Heh. Fair 'nuff - worth noting though that what triggered this was your note that Go was still unsolved.
Also fair enough.:) Technically, I suppose, I just said that since Go always comes up in these discussions, I'd take advantage and post some helpful links. But its unsolved nature is, of course, what I was referring to as the reason it comes up in these discussions. Truth be told, it was in a tongue-in-cheek manner--it's quite obvious to me that 4x8 checkers is computationally easier than 19x19 Go for reasons mostly related to board size.
You are right matter of taste is a factor, but is also true that reason Go and Checkers are easier to solve on larger boards is because they involve fewer rules for piece movement, thus the tree is much easier to search, that made it less fun for me.
I think taste is pretty much the only factor for humans, but computer-wise, I think you're wrong about Go being easier to solve on larger boards. I believe 19x19 chess will be solved long before 19x19 Go.
The reason why Go is so difficult for computers (as compared to chess) is primarily because there is no good evaluation function at the end of the search tree. In chess, you have very good evaluation functions--material balance, mobility and board control, etc. Furthermore, there's a very concrete end condition--checkmate. Go is ridiculously hard to create an evaluation function for. It's very difficult for a computer to tell who's ahead in a given position, even very close to the end-game, without searching further down the move tree. It's even harder for a computer to tell when the game is over. For example, take a look at the two best Go-playing programs battling it out in the final round of a recent computer tournament. It's rather shameful to watch, as a human.
I believe that, today, with the resources we have currently, we could have a tournament-class 19x19 chess player if the same resources dedicated to 19x19 Go were directed towards it. I suppose this has to remain pure speculation, as it's unlikely to ever happen. But if you like, we can play some 19x19 chess games against each other, followed by some 19x19 Go games, and see if we can anecdotally compare the relative human complexity. (Whether that will have any relationship to computer complexity, I'm not sure.)
This lack of complexity in piece movement, and ability to solve Go on larger boards is the main reason I prefer Chess.
This statement baffles me, quite honestly. There are many reasons to prefer chess over Go, in my opinion, but these two are not ones ever I've heard before. Have you actually tried playing Go? Or are these statements more theoretical in nature?
Although it is mindset as well, whatever, to each his own. In the end, what I was poking fun at was your comparing a 19x19 Go to an 8x8 Checkers (and yes, Checkers is still simpler to solve than Go).
I have no problem with poking fun at the comparison. I do it quite frequently myself.:) Your main points in response to Mr. Anonymous Coward were quite solid, including pointing out the unfair comparison. I just disagreed with your statement that Go "relies in large part [as compared to chess or checkers] on the size of the board to add complexity", which I don't think is true in either the human-complexity or computer-complexity sense. On the whole, however, I think we're very much in agreement.
Well, interesting-ish. It is clearly not the same game.
Well, obviously 9x9 is not exactly the same game as 19x19. There is much more concentration on fighting and tactics in 9x9, and requires much less understanding of the direction of play, positional judgment, building of frameworks, and the like. And the games are a lot shorter.
Furthermore, in a mathematical sense, 19x19 is obviously vastly more complex. 19x19 Go is much harder for computers to play well than 9x9 Go is.
But my point is that, from a human standpoint, 9x9 isn't a significantly easier game. No one who studies 9x9 Go for years is going to be much of a match for a 19x19 pro playing on a 9x9 board. The concepts and strategies carry over surprisingly well.
To sum up: neither in Go nor in Chess are the rules of the game very complicated. The enjoyment of both games comes about because simple rules can result in enjoyable, complicated games. But I don't think either game "relies" on the board size to produce an interesting, fulfilling game.
Checkers on 12x12 is still checkers. Chess on 12x12 is still, for the most part, chess. And Go on 9x9 or 13x13 or 19x19 is still Go. I strongly believe that a preference for one or the other is due to a preference for the ruleset and a matter of taste, not a preference for the board size.
In windows, there is the possibility to have some windows always on top like for the task manager (Options/always on top). It is just your application who doesn't use this possibility. Don't blame windows on this but the application you want to do this...
Things like always-on-top, always-on-bottom, stickiness, skip-during-alt-tab, don't steal focus, etc., can of course be set by the application, but should always be overridable by the Window Manager. Some Linux window managers don't have all the capabilities I would like, and I certainly blame them for that lack (and use window managers that do have that functionality). Why shouldn't I blame Microsoft or Apple's window managers if they lack the same, and use something else instead?
