First let me address your no patents system. It's a horrible idea. The concept of a patent is basically a social contract. The inventor gets the ability to make a living of of his inventions by having the right to exclude others from producing them, and, in turn, society gets full rights to an inventor's work after the patent expires by requiring him to disclose his inventive work to the public. These outcomes are mutually beneficial to both parties. In a no patent system, one of these outcomes will not exist. Either inventors will be unable to make a living, and the rate of invention will slow down as they take other jobs; or they will keep their inventions secret if possible so that they can make money by excluding others from their knowledge. In the former case, society gets stagnant technologically (i.e., the Middle Ages). In the latter case, inventors keep discoveries secret, and society doesn't get to build off them to discover new things. The scientific method relies on the availability all known sources of information of information for science to progress. (If anything a no patent system encourages, quacks, snake-oil salesmen, and mysticism since all of those promise solutions based on secrecy.)
This is mostly Big Medicine, and if Big Medicine can't manage to be profitable at the prices the public is willing to pay (generic prices) without patent protection
You obviously have no concept of how the drug business works. It takes years (sometimes over a decade) and hundreds of millions of dollars to develop a drug. On top of that it takes sometimes up to five years to get FDA and USPTO approval to both sell and patent a drug. Couple that with the rule that patents are deemed to expire from a term starting at their date of application, and you have the current situation where most drug companies only effectively get 15 years of protection out of 20 year patent. Apply this to your situation, and drug companies will get almost no patent protection at all.
This completely ignores the cost of recouping research, which most companies amortize over the life of their patent. If drug prices are high now, with companies spreading out their research costs over 15-17 years, imagine how high they will be if a company has to spread those costs over 5 years. You think health care is an inequitable situation right now, wait until your system where only the super rich can get access to the latest advances.
Supply and demand, free-market style (without the protectionism of patents).
I'm as pro-market as it comes, but the market only works if there is a limited supply or demand for goods. The main flaw patents and other IP is that in its natural market state information has:
Supply = Infinity, Demand Price = 0,
because knowledge as a good is non-exclusive, and non-rivalrous. In that situation, there is no economic incentive develop new technologies. Sensible IP laws solve this by allowing a restriction of Supply to some quantifiable level (in economics this is called "internalizing externalities"). Want proof that this works? Just look at civilization as a whole. Since the first copyright laws were introduced at the
True, so here's a solution: tie patents to individuals rather than corporations. Make them non-transferable...
That would be a horrible idea. Have you ever heard of a concept of economies of scale? If you prevent corporations from owning patents, then they will no incentive to fund research because their sole purpose of existence is to make money. Things like new drugs and new CPU's take tens to hundreds of millions of dollars to create. Who's gonna fund that research if a corporation cannot? Rich people (so only rich people can obtain patents now?)? The government (who has clearly demonstrated the ability to fund efficient and successful programs like social security, the war on terror, and the war on drugs)?
Making a patent nontransferable is a horrible idea, because then you only limit the inventor to the ability to make money, and many of them cannot do that without a significant investment in capital. That's what the corporation brings since it is the only business entity in existence that can take small contributions of many non-rich people, and utilize them together to get the purchasing power of one "rich person."
Incidentally, all of you anti-corporation people, should take some time to actually read up on the corporation. It's not as malevolent of an entity as you guys make it out to be, and its existence in its current form is tied to much of the Western World's development over the last 200 years.
You obviously do not hate ads as much as the next guy.
You want to see how many filter sets in Adblock I've subscribed to, and on how many websites I've turned javascript permissions off? I'll admit that I probably don't hate advertisements as much as you, but I block my fair share.
What I'm trying to point is that while that may be the case, I do empathize with the plight of the your average website. They depend on ads to stay in business b/c no one will pay for their content, but users (like me or you) keep trying to avoid their ads. It's an escalating arms race, and I personally do not fault them for forcing us to watch ads before viewing videos. Do I find it annoying? Yes. Will I mute the ad? Probably. But do I think they are scum for doing it? No, because they steps we as web surfers take to avoid the ads are equally as bastardly. If none of us used ad-blocking software, we probably wouldn't be getting the hard squeeze from the other side.
