" I might be more impressed if his cons didn't rely almost entirely on people being so gorram stupid."
You know, before 2016 neither you nor I ever realized 90 million americans are that stupid. And that was probably the prevailing assumption among upwards of 8 billion people.
But he did. Credit where it's due. He's simply the Rain Man of grift.
Well, you do sort of have to admire the sheer unadulterated Chutzpah of the guy; The only use for 'Truth Social' is to get investors to stuff his pockets with money so it doesn't really harm him if the principle which would allow the damn thing to operate is overturned.
It's as if he's torpedoing a leaky canoe he floated in preparation to whine that the evil libruls sank his aircraft carrier.
"Your kettlebells will never see a bungled firmware update or struggle to connect to the cloud. "
Reminds me of something I once read on an old BBS dedicated to long-suffering sysadmins way back. Dawn of time stuff from the 90's.
"I work for an investment bank. I have dealt with code written by stock exchanges. I have seen how the computer systems that store your money are run. If I ever make a fortune, I will store it in gold bullion under my bed. "
Matthew Crosby
It should be comforting to see that some things never change.
Why am I not comforted?
"If Nintendo tried to expand the copyright extension, then I think they would truly be the Disney of video gaming."
Although Nintendo have been abusing copyright law about as much as any other of the gatekeeper corporations they reserve their more draconian measures mainly for Trademark abuse.
I'd be less leery of copyright extension and more leery about them extending trademark provisions somehow.
Well, the fact that Subaru, Kia and Mazda are starting to run into the same problems of bad design and obsoletion the US car industry ran into in the 70's may be a good indicator of yet another paradigm change when it comes to which country gets to host the biggest carmakers.
I honestly hope these OEM's get their shit together and fundamentally rethink the fact that if they want to add computerization to their product then that needs the same attention they'd give to designing new engines.
That's a lot of bullshit which all boils down to "You condemning the nazi bar is an infringement of the nazi's right to be heard"
"The problem here is your desire to censor and ban political view points you dislike, and your willingness to demonize others to further your cause."
...says the shitwit who's gone through about a dozen comments with wordwalls all based on the same false premise: That a private entity choosing to actively condemn another private entity is akin to government censorship.
You are - fundamentally - wrong in that assumption. No one here has advocated censorship or banning. That's just you being a disingenuous asshole propping up yet another strawman.
You being "demonized" in no other way than by us pointing out that you are lying through your teeth in every assertion. There is nothing wrong in refusing to patronize the nazi bar nor about making no bones about our assessment of the nazi bar. Yet that's the exact metaphor of what you try to imply. Repetitively.
If you want respect and credibility then perhaps try not using long debunked stormfront talking points to make your case.
"If you think that Rogan's podcast is crap or filled with disinformation, then don't listen to it."
And our free speech allows us to say that Spotify are being assholes to host Rogan when he pushes the bullshit which has seen the US bring out a mountain of corpses composed of 700k-800k needlessly dead americans courtesy entirely due to large parts of the US making defying basic science and medical guidelines a test of loyalty.
This is the point where this disinformation becomes arguably more horrifying than every crackpot website to merely spout extremist propaganda in itself. There is a death toll.
It's Rogan's choice to be a disingenious and casually racist asshole.
It's Spotify's choice to keep hosting Rogan.
It's our choice to condemn spotify for this the same way we feel free to condemn the local nazi bar and the Westboro Baptist Church.
And your entire argument seems based on the premise that we need to abstain from making use of our rights to respect Rogan being a raging shithole and Spotify for assisting him in this.
Tolerance is not a universal moral imperative; It's a peace treaty. And part of the explicitly understood provisions there is that you neither need nor should tolerate those whose entire contribution is malice.
Whether you are an alt-right apologist or some horribly misguided fence-sitter doesn't really matter at this point.
"My glib reply was an instance of the "It's simple; we kill the Batman" meme to demonstrate that calling something simple is...not so much."
Calling for the abolition of copyright isn't calling for the death of the angsty dark vigilante though.