Oh, and "always on top" is quite a bit different (at least in my daily workflow) from "send currently focused window to back" or "put currently focused window down a layer". If you're switching back and forth between which you want on top and which you want focused (and in most cases don't want the same window focused and on top), it would be really annoying to have to set and unset the "always on top" setting, especially if it's in some Options menu.
p.s. all this is not to say, of course, that I think every user, or even every power user, should use a window manager in exactly the same way I do. But after using these particular features for years, I'm simply addicted to them. I can't imagine myself functioning the same way in a WM without these sorts of abilities.
I don't really understand your comment about the active window is in front. Would you like the inactive windows in front?
God, yes. It always amazes me how Windows-only or Mac-only users don't grasp this fundamental UI restriction. I use this functionality all the time (as a sibling post explains) and I can't imagine how people live without it. (Much less fail to understand why it's useful.)
9x9 Go (basically the same size as a chessboard) is still fun enough to play that it's an interesting game for professionals: http://gobase.org/9x9/
The rules themselves are what provide the vast majority of the complexity of Go. The size of the board makes it much more difficult for computers, but for humans, 9x9 and 19x19 are very, very similar games.
Go to http://silverlight.net/ and click the "Silverlight in action" link on the right hand side. Then tell me that Flash still has them beat;)
I just watched the video. I saw nothing that Flash couldn't do, much less anything that Shockwave couldn't do.
The reason why Flash is popular isn't because you can create complicated applications with it. (You can, but nobody uses them.) The reason why it's popular is because it's small, fast, and has a very large, cross-platform installed base. Silverlight isn't any of those three.
GPL2 License: Use our code, but give back your code too. GPL3 License: Use our code, give back your code, and do not use DRM or Patents to restrict your code or derivative program in any way.
"we have made it clear that any patent must be licensed for everyone's free use or not licensed at all." -- GPLv2
The best solution to 'abandonware' in either definition (the rights-holder really is gone or the rights-holder is just sitting on a monopoly they don't intend to use) is to use a very short initial term, of say 14 years, with mandatory registration along with a small fee (even a token fee of $1) for an extension of any length. First the short initial term (if it must be Berne-style "copyrighted by default") allows for the commercially biased to extract nearly all its wealth. Second, registration for extention prevents all the stupid posts on the Internet, and every other utterance, 4-note whistle, and napkin drawing from being copyrighted forever (or as long as lobbyists can buy term-extension legislation), but also allows for works with any value at all to continue to extract wealth at the expense of the public domain.
This approach seems reasonable, although I'd prefer a much shorter initial term. 14 years still allows for a lot of works (especially in the digital age) to be lost before they're copyable. How about 5 years for the initial term, and 15 for the renewal? That seems reasonable in terms of solving the abandonware problem. (I'm still not sure this would be optimal in terms of getting works created, but it does seem like a good solution for abandonware in general... although it doesn't seem to be a good solution for the related problem of copyright as censorship--a company can refuse to license a creative work, renew all copyrights, and just let the work rot on the shelf, despite demand for it.)
Since you taken the discussion off-line, maybe you'd be interested in his comments to me: You might be interested by Garwulf's previous refutation of derivative works in response to one of my comments: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=233553&cid=190 07351 (note the same arguments, "derivative works suck, so why encourage them!" and his "societies change, so of course copyrights have to be longer than ever!"). I don't have the energy you do to debate it.
I am amused at Garwulf's continual insistence that the person whose argument he is attempting to refute is ignorant of copyright law, having no idea how it works, framing his rebuttals as "history lessons"... when it is clear that his interpretation of copyright (that it's reasonable that an author "actually gets to keep the thing he creates and do with it what he will, and even leave it as a legacy for his children") is in fact a very modern approach to copyright, with little or no basis historically.
Of course, given the high quality of discourse generally found on Slashdot, I can't say I blame him for the occasional histrionics, but it is indeed amusing to watch.
Well, I don't know if we can keep this going more than a couple of posts longer (if for no other reason that on my side, these replies take a while to write and I actually have writing work to do, and as a bonus, I AM getting paid by the hour - yipee!), but I am really enjoying this, and you have raised some points I hadn't thought of before.
Likewise here. And Slashdot isn't exactly the best forum for lengthy discussions like this. If it makes it any easier we can take this into email--that both makes it easier to compose responses and come back to them later, as well as makes it easier to stretch the conversation out for a longer period of time. If you only respond once a week, it takes much less time away from your writing. (My email address is my slashdot username at the domain name in my URL.)