Google has been quite successful in making their ads inoccuous
On a side note, there is a big trade off to Google's approach. Their ads are more innocuous, but you give up a great deal of privacy for that. Google also makes money off of targeting their ads, which requires them gathering data on your web surfing habits, email contents, and other information you give them information to (e.g., Google Desktop Search). This not only makes the ads more effective, but it also gives them data they analyze and sell. And if you think they are not selling your data profile, you are sorely mistaken. It's a trade-off, your personally information for less ads or more ads, but less personal information. I'll take the latter.
It's the same argument as always: utility and quality of the experience of existing products is being reduced, with no benefit to the viewer / end user.
No benefit? You're not paying anything for the content. Free access to information and entertainment, how's that for a benefit? It costs money to run a website. They have to past the cost along to the consumers somehow. If not ads, then they'd be charging for content. It's not like every website is run by a rich trust fund baby who can afford to blow wads of cash.
Your entire argument is based on the assumption that (1) the costs for running a website are static, and (2) that the costs for hosting web content are static. Neither of these is true. Websites cost more to run as the bandwidth they require increase (i.e., streaming video, flash, graphics, javascript, AJAX). Increases in amount and volume of content (even plain), directly translate into a need for more bandwidth, and websites have to shoulder this cost somehow.
But why is that my problem?
It's not your problem, but then don't expect access to content. If you do not want to put up with the restrictions for viewing a site's content, then don't. But don't act like it's their obligation to provide you with free unfettered access to their content also.
video sharing sites dont produce the content, they have no right to butcher it by forcing people to watch ads.
Slashdot doesn't produce it's content, so therefore they have no rights to have ads? As I mentioned above, producing content is only part of the cost. For websites like youtube and Slashdot, you also have massive bandwidth bills, and for youtube, the hosting cost is probably tremendous as well. There are plenty of costs that these guys have to pay that necessitate them having a revenue stream.
Yes, well, while there you have a point (I don't dispute that), how much are you paying to look at Slashdot, Google or any other website? (And don't count internet access, that's like counting the gas you use up to drive to a movie theater.)
I hate ads as much as the next guy, but seriously, I do not get what is with all the bitching and moaning about *GASP* having to watch ads before you view some video content.
First, a lot of websites like ESPN and CNN already do this, so this I fail to see how this is big news.
Second, how is this different from TV?
Third, as much as we would like to ignore it, maintaining a websites and producing content cost money. Even good old Slashdot relies on ad revenue to stay afloat. Like TV, the only other choice we have is a pay-for-content scheme, and personally, I'd rather deal with ads then have to maintain subscriptions to the 20 or so websites I visit regularly. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
Here's some advice for you ad-challenged people. Get Adblock; it blocks 90% of the ads you'll ever have the potential to see. For the other 10%, just ignore them or surf another website until they are over. You may be forced to sit through the ad, but your not forced to pay attention to it.
While this is a very interesting development, the party's proposals raise as many questions as they provide solutions.
From the article (emphasis added):
Free file sharing: Technical development has made it possible to spread culture, both popular and niche, across the globe at minimal cost. We need new ways of compensating artists and copyright holders, to make free file sharing possible. Laws and regulations, both national and international, need to be changed so they only regulate limitations of use and distribution in a commercial for-profit context.
The Liberal Party seems to be suggesting two things here. The first is a quid-pro-quo arrangement with artist and copyright holder; you let us share your works in an unrestricted manner, and we will come up with some alternative scheme for compensating you. The problem is, the Liberal Party offers no such scheme in their declaration. The most apparent scheme would be some form of government subsidization, but that would have two potentially damaging effects on content creation, (1) it would put the government directly in charge of "creating culture"; and (2) it would move the cost in creation from those who want the creative content (i.e., consumers) to the cost of society as a whole. The first is alarming for obvious reasons, it effectively gives the government a giant platform from which to advocate its own views (i.e., massive viewpoint discrimination). The problem with second, is that if all of society is sharing in the cost of content creation, the content created will come to reflect the majority viewpoint in society. Niche forms of expression would receive little public support (and thus little public funding), and the end result would be a monolithic culture.
