Personally, I think the second should be disallowed completely, but I'm sure the major distributors would disagree with me.
Yes, and the *authors* who can make a lot more (and faster) cash by fully alienating the copyright.
Do you not agree that 2. is a mutually beneficial transaction? Yes, "big evil distributors" benefit from it. So do creators! Stop reading every gain as a loss for someone else.
Back when I played in '03, there was enforcement. I got reprimanded for:
1) planting listening bugs in people's houses, and 2) naming objects after people and having them say offensive things ("omg omg omg guys, check this out, I can make my text green! Hey, what do y'all think about racial issues...")
Not remembering dreams is *typical*, blowing a whole in this guy's theory, which sounds more like an utterance at a stoner session than something worth pursuing. And I mean, *much more* like a stoned guy than new theories typically sound.
Just go with Occam's Razor: dreams are just your brain's random firings while you sleep, they're not supposed to make sense.
That's the heart of the problem. Congress is authorized only to secure copyrights to creators ("Authors and Inventors") - not to employers, assignees, or heirs.
Forest, trees.
Once you accept that the author has the exclusive right to copy, you accept that he may implement this by e.g. "Any copying corporation X does is okay." It's not very reasonable to say, "Author, you have the exclusive right to copy this work... but only if you *personally* do the copying yourself."
Being able to sell the copyright to others adds value for the creator. The distinction you're trying to make is pointless and would be very harmful to creators if implemented.
That said, I totally agree that, whatever the merit of IP, 120 years is absurdly excessive. Subtract 100 from that for something more sane.
And when you get that HDTV, just make sure you don't get any rhythm games that output in 480i, because the lag will make them unplayable because the upscaling is designed to make the picture look slightly better.
I'm a little disappointed. No one seems to be considering the possibility that the OTHER clocks are wrong, and the iPhone (er, I mean, and iPhone) is right?
I mean, come on, which is more likely, that some central time authority everyone is syncing to had a glitch, or that an Apple product was in some way imperfect?
Interesting perspective, I hadn't heard it explained like that before. I hope you get modded up.
I had sort of a similar experience in the shift from CRT to LCD on my computer monitor. Basically, the CRT smoothed away a lot of ugly pixellation that showed up on LCD.
I'm sort of at a crossroads between getting at 360 or a PS3. The main thing driving me to get the 360 is Xbox Live, and it's kind of surprising that they can't handle a surge of new purchases. (Are they not expecting people to buy?) Without Xbox Live, the PS3 looks superior, with a free Blu-Ray drive and Wi-fi attached.
I'm sure there are a ton of other possibilities too, which I'll refrain from spelling out in detail since I've played a few too many hours of Grand Theft Auto.
What, like beating up virtual hookers, and having Google look up the amount of money hookers in that area are likely to be carrying?
All I ask for is that ONE non-development person go through actual use before I buy it. How expensive or time-consuming is that? If the interface problem can be discovered on one use, then I consider it inexcusable.
And believe it or not, many products I've used would fail even this.
I find it hard to believe that, given the right software, a fan of a tv show (or even someone just fluent in the language) couldn't transcribe it. Also, I find it hard to believe they would require more than $30 per hour of programming. Why must they be transcribing in coordination with the production crew? I don't see any errors that would result, assuming they have e.g. character names.
$30/hour of transcription (hour is more like 42 minutes) is above the wage typically awarded on mturk, but a drop in the bucket in terms of a typical show's budget. Probably a fraction of a drop. My guess is it has more to do with the possibility of them pirating it (even though it's already easy to pirate...)
There are always going to be holes in catering to those with disabilities. Someone's always going to be e.g. deaf and blind. For my part, various medical difficulties make it so I can't feasibly sit through a movie (though luckily those problems are getting corrected).
The good news is that voice recognition is improving every day, to the point that closed-captioning could be automated. Also, I wonder what the barriers are to crowdsourcing it? Let bored/low-wage people all over the world transcribe the dialogue, it can't be that hard, right?