It's more like calling for the killing of Hitler. Which, in the 1930's, would certainly have shaken up and harmed Germany quite a lot but would, in the long-term, certainly be preferable to the alternative.
"Is "killing batman" also one of your simple solutions?"
If Batman would, no matter what, always end up a serial killer then yes.
The problem with copyright is that it's based on a fundamental violation of basic principles - like people owning what they bought and sole governance over their property and information in their possession.
You simply can not apply any part of the old medieval heresy laws or information control and hope to not make it horrible. Hell, We know for a fact already that every invention and infrastructure of information storage and transmission over the last century has had to fight for its existence, tooth and claw, because progress has turned out to be the outright enemy of the principles of copyright.
As I usually say, the right to control copies of information being made is unreasonable from the get-go.
Author right of content paternity is the only part worth salvaging, as is the right to profit from commercial application and deny political use. Both of which would be better served by making any created works fall under Trademark and Branding legislation instead.
"Its like Turkeys voting to become thanksgiving dinner."
See PaulIT's comment, just above.
But there's another explanation as to why the republican base keeps voting against their best interests which acts in perfect synergy with his explanation. I'd suggest googling "grievance addiction", "what the science of addiction tells us about Trump", and if you want a DHS study to underline it "Addicted to hate: Identity residual among former white supremacists".
Essentially the current GOP base are junkies on the natural high of hatred they've been weaned on since childhood courtesy of republican and alt-right media. They keep voting against their own interests in exactly the same way as the junkie who keeps making horrible life choices (like renting a fridge and pawning it, stealing from their s.o. or embezzling from their company, to get ready cash) in order to secure access to their next fix.
Sticking it to the libs is just them putting the needle in their own arm and pressing the plunger. They need that fix no matter what.
This is why you can't argue with them. Trying to bring reason to the table is literally you threatening to take the needle or crack pipe from their hands.
I always hated the recurring trope in comics, books, TV series and movies where the Big Bad is always a knockoff of Dastardly Snidely-level "Evil, just because".
Yet here we are, with certain politicians being obviously malicious for no other reason than that people being able to communicate offends their sensibilities.
And by "whatever treatments the market deems profitable enough." my money is on that being a "treatment" consisting of happy pills prescribed by a US doctor highly incentivized to push as many patients as possible onto a diet of high-priced pharmaceutica meant to take the edge off the patients misery for as long as their medical insurance holds up.
The ongoing opioid crisis, part 2, in other words.
"The new ones that would be started to take advantage of the customers looking for that. If buyers knew what they were, and weren't, getting."
There is none.
Within every business sector in the US today profit margins determine whether a given tech has investor attraction. This kind of tech has very slim margins and requires excrutiatingly high investments not just to develop but to maintain.
Meanwhile those same investments will bring a hundred times as high margins by lobbying for higher use of oxicontin or other highly addictive hard legal drugs. Martin Shkreli is not an aberration, he's the norm.
"Don't underestimate the power of money sitting on the table waiting to be picked up."
Look at the timelines here. This tech is 20 years old. This pile of money has been sitting on that table for all that time with no takers because the roi is too small to interest anyone.
Here's my prediction. This tech will be picked up by the nationalized health services of other OECD nations because that's what happens when vitally important yet fundamentally unprofitable technology emerges. The US will once again be left completely behind with this tech being something the 1% send their kids to get from the UK, Germany or France while the american consumer in general has to remain on whatever treatments the market deems profitable enough.
"What might be a way out is manufacturers of these devices would be compelled to contribute to a "Medical Superfund" pool..."
I'm reminded of the aviation patent pool the US government enforced way back when. For those ignorant of history the US had to fly european planes in World War 1 as the patent wars around aviation on US soil kept the US from building any viable form of combat aircraft. The US government solved this by forcing every aviation patent into a common pool with licensing guidelines.
This one stroke is by many believed to be the primary reason the US not only caught up with the rest of the world but became the world's first and strongest air power in both commercial and military areas.
Problem is still that we're talking about literal cybernetics here. A patent pool won't solve the issue of patients facing the choice of having to defend their specific chosen corporate overlord come hell or high water, or actually having their sight or ability to walk taken away...