The second is that while the Liberal Party advocates regulations and limitations on use and distributions in a commercial for-profit context, such protection would not extend to digital distribution of content, such as iTunes and other online stores, which file sharing (in the context they are promoting it) would make inviable. This leaves only physical distribution of content as the one form of protected, for-profit, commercial distribution. This protection is illusory at best, since physical distributions such as CDs and DVD's are easily convertible into a digital format, which can then be shared without protection or consequence.
This basically leaves the Liberal Party in the position of advocating for the abolishment of content creation as a method of business, since the only way one can make money off of content creation is by restricting access to that content. Live performances, bieng the exception, this would be impossible in a world where legal file sharing would essentially give content a supply of infinity (and thus creating a demand price of zero).
Then again, this might not be a problem for Norway, as their culture only culturally profitable exports are the works Henrik Ibsen and "Lovefool" (and I think the Cardigans might actually be Swedish.) J/K:-P
Less storage then a regular size iPod. More than twice the cost of two 8GB iPod nanos. Other than for the sheer sake of proving it can be done, why is this hack impressive again?
No, wire fraud requires as one of its elements, that the perpetrator be using deception to "obtain[] money or property." Pretexting, while related to wire fraud, encompasses the broader act of obtaining information through deception. I understand your sentiments, but do not call this something it is not.
It's like a company switching to use robots versus a company switching to use foreign workers.
No, I think that distinction is inconsequential. The same thing happened in the 1970s with the moving of manufacturing overseas, and by-in-large, society has not seemed to be harmed by that. In fact, can blame technology just as much for outsourcing as you can for the fall of music industry. In outsourcing's case, advancements that allow for easier and faster transcontinental communication allow for engineering operations to be moved overseas.
I think a better distinction is to be made on the economic level. Outsourcing and the music industry's problems both stem from the fact that buyers for each market perceive the goods they are buying as too expensive, and thus, have sought to fill their demands by cheaper means. In the case outsourcing, companies that hire think they can get cheaper equivalent results by seeking replacements overseas. In the case of music, people have stopped buying CDs and started utilizing the black market (i.e., piracy). In both cases, you have buyers choosing cheaper alternatives that provide equivalent usefulness. It is on this level, that I feel there is an inconsistency.
Well, it may be crass to say this, but if the music industry's current business model is "outmoded," who is to say then that the idea of an American engineering workforce as a business model is not outmoded?
The impending collapse of the music industry is do to a collapse in demand. People do not want to pay the high prices for music available. The same thing could be said for outsourcing. In this case, employers do not want to pay the high prices for the engineers available in their work force.
Sure I guess one could argue as you do that "big corporations" are different from "hardworking people," but that argument is facetious because the two are the same thing. If the music industry fails, thousands of people are going to lose their jobs--and we are not just talking about Britney Spears and the President Warner Music. All of the people who are in the ancillary labor force that support the artists, labels, and current regime stand to lose their jobs as well.
Why is it okay that they should lose their jobs do to changes in market dynamics, while it is blasphemy for engineers to lose their jobs for the substantially same reason?
I was not questioning the comments themselves. You are probably right, they are different people. What I was questioning was why the community as a whole (i.e., the comment moderation) has two completely inconsistent viewpoints on two very similar issues.
This is the same issue that the Luddites could not come to terms with. Greater efficiency means less work to be done. Less work necessitates fewer employees and/or smaller wages. Instead of coming to terms with the reality and exploring other lines of work, they decided to resort to destruction of property to maintain the status quo.
I am sorry if this is offtopic or flamebait, but this is the exact same argument many people claim is facetious in the context of outsourcing. How is this situation any different?
Adapt or die. You know, any time someone uses the "adapt or die argument" in the context of the RIAA or MPAA, it gets modded insightful. Yet, when the same argument is used in conjunction with outsourcing, it gets modded as flamebait. Could someone explain the slashdot community's priciple or consistency on this issue. Or are we just all selfish assholes with selective morality?
