pushing for, what appears to be, the best solution for the problem - irrespective of it's licence.
directly contradicts this:
it should (unless it's really really appallingly bad) still come out smelling sweeter BECAUSE OF THESE VERY FREEDOMS THAT IT GIVES.
If it "comes out smelling sweeter" because of the freedoms it gives, then you are taking the license into account. You can't have it both ways.
The license of a piece of software is just one factor when it comes to whether it's the best solution for the problem. You can't reasonably ignore the license when making your decision, and neither should you focus entirely on the license -- either way lies madness. A balanced approach, taking into account all relevant factors (quality of software, up-front and continuing monetary costs, license, etc.), is the only reasonable way to go.
You have a lot of good ideas, but I wanted to point out a few of your, er, spoonerisms, so that your arguments might be better received in the future:)
that the time it takes to find out a fact and understand it is directly proportionate to the level of advancement of the given society in time (at this time)
What I think you're getting at is this: as the age of a society increases, the time it takes to find a given fact decreases. This is an inversely proportional relationship -- as one goes up (age) the other goes down (seek time). If something has a directly proportional relationship, then as one factor goes up (e.g. age), the other goes up (e.g. population).
since the very act of resource hogging is Neolithic and an impetus to human advancement!
An impetus is a push or shove that gets something going. The word I think you were looking for is "impediment", which means "obstruction".:)
some other exploit or some unilateral benefit (unlikely given human nature)
"Unilateral" means "one-sided". Perhaps you meant "universal"? Unilateral benefits seem likely given human nature -- people will strive to make things benefit only them. What's unlikely is something that benefits everyone (i.e. a universal benefit).
Why not strip-search every person who enters a New York City subway entrance? After all, many subway stations are adjacent to (if not directly under) many of the city's remaining skyscrapers. Ludicrous, you say? Well, so is strip-searching grandmas with one-way tickets on the airlines.
The rest of your post is basically a loaded "libertarian" diatribe, but this particular part is an example of an egregious logical fallacy, not to mention false exaggeration. You imply that everyone, even harmless grandmas, are getting strip-searched every time they takes a flight. This is provably false: I took two flights (from LA to DC and back) and wasn't even asked to remove my shoes. Neither was my wife, nor were 95%+ of the other passengers. (That was the exaggeration part.) The logical fallacy is that because subway passengers are not strip-searched, strip-searching airplane passengers is ludicrous. Even if airplane passengers were being strip-searched (which they are not, except in very rare situations, usually when they do something stupid), the fact remains that bringing down a skyscraper by crashing a plane into it is a lot simpler than bringing it down by somehow accessing its underground areas (presumably with explosives). There's only so many airports; monitoring access to airplanes is a lot simpler than monitoring access to the literally hundreds of thousands of individual access points to tall buildings.
I don't know what your actual age or station are, but you write like someone who just discovered these "ideals" and hasn't had much practice applying them to real life. Basically, you sound like a first-year college student who's just taken his first couple of econ and philosophy classes... so for your sake, I really hope that you *are* (everyone goes through that phase in college).
I'm curious; has there ever actually been a free-market telecom system? If so, when and where, and how did (or does) it work, and how well? I'm not being snarky; this is a serous question.
Would the Interstate Highway System have been built if the federal government hadn't gone and done it? No -- there would have been little motivation (not to mention vastly insufficient resources) for any private corporation to ever build such a thing.
The free market is a good thing, but it is not a magic-bullet solution to all problems -- so-called "market failures" are where the free market will not work, and public transportation is one of them. Corporations have only one incentive: make as much money as possible. Public transportation lends itself to a natural monopoly; competition makes it vastly inefficient (imagine if you had five or ten times as many bus stops, train stations, lines of rail, etc. because each company refuses to share the use of its transport resources).
Your facts aren't even right; there are numerous highly successful urban rail systems all over the world, most of which are government-run. Last month I was in D.C. and got to use their excellent rail system. Trains run often, on time, aren't overcrowded, and are cheaper than owning a car... and the whole thing is run by the government.
In places (like most of Europe) that have a "loser-pays" system, it does not work like this -- you don't end up with a "loser" paying the entirety of the other side's bills. The amount that either side has to pay of the other's bills is based on who brought the suit, how valid each side's claims were, how much each side was held responsible for the issue at hand, etc. I don't know how well it works, in practice, but I don't think it does any good to spread false information about how loser-pays systems work. Check out this article for information on how loser-pays systems really work.