I've definitely got to concede that point. Further, I'd add that a few amateur authors who went pro (like myself) might not have been able to do so. So enforcement is certainly a matter of shades of gray.
I'd say it's not enforcement that should be a matter of shades of grey, but rather that those "exceptions" should be built into the law itself as fair use provisions. I think the world would be better off if derivative works such as fan fiction, sampling (music), and other derivations that require a significant amount of creative input were legal for noncommercial use. I don't see any reason why this sort of provision is not enshrined in US Code.
This is one reason I think people like Jack Valenti tried so hard to get rid of fair use exceptions--they felt (rightly so, I think) that in a paradigm where copyright is a basic property right, fundamental to the act of creating a work, fair use exceptions simply don't make sense."
Well, you've highlighted some stuff I've been trying to bash into some of the abolitionist's heads for some time, albeit from a different direction than I often start from. You're right that copyright isn't a basic property right, but I would say that it has to start from that point.
Why does it have to start from that point? Or, rather, why does it make sense to start from that point? It abandons the entire history of copyright and changes the concept radically. From the earliest privileges for publishers to the Statute of Queen Anne, there was never any idea that the author had some special right to control his work--it was always a purely economic concept. Publishers couldn't make money publishing books if everyone could publish equally as well, so they ceased to publish quality books. Because of this, special privileges of exclusivity were granted to the publishers in order to allow quality books to actually be published. But if there were some other way to achieve the same ends (increase the quantity and quality of published works), exclusive right to copy might never have been invented.
The United States copyright laws are clearly patterned after this paradigm--the constitution itself says, "promote the progress of the useful arts," pointing exactly to this same historical purpose of copyright. So why, then, does it make sense to start out with the idea that the exclusive right to copy is somehow a basic property right of an author of a work? It's a tempting concept for authors, I realize. (I myself make a living through copyright, although I would gladly see a world without copyright despite the effect it may have on my salary.) But is there any historical or logical reason for the idea? It seems to be driven by an understandable desire to control one's creative output (much like the "moral right" sense I mentioned yesterday, which the US doesn't recognize), a desire which while I think is understandable, is not one on which we should base our copyright laws (and is not one on which they have been historically based).
I think, ultimately, we're both seeing eye to eye on what a copyrighted work actually is - it seems t
Well, that's the true joy of debate - and at the end, if it's done properly, both people have insights they didn't have before.
Wait... I thought the point of debate was to win?! And make the other person know that you're smarter than them, I think you get bonus points for that one. What's this stuff about both people gaining insights?;-) I must be new here...
I'm not sure that's the case - when I came up through Doctor Who fanfiction, there were a lot of really good fanfic writers there, people who could go pro if they wanted, and they never did (actually, come to think of it, a lot of the Doctor Who fanfic was an abnormally high quality - perhaps that's just my bias, but it seemed to attract a lot of good writers).... So, I think the same proportion of people who would write crap before are writing crap now, but because they don't have to get past the filter of a submissions editor, they can now inflict their crap on us much more easily.
I think you're right on this one. There's a lot of quality writing out there. Back in my first post when I was talking about the costs of copyright, I mentioned "perfect enforcement". If there was perfect enforcement, none of this could have existed, right? That seems like a definite loss to me. (p.s. I'm not really a reader of fanfic, but I think you're probably biased. Star Trek may have been a poor example, but a lot of my friends who are big fans of other genres say that there's lots of high-quality stuff out there.)
Well, I'd argue that what makes any right inalienable is a statement in a legal document like the US Constitution that it is so - too many people in the world today live without a lot of the rights we consider to be "inalienable" in our society. But, at this point on this particular subject, we're starting to move in circles, I fear.
Perhaps so. In any case, the constitution doesn't ever mention any sort of "monopoly on duplication" as a right, much less an inalienable one. The closest it gets is mentioning "securing exclusive rights for limited times to authors and inventors", which it explicitly states is for "to promote the progress of science and useful arts," not because of any inherent right a creator has with regards to exclusive rights to copy.
Damn - that is such a good question, and I had to think very long and hard to answer it. But, here I go - I'm actually going to answer "both," with qualifications:
If we create a basic property right, then one of the associated rights must be to control what happens to your own property. Otherwise, it isn't your property. To take the chair example I love so much (this must be some sort of strange fetish), if the moment you finish making the chair some stranger drives up with a truck and takes it to the local community centre without so much as a "by your leave," then you have lost a basic right towards your property.
