Before I Can Fix This Tractor, We Have to Fix Copyright Law
slate.com
slate.com
Anyone with half a brain knew the DMCA was a bad idea when it was being "debated". Now it's accepted because we've grown accustomed to workarounds. The only way our society will be fixed is when the reality-incongruent copyright system simply collapses.
IMHO being thankful for "safe harbor" seems more like a post-rationalization than anything else. If poor definitions meant common carriers weren't actually exempt, then that could have been resolved with straightforward clarification instead of an unnecessary "compromise".
...in much the same way as Grokster and Napster, DMCA notwithstanding.
"Frena" wasn't necessarily a correct decision, especially given the extreme power imbalance between parties. Would the same decision be reached if the defendant had been a well capitalized business? Similarly, the modern inverse of an individual file sharer trying to hide behind the DMCA likely wouldn't fly.
The decision certainly goes against what one would expect from general legal principles, but I suppose that's inevitable in the face of cancer like intent-free criminality. The same reasoning would have indicted him for a cd-r tossed onto his lawn.
Today, the purpose is lost, and the use is exploitative.
Enforcement is just utterly at odds with physics and at this point, the idea of "owning" control of bits in someone else's possession is incompatible with a free society.
"The first copyright law was a censorship law. It was not about protecting the rights of authors, or encouraging them to produce new works. Authors' rights were in little danger in sixteenth-century England, and the recent arrival of the printing press (the world's first copying machine) was if anything energizing to writers. So energizing, in fact, that the English government grew concerned about too many works being produced, not too few. The new technology was making seditious reading material widely available for the first time, and the government urgently needed to control the flood of printed matter, censorship being as legitimate an administrative function then as building roads."
At that, I agree that when you are offered a government enforced monopoly on information, that will be much easier to extort revenue from users with than trying to use one of these alternative means of funding development and profiting from information creative work. But like you said, its wholly imaginary and artificial.
All you need at that point is one copyright holder who believes – right or wrong – that you are in sufficiently zealous about protecting their content and, poof, lawsuit. This goes treble if you have money and the actual infringer is likely to be a broke college student in another country.
Now contrast this to many other people, including the people in favor of stronger IP law, who want the government to enact their views into law.
Now what's really bad is that Stallman is the less pragmatic and realistic of these two camps, because he wants regular people to "see the light" and voluntarily subscribe to his views, which obviously isn't happening (he's been at this for 3 decades now, and while Free software has made traction for sure (e.g. Linux kernel in most smartphones and many other devices), users seem to have less real freedom than ever thanks to locked bootloaders, app stores, etc.). By contrast, the jerks who want to force more DMCA-style silliness and even lengthier (effectively perpetual) copyright terms are more realistic because their approach actually works: we have or are getting all these bad laws.
This somehow reminds me of the quote by Shaw about all progress depending on the unreasonable man.
Those bastards! They stole all of our hard work to make some money! Now there are two possible scenarios. It will fail because they can't compete with GIMP which can be obtained at a $0 pricetag and respects their freedom. The user can have their cake and eat it too!
That's a pretty tough nut to crack but what if people actually end up buying the software? The only explanation would be that the fork presents added value that is worth paying money for!
In both scenarios the end user cannot lose. They either get higher quality software that suits their needs or software for free that respects their freedom.
I guess I can't fault the authors for failing to anticipate petty YouTube rivalries back in 1998, but it seems like the sole imagined use case was a respected corporation going after a pseudonymous warez jockey.
What a funny concept you created.
Here's a good intro:
https://www.copyrightalliance.org/2012/03/in-plain-english-a...
The law is far from ideal but a large part of the problem is the penalties for false claims are rarely enforced so there's been little corrective force against the companies which robo-spam claims. Additionally, companies like YouTube have invented additional processes which are often Kafkaesque and, since they're just arbitrary business processes, aren't subject to the normal legal process.
edit: abuse as in fraudulent take down requests
2) You talk of something entering the public domain...The US doesn't do that anymore (tragic smiley)
What were the (subjectively worse) alternatives being talked about at the time, and what do you think the best way out of this mess from today moving forward would be?
You seem to hold a unique perspective on copyright issues I haven't hear before!
We might not be in great shape in terms of intellectual freedom, but things could have gone much worse if big media got their way.
(As a non-American, you may not be aware that the first question the average American has when something goes wrong is "who can I sue?". Sad, but tragically common)
Previous laws were the Communications Decency Act (CDA) and the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), both of which got killed in court. They focused more on (trying) to prevent pornography from reaching the delicate eyes of children, but still touched on liability issues.
Alternatives to the DMCA went somewhat like Encryption talks now: INCREASE liability, give the govt lots of controls, etc. Sure the DMCA favors the copyright claimer, but if I'm a content host, you provide content, and I'm not liable. Then someone complains, and I let you know. You can dispute it, in which case I can keep it up without liability, or I can take it down. Alternatives didn't let it stay up, or would require that I prove your material isn't infringing myself, or other such things that fell even more heavily on the copyright claimant-side.
I don't think my perspective is all that unique - most of us that were around for the insanity that was CDA/COPA watched the DMCA with interest and had a "Well, this is progress" attitude even though we didn't really LIKE it, it was just a step in the right direction.
As for how to move forward, that's a multi-part issue:
* The places where DMCA is inadequate need to chafe so people get it changed. That's been happening for years, mainly in areas of general public concern, such as cellphone unlocking, takedown abuse, and format shifting.
* attitudes about "IP" need to change. That's been happening, but more slowly. I see non-legal people talking about IP as a wrapper for "this setting and associated characters" rather than "copyright/trademark/patents". News about patent trolls and related legal woes are becoming mainstream.
* One attitudes shift enough, the idea that "I thought of this, I can deny anyone else similar thoughts while being heralded as a hero" that currently drives copyright/patent policy will become more nuanced and allow for the idea that the legal protections afforded are for the public benefit, not private benefit.
It'll be slow going though.
For some reason this comes across just like a piece of bot written comment spam. I seriously thought you were a bot until I read you other comments.
Even talking about a "balance" suggests that we should acknowledge some inherent right of copyright holders for its own sake, rather than just as a means to an end. We shouldn't. We simply have a tradeoff between two desires of the public: getting more works produced, and getting those works into the public domain (to allow reuse/remixing/etc).
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/misinterpreting-copyright.htm...
The difference between a life+70 year copyright versus a lifetime copyright seems unlikely to lead to the creation of any additional works. The difference between a lifetime copyright and, say, a 30-year copyright, might result in some additional creation of works, but probably not as many as the works suppressed by the inability to reuse/remix 30-year-old works. So if we want to use copyright as an incentive, why do we increase it without bound, without thinking about how many more works we'll get?