Thermonuclear tomatoes? An appealing notion to me... on the other hand, I was the one who used to think that "The Grapes of Wrath" was a sequel to "Attack of the Killer Tomatoes," when I was a kid. Imagine my disappointment when I came across a copy of "Grapes" at school...
Reminds me of an old cartoon I saw
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I thing it was a Ziggy strip (who knew Ziggy could be funny?), but it was a picture of him looking at a map of the "Heisenberg Science Institute"... and there's about thirty arrows, pointing all over the map, which are marked, "You may be here."
A similar joke was a sign outside a motel in Las Vegas during a physicists' convention:
I was under the impression that transistors had a lower limit on how fast they could switch. A 3GHz chip, in theory, has a clock pulse every 1/3 nanosecond... and I thought transistors took a nanosecond or two to switch? How exactly does this work, then, or are my premises false?
The answer is reasonable accountability. It's reasonable to assume that someone will not buy a child's toy that has sharp razor blades protruding from all angles -- because a reasonable person will understand the dangers of sharp razor blades on a child's toy. But it might not be reasonable to expect that the average person will be aware of the dangers of children's toys made with a particular brand of plastic that, if it burns, emits toxic chemicals that will melt your skin on the slightest contact. It's not reasonable to expect a customer to buy the toy, take it to a chemical testing facility, and have them analyze it, just to see whether it's safe to give to his child. For one thing, EVERY consumer would have to do this -- or at least, a lot of them would, and would have to share their information in a common, concise, reliable way. Grass-roots efforts don't usually do this, so it's more efficient overall to have an agency whose job it is to do this kind of testing.
Now with the issue of security... if I'm a layperson who wants to be able to send email to my friends who live in other cities, am I going to even have enough education to understand the dangers of using closed-source software? Probably not, for the most part. I probably could learn, if I took the time, but then that's hours I have to spend not doing other things -- and there are a LOT of topics that I could learn about. If every person has to fully understand the nature and intricacies of the email system before they can use it, it would get used a lot less. (Then again, that may not be a bad thing...)
It's a complex issue; there's definitely an amount of accountability that the companies have when it comes to making sure their software is secure, reliable, and stable; but they can't keep stupid people from doing stupid things, so you have to draw a line somewhere. From such things are endless debates born.:)
Re:The solution to problems like this...
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HomeSec In the News
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This is called "attacking the symptoms, and not the cause". Instead of letting the President selectively veto individual components of a bill, why not prevent Congress from adding stupid bullshit onto a bill in the first place?
Change the rules so that a bill submitted to either house of Congress cannot be modified in its text (either added to, changed, or subtracted from) without resubmitting the bill from scratch. This would make it harder to pass any bill, but we don't need MORE legislation, we need BETTER legislation.
If this is infeasible, than at least allow subtractions and minor language modifications to a bill, and no additions without restarting the process. Anyone corrupt enough to add unrelated content to a bill should be beaten with a wiffle bat.
Re:It's gonna be a corporate giveaway this session
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HomeSec In the News
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I don't believe the original framers wanted political parties.
Correct. George Washington, in his farewell address at the end of his presidency, urged America to not form a party system. The other framers were all more or less against a party system as well -- it leads to divisiveness, cronyism, and other nastiness.
Re:It's gonna be a corporate giveaway this session
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HomeSec In the News
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The "Republican philosophy" is "Let's make sure the rich, primarily white upper class stays rich and primarily white. Let's also make our bedroom morals into law, and do absolutely everything in our power to make sure that corporations can keep giving us lots of money so that we may live fat, comfortable lives."
The "Democratic philosophy," on the other hand, is, "Let's SAY we're against all the stuff the Republicans are for, but then end up acting just like them 90% of the time anyway."
Our entire political system is horribly broken. Why are entities that can't vote (corporations) allowed to affect the political process in other ways (donating huge amounts of money to politicians)? Why are bills submitted to Congress allowed to be modified after they've passed committee review? (Any bill submitted should have to remain in fixed form until it's passed -- if you want to modify a single word of it, you should have to start over.) Why is Congress passing laws left and right that do absolutely nothing except benefit corporations at the expense of citizens, and the rich at the expense of the other 95% of the population? Why is the President of the United States of America trying to destroy the Constitution, and why is Congress helping him?
No, I'm not a Libertarian either. There's not a word for what I am -- how shallow do you have to be to believe that your political beliefs can be summed up in one word? Political parties are an outdated, broken concept that we need to abandon.
