Suppose that events in a virtual world were transactional and were logged to a change log, ala a DBMS system. Suppose further that you could rollback the state of the virtual world to a known point in time, apply a different transaction, and then replay the remainder of the transaction log. Obviously collisions would happen.
A popular topic in science fiction is "what would happen to the future if you went back in time and messed with the past?"
Why speculate? Why not simulate it using virtual world technology?
Obviously this is more interesting in some VWs than others (2L comes to mind as an interesting place to try something like this). And obviously, the meat of the discussion is deciding how to apply conflicting transactions..
I think it would make a fascinating research project for grad students. For a collision policy X, what is the total measured discontinuity between world W and W' based on a given historical modification. Have a few differing conflict resolution policies and see what the ramifications of each are.
Infact, there's probalby some sort of innovative gameplay dynamic that could be built around history modification. Assuming that time travel is atrociously expensive (in terms of in-game cost) and there's only a limited window of opportunity or impact while you're "in the past", how can players maximize their future outcome by manipulating world history?
(Yes, I'm aware of the Microsoft game that had a token "time travel" component in it. Obviously I'm talking about something more grandiose)
I'm certainly not a constitutional scholar and you may well be right. However, I would claim that current laws regarding slander, libel, hate-speech, and whatever law covers yelling "fire" in a theater are all laws that abrdige the freedom of speech (and the press, for that matter).
Either the amendment restricts what type of speech it is meant to cover to the narrow venue of political expression, or it is just flatly ignored in order to implement the speech restriction laws I've enumerated above.
Remember that private business' goal is maximum profit for minimum input. If you rely on private business for a space race, as odd as it may sound, we'd get a space system akin to what the Communist system was like. Shortsighted, concentrating on immediate goals and without any value for later expeditions. And worst of all, dangerous as hell
This is a commonly repeated position that really doesn't hold a lot of truth. For _certain_ companies or even certain whole industries this might be accurate. But in general, successful businesses are run with a _very_ long term outlook, especially smaller and mid-sized businesses. Many of these companies took years just to become profitable, and will take many more years of 16-hour days on the part of the owners before there is a "comfortable" amount of money concentrated near the top.
I think that when comparing the private and public sectors, the public sector almost always has the poorer long-term vision. Candidates by definition promise what they can devlier within their own election term. Funding is always approved to _Start_ a project but rarely to maintain or repair a project. Asset and infrastructure depreciation is a huge failing of government for precisely this reason -- its not the politicians own money, and its not fashionable or vote worthy to fix old boring stuff.
It is obvious that NASA was capable of great things in during the Apollo time frame. However, we were a different country then, with a different situation. You might want to recall that normal middle class Americans were building _bomb shelters_ and doing nuclear fallout drills. I still remember seeing the radiation hazard logo with the words "Fallout Shelter" written under it above the doors of many buildings when I was a kid (the mid 80s). How often do you see those now? Where would you go if there were a nuclear war with Russia today? Nobody knows because nobody is worried about it any more.
There can be no doubt that when there is national unity of purpose, exhorbitant spending, and people set aside some of thier comfort and convenience for a shared greater cause, that we can mobilize as a nation and do something amazing, with the federal government taking the rudder and aiming the sails.
But that's not today. The people and the money is simply not there right now. I think in today's environment, it makes sense to let private financiers have a go at things. Maybe a way to re-energize interest in space and space sciences is to put it into the hands of more people the way that privatization inevitably will.
Of Course. This _is_ the "McCain" in "McCain-Feingold" we're talking about, after all.
Surely you're familiar with the McCain-Feingold "incumbency protection act", who's aim is to create a dubious "protected class" of people for whom the 1st amendment (which protects _political speech_ and no other type) still actually applies.
For everyone else (people who aren't "real journalists") -- no more 1st amendment rights for you, anytime an election is 6 months (or wahtever the bill says) away.
McCain Feingold is one of these ridiculous laws that, when examined, seems totally ridiculous and unconstitutional. As a practical matter, I don't think it has had a chilling effect on much of anything. As a theoretical matter, it's one of the reasons why libertarians don't like McCain.
In many ways the '08 Election is a reverse of the '04 Election. In 04 the Democrats were running a "he's not Bush" candidate, and to be frank that was Kerry's only real qualification.
McCain is someone who is neither pleasing to conservative republicans nor to libertarians who normally grudgingly fall into the republican camp. He's the "not Obama & not Clinton" vote. Almost everyone I've spoken with is much more interested in "not Obama" than "McCain".
Oddly enough, the fact that McCain is not squarely in the conservative/republican camp may make him an acceptable president. He obviously doesn't care about pissing off other republicans, and he obviously jumps off traditional conservative/republican dogma when it suits him. The reality of the senate voting record is that McCain has jumped across the aisle to get something done with the Democrats far more often than Obama has broken rank with the progressive agenda to get some reasonably-centerist legislation done by cooperating with Republicans.
What I should have said is, "as someone with a fair bit of race track experience, I find that the authenticity of the simulation of the vehicle dynamics presented in the Gran Turismo series of games is lacking compared to other racing games and simulators I have experience with"
More concretely, the GT cars appear to respond to inputs differently than I would expect, to the point that it is frustrating at times.
All simulation games have a model of reality that dictates the behavior of the cars in response to given stimuli. Based on my experience with the GT series, their models exhibit problems which stick out to me. A notable problem is the propensity of the cars to retain front tire turn-in grip when you are performing maximum braking, or worse, have locked up the front wheels entirely. If you lock up the front tires and then dial in a giant bundle of steering lock, the car sails straight. Sims like RACER are very in-your-face about this (on certain cars)... in GT i've "gotten away with it" when I felt I shouldn't have.
On the other end of the spectrum, keeping a base model BMW going in a straight line at high speed on the Nurburgring in GT can be challenging. Given that I've driven the Nurburgring __in real life__ and had no such difficulties, there is clearly something fishy going on there.
In the latter case, I think this may partially be an issue of Logitech DFP input mappings or similar. The braking+turning stuff is much more likely to be an issue of insufficient dynamics model in the game. You cannot even explain it away with obnoxiouisly high tire coefficients since a locked tire should not be turning a vehicle. IOW - its not that certain simulation parameters are wrong, it is almost certainly the case that the simulation is wrong.
Who cares? When I'm playing a racing game the fact that the buildings aren't reflecting the surroundings accurately doesn't detract from my gaming experience at all.
