound cleanliness.
The same goes for just about every other job in existence. Lawyers, accountants, code monkeys, truck drivers, barbers, factory workers... they get paid for working. That's all the incentive they need. An accountant doesn't demand ownership of the numbers on your tax form; you just pay him for the time he spends coming up with them.
Why should it be any different for artists, authors, and other producers of copyrightable works? Are they so greedy that being paid for their time isn't enough of an incentive? Do they lack the courage to negotiate a price for their labor, like everyone else manages to do? Is the average artist's labor simply so worthless that a sweepstakes-style market (many will enter, few will win) is the only way for any artist to turn a profit?
But many artists need the money from those works. If they spread without payment, then it is most certainly is harming them.
No, there's a difference between being harmed and not receiving a benefit. If you think there isn't, then I guess you're harming me by not giving me the keys to your house and car, right?
I might like to get your house and car, just like an artist might like to get money from everyone who enjoys his work. But that doesn't mean either of us are entitled to it, or that we're being harmed when our wishes don't come true.
It's not like there's some meaningful difference here. In fact, it seems, by these definitions, a poorly selling album would be "private information". Feel free to tell me your definitions, if you disagree.
The difference is quite meaningful, and I've already explained it several times.
Here it is once more: private information is that whose spread is inherently harmful, and so you don't want people to have access to it. Medical records, financial details, classified military plans, and so on. You keep your PIN secret not so you can sell it for the maximum profit, but because it's dangerous for that information to become widely known.
Commercial copyrighted works, on the other hand, are not private. They're distributed to (potentially) millions of anonymous customers whose only qualification is that they have money in their hands. If I want to know how the latest Beyonce song goes, all I have to do is spend 99 cents on iTunes: no one could say with a straight face that that information is still, somehow, a secret, or that Beyonce is afraid of what might happen if it falls into the wrong hands. She wants to get it into as many hands as possible, as long as she's getting paid.
A poorly selling album still isn't private. It stopped being private the moment it was offered for sale to arbitrary members of the public.
(Now, if you want a gray area, consider a piece of private information that you'd still be willing to divulge for the right price. Who wouldn't give up their bank PIN for a billion dollars, for example?)
That still doesn't prove that sharing public information is not harmful. It is possible that an artist could be (and often is) far better off distributing himself, rather than leaving distribution to the anonymous masses.
Certainly, just like I'd be better off if you stopped doing your own web searches for free and instead paid me $5 each time to do them for you. So what? I don't get to insert myself into the information-distribution process just because it would put money in my pocket.
Either the information is private, in which case its spread should be stopped to prevent harm, or it isn't, in which case the government has no reason to restrict people from sharing it.
When we own a physical object, we can expect the (legally sanctioned) right to decide who the object is used by, how it's used, and when it's used (should we choose to decide that at all).
Yes, that's true, but think about why we have that form of ownership. It's not because ownership is automatically good. It's because physical objects can only be in one place at a time: one person's use can interfere with another person's use, so we need some way to decide which use will prevail. That's where the owner comes in, to make that decision.
In other words, ownership is a solution to the problem of needing some way to decide how an object will be used.
Information, on the other hand, is not subject to the same rules: it can be in any number of places at once, so no one needs to decide which use will prevail. Ownership of information is a solution to a problem that doesn't exist.
If I scream out your mother's name in the streets (I think there's a "your mum" joke in there somewhere), there would be no penalty. It's a word, and it isn't tied to you or your mother. If I use th
OK then. Let's apply this to copyright. We won't call it the dreaded "O" word (ownership) or the dreaded "P" word (property), but we will "recognize that they'll [the artists] be harmed by its spread." Clear?
But the artists aren't harmed by its spread. Quite the opposite! If they wanted to keep their works secret, they wouldn't exhibit those works in public or sell copies of them.
It doesn't matter what you call it, but looking at privacy the same way that you look at copyright, you'll find, terminology aside, the two concepts are extremely similar.
I suppose they are, in the same sense that these two statements are extremely similar:
1. Two plus two is four.
2. Two plus two is five.
The two statements differ in only one word, right? But that word is key to the meaning of the statement. Change that one word, and it falls apart.
Privacy is about stopping the spread of private information. Copyright is about stopping the spread of public information, and that makes it completely different. The sharing of public information isn't harmful -- that's why it's intentionally made available to anonymous members of the public -- so the reasoning that supports privacy law falls apart if you try to apply it to copyright.
We could make copying like speech, but it'd rely on us redacting our rights to privacy.
Again, this just isn't true.