Now, a novel isn't property like a chair - well, yes, actually, it is, but it has that extra dimension beyond the manuscript beside the proverbial typewriter (and it drives me crazy that I know exactly how it is different and yet still property, but I can't put it into words - the best I can do is that it is more than the sum of its parts - I feel like you need a poet to describe it), but a lot of the same things happen in general terms that happen when creating the chair. You have planning, construction of a sort, refining at the end, and once you're finished, you've created something tangible that wasn't there before. If you then say that having created this thing, you have limited rights to say what happens to it, then you have restricted a property right. If one property rights are lifelong, then you can't go and put restrictions on certain types of property.
(Damn, that's such a hard thing to explain - I hope I did a good job.)
I took a look at your site and what you wrote, and I have to say that while I do not agree with your stance - I think the problem is clearing up the abuse of copyright and the paranoia that you see in the DMCA, etc. - it's good to be talking with somebody who actually understands the issues.
Likewise; like most people, I most often talk with people whose views are more closely aligned with my own, so discussing the topic with someone well-educated and well-spoken, but with wildly different views, is a pleasant breath of fresh air.
I'm not sure your graph is right, though - being inside the industry, most of what I've heard is that publishers are having a lot of trouble because they're just being swamped with submissions. I'd go as far as to say that it's the media that makes the difference rather than the law, because right now we're getting more and more swamped with content.
I'm not sure what part of my graph you're considering inaccurate. Certainly it wasn't meant to be exactly perfect, but rather a general description of the basic idea that many abolitionists disagree with: more copyright restrictions result in more creative works being published. It's also meant to show the general principle that the increase you get is much more drastic from "no protection" to "very small protection" than it is from "very large protection" to "a little bit more than large".
Or, in other words, there are lots of people who will create works with one year copyright protection who wouldn't if they had no copyright protection at all. There are similarly lots of people who would create works with five year copyright protection who wouldn't if they only had one year copyright protection. However, I don't think there are very many people at all (if any) who would create works with a 100 year copyright who wouldn't create that same work with only an 80 year copyright.
Is there any part of this that you question the accuracy of?
Boy...I wish I could say no to that. One of the more bizarre debates I had on here in regard to copyright issues involved somebody accusing me of being part of a copyright conspiracy (I am not making this up) to create an underclass of people who have no access to content. Even now, I'm, well, not quite sure that to say to it - South Park doesn't tend to get that bizarre...
That is quite bizarre. Although I agree that stringent copyright (with perfect or near-perfect enforcement) would result in an underclass of people with significantly restricted access to content, I certainly don't believe there's any "conspiracy" involved.
Although I'm not allowed to look at fanfic now (now that I get paid to write, there are creative contamination issues), I still remember the quality of Trek fic being...well...not that high. Are you SURE not being able to write it is a bad thing?
;-) On a serious note, of course, one of the reasons why the quality is poor in general is likely due to the fact that if an author is good enough to get recognized and published, they can't spend their time writing "illicit" material.
Now that is a whole can of worms - the problem is this: some rights are rights that everybody should have. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness I would agree on. But property rights are also on that list, particularly when you've made the property with your own hands - or in the case of a novel, your own fingers and mind.
Property rights are also on that list only, in my opinion, because property is scarce. If I spend days painstakingly carving a chair out of wood, then when someone takes that from me they're depriving me of something real. But if I spend days painstakingly carving a chair out of wood, and someone makes an exact copy of it instantaneously with a Star Trek-like device, they haven't deprived me of anything. I may think it's unfair, since I spent days of hard work to get the chair and they got an
I don't have any beef with your claims that the OP doesn't comprehend copyright law, nor am I an abolutionist myself per se, but I wanted to respond to a few of your points to maybe give you more of an idea where abolitionists are coming from.
1. That having something under copyright keeps it away from society.
This one I find rather funny - there are abolitionists out there who really think that authors sit around creating work under copyright, and then cackle as they put them in a box and never let anybody see them.
This seems like a straw man to me. Are there really abolitionists who really think this?
When abolitionists say "having something under copyright keeps it away from society," I think they typically mean that the copyright reduces the number of copies that would otherwise be available for people to enjoy, as well as reducing the number (and probably quality) of derivative works. Both of these are costs to society due to copyright. The size of these costs and whether or not the costs are worth it are, of course, debatable, but I haven't seen anybody question the idea itself.