I suppose that would be fine if all games were racing games and all gamers were you.
I think the big benefit here is that scenes will be considerably more realistic, especially under motion.
GT has never done an _authentic_ job at anything. Most of its vehicle physics and eye-candy are faked, and in the case of vehicle dynamics, badly.
In the GT shot you've posted, the cars appear to have reflective surfaces, interacting shadows, etc. But the background doesn't. Why not? Becuase people look at cars.
Now look at the nVidia shot. Note that you can see the sign and bridge geometry reflected in the glass of the building. What are the odds that, if you had to explicitly program for this behavior, that a developer would bother to render accurate geometry reflections into individual panes of glass on a building.
That's computationally expensive, it takes a lot of programmer protein power, and it's just not something you'll see done with game-style renderers.
But raycasting and other light-simulation techniques are interesting precisely because they aren't optimized for any particular application (i.e. cars that look wet in dead boring backgrounds).
I think that as scene rendering and lighting becomes more general (instead of relying on tricks for certain desired effects), scenes will become over all more realistic, and things will start happening that nobody expected or planned for.
The "shadows" in that GT shot are awful. I don't want a vague, aliased, dark-map cast uniformly off the front glass. I want the reflection of the building to be cast over the windshield. I want the curvature of the glass to be apparent because the reflection has distorted over its contours. I want the reflected building to be translucent because when looking at a reflection on a peice of glass, there's a mix of reflection and transmission. Since the reflected building it itself covered in glass, i want to see reflected reflections on the windshield. Since light energy is lost at each reflective stage, i expect there to be more image attenuation between the 1st and 2nd reflected images.
And I want all of it to move and change realistically as the car moves (and the building doesn't).
It's not that this level of accuracy will make racing more fun (or that it would affect me anyway since i use exclusively in-car views (although it would be cool to see glare/reflection across the glass modelled properly!), it's that the world will become more accurate and immersive _in general_ in ways that developers didn't plan for.
Procedurally trying to acheive this effect is going to be painful. Shooting light energy into a completely described 3d world and letting the chips fall where they may is easier and more accurate. The issue is that it's never been plausible for real time applications.
Actually, Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman is where I first read of the link between occupational licensure and incumbency protection. You've read a lot into what I wrote that I didn't say.
Which is funny, given that you immediately start your response with accusing me of utilizing a strawman:)
Regarding restricting basic human rights -- Yeah, i think the government is far too heavy handed in what it says people can and cannot do amongst consenting adults.
Regarding the basic merit of my point -- which is that government getting involved in who is or is not "qualified" to be parents -- we can see how this turns out based on examples. One I give elsewhere, in China, regarding the kind of policies and their deleterious effects on society that a government who thinks it has the power to say who can and cannot reproduce (more correctly, how much someone can reproduce). The other situation to consider is the interview, home study, and total clusterfuck involved in doing domestic adoption in the US.
I am _offended_ that some social worker beleives they are qualified to, based on _pure_ subjectivity, act as an agent of the state and tell me that I will or won't be a "good parent". One couple I'm familiar with failed their adoption home study because the husband and wife were "not looking at each other enough during the interview". This kind of pseudo-science, practiced by some of the lowest-functioning members in society (government social workers) is not a gatekeeper I am willing to put up with governing basic human reproduction. It is already a travesty that our foster care system seems to prefer that the most qualified prospective parents must "import" babies from overseas and that existing US children are funneled into sexually abusive foster care situations.
I can only surmise that you are disagreeing with me based on a perception of my worldview, not because you don't see the basic truth in what I am saying -- occupational licensure laws, where those already practicing the profession control (via state power) who else may practice the profession, are an inherent conflict of interest and act as a supply-side limit. This results in driving up the price of services rendered by said people.
This is all discussed eloquently by Friedman if you care to read up on it.
Licensure regarding who can and cannot be an adoptive parent already puts the government into a tremendous position of power. Luckily biology is still giving individual actors the upper hand, but I don't think that will be the case in as few as 50 years.
Slashdot is usually good (collectively) at pointing out parallels between boneheaded reality of today and dystopian literature. If you talk about a government deciding who can or cannot biologically reproduce, or getting into the bioligical reproductive business directly, that should be setting off warning buzzers _all over the place_. Brave New World, for starters..
China has a policy limiting children. If that's the sort of society you want to live in, what's stopping you?
As for the US -- the concern that ideas like yours might become more popular are why there are gun-rights-single-issue voters every year. Gun ownership ensures that nobody like you gets too successful at implementing their ideas.
To take the example of parenting, we let anyone no matter how irresponsible or unqualified have kids, and then punish them - and the kids - when they screw up the job of parenting. How stupid is that? We don't do that with dentists or doctors or any other role of responsibility.
You and I probably wouldn't enjoy living in a society that resricted people's biologic function of having children. Nor would we want to live in a society where children were seized in great number from their parents post birth.
Regarding occupational licensure -- this is as much brought on by members of said occupation as a way to do supply-side limiting of people legally allowed to perform their trade, with obvious benefits to their own salary. Occupational licensure is _always_ sold to the people as "for their safety", but always asked for by those employed in the trade, not consumers who have been harmed.
If biology worked just a bit differently, and more people had difficulty having kids, and compensated surrogate mothers were more common, you can damn well expect some sort of union or occupational licensure for surrogate mothers to show up. And then you'd have precisely what you describe-- a license or permit required to have kids.
The ramifications of licensure in politics, when viewed through the lens that licensure is really incumbent protection, are unpleasant to consider. The effective barrier to entry into US politics is still too high; adding a licensure system where those in charge are other licensed polititians seems like socio-political suicide.
I was doing this as a teenager (the early 1990s) and ended up getting into a small bit of trouble over it.
Basically, as a prank, we set off about 20 of these things outside of a kids window late at night. Using 2 liter bottles they really do sound like shotgun blasts. THe smaller 16oz bottles aren't as loud but we had plenty of them mixed in as well.
Well, the kids parents didn't think this was very funny at all, and we all knew each other (these were "BBS acquantances") and we got hauled into the police station. Everyone's parents were also there.
The cops were asking how we learned to do this. I fibbed a bit and said that we learned it in chemistry class... basically HCL and metal causes an acid-metal reaction, and releases a ton of gas. The principles of acid-metal reactions are certainly well-explained in HS chemistry, and that's what I said.