I guess this means that the usage of "obsolete" to describe not-quite-current CPUs is itself incorrect. If "obsolete" can only mean what you listed, than saying that a CPU is obsolete is only accurate if the CPU is broken. Otherwise, even the oldest CPU can be useful. (Even a broken CPU can be useful as a decoration or paperweight...)
I, however, maintain that the usage of "obsolete" with regards to computer equipment is a usage meaning "Not the most recent". I'm writing this on a Dell that contains a P3-850 CPU, which might be described as "obsolete" compared to a 2 GHz Pentium 4, but it certainly is useful (I'm able to do all my normal work on the machine, and it uses all its spare cycles to run F@H).
English is defined by usage, not by fiat. In general, obsolete = useless, but if someone refers to an "obsolete CPU", then obsolete != useless.
I wasn't aware that solid-state electronics wear out faster if more electrons run through them. Perhaps you can elaborate on the exact reasons why a CPU being used more often would cause "wear and tear".
The enormous difference between the last magnetic shift and this one is that the planet wasn't covered in electronic devices before. A significant portion of our livelihood (food production, manufacturing, transportation, and pretty much all communications) are based on technologies that may be severely adversely affected by the weakening of the field. Yeah, life will persevere, but it doesn't mean everything's gonna be just rosy the entire time.
Now it may be gradual enough that we won't have any trouble dealing with it, but it would be best to plan for the worst, wouldn't it?
I don't know, I don't remember much about third grade, since it was seventeen years ago. Besides, I asked "Why do we compost?" not "What is compost?" Jump to conclusions much?
I've never quite understood what the purpose of a compost pile is. I'm vaguely aware of the organic matter in the pile decaying, and large piles can get rather warm (a big enough pile may burst into flame, or so I've heard). But, uh... why are we making compost piles, exactly?
Oh, yeah, and add me to the growing list of people who vote this article Least. Relevant. Slashdot. Article. Ever.
Interesting points. There is the fact that deliberately creating an artistic work that will reach a certain cash plateau is nearly impossible -- just look at how many creative endeavors never even get so far as to break even, and that's with authors trying really hard.
Also, there's the fact that an over-successful work creates desire for an author's other works -- so writing something which will exceed its copyright profit cap would still create income for the author's other works.
Additionally, if there's a minimum time limit set on the work (I'd say 15-20 years for books), then even if it is wildly successful, you could reap the profits for 20 years, even if you greatly exceeded the profit cap. Once that 20-year deadline hit, of course, the copyright would expire. Trying to calculate your work so that you only barely reach the profit cap *after* the minimum time would be utterly impossible, so I doubt that would have any effect on authors' efforts.
All that said, yours is a simpler solution (and one that I would support) -- 20 year copyright, non-extendable, from the date of first publication, regardless of the author. Period. Copyrights would be transferable (i.e. I could sell my copyright to a new owner, and I would lose *all* rights to it). It's an acceptable solution, though it doesn't mean it's the best solution (or even realistic, politically speaking).
My wife had a suggestion for limiting the life of copyright. Basically, tie it to the amount of income you get from the work. Once you reach a certain plateau, the work falls into the public domain (although you could argue for an additional minimum time requirement, i.e. 5 years for movies, so that a gigantic blockbuster won't enter the public domain after 6 months). Or instead of income, base it on profit. That way, you are guaranteed that you will make a certain amount of money before the work enters the public domain. Of course, for works that never reach the plateau, they would enter the public domain after a suitable period -- e.g. life plus 10 years for natural persons, or something incredibly short for a corporation, like 20 years).
Of course, there's practical problems with this method -- namely, accurately determining the amount of money a work takes in. It's all too easy to fudge financial data, as we've been too often reminded in the past year, and this idea may not be workable.
Slashdot Mirror
The license of a piece of software is just one factor when it comes to whether it's the best solution for the problem. You can't reasonably ignore the license when making your decision, and neither should you focus entirely on the license -- either way lies madness. A balanced approach, taking into account all relevant factors (quality of software, up-front and continuing monetary costs, license, etc.), is the only reasonable way to go.
Aside from that... good stuff :)
I don't know what your actual age or station are, but you write like someone who just discovered these "ideals" and hasn't had much practice applying them to real life. Basically, you sound like a first-year college student who's just taken his first couple of econ and philosophy classes... so for your sake, I really hope that you *are* (everyone goes through that phase in college).
I'm curious; has there ever actually been a free-market telecom system? If so, when and where, and how did (or does) it work, and how well? I'm not being snarky; this is a serous question.