Let's not forget Christie's is a prestigious auction house. While I'm no trekkie, and kinda creeped out by them, I find it even more repulsive that an auction house with a reputation to protect would be so cavalier about the authenticity to make this mistake. How is the buyer's admiration any different from people's obsession with Princess Diana or Jackie Kennedy? How big would the damages be if Christies defrauded people over one of those items?
I also saw a comment where someone said he was supposed to "properly do his research". Sorry, places like Christie's are supposed to do their research.
Btw, the story was submitted by "Token_internet_girl". Didn't know any girls were ever into star trek, but whatever.
Ah yes, that. Now, the name of the open source software package that's as easy to use as Halo for showing people moving around, but much more extensible?
Well, writers could feasibly bypass the studios by doing Red-vs-Blue type movies (forget the name for that type of animation). Presumably there's a software package more specifically tailored for this kind of movie-making so you don't have to use all kinds of workarounds?
I also have the emotional capacity to present my argument without slurring you.
By responding without showing any attempt at reading my post, you are in fact slurring me, by saying my posts aren't worth reading. Wanna go with the "stupid" option instead?
The point I made, which you didn't address,
I didn't address your point because it was a *different argument* than the one under discussion, which was being criticized. You cannot defend "A is a good argument against X" by saying, "Oh, but I could also make argument B against X".
The argument "A" under discussion was whether it's a valid criticism of the term "intellectual property" that it's vague in referring to many different things. You don't think "intellectual property" is property. That's great! I'm proud of you for that bold, sound-bite stance. In a lot of discussions, you might actually sound smart. But it's different from the claim that "intellectual property" is vague.
I did, however, present a challenge to the "imaginary property" crowd in my first post here, just to avoid making two post. That challenge was: "Are rights to radio frequencies also 'imaginary property' and thus not really property?" If you want to be useful, you can tackle that one. *not holding breath*
Perhaps we note that "significant other" refers to someone else, who is significant. Intellectual Property is *not* property.
Alright, and do you have the mental capacity to understand how that's a DIFFERENT ARGUMENT than the one I was addressing, which claimed that it's a bad term because it refers to several things that are very different?
Seriously, do debates about IP have some kind of magical power that shuts of people's mental capacities?
I thought I was going insane, being the only one to make the point the AC just did. I find Stallman's criticism to be truly bizarre. Do the people who reject "intellectual property" reject *all* umbrella terms? Like "significant other" and "toiletries"?
"People who refer to this mythical 'toiletry' are utterly confusing the difference between toothbrushes, razors, and shampoo."
I even debated a guy who argued against the term "intellectual property" on the grounds that you have to be more specific in court, all while citing someone who wrote a paper on intellectual property that used the term in the lay sense and broke it down into all the sub-types.
As for the "imaginary property" chant... just one question: Is ownership of radio waves "imaginary property"?
On the one hand, the newspaper's days are numbered. Who wants to go outside and dig their paper out of the snow to read yesterday's news when they can go online and get what's happening right now? Because they prefer being able to hold something in their hands with high "resolution" while not risking damaging an expensive item, and which is easier on their eyes, and which can compactly contain information about local events and businesses that haven't reconciled everything with Google maps just yet.
Not saying newspapers are superior, just listing advantages, and one of the reasons I've considered getting a subscription.
Your approach has merit, if it weren't for one fatal flaw: You'll never get the tax passed on a national level. Passing a new tax is political suicide for lots of congresscritters. Not if it were a replacement for all the other haphazard attempts at eliminating inefficiency (CAFE standards, etc.).
Even if, say, a miracle happened and you were able to get it passed, the consumer would scream bloody murder when the cost of so much stuff went up. That depends on how much you believe the externality to be. If you consider it eliminated when the CO2 is sunk, and that becomes very cheap (once there's money -- from the tax -- in doing so), it wouldn't be very large. (Of course, a lot of people baselessly claim the tax should be very large simply because they *want* carbon use to substantially drop, regardless of environmental justification.)