One of the moms was like "WHY ARE THEY TEACHING THIS KIND OF THING IN SCHOOL?" and got all emotional about it. I continued lecturing: "actually, this is simply basic chemistry, and it is important that kids are taught this kind of thing. we chose to use this knowledge to be mischevious" blah blah blah.
A few years later we heard of kids doing the same stuff and they got in _way_ more trouble over it. Times and attitudes have changed and this kind of stuff isn't funny anymore (well, it is, but not many people who matter think so).
The happy ending of this story is that I made one more of these things for a practical project / application talk in a later HS chemistry class. The class got to go outside and watch me set one of the things off. As long as I was able to explain the chemistry sufficiently and keep the class interested in chemistry, the teacher was all for it.
My father in law's mom was a science teacher; he'd give her a list of stuff to order periodically and she'd get it for him without asking questions. He blew up the kitchen table once. Another time he set a forest on fire with a frenell lens and some magnesium. He ended up getting a Chemical Engineering degree later in life and these days is one of the foremost industry experts at what he does. Nobody ever got hurt and society is certainly better for his contributions as an adult.
It's important to let kids be kids. Curiosity is the most important thing in a child, and one reason that I'll be homeschooling my son. He's too important to let "them" ruin his future.
I had to look up Snell's law quick, which doesn't mention wavelength as being a factor (I thought that the refective effects might vary according to wavelength), but then i noticed this at the bottom:
In many wave-propagation media, wave velocity changes with frequency or wavelength of the waves; this is true of light propagation in most transparent substances other than a vacuum. These media are called dispersive. The result is that the angles determined by Snell's law also depend on frequency or wavelength, so that a ray of mixed wavelengths, such as white light, will spread or disperse. Such dispersion of light in glass or water underlies the origin of rainbows, in which different wavelengths appear as different colors.
In optical instruments, dispersion leads to chromatic aberration, a color-dependent blurring that sometimes is the resolution-limiting effect. This was especially true in refracting telescopes, before the invention of achromatic objective lenses.
I would guess that any optical camoflauge technique has a function of input wavelength vs. camoflauge effectiveness, and that wavelenghths sufficiently on either side of "visible" would likely fall off of the effectiveness plateau.
This is the first comment I've read about this article that made me go "ohhhhhhhhhhh crap".
I think the US and the West should be _very_ careful with their due dilligence when thinking about how to handle ex-soviet satellites that want into the NATO party.
I was going to mention that but you beat me to it.
Specifically, it was the output of "banner", a giant sideways message made of asterisks. I don't think it was in alphabetical order; i think the groups came across in create-order in tin (which is what i was using the day it happened)
Oddly enough, if the motivation of that guy was to get people to "remember jerry", he succeeded. I specifically remember where I was when that happened. I was up in my 2nd floor bedroom. I was using a 486/33 w/ 20MB of ram. I had fvwm running, and the rxvt I was using was that goofy black on beige color scheme.
As the hundreds of newsgroups scrolled by, i thought it was the most clever hack i'd ever seen.
The history of metallic money is actually pretty obvious. Unlike the paper dollar, if the entire economy built on "IOUs" collapsed, a metallic based currency is still a given amount of metal, metal which can be put to a variety of uses.
In the earliest trade & barter systems, it was inconvenient to use "cow" as the medium of exchange if you wanted to buy something that you felt was only worth half a cow. Or if your trading partner had no particular use for cows in any quantity, whole or otherwise.
Metals on the otherhand, have some great properties for usage as currency - they can be melted and reshaped and reformed again and again without losing any of their worthwhile properties. - they can be cut (or recombined) into any size or denomination without diminishing their per-unit qualities (1/2 oz of gold is worth 1oz gold / 2. 1/2 of a cow is not necessarily worth 1 cow / 2.) - being elementals, there is little qualitative difference between gold from spain, gold fed grass, gold grown in sunny pastures, etc. Gold is gold. Grain, cattle, etc, all have many qualitative differences such that we can rarely say 2 cows or 2 sacks of grain are equally valuable. - the precious metals are exceptionally good at not oxidizing, corroding, or otherwise vanishing or decaying with age.
Basically, precious metals can be melted and remade in any shape or denomination as many times as you want, and they never decay or expire. Even so, they retain all of the physical properties that make them useful in metallurgy, or desirable to satisfy vanity. Metallic coined money then makes a tremendous amount of sense as a currency. It is not accidental that it was instrumental in the development of market economies.
The justice system practices "appeasement" all the time. Case in point: reducing a sentence or granting immunity in exchange for testimony to convict a bigger fish.
The law, owing back to biblical tradition, specifies the maximum penalty for a given crime. Any penalty from there on down to "please don't do that again" is legally valid, except in the recently fashionable "minimum penalty" offenses.
If it is better for society or law enforcement or general order to forgive a minor crime in order to use that criminals talents to avoid or prosecute much larger ones, that's a card that most jurisdictions will play most of the time.
The best bad guys will _always_ be better than the best good guys at this stuff. What the good guys have on their side is time and manpower. If they can get a high-talent, low-risk "criminal" to help out going after bigger fish, that's a good deal for everyone.
Part of the prison system is supposed to "Reform" people for re-introduction into lawful society. That hardly ever works in practice. In the case of some of these white collar "genius" crimes where you've got a pioneering or expert-level domain criminal, reforming them may be as simple as saying "work for us instead of going to jail". If they follow through with it, the system worked, and everyone wins.
Disparity of salaries between University Professors and Football Coaches - overall, who provides more long term gain to society and who are rewarded more in terms of salary (almost an order of magnitude difference)?
Well, on the point of providing value to society, that will rathole into a debate about what is "good for society", assuming that there's an objective or even subjective-with-high-consensus notion of such a thing. It's not clear that people want to live longer, healthier, more intellectually stimulating lives. Many people live too long and are bored. It's certainly clear that more US residents place a higher value on the entertainment offered to them by sporting events than whatever research and progress have done for them.
But like I said -- let's not rathole on that point:)
The second point is about rewards. I think it is worthwhile to point out that college sports are often _highly_ profitable to their host universities. I'm in general no fan of the typical games popular in the US, and especially so at the collegiate level. Even so, these programs tend to bring in a lot of money which is then diverted towards more academic purposes. Presumably, you see the (perhaps unfortuneate) utility in subsidizing higher-order activities with populist bread and circuses:)
1) I hadn't heard before now that Mac had somehow inherited _anything_ from the Apple ][ series. On the contrary, the Mac was designed from the ground up around the mouse. Do you have any sources that indicate different?
