No doctor on earth would hold back a cure for cancer or diabetes if such a thing existed.
It may say something about the state of my cynicism that I do not believe that to be true.
It is not so much the doctors themselves I believe capable of this treachery, since doctors actually interact with the patients they'd be forcing to suffer, and few humans are capable of purposefully inflicting pain on a known victim for the sake of profit; rather, the pharmaceutical companies that have everything to gain from never-ending poor health.
When you never have to see the face of those you cause to suffer, it is easy to write off their suffering as unimportant.
Please raise your hand if you have EVER read any such lengthy legalese gobbeldygook before clicking "accept" in order to get on with your task. ALL such "EULAs" are a colossal joke.
I read EULA's once in awhile, usually when I'm installing something I suspect has a horrifically draconian clause in it. You're right though, I don't usually read them, particularly when they are 15 pages of text jammed into a tiny textbox on a popup screen you can't resize.
There is also an explosion here of people requesting that banks refund chargies levvied due to going overdrawn, bouncing payments etc, as the law dictates that charges are for administrative costs, and not to be used for punitive reasons. Even though you agree to make those payments if you do for example, write a cheque you cannot pay, this is considered an "unfair contractual obligation" and is therefore null and void under law.
I wish they'd do that here in the States. Banks make something like $30 BILLION a year in Insufficient Funds fees, and from my own experience in the banking industry I can tell you that a great many of those fees are unfair and often plain wrong.
Why $30 is a reasonable fee for going 1 cent overdrawn for 3 hours is reasonable, I will never understand.. and I understand even LESS why the bank STILL charges you an overdraft fee on checks they DON'T PAY.
Ok so let me get this straight.
You're telling me that my inherent right (God-given or otherwise) to move around as I please, as a living, breathing human being, should be predicated upon the willingness of some private corporation to SELL me the right to use their road?
You don't possibly see how this can only lead to a stifled, nearly motionless civilization (in the abstract sense) - one in which, so locked down by ownership of MOTION ITSELF, nobody bothers to move ANYTHING?
So maybe I'm one of those odd fellows who would prefer not to suck up to people I don't really like just because they wipe their asses with fifty dollar bills and let their hangers-on clean up the bathroom after them. Maybe there are some guys who know something about how to play that game, but who think there are more rewarding games to play.
Hmm. I take back my previous comment, because I agree wholeheartedly.
I happen to be very good at that game.. and get physically ill if I play it. So, I don't, because I actually value my morality more than the wealth possible through that kind of life.
For example, the last 20 odd years have shown that a man who is not ethically or morally encumbered can become the richest person on Earth.
Hmm. That may not be a position you wish to advocate, when you consider that what you're advocating is essentially sociopathic behavior (which, while it may lead to massive wealth in the short term, can only end up a destructive burden on the society in the long term).
It's largely informed by my personal experience, but in general, I found school trying to enforce uniformity by holding people to the lowest common denominator. Most of my time in high school was spent doing nothing intellectually valuable (or skipping school to do so on my own time). So I see no moral reason in letting kids who would otherwise hear the 18th recitation of the quadratic formula(as long as they already knew it) surf around on the web instead.
My experience was the same. My teachers were generally smart people who recognized this, however, and chose to take a Montessori approach by letting me pretty much do whatever I wanted, because they knew that "what I wanted" would end up being something educational, rather than forcing me to sit there sleeping during class.
Would never have learned much about the stock market and quantum physics if they hadn't let me do that.. so it was nice.
That's not entirely true. Mono has implemented the functionality in a few of the MS specific DLL's (such as User32.dll). That said, there's a monster of functionality in those dll's that they have NOT implemented and you're right, the vast majority of P/Invokes are not portable.
Which really stinks, because many times.NET simply doesn't provide the functionality you need and you have to resort to P/Invokes to get things to work.
You've got it backwards. Copy.. right. The right to make copies. A PATENT is what is intended to protect the creator from theft of his or her unique creations, because it provides a means of proving who came up with the idea first (and thus who has the right to create marketable products based on it) - e.g., who invented it.
While patents are as screwed up as copyrights, the intent of patents is to protect people from others who would copy their idea and sell it as their own (not the work itself, the idea - one of the defining differences between a copyright and a patent).
I realize it's probably pointless to talk to you, but at any rate..
My point was that every generation idealizes the past and looks down on future generations for some reason
This is a consequence of social systems becoming more entrenched over time, in additional to an overall increase in the complexity of an individual's day to day life. While there is a general rise and fall in crime (both individual and corporate), and so it is a poor measure of how "ideal" the past was, the day-to-day complexity of a single human life in industrialized nations is less subjective.