They drew from the works of The Brothers Grimm, and once established, refused to contribute their own works back in like kind.
If we buy car/tractor/phone/whatever, we should be able to modify it(its hw/sw) however we want. I fail to understand how it breaks copyright. No one is copying and distributing anything. Copyright law should be to protect IP theft. Fix the law instead of having a stupid meeting for exceptions every 3 years. Or copyright yourselves into stone age
Wrong. What defines owning is not whether you paid or not, but the type of contract you made.
Moreover, you didn't pay for Windows; you paid for a license of Windows. This license specifically says what you are and what you are not allowed to do with the software, and among others, tinkering with is is not part of what you are allowed to do.
I mean, there is obviously a law stating that you cannot do this or that because it violates copyright. This implies that you as a citizen might do something illegal as close yourself in your room, do some magic and then get out and forget about it, although what you did has no influence on the world whatsoever. That is a problem.
Now, if we want to be precise there is actually a clear definition of what you own, and in fact you probably do not own the copy of Windows running on your PC. Still it is possible that you own that PC, and its hard drives and other stuff, so when we say that you do not own the software but just a license to use it we are giving credit to stuff like this:
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/10-ridiculous-eula-clauses-agre...
or this:
http://www.zdnet.com/article/apples-eula-nonsense/#!
To sum up, sure you might not have the right to hack your properties, but that's caused by a set of laws defending a power inbalance between consumers and producers. I believe that claiming that any sort of "hacking your stuff" should be prohibited because the law says so is an example of irrational justificationism if not supported by further arguments, still I'd like to hear about the reasons why we need copyright law as is.
Those EULA are dumb, but you don't have to agree with them. In many cases there will be no alternative, for sure. However you can't accept an EULA and subsequently say "this EULA sucks, I don't have to follow it".
I never met a human (excluding lawyers) who actually has read through a single EULA, and I doubt most of them would be valid if actually tested in court, at least outside the US.
[edit: typo]
Edit: Often it's not even at purchase. There are numerous apps that will do this every time they change their terms. And they don't show you a change list either. It's the whole 50-150 pages. No reasonable person would actually read it.
It'd be great if anyone could point to interesting resources on this issue. It seems to be an intriguing intersection of law and economics.
The DMCA should not pertain to you flipping bits into your own copy of Windows to modify it's functionality. You can do that, and if it's a violation of the license, Microsoft can sue you. It's an entirely civil issue with the burden of proof on MS.
The anticircumvention provisions of the DMCA criminalize any alteration of a device with the purported objective of protecting copyright. So now the state not only defends copyright, but the technical measures themselves, even if the real objective of the manufacturer is simply to be anticompetitive and incompatible. It's a massive privatization of criminal law in ad-hoc, unwritten form: "it's illegal to disable anything manufacturers claim defends copyright".
In this scenario, one of two things would happen:
* either there is a genuine need for buying/owning fixable hackable tractors, in which case there will be a market and companies will appear that sell those,
* or there is really no need, and leasing works just fine for tractor users, and it's only us couch-commentators who think we desperately need to repair tractors.
The key point/problem here is that we have a (deliberate) naming confusion: "ownership" should not come with rights restrictions. The same confusion was deliberately introduced with DVDs/BluRays, for example, not to mention computer software. The law should step in and force everyone to truthfully describe what they're selling: a product, a license to do certain things, or a lease.
There's likely always going to be a minority that wants or needs to fix their own tractor(or car) or have an independent 3. party fix it.
If that minority is objectively insignificant - well fine. If that minority is 20% of all tractor (or car) owners, the manufacturers can switch to a lease model, and screw over 20% of the customers, those can either give in or give up farming or driving - most won't.
The point is that those 20% might not be enough to sustain a new vendor coming into the market to cater to them. With our current model the 80% that don't care can pay their vendor to fix stuff, the 20% that cares can do it themselves or help support independent mechanics.
Which means with the current model all consumers win, which I'm generally in favor of over a system that maxes profit to big vendors at the expense of minorities.
What you described could happen, if tractor market is a monopoly or if all manufacturers collude, which shouldn't be allowed to happen. American broadband situation is a good example when there is monopoly due to lack of choices. They can price whatever they want for broadband and treat you royally when you contact their customer service because you can't switch ISP.
Like in the extreme case of price hike of a pill to $700, that is what happens if copyright law stays the way it is now.
Current situation is not a win for customers or the general progress. There is a lot of room for improvement.
The company gets a clean, consise cost of units sold, reduced large capital calls and a leaner corporate structure. It's a very compelling business desire.
The "sale that's really a lease/licensing deal" is a fairly new construct, at least as it relates to consumer goods that aren't obviously "software".
> All I see a big market opportunity for hackable, open-platform tractors.
Sadly, there is no big market opportunity for hackable, open-platform tractors.
in fact, I'll wager that the FUTURE of the tractor INSISTS upon it being open and hackable.
The "Lying EULA that attempts to rebrand a sale a lease" approach is bad for customers and bad for the world at large. It limits human innovation. Human innovation is what defines humanity. Perhaps we could just return to swinging in the trees and eating bananas unless our EULA allows us to walk upright and cook food with Fire(tm)
Pay attention, Tractor companies! pay attention to your customers and stop listening to that shortsighted man in the pinstripe suit trying to cheapen your relationships that MATTER!
You mean a common platform, similar to what iOS is in the computing world? Sounds nice, but I guess we use a different definition of "open".
OPEN TRACTOR API 1.0
Don't get me wrong, I love open source, I love Linus/RMS for giving me such a beautiful product with which I make a living. But it was theirs to give, not mine to take. You have the same strange ethics as RMS, two consenting adults make a trade, based on rules known in advance (ie., you cannot see/alter the source code), no one was hurt and no one has anything to do with this trade... and yet... RMS calls this evil. Again: I prefer open source to anything but the rights are the creators to hand out and the customers to accept or not, that is freedom.
Buy a different Tractor or try to negotiate a deal before you buy a tractor. Or start a forum to gather a lot of people that John Deere may listen to. But don't buy it and then start crying you don't like it.
And "by that logic" I shouldn't post on HN if I don't like downvotes. But I agreed to this system before I post. I won't whine about it afterwards since the possibility of being downvoted/offended existed before I commented. By your logic I should now start to pressure the government to do something about these awfull comments on HN, because I don't like them.
For example, what if the tractor terms say that you couldn't vote Republican or you would have to surrender the tractor? Or you could only use brand-name repair shops. Or that you couldn't open the hood.
