- Not at all? It's reasonable to point out issues with the implementation as it currently stands (those are abundant and blindingly obvious). However it is also clear that the underlying mechanism works extremely well. A claim to the contrary is quite extraordinary.
Sometimes people do talk about alternatives. State funding and patronage are two of the most common. Both have very obvious drawbacks in terms of quantity and who gets influence over the outcome. Both also have interesting advantages that are well worth examining.
- A perfect illustration of why IP should never be regarded as a moral right. It exists for the benefit of society as a whole. Thus the laws creating it need to be tuned with that as the explicit (and only) goal. Mickey Mouse law must not be permitted.
- It is not a model. It is a description. I'm torn on whether it would be correct to refer to the approach as constituting a sort of analogy.
No idea why you think the effect is being put before the cause. I'm hungry so I head to the kitchen. An observer says "he wants to eat". Antibiotics are administered. Only the bacterial cells expressing a certain set of proteins survive. An observer says "the infection wants to be resistant".
- Framed in anthropomorphized terms this would look something like the goal of humans as a species is not the synthesis of vitamin C but rather mere survival. Walking a path where we come to depend on external sources is not necessarily at odds with that.
Or more generally: Why did I do that specific thing? No particular reason, it just happened to work. After all, I managed not to fall off the platform for another few seconds. No telling what the future will bring.
As long as we're thinking about anthropomorphization it's amusing to note that vitamin C synthesis can be framed as a species level tragedy of the commons. In that case you are simply advocating that we as a species make the responsible choice not to participate in a race to the bottom!
- You're being overly literal. It's not "trying to fit anthropomorphized design onto a process" but rather "using anthropomorphization as a descriptive tool". This situation is not unlike when someone takes issue with an analogy due to erroneously interpreting it as a direct comparison.
> here are frequently multiple different "solutions" for a given metric
So too are there multiple different options when working towards any nontrivial goal in the real world. In the context of stochastic optimization the multi-armed bandit problem is a rather well known concept.
> evolution is not attempting to optimize anything
For the purpose of communication (of some other idea) it could be reasonable to say that the human race merely wants survival first and foremost. That is what evolution is after, at least in a sense. Of course that is not technically correct. Pointing out technical inconsistencies isn't going to convince me that I'm in the wrong here because I've already explicitly acknowledged their presence and explained why as far as I'm concerned objecting to them is simply missing the point.
Switching to a technical angle, to claim that evolution is not optimizing is to claim that water doesn't flow downhill but rather molecules just happen to vibrate and move around at random. It's completely ignoring the broader context. Evolution happens at a species level. It's an abstract concept inherently tied to other abstract concepts such as optimization and survival.
- China was playing industrial catch up. They didn't have to (for example) reinvent semiconductors from first principles. They will surely support some form of IP law once they have been firmly established at the cutting edge for a while.
I'm no fan of the current state of things but it's absurd to imply that the existence of IP law in some form isn't essential if you want corporations to continue much of their R&D as it currently exists.
Without copyright in at least some limited form how do you expect authors to make a living? Will you have the state fund them directly? Do you propose going back to a patronage system in the hopes that a rich client just so happens to fund something that you also enjoy? Something else?
- We want to encourage intellectual endeavors that are desirable to society as a whole but which otherwise face barriers. Making them monetarily favorable is an easy way to accomplish that. Similar to how not speeding is made monetarily favorable, or serving in the military is made monetarily favorable, etc. Surely you don't object to the government using monetary incentives to indirectly shape society? The historical alternatives have been rather brutal.
- You're trying to analyze an entirely different game played by an entirely different set of players by the same set of rules. It's a contextual error on your part. The decision to recognize or not recognize a given body of rules held by an opposing party on the international level is an almost entirely separate topic.
> A choice to enforce laws against small entities they can easily bully, and to not do it on a larger scale.
That's a systemic issue, AKA the bad regulatory regime that I previously spoke of. That isn't some inherent fault of the tool. It's a fault of the regulatory regime which applies that tool.
Kitchen knives are absolutely essential for cooking but they can also be used to stab people. If someone claimed that knives were inherently tools of evil and that people needed to wake up to this fact, would you not consider that rather unhinged?