The more complex daily life becomes, the more we perceive it to be inferior to the past, very simply because our brains haven't caught up to our always-on culture.
You just did it again by portraying the world a few generations ago as made up almost entirely of farmers and blue collar workers
While 70 years seems like a long time it isn't really all that unfair.
Based on what?
The purpose of copyright is to provide a temporary monopoly on distribution of the art so that its creator can benefit from the work enough to encourage them to create further works. Copyright is NOT intended to create a source of lifetime income for the creator.
This is particularly true because the entire purpose of encouraging the creation of artistic works is so that the public itself has more art from which to benefit. The true value of art is its value to the culture that created it, because it allows us to see ourselves and reflect on our own existence. Cultures NEED art because essentially, it tells us who we are. Jefferson himself (who, by the way, wrote the Copyright clause of the US Constitution), as a child of the Enlightenment, recognized that all artistic work is inherently public domain - which is precisely why copyright monopolies should be granted for as little time as possible. We can't FORCE people to create artistic works to benefit the culture, so we ENCOURAGE them to do so with copyrights. Simple as that.
From that perspective, there is NO justification for maintaining a "death + 70 years" monopoly (not just 70 years, by the way). Those kinds of copyrights only accomplish one thing: depriving the culture that created the art of its due. We have yet to see what disastrous consequences this is going to have on expression.
I don't know precisely what your idea of "advanced" entails, but human history shows that that the most "advanced" culture is the one that goes out and tramples all over the world. The Greeks did it. The Romans did it. The Arabs did it. The Spanish did it. The English did it. It is what every "advanced" culture does: expand to the limits of possibility, which allows them to maximize their share of the Earth's resources. It is not clear why a spacefaring culture should be any different.
But that's a very human-centric view of how culture works. You conceive of conquest as a natural activity of an advanced culture, but not even all advanced HUMAN cultures did that - only very few of out of the tens of thousands of human cultures ever did (ours included).
And that's just human cultures. To claim to even BEGIN to comprehend the motives or intentions of a race you can't even imagine is.. hubris?
I find it hilarious that the Slashdot "democracy" will support Crichton on the inadvisability of gene patents while casting aspersions on his scientific opinion regarding enviroreligiosity. [michaelcrichton.com] You can't have it both ways, guys and gals. Either the author of the TV ER series is a Hollywood kook, or he's a serious scientist and M.D. who has done his homework and knows what he's talking about.
In other words, you're openly promoting the idea of ad hominem attacks.. the guy may be right but hell, he's an ass so he's wrong!
How will this bill fuel innovation?... What if it was acceptable to charge a million dollars for a single dose of a cure? The benefit of medical research would sky rocket and I'm sure more money would go into development.
Please tell me you're kidding. Nobody would pay for such a cure, except for the obscenely rich, and there are sufficiently few of them (and an even much smaller subset that would have AIDS) that it still wouldn't make the research worth it.
My question is simply, how do you ensure that forcing parts of research to be open to the public won't prevent companies from dumping money into that research? If a company discovers and goes through the painstaking research of finding "natural genes" then why shouldn't they be able to profit off that?
They CAN profit off it it - off the cure, not the research. Scientific research has ALWAYS been a humanist endeavor in that the research, the gain in knowledge itself, has always been considered public property, for the benefit of everyone. That is enlightened thinking.
Companies should not be able to "own" the very subject of the study itself - as Crichton himself says, that's like patenting gravity or snow. Completely ridiculous.
The consequence of that knowledge, however - the innovation that arises as a result of it - the combustion engine, the laser, the miracle cure for cancer - these things CAN and SHOULD be incentivized. But not the research itself, and I am disappointed that would you would argue such a point.. I've always liked your posts and thought you wiser than that.
And who is responsible for this? Certainly not the citizens themselves - the average citizen doesn't sit at their computer hunting for kiddie porn for hours.
Now, the responsibility for this lies squarely on the fear-mongers who use that issue as a means to power - and nowhere else. Now, people complain about it because they believe it to be their social responsibility to do so.. but only because they were told to.
And only one group benefits.. and it certainly ain't the poor weak and it isn't even the children being abused. It's social manipulation of the highest order, impeccably executed, and the whole of the American people fell for it. Sigh.. sometimes I wonder why I am still here.
In reality, it is fueled by the citizens demanding more from their government under the delusion that it will help them.