2) Yes, the Restart/Sleep/Shut Down dialog is the one that isn't keyboard accessible (at least on 10.1-10.4). Tab, arrow keys, etc, all do nothing in this dialog to change the cursor selection.
CPU architectures Windows has never even booted on native
[Needs Citation]
This flexibility and power keeps Linux dominating markets Windows and MacOSX can't even enter.
It's not clear to me how with 100% of Windows and Apple desktops now running some variant of the x86 architecture that this is a critical or relevant point, or that it addresses my original post in anyway whatsoever. Even if it were factual.. which it isn't. There are a fair number of Microsoft offerings up and down the stack, from componentized windows down to Windows CE.
I think the folks at NetBSD and Wind River would like to talk to you about your apparently expert knowledge of embedded systems performance and operating system portability.
fwiw, Windows NT booted and ran on the Alpha, MIPS, and I beleive SPARC processor families before Linux did:)
The superior technology of Linux and MacOSX will keep them alive long after Windows' architecture crumbles, and Vista is the first huge sign that's happening.
I think the claim of superior technology is a bit dubious. What do you base that on?
I think it is telling that Linux, since I first started using it with _kernel.98_ has been trying to acheive feature parity with windows for basic home user and desktop tasks. Every year it is announced that linux has "finally done it" yet every year there continues to be more work to do and more projects undertaken. Either linux and the various desktop systems that run atop of it aren't quite there, or windows continues to make progress.
I also think it is unreasonable to discount a lot of the technology that goes into the windows stack.
OSX is on much less sure footing than linux, maturity and technology wise. Apple has a narrow use-case defined and it excels in serving that customer segment. Compare using a Mac with a windows box with no mouse plugged in. It's actually nearly impossible to operate a mac with no mouse. Certain dialogs (like shutting the machine down) are not KB accessible. When you plug an unrecognized keyboard into a mac you have to use a mouse to configure they keyboard (iirc).
Compare the availability of screen readers and other assistive technology devives between Mac and Windows. Or, talk to the accessibility folks directly: http://www.afb.org/afbpress/pub.asp?DocID=aw060505
Linux has all kinds of rough spots, which, if a user decides to try fixing it, leads them into a rats nest of competing technologies (i.e. X11 font families and font renderers) and disparate configuration surfaces. There's a lot of technology there, but it's not clear that it is especially novel, superior, etc.
If I had to make a poor generalization, I'd say that Apple is specialized enough that it does a few things excellently, Linux is generalized (and undirected enough) that it does nothing especially well but offers tremendous flexibility to power users, and Windows is kind of this broad sweet spot of functionality and applicability for a wide range of tasks for a wide range of users. Putting a usable facade over all of the baked-in technology is something windows does quite well and linux does less well.
I think for certain use cases, Linux and Apple are "good enough", and for some cases, Linux and Apple are probably demonstrably better. Underlying these advantages, however, I don't think you'll see some _fundamental_ technology advantage.
I think you'd be hard pressed to name some new technology in an Apple or Linux system that Windows doesn't have an analog of (with the windows function often being considerably more complex in implementation to support its edge-case features.. usually around central management or assistive technology support, yet still easier to configure and use on a daily basis)
I guess my summary is that I don't think someone can claim a technology advantage over windows by either OSX or Linux as a matter of settled fact. For starters, it's not even clear what that means.
the lessons of ip law and music then are completely unrelated to ip law issues governing the creation fo anything in the real world, such as pills
so you're "canonical ip problem" isn't canonical at all
The problems of the world are larger than your imagination. Today it is possible to put a 3d prototyping machine on your desk quite easily. The instructions to run the machine can be sent electronically. The goo used to make the part will be vastly cheaper than the hourly wage paid to the guy who designed the part. Cheap plastic toys are often copyrighted because the _design_ of the toy is what is important (especially from the perspective of liceensed characters,etc).
While what you say is true in the sense that today I cannot print drugs in my home, I suspect that in 10-20 years I very well may be able to. What then?
The "internet" is the same today as it was 10 years ago -- the difference is widespread adoption of cheap technology. That drug production is infeasible for the majority of drugs for the majority of home users _today_ does not mean it will not be in just a few years.
Your argument essentially boils down to "it's not a problem right now, so it's not a problem". I disagree, and before one talks about dismantling IP laws and protections, one needs to consider that in just a few years the drug problem may be _THE_ problem. Think of the ramifications of this.. the intellectual property concerns of drug manufacture may be at the bottom of our "worry list" compared to:
1) anyone can make lab-grade cocaine in their home 2) anyone can modify any drug to have perilous side effects and distribute it to unsuspecting folks 3) mass-manufacture of Rophynol in frat houses all across America 4) manufacture of toxins and WMD become completely untraceable, yet plausible in quantities large enough to be city-wide events.
etc etc. Desktop drug printing is coming, technology wise. Given the list above, I suspect anyone trying to sell such a machine will disappear with the "help" of the US government:)
Anyway, it is wreckless to wholesale dismiss the concept of IP and IP protection because we don't like what record and movie companies are doing _today_. They are only a small slice of the problem, one that is popular today but will be irrelevant in a few years when it has blown over. But the other aspects of the IP problem space will still be there and will become pressing issues as the technology needed to mass-produce copies of the information becomes widely available.
As for the IP not directly related to entertainment, I do not have such a clear cut answer as there isn't much media attention to the inefficiencies of their business model, and as such I've not given it much thought. But I'm very certain there is a way, if people are looking for it.
Figure it out, and I'll vote for whatever you propose. Until then, I'll steal music and pay for medicine.
That's fine. People who call for the wholesale dismissal of IP as a concept or as a protected legal entity aren't being careful enough in what they describe.
Hating the music industry is fine and dandy. Nobody in this thread has managed to tell me how they'd solve drug development compensation without the concept of IP protection laws.
Like I said -- i'd love to see the **AAs evaporate and all of their stupid laws go with them. But any argument grounded on "there is no concept of intellectual property" needs to explain the drug development case to be credible.
There is *NO SUCH THING* as intellectual "property".
Property and intellectual property are both constructs of government. Intellectual Property is only less real than "real" property because most people have the idea that they can hold "real" property in their hand.
Property, in the general sense is really about controlling access and use, two basic rights accorded to the property holder.
It's worth pointing out that many native american populations have no concept of land-as-property or land-for-ownership. Obviously the NAs who sold Manhattan for $24 in supplies weren't operating under the same contextual framework as the Europeans who purchased it.