In any case, the tax would never be fully passed onto consumers. Millions of decisions contribute to the chain of production that leads to each retail item, some of which would be influenced by changing the costs of fuels. Some could respond by shipping shorter distances, some could respond by switching consumption to nearer-produced goods, some could pack more into each truck that is shipped, some could replace lighting on showroom floors, etc. It's not like people would continue doing exactly what they're doing now while eating the tax.
Not to mention it introduces yet another bureaucracy into the US government Taxes on fuels already exist, they would just be increased. There's no additional bureaucracy. Setting up an agency to decide what's "too inefficient", or which considers petitions to use incandescents (lighting for movies, people with a medical condition, etc.) -- *that* is where the bureaucracy is.
From a practical point of view, banning incandescents is far more concrete and effective, if less than ideal. Except it's not effective, or ideal. Its effect is to give people free money (in the forms of energy savings), which they can go merrily spend on other carbon-intensive things, all while screwing over those who like incandescents but don't have the political power to get an exception. (And then smart people can decide instead to be bribe-getting bureaucrats.) Again, I have to ask: why not ban all foods except enriched gruel?
Prediction: based on past threads, people will read this ALTERNATE SOLUTION as global warming denial, or the claim that government should do nothing. I don't see it that way. You're taking a different approach to a common problem. Hey, I was just saying that based on my experience in past threads. You didn't see people's reaction to when I make suggestions like this, and they do exactly that. Here's an example. See this response and this one
We all need to use less energy; that's a given. Not quite. We need to control the *net* negative environmental externality. Using less energy is just one way of doing that, and given the rewards of economic growth, a poor way of doing it.
These debates frustrate me more than anything else. All of you are asking the wrong question. It shouldn't be:
"Does the government have the right to ban incandescents for the public good?"
It shouldn't even be:
"What things are inefficient enough to justify banning?"
It should be:
"Do all people appropriately incorporate the environmental externalities of their decisions?"
Any attempts to address the problem that avoid that question, are going to be haphazard -- and probably counterproductive -- approximations of what we do want. The reason is that when you say something is "wasteful" -- and thus hurting the environment -- you're making a judgment you literally cannot be qualified to make. Efficiency is "benefit provided per cost expended". I accept that you can tell me the cost expended, but the benefit provided exists purely in the mind of the user.
With that in mind, proposing a ban on incandescents is no different from:
-Banning all foods except enriched gruel. -Banning PS3s since "You can just get a Wii and BluRay isn't that good anyway." -Banning living more than 20 miles from work since, hey, not many people use public transportation.
Furthermore a ban on one thing you deem "wasteful" does not change the incentive structure for the infinite number of other changes people could be making in their lives. If all you do is save me money on lighting, I'll get extra free money and just waste fossil fuels in some other way. What energy-free thing do you think people are going to do with the extra money?
A far more robust and less annoying solution is to just assess the total environmental cost per unit of fuel consumed, add it in the form of a tax, and apply the proceeds toward sinks and abatement. Then, all decisions throughout the entire economy adjust, and you don't need to think about banning individual items. You don't need to debate which things people *really* get a benefit from. You don't need to carve out exceptions for French people who get the power from their incandescents from nuclear, or movie stars that "really" need their SUV or movie lighting. You don't need to go to environmental high priests to calculate the "total cost" of what you do, since the retail price would already do that. You don't even need to raise public awareness.
A ban on incandescents is just typical BS feel-good legislation.
***
Prediction: based on past threads, people will read this ALTERNATE SOLUTION as global warming denial, or the claim that government should do nothing.
Yes, and he didn't answer my comment from years ago. Let's say you got everyone to do this. Well, roads still have some maximum capacity where the traffic will jam.