Guess who we have to thank for that. Good old Franklin Deleno Roosevelt and his disastrous "Four Freedoms", which are:
1. Freedom of speech and expression
2. Freedom of every person to worship God in his own way
3. Freedom from want
4. Freedom from fear
The first two freedoms are hard coded into our Constitution. The last two, however, are just feel-good bullshit designed to make the government the people's Mommy and Daddy. Translated, these last two essentially equal "The government living your life for you." There is no such thing and can NEVER be any such thing as freedom from want or fear - these things are part of the human condition. They cannot be bought or legislated away, because we'd lose part of what makes us human were that to happen.
Prior to Roosevelt's bullshit speech, people actually had an expectation that they and their local communities were responsible for their well-being and their overall general welfare (outside the degree guaranteed by the Constitution). AFTER Roosevelt's speech, the US Government became a pandering behemoth whose sole purpose ceased to be the general protection of the people and establishment of order, but instead the entity responsible for TOTAL CONTROL - because total control is the only way you can even BEGIN to eliminate fear and want.
That is the society in which we live today, the fulfilled dream of madmen bent on absolute power, under the guise of "protecting the people." And you bought it, every one of you, and now you expect it, and now you're enslaved to it.
Free? You're not free. Freedom the way you think of it is an illusion, and has been for centuries. You're all slaves and prisoners in a prison whose bars you're incapable of seeing.
You jest, but it would be naive to think this isn't exactly what they want. Police have been wanting expanded powers and for their jobs to be easier for YEARS (never mind the fact that there's no guarantee ANYWHERE that says it should be).
You don't have any right to watch Talladega Nights in HD.
Strawman. I wasn't arguing that it's my right to watch HD content (and it isn't, I agree) - it IS my right that IF I buy an HD disc, that I be able to watch it on whatever media I choose.
I bought it, I want to watch it on my iPod. I should be able to. Vista prevents me from format-shifting it so that I may do so.
By providing DRM, Microsoft *enables* your rights.
I thought you said it's not my right to watch HD content.
What upsets me is that we have a broken body of international law that prevents us from doing anything other than what we've done, and yet somehow you think boycotting our product is going to accomplish something.
I agree that the law prevents you from doing anything else - that is why it is broken.
My natural response is to not use Vista. That DOES accomplish something - it protects my rights! How can you be missing that point?
You apparently have some misplaced sense of loyalty to Vista and/or Microsoft which I simply do not comprehend. I'm simply amazed at the intellectual gymnastics you're doing in order to argue this. Really, it boggles the mind.
You're boycotting the wrong thing. I don't care if you boycott Vista; like you say, we won't suffer. But the statement you're trying to make isn't being made when you boycott Vista. If you want to make that statement, you have to boycott the HD disc formats and players.
But I don't want to make that statement. I never said I did - you said it. You're setting up a logical paradox that I'm not talking about in order to make it sound like I'm making no sense. But I didn't say any of that.
All I'm saying is, I want to protect my rights. Vista helps the media companies take my rights away. Therefore, I won't be using Vista. Is this so difficult to understand?
On the topic of DRM itself, I have absolutely no intention of ever buying a Blu-ray or HD-DVD disc. So that answers your secondary (yet invented) concern that I'm attempting to boycott DRM. My actions are completely, 100% consistent - and yet it seems to upset you.
Well, I agree that Microsoft really didn't have much choice, but that doesn't change the reality of the situation that I won't have an operating system tell me what I am and am not allowed to do with my computer (or my media collection). That's merely a price Microsoft has to pay for the choices they make. That's the nature of the universe - choices have consequences.
I'm not going to give up my rights just because "I shouldn't make Microsoft suffer." One, because if they won't stand on principle, than I will. Two, because I doubt seriously that they'll suffer from my boycott, either.
The media conglomerates are trying to tell you what you can do with your HD-DVDs. When Vista sees a "bad" media path, it ASKS the DVD what it should do, and the DVD tells it. It's the DVD that says "don't play me!" or "make me look like crap!", and all Vista does is obey the command it's been given.
We *have* to do that. If we don't do what the DVD says to do, we're not allowed to play it; DMCA, and all that rot. The only thing we've done is set up a system that lets you play HD-DVDs legally on a suitably validated signal path.
Ah, I know it's the media conglomerates' responsibility, in the end. I don't particularly blame Microsoft for it, except for their own desires to make DRM meet their ends, too (See: Microsoft patent on OS modules that include DRM. Come on, that's contrary to the whole spirit of software development. Licensing is one thing, but DRM?).
So while I don't blame Microsoft for the DRM included in Vista, at the same time, that also means I'm not going to use it. Microsoft may have to pony up to the media companies, but they don't get a 'get out of jail free' card from consumers for doing it. It's a cost-benefit analysis and obviously Microsoft decided that for now, it's better for them to go along with the media companies rather than tell them to piss off.