Allow me summarize: "It's too expensive to be competitive, and we don't have a vision for being competitive anyway. So we're going to make our shareholders happy and shoot ourselves in the foot. Twice. Just to be certain. But hey, think of all the money we'll be saving!" Actually, what they are saying that it is too expensive for them to remain competitive the US. They in fact do have a vision for remaining competitive, and that involves moving R&D to China, where the costs are lower.
Whether you like it or not, the outsourcing of R&D occurring now is no different from the outsourcing of manufacturing that occurred the 1970s and 80s. The internet has made communication across vast distances cheap and affordable, much like advances in technology in the 1970s made the transportation of manufactured goods over long distances cheap and affordable. While the Structural Unemployment, caused by this sucks, the internet's existence comes with many benefits (email, wikipedia, pr0n), just like the advances in shipping technology did (overnight mail, mail-order businesses, Japanese Electronics). In the long run, we even benefited directly from the outsourcing of manufacturing in the form of cheaper goods.
Outsourcing, like it or not, is just a cost of progress, and much like the Luddites, we can either accept this fact and find other jobs, or start destroying trans-Pacific fiber runs in a vain attempt to save our current ones.
Would you - honestly - trust a pharmaceutical corporation to support research for a cheap and effective cure to ANY of the billion-dollar-revenue generating illnesses out there? This isn't conspiracy-theory 'They're sitting on an AIDS vaccine!' shit either, this is a simple and likely 'Why fund that? It'd just hurt our bottom line.' Yes, I would trust the pharmaceutical company. The first pharmco to cure cancer or AIDS is going to make hundreds of billions of dollars off the cure, and severely hurt their competitor's bottom line.
If anything completely government funded research would be worse, because the researchers have no incentive to complete their work. What's going to happen when these researchers find a cure? Their funding is going to be cut and they'll be out of work. If anything, they have incentive to string the government along because, unlike a pharmco Congress would not dare cut their funding. No Congressman wants to have to explain to his constituents how he is hindering their only hope of a cure by reducing funding.
The other benefit to pharmcos is competition. As I alluded to, if there is only one entity researching a cure, its only going to take one approach at a time to finding it. Contrast this with having several companies doing research. Each company is going to develop its own road map and take varied avenues to the research, effectively speeding up research as a whole. It's like the idea behind distributed computing. Why have one processor repeat same task 10 times when you can have 10 processors do each task once?
I would _not_ ever allow _anyone_ to hold _any_ patent in _any_ way related to human health and cure. Yes, I know what that would mean to "health" and drug companies. Drug Research is one of the few areas where I would support a strong patent regime. Your average drug today costs hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars to develop. There is simply no way for a company to recoup that money unless it gets exclusive rights to the manufacture and sale of that drug. In pharmaceutical discoveries were unpatentable, drug companies would have no incentive to invest in research. What's the point of spending a but load of cash to find the cure for cancer, when there are hundreds of generic producers waiting to copy your drug and undercut your margins?
As far as alternatives to the current patent regime, the only other solutions are either government directed research or large government prize rewards. Both of these have drawbacks that far outweigh the benefit of their implementation.
The problem with direct 100% government funding is that it creates an incentive to never actually finish work. Researchers would be loathed to find a cure if that cure meant that they were no longer needed and their funding would be cut off. As an illustration, look at the War on Drugs. Do you think the DEA and FBI would actually benefit if all illegal drugs were to suddenly stop entering the US? No, they would have their funding either capped or cut.
Direct prizes are problematic b/c they are inherently hard to value. At a proper prize would have to cover the cost of research plus a "healthy" profit to get companies to compete for it. The hard part here comes in determining the valuation. If the prize amount is set too low, no one will do research. If it is set too high, you effectively have society overpaying for the drug, the excess being the prize amount minus the minimum amount the winning company would have accepted. All of this guessing is eliminated in a patent regime, as the market will determine the amount spent on research, while the patent will effectively serve as "the carrot" for which the drug company will be awarded.
No, experimental use is only a defense if the alleged infringer's use was either for his amusement, to satisfy idle curiosity, or for strictly philosophical inquiry; and did not further the alleged infringer's legitimate business. Non-commercial research by a university has already been held to be a furtherance of legitimate business, and thus it is not covered by the defense. See Madey v. Duke.