Farmers need tractors. It's not like they have the option to not have one and wait forever for a deal that's never going to happen.
Buying means change of ownership and just because you write something into a contract doesn't change that fact.
To finish your example, yes, I would expect the buyer to be able to hack the machine. They bought it and it is now theirs to do with as they please.
In the tractor case, I'd feel more honest (and much better in general) if I would just buy a tractor of a different brand with less stringent conditions attached. Why would you reward a tractor company that sells you stuff under screwy conditions?
First you vote with your wallet and make a screwy company rich, then you complain. Perhaps you should think before you buy something. Or, get a group of people together and make a nice case to the manufacturer. Where do we end if we can just break any agreement we make based on need?
The honest way to get to hackable tractors is to not buy un-hackable tractors. I'm all for hackable tractors, I'm all for hackable everything! So lets buy products that are hackable!
Frankly, if there are conditions, then as far as I'm concerned you're not selling anything. Selling implies a change of ownership. You've done something, but not sold something.
If companies want to attach additional conditions, then they should have to call it something else, and make it clear that the agreement isn't a sale.
Probably because that tractor company is the only one left by either suing its competition, colluding with them to both adopt anti-consumer license agreements, buying them out, or lobbying politicians to making competition illegal by abuse of patent or copyright law.
This is part of the problem. "Contracts" have become one-way rights-limiters which perverts their original intent: For two parties to negotiate terms of a transaction. What we have today are contracts being abused to limit consumers' rights, limit their use of court to challenge them (arbitration clauses), and absolve the corporation of all legal liability that may ever come out of that transaction.
I think that in our age where consumers have no rights, its perfectly ok to enter into one-sided "contracts", then violate the spirit of those contracts by appealing to lawmakers to give consumers their rights back.
I guess you haven't seen John Deere tractors in a while.
As huge a gulf in technology as that may be, retracing over ground that has already been surveyed once is much easier than blazing a trail through wilderness. It only takes 50 years to advance that far in technology the first time you try it. The second time around, it goes much faster and less expensively, especially for everything with lapsed patent protection.
That particular tractor is supposed to be a bootstrapping device, so that in the unlikely circumstance that we do lose the benefit of modern infrastructure, it can mostly be rebuilt before anybody forgets how or why.
With the benefit of the modern manufacturing infrastructure, anyone else could copy a 1995 model of Deere tractor and just leave off the trademark elements.
The LifeTrac is designed around the resources that a self-sustaining OSE community could likely produce or scavenge. It's basically what two people and a rudimentary machine shop could build in a reasonable period of time.
Again, given the run-up in prices for used, owner-repairable tractors, there may be a market for copying the most popular models for new manufacture, and leaving out anything still patented or trademarked. Serious farmers won't build their own LifeTrac unless it is impossible to get a factory-built tractor.
Why are people buying these annoying tractors anyway? The reason to me seems: They are worth the trouble.
Here's the thing. They should be able to lease equipment with restrictions. However, if you're going to call it a sale, then I don't see why they should have the right to restrict your ability to modify it. A sale implies a change of ownership. If they can restrict what you can do with the product after you bought it, then there wasn't really a change of ownership, was there?
Interfering with this process reduces freedom.
Interfering with freedom is necessary, almost everywhere. The very fact that two people can come to an agreement that they would expect to be enforced is a massive interference in freedom. To say nothing of that fact that you seem to be happy to interfere in someone's freedom to tinker with things, but not happy to interfere in the freedom to restrict that freedom. Do you want this "freedom" of yours or not?
It's seen a lot in apartment/house rental contracts, where the renter puts predatory terms in a contract which aren't allowed by local or state laws. They try to enforce because "you signed it" but a challenge in court sees the contract, or at least those terms, scrapped.
Absolutely. We've had so many on farm productivity gains by modifying our machinery. We've added curtains to our spreader to better spread lime, extended our machines axles to setup a CTF system and built our own wetting agent system for our seeder bar, just to name a few, all which required machinery/implement modification. In some cases, machinery manufacturers have come and looked at the modifications we've made to a machine (in the case of the spreader curtains), and then taken the idea and started building it into their machines by default.
And sold it and kept all the money to themselves? Sounds like a great deal for them.
If you want to fix copyright, you need to realize it's a complex matter with lots of different actors and conflicting interests. Thus you will need to be able to discuss it accurately, to ensure people aren't getting a mixed message.
So let me help you out with a starter pack of accurate statements.
Copyright is not a fundamental right. It's an artificial monopoly enforced by government based on promises of enriching society at large, by giving it back for free, in the future, after a limited period of exclusivity.
Violating copyright isn't theft. "IP" is a legal construct to make something fundamentally unnatural (owning an idea) seem natural. "IP" is not real property and it cannot be stolen.
Having firmware for stuff you own being copyrighted and implemented in a way which makes it illegal to tamper with is clearly not in spirit with the way copyright law was written nor its intent.
Having copyright last 100s of year in a time where something is obsolete or outdated in less than 5 years is clearly also at odds with "enriching" society. Nothing is being given back. And if it is, it's long past the period in which it would be useful.
If you want to "fix" copyright, we need to get more focus on the spirit and intent of the law, rather than the "right" part of the law and specifically how big corporations look at it like a blanket-right to profit, for all eternity.
What right isn't granted by the government? We like to pretend that rights exist outside of governments, but the only right what a government gives is might makes right.
Inalienable rights (by definition, in fact).
Granted by, secured by, the effect is the same unless you believe people would enjoy the rights in the absence of something like government (specifically a gov't which effectively protects rights).
Would you mind naming an example?
>They are not mutually inclusive.
I have a feeling that this may devolve into an argument over trivia, but I hope not.
It seems that you're trying to argue that freedom from murder is a positive right, in that it necessitates that someone else provide you protection from harm. It is, however, commonly understood as a negative right because it requires inaction from others rather than action. And as such, because universal inaction would be just as good as any active protection by a government, the right of freedom from murder does not require that one exists at all. Therefore, it exists outside of societal constructs and is inalienable.
How are you going to enforce that right after it's been violated?
>It seems that you're trying to argue that freedom from murder is a positive right, in that it necessitates that someone else provide you protection from harm.
I wouldn't say necessitates, but I would predict a lot more murdering absent the expectation of reprisal from your tribe or government.
> And as such, because universal inaction would be just as good as any active protection by a government
It would be better since governments murder people too, and since because universal inaction is universal. So sign me up! We can get started right away. I promise I won't murder you if you'll promise not to murder me. Deal?