Minor historical note: The Northridge quake was January 17, 1994, at 4:31 AM PST, not 1992. The riots were in 1992. :)
Would the Interstate Highway System have been built if the federal government hadn't gone and done it? No -- there would have been little motivation (not to mention vastly insufficient resources) for any private corporation to ever build such a thing.
The free market is a good thing, but it is not a magic-bullet solution to all problems -- so-called "market failures" are where the free market will not work, and public transportation is one of them. Corporations have only one incentive: make as much money as possible. Public transportation lends itself to a natural monopoly; competition makes it vastly inefficient (imagine if you had five or ten times as many bus stops, train stations, lines of rail, etc. because each company refuses to share the use of its transport resources).
Your facts aren't even right; there are numerous highly successful urban rail systems all over the world, most of which are government-run. Last month I was in D.C. and got to use their excellent rail system. Trains run often, on time, aren't overcrowded, and are cheaper than owning a car... and the whole thing is run by the government.
In places (like most of Europe) that have a "loser-pays" system, it does not work like this -- you don't end up with a "loser" paying the entirety of the other side's bills. The amount that either side has to pay of the other's bills is based on who brought the suit, how valid each side's claims were, how much each side was held responsible for the issue at hand, etc. I don't know how well it works, in practice, but I don't think it does any good to spread false information about how loser-pays systems work. Check out this article for information on how loser-pays systems really work.
I thing it was a Ziggy strip (who knew Ziggy could be funny?), but it was a picture of him looking at a map of the "Heisenberg Science Institute"... and there's about thirty arrows, pointing all over the map, which are marked, "You may be here."
A similar joke was a sign outside a motel in Las Vegas during a physicists' convention:
"HEISENBERG MAY HAVE SLEPT HERE"
I was under the impression that transistors had a lower limit on how fast they could switch. A 3GHz chip, in theory, has a clock pulse every 1/3 nanosecond... and I thought transistors took a nanosecond or two to switch? How exactly does this work, then, or are my premises false?
The answer is reasonable accountability. It's reasonable to assume that someone will not buy a child's toy that has sharp razor blades protruding from all angles -- because a reasonable person will understand the dangers of sharp razor blades on a child's toy. But it might not be reasonable to expect that the average person will be aware of the dangers of children's toys made with a particular brand of plastic that, if it burns, emits toxic chemicals that will melt your skin on the slightest contact. It's not reasonable to expect a customer to buy the toy, take it to a chemical testing facility, and have them analyze it, just to see whether it's safe to give to his child. For one thing, EVERY consumer would have to do this -- or at least, a lot of them would, and would have to share their information in a common, concise, reliable way. Grass-roots efforts don't usually do this, so it's more efficient overall to have an agency whose job it is to do this kind of testing.
:)
Now with the issue of security... if I'm a layperson who wants to be able to send email to my friends who live in other cities, am I going to even have enough education to understand the dangers of using closed-source software? Probably not, for the most part. I probably could learn, if I took the time, but then that's hours I have to spend not doing other things -- and there are a LOT of topics that I could learn about. If every person has to fully understand the nature and intricacies of the email system before they can use it, it would get used a lot less. (Then again, that may not be a bad thing...)
It's a complex issue; there's definitely an amount of accountability that the companies have when it comes to making sure their software is secure, reliable, and stable; but they can't keep stupid people from doing stupid things, so you have to draw a line somewhere. From such things are endless debates born.
This is called "attacking the symptoms, and not the cause". Instead of letting the President selectively veto individual components of a bill, why not prevent Congress from adding stupid bullshit onto a bill in the first place?
Change the rules so that a bill submitted to either house of Congress cannot be modified in its text (either added to, changed, or subtracted from) without resubmitting the bill from scratch. This would make it harder to pass any bill, but we don't need MORE legislation, we need BETTER legislation.
If this is infeasible, than at least allow subtractions and minor language modifications to a bill, and no additions without restarting the process. Anyone corrupt enough to add unrelated content to a bill should be beaten with a wiffle bat.
The "Republican philosophy" is "Let's make sure the rich, primarily white upper class stays rich and primarily white. Let's also make our bedroom morals into law, and do absolutely everything in our power to make sure that corporations can keep giving us lots of money so that we may live fat, comfortable lives."
The "Democratic philosophy," on the other hand, is, "Let's SAY we're against all the stuff the Republicans are for, but then end up acting just like them 90% of the time anyway."