The point here is that you cannot brush IP aside or wish it away. The various things that make up IP law in the US _are_ real -- they are real because the law describes and defines them, just as it does for physical property, real estate, mineral rights, etc etc.
The distinction between "real" and "intellectual" property isn't one that has any strong legal standing. If property is primarily about controlling access and use, that in many cases this is more difficult to do for intellectual property doesn't mean that the latter ceases to become property.
I am fine having a discussion about Music and the Artist compensation / performance model, but that is a marginal case of the IP problem. As I've said elsewhere, the real issue is with drug development.
If people restrict their criticisms of IP to the music industry and speak more of music industry reform, that's fine. Attempting to equate all of the IP problem space to the music industry and then dismissing IP as a concept relies on the general contempt for the music industry, and doesn't establish much of an argument or answer any of the questions or problems that arise.
Slashdot Mirror
Suppose that events in a virtual world were transactional and were logged to a change log, ala a DBMS system. Suppose further that you could rollback the state of the virtual world to a known point in time, apply a different transaction, and then replay the remainder of the transaction log. Obviously collisions would happen.
A popular topic in science fiction is "what would happen to the future if you went back in time and messed with the past?"
Why speculate? Why not simulate it using virtual world technology?
Obviously this is more interesting in some VWs than others (2L comes to mind as an interesting place to try something like this). And obviously, the meat of the discussion is deciding how to apply conflicting transactions..
I think it would make a fascinating research project for grad students. For a collision policy X, what is the total measured discontinuity between world W and W' based on a given historical modification. Have a few differing conflict resolution policies and see what the ramifications of each are.
Infact, there's probalby some sort of innovative gameplay dynamic that could be built around history modification. Assuming that time travel is atrociously expensive (in terms of in-game cost) and there's only a limited window of opportunity or impact while you're "in the past", how can players maximize their future outcome by manipulating world history?
(Yes, I'm aware of the Microsoft game that had a token "time travel" component in it. Obviously I'm talking about something more grandiose)
I'm certainly not a constitutional scholar and you may well be right. However, I would claim that current laws regarding slander, libel, hate-speech, and whatever law covers yelling "fire" in a theater are all laws that abrdige the freedom of speech (and the press, for that matter).
Either the amendment restricts what type of speech it is meant to cover to the narrow venue of political expression, or it is just flatly ignored in order to implement the speech restriction laws I've enumerated above.
This is a commonly repeated position that really doesn't hold a lot of truth. For _certain_ companies or even certain whole industries this might be accurate. But in general, successful businesses are run with a _very_ long term outlook, especially smaller and mid-sized businesses. Many of these companies took years just to become profitable, and will take many more years of 16-hour days on the part of the owners before there is a "comfortable" amount of money concentrated near the top.
I think that when comparing the private and public sectors, the public sector almost always has the poorer long-term vision. Candidates by definition promise what they can devlier within their own election term. Funding is always approved to _Start_ a project but rarely to maintain or repair a project. Asset and infrastructure depreciation is a huge failing of government for precisely this reason -- its not the politicians own money, and its not fashionable or vote worthy to fix old boring stuff.
It is obvious that NASA was capable of great things in during the Apollo time frame. However, we were a different country then, with a different situation. You might want to recall that normal middle class Americans were building _bomb shelters_ and doing nuclear fallout drills. I still remember seeing the radiation hazard logo with the words "Fallout Shelter" written under it above the doors of many buildings when I was a kid (the mid 80s). How often do you see those now? Where would you go if there were a nuclear war with Russia today? Nobody knows because nobody is worried about it any more.
There can be no doubt that when there is national unity of purpose, exhorbitant spending, and people set aside some of thier comfort and convenience for a shared greater cause, that we can mobilize as a nation and do something amazing, with the federal government taking the rudder and aiming the sails.
But that's not today. The people and the money is simply not there right now. I think in today's environment, it makes sense to let private financiers have a go at things. Maybe a way to re-energize interest in space and space sciences is to put it into the hands of more people the way that privatization inevitably will.
Of Course. This _is_ the "McCain" in "McCain-Feingold" we're talking about, after all.
Surely you're familiar with the McCain-Feingold "incumbency protection act", who's aim is to create a dubious "protected class" of people for whom the 1st amendment (which protects _political speech_ and no other type) still actually applies.
For everyone else (people who aren't "real journalists") -- no more 1st amendment rights for you, anytime an election is 6 months (or wahtever the bill says) away.
McCain Feingold is one of these ridiculous laws that, when examined, seems totally ridiculous and unconstitutional. As a practical matter, I don't think it has had a chilling effect on much of anything. As a theoretical matter, it's one of the reasons why libertarians don't like McCain.
In many ways the '08 Election is a reverse of the '04 Election. In 04 the Democrats were running a "he's not Bush" candidate, and to be frank that was Kerry's only real qualification.
McCain is someone who is neither pleasing to conservative republicans nor to libertarians who normally grudgingly fall into the republican camp. He's the "not Obama & not Clinton" vote. Almost everyone I've spoken with is much more interested in "not Obama" than "McCain".
Oddly enough, the fact that McCain is not squarely in the conservative/republican camp may make him an acceptable president. He obviously doesn't care about pissing off other republicans, and he obviously jumps off traditional conservative/republican dogma when it suits him. The reality of the senate voting record is that McCain has jumped across the aisle to get something done with the Democrats far more often than Obama has broken rank with the progressive agenda to get some reasonably-centerist legislation done by cooperating with Republicans.
I see you were compiled with -Wpedantic today.
What I should have said is, "as someone with a fair bit of race track experience, I find that the authenticity of the simulation of the vehicle dynamics presented in the Gran Turismo series of games is lacking compared to other racing games and simulators I have experience with"
More concretely, the GT cars appear to respond to inputs differently than I would expect, to the point that it is frustrating at times.
All simulation games have a model of reality that dictates the behavior of the cars in response to given stimuli. Based on my experience with the GT series, their models exhibit problems which stick out to me. A notable problem is the propensity of the cars to retain front tire turn-in grip when you are performing maximum braking, or worse, have locked up the front wheels entirely. If you lock up the front tires and then dial in a giant bundle of steering lock, the car sails straight. Sims like RACER are very in-your-face about this (on certain cars)... in GT i've "gotten away with it" when I felt I shouldn't have.