There is a perspective/philosophy* in which humans under anarchic/natural-law are born with 100% rights. E.g., if you were washed ashore with a number of ship-wreck-mates on an otherwise uninhabited island, there'd be nothing to stop you from implementing works copyrighted in other lands. Further, there'd be nothing to stop you from violating the terms of any contract or even murdering anyone--you'd have unlimited rights.
But let's say we're wiser than that. When we wash ashore, we all agree that it's in everyone's best interest to avoid killing each-other. Therefore, we each give up a measure of our unlimited rights and grant them to each-other in the form of governmental 'powers'--if someone kills one member of our new tribe, the other members will kill (or otherwise deprive the rights of) the one who initiated the aggression.
In it's ideal form, the government's purpose is to maintain the largest possible sphere of individual rights without allowing individuals to infringe upon the rights of others. It can only exist inasmuch as each individual condones and supports it's actions. To the degree it becomes imbalanced towards one party or another, the aggrieved parties retain the right to withdraw the powers they've delegated--in extreme cases they may fight the other party's government to reclaim their inalienable rights.
With this scenario in mind, imagine that you see me building a sand castle on my side of the beach. You like the design so you copy it on your side of the beach. I'm not flattered by the imitation but you haven't really deprived me of any rights either--I'm still free to do as I wish on my side of the beach. Since I'm not really harmed, I don't have an inalienable right to monopolize the castle's design. In fact, if I storm over to your side of the beach and knock your copy down, I'd be depriving you of the right to make that kind of sand castle should you see fit to do so.
Given such a dispute, the tribe (including yourself) might agree to relinquish the right to manipulate sand in particular ways and create a new governmental power. The creation of this power appeases and incentivizes me to continue voluntarily beautifying the beach with fresh and innovative sculptures and promotes continued peaceful cooperation. This a matter of policy, there are no higher laws or anything set in stone about the validity or duration of my claims, etc.
* I tend to agree with this philosophy but want to take a more objective tack for the sake of the great-grandparent poster.
There being nothing to stop you doesn't mean it's not a violation of an inalienable right or that I didn't have that right to begin with. The widely held belief is that freedom from murder is a right regardless of whether or not an institution is established to protect it. I believe it follows directly from our ability for higher order abstract thought, particularly our ability to empathize with others. So in some respects, you might say that our ability to empathize is what creates inalienable rights in the first place.
As I think about it now, I would say that our inalienable human rights are derived from the fact that we exist self-aware with the desire and general capacity to assert our rights. I.e., to whatever end or purpose, we wouldn't have those abilities absent some reason. If you're alive, you want to live and you're not hurting anybody else; who's to say that you should be denied that life? If anyone, it's just some other guy who's opinion isn't actually any more important than your own. One might say it should all be self-evident :) .
At any rate, I think we're largely saying the same things.
If there is no difference between the inalienable right existing or not existing, then it is a matter of faith to if they exist at all.
While copyright law is being used as a legal wedge, the problem isn't just copyright. These arguments are often framed as being about copyright because obscures the other half of the problem, which is how these arguments ignore doctrine of first sale[1].
Case law has been confusing in this area, with cases such as Vernor v. Autodesk, Inc supporting the power grab where "licensing" overrules first sale. Other cases such as UMG v. Augusto reaffirmed that the original author's rights ended at the first sale. In our future that obviously includes software in many, many products, we either strongly reaffirm the right of first sale or we give up ownership[2] to whomever owns the software inside our products.
The DMCA is only part of the problem; this attack on first sale - an attack on the open exchange of culture[4] - has been going on a lot longer than the digital computer has existed.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine
[2] obviously, the actual copying of the software - instead of repair, resale, or other non-copying[3] uses
[3] if time-shifting is a valid use for betamax (Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc.), then any incidental, temporary copies of software that art part of normal use is fair use. The nonsense that a license is needed because a copy is made in RAM is patent nonsense.
[4] https://www.ted.com/talks/larry_lessig_says_the_law_is_stran...
If I was to come up with an comparable situation, I think it would be people demanding a "No Smoking on the Beach!" ordinance because of the cigarette butts littering the beach, when there's already a law against littering on the beach, but isn't being properly enforced.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/no-copyright-l...
As long as the item is purchased (owned) and it is for personal use and warranties are clearly voided, what business is it otherwise to the manufacturer after they make the sale.
Of course they can get around this by never actually selling the tractor and only leasing it to farmers, then the farmers are screwed because they don't own it - until Chinese clones show up.
What's most likely to happen is farmers will just keep modifying their machinery at will. It's already common place to chip your engine, or to physically modify machines/implements to improve performance or your production methods. I don't see that changing anytime soon.
It sounds vindictive and harsh, until you consider that's exactly how the legal system is used all the time.
We stopped buying Smith and Wesson firearms and their profits dropped like a stone. They thought that the increased business from the Federal government would make up for lost civilian sales but those Federal sales weren't what they were expecting and the civilian boycott was bigger than they expected.
It got so bad for the company that the owners had to sell it to get out from under the deal.
Look out, here comes China/Korea. Surely this policy of restricted software editing is intended to do one of two things:
1. force customers into dealerships for updates/repairs
2. stop a Chinese tractor appearing in the US market using the same or almost same but modified software that John Deere developed.
If it's the 1st then farmers will choose an alternative machine for future purchases, the tractor market in Europe at least has 20 brands jostling for market share.
If the 2nd argument is true, surely a license that allows users to modify and repair all the while restricting modified or original source from being distributed with the sale of a product, including resales, would solve this issue.
> By the time we got an exemption to repair tractors, the Copyright Office said that only the farmer, and not her mechanic, could tinker with the software.
So this part of the issue is that you can only tinker with machines you own yourself? Then how about this:
1) Farmer sells tractor to mechanic for $1.
2) Mechanic repairs tractor.
3) Mechanic sells tractor to farmer for $1 + cost of repairs.
You are always free to withdraw your consent from having your life be ruled by what a handful of people you've never met (and whose names you don't even know) have decided about how you and your community needs to conduct itself.
No, actually you are not free to do that. You can declare it, but it doesn't change anything in practice.
Sure you are. People do it all the time.
If you walk into a casino and notice that the rules appear to be rigged against you, do you try to work within the casino's system, perhaps petitioning the staff to change the rules to be more in your favor?
You have other options: (1) Leave the casino, (2) attempt to cheat the casino, (3) fight the casino using either violent or (preferably) non-violent means, (4) create a new establishment that you and your group are happy with.
Your other choice is to continue to play the slots and vent online when you keep losing, and although that might make you feel better it won't change the reality of the game.
And I mean what you've done about withdrawing the consent, not about tech projects.