It matters because then the police are committing actions that at best morally not in the right, and at worst are an abuse of their powers. I think in general, we expect the government to use its power in ways that would not offend our sensibilities as citizens. For example, like I said, if a basketball coach scouts the opposition by attending one of their games, we view that as a common sense action taken to gain tactical advantage. By the same token, if police use legal methods to obtain publicly available information, there is no violation because the information is available publicly so that anyone can freely access it. If all the NYPD were doing were attending public meetings to gather intelligence, then there would be no core problem since obtaining that information did not involve an abuse of power or authority.
Ok, I did not read the part about NYPD officers posing as sympathizers. That completely blows my argument up. I was under the impression that the officers were silent, uninvolved observers. There's nothing to look at here, carry on.
Disclosure: I don't feel like registering, so I did not read the article. My comments are based completely on the summary. Feel free to correct me if the story indicates otherwise.
That said, what the NYPD did is (1) travel to cities around the world (2) to observe public meetings of groups of people (3) who were likely to be in NYC during the convention (4) and cause significant disruptions in business and city services (5) for an extended period of time.
This is not espionage, it is scouting. The NYPD did not obtain any secret information from these meetings. These were publicly open meetings intended to disseminate the information the NYPD was after to anyone in attendance. The NYPD took action that an average person could take if they were willing to spend a several thousand dollars.
This is no different than a basketball coach attending an opposing team's game or looking at their game film. This is no different, even, than a police man listening to two people talking in the middle of a busy street. It is settled law, in the US at least, that individuals or groups of individuals have no expectation of privacy in a public area.
The NYPD did not exercise any extra-jurisdictional control over these people or use any methods that would illegal under either US, New York, or Local Country law. All they did was attend public meetings without advertising their presence. There is no evidence here that NYPD was abusing its authority in observing these groups, that it infiltrated these groups to cause internal disruptions, or that its observation invaded the privacy of these groups. In short, the NYPD did nothing legally or morally wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
You obviously have no concept of how the drug business works. It takes years (sometimes over a decade) and hundreds of millions of dollars to develop a drug. On top of that it takes sometimes up to five years to get FDA and USPTO approval to both sell and patent a drug. Couple that with the rule that patents are deemed to expire from a term starting at their date of application, and you have the current situation where most drug companies only effectively get 15 years of protection out of 20 year patent. Apply this to your situation, and drug companies will get almost no patent protection at all.
This completely ignores the cost of recouping research, which most companies amortize over the life of their patent. If drug prices are high now, with companies spreading out their research costs over 15-17 years, imagine how high they will be if a company has to spread those costs over 5 years. You think health care is an inequitable situation right now, wait until your system where only the super rich can get access to the latest advances.
I'm as pro-market as it comes, but the market only works if there is a limited supply or demand for goods. The main flaw patents and other IP is that in its natural market state information has: because knowledge as a good is non-exclusive, and non-rivalrous. In that situation, there is no economic incentive develop new technologies. Sensible IP laws solve this by allowing a restriction of Supply to some quantifiable level (in economics this is called "internalizing externalities"). Want proof that this works? Just look at civilization as a whole. Since the first copyright laws were introduced at the
That would be a horrible idea. Have you ever heard of a concept of economies of scale? If you prevent corporations from owning patents, then they will no incentive to fund research because their sole purpose of existence is to make money. Things like new drugs and new CPU's take tens to hundreds of millions of dollars to create. Who's gonna fund that research if a corporation cannot? Rich people (so only rich people can obtain patents now?)? The government (who has clearly demonstrated the ability to fund efficient and successful programs like social security, the war on terror, and the war on drugs)?
Making a patent nontransferable is a horrible idea, because then you only limit the inventor to the ability to make money, and many of them cannot do that without a significant investment in capital. That's what the corporation brings since it is the only business entity in existence that can take small contributions of many non-rich people, and utilize them together to get the purchasing power of one "rich person."
Incidentally, all of you anti-corporation people, should take some time to actually read up on the corporation. It's not as malevolent of an entity as you guys make it out to be, and its existence in its current form is tied to much of the Western World's development over the last 200 years.