On the other end of the spectrum, keeping a base model BMW going in a straight line at high speed on the Nurburgring in GT can be challenging. Given that I've driven the Nurburgring __in real life__ and had no such difficulties, there is clearly something fishy going on there.
In the latter case, I think this may partially be an issue of Logitech DFP input mappings or similar. The braking+turning stuff is much more likely to be an issue of insufficient dynamics model in the game. You cannot even explain it away with obnoxiouisly high tire coefficients since a locked tire should not be turning a vehicle. IOW - its not that certain simulation parameters are wrong, it is almost certainly the case that the simulation is wrong.
I suppose that would be fine if all games were racing games and all gamers were you.
I think the big benefit here is that scenes will be considerably more realistic, especially under motion.
GT has never done an _authentic_ job at anything. Most of its vehicle physics and eye-candy are faked, and in the case of vehicle dynamics, badly.
In the GT shot you've posted, the cars appear to have reflective surfaces, interacting shadows, etc. But the background doesn't. Why not? Becuase people look at cars.
Now look at the nVidia shot. Note that you can see the sign and bridge geometry reflected in the glass of the building. What are the odds that, if you had to explicitly program for this behavior, that a developer would bother to render accurate geometry reflections into individual panes of glass on a building.
That's computationally expensive, it takes a lot of programmer protein power, and it's just not something you'll see done with game-style renderers.
But raycasting and other light-simulation techniques are interesting precisely because they aren't optimized for any particular application (i.e. cars that look wet in dead boring backgrounds).
I think that as scene rendering and lighting becomes more general (instead of relying on tricks for certain desired effects), scenes will become over all more realistic, and things will start happening that nobody expected or planned for.
The "shadows" in that GT shot are awful. I don't want a vague, aliased, dark-map cast uniformly off the front glass. I want the reflection of the building to be cast over the windshield. I want the curvature of the glass to be apparent because the reflection has distorted over its contours. I want the reflected building to be translucent because when looking at a reflection on a peice of glass, there's a mix of reflection and transmission. Since the reflected building it itself covered in glass, i want to see reflected reflections on the windshield. Since light energy is lost at each reflective stage, i expect there to be more image attenuation between the 1st and 2nd reflected images.
And I want all of it to move and change realistically as the car moves (and the building doesn't).
It's not that this level of accuracy will make racing more fun (or that it would affect me anyway since i use exclusively in-car views (although it would be cool to see glare/reflection across the glass modelled properly!), it's that the world will become more accurate and immersive _in general_ in ways that developers didn't plan for.
Procedurally trying to acheive this effect is going to be painful. Shooting light energy into a completely described 3d world and letting the chips fall where they may is easier and more accurate. The issue is that it's never been plausible for real time applications.
Actually, Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman is where I first read of the link between occupational licensure and incumbency protection. You've read a lot into what I wrote that I didn't say.
Which is funny, given that you immediately start your response with accusing me of utilizing a strawman :)
Regarding restricting basic human rights -- Yeah, i think the government is far too heavy handed in what it says people can and cannot do amongst consenting adults.
Regarding the basic merit of my point -- which is that government getting involved in who is or is not "qualified" to be parents -- we can see how this turns out based on examples. One I give elsewhere, in China, regarding the kind of policies and their deleterious effects on society that a government who thinks it has the power to say who can and cannot reproduce (more correctly, how much someone can reproduce). The other situation to consider is the interview, home study, and total clusterfuck involved in doing domestic adoption in the US.
I am _offended_ that some social worker beleives they are qualified to, based on _pure_ subjectivity, act as an agent of the state and tell me that I will or won't be a "good parent". One couple I'm familiar with failed their adoption home study because the husband and wife were "not looking at each other enough during the interview". This kind of pseudo-science, practiced by some of the lowest-functioning members in society (government social workers) is not a gatekeeper I am willing to put up with governing basic human reproduction. It is already a travesty that our foster care system seems to prefer that the most qualified prospective parents must "import" babies from overseas and that existing US children are funneled into sexually abusive foster care situations.
I can only surmise that you are disagreeing with me based on a perception of my worldview, not because you don't see the basic truth in what I am saying -- occupational licensure laws, where those already practicing the profession control (via state power) who else may practice the profession, are an inherent conflict of interest and act as a supply-side limit. This results in driving up the price of services rendered by said people.
This is all discussed eloquently by Friedman if you care to read up on it.
Licensure regarding who can and cannot be an adoptive parent already puts the government into a tremendous position of power. Luckily biology is still giving individual actors the upper hand, but I don't think that will be the case in as few as 50 years.
Slashdot is usually good (collectively) at pointing out parallels between boneheaded reality of today and dystopian literature. If you talk about a government deciding who can or cannot biologically reproduce, or getting into the bioligical reproductive business directly, that should be setting off warning buzzers _all over the place_. Brave New World, for starters..
I see.
China has a policy limiting children. If that's the sort of society you want to live in, what's stopping you?
As for the US -- the concern that ideas like yours might become more popular are why there are gun-rights-single-issue voters every year. Gun ownership ensures that nobody like you gets too successful at implementing their ideas.
It was on his property, and he and his father were able to put it out. No big deal.
You and I probably wouldn't enjoy living in a society that resricted people's biologic function of having children. Nor would we want to live in a society where children were seized in great number from their parents post birth.
Regarding occupational licensure -- this is as much brought on by members of said occupation as a way to do supply-side limiting of people legally allowed to perform their trade, with obvious benefits to their own salary. Occupational licensure is _always_ sold to the people as "for their safety", but always asked for by those employed in the trade, not consumers who have been harmed.
If biology worked just a bit differently, and more people had difficulty having kids, and compensated surrogate mothers were more common, you can damn well expect some sort of union or occupational licensure for surrogate mothers to show up. And then you'd have precisely what you describe-- a license or permit required to have kids.
The ramifications of licensure in politics, when viewed through the lens that licensure is really incumbent protection, are unpleasant to consider. The effective barrier to entry into US politics is still too high; adding a licensure system where those in charge are other licensed polititians seems like socio-political suicide.
I was doing this as a teenager (the early 1990s) and ended up getting into a small bit of trouble over it.
Basically, as a prank, we set off about 20 of these things outside of a kids window late at night. Using 2 liter bottles they really do sound like shotgun blasts. THe smaller 16oz bottles aren't as loud but we had plenty of them mixed in as well.
Well, the kids parents didn't think this was very funny at all, and we all knew each other (these were "BBS acquantances") and we got hauled into the police station. Everyone's parents were also there.