My C.V.: https://fixingtao.com/cv/
EDIT: just noticed you stealth-edited this in:
> And I mean what you've done about withdrawing the consent, not about tech projects.
Tech projects can fall under (4). Tor, BitTorrent, Bitcoin, Silk Road, etc. were all tech projects representing withdrawal of consent through the creation of "new establishments". Creating a new country (if that's what you're referring to) also falls under (4) but requires a more cohesive community that does not knee-jerk downvote when told they have options. ;)
You do not get to reap the benefits of living in a society without subscribing to its rules and mores. You can work to change them from within, or you can walk. Pretending you can reap the rights of participation in society without shouldering your share of the responsibilities concomitant to those rights is spectacularly delusional.
You haven't actually defined "withdrawing consent" there, you've just repeated the phrase "withdrawing consent".
> Pretending you can reap the rights of participation in society without shouldering your share of the responsibilities concomitant to those rights is spectacularly delusional.
Nice feigned outrage + strawman.
EDIT: verbiage.
This is a reply that was written in response to a comment on this post: https://fixingtao.com/2016/01/lunatics-terrorists-and-the-th...
And is copied from here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Buddhism/comments/40uevh/lunatics_t...
<Begin>
> The system is forced onto Canadian Citizens, there is no way to opt out.
This is not entirely accurate, you can certainly opt-out by leaving Canada.
Canada is a group that has chosen to play by these rules.
So long as the rules reflect the interests of the group members, there is no problem.
The problem occurs when a substantial portion of the group membership feels no longer represented by the rules and wants to play by a different set of rules (and mass-migration is not an option).
It is not about making taxes voluntary per se, but about allowing new groups to form. If a portion of Canadians wish to form a new group, separate from Canada, then they should be allowed to. They can opt-out of paying Canadian taxes, but they will lose all of the benefits that you refer to, and I'm sure they will miss them and therefore decide to implement their own taxation system that they feel represents their interests.
Does that address your question?
</End>
Does that address your question?
Perfectly, thank you. It seems we're rather in agreement: play along, or don't — where "don't" isn't just a matter of not paying taxes, but still using the roads, or whatever. I'm, personally, not interested in going back and forth on the notion or merits of internal secession, or "home rule" or any of that; that's orthogonal to the point I was trying to make, and with which you appear to concur.
EDIT: But, for the record, I agree that it should, in principle, be possible. In practice, I think it's a far bigger deal than pretty much anyone who'd want to undertake it is probably prepared for, and that's likely part of why it's not allowed. Vanishingly few people have the resources to start their own wholly self-sufficient society.
Further, I submit that many, if not most, of the people who would want to would be doing so in order to perpetuate some prejudice or other. Witness the neo-Nazi group that tried to take over a town in North Dakota as an existence proof of the phenomenon. That's the kind of thing you'd explicitly have to allow, if you pursue the concept to fruition.
> Witness the neo-Nazi group that tried to take over a town in North Dakota as an existence proof of the phenomenon. That's the kind of thing you'd explicitly have to allow, if you pursue the concept to fruition.
If you are referring to a military takeover-type situation, the concept does not endorse that as in that instance the group members are not being represented.
On the other hand, yes, if the group members choose a set of rules that you (an outsider) disagree with, they should still be allowed to do so. To quote from the post itself:
Through awareness of the mortality of all systems (including our own), we should ensure a means by which any group is able to abandon our system in a conflict-free manner if its members want to adopt something else—even if we might disagree with their choice. Systems that explicitly allow such secession are called voluntary systems.
I guess, as long as you're cognizant of the fact that the system you're espousing offers potential institutionalized hate as a means of conflict avoidance, I don't think there's much else to say.
EDIT: Or, hell, let's just take it straight to ludicrous-land. Imagine a group that believes it should be able to practice virgin sacrifice, and raises their sacrificial virgins from birth to believe that it's in their, and their society's interest to be placed upon the altar, so they aren't inclined to leave the society that believes it needs their mortal blood for its upkeep. Do the rest of us just sit by and say, "Well, they're over there in West Whack-a-doo. Nothin' to be done about it", and let them go about their business?
As you say, it helps for the place to be self-sufficient.
A good example actually are the Amish. Their towns are almost completely composed of Amish and they're entirely self-sufficient except for the standing army part.
For this they actually pay fewer taxes than most Americans, but they still do pay taxes.
The formation of a country seems to require at least two things then:
1. Self-sufficiency in terms of resources
2. Self-sufficiency in terms of defense
(EDIT2: A friend points out that it's a bit more nuanced than this since many existing countries do not satisfy these criteria given the nature of modern trade. So these requirements can be filled by-proxy.)
On that last point, it doesn't necessarily have to imply a superior military. As long as you have some sort of leverage over neighboring countries (like trade agreements), you can arrange to have a truce or even an alliance between yourselves.
An example would be if Silicon Valley and neighboring farming regions banded together and said, "No more tech unless you give us autonomy."
---
EDIT: regarding the question you inserted in your edit, please see if the post I mentioned answers your question: https://fixingtao.com/2016/01/lunatics-terrorists-and-the-th... If it doesn't I invite you to post a comment there to continue the convo.
Luckily, modern democracies involve multiple layers of government (town/city, county, state, federal) to serve as a moderating effect to prevent some little town full of jerks legislating blatantly horrible stuff, but those jerks do have the right to move where they want, buy property, and to vote. To deny them those rights is undemocratic.
>Imagine a group that believes it should be able to practice virgin sacrifice, ..... Do the rest of us just sit by and say, .....
Well, it depends. Are they in a town within your country? Then obviously higher-level laws are going to prevent that kind of thing, and the feds have the right to send in the National Guard and take over the place for violating state and federal laws so blatantly, then prosecute everyone involved. However, if they're a separate country (and the group is the country; i.e. the country as a whole believes in this crap), then it's a little trickier. What is your proposal about how to deal with this screwed-up society? Invade, and install a puppet government? When has that ever gone well in the past? Not recently. Turn it into an imperial possession where the citizens there have no rights except what the imperial governor decrees? Maybe, but this also means you opposed democracy. Apply pressure from outside with things like sanctions? That seems to be the modern method, and doesn't seem to work too well either (look at the wonders it's done for North Korea). Honestly, this is something you could debate all day long, there's no easy answer.
Paying fines and/or avoiding jail (within the system) are not free as in beer. Likewise, leaving the country and relocating is also not free (e.g. there's a few to renounce US citizenship).
Whether we're free as in speech to withdraw consent from the social contract (by which I do not mean to speak to its validity or lack thereof) is more of a grey area. As with freedom of speech, the freedom to withdraw from the social contract is not without its (ominous) ramifications. See, e.g. Aaron Swartz.