You know the answer to that. The lobbies will start screaming about socialism, the US right will accuse anyone daring to float such legislation of trying to convert the western world into a communist protectorate and the left (in the US at least, what passes for the "left") will mainly be conspicuously silent because they need still need their campaigns funded.
India and Africa may pull the "compulsive licensing" trick through the WTO again if this turns out to be a thing for more than just optic devices, which it likely will be.
"But this begs the question to me...why the hell do these implants have an external dependency?"
Maintenance. As anyone with a relative bearing a hearing aid can attest, the damn thing has to be frequently tuned and checked. Software glitches start creeping in and hardware components start giving way to simple wear. Anyone who owns an SSD in their rig knows that solid state technology doesn't often suffer catastrophic malfunction but it degrades at a predictable rate.
Consider that a pacemaker is to be regularly checked once every six months to monitor battery charge and has to be replaced every 5-15 years or so...the thing is that almost all truly compact tech doesn't have replaceable batteries or exchangeable components. Once their lifespan is up, a new device is needed.
The people in the OP who received this tech are now on a timer where at some point they either get their implants replaced, or they go back to being functionally blind.
And because the tech is proprietary and has turned out not to be a cash cow my guess is that at some point enough incredibly wealthy people will require such implants to buy up the patents and the devices will be available again. At Shkreli-level markups.
Imagine you're a paraplegic. There's this wonderful new tech which will let you walk again. Only problem is that miracle will be courtesy of an implant which is owned, maintained and operated by a private company whose highest priority is to squeeze you for as much value as possible and will drop support in a heartbeat the very second your existence ends up on the black side of the ledger.
We've already seen that Musk can do anything he likes and there will still be a horde of people aggressively defending him. Some no doubt due to simple fanboyism, but how many do so because they've sunk their pension savings into Tesla and SpaceX stock?
Imagine a future where the average citizen literally faces the choice between upholding their chosen corporate overlord at any cost or being effectively crippled.
I swear, the older I get the more left I swing in politics, because the future I see emerging here is the absolutely worst of Gibson-esque dystopias.
None which justifies the drawbacks. You could fit created works under trademark law - make it part of a creator's brand - and solve almost every issue that way. Copyright though, in order to exist, infringes on every persons personal rights of property and comes uncomfortably close to old-style heresy law from medieval times in the way it exercises information control.
"Copyright needs to be much shorter."
It used to be. Once upon a time it was 7 years. The lesson of history is that as long as this fundamentally flawed legislation exists enormous monetary incentive will exist for middleman gatekeepers to lobby for extension. That being the case you literally can not restrict it, reform it, or pare it down with a single hope of keeping it within reason. Copyright will only ever have two settings - abolished or utterly unreasonable.
"However, ContentID goes beyond what DMCA requires. YouTube should be held accountable for it."
Pressure from the industry. ContentID is part of Youtubes "retain safe harbor" card which lets them minimize the takedowns - and subsequent contesting of those takedowns - which lets them keep the amount of people tasked to adjudicate within halfway reasonable limits.
Remember, every industry action is a consequence of a cost-benefit analysis. ContentID exists because it saves Youtube money and overhead in a paradigm where copyright legislation is outright insane.
"There's two groups that both need to suffer penalties for abuse:"
No, really just the one. The hosting providers are helpless since if a rights-holder files a complaint it's up to the hosting provider to either remove the content filed against or shoulder all the legal risk.
This is the problem with the DMCA effectively reversing burden of proof. The one filing a complaint is always assumed to be in good faith - which they never are - meaning the safe harbor provisions are all which stands between the hosting provider and staggering fines.
I've said it many times before and I'll say it again; Copyright is beyond salvaging. The harm it causes far outweigh any potential benefits.
Re: Re: Re: Ah gross hypocrisy, we meet again
" I might be more impressed if his cons didn't rely almost entirely on people being so gorram stupid."
You know, before 2016 neither you nor I ever realized 90 million americans are that stupid. And that was probably the prevailing assumption among upwards of 8 billion people.
But he did. Credit where it's due. He's simply the Rain Man of grift.