2. That you can copyright an idea.
The sad thing is that while the first one at least is a take on a speculative issue (and, I will concede, possibly not a failure on the reading comprehension level), this one is disproven just by reading the SUMMARY of the law.
I'm not quite sure what the OP wrote that you are responding to here, but it's true that, for example, no one can write a story that takes place in a Star Trek universe due to copyright restrictions. Derivative works cover at least part of what a layman would term as "copyrighting an idea". But again, I'm not quite sure what the OP wrote that you're responding to.
3. That copyright is more artificial than any other right.
This one requires people to have little or no concept of history. Or current events. The people who claim that "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" are natural rights seem to be missing the fact that at least half of the world's population lives in places without those rights.
Here I have little sympathy for your case. While it's true that "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" are artificial rights, they're certainly not "just as artificial as copyright". Copyright is something that we can (and should) gladly take away, limit, or extend as it benefits society as a whole. It's more along the lines with "the right to health care" than it is "the right to life" or "the right to free speech".
5. That because an abusive organization says copyright law is X, it must be X.... Everybody knows that the RIAA is dishonest - so what does it make the abolitionists who actually take the RIAA at its word about what copyright is?
I haven't seen anything the RIAA has said about copyright that isn't at least somewhat supported by the law. That doesn't mean it's right, of course, but it does mean that abusive organizations have tremendous amounts of control over what the law is.
6. That copyright guarantees an income (and that all an author has to do is write one book and s/he's set for life).
I'm right with you on this one. I don't see this one very often, but it is indeed an extreme fantasy.
7. That abolishing copyright will get rid of all the barriers to pushing the culture forward.
Ditto here.
The short answer to this is as follows: the most important aspect of copyright law is in regards to protecting the work during the submission process to a publisher and prior to publication. It's copyright law that prevents a publisher from looking at a work, telling an author "no thanks," adding a bunch of fluffy bunnies to it, and publishing it under another name. Or accepting the book and removing all the c
SO if somebody named strawberryfrog started running for president it would be ok for them to take your livejournal account away?
If their name was legally strawberryfrog, and the GP's name was not legally strawberryfrog, and the livejournal page was all about the strawberryfrog running for president not the GP, then I'd say inquivocably yes.
The US healthcare system has two choices to get better: either socialist free health care, or divorcing health insurance from employment. Right now we have the worst of both worlds. If people were free to shop around for health insurance like they shop around for car insurance, I'm confident that a host of problems currently plaguing our health care system would be solved.
Unfortunately, although I think government regulation may well have been the cause of employment and health insurance being conflated, I don't think that deregulation will successfully disentangle the two.
As far as democracy is concerned, you don't live in a democracy (assuming you live in the U.S. or Europe). The U.S. is a constitutional republic, and the important aspect of such a government is the constitutional limits, not the elections.
I appreciate your point, but "democracy" and "constitutional republic" are not mutually exclusive (and in fact the U.S. is both).
Premeditated killers and organized crime, no. Your average infuriated and/or mentally unstable guy? Yes. Why? Because they can't just whip out the gun or drop by home for it and go crazy. Most likely they don't have one, or know where to get one easily. Sure with a little time and paperwork or searching the shadier parts of town they could probably get one in a day or two, but not in that rage of fury they're in right there and then. Instead they use knives
Java generics don't provide real type safety, for example, you can easily put Strings in List (that's why Collections.checkedCollection kludge was added).
I've never understood this objection. This will always generate a compiler warning, and depending on your compiler settings may not even compile successfully. The only time you might turn those warnings off is when you're having to deal with non-genericized legacy code.
But it can in some cases be tricky when you get a really complex structure of Vectors containing Vectors containing Comparables. Not that it's impossible, but it can be a challenge.
The problems with Comparables usually come about because of a failure to implement Comparable instead of just implement Comparable. Java typically won't tell you that's the problem, it will steer you off into some other wild goose chase, but if you implement Comparable the challenges typically disappear.
A contract is null and void without acceptance: "We regret that we cannot accept your covenant offer without endangering others in the community." And Red Hat would still be able to distribute RHEL and support the Fedora project.