> To add insult to injury, you will find these choices were almost never made by parliaments, but in international treaties and larger organizations like the WTO, or executive powers of large trade blocks.
That's true, and it's a problem, but it (again) has nothing to do with the inherent value of IP as a concept. It isn't even directly related to the merits of the current IP regulatory regime. It's a systemic problem with the lawmaking process as a whole. Solve the systemic problem and you can solve the downstream issues that resulted from it. Don't solve it and the symptoms will persist. You're barking up the wrong tree.
- While your objection is technically correct it can still be useful (ie simple, straightforward, etc) to phrase things in terms of a goal. Since a goal (pursued by an intelligent being) and optimization pressure (a property of a blind process) are approximately the same thing in the end. In other words, Anthropomorphization can be useful despite not being true in a literal sense.
Certainly this can be misleading to the layman. The term "observer" in quantum mechanics suffers similarly.
- It's also possible that the entire goal was nothing more complicated than stirring up shit for fun. By either metric it must have been a massive success judging by all the attention this is getting.
- Neither take is correct. When correctly applied it can be an effective tool to encourage certain sorts of intellectual endeavors by making them monetarily favorable. When incorrectly applied it leads to dysfunction as is the case for most regulatory regimes.
Any tool can be used by a wrongdoer for evil. Corporations will manipulate the regulator in order to rent seek using whatever happens to be available to them. That doesn't make the tools themselves evil.
- > you can practically only have one line reflected in a name
Not true at all. You can trivially have two family names in a full legal name. In fact many cultures do exactly that to this day.
Also worth noting that the male's name being preferentially propagated makes a lot of sense in a society where the best off frequently inherited their vocation from their fathers.
- Doesn't completely solve the problem. You now have to pay per (unaffiliated) alias since each requires an independent domain. You also become extremely vulnerable to data breaches because rather than learning that foo@provider is john.doe@provider with IP xxx you instead learn that foo@domain is John Doe, phone number, street address, credit card, etc.
This issue goes far beyond email alone. The ICANN domain system effectively rents a string out to you on a temporarily basis and mandates that an Impressum be attached to it. It's a deeply flawed scheme when viewed from the context of both historical hacker culture as well as the fundamental values of a free and open society.
- If it isn't backed up it doesn't exist.
Corollary (likely unpopular I'd hazard) - hardware token implementations that I can't back up to paper don't exist as far as I'm concerned.
- That doesn't match my experience at all. If I disable filtering what I see is a slew of ephemeral domains. Without DMARC I'm sure they would instead be official looking and fake.
> It comes from so many sources you can't block them,
Nonsense. If it were really countless fixed sources then a centralized domain blacklist would be sufficient. The issue is that the sources - both domain and IP - are aggressively rotated and even spoofed whenever possible.
- I haven't used either language much myself and I thought the feature looked brilliant so I'd be very curious to know what sort of issues you ran into in practice.
- Sure, I also dislike corporate policy that doesn't require a warrant for such things. But at the end of the day that is their choice.
My complaint is that Google should not have been permitted that choice in the first place. The entire sequence of events - from requesting the data without a warrant through to handing the data over without a warrant and any following data mining that was done with it should have been forbidden on constitutional grounds. Both parties ought to have been in violation of the law here. We need to fix the gaping hole in our constitutional rights that the third party doctrine represents.
- Another common scenario is vastly different population density on the far side of the ferry route. It seems unlikely to me that autonomous vehicle companies would want to maintain a giant seasonal fleet at such destinations.
In a lot of cases rather than seasonal it will be a surge every weekend.
- Wouldn't that just increase concerns? When it comes to bad actors in this scenario the primary candidate is the state itself.
Patrons will produce some very interesting and detailed work but it will not necessarily align with your tastes and there will probably not be all that much of it. European history makes this clear enough (imo).
A system in which individual or very small groups of creators are able to produce work of their own choice that appeals to a small to moderately sized niche of their choosing seems like it should produce the best outcome from the perspective of the typical individual. Fiction books are a decent example of this. We get lots of at least decent quality work because a single author can feasibly produce something "on credit" and recoup the costs after the fact.