You want to see how many filter sets in Adblock I've subscribed to, and on how many websites I've turned javascript permissions off? I'll admit that I probably don't hate advertisements as much as you, but I block my fair share.
What I'm trying to point is that while that may be the case, I do empathize with the plight of the your average website. They depend on ads to stay in business b/c no one will pay for their content, but users (like me or you) keep trying to avoid their ads. It's an escalating arms race, and I personally do not fault them for forcing us to watch ads before viewing videos. Do I find it annoying? Yes. Will I mute the ad? Probably. But do I think they are scum for doing it? No, because they steps we as web surfers take to avoid the ads are equally as bastardly. If none of us used ad-blocking software, we probably wouldn't be getting the hard squeeze from the other side.
On a side note, there is a big trade off to Google's approach. Their ads are more innocuous, but you give up a great deal of privacy for that. Google also makes money off of targeting their ads, which requires them gathering data on your web surfing habits, email contents, and other information you give them information to (e.g., Google Desktop Search). This not only makes the ads more effective, but it also gives them data they analyze and sell. And if you think they are not selling your data profile, you are sorely mistaken. It's a trade-off, your personally information for less ads or more ads, but less personal information. I'll take the latter.
No benefit? You're not paying anything for the content. Free access to information and entertainment, how's that for a benefit? It costs money to run a website. They have to past the cost along to the consumers somehow. If not ads, then they'd be charging for content. It's not like every website is run by a rich trust fund baby who can afford to blow wads of cash.
Your entire argument is based on the assumption that (1) the costs for running a website are static, and (2) that the costs for hosting web content are static. Neither of these is true. Websites cost more to run as the bandwidth they require increase (i.e., streaming video, flash, graphics, javascript, AJAX). Increases in amount and volume of content (even plain), directly translate into a need for more bandwidth, and websites have to shoulder this cost somehow.
It's not your problem, but then don't expect access to content. If you do not want to put up with the restrictions for viewing a site's content, then don't. But don't act like it's their obligation to provide you with free unfettered access to their content also.
Slashdot doesn't produce it's content, so therefore they have no rights to have ads? As I mentioned above, producing content is only part of the cost. For websites like youtube and Slashdot, you also have massive bandwidth bills, and for youtube, the hosting cost is probably tremendous as well. There are plenty of costs that these guys have to pay that necessitate them having a revenue stream.
Yes, well, while there you have a point (I don't dispute that), how much are you paying to look at Slashdot, Google or any other website? (And don't count internet access, that's like counting the gas you use up to drive to a movie theater.)
I hate ads as much as the next guy, but seriously, I do not get what is with all the bitching and moaning about *GASP* having to watch ads before you view some video content.
First, a lot of websites like ESPN and CNN already do this, so this I fail to see how this is big news.
Second, how is this different from TV?
Third, as much as we would like to ignore it, maintaining a websites and producing content cost money. Even good old Slashdot relies on ad revenue to stay afloat. Like TV, the only other choice we have is a pay-for-content scheme, and personally, I'd rather deal with ads then have to maintain subscriptions to the 20 or so websites I visit regularly. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
Here's some advice for you ad-challenged people. Get Adblock; it blocks 90% of the ads you'll ever have the potential to see. For the other 10%, just ignore them or surf another website until they are over. You may be forced to sit through the ad, but your not forced to pay attention to it.
From the article (emphasis added):
The Liberal Party seems to be suggesting two things here. The first is a quid-pro-quo arrangement with artist and copyright holder; you let us share your works in an unrestricted manner, and we will come up with some alternative scheme for compensating you. The problem is, the Liberal Party offers no such scheme in their declaration. The most apparent scheme would be some form of government subsidization, but that would have two potentially damaging effects on content creation, (1) it would put the government directly in charge of "creating culture"; and (2) it would move the cost in creation from those who want the creative content (i.e., consumers) to the cost of society as a whole. The first is alarming for obvious reasons, it effectively gives the government a giant platform from which to advocate its own views (i.e., massive viewpoint discrimination). The problem with second, is that if all of society is sharing in the cost of content creation, the content created will come to reflect the majority viewpoint in society. Niche forms of expression would receive little public support (and thus little public funding), and the end result would be a monolithic culture.