Well, in terms of copyright law it really depends. People violate copyright law all the time (see torrents) and vast majority don't pay anything for doing so.
Sometimes people do have to face consequences, but one of the reasons that is so is because of the folks who disagree with and vehemently complain about ridiculous laws that do not represent their views, while simultaneously taking actions to re-enforce the system that gives them those laws (like downvoting comments on HN that remind them they actually do have a voice and a choice in the matter).
I may be mistaken, but I don't believe there's yet a torrent for tractor software, and my impression from other articles is that John Deere et al are more suit-happy at the moment than are the music, film, and publishing companies.
Rejecting the entire concept of having leadership and structure because these particular leaders aren't perfect is like writing in assembly for the rest of your life because C compilers optimize out unexpected things sometimes.
That's not what I'm suggesting at all.
I'm saying pick a structure and leaders that really do represent you. That's a very different thing from voting for pre-selected candidates whom you've never met and don't interact with, and then crossing your fingers.
I'm a bit sick right now, thus either my math or my formulas might be off. I welcome any corrections. :)
So.
Copyright policy is decided at the Federal level. The people in charge of setting that policy are elected members of Congress.
Let's assume that you can declare someone "met and interacted with" with a single five-minute conversation.
According to Wikipedia, California is the most populous state and Wyoming is the least populous state.
The CA Secretary of State reports that ~17 million voters were registered to vote as of the date of the 2014 general election. The WY Secretary of State reports that ~240 thousand voters were registered to vote as of that same date.
There are 124,800 minutes in a standard 40-hour-per-week, no-vacations-or-holidays work year. (60x40x52)
For Wyoming, each Senatorial challenger would need to spend 48,000 minutes per election cycle speaking to each registered voter. (240,000/5) That's doable.
For California, a challenger would spend 3,400,000 minutes per election cycle on the same task. (17,000,000/5) For California, what you propose is not possible for Senatorial challengers... they'd have to do nothing but hold conferences for 27 years to get this task done. (3,400,000/124,800)
So, what's the largest state where this is feasible?
This might be South Dakota (the 46th most populous state) (with -I think- ~514,000 voters). [0] If it's not, it's definitely Alaska (the 48th) (with ~509,000 voters).
So, it is physically impossible to even pay lip service to what you propose in either fourty-six, or fourty-eight of the states in the US.
Before you get too cranky, I do acknowledge that the situation changes when one meets with one's Representative:
In California the 27-year workload would -roughly- be divided over 53 representatives, meaning that they'd only have to spend just over half of a year meeting every registered voter in the state. But... this assumes a five-minute meeting. If that constituent meeting balloons to ten minutes, we're right back in the realm of impossibility.
While the workload might be smaller in the smallest states, Representatives are apportioned by population, so I don't expect that the picture would vary very much from state to state.
In short, your idea is promising, and would be really great to do... but there just aren't enough hours in the day to make it happen. [1]
[0] I'm having a fuck of a time finding historical voter registration numbers for SD. So, that voter registration number is based off of what I'm pretty sure is current voter registration data. :/ (North Dakota doesn't even have voter registration!).
[1] Yes, my analysis ignores the fact that a campaign could conceivably be a multi-year thing. It's difficult to get good numbers on the length of an average Congressional campaign, but it's... difficult to believe that a campaign would run for longer than two years.
lol, that is the opposite of my proposal, and your post (thank you for it btw) just further solidifies my point.
When math says it's impossible for your representative to represent you, perhaps at that point we realize that the system has reached the end of its shelf life.
See the rest of my comments in this thread for a clearer understanding of what I'm saying (and my apologies for the comments that HN makes difficult to read due to downvotes ;).
If I have myself and a small number of people represented and ruled by a group of folks, the only way to get this result is for my group of people to form federations with other groups of people, and those federations to form meta-federations, and so forth, and have each group willingly delegate most of its authority upwards. But that's really similar to how I live now.
That's not at all what I said, and it's a dramatic misinterpretation of my words. There are substantially better mechanisms available to us to figure out what people want and what they need than for a decision maker to ask them, one-on-one.
From what I understand, there's a whole raft of really good, reproducible research on how to tease out what people mean from what they say; people are surprisingly bad at both knowing what they want, and -even if they do happen to know- surprisingly bad at expressing that information coherently. It's trivial to structure queries in such a way to give different answers to what is effectively the same question. [0]
> ...perhaps at that point we realize that the system has reached the end of its shelf life.
This is narrow-minded. Based on this comment, you appear to be proposing that we dramatically increase the number of Federal representatives per citizen. [1] Go pick a country that you think is well run at the highest levels. Go look at their representative to constituent ratios. If they're like 10x or 100x greater than the US's ratios, [4] then you might have a point. If they're only 2x or 5x greater, you probably don't.
[0] A researcher wishes to discover what Presidential candidate a given person intends to vote for. He asks them "What Presidential candidate do you intend to vote for?". Most of the time, the answer to that question does not match what candidate that person actually votes for. The question to ask to get that information -most of the time- is actually "What Presidential candidate do you expect that most people will vote for?". Polling is full of crazy pitfalls like this!
[1] The other possible interpretation is either advocacy of voluntary expatriation of people who disagree with their Congressional representatives [2], or dismantlement of the Federal government. [3]
[2] Okay, sure. You do have the trouble of both finding a country that's governed in a way that you agree with, and will accept you as an immigrant, though.
[3] Ha. See the rest of the paragraph to which footnote #1 is attached.
[4] I'm fairly sure that's in the right direction. Again, I'm sick, sorry if my math is off.
Having a game of telephone for a government... sounds like it would result in the sort of legislation that can be found in the OP. XD
> Based on this comment, you appear to be proposing that we dramatically increase the number of Federal representatives per citizen.
Not at all. I again invite you to read my other comments.
For footnote [3] my reply is that representative democracy is one of a vast variety of possible systems you could use. That ratio of yours becomes much less meaningful in say, a liquid democracy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delegative_democracy
These two links should (hopefully) address any further questions: https://fixingtao.com/2016/01/lunatics-terrorists-and-the-th... + this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10899574
I guess you don't read many academic or technical papers. My ratio of words to footnotes is very, very high. :)
From your linked comment:
> This is not entirely accurate, you can certainly opt-out by leaving Canada.
Right. You're advocating expatriation (whether through emigration or secession). This is exactly as I said in footnote #1, and is a plan that is made substantially more difficult by the issues in footnote #2.
> https://fixingtao.com/2016/01/lunatics-terrorists-and-the-th...