The cops were asking how we learned to do this. I fibbed a bit and said that we learned it in chemistry class... basically HCL and metal causes an acid-metal reaction, and releases a ton of gas. The principles of acid-metal reactions are certainly well-explained in HS chemistry, and that's what I said.
One of the moms was like "WHY ARE THEY TEACHING THIS KIND OF THING IN SCHOOL?" and got all emotional about it. I continued lecturing: "actually, this is simply basic chemistry, and it is important that kids are taught this kind of thing. we chose to use this knowledge to be mischevious" blah blah blah.
A few years later we heard of kids doing the same stuff and they got in _way_ more trouble over it. Times and attitudes have changed and this kind of stuff isn't funny anymore (well, it is, but not many people who matter think so).
The happy ending of this story is that I made one more of these things for a practical project / application talk in a later HS chemistry class. The class got to go outside and watch me set one of the things off. As long as I was able to explain the chemistry sufficiently and keep the class interested in chemistry, the teacher was all for it.
My father in law's mom was a science teacher; he'd give her a list of stuff to order periodically and she'd get it for him without asking questions. He blew up the kitchen table once. Another time he set a forest on fire with a frenell lens and some magnesium. He ended up getting a Chemical Engineering degree later in life and these days is one of the foremost industry experts at what he does. Nobody ever got hurt and society is certainly better for his contributions as an adult.
It's important to let kids be kids. Curiosity is the most important thing in a child, and one reason that I'll be homeschooling my son. He's too important to let "them" ruin his future.
I had to look up Snell's law quick, which doesn't mention wavelength as being a factor (I thought that the refective effects might vary according to wavelength), but then i noticed this at the bottom:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snell's_law
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispersion_(optics)
I would guess that any optical camoflauge technique has a function of input wavelength vs. camoflauge effectiveness, and that wavelenghths sufficiently on either side of "visible" would likely fall off of the effectiveness plateau.
This is the first comment I've read about this article that made me go "ohhhhhhhhhhh crap".
I think the US and the West should be _very_ careful with their due dilligence when thinking about how to handle ex-soviet satellites that want into the NATO party.
I was going to mention that but you beat me to it.
Specifically, it was the output of "banner", a giant sideways message made of asterisks. I don't think it was in alphabetical order; i think the groups came across in create-order in tin (which is what i was using the day it happened)
Oddly enough, if the motivation of that guy was to get people to "remember jerry", he succeeded. I specifically remember where I was when that happened. I was up in my 2nd floor bedroom. I was using a 486/33 w/ 20MB of ram. I had fvwm running, and the rxvt I was using was that goofy black on beige color scheme.
As the hundreds of newsgroups scrolled by, i thought it was the most clever hack i'd ever seen.
The history of metallic money is actually pretty obvious. Unlike the paper dollar, if the entire economy built on "IOUs" collapsed, a metallic based currency is still a given amount of metal, metal which can be put to a variety of uses.
In the earliest trade & barter systems, it was inconvenient to use "cow" as the medium of exchange if you wanted to buy something that you felt was only worth half a cow. Or if your trading partner had no particular use for cows in any quantity, whole or otherwise.
Metals on the otherhand, have some great properties for usage as currency
- they can be melted and reshaped and reformed again and again without losing any of their worthwhile properties.
- they can be cut (or recombined) into any size or denomination without diminishing their per-unit qualities (1/2 oz of gold is worth 1oz gold / 2. 1/2 of a cow is not necessarily worth 1 cow / 2.)
- being elementals, there is little qualitative difference between gold from spain, gold fed grass, gold grown in sunny pastures, etc. Gold is gold. Grain, cattle, etc, all have many qualitative differences such that we can rarely say 2 cows or 2 sacks of grain are equally valuable.
- the precious metals are exceptionally good at not oxidizing, corroding, or otherwise vanishing or decaying with age.
Basically, precious metals can be melted and remade in any shape or denomination as many times as you want, and they never decay or expire. Even so, they retain all of the physical properties that make them useful in metallurgy, or desirable to satisfy vanity. Metallic coined money then makes a tremendous amount of sense as a currency. It is not accidental that it was instrumental in the development of market economies.
The justice system practices "appeasement" all the time. Case in point: reducing a sentence or granting immunity in exchange for testimony to convict a bigger fish.
The law, owing back to biblical tradition, specifies the maximum penalty for a given crime. Any penalty from there on down to "please don't do that again" is legally valid, except in the recently fashionable "minimum penalty" offenses.
If it is better for society or law enforcement or general order to forgive a minor crime in order to use that criminals talents to avoid or prosecute much larger ones, that's a card that most jurisdictions will play most of the time.
The best bad guys will _always_ be better than the best good guys at this stuff. What the good guys have on their side is time and manpower. If they can get a high-talent, low-risk "criminal" to help out going after bigger fish, that's a good deal for everyone.
Part of the prison system is supposed to "Reform" people for re-introduction into lawful society. That hardly ever works in practice. In the case of some of these white collar "genius" crimes where you've got a pioneering or expert-level domain criminal, reforming them may be as simple as saying "work for us instead of going to jail". If they follow through with it, the system worked, and everyone wins.
Well, on the point of providing value to society, that will rathole into a debate about what is "good for society", assuming that there's an objective or even subjective-with-high-consensus notion of such a thing. It's not clear that people want to live longer, healthier, more intellectually stimulating lives. Many people live too long and are bored. It's certainly clear that more US residents place a higher value on the entertainment offered to them by sporting events than whatever research and progress have done for them.
But like I said -- let's not rathole on that point :)
The second point is about rewards. I think it is worthwhile to point out that college sports are often _highly_ profitable to their host universities. I'm in general no fan of the typical games popular in the US, and especially so at the collegiate level. Even so, these programs tend to bring in a lot of money which is then diverted towards more academic purposes. Presumably, you see the (perhaps unfortuneate) utility in subsidizing higher-order activities with populist bread and circuses :)
1) I hadn't heard before now that Mac had somehow inherited _anything_ from the Apple ][ series. On the contrary, the Mac was designed from the ground up around the mouse. Do you have any sources that indicate different?
2) Yes, the Restart/Sleep/Shut Down dialog is the one that isn't keyboard accessible (at least on 10.1-10.4). Tab, arrow keys, etc, all do nothing in this dialog to change the cursor selection.