It doesn't have to be a contract with RedHat. It can just be Microsoft saying, publically, "We agree, officially, not to sue users of RedHat Linux for any patent infringements." RedHat is free to protest, but Microsoft can say, "You can protest, but our official offer still stands no matter what you say."
Likewise, Microsoft can do the same thing with Novell. No contracts, just a public, official, Microsoft statement that they will not sue users of Novell Linux for any patent infringements. Novell can "protest" just the same as RedHat can, and again Microsoft can just say, "No matter, our official offer still stands."
I see no possible license solution that can remedy this problem.
What if you lived in a wooden house, and a fire broke out, and you called 911 and they said "well, work to build fire-proof houses!"
I specifically pointed out in my previous post that I'm not saying, "Don't do a short-term solution because we really need a long-term solution," which your analogy directly implies. Sending a fire truck over to my wooden house is a very effective short-term solution.
I would have absolutely no problem with these particular GPLv3 changes if they actually stopped Microsoft from doing the sort of thing that they're doing. However, they don't. All Microsoft has to do is leave out the explicit deal with Novell part, and we're right back where we started. In changing the license this way, I'm convinced that we lose much more than we gain.
Slashdot Mirror
The reason why Go is so difficult for computers (as compared to chess) is primarily because there is no good evaluation function at the end of the search tree. In chess, you have very good evaluation functions--material balance, mobility and board control, etc. Furthermore, there's a very concrete end condition--checkmate. Go is ridiculously hard to create an evaluation function for. It's very difficult for a computer to tell who's ahead in a given position, even very close to the end-game, without searching further down the move tree. It's even harder for a computer to tell when the game is over. For example, take a look at the two best Go-playing programs battling it out in the final round of a recent computer tournament. It's rather shameful to watch, as a human.
I believe that, today, with the resources we have currently, we could have a tournament-class 19x19 chess player if the same resources dedicated to 19x19 Go were directed towards it. I suppose this has to remain pure speculation, as it's unlikely to ever happen. But if you like, we can play some 19x19 chess games against each other, followed by some 19x19 Go games, and see if we can anecdotally compare the relative human complexity. (Whether that will have any relationship to computer complexity, I'm not sure.)This statement baffles me, quite honestly. There are many reasons to prefer chess over Go, in my opinion, but these two are not ones ever I've heard before. Have you actually tried playing Go? Or are these statements more theoretical in nature?I have no problem with poking fun at the comparison. I do it quite frequently myself.
Furthermore, in a mathematical sense, 19x19 is obviously vastly more complex. 19x19 Go is much harder for computers to play well than 9x9 Go is.
But my point is that, from a human standpoint, 9x9 isn't a significantly easier game. No one who studies 9x9 Go for years is going to be much of a match for a 19x19 pro playing on a 9x9 board. The concepts and strategies carry over surprisingly well.
To sum up: neither in Go nor in Chess are the rules of the game very complicated. The enjoyment of both games comes about because simple rules can result in enjoyable, complicated games. But I don't think either game "relies" on the board size to produce an interesting, fulfilling game.
Checkers on 12x12 is still checkers. Chess on 12x12 is still, for the most part, chess. And Go on 9x9 or 13x13 or 19x19 is still Go. I strongly believe that a preference for one or the other is due to a preference for the ruleset and a matter of taste, not a preference for the board size.
Oh, and "always on top" is quite a bit different (at least in my daily workflow) from "send currently focused window to back" or "put currently focused window down a layer". If you're switching back and forth between which you want on top and which you want focused (and in most cases don't want the same window focused and on top), it would be really annoying to have to set and unset the "always on top" setting, especially if it's in some Options menu.
p.s. all this is not to say, of course, that I think every user, or even every power user, should use a window manager in exactly the same way I do. But after using these particular features for years, I'm simply addicted to them. I can't imagine myself functioning the same way in a WM without these sorts of abilities.
God, yes. It always amazes me how Windows-only or Mac-only users don't grasp this fundamental UI restriction. I use this functionality all the time (as a sibling post explains) and I can't imagine how people live without it. (Much less fail to understand why it's useful.)
9x9 Go (basically the same size as a chessboard) is still fun enough to play that it's an interesting game for professionals:
http://gobase.org/9x9/
The rules themselves are what provide the vast majority of the complexity of Go. The size of the board makes it much more difficult for computers, but for humans, 9x9 and 19x19 are very, very similar games.