Re: Ah gross hypocrisy, we meet again
Well, you do sort of have to admire the sheer unadulterated Chutzpah of the guy; The only use for 'Truth Social' is to get investors to stuff his pockets with money so it doesn't really harm him if the principle which would allow the damn thing to operate is overturned.
It's as if he's torpedoing a leaky canoe he floated in preparation to whine that the evil libruls sank his aircraft carrier.
Blast from the past?
"Your kettlebells will never see a bungled firmware update or struggle to connect to the cloud. "
Reminds me of something I once read on an old BBS dedicated to long-suffering sysadmins way back. Dawn of time stuff from the 90's.
"I work for an investment bank. I have dealt with code written by stock exchanges. I have seen how the computer systems that store your money are run. If I ever make a fortune, I will store it in gold bullion under my bed. "
It should be comforting to see that some things never change.
Why am I not comforted?
Re: Copyright Expanding?
"If Nintendo tried to expand the copyright extension, then I think they would truly be the Disney of video gaming."
Although Nintendo have been abusing copyright law about as much as any other of the gatekeeper corporations they reserve their more draconian measures mainly for Trademark abuse.
I'd be less leery of copyright extension and more leery about them extending trademark provisions somehow.
Re: Re: Poe's law?
Well, the fact that Subaru, Kia and Mazda are starting to run into the same problems of bad design and obsoletion the US car industry ran into in the 70's may be a good indicator of yet another paradigm change when it comes to which country gets to host the biggest carmakers.
I honestly hope these OEM's get their shit together and fundamentally rethink the fact that if they want to add computerization to their product then that needs the same attention they'd give to designing new engines.
Re: Re:
That's a lot of bullshit which all boils down to "You condemning the nazi bar is an infringement of the nazi's right to be heard"
"The problem here is your desire to censor and ban political view points you dislike, and your willingness to demonize others to further your cause."
...says the shitwit who's gone through about a dozen comments with wordwalls all based on the same false premise: That a private entity choosing to actively condemn another private entity is akin to government censorship.
You are - fundamentally - wrong in that assumption. No one here has advocated censorship or banning. That's just you being a disingenuous asshole propping up yet another strawman.
You being "demonized" in no other way than by us pointing out that you are lying through your teeth in every assertion. There is nothing wrong in refusing to patronize the nazi bar nor about making no bones about our assessment of the nazi bar. Yet that's the exact metaphor of what you try to imply. Repetitively.
If you want respect and credibility then perhaps try not using long debunked stormfront talking points to make your case.
Re: Re:
"If you think that Rogan's podcast is crap or filled with disinformation, then don't listen to it."
And our free speech allows us to say that Spotify are being assholes to host Rogan when he pushes the bullshit which has seen the US bring out a mountain of corpses composed of 700k-800k needlessly dead americans courtesy entirely due to large parts of the US making defying basic science and medical guidelines a test of loyalty.
This is the point where this disinformation becomes arguably more horrifying than every crackpot website to merely spout extremist propaganda in itself. There is a death toll.
It's Rogan's choice to be a disingenious and casually racist asshole.
It's Spotify's choice to keep hosting Rogan.
It's our choice to condemn spotify for this the same way we feel free to condemn the local nazi bar and the Westboro Baptist Church.
And your entire argument seems based on the premise that we need to abstain from making use of our rights to respect Rogan being a raging shithole and Spotify for assisting him in this.
Tolerance is not a universal moral imperative; It's a peace treaty. And part of the explicitly understood provisions there is that you neither need nor should tolerate those whose entire contribution is malice.
Whether you are an alt-right apologist or some horribly misguided fence-sitter doesn't really matter at this point.
Re: Re: There might be a strawman there.
"My glib reply was an instance of the "It's simple; we kill the Batman" meme to demonstrate that calling something simple is...not so much."
Calling for the abolition of copyright isn't calling for the death of the angsty dark vigilante though.
It's more like calling for the killing of Hitler. Which, in the 1930's, would certainly have shaken up and harmed Germany quite a lot but would, in the long-term, certainly be preferable to the alternative.