To apply the first bullet point at the end of the essay [0] would necessarily mean the end of the US's Federal Republic. Do you disagree?
In addition to that, let me ask a pointed question, along with two follow-up questions: Is there a national government on Earth that you feel is well-run and adequately represents its citizens? If there is such a government, what is the representative-to-constituent ratio in that nation? If there is not such a government, what are the top five [1] problems with the way the most reasonable national governments of the world govern?
> That ratio of yours becomes much less meaningful in say, a liquid democracy...
You should really read [2]. People are surprisingly incompetent. People are also often easily manipulated into acting dramatically against their own interests.
[0] The relevant pull quote is: "Systems that explicitly allow such secession are called voluntary systems"
[1] Pick any reasonable ranking that you like to determine ordering
[2] http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/07/stupider-than-you-real...
It totally depends on whether groups/states decide to remain part of it. To the extent that they do it will continue to be, and to the extent they don't it will cease to be.
> Is there a national government on Earth that you feel is well-run and adequately represents its citizens? If there is such a government, what is the representative-to-constituent ratio in that nation?
Heh, believe it or not that is a project I'd already set for myself.
It's not something I can answer for you in five minutes right now, but I will point out that Switzerland tops many charts and it actually employs direct democracy.
> If there is not such a government, what are the top five [1] problems with the way the most reasonable national governments of the world govern?
Ignoring for the moment the (non)existence of such a government, I'll rattle off a couple:
- Group rules do not represent the interests of group members. Most governments instead represent either the interests of the most wealthy (plutocracy) or the most vicious (dictatorships), and few (if any) provide explicit mechanisms for secession.
- Member votes are not properly weighed based on their understanding and knowledge of the issue they are voting on.
That last issue could be addressed by liquid democracy, or a group currency group fund: http://groupcurrency.org/#GroupFund
So, it sounds like the answer to my question is "No, I do not disagree.". It's abundantly clear that you're advocating for secession as the answer to perceived flaws in the US's Federal government. It's also abundantly clear there are at least several hundred thousand people who are similarly dissatisfied with the Federal government. If there are no real barriers to emigration via formation of a new Nation-State (however small) within the borders of the old, then the chronically dissatisfied, immensely stupid, and/or foolishly impassioned will be sure to do just that at the slightest provocation.
The thing about a Federation of States is that the group gains a lot of strength and stability if its member states are in it for good.
> It's not something I can answer for you in five minutes right now...
Oh sure. I didn't expect an immediate answer to the question. I do hope you get back to me on this, though. :)
> ...Switzerland tops many charts and it actually employs direct democracy.
There are a couple of things to note here:
* Despite Switzerland's "direct democracy", you don't consider it a shining example of a government that is well run. (I didn't expect that you would, I'm just noting it. :) )
* This "direct democracy" has -presumably elected- intermediaries, and (from what I gather) the vast majority of federal actions don't originate from the citizenry, and the majority of the real discussion that goes into shaping them is not open to the public. [0]
* The Swiss people must not be voting to decide even a tiny portion of what the Swiss government does. From Wikipedia: "Between January 1995 and June 2005, Swiss citizens voted 31 times, on 103 federal questions besides many more cantonal and municipal questions." That's three votes per year, on ten issues per year. I'm fairly certain that there is no state in the US that does so little. [1] I don't believe for a second that the Swiss people truly consider a significant fraction of the acts of their Federal government.
* The percentage of the population required to bring up an issue for reconsideration by the citizenry appears to be just over %1. [0] Coincidence?!? ;)
> That last issue could be addressed by liquid democracy...
How do you prevent the tyranny of the majority when any given government -or even a portion of a governed population- can splinter at a whim? How do you address the manipulation of voters to act against their best interests when everyone, regardless of understanding or expertise on the matter at hand has an equal say in how to address a matter at issue?
If your answer to that last one is "weight votes based on a person's understanding and knowledge on an issue", (as you mentioned in your comment) then my question is "How -exactly- do you plan to do this?".
Any reliable method will take substantially more effort than the vast majority of a given population will be willing to spend, [2] and many people are sure to disagree with an evaluation that means that their voting power on an issue they care about is less than a fellow citizen with whom they disagree. This gets even more complicated when such a person exercises their option to perform zero-effort secession.
Moreover, doing the research required to arrive at a suitable solution for real-world issues is really tough, and often very time consuming. I spent an hour or so digging around for those stats in my opening comment. I've spent probably another hour or two reading your comments and typing up all of my comments. This is all to kinda-vaguely-address one issue at a really high level! Real issues take days, months, or years of dedicated study to understand and come to an informed decision on. Some guy who's working two jobs (or one job, and caring for kids) isn't likely to spend his very limited leisure time actually learning about the issues that he cares about.
[0] http://direct-democracy.geschichte-schweiz.ch/
[1] Given Switzerland's size and population, comparing it to many US states is entirely appropriate. :)
[2] To elaborate: Weeding out the nearly-completely-ignorant is easy. However, it takes between days and months to rank the knowledge and understanding of medium-to-high-performing individuals. [3] If you're really serious about weighting based on knowledge and expertise, then you really have to go the extra mile to try to distinguish between those who are merely very knowledgeable, and those who are the equivalent of a Gauss or a Newton when it comes to the topic at hand, no?
[3] HN is full of "Man, hiring is so hard!" and/or "Everyone does hiring wrong! Here's how you should do it!" posts that demonstrate this fact.
Sure, I can do that off of HN if you contact me via email or twitter. My contact info can be found on that site I linked you to.
> This gets even more complicated when such a person exercises their option to perform zero-effort secession.
Who said anything about "zero-effort"? No need to interpret my words in the most absurd way to make it easy on yourself. ;)
> I spent an hour or so digging around for those stats in my opening comment. I've spent probably another hour or two reading your comments and typing up all of my comments.
People do not need to be green on the issues they choose to vote on. Having prior knowledge and expertise is what makes an expert an expert.
Liquid democracy, from every indication, appears to be vastly superior at fairly selecting experts to vote on issues than the silliness we're using right now. Since experts can have legitimate philosophical disagreements it's only part of the solution. A mechanism for the establishment of city-states to create a market of legal systems is one of the other important pieces.
think tank mode: what if the current system is restructured in a way so that we will let them take decisions for us. But when we don't agree with his/her view point we can readily bypass it if the majority wants a different thing, like may be diagree button near to a decision and proposed alternative, which everyone can vote on or propose another alternative(only one alternative can be picked by a person). Its democratic, practical and doable right now. The alternative with which highest number of people agree is a clear win. This can be applied in all countries and any form of govt.