Since Go always comes up in these discussions, I'll take this opportunity to point those curious about the game to some places to learn more about it:
http://playgo.to/interactive/, learn how to play the game in an interactive fashion.
http://361points.com/atarigo/, play "capture" Go against a simple computer opponent.
http://www.gokgs.com/, after you've learned the rules, play against others online worldwide.
http://www.godiscussions.com/, have more questions about the game? Ask them on this discussion board devoted to the game.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/21st_century
I just watched the video. I saw nothing that Flash couldn't do, much less anything that Shockwave couldn't do.
The reason why Flash is popular isn't because you can create complicated applications with it. (You can, but nobody uses them.) The reason why it's popular is because it's small, fast, and has a very large, cross-platform installed base. Silverlight isn't any of those three.
"we have made it clear that any patent must be licensed for everyone's free use or not licensed at all." -- GPLv2
2^6 x 5 x 19 x 12,043 x 216,493 x 836,256,503,069,278,983,442,067 if anyone's interested.
Of course, given the high quality of discourse generally found on Slashdot, I can't say I blame him for the occasional histrionics, but it is indeed amusing to watch.
Likewise here. And Slashdot isn't exactly the best forum for lengthy discussions like this. If it makes it any easier we can take this into email--that both makes it easier to compose responses and come back to them later, as well as makes it easier to stretch the conversation out for a longer period of time. If you only respond once a week, it takes much less time away from your writing. (My email address is my slashdot username at the domain name in my URL.)
I'd say it's not enforcement that should be a matter of shades of grey, but rather that those "exceptions" should be built into the law itself as fair use provisions. I think the world would be better off if derivative works such as fan fiction, sampling (music), and other derivations that require a significant amount of creative input were legal for noncommercial use. I don't see any reason why this sort of provision is not enshrined in US Code.
Why does it have to start from that point? Or, rather, why does it make sense to start from that point? It abandons the entire history of copyright and changes the concept radically. From the earliest privileges for publishers to the Statute of Queen Anne, there was never any idea that the author had some special right to control his work--it was always a purely economic concept. Publishers couldn't make money publishing books if everyone could publish equally as well, so they ceased to publish quality books. Because of this, special privileges of exclusivity were granted to the publishers in order to allow quality books to actually be published. But if there were some other way to achieve the same ends (increase the quantity and quality of published works), exclusive right to copy might never have been invented.
The United States copyright laws are clearly patterned after this paradigm--the constitution itself says, "promote the progress of the useful arts," pointing exactly to this same historical purpose of copyright. So why, then, does it make sense to start out with the idea that the exclusive right to copy is somehow a basic property right of an author of a work? It's a tempting concept for authors, I realize. (I myself make a living through copyright, although I would gladly see a world without copyright despite the effect it may have on my salary.) But is there any historical or logical reason for the idea? It seems to be driven by an understandable desire to control one's creative output (much like the "moral right" sense I mentioned yesterday, which the US doesn't recognize), a desire which while I think is understandable, is not one on which we should base our copyright laws (and is not one on which they have been historically based).
Wait ... I thought the point of debate was to win?! And make the other person know that you're smarter than them, I think you get bonus points for that one. What's this stuff about both people gaining insights? ;-) I must be new here ...
I think you're right on this one. There's a lot of quality writing out there. Back in my first post when I was talking about the costs of copyright, I mentioned "perfect enforcement". If there was perfect enforcement, none of this could have existed, right? That seems like a definite loss to me. (p.s. I'm not really a reader of fanfic, but I think you're probably biased. Star Trek may have been a poor example, but a lot of my friends who are big fans of other genres say that there's lots of high-quality stuff out there.)
Perhaps so. In any case, the constitution doesn't ever mention any sort of "monopoly on duplication" as a right, much less an inalienable one. The closest it gets is mentioning "securing exclusive rights for limited times to authors and inventors", which it explicitly states is for "to promote the progress of science and useful arts," not because of any inherent right a creator has with regards to exclusive rights to copy.
I think I understand what you're s
Likewise; like most people, I most often talk with people whose views are more closely aligned with my own, so discussing the topic with someone well-educated and well-spoken, but with wildly different views, is a pleasant breath of fresh air.
I'm not sure what part of my graph you're considering inaccurate. Certainly it wasn't meant to be exactly perfect, but rather a general description of the basic idea that many abolitionists disagree with: more copyright restrictions result in more creative works being published. It's also meant to show the general principle that the increase you get is much more drastic from "no protection" to "very small protection" than it is from "very large protection" to "a little bit more than large".