Credit card numbers, bank account numbers, medical details, etc. already aren't subject to copyright. You have the same right to copy (or speak) my credit card number as you do any other 16-digit number, and if you spread it all over town, the legal recourse I'll have has nothing to do with "owning" that sequence of digits. Does that mean I have no privacy?
But essentially, what you are suggesting is that information is not free, that it can be "tied to" (if not "owned by") a person (like your identity), but that anyone may copy that information, so long as they don't use it. It seems like a pretty broken way of guaranteeing privacy, and it offers no protection against the drunk doctor announcing you are HIV positive, but hey, you are entitled to your opinion. Good luck convincing others though.
Er.. no. Honestly, I'm a little puzzled at this criticism: have you somehow ignored or misunderstood everything I've said about private information and privacy laws?
Confidential medical details are obviously private information, and a drunken doctor who shares them without authorization would obviously have violated any law that restricts the sharing of private information. Open and shut case. That's no less protection than such information receives today. What's the problem?
Owning information doesn't imply ownership of anything physical. It just means you own the fact that you have parents named $MOTHER and $FATHER, as part of a large body of information that consists of your identity.
Wait, you're saying you own the basic facts of your birth? Who else shares ownership of this information: presumably your parents do, but what about your cousins and grandparents, the doctor who delivered you, your kindergarten teacher...? And what penalties do you propose for someone who violates this ownership by disclosing the fact that your mother is named $MOTHER without your permission?
Likewise, many artists do feel a sense of ownership over their works, even though the manifestation of their work is intangible.
If feelings are enough to grant ownership, then what's to stop me from claiming ownership of the money in your bank account if I start feeling like it should belong to me?
The question remaining is, why shouldn't we allow copyright? What makes it so different from things like privacy and identity?
Answered above.
If you have a bank account, someone (or something), somewhere has to know your personal details, even if only fleetingly. What if they took that data, and told everyone? By your argument, that data isn't yours.
That's right, it isn't -- data has no owner -- but that doesn't mean everyone else is free to share it. Not every law has to rest on property rights. It's perfectly OK to say "anyone who shares bank account details without the account holder's permission is guilty of a felony" without treating those details as a form of property.
The first is odd, because it's something you naturally wouldn't share.
Exactly! That's not odd, it's the fundamental difference between private and public information. Private information is guarded and intentionally restricted to as few people as possible, because the spread of that information is potentially harmful in itself.
While you may laugh at the statement "owns his pin", you wouldn't laugh so much if your bank decided to share it.
Er, my PIN is not my property no matter what the bank does; the statement is still laughable. Of course I'd be upset if the bank decided to violate my privacy by sharing that information with the wrong people, but that has nothing to do with property or ownership.
Again (for the upteenth time), this argument is designed not to prove the necessity of copyright, but to prove the necessity to abridge the right to copy.
I agree, the right to copy isn't absolute, but neither is any other right. One cannot excuse every abridgment simply by pointing out that the rights aren't absolute; we should presume that the rights apply in every situation by default, unless someone can show that it's necessary to abridge them in some circumstances.
Private information must belong to someone. Otherwise it wouldn't be private. I mean, what is privacy, if not an ownership of information?
Privacy is the recognition that harm will result if certain information is spread too widely. We don't have to grant "ownership" of that information to anyone in order to recognize that they'll be harmed by its spread.
For example, consider the classified details of a planned military operation: an obvious example of private information, right? If those plans become known to the wrong people, the success of the mission is in jeopardy, and lives may be lost. But who "owns" them? The soldiers whose lives may be lost? The generals who drew up the plans? The executive who ordered the plans to be drawn up? The taxpayers who ultimately foot the bill? No, no one owns them.
Ha! That's exactly right! That's my point! We have the freedom to copy, not copy every single thing we could copy.
Er, no, that's not what I'm saying.
Copying is analogous to speaking. Freedom of speech means there's no limit on what you can say, or even on who you can say it to: only on where and how you can say it. Saying "give me all your money or I'll kill you" is one thing if you're an actor in the play, but if you pull one of the audience members into an alley afterward and say the same words to him, it's something else entirely, because your meaning is different, and courts aren't stupid.
Freedom to copy, likewise, means there's no limit on what you can copy or who you can give the copies to (privacy laws notwithstanding). But that doesn't imply that you can do anything you want as long as a copy is somehow involved in the act.
Saying "here's the first page of Harry Potter: [JPEG attachment]" is quite different from saying "here's the first page of a book I wrote: [same JPEG attachment]". If you aren't J. K. Rowling, then the latter statement is fraudulent.
The freedom to share a scan of that page doesn't imply the freedom to lie about its origin, just like the freedom to share a credit card number (again, privacy laws notwithstanding) doesn't imply the freedom to make purchases on the account.