Its way better than any alternatives we currently have, like having to spend big time and effort on making petitions, or rally for cause, etc. Now a days even peaceful gathering gets violet due to govt mishandling the situation.
Here's the Economist complaining about it in 2009: http://www.economist.com/node/13649050 I can anecdotally confirm that my reaction to most of the referendums, a few years later, was "How should I know?"
This is not to say that such an approach won't work. You just need some mechanism for managing complexity. That could involve trusted organizations that like-minded people delegate these decisions to (sort of a cross between lobbying/activism organizations and political parties), which could work very well or could just turn out like an actually corporate version of the current party system. You could alternatively try to limit the inherent complexity of governing, but that seems very experimental.
I respect those working to improve the system from within, but also respectfully point out that change of the sort this article is talking about comes from the outside. Revolutions all have one thing in common. Out with the old, and in with the new. Copyright law is old, it is administered by old people, and it is kept in place by the old guard. Open source hardware, distributed open source software development, 3D printing, crowd funding, and on and on, these are all new.
You can attempt to evolve (fix) the old rules, you'll fail. It seems to me to be a safer bet to simply begin playing the new game, even though the rules are not totally worked out yet, even though people say it isn't legit, even though there are no referees to call foul or panel of judges to provide approval and award medals. Out with the old, and in with the new.
This is not something that will organically happen in our lifetimes. If it happens in the next fifty years, it will be a divisive war, not a slow decline. And at this moment there are four camps - the ultrarich perpetuating the system for profit, the apathetic masses that make up 99% of the population who do not care, do not know, or do not give a damn, the portion who defend the old guard on false pretenses that because this is the way it is this must be the only way that works and thus the best way, and lastly, in a tiny fraction of a fraction of people, who do not have the power or influence to push reality onto the rest, are those who fight against draconian IP policy.
It will take a lot more involvement and effort to actually reverse the tide. If any of the new age free thought IP out there ever became a tangible threat to the established media empire, it would be swallowed up instantly for the time being. And those in power are not unaware - there is a reason these companies are spending a large portion of their war chests buying patents and IP themselves, to produce an endless morass of bullshit ownership of ideas to drown anyone who threatens them in.
Listening to music is now "buffet-style" because of iTunes, not Napster. Napster died.
AC kicked DC because the latter was financially non-viable.
I think you just rewrote history.
Re: AC/DC, DC was financially viable. You might notice that we still make use of DC, where it does much close quarter nut kicking. DC was financially uncompetitive over distance, but not because of magic finance. It was uncompetitive because someone had to buy, build, and install the associated hardware to make it work over long distances. AC required much less in that arena, because of the technology, not magical finance. AC as a technology was more viable then DC as a technology over distance because the technologist, not the banker, endowed it with such awesome, nut kicking powers. And nut kick it did.
The fundamental problem with DC is that, in 190x, there's no practical way to convert it from one voltage to another. That's why AC won the "current wars", plain and simple. Stupid Edison really thought it would make sense to have a power plant on every city block, but obviously that dream went nowhere, for good reason. With AC power, you use a "transformer" to step the voltage up to much higher levels for long-distance transmission, then another transformer to step it back down at the point-of-use. Higher voltage has much lower losses because the losses, according to Ohm's Law, are P=RI^2, where P is the power loss, R is the resistance (which we'll assume to be fixed for a given length of wire), and I is the current. Since P=VI (power = voltage current), stepping up the voltage means you have proportionately lower current, for the same amount of power, and as you can see from the first equation, the losses go up with the square of the current. This is why long-distance transmission lines use scarily-high voltages (some over 1 megavolts).
These days, we have ways of converting DC to different voltages using modern electronics and transistors, but these did not exist in the late 1800s and early 1900s. There was simply no way back then to make an electric generation and transmission system of any scale without the AC devices invented by Nikola Tesla.
AC wasn't viable at that time because it hadn't been invented and deployed yet. It wasn't intuitively obvious and it took a brilliant Serbian electrical engineer to invent it (or rather, the machines to implement it; AC was theorized before Tesla) before it became viable.
However, as a competitor to AC power systems spanning whole cities and interconnected in a nationwide grid, DC wasn't even remotely viable.
You're first paragraph is spot on. But.
The next step is, DIY tractors, as if they were hot rod motorcycles, since, let's be honest... Tractors are NOT high technology items.
Okay, so tractors aren't as sexy as motorcyles, and gear heads don't cut their teeth on John Deer. So... just buy ordinary tractors, why not? They are basically covered wagons with motors, and attached shovels. They scrape dirt. They sift potatoes out of mud.
Why do tractors need horrendously advanced software at all? How complicated is a riding lawn mower?
These are not jumbo jets with multi-core governed CPU voting systems. Tractors don't have ailerons that need to adjust pitch and yaw at hypersonic velocities.
They fucking creep along at like 5MPH. Christ.
Then, after that one little nitpick, I'm with you all the way.
You'd be surprised. There are far more lasers, GPS units, etc. in use at the typical farm than owned by the typical consumer.
[1] http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a48ad98c-36c7-11e3-aaf1-00144feab7...
RTK: Makes GPS based steering more accurate. Often a dedicated RTK transmitter is installed on the farm for the tractor to pick up and use to correct against the GPS you may be already familiar with like the one in your car or smartphone.
End of Row Guidance: A piece of software that allows you to program macros to control an orchestrated set of events for the implement you're pulling behind you. (seeder, bailer, combine). There are many repeatable events that happen when farming from lowering & raising seeders, dealing with drift, changing seeding depth based on previously collected yield data, etc...
Mesh Networks: So one guy can drive a tractor and a combine with the combine following next to the tractor.
Auto Guidance: Think self driving car. Functional safety is a huge problem for companies producing self driving tractors - see ISO26262
ISOBUS: Is a technology whereby an implement is attached to a tractor and the tractor's cabin display creates a GUI image and/or menu for that implement to control it. The display need not have any advanced knowledge of the implement. So even the implements have an on board computer too.
It really irks me to see comments like yours. You clearly don't work in this field buy your comments come off as someone with all this great knowledge about how things work. Have you even bothered to research such topics as precision farming? These tractors collect tons of data year over year in order maximize yield which is very important to farmers and their ROI.
Grow up, do your homework next time.
It really irks me to see comments like yours. You clearly don't work in this field since your comments come off as someone with all this great knowledge about how things work. Have you even bothered to research such topics as non-precision farming? These tractors collect tons of data year over year in order maximize worthless imaginary justifications for more cargo cult technology.
Grow up, learn to grasp the premise of the comments you read.