The second is that while the Liberal Party advocates regulations and limitations on use and distributions in a commercial for-profit context, such protection would not extend to digital distribution of content, such as iTunes and other online stores, which file sharing (in the context they are promoting it) would make inviable. This leaves only physical distribution of content as the one form of protected, for-profit, commercial distribution. This protection is illusory at best, since physical distributions such as CDs and DVD's are easily convertible into a digital format, which can then be shared without protection or consequence.
This basically leaves the Liberal Party in the position of advocating for the abolishment of content creation as a method of business, since the only way one can make money off of content creation is by restricting access to that content. Live performances, bieng the exception, this would be impossible in a world where legal file sharing would essentially give content a supply of infinity (and thus creating a demand price of zero).
Then again, this might not be a problem for Norway, as their culture only culturally profitable exports are the works Henrik Ibsen and "Lovefool" (and I think the Cardigans might actually be Swedish.) J/K
Less storage then a regular size iPod. More than twice the cost of two 8GB iPod nanos. Other than for the sheer sake of proving it can be done, why is this hack impressive again?
No, wire fraud requires as one of its elements, that the perpetrator be using deception to "obtain[] money or property." Pretexting, while related to wire fraud, encompasses the broader act of obtaining information through deception. I understand your sentiments, but do not call this something it is not.
No, I think that distinction is inconsequential. The same thing happened in the 1970s with the moving of manufacturing overseas, and by-in-large, society has not seemed to be harmed by that. In fact, can blame technology just as much for outsourcing as you can for the fall of music industry. In outsourcing's case, advancements that allow for easier and faster transcontinental communication allow for engineering operations to be moved overseas.
I think a better distinction is to be made on the economic level. Outsourcing and the music industry's problems both stem from the fact that buyers for each market perceive the goods they are buying as too expensive, and thus, have sought to fill their demands by cheaper means. In the case outsourcing, companies that hire think they can get cheaper equivalent results by seeking replacements overseas. In the case of music, people have stopped buying CDs and started utilizing the black market (i.e., piracy). In both cases, you have buyers choosing cheaper alternatives that provide equivalent usefulness. It is on this level, that I feel there is an inconsistency.
Well, it may be crass to say this, but if the music industry's current business model is "outmoded," who is to say then that the idea of an American engineering workforce as a business model is not outmoded?
Really, how so?
The impending collapse of the music industry is do to a collapse in demand. People do not want to pay the high prices for music available. The same thing could be said for outsourcing. In this case, employers do not want to pay the high prices for the engineers available in their work force.
Sure I guess one could argue as you do that "big corporations" are different from "hardworking people," but that argument is facetious because the two are the same thing. If the music industry fails, thousands of people are going to lose their jobs--and we are not just talking about Britney Spears and the President Warner Music. All of the people who are in the ancillary labor force that support the artists, labels, and current regime stand to lose their jobs as well.
Why is it okay that they should lose their jobs do to changes in market dynamics, while it is blasphemy for engineers to lose their jobs for the substantially same reason?
Thanks, that's pretty much the type of analysis/answer I was looking for.
I was not questioning the comments themselves. You are probably right, they are different people. What I was questioning was why the community as a whole (i.e., the comment moderation) has two completely inconsistent viewpoints on two very similar issues.
Whether you like it or not, the outsourcing of R&D occurring now is no different from the outsourcing of manufacturing that occurred the 1970s and 80s. The internet has made communication across vast distances cheap and affordable, much like advances in technology in the 1970s made the transportation of manufactured goods over long distances cheap and affordable. While the Structural Unemployment, caused by this sucks, the internet's existence comes with many benefits (email, wikipedia, pr0n), just like the advances in shipping technology did (overnight mail, mail-order businesses, Japanese Electronics). In the long run, we even benefited directly from the outsourcing of manufacturing in the form of cheaper goods.
Outsourcing, like it or not, is just a cost of progress, and much like the Luddites, we can either accept this fact and find other jobs, or start destroying trans-Pacific fiber runs in a vain attempt to save our current ones.
