Comment Re:life-long updates (Score 1) 687
I paid for AC3D for exactly that reason once upon a time. Of course they later decided to not give a shit about their committment so no way I'm falling for that one again.
I paid for AC3D for exactly that reason once upon a time. Of course they later decided to not give a shit about their committment so no way I'm falling for that one again.
Thanks, a long but interesting article.
True. The issue is how we ascertain when human labour is obsolete as most economic models do not contain any provisions that deal with it. For example, the idea that lowering interest/expanding monetary supply will stimulate growth in employment is only valid if added demand actually leads to higher employment which may not be the case anymore.
Perhaps connecting 'standard' working week to unemployment levels would be possible to slowly adjust the economy and balance it, but that has its own problems as well.
By the time remote controlled robots would be usable enough to carry around and install office equipment it won't be long before we have robots that can do it without any remote control.
And I doubt there will be a significant time span where robot-maintainer is a useful job; we'll have robots for that too.
There needs to be a serious discussion on what kind of society we are going to have when human labour is obsolete. The current system will start seriously breaking down when capacity outstrips demand by a significant degree and any increase in demand will be met by further automation.
You cannot selectively enforce a law of nature or a mathematical law. Human laws are selectively enforced all the time. Intent and circumstances are often taken into account. Often history is considered. Sometimes even connections, wealth and race. All of those influence whether laws are enforced in any particular case.
Many judicial systems have significant discretionary powers, to the extent where, for better or worse, the letter of the law is often less important than the circumstances of the case.
IP is ultimately a form of taxation and redistribution and as such it contributes to the general cost level of the economy. Saying that IPR is needed because the jobs are the only ones that don't get outsourced to cheaper countries is equivalent to saying that we need higher taxes to pay for government jobs that are the only ones that don't get oursourced.
IPR simply makes an economy less competitive and is part of the reason why everything is too expensive to do in the west.
And frankly I can't see any reason why blockbuster couldn't trivially be outsourced. The script for most films could probably be written by, eh, a script. Effects can certianly be done anywhere and I really doubt actors will last beyond the decade before they start getting replaced by rendered versions.
The idea that more people are alive than have died is an urban myth; if you google it, estimates are that about 100 billion people have lived and died over the last 50k years. So we're outnumbered by dead people by quite a bit.
Exactly. As long as the patent system is built to be an adversarial system where one of the parties has to get screwed for it to function, well, somebody is and chances are it's the little guy.
If someone actually wanted to make inventing and patenting easier and more consistently worthwhile then the system would be reconstructed so, for example, the patent office pays the inventor when his patent gets used, while the funding would be gathered as VAT or something general. It would become just another tax/subsidise scheme (just like it is anyway) handled like every other such scheme, accounted for within state budgets and evaluated for efficiency.
Actually it's a quite interesting topic as it highlights the deficiencies of economic measures like GDP. Measures that could take into account all value created in society, ranging from pro-bono work to free software to the value of free time would be far more useful to maximize the wealth creation in an economy as a whole.
The reason why we would get a world without professional musicians would be that there was a vast surplus of musicians leading to supply massively outstripping demand. Which means we'd have a world with a lot of amateur musicians playing for fun, without pay, because they enjoy doing it. Much like we have today.
To answer the question of what the GP does for a living, one can assume he's doing something that nobody else would do for fun or as a hobby. Probably not trying to be a professional starcraft player or a pro angler. Much like most people who hold paying jobs, making the choice between fun or a paycheck. It's not a question of the value of the work, it's a question of wether the value is available anywhere and everywhere without remuneration or not.
The reaction from 'professional musicians' when Amanda Palmer invited amateurs to play with her on tour locations is an exceptional example of what must be the most spoiled and conceited group of people ever to grace the labour market.
As a general rule it's not 'one company', but many and varying forms of companies in many countries depending on the forms of incorporation that are available in each country. Most countries have variants that can be owned and controlled by outside entities, which is why the local ones don't go around doing their own thing.
This of course creates all sorts of ways to move money around to the place in which profits are best taken, as they can usually make internal sales for imaginary numbers to their subsidiaries which allows them to control exactly where the profit goes. For the specific corporate structure used by google and many others you can look up Double Irish on Wikipedia, which is a structure that allows any corporation to basically pay very close to no taxes at all.
Work continues in this area. -- DEC's SPR-Answering-Automaton