So now that everyone's followed your advice. What then? "Hey, LA has no traffic. 15 minute commute! Let's move there!." And then you're all the way back where you started.
"Build more roads" is not a solution. Eventually, the road has to dump its traffic load onto a necessarily-small road, where it will back up.
Congestion pricing, on the other hand... (see journal)
Slashdot Mirror
I'm more more surprised that no one has yet made a grammar comment with a mocking pirate theme, like,
"Arrr, I think this be post-hydriecarba world knockin on 'r door, matey! It be a danger too, since less global waaaarmin means less 'f us!"
Personally, I think the second should be disallowed completely, but I'm sure the major distributors would disagree with me.
Yes, and the *authors* who can make a lot more (and faster) cash by fully alienating the copyright.
Do you not agree that 2. is a mutually beneficial transaction? Yes, "big evil distributors" benefit from it. So do creators! Stop reading every gain as a loss for someone else.
Back when I played in '03, there was enforcement. I got reprimanded for:
1) planting listening bugs in people's houses, and
2) naming objects after people and having them say offensive things ("omg omg omg guys, check this out, I can make my text green! Hey, what do y'all think about racial issues...")
Not remembering dreams is *typical*, blowing a whole in this guy's theory, which sounds more like an utterance at a stoner session than something worth pursuing. And I mean, *much more* like a stoned guy than new theories typically sound.
Just go with Occam's Razor: dreams are just your brain's random firings while you sleep, they're not supposed to make sense.
That's the heart of the problem. Congress is authorized only to secure copyrights to creators ("Authors and Inventors") - not to employers, assignees, or heirs.
... but only if you *personally* do the copying yourself."
Forest, trees.
Once you accept that the author has the exclusive right to copy, you accept that he may implement this by e.g. "Any copying corporation X does is okay." It's not very reasonable to say, "Author, you have the exclusive right to copy this work
Being able to sell the copyright to others adds value for the creator. The distinction you're trying to make is pointless and would be very harmful to creators if implemented.
That said, I totally agree that, whatever the merit of IP, 120 years is absurdly excessive. Subtract 100 from that for something more sane.
And when you get that HDTV, just make sure you don't get any rhythm games that output in 480i, because the lag will make them unplayable because the upscaling is designed to make the picture look slightly better.
I'm a little disappointed. No one seems to be considering the possibility that the OTHER clocks are wrong, and the iPhone (er, I mean, and iPhone) is right?
I mean, come on, which is more likely, that some central time authority everyone is syncing to had a glitch, or that an Apple product was in some way imperfect?
Think about it.
Interesting perspective, I hadn't heard it explained like that before. I hope you get modded up.
I had sort of a similar experience in the shift from CRT to LCD on my computer monitor. Basically, the CRT smoothed away a lot of ugly pixellation that showed up on LCD.
I'm sort of at a crossroads between getting at 360 or a PS3. The main thing driving me to get the 360 is Xbox Live, and it's kind of surprising that they can't handle a surge of new purchases. (Are they not expecting people to buy?) Without Xbox Live, the PS3 looks superior, with a free Blu-Ray drive and Wi-fi attached.
I'm sure there are a ton of other possibilities too, which I'll refrain from spelling out in detail since I've played a few too many hours of Grand Theft Auto.
What, like beating up virtual hookers, and having Google look up the amount of money hookers in that area are likely to be carrying?
All I ask for is that ONE non-development person go through actual use before I buy it. How expensive or time-consuming is that? If the interface problem can be discovered on one use, then I consider it inexcusable.
And believe it or not, many products I've used would fail even this.
Oh, look honey, more vengeful mods.
Let's take me back to 4, guys. Just because I've made a lot of enemies (and a lot of friends) doesn't mean I deserve this BS.
I find it hard to believe that, given the right software, a fan of a tv show (or even someone just fluent in the language) couldn't transcribe it. Also, I find it hard to believe they would require more than $30 per hour of programming. Why must they be transcribing in coordination with the production crew? I don't see any errors that would result, assuming they have e.g. character names.