Just to point out, punishing fraud is punishing others from using your identity.
"Your identity" is the identity associated with you. It doesn't mean you own your name or the facts about your history, creditworthiness, etc., just like the phrase "your parents" doesn't imply that your mom and dad are your property.
If all information belonged as much to me as to the next person, then I would have no say in how other people used my name or my identity. Hence, fraud would not be crime.
Property and ownership don't enter into it: fraud is whatever the law says it is. If the law defines making unauthorized purchases on an account that someone else is responsible for paying as fraud, then it's fraud whether or not the account or the card number are "owned" by anyone.
Which, of course, they'd be allowed to do, because information doesn't belong to them, and those credit card details are just a sequence of digits and letters. If they're allowed to type 16 digits and a name into a text box, then why not some credit card info? It's not like the person who gave them the information "owns" that information.
I'll ignore the conflation of property with privacy here, since I just posted about it above.
The other problem with your line of argument, though, is that you're confusing the freedom to reproduce information with the freedom to perform every conceivable action that involves the reproduction of information.
Free speech generally allows you to say whatever you want, but not in every context. "Give me your money or I'll kill you" is legal when you're reciting a line in a play, but not when you're threatening someone in an alley. There's a difference between simply speaking words aloud and directing them at a person to achieve a goal. Threats, incitements to riot, false advertising, and fraud are all limitations on speech based on the greater context in which it's spoken.
Likewise, in the absence of any privacy laws, the freedom to reproduce information would allow you to share credit card details with other people, but using those credit card details to make a fraudulent purchase would still be fraud. By typing that number on the checkout page and clicking Submit, you're saying "this is my account and I'm authorized to make this purchase", which is a lie no matter how you say it.
That's actually not the argument. It's a counter argument to this notion that copying is trivial, and that preventing it is stupid. Naturally this doesn't necessarily lead straight to copyright, but like I said, it opens the door to applying property. [...] If you want arguments against copyright, I suggest you look at figuring out why we would be better off without applying property to intangible bits that represent art and entertainment, while apply property to intangible bits that represents private information.
Again, you're missing the distinction between property and privacy. We don't have to grant "ownership" of information in order to recognize that some information is private and shouldn't be shared.
It doesn't make sense to say that a patient "owns" the fact that he has HIV, for example, or that an account holder "owns" his PIN. Those things are not subject to ownership; they can never be taken away. They can, however, be used to the disadvantage of the patient and account holder if they're spread too widely, and so it makes sense to treat them as private.
I don't want too many people to know my account numbers, but on the other hand, Disney does want as many people as possible to have a copy of The Little Mermaid on DVD -- as long as they get paid for each one. It would be entirely possible and reasonable for the law to distinguish between private information like my bank account details, and public information like the contents of those DVDs.
Well, the movie is just electromagnetic radiation and variations of pressure in the air, right? Why aren't we allowed to reproduce them, huh?
The correct answer is that the whole thing is stupid.
Agreed. It's stupid to prohibit reproducing any of those.
Imagine if we did that with private data? I'm allowed to copy bits, so I can copy your bits off your hard drive, or off your bank account, or wherever your credit card details are stored. [...] I guess you have to take the good with the bad. You have to pay for your media, but then again, you get to keep the rest of your life savings.
No, that doesn't follow. Just like free speech doesn't entitle you to speak in my living room, freedom to reproduce information doesn't entitle you to break into my hard drive to obtain it, or to use it to withdraw from my bank account once you've got it.
And frankly, this argument that you can't have privacy without copyright is off-base to begin with. There's a clear difference between public information offered to anyone who pays for it, like a movie, and private information disclosed only on a need-to-know basis, like financial or medical details. The law could certainly distinguish between them; like you said, the courts aren't stupid.
As long as the sample is representative, the margin of error there is only about +/- 3.5%. (Sample Size Calculator)
Most national polls use sample sizes of 1000 or less, chosen from a population of 300 million. The whole point of polling is that you don't need to talk to a huge percentage of the population in order to be confident in your results.
I've only used eMule, so I don't know how much these problems affect other eDonkey clients, but in my experience these are the big issues:
1. You can only start sharing once you've downloaded an entire piece of the file. The same is true of BT, but eMule pieces are big and have a fixed size (around 9 MB). Torrent piece sizes are variable, and they're often less than 1 MB. This means you can start sharing sooner, especially since...
2. ...eMule severely limits the upload speed per connection. If you set your upload rate to 30 KB/sec, you'll end up with 10 connections, each uploading at 3 KB/sec. At that rate, it takes nearly an hour to transfer an entire piece of the file, and until that's finished, the peer can't share any of the data you've been sending him.