They still have to pay that price for their own part in the deal. That just means they'll have one fewer future customer, in my case. No big deal. At the moment there's nothing I do on my machine that can't be as easily done on Linux; I'm just supremely lazy and don't want to install Linux unless I have to.
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It is not so much the doctors themselves I believe capable of this treachery, since doctors actually interact with the patients they'd be forcing to suffer, and few humans are capable of purposefully inflicting pain on a known victim for the sake of profit; rather, the pharmaceutical companies that have everything to gain from never-ending poor health.
When you never have to see the face of those you cause to suffer, it is easy to write off their suffering as unimportant.
Why $30 is a reasonable fee for going 1 cent overdrawn for 3 hours is reasonable, I will never understand.. and I understand even LESS why the bank STILL charges you an overdraft fee on checks they DON'T PAY.
Ok so let me get this straight. You're telling me that my inherent right (God-given or otherwise) to move around as I please, as a living, breathing human being, should be predicated upon the willingness of some private corporation to SELL me the right to use their road? You don't possibly see how this can only lead to a stifled, nearly motionless civilization (in the abstract sense) - one in which, so locked down by ownership of MOTION ITSELF, nobody bothers to move ANYTHING?
I happen to be very good at that game.. and get physically ill if I play it. So, I don't, because I actually value my morality more than the wealth possible through that kind of life.
Would never have learned much about the stock market and quantum physics if they hadn't let me do that.. so it was nice.
That's not entirely true. Mono has implemented the functionality in a few of the MS specific DLL's (such as User32.dll). That said, there's a monster of functionality in those dll's that they have NOT implemented and you're right, the vast majority of P/Invokes are not portable.
.NET simply doesn't provide the functionality you need and you have to resort to P/Invokes to get things to work.
Which really stinks, because many times
Seriously, what pointless hyperbole. Attempt to understand my argument or simply be quiet.
You've got it backwards. Copy.. right. The right to make copies. A PATENT is what is intended to protect the creator from theft of his or her unique creations, because it provides a means of proving who came up with the idea first (and thus who has the right to create marketable products based on it) - e.g., who invented it.
While patents are as screwed up as copyrights, the intent of patents is to protect people from others who would copy their idea and sell it as their own (not the work itself, the idea - one of the defining differences between a copyright and a patent).
Lol.. I stand corrected.
This is a consequence of social systems becoming more entrenched over time, in additional to an overall increase in the complexity of an individual's day to day life. While there is a general rise and fall in crime (both individual and corporate), and so it is a poor measure of how "ideal" the past was, the day-to-day complexity of a single human life in industrialized nations is less subjective.
The more complex daily life becomes, the more we perceive it to be inferior to the past, very simply because our brains haven't caught up to our always-on culture.
Actually, that much is accurate. The 20th Century Transformation of U.S. Agriculture and Farm Policy
The purpose of copyright is to provide a temporary monopoly on distribution of the art so that its creator can benefit from the work enough to encourage them to create further works. Copyright is NOT intended to create a source of lifetime income for the creator.
This is particularly true because the entire purpose of encouraging the creation of artistic works is so that the public itself has more art from which to benefit. The true value of art is its value to the culture that created it, because it allows us to see ourselves and reflect on our own existence. Cultures NEED art because essentially, it tells us who we are. Jefferson himself (who, by the way, wrote the Copyright clause of the US Constitution), as a child of the Enlightenment, recognized that all artistic work is inherently public domain - which is precisely why copyright monopolies should be granted for as little time as possible. We can't FORCE people to create artistic works to benefit the culture, so we ENCOURAGE them to do so with copyrights. Simple as that.
From that perspective, there is NO justification for maintaining a "death + 70 years" monopoly (not just 70 years, by the way). Those kinds of copyrights only accomplish one thing: depriving the culture that created the art of its due. We have yet to see what disastrous consequences this is going to have on expression.
And that's just human cultures. To claim to even BEGIN to comprehend the motives or intentions of a race you can't even imagine is.. hubris?
Thank you. I've tried to say the same in other posts, but yours came out clearer than mine. Nice.
Nice rational thinking there.
Please tell me you're kidding. Nobody would pay for such a cure, except for the obscenely rich, and there are sufficiently few of them (and an even much smaller subset that would have AIDS) that it still wouldn't make the research worth it.They CAN profit off it it - off the cure, not the research. Scientific research has ALWAYS been a humanist endeavor in that the research, the gain in knowledge itself, has always been considered public property, for the benefit of everyone. That is enlightened thinking.