Our entire political system is horribly broken. Why are entities that can't vote (corporations) allowed to affect the political process in other ways (donating huge amounts of money to politicians)? Why are bills submitted to Congress allowed to be modified after they've passed committee review? (Any bill submitted should have to remain in fixed form until it's passed -- if you want to modify a single word of it, you should have to start over.) Why is Congress passing laws left and right that do absolutely nothing except benefit corporations at the expense of citizens, and the rich at the expense of the other 95% of the population? Why is the President of the United States of America trying to destroy the Constitution, and why is Congress helping him?
No, I'm not a Libertarian either. There's not a word for what I am -- how shallow do you have to be to believe that your political beliefs can be summed up in one word? Political parties are an outdated, broken concept that we need to abandon.
I guess this means that the usage of "obsolete" to describe not-quite-current CPUs is itself incorrect. If "obsolete" can only mean what you listed, than saying that a CPU is obsolete is only accurate if the CPU is broken. Otherwise, even the oldest CPU can be useful. (Even a broken CPU can be useful as a decoration or paperweight...)
I, however, maintain that the usage of "obsolete" with regards to computer equipment is a usage meaning "Not the most recent". I'm writing this on a Dell that contains a P3-850 CPU, which might be described as "obsolete" compared to a 2 GHz Pentium 4, but it certainly is useful (I'm able to do all my normal work on the machine, and it uses all its spare cycles to run F@H).
English is defined by usage, not by fiat. In general, obsolete = useless, but if someone refers to an "obsolete CPU", then obsolete != useless.
Yeah, but it's like leaving on a light bulb that cures cancer, not one that simply provides illumination nobody needs. :)
I wasn't aware that solid-state electronics wear out faster if more electrons run through them. Perhaps you can elaborate on the exact reasons why a CPU being used more often would cause "wear and tear".
The enormous difference between the last magnetic shift and this one is that the planet wasn't covered in electronic devices before. A significant portion of our livelihood (food production, manufacturing, transportation, and pretty much all communications) are based on technologies that may be severely adversely affected by the weakening of the field. Yeah, life will persevere, but it doesn't mean everything's gonna be just rosy the entire time.
Now it may be gradual enough that we won't have any trouble dealing with it, but it would be best to plan for the worst, wouldn't it?
I don't know, I don't remember much about third grade, since it was seventeen years ago. Besides, I asked "Why do we compost?" not "What is compost?" Jump to conclusions much?
I've never quite understood what the purpose of a compost pile is. I'm vaguely aware of the organic matter in the pile decaying, and large piles can get rather warm (a big enough pile may burst into flame, or so I've heard). But, uh... why are we making compost piles, exactly?
Oh, yeah, and add me to the growing list of people who vote this article Least. Relevant. Slashdot. Article. Ever.
Interesting points. There is the fact that deliberately creating an artistic work that will reach a certain cash plateau is nearly impossible -- just look at how many creative endeavors never even get so far as to break even, and that's with authors trying really hard.
Also, there's the fact that an over-successful work creates desire for an author's other works -- so writing something which will exceed its copyright profit cap would still create income for the author's other works.
Additionally, if there's a minimum time limit set on the work (I'd say 15-20 years for books), then even if it is wildly successful, you could reap the profits for 20 years, even if you greatly exceeded the profit cap. Once that 20-year deadline hit, of course, the copyright would expire. Trying to calculate your work so that you only barely reach the profit cap *after* the minimum time would be utterly impossible, so I doubt that would have any effect on authors' efforts.
All that said, yours is a simpler solution (and one that I would support) -- 20 year copyright, non-extendable, from the date of first publication, regardless of the author. Period. Copyrights would be transferable (i.e. I could sell my copyright to a new owner, and I would lose *all* rights to it). It's an acceptable solution, though it doesn't mean it's the best solution (or even realistic, politically speaking).
My wife had a suggestion for limiting the life of copyright. Basically, tie it to the amount of income you get from the work. Once you reach a certain plateau, the work falls into the public domain (although you could argue for an additional minimum time requirement, i.e. 5 years for movies, so that a gigantic blockbuster won't enter the public domain after 6 months). Or instead of income, base it on profit. That way, you are guaranteed that you will make a certain amount of money before the work enters the public domain. Of course, for works that never reach the plateau, they would enter the public domain after a suitable period -- e.g. life plus 10 years for natural persons, or something incredibly short for a corporation, like 20 years).
Of course, there's practical problems with this method -- namely, accurately determining the amount of money a work takes in. It's all too easy to fudge financial data, as we've been too often reminded in the past year, and this idea may not be workable.