If anything completely government funded research would be worse, because the researchers have no incentive to complete their work. What's going to happen when these researchers find a cure? Their funding is going to be cut and they'll be out of work. If anything, they have incentive to string the government along because, unlike a pharmco Congress would not dare cut their funding. No Congressman wants to have to explain to his constituents how he is hindering their only hope of a cure by reducing funding.
The other benefit to pharmcos is competition. As I alluded to, if there is only one entity researching a cure, its only going to take one approach at a time to finding it. Contrast this with having several companies doing research. Each company is going to develop its own road map and take varied avenues to the research, effectively speeding up research as a whole. It's like the idea behind distributed computing. Why have one processor repeat same task 10 times when you can have 10 processors do each task once?
As far as alternatives to the current patent regime, the only other solutions are either government directed research or large government prize rewards. Both of these have drawbacks that far outweigh the benefit of their implementation.
The problem with direct 100% government funding is that it creates an incentive to never actually finish work. Researchers would be loathed to find a cure if that cure meant that they were no longer needed and their funding would be cut off. As an illustration, look at the War on Drugs. Do you think the DEA and FBI would actually benefit if all illegal drugs were to suddenly stop entering the US? No, they would have their funding either capped or cut.
Direct prizes are problematic b/c they are inherently hard to value. At a proper prize would have to cover the cost of research plus a "healthy" profit to get companies to compete for it. The hard part here comes in determining the valuation. If the prize amount is set too low, no one will do research. If it is set too high, you effectively have society overpaying for the drug, the excess being the prize amount minus the minimum amount the winning company would have accepted. All of this guessing is eliminated in a patent regime, as the market will determine the amount spent on research, while the patent will effectively serve as "the carrot" for which the drug company will be awarded.
No, experimental use is only a defense if the alleged infringer's use was either for his amusement, to satisfy idle curiosity, or for strictly philosophical inquiry; and did not further the alleged infringer's legitimate business. Non-commercial research by a university has already been held to be a furtherance of legitimate business, and thus it is not covered by the defense. See Madey v. Duke.
It matters because then the police are committing actions that at best morally not in the right, and at worst are an abuse of their powers. I think in general, we expect the government to use its power in ways that would not offend our sensibilities as citizens. For example, like I said, if a basketball coach scouts the opposition by attending one of their games, we view that as a common sense action taken to gain tactical advantage. By the same token, if police use legal methods to obtain publicly available information, there is no violation because the information is available publicly so that anyone can freely access it. If all the NYPD were doing were attending public meetings to gather intelligence, then there would be no core problem since obtaining that information did not involve an abuse of power or authority.
Um, yah, I said exactly that.
Ok, I did not read the part about NYPD officers posing as sympathizers. That completely blows my argument up. I was under the impression that the officers were silent, uninvolved observers. There's nothing to look at here, carry on.
Disclosure: I don't feel like registering, so I did not read the article. My comments are based completely on the summary. Feel free to correct me if the story indicates otherwise.
That said, what the NYPD did is (1) travel to cities around the world (2) to observe public meetings of groups of people (3) who were likely to be in NYC during the convention (4) and cause significant disruptions in business and city services (5) for an extended period of time.
This is not espionage, it is scouting. The NYPD did not obtain any secret information from these meetings. These were publicly open meetings intended to disseminate the information the NYPD was after to anyone in attendance. The NYPD took action that an average person could take if they were willing to spend a several thousand dollars.
This is no different than a basketball coach attending an opposing team's game or looking at their game film. This is no different, even, than a police man listening to two people talking in the middle of a busy street. It is settled law, in the US at least, that individuals or groups of individuals have no expectation of privacy in a public area.
The NYPD did not exercise any extra-jurisdictional control over these people or use any methods that would illegal under either US, New York, or Local Country law. All they did was attend public meetings without advertising their presence. There is no evidence here that NYPD was abusing its authority in observing these groups, that it infiltrated these groups to cause internal disruptions, or that its observation invaded the privacy of these groups. In short, the NYPD did nothing legally or morally wrong.