Companies should not be able to "own" the very subject of the study itself - as Crichton himself says, that's like patenting gravity or snow. Completely ridiculous.
The consequence of that knowledge, however - the innovation that arises as a result of it - the combustion engine, the laser, the miracle cure for cancer - these things CAN and SHOULD be incentivized. But not the research itself, and I am disappointed that would you would argue such a point.. I've always liked your posts and thought you wiser than that.
And who is responsible for this? Certainly not the citizens themselves - the average citizen doesn't sit at their computer hunting for kiddie porn for hours.
Now, the responsibility for this lies squarely on the fear-mongers who use that issue as a means to power - and nowhere else. Now, people complain about it because they believe it to be their social responsibility to do so.. but only because they were told to.
And only one group benefits.. and it certainly ain't the poor weak and it isn't even the children being abused. It's social manipulation of the highest order, impeccably executed, and the whole of the American people fell for it. Sigh.. sometimes I wonder why I am still here.
1. Freedom of speech and expression
2. Freedom of every person to worship God in his own way
3. Freedom from want
4. Freedom from fear
The first two freedoms are hard coded into our Constitution. The last two, however, are just feel-good bullshit designed to make the government the people's Mommy and Daddy. Translated, these last two essentially equal "The government living your life for you." There is no such thing and can NEVER be any such thing as freedom from want or fear - these things are part of the human condition. They cannot be bought or legislated away, because we'd lose part of what makes us human were that to happen.
Prior to Roosevelt's bullshit speech, people actually had an expectation that they and their local communities were responsible for their well-being and their overall general welfare (outside the degree guaranteed by the Constitution). AFTER Roosevelt's speech, the US Government became a pandering behemoth whose sole purpose ceased to be the general protection of the people and establishment of order, but instead the entity responsible for TOTAL CONTROL - because total control is the only way you can even BEGIN to eliminate fear and want.
That is the society in which we live today, the fulfilled dream of madmen bent on absolute power, under the guise of "protecting the people." And you bought it, every one of you, and now you expect it, and now you're enslaved to it.
Free? You're not free. Freedom the way you think of it is an illusion, and has been for centuries. You're all slaves and prisoners in a prison whose bars you're incapable of seeing.
Alberto Gonzales must be creaming his pants repeatedly at the idea of this law passing.
Imagine the kind of unregulated, unrepresented, unelected power he'll have. It's enough to make any evil man weep.
You jest, but it would be naive to think this isn't exactly what they want. Police have been wanting expanded powers and for their jobs to be easier for YEARS (never mind the fact that there's no guarantee ANYWHERE that says it should be).
I bought it, I want to watch it on my iPod. I should be able to. Vista prevents me from format-shifting it so that I may do so. I thought you said it's not my right to watch HD content. I agree that the law prevents you from doing anything else - that is why it is broken.
My natural response is to not use Vista. That DOES accomplish something - it protects my rights! How can you be missing that point?
You apparently have some misplaced sense of loyalty to Vista and/or Microsoft which I simply do not comprehend. I'm simply amazed at the intellectual gymnastics you're doing in order to argue this. Really, it boggles the mind.
All I'm saying is, I want to protect my rights. Vista helps the media companies take my rights away. Therefore, I won't be using Vista. Is this so difficult to understand?
On the topic of DRM itself, I have absolutely no intention of ever buying a Blu-ray or HD-DVD disc. So that answers your secondary (yet invented) concern that I'm attempting to boycott DRM. My actions are completely, 100% consistent - and yet it seems to upset you.
Why?
Well, I agree that Microsoft really didn't have much choice, but that doesn't change the reality of the situation that I won't have an operating system tell me what I am and am not allowed to do with my computer (or my media collection). That's merely a price Microsoft has to pay for the choices they make. That's the nature of the universe - choices have consequences.
I'm not going to give up my rights just because "I shouldn't make Microsoft suffer." One, because if they won't stand on principle, than I will. Two, because I doubt seriously that they'll suffer from my boycott, either.
So while I don't blame Microsoft for the DRM included in Vista, at the same time, that also means I'm not going to use it. Microsoft may have to pony up to the media companies, but they don't get a 'get out of jail free' card from consumers for doing it. It's a cost-benefit analysis and obviously Microsoft decided that for now, it's better for them to go along with the media companies rather than tell them to piss off.
They still have to pay that price for their own part in the deal. That just means they'll have one fewer future customer, in my case. No big deal. At the moment there's nothing I do on my machine that can't be as easily done on Linux; I'm just supremely lazy and don't want to install Linux unless I have to.