Or, in other words, there are lots of people who will create works with one year copyright protection who wouldn't if they had no copyright protection at all. There are similarly lots of people who would create works with five year copyright protection who wouldn't if they only had one year copyright protection. However, I don't think there are very many people at all (if any) who would create works with a 100 year copyright who wouldn't create that same work with only an 80 year copyright.
Is there any part of this that you question the accuracy of?
That is quite bizarre. Although I agree that stringent copyright (with perfect or near-perfect enforcement) would result in an underclass of people with significantly restricted access to content, I certainly don't believe there's any "conspiracy" involved.
;-) On a serious note, of course, one of the reasons why the quality is poor in general is likely due to the fact that if an author is good enough to get recognized and published, they can't spend their time writing "illicit" material.
Property rights are also on that list only, in my opinion, because property is scarce. If I spend days painstakingly carving a chair out of wood, then when someone takes that from me they're depriving me of something real. But if I spend days painstakingly carving a chair out of wood, and someone makes an exact copy of it instantaneously with a Star Trek-like device, they haven't deprived me of anything. I may think it's unfair, since I spent days of hard work to get the chair and they got an
This seems like a straw man to me. Are there really abolitionists who really think this?
When abolitionists say "having something under copyright keeps it away from society," I think they typically mean that the copyright reduces the number of copies that would otherwise be available for people to enjoy, as well as reducing the number (and probably quality) of derivative works. Both of these are costs to society due to copyright. The size of these costs and whether or not the costs are worth it are, of course, debatable, but I haven't seen anybody question the idea itself.
I'm not quite sure what the OP wrote that you are responding to here, but it's true that, for example, no one can write a story that takes place in a Star Trek universe due to copyright restrictions. Derivative works cover at least part of what a layman would term as "copyrighting an idea". But again, I'm not quite sure what the OP wrote that you're responding to.
Here I have little sympathy for your case. While it's true that "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" are artificial rights, they're certainly not "just as artificial as copyright". Copyright is something that we can (and should) gladly take away, limit, or extend as it benefits society as a whole. It's more along the lines with "the right to health care" than it is "the right to life" or "the right to free speech".
I haven't seen anything the RIAA has said about copyright that isn't at least somewhat supported by the law. That doesn't mean it's right, of course, but it does mean that abusive organizations have tremendous amounts of control over what the law is.
I'm right with you on this one. I don't see this one very often, but it is indeed an extreme fantasy.
Ditto here.
The US healthcare system has two choices to get better: either socialist free health care, or divorcing health insurance from employment. Right now we have the worst of both worlds. If people were free to shop around for health insurance like they shop around for car insurance, I'm confident that a host of problems currently plaguing our health care system would be solved.
Unfortunately, although I think government regulation may well have been the cause of employment and health insurance being conflated, I don't think that deregulation will successfully disentangle the two.
RTFComment. He quotes the part of the article where it is explained, and makes a joke about it.
I've never understood this objection. This will always generate a compiler warning, and depending on your compiler settings may not even compile successfully. The only time you might turn those warnings off is when you're having to deal with non-genericized legacy code.
The problems with Comparables usually come about because of a failure to implement Comparable instead of just implement Comparable. Java typically won't tell you that's the problem, it will steer you off into some other wild goose chase, but if you implement Comparable the challenges typically disappear.
It doesn't have to be a contract with RedHat. It can just be Microsoft saying, publically, "We agree, officially, not to sue users of RedHat Linux for any patent infringements." RedHat is free to protest, but Microsoft can say, "You can protest, but our official offer still stands no matter what you say."
Likewise, Microsoft can do the same thing with Novell. No contracts, just a public, official, Microsoft statement that they will not sue users of Novell Linux for any patent infringements. Novell can "protest" just the same as RedHat can, and again Microsoft can just say, "No matter, our official offer still stands."
I see no possible license solution that can remedy this problem.
I specifically pointed out in my previous post that I'm not saying, "Don't do a short-term solution because we really need a long-term solution," which your analogy directly implies. Sending a fire truck over to my wooden house is a very effective short-term solution.
I would have absolutely no problem with these particular GPLv3 changes if they actually stopped Microsoft from doing the sort of thing that they're doing. However, they don't. All Microsoft has to do is leave out the explicit deal with Novell part, and we're right back where we started. In changing the license this way, I'm convinced that we lose much more than we gain.