Here's a possible implementation of your idea that could help get the ball rolling.
1. Get a group of wealthy investors to select a well-known director and film that they would like to support. Ideally the people in charge of the creative side would be open to trying alternative business models.
2. Try to work out a reasonable budget to produce the movie. The overall cost should be much less than usual due to the complete lack of middle-men.
3. The investors provide funding to create an awesome trailer for the movie.
4. Using this trailer, the movie producers crowd-source funding for the movie. If this funding falls short, the investors are obligated to cover the difference. However, if the funding exceeds the movie's budget, the investors are rewarded accordingly.
5. The movie is completed and released into the public domain.
If you intend to make money from your novel, it's your responsibility to find a way to capitalize on it. Obvious approaches include collecting funding/reservations in advance or asking for donations after the fact.
If you release a digital copy of your novel online, it's quite likely that at least a few people will copy it. However, there's also a pretty good chance it will attract more future customers.
Right, so if you provide a service you can charge what the market will bear but if you provide an art that happens to be convertible to digital form you need to get on your knees with your hat outstretched and beg for your income.
Do you people actually think about what you're saying?
Society has no obligation to make your preferred business model profitable.
You don't have a right to make profit, only to try.
In this case copyright only exists as an explicit tradeoff by society in order to gain other benefits. If those benefits can be obtained cheaper and/or without the limits imposed by copyright through other means, or if society decides the tradeoff is not worth it, then tough.
Yes, but we don't have a completely free market. We can (and do, all the time actually) put in place rules and regulations that make favorable things which would not be under a completely free market. This can include laws against doing things you could do for free, such as copying some digital media and giving it away for free.
I personally don't think it's an unreasonable restriction until some way is figured out to compensate creators of digital media for their efforts that doesn't care about digital piracy. I do have a problem with some of the efforts that are being put in place to enforce these rules though, much in the same way I have a problem with the TSA.
The proper response here is for artists to stop producing until society decides art is worth paying for. Begging like a homeless person is not a business model.
You seem to be making the inaccurate assumption that both the law and its enforcement are logically consistent. This might seem reasonable if you are a mathematician or engineer who is used to working with formal specifications and precise definitions. Unfortunately, the people who write and uphold the law are about as far from engineers as you can get.
Too true. Once two perfectly sound legal arguments are made without breaking any semantic rules of the legal system, but point to opposite conclusions, the law becomes a political process. Good lawyers complete the first phase and hope, truly excellent ones are adept politicos as well.
It takes years of legal training to stop thinking about the reality of the situation or what laymen would say "actually happened".
Software really is sort of a special case though. Most of the problems you mentioned are at least partially caused by the constraints and resources of our physical environment. However, the complexity of software is almost entirely generated by human ineptitude. The one exception might be complexity caused by necessary optimization for hardware limitations, which would in fact explain some of problems cited in the blog post.
Most of the problems I mention aren't objective. Sometimes I like washing dishes, it's relaxing. I certainly like eating from dishes. Some people like cars and like driving. It certainly saves people time. Peeling grapefruit is very satisfying and makes the room smell nice. Central air is so much nicer than setting up a fan by my window and hoping that blowing the 75 degree air from outside will cool down the 85 degree ambient temperature inside.
Blaming "human ineptitude" is pessimistic. Sure, the fact that humans can't all manipulate computational machines directly and require layers of abstraction to effectively model problems can, technically, be called ineptitude, but really-- why be so down about it? That's the way things are and there's a lot of good that comes from software if you think about it for more than 30 seconds.
Unix (for example) was most certainly designed around the constraints of hardware at the time.
Furthermore it is a physical limitation for how much software you can write (and have it work) if you can get something that "mostly works" by building on top of yesterday's cruft then you do it, since the alternative is starting over from scratch and not being able to finish.
Why shouldn't they be patentable. If your company spends money and time comig up with a novel way to sort or search or compress information, why should you not be afforded the same protections as a company that came up with a novel way to store energy, or convert energy?
The "time and money" argument (financial incentive to innovate) is as old as it is irrelevant. Frankly, I don't care if you can't make money off the monopoly rents of an abstract concept (and I'm offended that you think I should). What I care about is you thinking you are entitled to halt progress for your own selfish goals.
Besides, it's fallacious to imply that people need "incentives" to innovate. I'd wager there are much more people who are hindered by the patent system than there are people who would stop innovating just because there's no more monopoly to be had by being the first to apply for some legalese nonsense.
It's utterly absurd to imply any sort of ownership or rights to an abstract concept. The very notion of it should be grounds for attesting insanity. Instead, we should focus on free flow and exchange of ideas, tight cooperation and incremental development off each others' discoveries.
So no, they shouldn't be patentable. Nothing should be.
So you disapprove of any type of ownership over an idea. I understand that on a certain level. I suppose first to market would be the only commercial advantage to an invention then. That's not so bad but on a ten year expense to invent you arent getting much return if your idea can be replicated in a one month copycat product. Then again....it seems you are also not fond of personal gain or reward for one's efforts. That I can't really relate to. I don't think that everything I invent should be for the progress of all mankind.
I would say you're probably right about work experience being much more relevant. However, if you went to a very prestigious school, you might want to put it at the beginning for two reasons.
First, the education section takes up relatively little space, and a good school will quickly get the reader's interest.
Secondly, by the end of your work experience section, the reader has probably formed an opinion of you, and a good school won't do much to recover from a mediocre list of jobs.
Of course, none of this actually affects your qualifications for the job. However, HR people usually see things a bit differently than an engineer would...
And you've discovered that determinism implies an omnipotent creator/deity?! Truly we are breaking ground here on HN that the best philosophers and scientists throughout history have grappled with for tens of thousands of lifetimes!
I don't know which meaning of random you have in mind, but we can make predictions about random "things".
If I understand correctly if we measure qubit that is in 10/90 superposition of 0 and 1, we have 0.1 and 0.9 chance of it becoming 0 and 1 respectively. We can predict, that it would probably be 1, but it is still random.
1. Get a group of wealthy investors to select a well-known director and film that they would like to support. Ideally the people in charge of the creative side would be open to trying alternative business models.
2. Try to work out a reasonable budget to produce the movie. The overall cost should be much less than usual due to the complete lack of middle-men.
3. The investors provide funding to create an awesome trailer for the movie.
4. Using this trailer, the movie producers crowd-source funding for the movie. If this funding falls short, the investors are obligated to cover the difference. However, if the funding exceeds the movie's budget, the investors are rewarded accordingly.
5. The movie is completed and released into the public domain.