$30/hour of transcription (hour is more like 42 minutes) is above the wage typically awarded on mturk, but a drop in the bucket in terms of a typical show's budget. Probably a fraction of a drop. My guess is it has more to do with the possibility of them pirating it (even though it's already easy to pirate...)
There are always going to be holes in catering to those with disabilities. Someone's always going to be e.g. deaf and blind. For my part, various medical difficulties make it so I can't feasibly sit through a movie (though luckily those problems are getting corrected).
The good news is that voice recognition is improving every day, to the point that closed-captioning could be automated. Also, I wonder what the barriers are to crowdsourcing it? Let bored/low-wage people all over the world transcribe the dialogue, it can't be that hard, right?
Let's not forget Christie's is a prestigious auction house. While I'm no trekkie, and kinda creeped out by them, I find it even more repulsive that an auction house with a reputation to protect would be so cavalier about the authenticity to make this mistake. How is the buyer's admiration any different from people's obsession with Princess Diana or Jackie Kennedy? How big would the damages be if Christies defrauded people over one of those items?
I also saw a comment where someone said he was supposed to "properly do his research". Sorry, places like Christie's are supposed to do their research.
Btw, the story was submitted by "Token_internet_girl". Didn't know any girls were ever into star trek, but whatever.
Ah yes, that. Now, the name of the open source software package that's as easy to use as Halo for showing people moving around, but much more extensible?
Well, writers could feasibly bypass the studios by doing Red-vs-Blue type movies (forget the name for that type of animation). Presumably there's a software package more specifically tailored for this kind of movie-making so you don't have to use all kinds of workarounds?
ROFL! Nice!
I assume they have some protection against this at Mac stores...?
I also have the emotional capacity to present my argument without slurring you.
By responding without showing any attempt at reading my post, you are in fact slurring me, by saying my posts aren't worth reading. Wanna go with the "stupid" option instead?
The point I made, which you didn't address,
I didn't address your point because it was a *different argument* than the one under discussion, which was being criticized. You cannot defend "A is a good argument against X" by saying, "Oh, but I could also make argument B against X".
The argument "A" under discussion was whether it's a valid criticism of the term "intellectual property" that it's vague in referring to many different things. You don't think "intellectual property" is property. That's great! I'm proud of you for that bold, sound-bite stance. In a lot of discussions, you might actually sound smart. But it's different from the claim that "intellectual property" is vague.
I did, however, present a challenge to the "imaginary property" crowd in my first post here, just to avoid making two post. That challenge was: "Are rights to radio frequencies also 'imaginary property' and thus not really property?" If you want to be useful, you can tackle that one. *not holding breath*
Perhaps we note that "significant other" refers to someone else, who is significant. Intellectual Property is *not* property.
Alright, and do you have the mental capacity to understand how that's a DIFFERENT ARGUMENT than the one I was addressing, which claimed that it's a bad term because it refers to several things that are very different?
Seriously, do debates about IP have some kind of magical power that shuts of people's mental capacities?
I thought I was going insane, being the only one to make the point the AC just did. I find Stallman's criticism to be truly bizarre. Do the people who reject "intellectual property" reject *all* umbrella terms? Like "significant other" and "toiletries"?
... just one question: Is ownership of radio waves "imaginary property"?
"People who refer to this mythical 'toiletry' are utterly confusing the difference between toothbrushes, razors, and shampoo."
I even debated a guy who argued against the term "intellectual property" on the grounds that you have to be more specific in court, all while citing someone who wrote a paper on intellectual property that used the term in the lay sense and broke it down into all the sub-types.
As for the "imaginary property" chant
Not saying newspapers are superior, just listing advantages, and one of the reasons I've considered getting a subscription.