[Needs Citation]
[Needs Citation]
[Needs Citation]
[Needs Citation]
It's not clear to me how with 100% of Windows and Apple desktops now running some variant of the x86 architecture that this is a critical or relevant point, or that it addresses my original post in anyway whatsoever. Even if it were factual.. which it isn't. There are a fair number of Microsoft offerings up and down the stack, from componentized windows down to Windows CE.
I think the folks at NetBSD and Wind River would like to talk to you about your apparently expert knowledge of embedded systems performance and operating system portability.
fwiw, Windows NT booted and ran on the Alpha, MIPS, and I beleive SPARC processor families before Linux did :)
I think the claim of superior technology is a bit dubious. What do you base that on?
I think it is telling that Linux, since I first started using it with _kernel .98_ has been trying to acheive feature parity with windows for basic home user and desktop tasks. Every year it is announced that linux has "finally done it" yet every year there continues to be more work to do and more projects undertaken. Either linux and the various desktop systems that run atop of it aren't quite there, or windows continues to make progress.
I also think it is unreasonable to discount a lot of the technology that goes into the windows stack.
OSX is on much less sure footing than linux, maturity and technology wise. Apple has a narrow use-case defined and it excels in serving that customer segment. Compare using a Mac with a windows box with no mouse plugged in. It's actually nearly impossible to operate a mac with no mouse. Certain dialogs (like shutting the machine down) are not KB accessible. When you plug an unrecognized keyboard into a mac you have to use a mouse to configure they keyboard (iirc).
Compare the availability of screen readers and other assistive technology devives between Mac and Windows. Or, talk to the accessibility folks directly: http://www.afb.org/afbpress/pub.asp?DocID=aw060505
Linux has all kinds of rough spots, which, if a user decides to try fixing it, leads them into a rats nest of competing technologies (i.e. X11 font families and font renderers) and disparate configuration surfaces. There's a lot of technology there, but it's not clear that it is especially novel, superior, etc.
If I had to make a poor generalization, I'd say that Apple is specialized enough that it does a few things excellently, Linux is generalized (and undirected enough) that it does nothing especially well but offers tremendous flexibility to power users, and Windows is kind of this broad sweet spot of functionality and applicability for a wide range of tasks for a wide range of users. Putting a usable facade over all of the baked-in technology is something windows does quite well and linux does less well.
I think for certain use cases, Linux and Apple are "good enough", and for some cases, Linux and Apple are probably demonstrably better. Underlying these advantages, however, I don't think you'll see some _fundamental_ technology advantage.
I think you'd be hard pressed to name some new technology in an Apple or Linux system that Windows doesn't have an analog of (with the windows function often being considerably more complex in implementation to support its edge-case features.. usually around central management or assistive technology support, yet still easier to configure and use on a daily basis)
I guess my summary is that I don't think someone can claim a technology advantage over windows by either OSX or Linux as a matter of settled fact. For starters, it's not even clear what that means.
The problems of the world are larger than your imagination. Today it is possible to put a 3d prototyping machine on your desk quite easily. The instructions to run the machine can be sent electronically. The goo used to make the part will be vastly cheaper than the hourly wage paid to the guy who designed the part. Cheap plastic toys are often copyrighted because the _design_ of the toy is what is important (especially from the perspective of liceensed characters,etc).
While what you say is true in the sense that today I cannot print drugs in my home, I suspect that in 10-20 years I very well may be able to. What then?
The "internet" is the same today as it was 10 years ago -- the difference is widespread adoption of cheap technology. That drug production is infeasible for the majority of drugs for the majority of home users _today_ does not mean it will not be in just a few years.
Your argument essentially boils down to "it's not a problem right now, so it's not a problem". I disagree, and before one talks about dismantling IP laws and protections, one needs to consider that in just a few years the drug problem may be _THE_ problem. Think of the ramifications of this.. the intellectual property concerns of drug manufacture may be at the bottom of our "worry list" compared to:
1) anyone can make lab-grade cocaine in their home
2) anyone can modify any drug to have perilous side effects and distribute it to unsuspecting folks
3) mass-manufacture of Rophynol in frat houses all across America
4) manufacture of toxins and WMD become completely untraceable, yet plausible in quantities large enough to be city-wide events.
etc etc. Desktop drug printing is coming, technology wise. Given the list above, I suspect anyone trying to sell such a machine will disappear with the "help" of the US government :)
Anyway, it is wreckless to wholesale dismiss the concept of IP and IP protection because we don't like what record and movie companies are doing _today_. They are only a small slice of the problem, one that is popular today but will be irrelevant in a few years when it has blown over. But the other aspects of the IP problem space will still be there and will become pressing issues as the technology needed to mass-produce copies of the information becomes widely available.
Figure it out, and I'll vote for whatever you propose. Until then, I'll steal music and pay for medicine.
That's fine. People who call for the wholesale dismissal of IP as a concept or as a protected legal entity aren't being careful enough in what they describe.
Hating the music industry is fine and dandy. Nobody in this thread has managed to tell me how they'd solve drug development compensation without the concept of IP protection laws.
Like I said -- i'd love to see the **AAs evaporate and all of their stupid laws go with them. But any argument grounded on "there is no concept of intellectual property" needs to explain the drug development case to be credible.
Property and intellectual property are both constructs of government. Intellectual Property is only less real than "real" property because most people have the idea that they can hold "real" property in their hand.
Property, in the general sense is really about controlling access and use, two basic rights accorded to the property holder.
It's worth pointing out that many native american populations have no concept of land-as-property or land-for-ownership. Obviously the NAs who sold Manhattan for $24 in supplies weren't operating under the same contextual framework as the Europeans who purchased it.
The point here is that you cannot brush IP aside or wish it away. The various things that make up IP law in the US _are_ real -- they are real because the law describes and defines them, just as it does for physical property, real estate, mineral rights, etc etc.
The distinction between "real" and "intellectual" property isn't one that has any strong legal standing. If property is primarily about controlling access and use, that in many cases this is more difficult to do for intellectual property doesn't mean that the latter ceases to become property.
I am fine having a discussion about Music and the Artist compensation / performance model, but that is a marginal case of the IP problem. As I've said elsewhere, the real issue is with drug development.
If people restrict their criticisms of IP to the music industry and speak more of music industry reform, that's fine. Attempting to equate all of the IP problem space to the music industry and then dismissing IP as a concept relies on the general contempt for the music industry, and doesn't establish much of an argument or answer any of the questions or problems that arise.