3. eMule's credit system is mostly only useful when you're downloading a group of files that are shared by the same users who are also interested in some similar files you have (i.e. you share S1E1 and gain credits that you redeem when downloading S1E2). BT provides immediate gratification: your uploads are almost always reciprocated right then and there.
You have to set the bar somewhere, and then stick to it. Sure, you can be more lenient on edge cases, but you still need to say "the limit is X", or the whole legal system is a farce made out of "fuzzy rules we're kind of supposed to follow".
No, you don't have to "set the bar somewhere". Age limits are never necessary, because age is an arbitrary measurement with only a vague correlation to the qualities that actually matter in terms of protecting people's rights. In every single case where age limits are currently used, we'd be better off replacing them with something more sensible (or in some cases, eliminating them -- the age limits on driving and running for office, for example).
And of course, moving away from age limits doesn't mean moving over to "fuzzy rules we're kind of supposed to follow". On this News For Nerds site, we might like to think that you can't be sure of anything unless a number is attached, but that's not really true. Look at all the other laws, the ones that don't involve age: are they fuzzy and impossible to enforce? Mostly, no. For example, the difference between voyeurism and consensual porn is pretty clear even when age isn't a factor, and so is the difference between rape and consensual sex.
You can get some pretty good 99% isopropyl from any good pharmacy (ask for it) or computer store (I get mine from Altex, it's $8 a bottle..).
You don't even need to ask for it. I bought 99% isopropyl at Safeway just a couple days ago. It was right next to the 70% and only cost a few cents more.
I had all those problems with my *Bluetooth* MX1000. The double-click problem is why I replaced it, after about 3 years of clicks working fine - but it still lagged pretty often, especially when I had a lot of wifi traffic going.
Now I have an MX Revolution, and it's not giving me any trouble. Maybe yours is just defective.
That's not what he was referring to.
The noise you hear when you leave your phone next to speakers is the phone transmitting. Every so often, the phone transmits a signal just to remind the tower that it's still there. If the tower doesn't get this signal, it assumes you've left the coverage area or your battery has died.
But the parent was talking about receiving. The "slotted mode" he mentioned allows the phone to turn off its receiver, so instead of listening constantly to know if it's receiving a call, it only has to wake up and listen every X milliseconds. The tower knows when each phone will be listening and saves its pages until then. This saves battery life, at the cost of potentially delaying your incoming messages and calls by a couple seconds.
So most of the phone can be sleeping all the time without constantly waking up every now and then. exept maybe the gsm chip itself will be powered down too to save even more battery, what i find hard to believe.
Believe it. That's exactly what the parent was saying: the radio receiver consumes power just to listen, so "slotted mode" actually turns off the receiver while waiting for the next slot to come around.
But he was talking about CDMA, not GSM.
Root access != access to encrypted data. That's kinda the whole point of encryption.
Is there anyone here who seriously believes that someone should be encouraged to sell crap under someone else's name and be able get away with it? Really?
No, but that's a trademark issue, not a copyright (piracy) issue.
Let the crap-mongers sell whatever crap they want under their own names. If they fraudulently use someone else's name, we can solve that problem in court, not in hardware.
Actually, his point has nothing to do with emotions.
Many people do, in fact, put off going to the doctor because they're worried about the cost. By the time the problem has gotten serious enough that they're willing to go in, it has often progressed to the point where it's more expensive to treat and/or less likely to be treatable.
That's one reason why high US health care costs don't lead to better patient outcomes: the structure of our system discourages prevention and early diagnosis. Even when you have insurance, many insurers hesitate to pay for preventive treatments because there's a good chance you'll have moved on to another insurer by the time it pays off.
In Poker all players put X amount of money in, and in the end leave with X - Y money, where Y is the cut. Unless you have some system to guarantee that your opponents will lose, only the house wins in the end.
Poker isn't a team game. It's not "all players" vs. the house; it's a bunch of individuals playing against each other, with the house skimming a few percent out of every pot.
Taken as a whole, yes, all the players at the table will walk away with less money than they started with. But as an individual, if you're one of the better players at the table, you're likely to walk away with more than you started with. Bad players will lose a lot of money, but the majority of that money goes to the good players, not the house.
Being a good player doesn't guarantee that your opponents will lose: there's still an element of chance. But it does tip the odds in your favor. A good poker player can make a consistent profit by being on the right side of those odds, just like the house does in games like blackjack.
That's true in games where you play against the house, but not in poker.
That page gets /describe totally wrong, BTW. You can't forge emotes from other people. The command sends an emote to someone else, privately.