Re: Re: A simple solution for this problem.
"Is "killing batman" also one of your simple solutions?"
If Batman would, no matter what, always end up a serial killer then yes.
The problem with copyright is that it's based on a fundamental violation of basic principles - like people owning what they bought and sole governance over their property and information in their possession.
You simply can not apply any part of the old medieval heresy laws or information control and hope to not make it horrible. Hell, We know for a fact already that every invention and infrastructure of information storage and transmission over the last century has had to fight for its existence, tooth and claw, because progress has turned out to be the outright enemy of the principles of copyright.
As I usually say, the right to control copies of information being made is unreasonable from the get-go.
Author right of content paternity is the only part worth salvaging, as is the right to profit from commercial application and deny political use. Both of which would be better served by making any created works fall under Trademark and Branding legislation instead.
Re: Re: Re:
"Its like Turkeys voting to become thanksgiving dinner."
See PaulIT's comment, just above.
But there's another explanation as to why the republican base keeps voting against their best interests which acts in perfect synergy with his explanation. I'd suggest googling "grievance addiction", "what the science of addiction tells us about Trump", and if you want a DHS study to underline it "Addicted to hate: Identity residual among former white supremacists".
Essentially the current GOP base are junkies on the natural high of hatred they've been weaned on since childhood courtesy of republican and alt-right media. They keep voting against their own interests in exactly the same way as the junkie who keeps making horrible life choices (like renting a fridge and pawning it, stealing from their s.o. or embezzling from their company, to get ready cash) in order to secure access to their next fix.
Sticking it to the libs is just them putting the needle in their own arm and pressing the plunger. They need that fix no matter what.
This is why you can't argue with them. Trying to bring reason to the table is literally you threatening to take the needle or crack pipe from their hands.
Re:
You and me both.
I always hated the recurring trope in comics, books, TV series and movies where the Big Bad is always a knockoff of Dastardly Snidely-level "Evil, just because".
Yet here we are, with certain politicians being obviously malicious for no other reason than that people being able to communicate offends their sensibilities.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Can better disclosure solve this?
[Addendum]
And by "whatever treatments the market deems profitable enough." my money is on that being a "treatment" consisting of happy pills prescribed by a US doctor highly incentivized to push as many patients as possible onto a diet of high-priced pharmaceutica meant to take the edge off the patients misery for as long as their medical insurance holds up.
The ongoing opioid crisis, part 2, in other words.
Re: Re: Re: Can better disclosure solve this?
"The new ones that would be started to take advantage of the customers looking for that. If buyers knew what they were, and weren't, getting."
There is none.
Within every business sector in the US today profit margins determine whether a given tech has investor attraction. This kind of tech has very slim margins and requires excrutiatingly high investments not just to develop but to maintain.
Meanwhile those same investments will bring a hundred times as high margins by lobbying for higher use of oxicontin or other highly addictive hard legal drugs. Martin Shkreli is not an aberration, he's the norm.
"Don't underestimate the power of money sitting on the table waiting to be picked up."
Look at the timelines here. This tech is 20 years old. This pile of money has been sitting on that table for all that time with no takers because the roi is too small to interest anyone.
Here's my prediction. This tech will be picked up by the nationalized health services of other OECD nations because that's what happens when vitally important yet fundamentally unprofitable technology emerges. The US will once again be left completely behind with this tech being something the 1% send their kids to get from the UK, Germany or France while the american consumer in general has to remain on whatever treatments the market deems profitable enough.
Re: Great but for one thing
"What might be a way out is manufacturers of these devices would be compelled to contribute to a "Medical Superfund" pool..."
I'm reminded of the aviation patent pool the US government enforced way back when. For those ignorant of history the US had to fly european planes in World War 1 as the patent wars around aviation on US soil kept the US from building any viable form of combat aircraft. The US government solved this by forcing every aviation patent into a common pool with licensing guidelines.
This one stroke is by many believed to be the primary reason the US not only caught up with the rest of the world but became the world's first and strongest air power in both commercial and military areas.