In any case, the tax would never be fully passed onto consumers. Millions of decisions contribute to the chain of production that leads to each retail item, some of which would be influenced by changing the costs of fuels. Some could respond by shipping shorter distances, some could respond by switching consumption to nearer-produced goods, some could pack more into each truck that is shipped, some could replace lighting on showroom floors, etc. It's not like people would continue doing exactly what they're doing now while eating the tax. Not to mention it introduces yet another bureaucracy into the US government Taxes on fuels already exist, they would just be increased. There's no additional bureaucracy. Setting up an agency to decide what's "too inefficient", or which considers petitions to use incandescents (lighting for movies, people with a medical condition, etc.) -- *that* is where the bureaucracy is. From a practical point of view, banning incandescents is far more concrete and effective, if less than ideal. Except it's not effective, or ideal. Its effect is to give people free money (in the forms of energy savings), which they can go merrily spend on other carbon-intensive things, all while screwing over those who like incandescents but don't have the political power to get an exception. (And then smart people can decide instead to be bribe-getting bureaucrats.) Again, I have to ask: why not ban all foods except enriched gruel? Prediction: based on past threads, people will read this ALTERNATE SOLUTION as global warming denial, or the claim that government should do nothing. I don't see it that way. You're taking a different approach to a common problem. Hey, I was just saying that based on my experience in past threads. You didn't see people's reaction to when I make suggestions like this, and they do exactly that. Here's an example. See this response and this one We all need to use less energy; that's a given. Not quite. We need to control the *net* negative environmental externality. Using less energy is just one way of doing that, and given the rewards of economic growth, a poor way of doing it.
These debates frustrate me more than anything else. All of you are asking the wrong question. It shouldn't be:
"Does the government have the right to ban incandescents for the public good?"
It shouldn't even be:
"What things are inefficient enough to justify banning?"
It should be:
"Do all people appropriately incorporate the environmental externalities of their decisions?"
Any attempts to address the problem that avoid that question, are going to be haphazard -- and probably counterproductive -- approximations of what we do want. The reason is that when you say something is "wasteful" -- and thus hurting the environment -- you're making a judgment you literally cannot be qualified to make. Efficiency is "benefit provided per cost expended". I accept that you can tell me the cost expended, but the benefit provided exists purely in the mind of the user.
With that in mind, proposing a ban on incandescents is no different from:
-Banning all foods except enriched gruel.
-Banning PS3s since "You can just get a Wii and BluRay isn't that good anyway."
-Banning living more than 20 miles from work since, hey, not many people use public transportation.
Furthermore a ban on one thing you deem "wasteful" does not change the incentive structure for the infinite number of other changes people could be making in their lives. If all you do is save me money on lighting, I'll get extra free money and just waste fossil fuels in some other way. What energy-free thing do you think people are going to do with the extra money?
A far more robust and less annoying solution is to just assess the total environmental cost per unit of fuel consumed, add it in the form of a tax, and apply the proceeds toward sinks and abatement. Then, all decisions throughout the entire economy adjust, and you don't need to think about banning individual items. You don't need to debate which things people *really* get a benefit from. You don't need to carve out exceptions for French people who get the power from their incandescents from nuclear, or movie stars that "really" need their SUV or movie lighting. You don't need to go to environmental high priests to calculate the "total cost" of what you do, since the retail price would already do that. You don't even need to raise public awareness.
A ban on incandescents is just typical BS feel-good legislation.
***
Prediction: based on past threads, people will read this ALTERNATE SOLUTION as global warming denial, or the claim that government should do nothing.
Yes, and he didn't answer my comment from years ago. Let's say you got everyone to do this. Well, roads still have some maximum capacity where the traffic will jam.
... (see journal)
So now that everyone's followed your advice. What then? "Hey, LA has no traffic. 15 minute commute! Let's move there!." And then you're all the way back where you started.
"Build more roads" is not a solution. Eventually, the road has to dump its traffic load onto a necessarily-small road, where it will back up.
Congestion pricing, on the other hand