Problem is still that we're talking about literal cybernetics here. A patent pool won't solve the issue of patients facing the choice of having to defend their specific chosen corporate overlord come hell or high water, or actually having their sight or ability to walk taken away...
Re:
You know the answer to that. The lobbies will start screaming about socialism, the US right will accuse anyone daring to float such legislation of trying to convert the western world into a communist protectorate and the left (in the US at least, what passes for the "left") will mainly be conspicuously silent because they need still need their campaigns funded.
India and Africa may pull the "compulsive licensing" trick through the WTO again if this turns out to be a thing for more than just optic devices, which it likely will be.
Re: Horrible, but begs the question.
"But this begs the question to me...why the hell do these implants have an external dependency?"
Maintenance. As anyone with a relative bearing a hearing aid can attest, the damn thing has to be frequently tuned and checked. Software glitches start creeping in and hardware components start giving way to simple wear. Anyone who owns an SSD in their rig knows that solid state technology doesn't often suffer catastrophic malfunction but it degrades at a predictable rate.
Consider that a pacemaker is to be regularly checked once every six months to monitor battery charge and has to be replaced every 5-15 years or so...the thing is that almost all truly compact tech doesn't have replaceable batteries or exchangeable components. Once their lifespan is up, a new device is needed.
The people in the OP who received this tech are now on a timer where at some point they either get their implants replaced, or they go back to being functionally blind.
And because the tech is proprietary and has turned out not to be a cash cow my guess is that at some point enough incredibly wealthy people will require such implants to buy up the patents and the devices will be available again. At Shkreli-level markups.
Re:
Easier said than done.
Imagine you're a paraplegic. There's this wonderful new tech which will let you walk again. Only problem is that miracle will be courtesy of an implant which is owned, maintained and operated by a private company whose highest priority is to squeeze you for as much value as possible and will drop support in a heartbeat the very second your existence ends up on the black side of the ledger.
We've already seen that Musk can do anything he likes and there will still be a horde of people aggressively defending him. Some no doubt due to simple fanboyism, but how many do so because they've sunk their pension savings into Tesla and SpaceX stock?
Imagine a future where the average citizen literally faces the choice between upholding their chosen corporate overlord at any cost or being effectively crippled.
I swear, the older I get the more left I swing in politics, because the future I see emerging here is the absolutely worst of Gibson-esque dystopias.
Re: Re: Re: Re:
"Copyright has a purpose"
None which justifies the drawbacks. You could fit created works under trademark law - make it part of a creator's brand - and solve almost every issue that way. Copyright though, in order to exist, infringes on every persons personal rights of property and comes uncomfortably close to old-style heresy law from medieval times in the way it exercises information control.
"Copyright needs to be much shorter."
It used to be. Once upon a time it was 7 years. The lesson of history is that as long as this fundamentally flawed legislation exists enormous monetary incentive will exist for middleman gatekeepers to lobby for extension. That being the case you literally can not restrict it, reform it, or pare it down with a single hope of keeping it within reason. Copyright will only ever have two settings - abolished or utterly unreasonable.
Re: Re: Re: Re:
"However, ContentID goes beyond what DMCA requires. YouTube should be held accountable for it."
Pressure from the industry. ContentID is part of Youtubes "retain safe harbor" card which lets them minimize the takedowns - and subsequent contesting of those takedowns - which lets them keep the amount of people tasked to adjudicate within halfway reasonable limits.
Remember, every industry action is a consequence of a cost-benefit analysis. ContentID exists because it saves Youtube money and overhead in a paradigm where copyright legislation is outright insane.
Re: Re:
"There's two groups that both need to suffer penalties for abuse:"
No, really just the one. The hosting providers are helpless since if a rights-holder files a complaint it's up to the hosting provider to either remove the content filed against or shoulder all the legal risk.
This is the problem with the DMCA effectively reversing burden of proof. The one filing a complaint is always assumed to be in good faith - which they never are - meaning the safe harbor provisions are all which stands between the hosting provider and staggering fines.
I've said it many times before and I'll say it again; Copyright is beyond salvaging. The harm it causes far outweigh any potential benefits.
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